Posts Tagged ‘life’

18
Jun
2020

People trying to justify lack of disability are wild.

categories: personal; word count: 306 words

Someone literally told me with a straight face, or as straight of a face as they could have hoped to manage, that “just because I can use social media, I’m not disabled, and there are probably jobs that I can find if I try hard enough”… or something. (One of my friends was as surprised as I was at this and inserted their own $0.02 into the matter, at which point the person who said this didn’t even really bother to engage them from my own understanding, because the exchange took place — wait for it — online, behind a computer screen, where the person could ironically say these things behind the veil of anonymity. Isn’t that how it always is?)

I told the person that I would continue to take advice from my care team, reminded them that the lights on my section of the house are kept dim, that I am “not always at the computer”, that my computer runs f.lux with Cave Painting selected (which is the least bright setting), and that I actually wear sunglasses in the house as necessary, and yes, until I found out that Zenni Optical now makes sunglasses in my prescription strength, that actually meant over my glasses some of the time. Aren’t these people wild, though? So desperate for people not to be disabled because they can not stand the idea of these people getting “free handouts”, even though these are benefits and services very often needed for these people to survive…

It’s almost always conservatives who say these things though, and more often than not religious ones.

Many of us would work if we could, because to stay eligible for these programs really is difficult. We would.

Hell, to actually become eligible for the programs in the first place is sometimes a hop, a skip, and a jump.

17
Jun
2020

Facebook picture filters are always amusing, y’all.

categories: blog maintenance, personal; word count: 100 words

This one happens to be one of my favorites. Monster likes “the science one”, even though that one’s gone…

Meanwhile, I’ve been installing some plugins behind the scenes, choosing some popular ones since it’s been a bit more than a decade since I’ve actually blogged publicly, let alone on WordPress. One of the ones that I chose was Yoast, since it’s been awhile since I’ve done SEO, let alone on a(ny) website. I guess I’ll be finding out in a few weeks how well it works for me since I am running Google Analytics in the background of this.

15
Jun
2020

So Zuck kisses Trump’s ass and targets activists.

categories: personal; word count: 168 words

This isn’t a picture of my account, but it is a screenshot that my friend took from their account. Not only does Zuckerberg allow Trump to say whatever he wants on Facebook even when it violates the Terms of Service (something that Twitter hasn’t been doing, which is worth drawing a parallel over), but if you do any meaningful sort of activism or advocacy on Twitter and get enough comment or post blocks for it Facebook threatens to disable your account over it. This is sadly something that I will now have to keep in mind, because for all of the “free speech” Facebook claims to allow you to have, if you’re an actual activist, you are targeted on their website, and you don’t actually have any free speech there at all — you are nearly repeatedly silenced into submission by individuals who, by their own attestation, game Facebook’s reporting algorithm, and Facebook refuses to do a thing about it even when it is repeatedly brought to their attention.

13
Jun
2020

The Myka Stauffer “re-homing” drama, continued.

categories: personal; word count: 366 words

First of all, I’m going to come out and say that I’m glad that more and more companies are dropping her as an advertiser. She literally re-homed her child (yes, adopted or not, he is — was — her child) like he was a pet. She absolutely should face repercussions for this, especially because she tried to hide it for so long and then responded to it by not responding to it and then deleted all pictures of him from her Instagram account.

But what I actually came here to write about: it later came out after all of this came out that she stopped Huxley’s ABA therapy (that’s a completely separate post that I cam get into, my thoughts on ABA) and therapy services, probably because actually having an autistic child — even though she had the finances and the means to be able to care for him, and knew exactly what she was getting into adopting him (I continue to call bullshit on her “not knowing what they were getting into”, as Chinese children can only be adopted by United States citizens if they have disabilities to prevent what are called “tourist adoptions”) — was too much of an inconvenience for her. But if the reason that she actually “re-homed” him was because he had severe behavioral concerns and safety was a concern, there were things that she could actually have done to keep him safe that did not involve relinquishing her parental rights, such as a stay in a group home for whatever length of time was deemed appropriate for the circumstances, or even institutionalization (again, don’t get me started on my feelings on that, but it would probably have been better than this if the proper facility was selected). There is also respite care, which is offered by a lot of insurance companies, or she could even have paid for it out of pocket with the money that she had been making as a YouTuber with the sponsors that she had had before they had dropped her for this. But she shot herself in the fucking foot.

Basically: there was so much more that she could have done before she actually did what she did here.

12
Jun
2020

I don’t think that I’ve ever actually told this story…

categories: personal; word count: 492 words

Not here, anyways.

When I was a senior in high school, me and a group of friends actually kept a freshman from committing suicide by jumping off of the art building (chances are high that he would actually have… succeeded).

After seeing that he had actually climbed up there and began shouting that he was going to jump, which eventually drew the attention of everyone in the cafeteria that morning — you could see the art building from the cafeteria because it was… adjacent to it in a peculiar way — and seeing that everyone in the cafeteria with the exception of us was going to start chanting, “Jump! Jump! Jump!”, my friends and I knew that we had to summon help in the form of an adult so that he wouldn’t actually jump. The nearest adult that I knew we could find was the student activities director whose office was in the cafeteria on the stage, so my friends and I literally pushed our way through the growing crowd of students to get to her (mind, this was not a small school, so we probably pushed our way through the equivalent of a small mosh pit, a thousand or so students by that point), and as luck would have it, she was actually in her office, and we could tell her what was going on. She immediately stepped out of her office, saw the students practically cramming themselves against the glass of the cafeteria wall nearest where they could see this kid standing on the top of the art building, still chanting at him to jump, knew that we weren’t pulling her leg, and called the front office to tell them that they needed to call emergency services and why all of this was necessary.

Not long after, some of them pulled up by that side of the school and some of them climbed up there with him. This poor kid literally tried as hard as he could to get away from them and jump off of the building — we’re talking, he literally tried to drag himself out of their grip at several points, and we saw them sedate him at one point — but they did succeed in getting him down and keeping him from hurting himself. And we eventually found out that we were the only students who told an actual adult what was going on, which meant that if we hadn’t, he might actually have successfully jumped from the building. Out of a school with slightly more than two thousand students with approximately a thousand of them in the cafeteria at that time, only maybe six actually did the right thing summoning aid so that this student would not hurt himself.

Needless to say, a lot of students got to their first period classes late, but given what went on, there was reason for it. My reason was, well… I actually helped keep one of the school’s students from killing himself.

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