from @/vero_muerte on tiktok!!

Most of my friends are aware that I do this, and will back me up in conversations without batting an eye when I reference my daughter. And the best part is that they literally never drop the story. They just 100% all the time accept that I have a two-year-old adopted daughter. The fact that she happens to be a sheep is an unimportant detail, not worth mentioning until an anecdote gets too weird to plausibly be about a human toddler.

Which actually takes much longer than you’d think, since human toddlers apparently have absolutely zero sense. “She bites if you stop paying attention to her” is believable, “she tries to eat rocks out of the landscaping” is believable, “she stuck her head through a fence and couldn’t get out” is believable. “She jumped a five foot fence and came screaming back into the house through the dog door when I left her outside in the pasture” does get some strange looks, though usually not for the right reason.

Occasionally the joke gets turned around on me, though. I posted a picture on my not-tumblr blog of her wearing my glasses, and every comment was “Oh my gosh she looks just like you!!!” “I would never have known she was adopted If you hadn’t told me!!” “Are you sure that’s not an old picture of you?!”

So apparently this is what I look like:

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

Government workers need to face much much harsher social and legal consequences for ableism. No exceptions.

I am including bus drivers, transit staff, clerks, caseworkers, and anyone else whose job is to interact with the public in an official capacity.

This is a pattern of behavior where disabled people are treated as inconveniences, liars, burdens, or problems instead of people accessing services they are legally entitled to.

When a bus driver blows past a disabled person because it is inconvenient to deploy a ramp, that is not rudeness. That is denying access to transportation.

When a driver yells at or even just speaks down to someone for taking too long to board, or for needing clarification, or for not moving or standing “correctly,” that is not impatience.

it is harassment backed by institutional power.

When disabled people are humiliated, stranded, made late for work, denied medical appointments, or put in unsafe, scary, or embarrassing situations because a government worker decided they were annoying or not worth the effort, the damage is real and cascading.

Here is a thing we need to acknowledge:

Disabled people cannot opt out of these systems!

You can quit a job with a shitty coworker. You can leave a bad store. You cannot choose to stop needing transportation, healthcare access, benefits offices, or public infrastructure.

These workers are not just random individuals in your life. They are gatekeepers to survival resources.

Which is why I do not give one single solitary shit about the argument that “they are just people too” as a shield against accountability.

No, they are not ‘just people’. They are people acting with the authority of the state.

If a random stranger is ableist to me, that sucks.

If a government worker is ableist to me, that can cost me my job, my housing, my health, or my safety.

Those are not comparable.

I think we need to stop treating ableism from ALL government workers as a minor customer service issue and start treating it as what it is;

A complete and total civil rights violation.

If a bus driver repeatedly refuses to accommodate or be kind to disabled riders-

(yes! including invisible disabilities! Bus drivers should be seen and not heard unless someone is causing a true violent outburst! and no I don’t mean a mentally ill person being a little verbally disruptive, I mean actual physical or verbal outright threats or racism etc)

-they should not just get a slap on the wrist or a “retraining.”

They should be suspended or fired, and if a re-occurring pattern of this behavior exists, there should be severe legal consequences that forbid them from working a government job or any job where they may be working with vulnerable disabled people again.

Because right now the burden is almost entirely on disabled people to document, report, appeal, relive the harm, and hope someone believes them.

And most of the time nothing happens anyway!

We are told to be patient. To be understanding. To remember that the system is underfunded and understaffed.

Meanwhile disabled people are expected to plan their lives around the assumption that they will be mistreated, doubted, or punished for existing in public.

That is structural ableism being enforced and reinforced by individuals who know there will be no real consequences.

If your job is a public facing government role and you cannot treat people, not even just disabled people, all people, because you cannot tell who is disabled, with baseline dignity and respect, you should not have your government job.

This is not radical. This is the bare minimum.

Accessibility is not a favor. It is not optional. It is not something you get to decide is “too much today.”

I am tired of watching disabled people like me absorb endless harm while everyone else rushes to protect the feelings and job security of the people doing the harm.

I swear I remember it like a feature length movie devoted to their love. It had more impact on me than any movie I've ever seen. Titanic doesn't have shit on this epic love story.

and i was blind. for the first time in my life, i was totally blind. i kept thinking about reading, about writing. weirdly, just once, about driving. we had no idea if i would ever see again. just like that - my entire life was different.

it is a strange place to reference for a soft memory, to begin here.

my siblings were taking excellent care of me, but there was a moment in the hospital where, just through bad luck and timing - both of them had to step away for a moment. i was crying at that point; not emotionally. for 3 days after this i would still be crying, my tears, like a mermaid's, a frothy pink with blood.

my brother worried about leaving me. he had another, just-as-bad emergency.

"i got her," someone said. "don't worry."

a soft hand held mine, and then she started talking.

her name was jess. she has a wife named clyde. they live a few blocks up the street. clyde fell down, but the x-rays seem to be coming back better than expected. jess says she's got long dark hair and "more wrinkles than an elephant". jess describes every chair in the room and every person. she talks about her two kids and her cats and her favorite memories from college.

a doctor came. i had to switch to a different waiting room. i tried to stand up to follow the voice - i found jess's hand, following me. she didn't let go. she kept talking the whole way: lamp to your left, just a few more steps, okay to your right is the ugliest painting, good, now a little more walking straight, you got it baby

in the new silence of the next room she sat me down and called my brother for me, telling him where we'd gone to. and she stayed there for a bit, just chatting, her voice echoing in the eerie quiet. gently describing the room to me. and then someone was rude. from the sound of the voice, a kid, i think.

"why is she crying?"

"she just lost her vision," jess said. "she can't see."

"oh." said the kid. "that's scary."

the kid tells me he is here because he has peas stuck up his nose. that makes me laugh, his mom (?) groans. she tells me about the kid (he's 6, he likes paw patrol and eating cheese), about herself, about moving from cali.

jess says she's sorry, but she has to leave now, she's gotta go check on her wife.

"don't worry," says the mom. "i got her." and then i felt her hand press into mine.

for hours like that: i am taken care of by strangers. each person just talking with whatever comes to their head - not for any reward or celebrity or real reason, i guess. just because i am scared and alone and in the hospital and blinded and need to be distracted. not everyone even got told the story - they would just pick up in the silence with - oh by the way the television is playing HGTV - do you like that kind of a thing? yeah, me too, but could never quite get into those open-floor plans, i'll tell you -

by the time my brother is able to come back, the room is buzzing. we talk to each other like old friends, laughing, cracking jokes about if you don't like hospital food wait until you get on an airplane and can't believe i'm up past two in the morning what a party animal i'm becoming. i am holding the hands of someone named drew, who likes my crow tattoo and making crochet snails.

there are many dark moments full of pain in this world. this - in the low of absolute-dark, absolute-pain: people find a way to paint in it anyway. the color splash of their voices: this triumphant, radiating kindness of - let's be here together, let me help you, let's keep going.