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Torture and strife and everything nice

@weirdstrangeandawful / weirdstrangeandawful.tumblr.com

hi! my pronouns are he/him adult | gay | aroace | disabled astronomy major by night, train wreck by day

About me!

Hi! I'm Laertes. I've been here a while, but introductions are hard. This blog is mostly a whump prompt blog and a home for my novel A Good Man's Heart, but I will often put other stuff in it like art and fibre arts. I am also disabled and it impacts every part of my life so that will show up here very often. If you are not a bot or fundraiser, please send me asks -- I'd love to chat! Especially about my novel and my OCs.

A little about me I guess. I'm aroace, gay, disabled, and not American. I am an adult although I don't feel comfortable putting my actual age publicly on the internet (if that's a deal-breaker for you I respect that but I won't be changing this). I'm currently pursuing a degree in astronomy and I work in software engineering.

I enjoy exploring darker whump themes such as domestic violence, major trauma (especially painful or unsuccessful recoveries), and addiction although my prompts will contain a huge variety of things. I also love to research and write historical (especially military) whump no later than World War I (although it's mostly Canadian and British because, well, I'm Canadian).

(If you don’t know what whump is check out my post on the subject)

Please do check out what I've finished of my novel! I've never shared my writing before so I'm very proud of it!

Some notes on accessibility:

  • This blog is not terribly screen-reader friendly -- I do my best to add descriptions in alt text but what I end up posting usually takes all my effort to do so. A Good Man's Heart contains scene break embellishments in the text (similar to *** in printed books) which are just described as 'embellishment' so as not to break the flow too much. You can see the above-linked table of contents for a description of the embellishment (under the cut and under the cover image)
  • My tag system is a mess and I have yet to make a coherent one and corresponding post. The ones I stick by the most are: #whump+#whump prompt, #weird strange and awful art, and #disability
  • I post trigger warnings at the top of my whump posts (as well as some others) and I tag for as much as I can with just the term (no tw, cw, etc before or after). Do not hesitate to send me an ask or a message if you would like me to trigger warn a certain topic. I cannot commit to always tagging my disability related posts properly since I am often posting those when I am barely functional but I do my best.
  • If there are any accessibility improvements, please let me know! I may not always be able to accommodate because of my own accessibility needs but I do want to hear about what your needs are!

Also! @obfuscated-abstract is my sideblog which I use to summarise and post medical documentation on disabilities which would require someone outside of academia to pay for. Feel free to check it out and send in any papers you need access to.

They're charging me $400 to replace a part of my wheelchair that was fucked up when I got it??? And the Blue Cross site isn't working for me right now so I can't check how much they cover for repairs (I highly doubt it's anywhere near $400 but I need to know how hard I need to fight)

In better news, my medical supply company finally called me back after months of radio silence.

In baffling news, my tech left without telling me so my file just got abandoned.

daily reminder that if you do not provide the same amount of care, respect and support to people with gi issues, to people who have to use the toilet a lot due to their disablility, to people who are incontinent, to people who vomit a lot, to people who have ibs, to people with chronic nausea, to people with bladder or bowel control issues, to people who use diapers, to people who cannot control their bodily functions, to people who drool, to people who smell bad due to an aspect of their disability, and to people who have any "gross" aspect to their disability that you do to those who have more "conventional" disabilities then you are not an ally.

It’s always funny when people make the argument that children shouldn’t have access to some media because “it will give them nightmares” like I hate to tell you this but children can have nightmares all by themselves. I had recurring childhood nightmares about the washing machine

Nightmares are such a normal and important part of processing difficult things. They are not something to be avoided. In fact, it's avoidance of nightmares (by not sleeping for example) which is usually indicative of a problem rather than the presence of those nightmares.

I want to be very clear on this. You can be out drinking with your friends on Friday night and dead on Sunday because of meningitis. Does that sound a little specific? Guess why I have such a specific scenario in mind.

And getting vaccinated is an easy way to prevent that. There is no medical reason to stop recommending that vaccine. There's no new study that shows that it's unsafe, there's no replacement that's better. This is literally the government making its citizenry less safe for no reason.

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

Learning to sketch has been the most useful thing I've learned as a visual artist. Sketching is the artist's equivalent of bullet points. sketching an idea so I don't forget it is so important. Planning my project so I don't get overwhelmed is so important.

I'm not joking or exaggerating when I say that learning to make this:

Took at least four times as long as learning to make this:

One of the hardest parts of visual art is trying to turn a thought into something visual. Once it's out, you can compare it to the idea and shape it how you want. The sketch isn't supposed to look like the idea.

Two things that really helped me take this to heart:

  • I should be able to make something that looks at least something like the sketch with my eyes closed
  • I should not have more than 5 basic shapes in the image and shouldn't have more than 20 shapes total

These aren't rules I go by anymore but they're very much rules that helped me let go of my old, incorrect idea of sketching.

for no reason whatsoever here’s a reminder that if you consider yourself a leftist/punk/abolitionist/anarchist/radical in any sort of way and get called into jury duty, you are to become the most square person on earth during the jury questionnaire!!!

don’t be that guy who says fuck the police in the jury questionnaire! that just gets you sent home! if you want to generate change, interact with the case and use your jury vote for good! ESPECIALLY if it’s a high profile case!

Remember, when you're on the jury, a good "that cop's story didn't add up" will sway a lot more Chads and Karens than "fuck the police."

Had jury duty, can confirm!

An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)

And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.

Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?

That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.

Being able to raise reasonable doubt among a jury of one's peers saves lives. If you get the chance, take it.

"Jury Room / The Holdout" (1959) by Norman Rockwell. One of my favorites of his. Particularly the gendered dynamic he depicts here.

Not to mention, 'fuck the police' isn't how you should be handling jury duty. These are people's lives you're dealing with, not pawns in your political movement. As someone who has been a victim of violence, if my case had gone to trial and a jury had found the perpetrator not guilty entirely because they didn't think police ever told the truth, I would be even more devastated than I am about my case not being taken anywhere. As a juror, your job is to be critical and judge based on the evidence. Disbelieving everything the cops said and being wrong causes just as much damage as believing everything the cops said and being wrong.

Starting off my challenge to make 1 zine every week until march, it’s some of my favourite baby birds!

I’m doing this challenge to try to kick my habit of overthinking and never starting stuff, though I will admit I’m posting this now on my self-appointed deadline day because I spent the whole week overthinking, gotta start somewhere I guess. Once I forced myself to just sit down and just start drawing it only took me an hour which makes me feel a bit silly

I don’t sleepwalk but I do sleep-remove-my-splints lol.

It’s not really a problem because my splints are over a decade old not well fitted for my currently so I assume I take them off because of pain which is a good thing. I just find it funny.

Can wheelchairs (even well-fitted wheelchairs) cause damage? yes.

Is muscle atrophy the damage we need to be warning people about? no.

I know this is just because people (doctors included) are only semi-educated on wheelchair use but I'm so tired of people pushing back on wheelchair use in the name of 'education' but not actually being able to educate.

'Do not post about [topic] without a trigger warning' is not a boundary. It is your responsibility to block in that situation.

'Do not message me directly about [topic] without a trigger warning' is also not a boundary.

'I will no longer interact with you if you continue to mention [topic] without a trigger warning' is a healthy boundary.

Healthy boundaries have to be about your own actions. Healthy boundaries should not be made with the intent of changing someone else's actions. Ever. A roof does not provide shelter by telling the snow to stop.

If someone is expressing an accessibility concern with a piece of software and you want to help, your job is to help them make that piece of software meet their accessibility needs. You have to respect that disabled people aren't idiots. We are using the inaccessible software for a whole host of reasons which are a) none of your business and b) well-researched.

Sometimes those reasons are as simple as switching software is a massive accessibility barrier so telling people to switch is not only not fixing the accessibility concern but adding inaccessibility. Sometimes those reasons are related to a condition they don't want to disclose details of so you're just being a jerk and making them uncomfortable.

Switching is an option, yes. But if you're not prepared to work with them when they tell you that option isn't viable, then you need to fuck off.

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