whether or not I’m attractive now is another thing, but being socialized as ‘ugly’ and ‘undesirable’ in public school early on has really taken a toll on me
“Character who looks dangerous but is actually harmless” and “character who looks harmless but is actually dangerous” are both well and good, but consider: character who looks dangerous, and actually is, but for a completely different reason than they look like they should be.
And no, I don’t mean like “guy who wears robes with a water motif is actually a fire wizard”. I mean like “seven-foot-tall mountain of gleaming muscle with sword the size of a surfboard strapped to his back is actually the Nine Realms’ most feared lawyer”.
Hiram McDaniels, a nine headed dragon wanted for insurance fraud.
i was ranting about ableism on twitter and. i realize a lot of people genuinely do not know this and dont mean harm. so please know this and cause less harm. you will make my life and the life of other autistic people just a little bit better.
and people can gain new skills over time, where you are now is not where you will always be.
Also, what skills and needs an individual autistic person has can vary a lot over time (even day to day or hour to hour!) depending on lots of factors. When I am not putting my energy into dealing with sensory overload or making the effort to seem neurotypical to judgy people, I’m able to cultivate a lot of abilities that I just can’t maintain when I’m under heavy stress.
Reblog if you’re part of the ‘I read a lot of fan fiction and now I have a bizarrely accurate judgement of how long it takes me to read a particular number of words’ squad
As of July 4th 2018, the Internet as we know it might be dead for good.
The European Parliament is passing a new Copyright Directive. Article 13 #CensorshipMachine will impose widespread censorship of all the content we share online. Art, fanfiction, parodies, remixes, mashups, memes, etc.. Anything that you do not hold the rights over will be taken down.
Article 13 would force all online platforms to police and prevent the uploading of copyrighted content, or make people seek the correct licenses to post that content. Internet platforms hosting large amounts of user-uploaded content must monitor user behaviour and filter their contributions to identify and prevent copyright infringement.
Such filters will be mandatory for platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit and Instagram, but also much smaller websites.
Last Tuesday (19th June 2018) a group of more than 70 people who have played important roles in building the internet and developing it (Tim Berners-Lee, Vincent Cerf,
Jimmy Wales, Mitchell Baker…) into what it is today addressed an open letter to the members of the European Parliament:
“As creators ourselves, we share the concern that there should be a fair distribution of revenues from the online use of copyright works, that benefits creators, publishers, and platforms alike.
But Article 13 is not the right way to achieve this. By requiring Internet platforms to perform automatic filtering all of the content that their users upload, Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users. […] The damage that this may do to the free and open Internet as we know it is hard to predict, but in our opinions could be substantial.”
[Image Description: Tag reading “I wrote this out of pure spite”]
The AO3 Tag of the Day is: Someone please take this opportunity to ask me about the Pumpkinification of the God Claudius
Ok, it is my great delight to introduce you all to one of the most absurd pieces of political satire ever written. It is a work of pure spite, entirely scurrilous and utterly delightful. It also has the distinction of having the best name ever: Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii, which is translated various ways, but which I’ve always thought is best rendered as The Pumpkinification of the God Claudius.
Now, Claudius was a Roman emperor in the first century and a pretty good one, all things considered. He was careful and thoughtful and did things like reform the judicial system and balance the budget and other boring, necessary stuff like that. He was also, and I say this factually and without prejudice, fat, ugly, physically disabled, and possessed of a severe speech impediment. For reasons unknown (but possibly related to the fact that he was all of those things and humanity basically sucks sometimes), people hated him. Hated. Which meant that when he died and his stepson took over, people were really excited. One of those people, Seneca, celebrated by writing the Apocolocyntosis.
A note about the fundamental joke of the Apocolocyntosis: when a Roman emperor died, it was customary for the Senate to meet and vote to make the dead emperor a god. After Claudius died, the Senate duly deified him, and, though we don’t have the exact decree, would likely have issued a proclamation along the lines of “The Deification of the God Claudius.” See where this is going? Yeah.
Here’s an incomplete list of shit that happens in the Apocolocyntosis:
Claudius orders Hercules to be executed
This doesn’t work out so well, because, you know, it’s Hercules
The line “The last words he was heard to speak in this world were….“Oh dear, oh dear! I think I have made a mess of myself.” Whether he did or no, I cannot say, but certain it is he always did make a mess of everything.“
The gods apparently have a Senate too, where they meet to vote about whether Claudius should become a god. In this meeting, Claudius’s grandfather stands up and makes fun of him in front of the entire God Senate
(The God Senate runs on the Roman version of Robert’s Rules of Order)
Hercules physically threatens some god senators, because he’s, you know, Hercules
There’s a clown parade
Claudius ends up getting sent to the underworld, where literally everybody yells at him
No seriously. They hold an entire legal trial so that all the dead people can yell at him
Claudius ends up having to do the “tantalus reach out for the food or water and it runs away punishment thing” except with gambling for some reason
Another dead emperor shows up and announces that Claudius is one of his slaves and then just walks off with him
I feel like I should back up and mention again that there’s a clown parade
I’m serious. It’s a fucking clown parade. I have no fucking clue why
One thing the Pumpkinification does not involve? Pumpkins. There are no pumpkins in this pumpkinification book.
(Important side note: Claudius’s stepson who took over? Nero. Yeah, that Nero.)
One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.
There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”
My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”
To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”
Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn’t think she’s too fat to be allowed to eat.
This reminds me of a cousin of mine who ended up with her kids being taken away from her by social services for a number of reasons but mostly for nearly killing her baby daughter. How?
By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.
After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”
Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.
When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.
(Note. She still, to this day, maintains the view that she was right and the doctors were wrong. “They just want fat kids so they can keep employed treating them for all those diseases that being fat causes.” = her actual words.)
My mom had me dieting with her when I was eleven. She had me eating less than 600 calories a day because she was worried I was going to “get huge.” She even grounded me once because she found out my friends were bringing me lunches! I ended up passing out, going to the ER, and getting two IVs at once BC I was so goddamn dehydrated. Soooooo surprised they didn’t call child services… And looking back, this was the root of my anorexia. I’m nearly 22 and still fighting it. Please don’t starve your fucking children.
For fucks sake babies are SUPPOSED to be fat, what is wrong with people? It’s just stored energy, and growing children need stored energy – an 11 year old is just about to hit some major growing years. Damn.
Fatphobia
Is
Real
and it kills
This is no joke. people will literally starve their own babies cause they don’t want them getting fat. A parent brought in their six month old baby who was having breathing issues and kept getting sick. the parent was asked if the baby was eating regularly and the parent straight up told the doctor that they only feed the baby once a day. ONCE A DAY. A FUCKING BABY. they even had the nerve to say because they didn’t want the baby to get fat. people like this are real. they would rather have a dead baby than a fat one.
My youngest son is a very big boy and has been since he was born. When he was 10 months old I took him for his well-baby check and vaccinations. The nurse noted his weight and said, quite casually, “He is in the 99th percentile for weight so he is at risk for obesity. You may want to keep an eye on that.” I said, “He is exclusively breastfed. He refuses to eat any solids yet.” What did she expect me to do? What would it mean to “keep an eye on” an exclusively breastfed baby’s weight?
She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.
Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.”
I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.
We need to completely eliminate weight talk from medicine, especially when it comes to children. Even the smallest exposure can have terrible consequences.
Wtf…
A friend from college had been going to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. She was told to lose weight.
Over the course of several years, she went back to the doctors time and time again, telling them that she’d been sticking to the diet but because of her breathing problems she had been unable to even walk for more than 20 minutes at a time.
The doctor got her into an exercise programme and told her that she just needed to really try to lose weight because that was clearly the reason for her breathing problems.
By the time they found the tumour on her lungs, it was inoperable. She only lived three months after diagnosis. She was 25.
She’d had the tumour for over five years.
The doctor was so focused on the fact that my friend was “fat”, that they refused to look for any underlying cause.
They killed her.
Weight-first treatment KILLS. Fatphobia KILLS.
I have 2 scary stories to share about fatphobic doctors & parents harming their childs/patients’ health:
1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).
You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.
She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.
And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!
2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.
Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.
My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:
SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.
She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:
If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.
It’s a real shame that we all have so much stories to share about this issue. A REAL SHAME.
Future doctors, interns, and residents following me:
FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!
Don’t let bias against your fat patients kill them!
i’d really like my thin followers to reblog this if you can. fat people are already here for each other, we need you guys to help us out too. this is something i never see anyone actually talking about in-depth, and it’s disappointing. be there for your fat siblings, too.
ruby-dear archive 