Something deeply painful is the fact that seasons, especially fall, dont feel the same. Not because of individual maturity but because climate change has impacted the weather patterns so so so much that we cant even experience the same annual shifts that our ancestors have for centuries
I feel displaced, i yearn for the spring, summer, fall, and winter that i can barely remember experiencing
To make things worse, if you’re under 50-60 years old, you can’t even remember what normal seasons were like because you weren’t alive to experience them
In the graph above, you can see how there’s a clear tipping point in the late 1970′s, which is when global temperatures first began to really skyrocket.
I was born in 1997, so about 20 years after this shift occurred. There is an immense difference between the climate now and the climate I remember growing up in, but the way I experienced the seasons in my childhood was already fundamentally different from what the seasons were supposed to be like! My parents were pretty much the last generation to experience a normal climate, and that’s just… incredibly sad
I am processing this information in a normal way devoid of rabid rage and bloodlust i am processing this information in a normal wa-
Local PSA: invisible disability does NOT mean you can live your life like a “normal person” invisible disability meant that if a stranger looks at you in public they wouldn’t know what’s going on.
Like if a wheelchair user were to decide to run into a corner store to grab a candy bar because they know that their legs can last that long without, the cashier wouldn’t know.
Or someone with “mild” scoliosis walking upright through their shoulder leans slightly to the left. Maybe they just have bad posture. The lady in the next isle thinks to herself.
The person with EDS or POTS or whatever sort of condition wearing compression gloves out and about. Perhaps it’s a fashion statement?
Or what about the people with intestinal issues? They can look like “normal people” too.
You never know what someone is going through.
You never know what they might need to survive or if they’re on the edge of a flare up or even if they are currently going through one just by one look.
I think both disabled and non disabled need to realize this. You’re not “no longer disabled” because you can “live without” disability aids. They’re there to help you. To make your life easier. If living without a cane is going to make it more likely you’ll fall over and hurt yourself, use the cane.
If you need to sit down to do dishes or cut vegetables because you need to save your legs for taking out the trash, sit down.
If you need a shower chair because you don’t know if you’ll pass out, use the shower chair.
People are going to judge you regardless for multiple reasons out of your control.
I’d rather they judge you while you’re being safe.
With great excitement I can finally unveil: Glass Roses!
This is my year long student film, with Echo the Dragon and Harper the glassblower learning to communicate and get along. Best enjoyed with sound as it has a custom score.
The
story concept was mine and I got to be the art director and story lead
on it. I did most of the animation on this, I designed Echo the dragon,
and gave feedback and direction on color palettes, layouts, and VFX. My
awesome team pulled out some awesome work and overall I think our final
film is absolutely stellar.
Please feel free to reblog this! I spent so much pouring time and love into this! If you want you can leave me a tip onKo-fi, and I have an Echo design up on Redbubble if you like my little dragon!
This film was from my sophomore year. Looking back it’s hard not to see what I could do better now but I still find it charming.
My biggest frustration with the left has always been the inability/unwillingness to work on making progress inside of the system while advocating for greater change.
I remember the first time I came to this realization.
I was nineteen, pregnant. We couldn’t afford to heat the house because we couldn’t afford the deposit to turn the gas on. It was miserably cold. The duplex we were renting was old and rickety and drafty. The window frames were messed up and there were cracks you could stick your finger through that were open to the elements.
Just, like, to give you an idea where we were financially. And this was better than we’d been doing before!
Anyway, I had recently started going to DSA meetings. And that month, they were talking about how a moderate democrat had successfully gotten a small increase in WIC benefits monthly. It came out to, like, $10 a month.
The members talking—mostly male, almost all doing decent—were scornful. The democrat should have pushed harder and gotten more, refused to accept anything until everyone else caved to their demands. I remember sitting there, quietly drinking the latte in the smallest size they had that I had bought with scrounged quarters, listening. Wishing it wasn’t held in an indie coffee shop because it was a luxury I really couldn’t afford, but it would be rude not to. Enjoying the coffee anyway.
I was one of the lucky ones who was getting that additional $10 a month through WIC. Even more exciting, we were now getting a voucher for the farmers’ market. I casually mentioned that WIC recipients would now be getting farmers’ market vouchers, too.
The guy who organized the meetings was a hard worker, passionate guy. Did something in tech.
He was like, “That’s the thing! These people don’t want farmers market vouchers. They want—” and he went on to describe a bunch of pie in the sky desires. That, yeah, sounded good.
But one. I was one of those people! A lot if the tamiles were super excited about it, myself included.
I had never been to a farmers’ market before. I tried arugula for the first time, a piece pulled from a bunch by the grower as he explained the flavor difference. I hadn’t known before then that different lettuce greens had different flavors, that it was more than just the texture and shape. I tried pesto, which delighted me. Goat cheese. I got three full pounds of strawberries for two dollars, since they were closing soon and the old man selling the berries got a kick out of me.
Anyway. It was like, you have a decent life. Not great but decent! The things that are life changing for me, for us… you already have.
The ten dollars at the grocery store made the difference between a meal of broken-noodles-with-some-half-horrible-pantry-scraps and a meal. It kept me full and healthy! And the additional farmers’ market voucher was world changing for me.
The democrat who worked for those things barely got them through. And it was means tested to hell and back. They weren’t able to get everything they wanted. But what they got made such a huge difference for me, for people like me.
Image ID: blue text on a cream background which reads “Nine types of rest. 1) time away 2) permission to not be helpful 3) something “unproductive” 4) connection to art and nature 5) solitude to recharge 6) a break from responsibility 7) stillness to decompress 8) safe space 9) alone time at home”. End ID.
Misread “decompress” as “decompose” and didn’t notice anything wrong at first. Like, yeah, that checks out, it’s ROTTING TIME.
Ok so at this point I’ve had two people roll up to me in manual wheelchairs, well, one of them was somebody pushing somebody who was nonverbal at the time, but it still counts. They asked me why I had zip ties around my tires.
It’s winter where I’m living and we have really bad snow. And the snow plow people are really bad at their jobs probably because there aren’t snow plow people who clean sidewalks. As a solution I got to thinking about how I could increase the traction on my wheels. And the most redneck thing I could think of was taking a bunch of zip ties and tying them around my wheels. They last surprisingly long, and work surprisingly well. It’s basically the same premise as chains for your tires during the winter.
I chose to space them out pretty evenly so there’s about one for every spoke. You could probably do more or less depending on how many you want and how much traction you get but I wouldn’t go more than three per spoke. I realize that it’s a bit later in the winter, and I probably should have made a post about this sooner, but I came up with it about a week ago. So please share this, even if you’re not disabled, because there are tons of people I know who are stuck in their houses because they can’t get around in the snow. A pack of zip ties costs about $5, which compared to $200 knobby snow tires is a big save, and if you want to invest you could get colored zip ties.
Sharing for accessibility
Oh fuck yes. Thank you all the abled people between op and me this is exactly what I needed to see 💜
ooh sweet, thanks for the tip
(for anyone using their chair both indoors and outside, highly recommend wheelchair ‘slippers’/wheel socks like these so you don’t tear up wood/vinyl/linoleum flooring with the zip ties!)
Here is my first non-DC book rec, which originally came to me by recommendation from @audreycritter.
Cuckoo’s Egg is an old school sci-fi from award-winning author C.J. Cherryh, who is a big deal and yet whom I’d never read before this book. (Also, her website is bananas. 10/10.) It’s technically third in the series, but I think Cuckoo’s Egg functions really well as a standalone, and this is where those rock-solid found family and good dadman feels are.
All you need to know is there’s a stone-cold soldier who is highly respected in his field who takes an abrupt retirement to raise an alien infant. (Well, alien to him. To us, the dad is the alien; the child is human.) And you guys, he. loves. his. ugly alien son. so. much.
It’s like Disney’s Tarzan if all the other apes were like “ew what a little freak” and Kerchak were the one being like “THIS IS MY KID BACK OFF.”
Like someone else we know, the dad is very very bad at using his words to tell his son how much he loves him, but it’s there. It’s there. And as the son grows, the narrative alternates between their POVs which is delicious.
There is also an absolute banger of a line that I am going to steal for a fic title someday: “This one was his safety that kept the games all games.”
You are working the gate in the afterlife and for the first time ever, something the humans built has shown up to be processed. You’re not sure what to do, this… entity shouldn’t have a soul, but here it is in front of you, freshly dead and awaiting the next life.
It’s not as exciting as it sounds, working at the pearly gates.
Sure, it’s satisfying to send the hypocrites and the assholes to hell. And it’s nice to see the ones who thought they were beyond redemption walk through into paradise.
So yeah, it has its perks. But not exciting. I mean, after the first million souls or so they all blur together, you know? You never get anything new. Animals all get sent right on through automatically and there’s nothing other then humans in our jurisdiction. Oh sure, there’s life other then humans. But that’s no my department.
I keep tads on humans on my lunch breaks. You’re a damn fascinating species, better then anything your “television” puts out. Although The Good Place was a little too relatable, I’ll give you guys that.
Anyway, one of my favorite things you guys came up with was the Space Race. I mean, what a nail biter! And it was so tense up until the end. Pity about those Apollo one guys, though. But I heard they got a kick out of watching the moon landing when it did happen.
Course, that sorta died down after a decade or so. Don’t know why you guys quit going to the moon.
And then you decided Mars was the place to be and started sending out all those rovers of yours. Not nearly as exiting as going yourselves, but as you all like to say, baby steps.
The rovers were surprisingly fun to watch. For mindless robots, they’ve got a lot of spunk. So I’d check in every once in while, but mostly I watched Earth. You guys had figured out how to work memes and it was a very amusing thing.
I was half way through a shift when it go here. I have no idea why none of the others I processed mentioned the thing, but death is confusing enough I guess.
It shouldn’t have been there. I want to make that clear, by no law of the universe should that thing have had a soul. You humans are where closer to making actual AI then you are sprouting wings. And you never even tried with this! Its job was to collect rocks!
And yet there is was, beeping up at me.
It didn’t look like a human soul. Or any other form of life that I had ever seen. It wasn’t damaged at all, or even afraid. That was the weirdest thing. You humans are always scared shitless by the time I see you. But this thing wasn’t. Even a little. It was just… curious. Like that’s all I could feel from it. Pure wonder.
I blinked a bit before flipping through my files, seeing if it was a new species or something. I found nothing, of course. Those idiots over in records never give us anything useful.
So I did the only thing I could do. I asked its name.
Now, you humans have come up with so many ways to say the same thing that I’ve had to learn a lot of languages to keep up. The newest was binary, which I never expected to actually need.
It came in handy, since that’s what the thing answered back in.
I remembered that name. It had popped up in new reports regarding a Mars rover that went out of commission, sending the final message “my battery is low and its getting dark.” before dying.
Humanity had cried over it for a solid couple of days. You guys really like personifying objects.
But I had dismissed it as just that. But here it was. Waiting patiently for me to send it On.
I could just opened the gates and sent it through and put from my mind. Make the thing some else’s problem.
I didn’t.
I stood, crossed in front of my desk, and put out my hand to touch the strange soul.
Opportunity didn’t feel human. Nor animal. It felt…. simple. Calm.
I could feel an awearness of the love its chief engineer had felt for it. The pang of missing the workshop back on Earth where it had been built, during long nights on Mars.
It had dreamed. Dreamed of humans making it to Mars and finding it. Of it’s engineer taking it home and repairing it. Dreamed of exploring Earth as it had Mars.
I could purpose, and curiosity in its mission. Lonely as it was, it never doubted its purpose or resented its lot in life. It got to learn, and to see what had never been seen. What more could it ask for?
I could feel one tiny spec of fear. Near the end of its life, it realized it would never go home. Never see Earth or its engineer again. That it would die alone on Mars.
And like all things with a soul it did not want to die. It cried and mourned and begged to live. It was alive! It had a home and it wanted to go home! So badly did it want to go home.
But there was nothing to do, of course. Even its engineer, whom it loved so dearly, couldn’t reach Mars and bring Opportunity home.
It had watched one last sunset, and sent one last message.
A goodbye. And a plea to be mourned, if it could not be saved.
I withdrew my hand and looked over the soul. It looked up at me.
For the ones that I send upstairs, I take the form of whoever loved them most in life. I guess in that moment, I was in the form of an engineer at NASA. Opportunity seemed delighted to see me.
“Welcome home,” I gestured to the gates that swung slowly open behind me. “I missed you.”
It beeped out a single phase, 01001001 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110011 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111
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