Radioactive Rats

🔍 <character>

@biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist well, since you asked so nicely :)

I want them insulting each others cities and heroes and sports teams and street names and bragging with their own events and people and inventions.

I want Billy and Danny to be besties and hang out and laugh at the praise, insults and admiration thrown at them in the all but war that is taking place on the internet. Not that they're not taking part in it, they still have to defend their town's honour.

From bottom of my heart

When I was a teenager and learning about critiquing, one of the things I was explicitly taught was that you don't share other people's manuscripts without permission, full stop. If you're critiquing someone's story, you don't show that draft to your partner, or your friend, or anyone, no matter how good or how bad or how funny or how weird or how whatever you think it is. You have been extended a degree of trust, but that does not come with the right to extend that trust to someone else on the author's behalf.

an additional level

of betrayal here.

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

some but not all cool things nobody ever thinks of:

put hand sanitizer or a sink in the accessible bathroom stall, or alcohol wipes outside of it. people who cannot use their legs have to use unwashed hands to roll to the sink, and people who can use their legs are afraid to walk out of stalls because they get harassed and even assaulted.

enough space for wheelchair in doorway…AND ARMS. HOW DO YOU THINK THE WHEELCHAIR MOVES! if I cannot roll through it without scraping my arms it is not accessible

brick paths suck the end

gravel paths suck. make it smooth

a ramp is not accessible if it is too steep. not every wheelchair user is ripped enough or capable of using muscles enough to propel themselves up a steep angle safely. some wheelchair users have heart issues. you want heart attacks? this is how you get them

perfect 90 degree turns suck and are often impossible to turn through

some wheelchairs have foot rests. account for them

wheelchair accessible means wheelchair accessible while alone. if you expect someone to have to be helped out to use your facility, that is not acceptable or accessible

There isn’t adequate space to open the door while in a wheelchair.

Your door is impossible to close while in a wheelchair.

Your door requires a weirdly high amount of hand dexterity.

Your door is too heavy. It’s so stiff. It’s impossible to see someone struggling with it and people open it into the wheelchair user from the inside because it’s too heavy and they didn’t see them there.

a weirdly high amount of

hand dexterity.

The moon’s not white! It’s concrete-gray! It only looks so shiny when compared to the void of space!