i read the hobbit in 3rd grade and i thought it was really lame. however i liked bilbo baggins for some reason and i was fully convinced he was some sort of rabbit/mouse thing until i saw the lotr movies and was really, really confused
Dreamed that there was a mundane-setting TTRPG I’m going to call “Greg and Maureen” where the players are visiting a non-player character couple their characters are friends with. But the couple is going through a rough spot! The objective was to investigate their relationship and either to help their marriage or hasten their divorce. It’s always small town and you’re always staying at their house. Players could add a little flavor of how they knew Greg and Maureen and even choose some minor traits for them before the game.
I’d played the game with another group before, but I didn’t know there were multiple paths. There’s a note Greg writes confessing to something, but depending on the dice roll it’s a different note. The content of a major plot point depended on a 2d6 dice roll.
In the dream, I’d previously played a version where he confessed to cheating on Maureen with another woman, so I thought Maureen should see the note, but in the game we were playing, my friend Celia found the note, which actually said that Greg was dishonorably discharged from the army for a gay relationship (he’s bisexual) before he met Maureen, and that he had lied about having had an honorable discharge. So for a while I came off as an asshole because I kept saying that Maureen needed to know the contents of the note so that she could confront him about what he did to her, and my friend seemed to me to be unusually blasé about what I thought was an affair.
There were other possible notes. In other timelines he had never had an affair, never been in the army, never even loved her, etc. There was another possible note where you learned he’d lied to her that he was good at track in high school (imagine an impressive mile time, which my dream mind supplied as 6:40, though that won’t even get you into varsity level) when he was actually bad at track in high school (14 minute mile). This was a lie he’d told, like, once, and he and Maureen almost never talked about running or high school sports.
In every possible timeline, Greg was Utterly Wracked with guilt about his secret. Yes, even the high school track universe.
Also, if players had decided that Greg was white before the game, you could unlock a timeline where his secret was that his distant ancestors had been in league with THE Devil from Christianity between like 1830s and 1910s. (The devil was just their accountant. He was ashamed of them for non-devil reasons.) In this timeline, you could actually meet the devil.
You didn’t find a note in every timeline, so sometimes you had to work off other evidence. I had only ever played mainly investigating Greg, but you could also focus on investigating Maureen. I think the other players and I just suspected him of hiding something every time, due to our biases. Sorry Greg! Guess we weren’t real gregheads.
Like, I want to be made into a beautiful glass thing. I want to be something treasured for a long time and rarely talked about. I want to live in the home of someone who loved me, and touched now and then in silent memory.
I want people to forget that I’m in there, I want the memory of what I am to pass out of the family’s knowledge. I want to be given away, and put out in a thriftstore somewhere.
I want someone to buy my ashes for $4.99 and put me in a window and love the colors. I want to cast beautiful, fractious and curving sunlight across the wall, sparkling and glowing and shimmering, depending on the time of day. I want someone to take a picture of me with the moon behind me, luminous and mysterious.
I want a witch to buy me and put me in her work room. I want an artist to leave me on their worktable. I want to inspire people and make them smile. I want to be warm from sunlight or chilly from the cool air. I want to be packed in newspaper carefully when they move. I want to be given as a holiday or graduation present to someone’s kid, I want to be given as a housewarming gift as a reminder of home.
And god, then, hopefully some day, I want to roll off the table, I want that globe to crack.
And then I want to haunt the living shit out of the future.
Holy shit, the comment made this sixty times more awesome and now I want this to be done to me too.
entrap my soul in the swirl orb
Trap my ashes into the glass void
Elodie Under Glass: Literal Version
The father of a high school friend of mine did this with her ashes when she died. He commissioned, oh, maybe a dozen or so of these soul orbs and distributed them to friends of hers around the world, who took them traveling to places she’d never been, to see people she loved, to visit places she wanted to go. They took pictures for him, and sometimes those orbs were left to rest somewhere beautifully… or to be passed along around the world to other people.
A year or so ago, he got a message from someone who found one of her orbs under a tree, and did he want it back? No, he said, just leave it there or take it to somewhere new, if they didn’t mind. And then he posted about it, because none of her friends had put it there, it’s not clear where that orb originated, but other people had picked it up somewhere in the world, seen the cursory description on the underside, and taken it with them to the next place on that ongoing journey.
My favorite thing to do before executing a risky maneuver is to loudly proclaim to anyone nearby that “I’m young, I’m fantastic, and I’m never gonna die”. This is firstly to pump myself up, secondly because if I succeed I’ll be proven right in front of an audience, and thirdly because it is the funniest possible thing to say immediately before being horrifically mangled in a completely dumbfuck sort of way
Okay, this is super preliminary, but since we’ve been talking about zoo accessibility I wanted to launch a project I’ve been planning for a couple months.
One of the hardest things about visiting zoological facilities when disabled is the lack of knowledge ahead of time, right? Often the information on the zoo’s website about accessibility doesn’t contain everything folk need to know to plan a visit. I think we can probably help fix that, even if it’s with just crowd-sourced knowledge!
This is a google spreadsheet for recording accessibility information for various zoos. It is super unfinished right now, FYI. That’s partially because I need to fill in more of it from my own experiences, and partially because there are things I didn’t note or experience - which I’d love for y'all to chime in about.
Categories for the spreadsheet so far include rentable assistance options, service dog information, accessible bathroom locations, mobility, vision, auditory and sensory issues (or accommodations), food allergy options, and general notes. I’m also including the information each zoo website provides, and guest assistance phone numbers, so all the information is in one place.
To add to this crowd-sourced zoo accessibility resource:
Send an ask to the blog, or comment on the appropriate cel on the spreadsheet (if the facility you want to comment on is already listed).
Provide the name of the zoo/aquarium/sanctuary and the approximate date you visited.
Tell me your experiences / information, and what categories they belong in.
Feel free to submit photos, if that’s useful info! I’m going to see if I can find a way to host them and link in the spreadsheet.
I’ll take information as it’s submitted and integrate it into the sheet. If the zoo you’ve visited isn’t on the list yet, I still want to add it! This resource is going to stay US-based, however. (I just don’t have the capacity to manage an international one).
Obviously, I can’t personally verify everything people submit, so this is very much a resource and not a definitive guide. Date stamps are crucial important for keeping track of what’s recent and what might have been updated since someone visited.
Let’s make zoo, aquarium, and sanctuary visits more accessible for everyone!
Okay! I think I’ve got almost everything that was added (via ask, reblog, or spreadsheet comment) integrated! Had to take a bit of time off for health reasons, but happy I can come back to it again.
I’ve added a bunch more categories based on your suggestions and contributions, including: parking, multi-lingual support, ride/show/transit accessibility, sun exposure, food & water, low/no cost entrance, support staff policies, options for SDs (bathroom spots, etc), behind-the-scenes accessibility, elevator locations, bench frequency/locations… it’s getting huge but I think it’s super important information.
I’ve done a bit of formatting to try to make the spreadsheet less visually overwhelming. Topics aren’t in any particular order, although I tried to group related concepts together. Grey columns are for information copied from the facility website, and white comments are for the most important part of the spreadsheet: your comments and feedback! That way what’s shared officially can be differentiated visually from what people have contributed.
Please feel free to send me more information and I’ll update it as I have time.
Comments and feedback from personal experience are the most useful contributions. I’m going through as I have time and populating the information from the zoo’s website, so while I super appreciate it when you send me that, you don’t need to duplicate that work. What I want to know is what I can’t find online!
How long are the hills? How’s the path conditions? How did you feel like the staff reacted to your SD? Is the signage at wheel-chair level appropriate for adults, or just kids? That sort of thing is the meat of this project.
When I was first in recovery for my brain injury, the physical therapist’s office was incredibly mobility-friendly and the majority of people there used wheelchairs. I was paralyzed down my right side due to my neck and back injury from the same car accident so I also was in a wheelchair until I had recovered enough to use a cane instead.
The lights were so bright that I spent the first several weeks of exercises with a towel covering my face as I laid on the bench and my PT worked on me and then I would be driven home to cry for hours in the dark because even with that it was still Too Much Too Loud Too Bright Too Tactile Too Much. At some point, several weeks in, my PT suggested we move to a private room instead of the main exercise area where she could turn off the lights and we could work in the dark instead.
During that period I couldn’t talk to advocate for myself so there was no way for me to communicate my needs besides through gestures and grunts and forcing single word sentences out. I couldn’t hold a pencil long enough to write and I couldn’t look at a screen long enough to type.
So yes actually I have been places where mobility needs are met but no one else’s are, and I’ve also been places where other needs are met but not mobility. Funny enough ableism in society is a weapon used against any and all disabled people and having inadequate accomodations should be a uniting factor between us rather than a dividing point. It sucks to be disabled in ableist society. I think we all know that.
I’d also like to add the thing I think about every time people talk about trying to be inclusive to people with mobility issues. Not as a counter to this, but to reinforce that people can have every intention to make something accessible and end up making it accessible for Some People, but still have a space that is ultimately inaccessible to people who weren’t thought about in the process.
My hometown built a new library and as it was being designed it was touted as being super accessible.
When it opened, my grandparents were excited to go, because they frequented the old library and had been missing it while there wasn’t a library in town as construction happened, and there was also a built in area that was specifically meant to be used as a seniors centre.
They get there and immediately there’s an issue. My grandfather was at a point in his life where he was having some mobility issues, but was not yet using a walker (he’d sometimes use a cane), and wasn’t in a wheelchair either. The entire building was built around ramps. Which I’m sure would be perfect if you used a mobility device with wheels! However, what it meant for my grandfather was walking longer distances on slopes to get from one elevation to another, whereas it would have been in some cases maybe three stair steps which he would have been much more able to do had there been stairs included anywhere (there were also whole floor elevation changes, just pointing out the ones that he specifically remarked on.)
Meanwhile, the old library was fewer levels—just two floors rather than a weird multi-tired space with floors above and below that—with stairs and and elevator. It was actually more accessible to people with a wider range of mobility issues than the new one ended up being.
Accessibility will never be a one-size-fits-all thing!
It’s great that mobility needs are actually sometimes thought about in designing buildings, but it’s true that it’s still not enough. That doesn’t mean that other disabilities aren’t also critically underserved because a lack of accommodation for them and extreme lack of awareness that those accommodations even need to exist!
Conflicting needs is the phrase you’re looking for!
For your grandfather, similar to my father, as his body breaks down he needs to walk less. A short staircase is less steps than a gently sloping ramp. What makes it easier for a wheelchair user makes it infinitely harder for someone who is capable of walking, just not walking much.
I will faint if I have to stand still without moving for too long. A long line to gain access to a building, or even just a slammed grocery store with a limited amount of cashiers near a holiday, is much more difficult for me than it is for someone who is already seated.
An elevator is great for everyone except someone who has a panic reaction in small, enclosed spaces, especially those containing strangers in close quarters or those where you can feel the floor move beneath you.
A larger stall is wonderful, but not so much if it means there’s less toilets overall after installing one.
Shorter counters are great until the person whose back literally doesn’t bend needs to use one.
All of these are conflicting needs! And it doesn’t mean that one should be prioritized over the other! It means that there needs to be accommodations for both! There needed to be stairs and elevators and more space-efficient for your grandpa, while continuing to keep the ramp options. A seat, cutting in line, express lanes, or even just fucking hiring more cashiers and scheduling more than just a skeleton crew (retail challenge: impossible) would work for me. Having the option to take a different route besides an elevator doesn’t mean you’re getting rid of the elevator. Designing bathrooms to be more space-efficient and larger overall while keeping an adequate number of toilets and accessible stalls is the correct answer. Having the option for both a shorter counter and a taller one, or making it user-adjustable, would be better than one or the other.
There are times when it is not possible to accommodate everyone due to conflicting needs. That’s not an excuse to not try. Every time this comes up where someone says “well [x need] gets accommodated but never [y need]” my response almost always is “I think it’d be better if both of you had better options actually”. Inadequate accessibility is a thing across all disabilities. We’d do better to demand better rather than telling others that their needs don’t matter as much.
Realizing that Amok Time, from T'Pring’s perspective, is basically the equivalent of a Vulcan Hallmark Movie, where a holiday (Pon Farr) makes our hero realize she wants hometown boy Stonn and a simple (Vulcan) life instead of big-city (space) boyfriend Spock, and it all comes to a head in an embarrassing misunderstanding in front of her family, is certainly making me feel some kind of way
2nd July 2023
Reblogged From the-mathmatician
Notes: 14187
