GossamerOrigins

@free-and-to-none-accountable

@anarchistmemedistro

The age of eligibility for an ABLE account, allowing USAmerican disabled people to save up money without losing their government assistance for having “too much,” is going to go up to cover disabilities diagnosed by age 46 (currently it’s age 26), meaning a much larger number of people will be able to access them. As the article notes, many Americans don’t know these accounts exist, let alone whether they or someone they care for could qualify for one, so please share this information around.

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

are you a teenager? do you wish you had the space & resources & organization to do a thing, whether that's an anime club or a movie night or a big craft workshop or creative writing group or literally whatever? would you like to do your thing totally for free? yes?

okay, then bring it up to a librarian

seriously, teenagers are the absolute hardest group to engage at most libraries & we'll often organize programs that absolutely no one will show up to & it sucks. if you go up to a public librarian & say "hey, some friends & i want to do this thing. does that sound like a feasible teen program for the library?" most people will move heaven & earth to pull it off for you because we know there's an interest in our community. we will go balls to the freaking wall to make it happen

In equestrian, Shane hates his horse and cannot get him to do anything. Ilya adores his horse but also cannot get him to do anything because the horse can tell Ilya just wants to pet him. They both look absurdly gorgeous on horseback.

Shane is better at pistol. Ilya is better at rifle.

Bood humiliates everyone at cricket.

Coach Wiebe categorically refuses to let anyone on a skateboard.

Both Shane and Ilya are good at canoeing but when they get in a doubles canoe they are unbeatable.

Hayes is confusingly good at badminton.

Like. It's a really clever show. The first season is REALLY CLEVER. The twists and turns the first season take feel earned to me. I felt clever when I guessed what would happen, and delighted when they fooled me.

The premise is that a high school girl, Maddie, wakes up having died in the school boiler room. She is ghost trapped on school grounds, along with a group of other students and at least 1 teacher who have died on school grounds over the life of the school. The problem is, she doesn't remember dying, and there's no body. The other ghosts remember how they died. Their bodies were found. But not Maddie.

So after squirming around about it trying to escape school grounds and flailing about how this isn't right, she gets to business and begins to investigate her own death. She follows her friends and family as they appear at the school. The other ghosts help her. The living cannot see them...... except Maddie is standing beside her best friend, Simon, a few days after she woke up here, looking out the same window as him... and the focus of his eyes go from staring out the window, to staring at her reflection in the window. And he turns, and he sees her.

And that's just in the first episode!!! I can't really go into the whole plot without giving away a lot of it, but there are so many threads woven together, and the characters are all fantastic.

Look at them!!

The two on the left, Yuri and Charley, are dating and also I LOVE their individual arcs so much!! Charley is one of the younger ghosts in the school, having joined in the 90s after dying from anaphylaxis, and he has been stuck there watching the young boy he loved grow up and become a teacher at the school, unable to tell him everything he'd left unsaid. He's clever but also young in a lot of how he acts compared to the others, which is GREAT because even though they're all the same approximate age in looks, some of them have clearly been growing up more over time. Yuri is The Pottery Guy that everyone is convinced is Russian and speaks no English, because he minds his own business in the art room and never acknowledges what anyone says to him as if he understands. He is not Russian, he understands everyone. He just doesn't want to be included in the drama, which is the funniest thing to me when he just starts talking to them normally at one point to get them out of his hair, and IMMEDIATELY gets dragged in ass over teakettle.

I love them Back to the group photo: The boy in green sitting on the floor is Xavier and he was Maddie's bf until she died and found out some stuff, but he takes responsibility for his actions and accepts that she is just a friend now, and a good one. The boy in red next to him is Simon, and he's in love with Maddie and also her best friend, and they would literally die for each other but also she's not interested in him like that as far as I can tell. Maddie is in the middle there, and the boy in grey behind her is Wally, a ghost she falls for that has some great character growth over the course of the seasons, I did NOT really care for him at the start but I would put claws in anyone trying to hurt him now. The girl on the couch beside Maddie is Nicole, Maddie's other best friend, and she goes through some Shit because Simon doesn't tell her about Maddie being dead and Nicole thinks she's just missing and is desperate to find her. The girl behind Nicole is Claire, Maddie's ex best friend who got involved with Xavier before Maddie died, and goes through So Much Shit and becomes Nicole's best friend, helping her start standing up for herself and Being Herself instead of being in Maddie's shadow like she was in S1.

For the group photo again: The girl in black standing beside Claire is Rhonda, another ghost and one of the oldest, who is so sick of being dead and way too traumatized to move on. Sitting in front of her is Quinn, who joins the group after S1 to help solve the riddle of the school after Rhonda yells at them to WAKE UP from the endless looping of a stuck ghost, and they end up falling for Rhonda afterward. And YES Quinn is explicitly nonbinary.

I mean c'mon, look at them please

And basically none of that is really plot, and that's not even all the characters!!! but listen I LOVE the characters. I love them. And the plot is worth not spoiling.

Personally I feel like that shouldn’t be hard to do.

Seriously. Stop taking these pics without their consent and then posting them online, and then saying where they were taken and spreading all of it over and over.

The following items are demonstrated in the video and described in the voice-over:

1. Assorted bump dots - Various kinds of stickers with protruding dots on them that can be put onto appliances to make them more tactile.

2. Pocket money brailler - A device that allows you to imprint braille onto paper notes, indicating their value.

3. Liquid level indicator - A device hung on the edge of a container with metal prongs that detect when liquid has reached it.

4. Braille Pop-It - A pop-it with the alphabet in braille on each bubble.

5. Tactile Rubik's cube - A rubik's cube with unique textures for each color.

6. Braille color clothing tags - Tags with braille to indicate what colour a piece of clothing is.

7. Signature guide - A card with a rectangular slit in it to guide the user when writing their signature.

8. Low vision playing cards - Cards with very large and colorful numbers on them.

9. Pop-A-Cell - A plastic card with 6 bubbles you can indent to practice braille characters.

10. Talking keychain clock - A clock that says the time aloud when you press a button.

I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.

But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, “Oh yeah, that’s really pretty.” (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)

MEAN YOU HAVE TO ABANDON

WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY.

When I bought my house, the kitchen was multiple shades of dingy white. It was dismal, but it was now mine! So went to the hardware store for paint (well, several trips, painted swatches on panel, etc — I’m very picky. But this was the final, ‘real’ trip). It was a busy day in the paint section. There were at least five people behind me in line.

Now, remember, latex paint is slightly lighter and brighter when wet than it is when dry. And I’d decided to paint my kitchen candy-apple red. The hardware store employee took my gallon off the Paint Jiggler and cracked it open to put a dab on the top, revealing the most incredibly deep pink, and behind me I hear the entire line of people say,

“Oh my god.”

…in perfect chorus.

This is the door to my garage. It used to be white. Live your best life.

Mischief the cat says “Who goes there?”

Every visiting friend says “This is so cool.”

my garage. It used to be

white. Live your best life.

not decorating trends; those have always existed. but the idea that color and decoration is inherently childish

this is the dining room at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, from 1878 (where I used to work, briefly). the walls are TEXTURED MICA SHIMMER on a green background. Adult Space For Adults!

A jewelry shop in Paris c. 1901. kids can’t buy jewelry!

who can forget the classic 1950s colorful bathroom? I’m not a huge fan, but still! adult space! bright colors; decorative designs!

So here’s two examples of traditional Norwegian farmhouse interiors. You know. The kinds of places peasants live in.

This type of painting is called “rosemaling” and today you usually find it on, like, carved wooden bowls and such that are only used for decoration. But back two centuries ago, it was very common to find the interiors of homes covered in it, in projects that were painted little by little over the decades. Because it’s beautiful to look at, paint is the cheapest way of decorating your house, and what else are you going to do on the long winter nights when it’s too dark and cold to work outdoors?

But mostly, they did it because it made them happy, and it was beautiful.