I was back in school but as Fred from Scooby Doo. I think a party was going on and I was in a quiet corner when Shaggy sat next to me and Toto's Africa was playing in the background and I broke the fourth wall when Shaggy said he didn't know me by saying something like, "Shaggy it doesn't matter!" We hugged and sang horribly along to the lyrics. Good times all around. :)
I've been thinking about how, when you're little, you're surrounded by adults who adore you, who you're never going to remember.
I don't mean like your parents and stuff, but like — I work in after school care, and I'm forever meeting five and six year olds who seem like the most incredible people on earth. Kids who painstakingly explain the rules of handball, kids who ask me to help them colour in, kids who feel really deeply wounded by a classmate's behaviour, just an endless stream of them.
Or like my friends' kids who I've babysat once or twice. A kid who played with me in a creek, a kid whose mannerisms are etched in my mind. Cousins' babies who I held for a while. Even just stranger's babies in shops who stare at me the way babies do.
One of my best friends has an online friend who's recently had a baby, and he tells me - someone who doesn't know the friend's name even - about that baby having their first bath. Because that's the kind of love and excitement that little children inspire.
None of these children will remember me.
I literally don't have a greater point here, it's just blowing my mind to think about how much love is directed towards people who can't remember any of us. They can maybe, I guess, if everything goes well, remember the feeling of safety that ought to go with that love.
My cousin had a baby a while back and I visited her, recently, and she had a nap while I ended up holding the baby. This like, two month old baby. She can't even smile yet. I do not have a lot of experience with infants - my mum had to show me how to hold the baby, and she cried a fair bit until we found a system that worked.
And then she slept in my arms, resting on my chest, for two or three hours.
It was at least an hour before I even thought about doing something else. Holding a sleeping baby, it turns out, can be a completely absorbing activity, even if you have ADHD. (Baby also enjoys the inherent leg-bouncing that comes with the ADHD.)
Now I can't stop thinking about how when that kid is five or six she's gonna run into me at Christmas lunch or some such event and - even if I see her on every holiday between now and then - I will basically be a stranger to her. But to me she will have the starring role in a memory I'm gonna treasure probably forever.
I can't stop thinking about all the aunts and uncles and family friends and second cousins once removed that I was routinely introduced to at Christmas lunches or weddings or funerals, who would say "You're so tall! Has it been that long? You probably don't remember me haha."
and how im gonna be saying the exact same thing very soon
The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale.
the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going.
To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang.
Appreciate them while they are still here.
I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…
They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.
There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.
That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.
The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.
If the door has a wheelchair button do not open the door for us.
Do not try to press the button.
Deffently do not try and hold the door open for us.
If there is a working button you trying to help is only going to make things harder for us.
Most wheelchair users can operate manual doors on our own as well and depending on the door it still may be harder for us if you open it.
As always when you want to help a wheelchair user here are some points
Did they ask you for help?->help them if you can!
Do they look like they are struggling with something?->Ask them if they would like aid. Respect whatever answer they give you. If they say yes, they'd like help, listen to their instructions, then only help with what they said.
Did a wheelchair user simply pass you on the street?->leave them alone they are just trying to walk somewhere just like you are
Are you in a car and you see someone in a wheelchair?-> do not pull over to check on them, offer them a ride, etc. It's creepy as hell man
Does the person appear to be in a medical emergency?-> if they are responsive listen to whatever they say, if they aren't call the appropriate emergency number. Do NOT assume we are in a medical emergency by performing normal tasks even if they are medical. Wheelchair users have higher level of medical issues than gen pop.
Never touch someone's chair without their permission.
Don't press wheelchair buttons with your feet
Don't keep pressuring a wheelchair user if you don't like the answer they gave you
Most of us know how to fix our chairs and they are an extension of our bodies so don't be surprised if a wheelchair user doesn't want help fixing their chair. It is not the same as a flat tire on a car.
Never move someone's chair without their explicit permission. This applies weather or not the user is in the chair.
Wheelchair parking, seating, spots, etc. Are not your priority seating or parking. We need the extra space, the safe spot on the bus, etc. it is a matter of our saftey don't you dare prioritise your comfort/ease for our saftey.
Guest Blog by Tuttleturtle I am an AAC user. I am also queer and trans. My AAC is part of my gender presentation. I have also never seen an AAC system represent someone like me. Even so, I'm a privileged AAC user. I've had access to education that taught me…
“Part of presuming my competence includes presuming I know my own gender. I am trans. If you do not believe me, you are saying I am incapable of knowing myself well enough to know my own gender, something inherently personal.“
hello! I'm writing a fantasy story & I want to include a few autistic-coded characters. however I'm not autistic & I don't want any of my coding to come off as ableist or offensive stereotypes. So could you give me examples of traits I could give the characters that would still clearly show they are autistic & maybe things I should *not* do to avoid writing them as bad stereotypes? also, if you could rec any blogs that help specifically with writing autistic characters, I'd be grateful! thank u!
https://autism-asks.tumblr.com (is a good place for learning about autism in general)
i’d probably need more specialized questions (but there are other autistic mods too) but i can say some things to AVOID (but i’m not quite sure how to give a big full explanation without more specific things to target, i’d say that’s a trait but it’s more a dual adhd/autistic thing WHICH if you want to go for is cool too bc they’re often comorbid! anyway i’ll do my best but heeeere, under a cut because i’m long winded,
Problem with Discord's new (and old) font(s) and its treatment of non-Latin text
Before getting into it, I'm gonna say that I'm not going to criticize its aesthetics or "readability". These feedbacks are rarely helpful from the designer's perspective especially coming from people who don't know much about what goes into designing a typeface, and because readability is really, really subjective.
I was happy to hear that discord was changing its font, especially when I found out that they are adding support for Vietnamese. Previously, discord used Whitney, a humanist sans serif font with Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic support. Unfortunately, Whitney doesn't support all Latin characters in Unicode, and crucially it doesn't support Vietnamese characters.
Text font not supporting a script is usually not a problem, the fallback font will take care of it for you. The problem occurs when there's partial support. Vietnamese uses Latin, but it also has a ton of precomposed vowels with diacritics. This is what Vietnamese looks like on my phone, where the font change hasn't taken effect yet:
here's the same text with unsupported characters highlighted in red:
It might not look that weird because the fallback font on my phone happened to be somewhat similar in style to Whitney, but depending on the device it may be completely unreadable. I submitted a feedback a while ago asking them to address this issue
This is why when I heard that discord was changing its font to add Vietnamese characters, I was excited. This is what the same text looks like in gg sans.
All characters harmonious!
However, after receiving the update I was disappointed because the new font now no longer supports Greek and Cyrillic. This alone is not really a big problem, because Greek, Cyrillic and Latin characters rarely occur in the same word. Although it is disappointing that they are no longer harmonious, it's not that big of a problem. The problem though, is that they decided to include Δ, Ω, μ, π (capital delta, capital omega, lowercase mu, and lowercase pi) into the font.
Depending on the device and rendering settings, it might look like it fits well with the fallback font, being almost unnoticeable, or so noticeable that it's hard to read. These four glyphs are often included in typefaces that only support Latin as they are often included in Latin lettersets because of their use in mathematics and science, so I thought it was simply an odd oversight.
Then I found out about this:
(As of 2022/12/3 9:22 pm UTC+9 I couldn't recreate this. It may be because of css setting or because they've already fixed it. I'm hoping it is the latter)
They decided to include katakana characters to be only used in the shrug emoticon.
I was massively disappointed when I heard this news because it means they did not care at all about global accessibility when making the new font. I was under the impression that they were doing it at least partially to address this issue. I was under the impression that maybe they've heard us complain and complain about the font only having partial support for Vietnamese. Maybe they've realized the core problem. But no, it's clear that they still don't know what the problem is.
Maybe I should have realized it sooner. Did you know, Discord limits the amount of diacritics that can be attached to a single character, even though in a lot of non-Latin writing systems diacritics are crucial because they represent vowels, consonant clusters, et cetera?
Moreover, did you know that Discord has a limit on how many diacritics you can have in a single message? This means if you have a copy pasta in abugida writing systems such as Devanagari, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Bengali, Burmese, et cetera, the vowel diacritics are just going to disappear after a while, rendering the text unreadable?
Affected portion underlined in red. I assume these are done to prevent zalgo, which really shouldn't be done by Discord itself, not to mention that typical "zalgo" diacritics are usually IPA diacritics with actual use, which can often stack in a zalgo-like fashion.
Did you know that Discord enforces strict text line height, even though some writing systems need more horizontal space than latin to be legible? Anything outside of the bounds are cut off and rendered invisible.
Anyway, do you remember when I said I wasn't going to talk about aesthetics and readability? I kind of lied. I am going to talk about them.
A lot of people seem to be saying that the new font is bad and that it's significantly less readable than the previous font. I have doubts about whether this is actually because of the font itself or because they're simply not used to it yet. My guess would be the latter. However, that doesn't mean the solution is to make these people shut up and wait till they get used to it.
There is no universal solution for readability and legibility. The truth is that different people have different needs, and this is no different when it comes to typefaces. Ideally, discord should provide an option to change fonts. Many platforms do. They've been refusing to implement it because, I dunno, brand image?
There is also a bigger problem with how UI designers design in general. They only design around Latin in mind, even though different writing systems use space differently. Many Brahmic scripts use ligatures and diacritics stacking above or below the main character. If you care about non-Latin scripts not appearing illegible, make it so that UI elements can accommodate for that, or something.
I'm bad at writing conclusions, so there you have it. Me rambling about a thing that I care about that apparently everyone else should too.
asked my brother if he'd seen goncharov (1973) and he looked at me and grabbed this beanie that hes had for 2 years that ive seen but never read the tag on it and
turns out he and his friends got matching beanies and made lore a full TWO YEARS ago
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