This Is A Politics Blog Now

ADHD awareness month. Comic about my mental health and how labels and diagnosis have helped me better navigate my brain.

How are speedrunners not even like.. employed as professional beta testers

consider this:

game dev: any bugs?

speedrunner: no.. i checked everything.. no bugs sir :)

speedrunner in his head:

fun game dev fact!

i do QA testing on AAA games. speedrunners are considered throughout the testing process, and every once in a while we will log a bug or an exploit that can be considered useful for speedrunners, and the devs may deliberately choose to not fix the exploit.

sometimes either the exploit is left in, or it may be that it would be such an exhaustive rewrite of a lot of low level systems that fixing it just isn’t worth the time and effort when 99% of players won’t experience it playing normally.

consider the fact that a lot of exploits speedrunners use are usually involved with the physics engine, player controller, or some other significant core pillar of the game—to fix something like that would probably end up breaking hundreds of systems built on top of those core systems.

i for one have literally watched a speedrun of a game i worked on, where the runner used an exploit that i personally found and logged!

several of my coworkers are speedrunners in fact, and they end up finding some of the wildest bugs!

France has always and I mean ALWAYS had a history of Islamophobia...but, for those of you who don’t know what’s going on right now:

These restrictions (I have definitely not covered a lot of them) fall under France’s Separatism Bill which still needs to be passed by the National Assembly. France maintains that these actions are to uphold secularism (the separation of religion and state).

However, these targeted laws and the statements accompanying them...

...just showcase how deeply rooted these laws are in Islamophobia and how France is maximizing restrictions on daily Muslim life just to...be a white saviour?

There are five million Muslims in France right now and they are all being affected by this.

Respectfully, I think this is not adequate.

Julian is a writer and trans person and their use of the word transsexual was deliberate and intentional. If you (general you, and the anon, not NH) are not comfortable using that word by a trans author when using the rest of their words, dont use their quote. It’s that simple.

Julian has written at length about the biblical language. That is as intentional as their use of the word transsexual. Their use of the word is deliberate, is a provocation, is an invitation for you to think about the word and why Julian would choose to use it and reclaim it. This is their prerogative as a writer and artist. It is not yours.

Dont take the words of a trans author that are about being trans, an author that has written about choosing that word deliberately, and then disregard it to do whatever the fuck you want with it. That’s violence. Yes, even being trans yourself does not entitle you to chop up another trans person’s words and works against their wishes. That is still violence and shame on you for ignoring their wishes. “Yours [normal-horoscopes] is better”?? Make up your own inspo porn quotes if you aren’t happy with theirs then.

And don’t take it from me — take it from Julian:

“I think I have to say that if you can’t use transsexual comfortably, you don’t get to quote this.”

https://twitter.com/juliankjarboe/status/1318169156081098754?s=21

https://twitter.com/juliankjarboe/status/1334204223538532355?s=21

And on the topic of the religious language:

https://twitter.com/juliankjarboe/status/1298466405873049600?s=21

And they don’t appreciate this thing that’s very meaningful for them being co-opted into the magic/alchemy language. If it’s not palatable to you as is, don’t use it.

https://twitter.com/juliankjarboe/status/1299478251958657025?s=21

And there’s more where that came from, on their Twitter, their website, and in their books. You can engage with them directly if you wish.

The fact is, if you don’t understand why they would use the words transsexual and the religious imagery, you don’t actually understand what they were trying to say, so don’t use the quote.

Anyway, in conclusion: you can’t help what you don’t know but once you have been informed things like “this is the original quote” and “this author has talked at length about how plagiarism harms them” and “they’ve also talked about why they chose the words they used, and that they don’t want people who are not engaged enough on this topic to understand why they chose those words to use their words at all” then you ARE responsible for what you do with that knowledge.

Extremely well put. Yet another reason that it's fucked that Julian's words were shared without context or credit.

StopLine3

I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.

#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)

Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.

This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.

Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.

Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.

A charity where you can do this, right here.

Be Parker! Be somebody else’s Leverage!

THANK YOU, from the disability community, for doing the actual research and not just relying on your first assumptions and stereotypes.

Organization of nurses with disabilities: http://nond.org/

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.

And above all? Write respectfully.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

Experience being disabled is a very relevant thing.

If you’ve got a task that you don’t think you’d be able to do one armed, think about it like this: do you think you could do it one armed if you had 10 years to figure it out?

Most adults who were born disabled have 20+ years of experience figuring out how to do shit while disabled.

That’s a very real expertise, and it’s relevant to other situations as well.

The expertise and experience of disabled people is such an important factor. So many people without a disability think of it like: “what if I suddenly lost an arm, or lost my sight (or just closed my eyes); how would I do X?” And if they can’t think of a way (usually fairly quickly), assume it can’t be done.

There is so much about accomodations and adaptive technology and just plain skills that abled people generally don’t even know that they (we) don’t know. It’s a whole other universe of possibility.

white people, i’m going to need you to change the way you react to poc calling you out on racism, or telling you not to say something because it’s racially inappropriate:

I love a dude with a passion for creative stuff

Kitten falls in love with dog. (via)

Comparing regular fiction to propaganda is. Hmm.

Propaganda is a deliberate thing, where true facts are mixed with falsehoods or misleading information to force the audience to come to a specific conclusion. Sometimes this conclusion is obvious, like the "WAR IS GOOD AND RIGHT" propaganda that's been used for decades, but sometimes it's more subtle and is designed to make the audience question what they know or feel sympathetic for certain groups.

Take copaganda for example. In "progressive" cop shows, we get some very simple messages. 1) Individual police often do terrible things. 2) Some individual police are against those things. 3) The law enforcement system has a lot of diverse officers. These are all true facts.

Using that information, the conclusion that the show leads the audience to is, at best, "police are a necessary evil". At worst, the conclusion is "issues in the police force are individualistic and can be fixed if a couple cops just care hard enough". These are NOT true but copaganda shows are very deliberate in their message THAT police are necessary and helpful, and those shows purposely DO NOT show the issues in law enforcement as systematic.

This is propaganda because, again, it's mixing facts with lies and obscuration to lead the audience where the creator wants them.

This is NOT comparable to regular fiction because propaganda is specifically designed to manipulate the audience, which is not true for other forms of fiction. Propaganda depends on using real facts, established social beliefs, and ingrained biases to twist social perceptions of different issues.

A job that allows one to abuse others with virtual impunity will always attract those who want to and will.

So glad to know we’re giving this technology to a group of people who will almost certainly abuse it to murder people in the worst case scenario and in the best case scenario will allow them to continue arresting innocent civilians for non-violent petty crimes during a global pandemic in a disinfected car.

Yeah as an Aussie I can tell you they absolutely fucking will because they already have

well shit

Ah yes, the profit motive, always incentivising the best outcomes.

i’m gonna lose my fucking mind if I see this post being circulated one more time with blatant misinformation

y’all this just ain’t true??? I’m begging you to open google PLEASE it takes one search and like 2 minutes of reading

the company that produced this anti-venom was purchased by Pfizer. Pfizer is working on making a new anti-venom with a longer shelf life and they’re STILL PRODUCING THIS ANTIVENOM.

now, you’re correct in that there isn’t much of this anti-venom in the country. but why is that?

because NOBODY GETS BIT BY CORAL SNAKES.

in the last 20 years, only two people have died in the USA from coral snake envenomation. Of those two, ONE OF THEM didn’t seek medical help- and the OTHER ONE waited a few hours before going to the hospital.

if you’re bitten by a coral snake, and you IMMEDIATELY go to the hospital, you’ll probably live! local hospitals work with poison control and larger hospitals to get anti-venom to patients, and guess what? this system WORKS.

That second screenshot from Google looks really worrying, though, right? Guess what- it’s from 2013. It’s REALLY fuckin outdated!

there is enough coral snake anti-venom in the country for those that need it, to get it. the shelf life of an existing lot of anti-venom was recently extended to January of 2020, and the FDA has extended that date every year since 2017. they’ll likely extend it for 2021, too.

i posted a better explanation earlier, but i can’t be fucked to go grab it. just- google things before you decide to “spread the word”

Thank you for correcting this.