I’m just super fucking bitter that once the flint water crisis got it’s 15 minutes of fame people stopped giving a shit. The water is still poisoned, people! Donations have plummeted and people have been forced back into drinking and bathing with the water! The medical effects of this are astounding, cases of legionnaires disease have skyrocketed, people are having seizures, people are having weird rashes break out over their body, people (including me!) are having their blood poisoned, and it’s not just lead! it’s coliform bacteria! it’s THMs! it’s all in the water and it gets into the bloodstream and breaks down blood vessels, causing bruising and petechiae and internal bleeding and no one gives a shit anymore and it’s only gotten worse like how many people are going to have to die until people realize this is still a problem
I would like to add that the people of Flint cannot sell their houses, because selling a house with leaded water is illegal. Additionally, households with children can’t stop paying for the water because living in a house without running water is cause for CPS to take their kids. Flint has been living this way for over two years.
I hate to ask for help like this but I don’t know where else to turn. My cat needs lifesaving surgery and we don’t have the money. Our Care Credit cards are maxed out from our cat’s previous emergency treatment for urinary blockage. It’s painful, recurring, and if left untreated, all he can do is curl up in a corner and wait to die an agonizing death. Even if treated, it will keep happening (this is his third or fourth time going through this.) He needs a perineal urethrostomy surgery which costs almost $1,000.
The only vet clinic where we can afford to take him will not accept a payment plan. We have no credit cards to use. Our mortgage is past due. We can bite the bullet to pay off the mortgage by the end of the month or pay for our cat’s surgery, but not both. Like always, his symptoms came suddenly, and despite our best efforts with helping him drink lots of water and switching him to a urinary health food, he still has this condition.
Please consider donating. I don’t want to give a sob story but we’ve been through so much. My mother was in the hospital recently to have her cancerous esophagus removed. She got pneumonia and was put on a ventilator, and the doctors said she would likely die. She stayed in the ICU for a month and a half before they moved her to the main floor and then to rehab. It was 90 degrees and storming outside the day of her surgery, and when she finally felt fresh air on her face again, it was a blizzard outside. My partner and I cared for her during that time but we took a financial hit from it.
On top of that, we had to euthanize our dog during that time. Our dog developed respiratory symptoms out of nowhere and we took her into the vet, but the medicine didn’t work and she got worse fast. She had started to go blind the morning we took her back. What they thought was a simple respiratory infection was metastasized cancer. We had no idea. It devastated my partner, who still cries about it eight months later. Our dog was still young.
Please. Any amount helps. I don’t want to fail my cat, too. I don’t want us to have to choose between all of us being homeless and saving my cat’s life. This isn’t how we normally live, we’re just stuck in a very tight spot and we could use any help you could possibly give.
i think the worst thing to come out of this site are the ‘NAZIS ARE TERRIBLE. they WILL KILL ALL JEWS in COLD BLOOD, LET THEIR FAMILIES DIE IN FRONT OF THEM, and start the HOLOCAUST 2.0!! also reblog to make a jew feel safe.’ formatted type posts
ways to make a jew feel safe and comfortable:
-let them celebrate their holidays openly around you and encourage them to express themselves religiously. if they invite you over for a holiday, go!! they’re making an effort to let you learn more about them.
-consider any different diets they might be on (ex. kosher or even if it’s passover) when you have them over at your house. a little goes a long way with this one
-if christmas is around חנוכה that year, feel free to send them a חנוכה card!! it’s not really as big of a holiday for us but we do appreciate the effort put into making us feel included 🙂
-educate any of your friends that might make antisemitic jokes. even ‘grammar nazi’ jokes. standing up for jewish people goes further than when theyre just around. antisemitism isnt something that only exists when a jew is in the room.
-understand that, if they practice judaism, their beliefs arent like yours, and that that’s ok! a lot of people forget that not everyone is either a christian or an atheist whenever the topic of religion comes up. (but also remember not every jew practices or believes in judaism!!)
-if they tell you to warn them before you talk about nazis, do it. It’s really easy just to give someone a heads up before you talk about people who want them dead, especially if they’re openly jewish or a holocaust survivor descendent.
ways NOT to make a jew feel safe and comfortable:
“NAZIS are EVIL. they will KILL ALL THE JEWS. that’s just BAD. they will MURDER EVERY SINGLE JEWISH FAMILY. NO JEW IS SAFE. anyway reblog to make a jewish person feel safe and loved 🤗”
also if you can goyim reblog. and if you’re jewish and want to add on feel free!
hey by ‘if you are a goy reblog if you can’ i meant ‘i highly encourage you to reblog this because i have seen too many posts that make me and other jewish people very uncomfortable and they are, to be honest, entirely surface level and exhausting to see over and over again. not only that, but they are also annoying to us because they dont make us feel safe at all, and reblogging posts about how bad nazis are isnt actual activism or showing real, substantial support for jews. if youre serious about being there for your jewish siblings actually take part in their lives. make sure they’re comfortable. make sure you make casual antisemitists uncomfortable. dont just reblog posts about hating nazis, your posts dont do shit. supporting your jewish friends by even doing something as simple as what i listed above does have an affect of us. your posts about you hating nazis mean absolutely nothing unless you care for and acknowledge Actual Jewish People’s problems and challenges. otherwise, they’re surface level bullshit and do not contribute whatsoever to improve our safety.’ 🙂 🙂 🙂
So the butch gal girl really is threatening to sue me and ruin me and my moms lives. Please dont send her anymore stuff. If you did, just apologize. A court case would ruin me and my moms lives.
Y’know, sometimes a question comes along that exposes your biases. I’m really, really glad you asked me this.
My initial instinct was to say no. There are a lot of tasks as a paramedic that require very specific motions that are sensitive to pressure: drawing medications, spreading the skin to start IVs. There’s strength required–we do a LOT of lifting, and you need to be able to “feel” that lift.
So my first thought was, “not in the field”. There are admin tasks (working in an EMS pharmacy, equipment coordinator, supervisor, dispatcher) that came to mind as being a good fit for someone with the disability you describe, but field work….?
(By the way, I know a number of medics with leg prostheses; these are relatively common and very easy to work with. I’m all in favor of disabled medics. I just didn’t think the job was physically doable with this kind of disability.)
Then I asked. I went into an EMS group and asked some people from all across the country. And the answers I got surprised me.
They were mostly along the lines of “oh totally, there’s one in Pittsburgh, she kicks ass” or “my old partner had a prosthetic forearm and hand, she could medic circles around the rest of her class”. One instructor said they had a student with just such a prosthesis, and wasn’t sure how to teach; the student said “just let me figure it out”, and by the end of the night they were doing very sensitive skills better than their classmates.
Because of that group I know of at least a half-dozen medics here in the US with forearm and hand prostheses.
So yes. You can totally have a character with one forearm, who works as a paramedic for a living.
Thanks again for sending this in. It broadened my worldview.
Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing: https://amphl.org/
When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldn’t do would be to be a doctor. This is because they weren’t sure how to work around the “need” to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didn’t have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didn’t really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didn’t have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit – just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.
Now flash forward to when I’m in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aids in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid. The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point I’m starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally don’t compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds – well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didn’t exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, it’s now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When it’s processed so that it’s actually something I can hear. But somehow this stethoscope–invented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aids–managed to be loud enough for me.
Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didn’t even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself
And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really can’t hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out that’s a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You don’t have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.
And … somehow, even though I had never personally actually wanted to be a doctor anyway, and still don’t want to, and still don’t miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.
People need to know.
PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.
That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things
THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.
Because … on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually can’t do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until that’s ready, blind people still can’t do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people can’t be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah that’s an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) can’t interpret between spoken languages on the phone.
But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do? Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity.
More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more “innovative” ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because we’ve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example – As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (I’ve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because that’s what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a “gee whiz” creative answer for people who haven’t needed to adapt to life without arms, but isn’t so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually work to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lot of practice working to come up with solutions for things we haven’t tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else misses–and not just for disability related accommodations.
People with disabilities don’t want to set themselves up to fail any more than anyone else. So if they seem to believe there’s a way for them to do it, you should give them a chance to show you, or explain what they’ve already been doing in the past, or explain what they’ve seen other people with the same disability do, or explain what ideas they have that they would like a chance to try out. Don’t just assume and then stop trying. Talk to us.
This. All of this.
Are you looking at creating a disabled character? Then you need to think not about what they can or can’t do, but about how they might approach the same task with different tools at their disposal.
Don’t say “X can’t do Y or Z”. First, ask, “what is actually NEEDED to do Y? What’s the process? How could I adapt it?”
I’ll be the first to say that medicine is an ableist community. We are. We almost have to be, because the whole point of medicine is to reduce disability and disease. We assume total health is the baseline, that other states are “abnormal” and to be corrected.
And sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. Misconceptions. False assertions.
And I’m going to tell you this, because I think @andreashettle would like to know this: I am, functionally speaking, a person with “normal” hearing. (I have a very slight amount of loss from working under sirens for a decade, but functionally I do just fine).
But you know what? I’ve never heard the sound of nerves. Never. I didn’t even realize that that is a sound you can hear.
So you, with your deaf ears, just taught me something about a tool I use every. single. day. of. my. life. About a sound I’ve never heard, with my “normal” ears and my “normal” stethoscope. (Okay, it’s a pretty kick-ass stethoscope, lezzbehonest rightnow.)
And for the love of all that is holy, I want to see these characters in fiction. Deaf doctors, one-handed medics, bilateral amputees running circles around other characters just to prove that they can.
I apologize for my misconception, for assuming that disability meant “can’t”. It’s a cultural part of medicine that I dislike. But now that I know it’s a thing I want to see it everywhere.
But if you’re going to do it… do the godsdamned research. Have respect for those who live with disabilities. Write better. Write real.
Hi, if you haven’t already read Seafoam Kettle-Eyes, let me introduce you to it! It’s a romance fanfiction about an Inkling named Grii who ventures to Octo Valley out of curiosity and meets an Octoling there. The Octoling, Tenta, had escaped from the Octarian military and seeks refuge from her society. The fic is a slice of life and drama dealing with themes of abuse and recovery, and it has LGBT themes as well.
I’ve been working on this fic for 2 years now, and I went and cleaned it up a little! Please check it out if you have the time ♥
I remember posting somewhere once in a thread about why girls aren’t exploited in animation anymore where some guy said, “all the disney girls are drawn to be generally attractive, but I don’t think there are any eye-candy men… or are there? Are there any Disney men that lots of girls like?” and I mentioned Roger. Tons of girls replied agreeing with me and the original guy was like “wait, Roger? from 101 Dalmatians? What’s attractive about him, he’s tall and lanky and has a big nose, he isn’t muscley at all! Wouldn’t you all prefer Gaston or something? Or do you girls think his big nose is indicative of something else?” and I was like “no, you idiot, he’s a silly, goofy guy who likes animals and can play a bunch of instruments, that’s why he’s attractive. What’s the matter with you? Gaston, seriously?”
This is why we need more girls in animation. And more guys like Roger apparently.
This is why I laugh my ass of whenever dudes talk about how men are “objectified” by the media too. Because 9 times out of 10, what men think is “women objectifying men” are characters like Gaston.
And Gaston is NOT a woman-driven fantasy. Gaston is a male wish fulfillment fantasy. Gaston is not what women want, he is what men want to be. He is hyper-masculinity to an extreme degree, dripping with sexism and testosterone. The fact that men think that Gaston is what women want says an awful lot about those men.
While I don’t want to generalize, female fans tend to prefer a very different kind of male hero. We like the Rogers, the Milos, the Hercules. Genuinely kind, often awkward men who are sometimes vulnerable and respectful to women.
Yes, this is a generalization. I own up to that. But I think it’s important to remember that there is often VERY big difference between what MEN want to be and what women WANT in our media.
Reblogging this again because fucking this. And hell, even the muscley dudes (see: Khal Drogo, Hercules, Thor, Captain America) are loved, not because they are muscley, but because they are sweet and loving and adorable. We love Thor because his mispronounces “Hubble” as “Hooble,” not because of what he can do with a hammer.
Reblogging for the awesome comments.
I’m just here to say I love the animation of Roger so fucking much. look how fucking smooth and graceful and agile he is. 2d animation is amazing and i just want to hug it
All of this.
Okay, listen, to return briefly to the idea of Gaston: Beauty and the Beast is actually the first animated Disney screen play written by a woman. Linda Woolverton, the screenwriter, got a lot of attention for creating a self-proclaimed feminist heroine in 1991, but she also had a *lot* to say about Gaston. She didn’t stumble into that villain by mistake. She crafted him based on her own experiences with men and even her ex-boyfriends, and said: “To Gaston, Belle wasn’t a person; she was a possession. And I think it’s great for little boys to see that Beauty doesn’t choose him. Not only can they look at Gaston as an example of how not to treat women, but they can hopefully be taught by the Beast, a macho guy who is comfortable with his feelings and gentleness. He could teach a lot of men, in fact, about sensitivity.“
Not only is Gaston not a woman’s fantasy, he’s literally a woman’s horror story.
I read a tweet on this subject today and remembered this post, but the tweet came to a different conclusion:
For those who don’t know, Nightcrawler (aka Kurt Wagner) is this perfect blue boy:
(I chose an Evolution gif because that’s what I’m most familiar with. I’ve only seen a significant amount of this one piece of X-Men media, because everything else ends up having too much Wolverine and not enough Nightcrawler.)
He’s fun, charming, goofy, and kind. He often acts confident, (”chicks dig the fuzzy dude!”) but (at least in this series) has deep insecurity about his…unusual appearance. He’s also very agile, and often strikes the kinds of extreme poses that Roger displays above. (He teleported onto a desk control panel in my chosen gif, not to mention literally crawling on the walls.) And sure, he’s trying to flirt with Kitty in this scene, but he doesn’t hold her eventual rejection against her in any way.
The problem with the idea of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of recreation as a structure for a day is that it simply can’t work that way. If I’m expected to be at work at 9, then my work day must begin at 7. Allowing myself a rushed experience to wake up and get to work. And I live close to work. So either my recreation or my sleep needs to take a hit, but for some people it could be more. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week as a basis for full time work is honestly unreasonable at that point. Because it isn’t actually 40 hours a week, it’s 50 hours a week lost to a job, of which 10 is unpaid.
some of my coworkers have 2h of transit to get to work, which takes 4-5h off their free time. working full time is a bad idea and shouldve never been a thing
And let’s not forget that maintaining a clean home and providing food for yourself takes over 20 hours a week (appx 20 hours in-house, and varying hours spent running outside errands) if you are completely abled.
This is starting to be common enough knowledge thank goodness.
So here’s the real question: WTF DO WE DO ABOUT IT?!
There are so many people brainewashed into thinking “if you don’t spend every waking hour working, you’re a worthless piece of shit.” And I don’t just mean rich corporate assholes or republicans either, I mean normal ass people too.
And even forgetting that, we will be shouted down and shamed for trying to fight this for the reasons I just mentioned. We have no real power to fight against this shit that I am aware of. They tried fighting this in the 40’s when we had FDR in office and THEY couldn’t do it, how the fuck are we supposed to get anything done NOW?
I’m sorry. I just… I feel so hopeless and beyond frustrated about our future politically speaking.
The fact is, a lot of the infrastructure and culture that helped get there labor changes we had (many of which have been lost to loopholes) don’t exist anymore. And that’s tragic, yes.
But unions and revolutions were not gifted upon the working class by benevolent gods, either.
We’ve made them before, countless times, and we can make them again.
In fact, most labor unions that do still exist- and there are handfuls of them in every state, though certainly not every town- offer education on how to unionize, and some of the better equipped ones even offer training. The two key things to organizing your workplace are having the confidence to talk to your co-workers about it, and knowing the things your management will do you try to crush you out.
Shit sucks, don’t get me wrong. And things get worse once you start figuring back, anyone who has been in any kind of abuse situation knows that.
But people have come together from the ground level before, built things from nothing before, fought before, and won before.
This whole “trust Tumblr blindly” thing is eventually going to kill someone, as I became pointedly aware of on one occasion I was making fun of how poorly a particular bleach-based drain declogger was working on my sink and got a chorus of really dangerously misinformed people telling me to pour vinegar in after it because all cute little cool kid diy home care blogs they’re following talk about vinegar like it it’s the big secret the cleaning companies don’t want you to know.
And I cringed knowing that someday, some Well Actually expert who read a blog article once is going to give that advice to someone who unfortunately didn’t take high school chemistry and isn’t aware that MIXING VINEGAR AND BLEACH MAKES CHLORINE GAS.
holy fucking jesus tits reblog to save a life
OK I actually got a full on A* for GCSE Chemistry and if I ever knew this I’ve forgotten it. Seriously reblog this.
Also don’t use bleach to clean up if your cat pees outside the littlerbox (or urine in general for that matter, species doesn’t really matter here I think). I did that in a small space and it took me a bit of coughing and wheezing and wanting to tear my eyes out before I went, “wait, fuck, I just gassed myself”.
Be aware of the chemicals you are using even if they are natural cleaners.
GhostKitten's shitpost pile 