such a beautiful take. allies take note.
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From my experience what these people actually want is confirmation that their experiences were normal and correct and that it's the world that has gone wrong. That's why confronting them with the fact that actually how they were treated was literally abuse makes them so upset, they don't want to acknowledge that they were (and often still are) victims of people and systems outside their control. They were raised with the mindset that to admit something hurt you was a weakness. They were raised to believe that suffering through hardship silently is a sign of good character and strength. They want to be praised for being so strong, not sympathised with for being so hurt, they just don't know what to do with that massive shift in perspective
This unlocked a memory for me. I'm maybe 7 or 8 years old. My father had screamed at me for some tiny mistake and left me a sobbing mess, then stormed away in anger. A little while later he came back to me looking ashamed, sat next to me, and said he was sorry for shouting and making me cry. He said sometimes being a dad was hard. I asked him why he yelled at me like that and his answer was, "Well, I guess that's just what dads do. That's what my dad always did. He used to shout himself hoarse at us all the time. He even hit us sometimes."
And my little autistic ass looked at him and asked, completely innocently, "Well... did you like it?"
The look on his face was priceless. The shock as he considered, for the very first time, that how he had been treated was not okay. That just because it was seen as normal didn't mean it was right. He teared up and said, without looking me in the eye, "I mean. No, I didn't. That's... a good point." He then apologized again.
Shortly after that, I later learned, he started going to therapy. He stopped yelling at us. He learned better ways to cope with anger and enforce the rules with me and my siblings. We didn't know it at the time, but when I was a lot older he told me proudly how when he realized he was repeating a pattern of abuse, he went and did something about it and became a better dad rather than pass those lessons on to his kids.
Obviously that's not how such conversations always end. But sometimes when you confront them with it, it does make a difference.
I see his robot as an absolute win
OK - a very tangential takeoff: Engineering prof assigns students this question: Explain how to determine the height of a very tall building using a barometer.
Obviously meant to use change in barometric pressure with altitude. But one student submitted the following:
There are several ways of doing this
1. On a sunny day, stand the barometer up in the sun, measure the length of its shadow relative to its height, then measure the length of the building’s shadow and calculate its height from that.
2. Go into the stairwell and climb the stairs to the top, marking off the length of the barometer on the wall, giving you the height of the building in “barometer units”.
3. Go onto the roof of the building and drop the barometer off the top and time how long it takes to hit the ground, then calculate the height using the well known formula of 32 ft./sec./sec.
4. Go into the office of the building superintendent and say “If you tell me how tall this building is, I will give you this nice barometer”.
Newton….
This is basically any DnD party solving puzzles but with more success.
yo
[image id:
tweet from Karl Groves that reads: "Stolen from Reddit: 3D printer add ons for wheelchair handles to prevent randos from "helping.""
Below it is a picture of wheelchair handles with yellow 3d printed spike rings, 3 on each handle.
/end image id]
This is so fucking metal
[ID: the Supernatural "I love you" meme. The 2nd box reads: "Wayne Brady just came out as pan." End ID.]
Here's the video he posted on tiktok:
[ID: a 32-second tiktok of Wayne Brady, accompanied by 3 dancers, lipsyncing and dancing to "It's All Coming Back To Me Now." He starts the video in a pink bathrobe, then reappears in a pink suit and a long wig. The other dancers wave a rainbow flag. End ID.]
the video description (which doesn't appear with the video outside the tiktok app, annoyingly) says:
As someone who gets to bring joy to others daily on tv, it's been ironic that I don't experience it as much as I'd like. I advocate mental health for all and a part of that is self transparency. In doing my work, I've come to see a few truths, one of them being that I want to be free to l love whomever I want. This truth makes me pan and part of the lgbtq+ family. It's scary as hell to say it out loud but here it is. The people I admire most are the ones brave enough to be themselves unapologetically. This shouldn't shake anyone's world, but if it bothers you at all, that's your business:) I was so afraid of having my manhood questioned, but screw that. A "real man" in my eyes, isn't afraid to be honest and happy. From now on, I'll be over here living my best life. I love you @Mandietaketa @Maile Masako @Jason
I wasn’t going to derail the disability pride month post for people with peanut allergies but in relation to that topic
I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.
Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.
Also other parents in the classroom are guilty too. The “not my child not my problem” brain rot means that those lunchboxes are like bombs for airborne exposure allergies
I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.
This woman was laughed at for asking for allergy accommodations at multiple points in her trip, and was denied to the point that she was practically told she’d be refused care in the event of anaphylaxis.
I work in healthcare. I cannot get my coworkers to consistently change their gloves after handling a PBJ. They literally do not think of it, and I don’t understand why. I also don’t know how to make it stick in their brains that this is a thing they need to do.
I grew up in the early 2000s with severe allergies to not just peanuts, but ALL nuts as well as beef, pork, shelfish, seeds, kiwi, and some food dyes. The resistance that my family faced from educators in the early 2000s is frankly bananas, not to mention the shit other parents and kids got up to.
When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.
Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)
Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.
College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.
Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back: