Day: October 25, 2018

thylacine-dreams:

This photograph was published in the Illustrated London News in March 1926. It advertises the thylacine as “a species almost extinct” recently acquired by the London Zoo.
Photo via Beth Windle on Twitter.

The individual in question, pictured above shortly after arrival, was a female who lived at the London Zoo from 1926-1931. The story of her arrival was published in an article from The Daily Mercury:

“The animal is now so rigidly protected by the authorities, however, that the London dealer who imported the wolf was not allowed to take a male out of the country, and had to content himself with two females. Owing to the shipping strike, the two voyagers were six months aboard ship. One of them died, but the survivor is in fine condition, and, being the only specimen of its kind in a European menagerie, and the last, it is said, to be allowed to be exported alive, it is not likely to suffer from a lack of attention.” (April 1926, via The Thylacine Museum)

This was the last living thylacine outside of Australia.

thesyzygysystem:

Please don’t suddenly push someone’s wheelchair without their permission. It’s extremely rude and most of us hate it.

Someone in a wheelchair pushing themselves up a slope? Want to be of assistance? Ask if they would like help. Don’t just run up and start pushing. It’s the equivalent of you seeing someone limping up a hill and deciding to suddenly carry them to get them to the top.

Someone in a wheelchair blocking your path? Need to get by? Ask them to move. Do not reach out and push the chair aside. It’s the equivalent of you shoving someone out of the way instead of just saying “excuse me”.

We understand that you have good intentions and just want to help. But having a wheelchair suddenly moved, pushed, grabbed, or touched can feel violating, very uncomfortable, and even frightening. It can also feel like you’re ripping our control away, as there is very little we can do to stop you from pushing us. Unless we pull the hand brakes, which may potentially send us flying out of the chair.

Even for those few who are okay with being randomly moved, you pushing the chair without warning while they’re wheeling themselves can cause their fingers to get caught or crushed in the wheels. It can be pretty painful, trust me.

Unless it is a life or death situation, or you have prior consent to always push that person, please ask for permission before touching or pushing someone’s wheelchair. You wouldn’t like being grabbed or picked up without permission by a total stranger, either.

hornygold:

wizardshark:

fizzy-dog:

tilthat:

TIL that carrots aren’t actually good for your eyes… it’s just a myth that the British government fabricated during WWII. They wanted to keep their newly developed radar system secret from the Germans and had to find some way to explain how they were suddenly shooting down a lot more planes.

via reddit.com

germany: how are you guys destroying our planes so easily?

british guy who’s about to invent the myth about carrots being good for your eyes: oh you haven’t heard?

the best part though is that the germans BELIEVED IT

That’s because the people making the decisions were Nazis and, like most people on the far right (Brexiteers, Trump voters, etc.) Nazis are numpties. The Brits hoodwinked the Nazis again and again and again all the way through the war, with such startling regularity that they must have been in a state of perpetual surprise that so many of their schemes worked.

It helped that the Nazis never established a spy network of their own in Britain: of the 115 agents the Nazis sent to the UK during the war, 114 were either captured (and very often turned) or were already British double agents. The one exception committed suicide to avoid capture.

But it’s the various ruses the Brits pulled that are worth reading, and the whole carrot thing completely fits with their style. Two of my personal favorites are Operation Mincemeat, and Agent Zigzag.

Hey here’s a fun fact, I’ve been sent into tons of panic attacks and bouts of crying, vomiting, shaking, and self harming because of accidentally coming across works where people wrote the abuse I suffered as kinks. And you, ya little rascal, you’re defending it. A whole blog! Wow. If there’s a hell, you have a one way ticket. That’s all I can say. It’s fucking incredible.

naamahdarling:

lines-and-edges:

who-gives-a-ship:

First of all, I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I also have panic attacks and they’re awful. But you need to address the fact that you have a serious problem here and the solution isn’t censoring other people’s stories. If you’re having panic attacks and episodes of self harm from just being reminded of the existence of certain kinks, please see a therapist. This is not healthy, it’s not normal, and it’s not a situation that you should be in for the long term. These kinks aren’t going to go away and you need to learn how to handle that for the sake of your mental health.

Also? People aren’t writing about your abuse. We have no idea who you are or what you went through. We’re writing fictional stories about fictional characters in fictional scenarios. It’s not about you.

Fun fact: Giant otters have 22 distinct noises they use for communication. Also they want you to get help too, anon. Please listen to the otters.

Sometimes people have these kinds of symptoms from: hearing a garage door open. Popsicles and soup broth. Certain common children’s toys.

Asking people to voluntarily tag a trigger is good.

Offering to tag for triggers to the extent that you are able is good.

Making sure your fic is well tagged is good.

Using AO3’s filters to filter out tags you find disturbing is good.

Seeing a therapist is good.

Thinking that other people are maliciously doing something because they know you’re triggered by it (when said people don’t even know you) is a cognitive distortion.

Yelling at other people who are also trying to help you get access to a space free of your triggers? Is counterproductive.

(Sometimes, also, although it’s very thorny to talk about it, people have triggers around the existence of another type of person. Sometimes people take their triggers as a moral imperative, and decide that some group of people different from them is bad as evidenced by how they personally feel around such people. Other times, they do the work to respect other people and avoid harming anyone, despite their physiological reactions. Mental illness can make ethical responsibility confusing, but it doesn’t automatically strip us of moral agency.)

While I am a known stan for the specific right of trauma survivors to write fic without harassment (everyone should have that right, but protect the most vulnerable first), that right depends heavily on the ability for trauma survivor fic writers to have a crowd to blend with. To not have to disclose personal upsetting history in order to write.

Which means that the distinctions between sexual and artistic and cathartic are going to be inherently blurry! Plus also many people need to comprehend their suffering as an experience connected to other narratives and human experiences, in order not to dissociate it forever.

(Everything fictional I write lately is intended as all three, at least a little bit. Sometimes it’s mostly catharsis with a little bit of sex and art. Sometimes it’s mostly sex, art or both, with a little bit of catharsis. All of which is to say, I don’t genuinely know whether anon would find my handling of difficult subject matters to be “as kinks”, in their vernacular, or not – even though, where there is abuse in my stories, I do my best to handle it seriously.)

Yeah, anon desperately needs professional help. They sound very uncomfortable, miserable even, and no amount of censorship is going to do the work of recovering for them.

I’ve stumbled into some shit that made me cold and shaky and nauseated. That was not the author’s problem. It was mine. My past trauma is my responsibility, not theirs. They can write what they want. It is on me to take measures to make sure I am protected and to take care of myself.

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

chavisory:

queenshulamit:

ozymandias271:

reading a paper on quality of life among 45-to-70-year-olds with Down syndrome:

“Individuals expressed a desire to be allowed to go to bed when they wanted to.”

😦

Imagine.

I lived in a room and board that failed the burrito test. (”If you’re not allowed to get up in the middle of the night to microwave a burrito, you live in an institution.”) No one stopped me from going to bed, but they did tell me I had to have my lights out by 10, and that I had to be out of the house by 10 the next morning. When I complained to my outpatient program that I needed more help than I was getting, they threatened me with board and care, where my cell phone would be taken away and I would lose contact with the outside world. My case manager sounded so damn smug, like he had caught me out, when he said, “if you’re really as helpless as you say, then you need to be in a board and care.” Like my only options were struggling to do things I couldn’t do, or surrendering my life to an institution.

When I tried to talk about these things with other people, they always rationalized it away. (I told my dad once that my caseworker was reading my e-mails as I wrote them, demonstrating extreme disrespect for my privacy, and he said, “Well, she’s probably making sure you don’t use the internet to goof off.” I was 22 years old.)

 People tend to mock the idea that telling an adult when to go to bed, when to eat, etc., is a human rights violation, even though they would find it outrageous and absurd if anyone came into their lives to do the same thing to them.

And this is what people seem to think when they tell disabled activists we’re just not disabled enough to understand that some people really do need to be locked up and deprived of all autonomy.