Bi cripple on a crip bicycle

bi/pan - disabled - adapted bike rider - aka @ipso-faculty

[bicripple]

Pinned post

General themes of this blog: - disability & accessibility - urbanism: trains, bikes, etc - mobility justice: trains and bikes for disabled people - sociology & technology

My other blogs: - @ipso-faculty - where I post about gender & intersex stuff (used to be @ipsogender) - @queereadsmontreal - queer book club I manage the tumblr for - @intersexbookclub - my other book club

About me: - Queer: bi, genderqueer, ipsogender & intersex - Disabled: POTS, neurodivergent & long covid - Elder Millennial

[post-grammatic-stress]

If you've ever told a person who's had to be bedbound for a period of time that you wish you could "just stay in bed", DO IT.

Stay in bed. For days. But don't get up if someone needs you to, or you get bored, or you get antsy. Don't do anything other than rest. Just lie in your bed, whether you need to get stuff done around the house or socialize or anything else "productive". You'll have to cancel on people, you'll disappoint them, they won't understand.

And if you're thinking, "well, i CAN'T just be in bed. There's stuff that has to be done - I have plans", maybe ask yourself why you assumed a disabled person doesn't have plans or things to do or desires.

[communist-ojou-sama]

People who talk about what population density is necessary to "justify" a rail system are wrong but they're wrong in the opposite way from how they think. Even in Japan which has more than twice the population density of China the rail system is not profitable. JR makes most of its profit by operating malls and collecting rent from vendors. If you blindly follow profit instead of considering the broader social benefits the result will always be putting your rail system into a death spiral of rationalization. Stop expecting public transport to turn a profit that's not what it exists for.

[msaprildaniels]

The point of transit is to move people and goods from one place to another. If you expect that to be a profit center, you're expecting a private tax on all commerce as if that were a good thing.

[nicuveo]

the same people who complain about public transport not turning a profit also expect their government to build and maintain roads for them to "freely" drive on, as if those were not horribly costly. but that's road infrastructure, it justifies itself, it doesn't have to make a profit, what will we do without it, they will clamour, not realising THE SAME APPLIES TO OTHER FORMS OF TRANSPORTATION

[bicripple]

Tips on returning a product to store after the return window

I was never great at returning things on time given my ADHD, but since developing Long Covid it's become way more of a Problem.

It wasn't until that recently that I figured out it is often (not always) possible to get an exception to return policies! 😯

Generally it will be for store credit, and it may not be a 100% refund - a 75-80% store credit is pretty common. (Even if it's not a full refund, it's usually more than what you'd get if you tried to resell it on the used marketplace!)

TIPS

Buy from local, non-monopolistic stores. My experience is that the smaller independent stores tend to be most quietly willing to be flexible about their policies. (Oftentimes it's because the person you wind up talking to is the actual owner.)

Do not expect the refund. If you get it, it's great. Do not go in feeling entitled to it.

In my experience, whether they'll take the item back is not a function of how late you are in returning it. It's a function of how resellable the item looks. Is it still in the original packaging? Is it still in original condition? Did you repack it exactly as it was before? Does it look like it could go back on the floor as-is?

Be ready to buy other things from the store! If it's a brick-and-mortar store, I like to first shop for something I legitimately would want from the store, so that when I show up to the counter to ask my refund I have something in hand that I would use the store credit on. It helps make clear that I'm a returning customer.

Be polite. Show some contrition that you messed up, but enough restraint that it doesn't distract or derail the conversation. A singular apology with a "oops" expression is sufficient before pivoting back to smiling and being nice to the employee.

Keep the excuse simple. That's a singular excuse. You only need one. So it's EITHER "I have long covid and it's impacted my memory" OR "I have ADHD" OR "there was a death in my family and I was out of town and forgot about this". The customer service rep does not need a long story or laundry list of extenuating circumstances. Again, what generally makes the difference is how resellable the item is, not the backstory. Remember this is a business decision on their part.

If they give you the exception: give the store a 5-star review afterwards. DO NOT mention they made an exception to store policy for you. DO praise the staff for being helpful and good at their jobs.

Generally speaking, the stores that have made exceptions for me have turned me into a loyal customer. And oftentimes the staff will remember me as a repeat customer: most local stores rely on their regular customers to keep them afloat.

Many stores understand this as a reason to give a customer an exception. Your results may vary but in my experience, local stores consistently give me at least partial store credit! And it's a big relief to do it: I now have one less useless item sitting in my apartment! 😅

[ppd-culture-is]

Stop saying differently abled when you mean disabled.

Stop saying gited burnt out kid when you mean disabled.

Stop saying the c-slur when you mean disabled.

Stop saying 'super power' when you mean disabled.

Stop saying senile when you mean disabled.

Stop saying special needs when you mean needs for someone who is disabled.

Start saying disabled when you mean disabled.

Disability isn't, nor will it ever be, a dirty word. The only reason you think it's dirty is because you walked on it with muddy shoes.

[intervex]

What Pride Flags Mean, Part 1: Gender and Attraction

Welcome to the latest installment of my autistic hyperfixation on flags! I wanted to figure out a common language of Colour X means Thing Y. Like how pink is consistently used for feminine.

Having a common language for flag meanings matters because it improves cognitive accessibility of flags. ♿️💙

But I didn't want to be prescriptive about what colours should mean what. Just because I think Thing X should go with Colour Y doesn't mean everybody else would.

So this turned into a descriptive, empirical project. I gathered a data set of 2060 pride flag colour choices to figure out what are the most common colour-meaning combinations. Some of the results:

And here are the abstract modifiers: these are modifiers that were generally shared between the genders and the attractions. For example, black is used to indicate having no gender as well as having no attraction.

Click here for tables with okLCH values, hex values, definitions, and notes - I've put a more detailed write-up on my Wikimedia Commons userpage. (Mediawiki supports sortable tables and Tumblr does not.)

METHODS-AT-A-GLANCE

To make the figures above, I assembled a data set of pride flag colours. It contains 2060 colour choices from 624 pride flags, representing 1587 unique colours. Click here for a detailed description of how I gathered and tagged the pride flag colours and tagged them.

For each tag, I converted every colour to okLCH colour space and computed a median colour. OkLCH colour space is an alternative to RGB/hex and HSL/HSV. Unlike RGB/hex and HSL/HSV, okLCH is a perceptual colour space, meaning that it is actually based on human colour perception. 🌈

In okLCH space, a colour has three values: - Lightness (0-100%): how light the colour is. 100% is pure white. - Chroma (0-0.37+): how vibrant the colour is. 0 is monochromatic. 0.37 is currently the most vibrant things can get with current computer monitor technologies. But as computer monitor technologies improve to allow for even more vibrant colours, higher chroma values will be unlocked. - Hue (0-360°): where on the colour wheel the colour goes - 0° is pink and 180° is teal, and colours are actually 180° opposite from their perceptual complements.

The important thing to know is that okLCH Hue is not the same Hue from HSV/HSL - the values are different! (HSL and HSV are a hot mess and do not align with human colour perception!)

You can learn more about okLCH through my little write up, which was heavily influenced by these helpful articles by Geoff Graham, Lea Verou, and Keith J Grant.

You can play with an okLCH colour picker and converter at oklch.com

🌈

MORE RESULTS: COLOUR DISTRIBUTIONS

Back when I started tagging my data, I divided my data into five main chunks: Gender qualities (e.g. masculine, androgynous), Attraction (e.g. platonic, sexual), Values (e.g. community, joy), Disability (e.g. Deaf, blind), and Other.

I'll talk about Disability and Values in future posts! But for an alternate view of the data, here are the full distributions of the colours that were placed in each tag.

They come in three parts: tags I created for Gender, tags for Attraction, and tags from Other. The abstract modifiers are spread between the first two, though their contents transcend Gender and Attraction.

Some distributions have a lot more variance within them than others. Generally speaking, major attraction types tended to have the least variance: sensual attraction is really consistently orange, platonic is really consistently yellow, etc.

Variance and size do not correlate. Many of the smaller tags are quite internally consistent. I don't have a ton of tags in "current gender" but they're all the same dark purple. Xenine/xenogender has a whole bunch of entries, and there's a really big spread from blue to yellow.

Some tags, like intersex as well as kink/fetish show there are a small number of different colours that are very consistently used. Whereas other tags like masculine show a very smooth range - in this case from cyan to purple.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with how things wound up! 🥳 It makes sense to me that an umbrella term like xenogender would have a lot of variance. What honestly makes me happiest is just how many tags wound up 180 or 90 degrees from their opposites/complements. 🤩

Not everything lined up nicely (the opposite of drag is .... neuroqueer? awkward.) 🤨 Some things lined up in hilarious ways, like how initially I had the opposite of kink/fetish being Christian (amazing.)

But as a whole, there's a lot of structure and logic to where things landed! I hope this makes sense for other people and can help inform both flag making as well as flag interpreting (e.g. writing alt-text for existing flags). 🌈

I'm hoping to post the Disability and Values analyses in the coming days! If you want to learn more, my detailed notes along with tables etc are over on my Wikimedia Commons userspace. 💜

Everything here is Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0, which means you're free to reuse and build on my visualizations, tables, etc. Enjoy!

[ampervadasz]

Unmute !

[brightlotusmoon]

[dreadkithulhu]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The great thing about having an awful memory is that you get along really well with people with Alzheimers. "Grandma kept forgetting your name I'm so sorry about that" I forgot her name in that conversation three times also. It's not a personal slight. "Grandpa keeps thinking he's still working on the farm they sold twenty years ago" yeah he can't remember much and he's extrapolating from older memories and context clues. Like me trying to remember where I know the woman who talked to me for ten minutes in the grocery store from. The last thing he remembers is being a farmer and he's holding a pitchfork in the garden, of course he's going to farm shit. If I can't remember why I came into the kitchen but there's a teabag in one hand and a mug in the other, I draw the obvious conclusion and make a cup of fucking tea. "Auntie May mustn't have long for this world, she keeps forgetting her parents died years ago" bitch I get a sudden burst of serotonin AT LEAST once per week when I'm thinking about my stepfather and suddenly remember that he's been dead for five years. Stop riding these old people so hard. Put anything poisonous somewhere they can't get into it and let them live their fucking lives. AND STOP REMINDING AUNTIE MAY THAT HER PARENTS ARE DEAD AND QUIZZING HER ON IF SHE CAN REMEMBER. SHE WONT "GET BETTER". YOU'RE UPSETTING HER FOR NO FUCKING REASON.

[ndcultureis]

The autistic urge to have a strict routine at all times VS. the ADHD urge to break that routine constantly in favour of doing something spontaneous/more stimulating.

[yuyuuyuyuu-deactivated20230726]

we need irl subtitles. what are you guys even saying

[chthonic-pain]

"we'll get you in" and "someone can help you" do NOT mean the venue is accessible. if i call up in advance of an event and ask if i will be able to attend, i want to know if i can actually attend or if going there will be a disastrous waste of my time, money, and energy. if you have stairs just fucking say you have stairs, fucking hell, "uhhhh we can carry your wheelchair with you in it" is not an answer to whether there is step-free access

[cannabiscomrade]

The anti-mask brain rot is penetrating the hospital system in a terrifying fashion.

Masks are necessary for accessing central lines, and more and more nurses are starting to have issues with wearing a mask during STERILE PROTOCOL.

These lines are going right into our hearts and nurses are throwing tantrums about having to cover up their faces for 5 minutes.

This has not happened at my infusion center personally but I have mutuals and friends who have had to beg their nurses to put on the mask that literally comes in the sterile access kit.

[porterdavis]

[theamphibianmen]

"low support needs disabled people are often not believed to have a disability at all and therefore struggle to get accommodations."

"high support needs disabled people's accommodations are often seen as 'too much' and therefore are not met."

"neurodivergent people's needs are often dismissed because nothing is physically wrong with them."

"physically disabled people people often cannot physically access buildings and people refuse to do anything about it."

"invisibly disabled people are seen as lazy by society."

"visibly disabled people are ostracized from society."

IT'S ALMOST LIKE THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE DISABILITY

[disabledunitypunk]

Also neurodivergent people are often not believed when they cannot physically access a place (whether for safety reasons or because their neurodivergence is physically disabling in ways people feel it "shouldn't be" - some examples include migraine and epilepsy triggers being present and severe balance issues due to multiple types of neurodivergence)

And physically disabled people's needs are often dismissed because there is nothing visibly wrong with them, especially if it doesn't show up on the most basic of blood and urine panels (like not even actual screening panels, just like the blood counts and potassium levels -_-)

Just from the perspective of a physically disabled neurodivergent person, I've faced types of ableism more typical of corpoableism for neurodivergence and types of ableism more typical of neuroableism for physical disabilities and the way people discriminate and mistreat disabled people doesn't fall into neat little boxes either, which is a big part of what OP is saying I think

[thedisablednaturalist]

Doctor red flags:

-Mentions weight loss, exercise, nutrition, mental wellness, before any physical examination/testing

-interrupts you

-tries to rush the appointment

-laughs at you

-says you're too young

-Touches you without warning or asking for consent (common with older male doctors unfortunately, but is becoming less common)

-accuses you of self dxing/mentions dr. Google

-mentions anything about powering through the pain

Do not be afraid to drop a doctor/caregiver and see a new one. Doctor shopping is a term made by ableds who believe every doctor is perfect. Your health is precious and you should only trust those you're comfortable with to take care of it. Do not feel bad about offending the doctor. They do not care. They won't harass you or question you (if they do then that's..probably illegal). I know its hard with some insurances or lesser served areas so don't feel bad if you can't, but if you have the option to do so do not be afraid.

Extra tip: Most doctors will behave themselves if you bring an advocate. Even just having a friend sit quietly will help.

[random-things-i-care-about]