Kangarawr!

It's the kind of thing I've seen people say doesn't happen. It does.

People on phone calls will be kind and respectful until you tell them you're on Medicaid - suddenly they will become strict and hostile. They'll correct your wording and pronunciations, sometimes even mocking you for them. Suddenly there's a wait list. Suddenly the program isn't for "people like you."

Medical offices (who say they accept Medicaid) are open to seeing you. You mention you're on Medicaid and suddenly they don't have any openings. No, not even a wait list. Try another office.

Landlords will find out you have subsidized rent and suddenly the apartment you toured has been filled by someone else, and actually, nowhere else is vacant.

Your meals in fast food joints are watched like a hawk. If you stay too long after finishing them, you're at risk of getting kicked out. Don't even get me started on department stores.

A lot of these are generally part of the poor experience, and also a lot of them are usually worse if you're unhoused (and even worse if you're visibly unhoused), worse if you're racialized, and worse if you're visibly disabled. Black and Brown poor people have all of the above issues and also a higher risk of the cops showing up, and God knows the cops won't listen to their side of the story.

A lot of these are illegal - some blatantly. But you don't have time to prosecute because you're at risk of eviction, you're at risk of losing benefits, losing your car, your medication access, your ID, your food stamps, your spot in a shelter, your name on a wait list... a permanent crisis, a socially engineered pressure cooker.

I have a really bad case of the tinkerbells (I need applause to live) so I have these statistics I use to keep myself from getting depressed as a creator*. Here they are. They may help you as well!

In professional marketing, 5% of viewers engaging with a post is positive turnover.

5% of engagers will click the link

5% of link clickers will buy the product

On twitch, the average number of views a live stream has is between 0 and 1

According to social media professionals, 10% of users do all the posting. The other 90% may not even comment.

So if your fanfiction has 100 hits and 5 kudos, you're meeting your goals at fanfiction corp and you're getting your raise this year. If your fanfiction has 100 hits and 10 kudos you're getting a promotion.

If you make a post about your new ttrpg and it gets 20 likes, 10 reblogs, and makes 1 sale, you're doing really well!

If your stream has an average of 1 friend who drops in and chats to you occasionally, you're doing better than average. If you make it to Affiliate you are genuinely doing incredible work.

90% of online creative work is just shunting stuff into the void, and it feels so so so bleak sometimes. But remember. You're doing good at it! Your "flop post" with 3 notes is actually more attention than 90% of internet users get.

Remember not everyone clapping for you is telling you about it. <3

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

So yeah there are people who genuinely believe that "accessibility" means only making things that are unchallenging. This is incorrect in any form of art, whether it's popular media or something more traditional. Accessibility in writing means printing in larger text, use of readable fonts and formatting, translation into Braille, and recording in clear audio. Accessibility in gaming should mean colorblindness filters, toggles to deactivate strobing in cutscenes and environments, scalable text, custom keymapping, and the ability to modify graphical settings including framerates, motion blur, fixed versus free camera, and so on.

this post's hypothetical by itself is already ridiculous but the thing that gets me is how the wording implies two very funny things that become funnier in tandem

1. "Accidentally, the pitcher tosses a Christian baby" means this is a mistake on the pitcher's part. i imagine the pitcher is breastfeeding on the field and they pitch and they look down at their hands and they see the ball still in the glove and they go "fuck"

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.