#cw ableism

[rawme-price]

Ghost is ugly, it's a fact he's learned to live with. It'd never truly been an insecurity...until now.

You find ghost stood in the bathroom of your apartment, the one that you practically share at this point, staring at the mirror. He's got that subtle scrunch to his nose that would be a pinched expression on anyone else.

"Si, what're you doing, baby?" You ask, wrapping your arm around his side, leaning into his space. Your eyes drift down to his hand, holding various pamphlets. "What's this?"

Simon holds the pamphlets up for you, and a quick glance has you frowning. Reconstructive surgery. Worn at the edges, as if stored in a bag for a long time, something he got years ago. Still, he asks "would you...would you prefer if I got my face...fixed?"

"Simon..." you whisper, shocked. Ghost trails a hand over his face, fingertips dipping into the grooves of scars and catching over bits that never healed right. They pause over the gash that tore a hole straight through his cheek.

"I can't eat right, and I see the way people...People look at us." He whispers to you. You should have seen this coming after last night.

Your anniversary dinner, two whole years. It was a fancy restaurant, and you wanted to strangle the waiter for how he looked at your simon just trying to enjoy the meal. A cloth placed under his mouth, hunched over the plate to avoid making a mess. He's always been messy, unable to eat cleanly with all the injuries to his face.

The other patrons stared, and you ended up calling the night short in pure rage. Now, simon thinks it's his fault.

"I would never forgive you if you did," you finally whisper, grab his jaw and pull his face away from the mirror. Simon looks shocked by your answer, so you thumb over the divot in his lip, smiling "you are as beautiful as the day i met you. I love how you look, and I'm sorry that I made you doubt it."

"I don't look normal..." ghost tries to counter, but he melts into the palm of your hand like a stray dog finally feeling kindness.

"I don't want normal, I want you, si. I always want you," finally, you pull him into a kiss. Slow, deep, reverent. There in the same bathroom you cut his hair in, the same one he helped you shower in. The grout surely still has flecks of his blood in them from bad nights, but you don't fear the rot.

You toss the pamphlets out, wish you could burn them where they sat.

Instead, you pull ghost into bed and promise to show him you feel no amount of disgust or shame for any part of him.

[the-fallen-collective]

Seeing someone comment “wow i never considered a schizophrenic person as the victim and not the serial killer” makes me so fucking mad. All those media portrayals are wrong!!! Schizophrenic serial killers are not common!!! Most criminals are entirely sane and usually neurotypical!!! People with schizophrenia are way more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators of it. We are not inherently violent. A schizophrenic person who deals with persecutory symptoms are not an immediate sign of harmful behavior. Its actually a lot more realistic for schizophrenics to be in victim roles in media

[pumpkin-magpie]

Thought a bit after posting that last thing so I made this

[ikibli]

look, even if hypothetically I was willing to scan my face and give a video of me to a social media company's shady unnamed third party data processor to do [God] knows what with in order to prove my adulthood...

chances are I can't. my body is that of a disabled Asian woman.

the facial markers of childhood on a white person- prominent monolid eyes, round faces without prominent cheekbones, clear, smooth skin devoid of wrinkles, lack of facial hair- are traits that many adults of Asian descent, many in their fifties and sixties even, have to an extent that several of my (adult, mind you) relatives and friends have been declared to be in their teens, or even to be preteens or 8-year-olds, by an algorithm that associated those features with childhood rather than ethnicity and lineage.

I can usually figure out how to look directly at a camera, if I try hard enough. but from what I've seen of Roblox's face verification process, it also needs you to move your eyes slowly from left to right so it can determine you're using live footage of a real person.

simple, right? wrong. I can't do that. I can kind of move my eyes a short distance(and it always hurts like hell, especially when I do it consciously), and I can change what part of my vision I'm paying attention to, but otherwise my only way to change what I'm looking at is to turn my entire head. and it clearly doesn't accept head-turning as "looking from left to right".

I don't have any other facial differences that might mess with the algorithm recognizing my face as a face- and that's a related problem that's already been documented by numerous people and organizations like Face Equality International.

I just can't follow the instructions, because it wants me to do something I can't do and expects that all adult humans can move their eyes consciously, because ha ha who couldn't do that if they're using a computer in the first place? it's not like disabled people might ever have friends or want to be on social media!

[paintingpuff]

Hello tumblr I heard you like changeling stories

Edit: If you want a physical copy of this comic!

[grendel-menz]

My round two entry for an oc tournament -- featuring my character Eyvor and @arkatrine's Janvier.

round one here.

[codex-entry]

Around 2:25:45 in your last Of the Devil stream, you casually mentioned "that autistic trauma" around making sure people understand you, and that's been stuck in my head ever since, which is why I have the exact timestamp. And I wondered if you had more to say about it. Is it really a trauma thing?

While I obviously can't speak for every autistic person, I'm pretty firmly of the opinion being autistic in our current society is inherently traumatic. Even before getting into the broader politics of it with things like how the structure of the education system, mental health system, economic systems, general negative stereotyping, etc. that all fail autistic people in every country, being autistic all but insures a lifetime of tumultuous interpersonal relationships with people, allistic ones especially.

I'd wager about 90% of my friendships have ended abruptly because I had violated some social norm I didn't understand, or misinterpreted a signal, or was just decided to generally be too weird, distant, and off-putting to deal with. There's a lot of things I love about being autistic, but this is one way it has undoubtedly made my life harder and I've never met an autistic person who didn't have at least one story about being horrendously misunderstood for, bluntly, acting autistic. All the while, I often struggle to understand why the problem is even a problem in the first place.

And when you're both horrifically misunderstood and struggling to understand, you really only have two options: You either try even harder to understand and be understood, or you say fuck it and just let the consequences be what they will.

Hence, you tend to end up with autistic people who have put extensive effort into understanding the rules and communicating their feelings within those rules using the surgical precision and anxiety of someone disarming a bomb, or autistic people who move on pure reflex and just leave it to others to either accept them as they are or leave.

Can this happen to allistic people too? Sure. But it has happened to basically EVERY autistic person I've ever known in some life defining way and seems to be a consistent throughline in the life stories I hear from autistic people online and in writings as well. Trauma doesn't define the autistic experience, but it is absolutely a central fixture of it.

[qoldenskies]

tomato soup