An explosion happened, I think

if i’m allowed to be picky, i also wish people could be more thoughtful/realistic when deciding on scars. like do some research and think ‘how did this injury happen’. if someone got attacked by wolves, how does that give them a straight cut scar across their face? 

and where are the other effects of these injuries? nerve damage, contractures, amputations, brain damage, PTSD, chronic pain, speech issues, sun sensitivity, blindness, etc? and please do research on these too, its good, its not that difficult.

i want to see characters have scars, and still be able to be normal, and cute/pretty/beautiful/sexy, and loved, and happy. this includes people with extensive burn scars, with skin grafts, with tons of reconstructive surgeries, who are missing eyes or noses or ears or limbs. this includes people with keloid scars, who don’t look normal, who have “gross” symptoms from their injuries. this includes people who have scars from elective or cosmetic surgeries, and surgeries that were botched. this includes people who have scars from self harm or suicide attempts. 

   please give more characters scars, and be normal about it. i am (politely) begging you. 

If you aren't any one of those and your first thought is, "But sometimes it's upsetting/anxiety inducing/disturbing to look at." Then I think you might have to think beyond yourself (not in a shaming way, but as genuine introspective), or just not engage in the Internet.

Bodies that don't fit the non-scared body standard or that don't look "normal" to societal standard are still humans that do have normal bodies.

Imagine having scarring and already being self-concious and having people put "Trigger warning: body horror and scars." Like your body comes with a warning because it's so upsetting to look at and everyone should be warned before they show a person who looks like you.

This is especially true online and I think people need to understand when they may be becoming overly entitled.

Seeing a person with self-harm scars and the video is nothing about self-harm, but then commenting, "Please put a warning for your scars," When you are in complete control to scroll isn't okay.

On the internet, you can scroll, block, restrict, or do other things before you ever have to engage in content that upsets you and 2. Make others feel bad about something normal they have (yes, even if its upsetting or triggering for you, because that's their appearance and you can choose to engage in that content or not.)

If you want to live in the comfortability that everyone's bodies have to not be reminiscent of anything atypical or "upsetting" or that people always need to accomodate for something you should work on, then that's a society where disabled/different people/scarred/burned people can't exist and you're opting for that over facing your own discomfort or finding coping skills.

It's completely okay to be triggered by something, as it's tied to trauma (triggers aren't just things you find a bit uncomfortable or things you dislike; its related to trauma); you can't control that. It's okay to be uneasy, squeamish, or feel another type of uncomfortable feeling; you can't control that.

But it's never okay to make others feel bad about their body, tell them to hide, or make them suit your needs in a way that makes them live quieter and sadder.

Scroll, block, disengage, don't look, or don't stare.

A (hopefully) educational post!

I wrote the original version of this post back in 2021! I've learned more things since then + I've gotten better at writing, so I thought it'd be nice to remake it with some updates! So, let's get into it :)

What is Microtia?

Microtia is a congenital facial difference that affects the outer ear, where the outer ear doesn't fully develop during pregnancy like it should.

Microtia comes in four "grades" depending on how developed the ear is. At higher grades, it may also include atresia, which is the lack of an external opening to the ear canal. The highest grade, grade 4, is also known as anotia, and that means there is no external ear present at all.

Microtia can be present on its own, or it can be a part of the wider conditions Hemifacial Microsomia, Goldenhar Syndrome, and Treacher-Collins Syndrome.

If you'd like more fancy clinical information, I'm gonna direct you to this website :) I'm not a doctor.

What effects can microtia have?

Probably the most obvious effect of all is that microtia is a visible difference. People will notice, and they will wonder about you. When I was younger, I was asked more than once by my peers if I had been in a fire! To which, hey, it's none of your business!

I know most adults, at least, understand that it's rude to ask, but I still wear my hair down near-constantly, just to avoid any attention getting drawn to my ears. I've never gotten them pierced, for the same reason.

If atresia is present, then microtia can also be a cause of deafness. Whether a person with microtia is involved with the d/Deaf community may vary (I am not), but it's still pretty hard to hear when there's no way for the sound to actually get to your inner ear.

Some people opt for reconstruction to change this- essentially, plastic surgery to open up the ear canal and make the ear appear more "normal". Others get a bone-anchored hearing aid, aka BAHA– sound can be conducted through bone, so a BAHA delivers sound as vibration directly to the bone. Still others (like me) choose not to change it– I feel my ears are fine as they are, and I would rather the people around me simply be accommodating! (More on this in a bit!)

I, specifically, have microtia in both my ears, with atresia on my right side. This means I am unilaterally deaf. Unilateral hearing loss requires some different considerations than bilateral hearing loss– I can still generally hear and understand others, but I have trouble with a few things, which I'm going to give their own subsection right here.

People standing on my right side– I generally call it my "bad side" but that's definitely not the most neutral thing to call it and it'll vary person to person what they're comfortable with. If someone stands on my bad side I will struggle to understand and keep track of them, and I may not even realize they are speaking to me if I didn't expect it.

Due to this I try to always stay to the right of others and stand at a little bit of an angle.

Unilateral hearing loss causes a loss of what we call "distance perception", much like how loss of vision on one side causes a loss of depth perception– my brain can't compare inputs from both ears to tell where a sound is coming from and what sounds to prioritize.

This means that I am bad at Marco Polo, buuut it also means that noisy areas can be especially overwhelming and I can struggle to follow conversations there. I hated my high school cafeteria with a burning passion.

The little things! I can't wear earbuds in my right ear, and they get uncomfortable quickly in my left. I need the earpieces of my glasses bent further so they stay on right, and I can't wear face masks that go over my ears. If I get earwax or water in my left ear, I will really struggle to hear at all. It's a pain in the neck!

How can you (and/or your characters) be accommodating to someone with microtia?

Don't ask invasive questions! Seriously, it's really uncomfortable, they'll tell you on their own if they want you to know.

Stand and walk where they can hear you well! If you do this on your own it's really nice and shows you care.

Use the language they are comfortable with! There's not as much of a "person-first" versus "identity-first" thing with microtia– I mean, I guess I could be called a "microtia-having individual", but it'd just feel really clunky. But I'm not the spokesperson for every person with microtia out there! So respect the language they'd like you to use.

Be mindful of situations where they might be struggling to hear you, and make a conscious effort to include them in conversation! Remember how I mentioned the cafeteria? Yeah, I might not have hated it so much if the people I knew actually tried to have intelligible conversations with me. Also, please just repeat stuff if we ask, it just feels like you're purposefully leaving us out if you say "never mind".

Why am I writing this?

This is the most important part of this whole guide to me!

The thing is, I've never seen a character with microtia in media, and only once or twice in art. As much as I would love to see characters who look like me, that just doesn't happen.

Yeah, microtia is rare– it occurs in somewhere between 1/6000 to 1/12000 births– but even by that logic, for every 60 to 120 redhead characters, there should be one with microtia! And I know a LOT of redheads in pop culture.

Furthermore, even the discussion of microtia online is pretty heavily focused on family and what they can do to "fix" microtia. And while I won't bash people who did go that route– if its right for you, it's right for you!– I see my ears in a neutral light and would rather just treat them as a part of my body like any other.

I want to be able to have conversations with people like me and commiserate about how annoying it is to have someone try to talk to me and be unable to understand them, or how convenient it can be when someone is apparently being annoying off to my right side and I don't have to listen to them!

So, I hope this little guide post of mine inspires you to include microtia in your artwork, or for that matter, to include other lesser-known differences! I'm sure there are other people out there hoping for the same thing I am. So go forth and talk to them, include them, and I bet they'll be really happy to see themselves, just as I'll be :)

🦀 Kudos Crab 🦀

If you are scrolling and see Kudos Crab, your fics will be blessed!

You will get good comments and kudos!

You will beat your writers block!

I read that we should give them a lot more in heir personality than just the blindness part, and that is what I did! He is a fully fleshed out character without the blindness too, but I really wanted to portray blindness and play with the way description works from this point of view.

Would it be the cure-the-blindness trope if he gets it back? Because the group of misfits, in the end, will get the rose anyway, they aren’t looking for it solely (or even at all!) because of their blind friend.

It is in character from him to wish to see again, and he is miserable once he loses his eyeballs, but I can’t tell if it is offensive to cure what he has lost or not.

Bluntly, yes. It is absolutely curing his blindness if you, you know, cure his blindness. This is a very classic example of the trope. It does not matter if he specifically was not involved in searching for this Rose or that it was not sought out specifically for him, what matters is that you cured your disabled character’s disability.

My question for you would be why do you want to write a blind character if you plan to cure him in the end anyway? What is it about this blind character that you want in the story? Do you actually want to represent blindness because it deserves to be represented, because you want to include that perspective, because blind people like all other people are just a natural part of the world, or just because you think it’s neat to play with whatever you think a blind person‘s version of descriptions would be in the narrative? And why exactly did you write him to be so miserable about his blindness and to be so desperate to get his vision back? We can say that something is in character, but at the end of the day you as the author are making choices about who he is and what he wants. Why do you want him to want his vision back and to be so unhappy while he is blind? And why do you want him to be cured?

Yes, this would be a very direct example of the cure trope and it would indeed be offensive. Most of us do not want to see some of the only representation we get to see of ourselves in stories taken away at the end, as if that’s a good thing, all part of the happily ever after and tying of loose ends of the story. That tells us that this version of happily ever after cannot include disability in it, disability can’t be part of the happy, that we as real disabled people aren’t considered good enough just as we are to be part of that celebration if we don’t get cured. It is very good that there are other elements to his character that do not revolve around his blindness, I would’ve liked to hear more about them here, but it does not negate the harm of the cure trope.

I would much rather see this character remain disabled and not still be hoping so much to cure it in the end. I would like to see him eventually develop much less negative feelings about his blindness throughout the story instead of his blindness only being a blight on his life that he gets to get rid of at the end. And, while it is perfectly natural for any freshly disabled person to go through grief and difficulty in the early days after becoming disabled and to struggle to relearn how to do everything they used to know how to do all at once, I would also like to see him when he reaches that point of acceptance that many of us do once we do start mastering those alternative skills. It would also be nice if, instead of struggling through relearning how to do his job with only the help of his friends who presumably are not blind and his own trial and error, he instead eventually finds a blind mentor or perhaps a whole group of blind people who gather regularly who he learns from and gains perspective from. For most of us, the answer to acceptance didn’t come when we just brute forced our own way through it all on our own, it often came when we found community, other people like us living their lives and being happy. Just like being part of any other minority group, it is hard and lonely to be the only person like you you know. Just as finding queer community can be so powerful to many of us who are queer for the first time, finding disabled community can also be incredibly powerful for those of us who are disabled.

Maybe he decides he does not want to be cured. Maybe he’s been blind for so many years now that it feels as much a part of him as any other characteristic and would feel wrong to get rid of. Maybe he feels that this was the path that his life was meant to take as some spiritual people do. Maybe he feels that he went through so much work to adapt to blindness that it would be like spitting in the face of all that work to take his vision back all of a sudden. Maybe he finds a place sharing the skills he has gained with other blind people in related lines of work and feels purpose in it. Maybe he has been blind for so long now that even if he did get his vision back, he would have to do just as much work to relearn how to see an interpret what he is looking at, and that sounds like more trouble than it is worth to him.

Or perhaps he would still be interested in a cure but it turns out not to be possible or advisable. Maybe this Rose can heal illness but cannot regrow things that are no longer there, cannot regenerate entire organs. Perhaps it can, but he has been blind for so many years that even if his eyes were regrown, his brain no longer has the ability to interpret visual input and it does not work. Or perhaps the rose is so mystical and mysterious that he does not trust it not to go wrong, does not wish to risk such a large undertaking as completely regrowing his eyes in case something else or to go wrong and it to make him sick in some other way. Perhaps he decides that being blind is not so bad that he is willing to undergo whatever risk or consequence may come with using the Rose after all.

Oaky oaky thank you!! I now understand better why it’s so important to NOT do the cure-the-blindness trope. I had in mind for him to decline the offer of the rose, but I hadn’t thought it through, but I will look into it and maybe this one will fit him better.

The loss of his eyes makes him realize how wrong his father had been treating him, using him as a tool to find said rose to cure his wife from an illness that would kill both of them, that is why he loses his eyes from the start.

He is had been an ironsmith before, making every kind of weapons which are forged with iron, and such precise work is what makes it harder for him to get back to his life. The big grief happens majorly not because he is blind, but because his father took what isn’t his.

He has the Main character girl with him who had been working in a Lazarett for a while and took care of a soldier who lost his vision in battle.

I haven’t thought about this aspect, but introducing them to eachother might be good for the two of them, we shall see.

I’ll try to write my character without upsetting anyone. Im from a minority aswell so while I do know how shitty misrepresentation can be, I still haven’t been exposed to those themes enough to the point of understanding my character who has been going through all this

I am kind of scared to do something wrong :(

Response:

This is really great information actually and already I find this story really compelling now. I think there is a lot of juicy stuff to work with right here. I’m guessing that his father essentially blinded him to set this whole plot in motion? I could see that alone being a great reason why he would not want to use this Rose, because it represents everything his father did to him, and it would be very easy to imagine a character who doesn’t want anything to do with that stupid Rose that his father did such terrible things to get, even if he does still have complicated feelings toward him and does still want the two of them not to die. I could even envision him wanting to reclaim his blindness as a form of resistance. The terrible thing was done to him for terrible reasons that aren’t fair, but he’s going to go on living his life and reclaiming this disability in spite and a refusal to have his life controlled by this person anymore or something along those lines.

Introducing him to that nurse could be great, maybe that’s the very first step, and then maybe she introduces him to that soldier who has had a lot of life experience learning how to be blind now, and through those people he finds other blind people in different lines of work that he builds connections with and learns from. Finding other blind people specifically is still really important, and this nurse could be a great steppingstone to get there in his life story.

I don’t know much about metal working specifically unfortunately, I’m sure there are others who are much more high fantasy engaged to might be able to come up with some methods he could use for this, but it could also be that he does slightly different kinds of metal work now that are easier to do while blind if the current type of work he does is not easy to adapt. He might also employ a sighted assistant who can aid in visual feedback or tasks which are less able to be adapted.

I will throw this piece out to anyone in the notes who might have ideas on accessible metal working. Perhaps @cripplecharacters has some ideas?

Just canceled my account (not that I used it that much). But I won’t permit this. Via @unaminh.bsky.social:

IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

I grew up with Andersen's fairytales and many of them has made a permanent home in my heart. The nightingale (or nattergalen, as is the original title) has always been amongst my favourites.

It is the tale of how the emperor of China learns that a great bird exists in his empire and he asks it to come and sing for him. The song deeply touches him and all the people at the palace, and the little bird is celebrated for his voice and song.

One day, a box is sent to the emperor, and within is it a golden mechanical bird, an artificial imitation of the real nightingale. They are asked to sing side by side, but it doesn't work well. The nightingale improvises and goes with his mood, while the mechanical bird can merely repeat how it has been programmed.

Still, hearing the mechanical birds makes the crowd ooh and ahh, and it can sing without mistakes and much more often than a real bird. It is wound up again and again for the amusement of the emperor and the people. The real nightingale leaves discouraged.

But as the time goes on, the mechanical bird starts to break down, and eventually, it doesn't work anymore at all. When the emperor becomes deadly ill, the soft song from a nightingale is all that can save him, but his little wind-up toy cannot help him.

The real nightingale comes back and saves the emperor's life, for it had been so touched when it first sang for the emperor and it made him shed tears. It remembers that first touch of something oh, so special as sharing its voice. The emperor learns the error of his ways.

Gen AI can only ever be an intimidation of the real thing. It is stuck in the same grooves as a mechanical bird. It can do it "perfect" and faster than humanly possible, but it is and always will be an imitation that cannot stand on its own. It might be enough to impress but it is not sustainable.

Only with the real music, art and writing can what is special be perserved. It must be created by living beings. We are able to adapt and change and create stuff outside of set parameters. But it is very understandable that it is highly discouraging to see gen AI spit out music, art or writing that to the untrained, or uncaring, eye is praised.

I reckon that the well will dry up eventually, whether it will be a crash, or behind a high paywall, and everyone who grew accustomed to it will cry out in despair. The mechanical bird is broken. Death will come and sweet song is not there anymore.

The nightingale flew home and continued with his life. He kept singing to the forest, but in another version of the tale, maybe he had stopped singing. It would have been a tragedy for both himself and all the people who eventually realised their folly in depending on a mechanical bird over the real thing.

Typing this from Graphene now, in fact. But, both of those take the Android Open Source Project, without all the bloatware--and largely de-Google the whole thing. They give you much more control over privacy and what the apps you choose to install can do and access on your phone.

I know Graphene sandboxes everything, including the optionally installed Google Play Services which a lot of apps unfortunately require to run. (Lineage uses an alternative to Play Services instead.) So, you can install what would normally be unacceptably intrusive apps and just lock them away from pulling any funny shit with your data, or phoning home. Including the couple of Google things I do still keep around.

I also prefer running much more transparent, privacy-respecting open source apps where possible. Besides the transparency, I'd rather avoid the shitty tech corps entirely where I can. There are pretty good alternatives available for a lot of the usual suspects.

An alternative app store:

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

Wake up babe, new octopus just dropped