radiance and mist

Delta → 30s / ftm / aroace-spec Currently thinking a lot about: Murderbot Always thinking a lot about: Hollow Knight

[stonedrozes]

the worst thing in the world is doing things. the second worst thing in the world is not doing things. how has no one ever come up with a solution for this

[marlynnofmany]

"Automatic updates? The thing that made Murderbot commit mass murder?"

Bringing this joke back in honor of today's CrowdStrike fiasco.

[scientia-rex]

I think a lot about how, if the glorious violent revolution happens, every kid with significant medical needs in a hospital where power gets cut will die.

You can decide you're willing to sacrifice your own life, but you don't get to tell everybody else on the planet that they're acceptable collateral damage.

[scientia-rex]

This gets notes every time it drifts into leftist circles. But here’s the thing: I am a doctor. I have cared for children in hospitals. Vast, intricate supply chains that rely on functioning world governments with trade agreements are necessary to the provision of modern medical care. There is no way to work it so those kids can win if electricity, water, food, or medical supplies like sterile intravenous fluid bags or EKG stickers get interrupted. Forget even permanent disruption, a temporary disruption of the sterile tubing necessary for surgery would mean a lot of kids die of appendicitis. The generators we have as back-up are meant to last minutes, not weeks. And you can say “under my new system, the total violence done would ultimately be less than the violence done by the state,” but it’s easier to say that about a hypothetical kid than one lying on a gurney in front of you. When you’ve been responsible for a life—when you’ve lost a patient, when you’ve been through a Code Blue for a one-year-old—there is nothing you would not do in order to protect that life. I think all the time about what Devil’s bargains I would make for various situations; it’s one of the fucked up things I do. I can tell you that I would kill anyone who tried to cut power to my hospital, or I would die trying. There is no alternative.

The world is too interconnected to allow one part of it to go down. When Puerto Rico got slammed by hurricanes and the US did fuck all about it, we had a nationwide shortage of bagged IV fluids. I was working in hospitals through that. Things we normally do as part of routine medical care, like giving the puking kid with the migraine IV Zofran and Reglan, got a whole lot harder. I was working inpatient during COVID, when there were sudden shortages of pain and anxiety medications we relied on, like opioids and benzodiazepines. There was a nationwide shortage of lidocaine last year and we had to save it for biopsies of suspect cancers. Surgery requires not only a surgeon but an entire team of people and complex equipment to safely sterilize tools, most of which are now based around laparoscopic surgery that requires camera tools instead of the old-school open surgeries. You could not even say “but the surgeons can still operate” because no. They can’t. Not safely. Not with ether instead of succinate and fentanyl. I could deliver your baby after the apocalypse, but who’s staffing the blood banks when you have a post-partum hemorrhage and I don’t have three trained nurses with a kit of specialty meds to slow the bleeding? I still remember the time during the worst of COVID when I couldn’t fly a patient from our rural hospital to an urban hospital that could have done the operation he needed, because the hospitals were completely full. I had to buy time with heavy-duty IV antibiotics (the one and only time I’ve been allowed to use a -penem) while he lay there in agony for 12 hours until a bed came open and we could transfer him. If we couldn’t treat the pain and keep the infection from killing him long enough to operate, he would have died then and there, in front of us, while we stood there helplessly.

So how many kids are you OK with watching die from a ruptured appendix? That’s what comes in to the ED at two in the morning and within half an hour if you’re lucky has an ultrasound proving the diagnosis and a surgeon getting scrubbed in. If there isn’t ultrasound, ultrasound techs, pain medication, anesthesiologists, ventilation machine for when you’re under, light-up scopes with blades to allow for intubation bc then there’s direct visualization of the vocal cords, paralytic medications to keep you still, medications to keep you asleep, monitoring machines that read your blood pressure ans CO2 levels and pulse oximetry while you’re under, computer scheduling for OR time, post-op recovery nurses, gurneys, autoclaves, specialized small metal tools for the surgery—if there are interruptions in training or production of any of these and a whole lot more, anyone could die of a surgical problem, but it hurts worse when it’s a kid. Watch breast cancer come back into vogue, as we lose mammograms. You ever treated a woman who’s ignored breast cancer so long it’s now a fungating mass? Go Google what that looks like. Two cases have walked into my office and they are both dead now. One was schizophrenic. Without modern global supply chains, we don’t have lorazepam or morphine for humane death, let alone psych meds. How many people would deteriorate? Get specific. Which friends would you be willing to watch die? Which of their kids are expendable?

What kind of violent revolution are you planning where you are able to look a patient in the eye and tell them, “Your death is necessary to my vision,” and not understand that you are the villain?

You get to decide whether you want to end your own life for this glorious future. You do not get to decide to end my life or my patients’ lives or anyone else’s. You are not God and you do not get to make plans as if you are, as if you have the One Correct Vision and the rest of us just need to fall in line and follow the prophet. Fuck you. You think the Black kid whose treatment team I was on while he writhed in pain on a hospital bed because he had a kidney transplant and it was rejecting wouldn’t tell you to go fuck yourself about your violent revolution? Our society is no longer able to tolerate large-scale disruptions. We have built too much and we would lose too much. We are too big to fail, and although it’s easy to see that as a bad thing, what I keep seeing, over and over, is that transplant team. How the nephrologist and the resident and the nurses and techs and pharmacists and therapists were working together to keep that kid alive. The scientists who did the research, relying on impossibly complex systems that have taken hundreds of years to build. Collaboration is how we survive.

We cannot allow the vulnerable to die and call that progress. We cannot turn the lights out on any hospitals, because the people in the ICU on ventilators will stop breathing and die within minutes. Would you want that to happen if it’s your mother in that ICU? Would you tell your mother the answer to that? What if it was your child? What about your favorite sibling? How many of other people’s families are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of something that stands a virtually 100% chance of going up in flames immediately, when we look at prior attempts at creating a new government out of war and chaos? The massive impacts of even “small” shortages on patients is not theoretical and has killed patients since I’ve been an attending, starting three years ago.

You do not own the right to anyone else’s life.

And if you think you want a violent revolution, see how you do with your next toothache without pain meds, lidocaine, dental expertise, and composite that lets you keep the tooth and keep chewing. How long would you have to suffer to crack?

[emblazonet]

Collaboration is how we survive.

[identitty-dickruption]

sorry, it's a GOOD thing if cishet people use non-conforming pronouns or dress in non-conforming ways or whatever else. for one, that person may not be cishet. but more importantly, living in a society where more people feel comfortable exploring their relationship to gender and sexuality is an undoubtedly GOOD thing

[ace-aussie-asshole]

”He’s queer baiting! He’s in a skirt!” I thought clothes weren’t gendered? What does a skirt have to do with gender and sexuality? Are you, perhaps, just a little bit bigoted?

“Girls with short hair are never straight.” Yes they are. It’s a haircut. I thought hair didn’t define gender? I thought we were allowed to do whatever we want with our hair? Why does she have to have long hair to be considered straight?

“you can’t use neopronouns, you’re not even non-binary!” I thought pronouns didn’t equal gender. I thought we could use whatever pronouns feels most correct. Why are you gendering these pronoun sets that were literally created to be used by anyone of any identity? Are you possibly trying to govern how other people express or experience gender?

Why are these things inherently queer? Are you stereotyping queer people? Are you trying to say that a specific type of person has to be queer? Why? Are you homophobic and transphobic? No? Then stop being a fucking prick and let people do whatever the fuck they want. Let cishet men wear skirts. Let straight woman have short hair. Let binary people use whatever pronouns they want. Stop pushing gender norms, it’s not progressive.

[nebuleeart]

HAPPY PRIDE!!! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

[vaspider]

Every time we vend at Pride, there are times when I have to fight breaking down.

It's probably not when you'd expect. Yes, I get misty at the Big Moments and the Conversations, and we have those every time. I love seeing the parents who are buying their kid's first Pride item, the trans girls spinning in skirts they just bought, the curve of fresh scars across a chest that's clearly seeing sunlight for the first time this summer. I love it all. I devour every minute of it.

But it's the parents who hand their kid a $20 or tap their Apple watch on our card reader and look slightly bored that get me, sometimes.

My G-d. It's not scary, it's not overwhelming, it's not tense and nervewacking. It's boring to them.

2 weeks ago, my brother tells me, my parents used the right name and pronouns for me through an entire dinner with Jake and his partner.

I turned 47 three days ago.

Today, a parent looked bored escorting their teenager around at Pride.

My G-d.

[vaspider]

No, no, please, listen to me.

I love when parents are enthusiastic, it's so wonderful, but there is something so unspeakably precious to me about the idea of going to Pride with your kid being so fucking normal that you can be bored.

You're not nervous or on-guard, you aren't worried that you'll say the wrong thing because you're comfortable enough that you aren't constantly making sure you're not Doing It Wrong... you're just At This Thing Your Kid Wants To Do, and it's a fucking normal thing. It's normal like soccer. It's normal like summer camp. It's normal like 4th of July and the big family barbecue. Those things can be fun and cool but also they're so normal that you have the mental room to be bored.

Like, yes, I want the parents to be enthusiastic but also there's something so incredible about it being that fucking everyday of an event. I can't explain it any better than that.

Do you have any idea what I would give for my mother to be bored by the fact that I'm a giant transmasc dyke with two wives? For that part of me to be that level of normal to her?

Sure, I'd love her and my dad to be proud, but holy shit, I'd totally take bored.

[utilitycaster]

I should note, I hate the soulmates "we would fall in love in every universe" trope for the aforementioned "where's the tension and interest and really anything worthwhile" reasons. However, "we would find each other in every universe" fucking rips. We would interact meaningfully in every universe but sometimes we are lovers and sometimes we are friends and sometimes we are bitter enemies and sometimes we'd simply both be in the same HOA.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Death: I have come to claim you.

Murderbot: Hold on, I have to ask everyone.

Death: This is not a choi-

Murderbot: They said no.

[beifongkendo]

Dinosaurs 🦕🌿, leaf artwork by Raku Inoue

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

2 people have now suggested this post to me, and it is good. good leefs.

[snommelp]

[punkrorschach]

“As a chemical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh who uses a power wheelchair, I figured it wouldn’t be long before I met one of these bots in a frustrating face-off on a narrow sidewalk. What I didn’t realize was how dangerous, and dehumanizing, that scenario might be.

The robot was sitting motionless on the curb cut on the other side of Forbes Avenue. It wasn’t crossing with the rest of the pedestrians, and when I reached the curb, it didn’t move as the walk signal was ending. I found myself sitting in the street as the traffic light turned green, blocked by a non-sentient being incapable of understanding the consequences of its actions.”

-Emily Ackerman

[zeldahime]

The article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-19/why-tech-needs-more-designers-with-disabilities

Lessons From My Standoff With an Autonomous Sidewalk Robot

A life-threatening encounter with AI technology convinced me that the needs of people with disabilities need to be engineered into our auton

[mosscrab]

[ID: three screenshots. The first is a perspective article by CityLab. It’s headline reads “My fight with a sidewalk robot.” The paragraph below reads “A life threatening encounter with AI technology convinced me that the needs of people with disabilities need to be engineered into our autonomous future.” Below the paragraph is a picture of a small rectangular sidewalk robot moving along a sidewalk.

The second screenshot is a tweeted picture by an unknown user of six sidewalk robots going down the side of the street, with a car trying to pull between two of them. There are two replies below it, the first reply is by Adrian Lopez @PaladinZilch and reads “Wow. Imagine being in a wheelchair and seeing that.” The second reply is by I [flaming heart emoji] You @IAm444x and reads “oh god the tech bros made car traffic for sidewalks [crying emoji].”

The third screenshot is a reply tweet by Will Jackson @geologywill that reads “A few weeks ago… it took 5 minutes for their sensors to figure out how to get out of the standoff… Enjoyed every second of it.” Below is a picture of three sidewalk robots caught in a circle at an outdoor bus stop, presumably stuck in their circle. End ID.]

[snommelp]

@a-square-6-28-496 here's a reblog with image IDs

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

The logic of these devices being "allowed" on the sidewalk, whether they've found a technical legal loophole for it or not, is complete nonsense.

Motorized vehicles aren't allowed on the sidewalk. The sidewalk is for pedestrians. Power chair users are considered pedestrians by specific exemption (and for good reason - that is a single human, using the most minimally disruptive means of locomotion available to them.)

This thing isn't a pedestrian. It's a miniaturized delivery van. They should be banned from the sidewalk. They might already be in most places under existing laws, and nobody is enforcing it.

[justangrymacaroni]

as a knitter, you start to notice how rare it is for characters in tv shows and movies to knit correctly. from worst to best, it ranges from:

- laughably incorrect, just flinging yarn around

- knitting the most basic scarf incredibly slowly because the actor Learned How To Do It For The Role

- old lady actresses casually knitting an intricate lace pattern while doing a monologue

- gromit from wallace and gromit

[justangrymacaroni]

1. that’s a garter stitch, which you can clearly see despite it being made of clay

2. they took the time to animate a modified continental style of knitting, including showing how his working yarn is wrapped around his pinky, and that he’s flicking with his index on his right hand

3. he only has four fingers and yet this is better than the vast majority of knitting on tv

[homunculus-argument]

You think you're done with therapy but then get anxiety and start dreading doing a friend a favour because for some reason you were fully expecting some sort of backlash for trying to do the right thing. Scolded for not asking permission, for doing it wrong, for inconveniencing other people, just bracing yourself for The Consequences, with no idea what the fuck the consequences would even be, and then realise like wow. What the fuck was wrong with the people who raised me like this.

[homunculus-argument]

Literally just walked past a root that grew all fucked up to get past a tree stump that's now eroded and not there anymore. The root's way is no longer blocked but the shape of the obstacle is still there, as an absent silhouette.

If I wrote this shit into a book, an editor would beat my ass for such an over-the-top on the nose metaphor.

[prokopetz]

Honestly, I don't mind the proliferation of emojis in casual online communication because it makes my favourite sort of bit much easier to pull off. Saying patently absurd shit in a perfect deadpan used to be hard to convey in pure text, and now all I have to do is punctuate and avoid using little cartoons.

[prokopetz]

It's actually kind of fascinating how expressing the formal register in textual communication has shifted over my lifetime. In spoken communication, the formal register is mostly about grammar and vocabulary, and this was once true of text as well, but these days folks will often use very formal grammar in casual text, counting on the fact that they're not captalising the starts of their sentences nor ending them with periods to establish that they're speaking in the casual register – and conversely, doing those things can establish a formal register even when one's word choices are conspicuously casual. We've basically evolved a formal register which is only intelligible in written form because it relies entirely upon orthography.

[prokopetz]

To the fluent speaker of contemporary textual communication, "fuck" and "Fuck." are completely different sentences.

[disabledfurry]

what if we stopped giving characters strabismus as a funny joke. what if we stopped? what if we stopped. what if we stopped

why the fuck do i even need to say this. "it's googly eyes" no, real people look like that. and you know they do. i know you know they do

ID: a graphic titled "strabismus (misaligned eyes) by Cleveland Clinic. there are 4 types of strabismus, each represented by a drawing of a person with it.

Hypotropia: eye points downward.

Exotropia: eye points outward.

Hypertropia: eye points upward.

Esotropia: eye points inward.

end ID

[disabledfurry]

i've only seen it in the tags just once, but because it happens every time i mention strabismus jokes, i want to preemptively say:

this joke when it appears in media is not usually just "hey this person has a weird eye" it's "hey this person is disabled", specifically, 99% of the time, "this person is intellectually disabled and either has or potentially has brain damage". (alternatively, rarely, "this person is mentally ill", such as fiddleford mcgucket and his glass eye, and a handful of cartoon villains i saw growing up for some reason)

strabismus jokes are not harmful because they "wrongly associate strabismus with stupidity", they are harmful because they are making fun of disabled people, especially intellectually disabled people and people with brain damage, who often do have strabismus, because many congenital and neurological conditions cause strabismus, intellectual disability, developmental disability, and cognitive disability. so while they think our eyes "look funny", that is only part of it

the strabismus jokes i see are generally about exotropia or esotropia. i see them on tv in comedy skits, i see them in cartoons both new and old, i see them in just random peoples's fucking art, i see them in reaction images often, i see them in memes often, i see them in emojis in discord servers, i see them in new media like fionna and cake (candy queen) and dungeon meshi (most notably marcille's "if i'm not useful to anyone" scene, laios, and an orc are all portrayed with exotropia as a joke at least once.)

there is a tv tropes term for this: fish eyes. and another! comically cross-eyed. the second even mentions this:

"In Real Life strabismus is a serious condition and poking fun of it is likely to offend some people, as it's a relatively common disorder. Despite this it's still an Acceptable Target in most circles, and mockery of strabismus is surprisingly common even in modern media."

but why are we considered an acceptable target? is it so normalized to make fun of people with visible differences, especially facial differences, that you need someone on a condemned social media platform to tell you it's not ok?

how do you "not know" that people with strabismus exist? stop putting that on my post. how could you not read between the lines when you see characters take a blow to the head and suddenly become cross eyed, speaking and walking like they're drunk? when things fall out of their hands and they drool? i always remember patrick going "wall eyed" and drooling and spongebob snapping his fingers. how could you not see what was being made fun of? did you not have disabled kids in your schools? have you never seen people with strabismus outside, even though there's at least 13 million of us? i just can't wrap my head around it- how could you "not know"?

someone i know recently said that people with visible disabilities are so hyper-visible that we've become "invisibilized". inconsequential. i'm hidden in my house and a shadow at my mother's heels, a flea bitten bad dog who does not speak unless i'm spoken to, does not try to take or want more than i have been graciously offered, and does not challenge the way things are

i refer back to the ugly laws- that unless we were there for the purpose of entertainment (jokes, inspiration porn, "feel good" stories that dehumanize us and shower praise upon able bodied people for being so kind as to take care of us or to take us to prom or to dance with us or to fucking... take us to a strip club, because we are also desexualized, and degendered, rendered entirely fucking inhuman and only existing for able bodied consumption, even in our day to day irl interactions) or reminding people to be repulsed by us (horror, villains, "undesirable" characters like loser nerds or stalkers), we were not to be seen in public.

this is also a call to like, think about what you're seeing and what's being depicted and what's being implied by what you're seeing depicted. think about what's being implied by marcille with her wide apart eyes and her childish voice and limited vocabulary. who might sound like that? who might look like that?

[suntara]

my favorite love language is trying, actually

[suntara]

like when people try to learn your hobbies or try to play the same sports that you play in an effort to get closer to you, people who try to love you the way you love people, people who will go to places you want to visit just for your sake, people remembering, putting in an effort. just. trying

[thetragicallynerdy]

Reminder from someone with actual literal brain damage from a brain injury to stop fucking using "brain damage" and "brain injuries" as a means of describing someone whose opinions you don't like or deem as stupid.

It's ableist and offensive as fuck, and for some reason a lot of leftist people think it's okay to use. I've seen posts replying to right wing racists calling them "brain damaged if you believe this" and "do you have a brain injury? do you not understand X?". Just now I saw a beautiful post about fat people throughout history that was absolutely ruined by opening with "How do we break it to boomers with actual brain damage and nostalgic brainrot..." before continuing to say that fat people existed throughout history.

Brain damage does not make you racist. A brain injury doesn't make you ignorant, or fatphobic, or unaware of history and politics. Stop fucking using my disability as a catch all to describe people you think are shitty. Y'all use it like it's a replacement for how people used to use the R-slur, which shows you learned absolutely nothing about why the R-slur was wrong to use and decided to throw in other disabilities instead. Fuck off and stop doing it.

(And don't do it with other disabilities either, because I know y'all do.)

I know a lot of people with brain injuries. They're smart, and funny, and compassionate. They learn about the world and care about social issues and wish they could go to protests if their disability won't allow them to. Are there right wing people with brain injuries? Sure, absolutely. But they are not right wing because they have a brain injury, and using any disability as an insult is still fucking ableist.

Tldr - stop using brain damage and brain injury as an insult. It's ableist and incredibly offensive.

Love, your local brain injured/brain damaged pal

[sputnikcentury]

There is a passage from one of the Ender’s Game sequels that lives rent free in my mind every time I enter a public restroom of like… Bean thinking very hard about which stall to select because appropriately masculine men never select the first stall, if you take the last stall you’re trying too hard, but you can’t take a stall next to a stall next to one that’s already occupied…

Orson Scott Card is having a Real Normal One Over Here, I Guess.

[sputnikcentury]

Like certainly the most interesting part of the Ender’s Game books is the characters’ constant mental calculus of how to perform masculinity and compulsive heterosexuality competently enough to not be judged A Faggot and like. Whatever is going on with Ender and the Last Queen and his whole Splitting Himself Into Two Idealized Versions Of His Siblings, who Perfectly Embody Their Gender Roles In A Way Ender Never Could…

But it’s impossible to talk about all that in a lens of Queer Theory without circling back to like

Not all homophobes are closeted but Orson Scott Card is out here having An Extremely Normal Time.

[sputnikcentury]

Ender’s Game is a metaphor for Conversion Therapy, Actually.

[sputnikcentury]

How are we meant to treat the narrative of an effeminate child kidnapped to a school where his latent capacity for violence is dragged out of him until it becomes his defining trait, who ultimately rejects his status as the savior of humanity in order to atone for his war crimes by [checks notes] finding a planet that will be safe for the aliens named after a gay sex act to rebuild their population on.

If not

As a story of conversion therapy and its aftermath

[sputnikcentury]

Literally in the opening chapter of Ender’s Game we are told “Peter is Too Boy, and Valentine is Too Girl, and Ender is Just Right”

Ender is CANONICALLY Experiencing Gender and then they use that specific fact to inflict trauma on him and turn him into a bomb.

[sputnikcentury]

I think maybe one of the most potent things about this is that when you are nine years old and read Ender’s Game, you think Battle School sounds fun, and then you grow up and realize Battle School is an Infant Crushing Machine and that’s also how being perceptibly queer at sleep away camp works

[sputnikcentury]

Before he even gets to orbit, Ender looks around at his traditionally masculine classmates and is like “no thanks” and then zeroes in on Shen to be his friend specifically because he has a mincing gait when he walks. If that’s not queer solidarity I don’t know what is.