Dreams of Donuts

But what you need to understand is this: deaf people always have to deal with hearing people, all the time, every single day, who just don’t want to have to deal with us and our communication access needs.  We encounter hearing people who act hostile when we ask them to please repeat themselves or write things down.  We encounter hearing people who seem pathologically incapable of grasping the concept that sometimes lip reading just isn’t going to work and yes they really will need to write it down before I have any hope of understanding it.  We encounter hearing people who avoid us like the plague at social events because they don’t want the nuisance of having to repeat themselves all the time or write things down.  This means that 99 percent of the time when we are told, “Never mind”, what it really means is, “Eff you, I don’t want to have to deal with you.”

So when you say, “Never mind,” or “I’ll tell you later” (Will you really remember? Most hearing people don’t.) or, “Forget it”?  We have absolutely no way to tell apart a hearing person who says this because they can’t be bothered with us and a hearing person who has other motivations.  

If you want us to recognize that you’re really, truly not intending to give us the brush off, then the solution is simple.  Don’t give us the brush off.  Just repeat what you said, or just write it down.  Because anything else is giving us the brush off whether that’s what you intended or not.  Even if it would never be seen as a “brush off” by other hearing people.  Saying “never mind” doesn’t have the same meaning to deaf people as it does to hearing people and no amount of trying to explain the perspective of hearing people is going to erase the long and painful history that every deaf and hard of hearing person (and probably also, people with auditory processing disorder) has with that awful phrase, “Never mind.”

“Tell me a story while I sleep, friend.”

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Alright guys, here it is. Still working on it but it’s in better shape than yesterday.

Vash’s moving over here so go follow him!

i don’t usually post shit like this on here but can we just be clear on one thing:

roleplayers are not their characters.

condemning a roleplayer for writing an evil character would be like condemning fantasy authors for writing villains into their novels. it’s downright silly. most people have a healthy sense of what’s real and not real, what’s fiction and nonfiction, and if someone is writing a character who’s raped, murdered, whatever, that shouldn’t reflect on the writer themselves. particularly because a lot of the writers penning these characters are victims themselves. i personally use my writing as a way to cope with things i’ve been through, and sometimes that involves writing characters who fantasize about things like rape, or characters who have abused their loved ones. i’m a rape survivor, i’m an abuse survivor, and because of this, i always, always make sure to make it clear that my characters are in the wrong.

vladimir nabokov wrote lolita not as an endorsement of child abuse, and certainly not an endorsement of pedophilia. the author himself described humbert, the 40-year-old protagonist who became obsessed and infatuated with 12-year-old dolores, as a cruel wretch and a hateful man. the novel’s still incredibly controversial, but the writer makes it clear that we aren’t supposed to sympathize with humbert, and we’re not supposed to sexualize dolores, who’s still just a child.

the same should be said in the roleplay community. if someone is writing a character who is a rapist or abuser, that doesn’t make the writer a rapist or abuser themselves. you don’t know what they’ve gone through, you don’t know what their personal history is. if all else fails, just ask why they chose to write such a dark character – more often than not, i’ve found that most roleplayers are more than happy to discuss their choices. and a good portion of the time, they don’t romanticize or glorify the things their character does.