dance of the sugar plum fairy

I also have the progress/breakdown video if anyone is interested in it 👀

Every person need to be taught disability history

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Teach about us.

Oh! Oh! I got one! Meet Edward V. Roberts-

Ed Roberts was one of the founding minds behind the Independent Living movement. Roberts was born in 1939, and contracted polio at age 14, two years before the vaccine that ended the polio epidemic came out (vaccinate your kids). Polio left Roberts almost completely paralyzed, with only the use of two fingers and a few toes. At night, he had to sleep in an iron lung, and he would often rest there during the day as well. Other times of the day, he breathed by using his face and neck muscles to force air in and out of his lungs.

Despite this being the fifties, Roberts' mother insisted that her son continue schooling. Her support helped him face his fear of being stared at and ridiculed at school, going from thinking of himself as a "hopeless cripple" to seeing himself as a "star." When his high school tried to deny him his diploma because he had never completed driver's ed, Roberts and his mother fought the school and won.

This marked the beginning of his career as an activist.

Roberts had to fight the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation for support to attend college, because his counselor thought he was too severely disabled to ever work or live independently. Roberts did go to school, however, first attending the College of San Marino. He was then accepted to UC Berkeley, but when the school learned that he was disabled, they tried to backtrack. "We've tried cripples before, and it didn't work," one dean famously said. The school tried to argue the dorms couldn't accommodate his iron lung, so Roberts was instead housed in an empty wing of the school's Cowell Hospital.

Roberts' admittance paved the way for other disabled students who were also housed in the new Cowell Dorm. The group called themselves "The Rolling Quads," and together they fought and advocated for better disability support, more ramps and accessible architecture like curb cut outs, founded the first formally recognized student-led disability services program in the country, and even managed to successfully oust a rehabilitation counselor who had threatened two of the Quads with expulsion for their protests.

After graduation from his master's, he served a number of other roles- he taught political science at a number of different colleges over the years, served on the board for the Center for Independent Living, confounded the World Institute on Disability with Judith E. Heumann and Joan Leon, and continued to advocate for better disability services and infrastructure at his alma mater of UC Berkeley.

Roberts also took part in and helped organize sit ins to force the federal government to enforce section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which stated that people with disabilities should not be excluded from activities, denied the right to receive benefits, or be discriminated against, from any program that uses federal financial assistance, solely because of their disability. The sit-in occupied the offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco and lasted 28 days. The protestors were supported by local gay rights organizations and the Black Panthers. Roberts and other activists spoke, and their arguments were so compelling that members of the department of health joined the sit in. Reagan was forced to acknowledge and implement the policies and rules that section 504 required. This national recognition helped to pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

Roberts died of cardiac arrest in 1995 at the age of 54, leaving behind a proud legacy of advocacy and activism. Not bad for a "hopeless cripple" whose rehab counselor thought he was too disabled to ever work.

[id: a black and white photograph of Roberts, a bearded white man, sitting in his chair and smiling with a ventilator tube between his teeth.

A younger Roberts lying in an Iron Lung with a cup with a straw next to his head.

Two photographs, one of Roberts and a black man with a service dog (probably a seeing eye dog) walking along a path together, the other of Roberts participating in a march, with another man behind him holding a sign saying “Civil Rights for Disabled”]/end id.

dance of the sugar plum fairy

every gym leader is like “I lost!?! UNBELIEVABLE!” buddy you live in a world where every ten year old child has always been offered a free fire breathing monster at least once and you brought nothing to this fight but anthropomorphic flowers

gym leaders’ whole job is to provide a specific challenge, a battle of a certain type and difficulty level. if you’ve brought the tools and skills to complete that challenge, you’re going to win by design. the pokémon in that battle are probably not actually the strongest pokemon they have.

when gym leaders go “argh, how could i lose??” they’re acting to give your victory legitimacy because you’re 10. they’re like a villain cosplayer letting a baby knock them over. they’re being nice!!

[puts a gun to your head. three guns even] READ MEG'S ROLESWAP FIC NOW

…Hot take, but we need to start hiring fursuit makers of this caliber to do practical creature effects for indie fantasy/sci-fi movies, because clearly these people seem like the goddamn future of practical effects….

…And yes, before anyone brings it up, I am aware the all-fursuited fantasy movie Bitter Lake exists, but we need more stuff like that IMO.

What’s wild to me is you can’t see where the wearer’s vision is. Usually close-fitting masks like this use the wearer’s eyes as the character’s eyes, and while it does look cool you can’t get cartoon eyes that way. This mask has cartoon eyes, but doesn’t have the usual black patches at the corners for vision. I’m wondering if the eyes are actually where the wearer’s eyes are and they’re using a material like reflective sunglass lenses to prevent their eyes from being easily seen.

And don’t get me started on how well the jaw works! Mobile jaws that follow the wearer’s movement are common but often have very slight oddities that give away the mechanism. This one is perfect. I’d love to see this artist’s other work.

EDIT: Artist is here: https://twitter.com/smallyuXP

I think the vision IS using the tearduct method, it’s just so seamless you don’t notice! Incredible.

In a previous post about the Modernisme architectonic style, I said I wouldn’t mention the tiles not to make the post longer… @kiragecko​ asked for some tiles, so here are some examples!

The tiles in this post are “rajoles hidràuliques” (meaning “hydraulic tiles” in the Catalan language), which is a kind of tile invented in the 1850s in Catalonia and very widespread in our country since they’re very resistant and quite cheap.

In this post I include photos mostly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all from buildings in Catalonia and often inspired in older traditional Catalan tile stiles and the style of carpets.

This website posted a lot of tiles from Barcelona.

These ones were in the library of Vilassar de Dalt.

Barcelona again.

The street pavement in parts of Barcelona.

Palau Baró de Quadras, Barcelona. Tiles in the walls and floor.

There’s also wall tiles in relief

The two above are in Barcelona and the bottom one in Canet de Mar.

Wall and ceiling in Hospital de Sant Pau, Barcelona.

Two examples of walls in Barcelona.

And it’s not only for the floors and lower half of walls, they used it in the outside of buildings too:

The roof of Casa Batlló (Barcelona, Catalonia). It represents the scales of a dragon, as if the dragon was asleep on top of the house.

Or to write the name of your house (Bell Esguard)

Or to make a mosaic (this is also in Torre de Bell Esguard)

For your shop’s door.

Outside domes or the top of towers.

Outdoors of two buildings in Argentona.

This is in Canet de Mar too.

We could spend pages and pages and pages on floor hydraulic tiles alone (seriously, Catalonia is FULL of different designs of them), but I think everyone who has to scroll past this post will appreciate it if I stop making it longer. If you want to see more photos of Catalan modernist architecture, the photographer Arnim Schulz has hundreds of photos in his Flickr account (or let me know if there’s interest in something else and I’ll post it).