just a twink

The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.

You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!

I remember telling people years ago “I think there’s got to be something positive about this or we wouldn’t do it when in profound distress” and basically being told I was in denial about how much my mental illness affected me. Drove me batty.

If you want your setting to be accommodating, change the environment more than the person.

i.e.: On a worldbuilding level, if you want to portray a society that keeps disabled people in mind, then that needs to be reflected more broadly, even without your disabled character on screen. Because this means that your society was considering disabled people as part of itself when it was figuring out what's necessary.

If your computer takes voice commands, it should also have an optional keyboard in case someone can't speak.

If your magic school has multiple floors, it should have a teleporting rune circle for those that can't take the ever-changing stairs.

Whenever you have a feature you're adding, ask yourself—"If my character couldn't use this, what would they do instead?" And if the answer is "they'd have to wait until they could" or "they need someone else to use it for them," then your setting isn't accommodating. An accommodating setting always has an actionable answer to that question.

And as a bonus, if you follow through with it, oftentimes you'll end up with a more interesting world and story overall. Spells most people can speak can be written in ancient elven instead? That means you can have a character sneak a spell into a magic-banned city by writing it on their hair ribbon, and that it's possible that a book might be a self-generating spell on its own. Your spaceship has textured lines on the walls to let blind people navigate without guidance? Not only can you make it look artistic (different colored paints, glowing patterns), but now your engineer can make it to the warp core when the power's out and oxygen's finite.

Don't limit yourself just to what's needed in the moment. Figure out interesting alternatives to your setting's features, and your world will automatically feel more alive.

Cheat Code 1: How to avoid eliminating disability in your setting

Cheat Code 2: What kinds of aid to use to accommodate disability

How you aid a disability depends on if it's a new development or had always existed.

i.e.: If someone's lost their legs to a griffin biting them off last week, giving them steampunk prosthetic legs is a good aid. There's something they can't do, that they very recently could, that they need to learn to work around. The prosthetic legs still need an adjustment period to learn how to use them, but your character knows how legs should work and can figure it out more easily.

If someone lost their legs because, as a child, they wandered away from the space field trip and got partially eaten by a carnivorous plant, then it depends. Prosthetic legs can technically work, but the longer the character was without legs, the harder it'll be to re-learn how to use them. You might want to go with bionic legs for short distances, but a hover chair for daily use.

If someone was born without legs, then prosthetic legs are more hindrance than they're worth. Your character has never had legs, and has no idea how they're supposed to work.

Imagine if you're in a world of centaurs; you're given prosthetic hind legs, and now expected to be able to climb up cliffs with the grace of a mountain goat. It's a whole new skill you'd have to learn, and you would get annoyed with it very fast; how are they supposed to sync with the legs you already have? How are you supposed to balance? You can't feel anything, you don't know how much space it occupies.

Someone who's always been disabled doesn't need the thing they were born without, they need aid that lets them do what everyone else can in a way they're familiar with. If your character has always been deaf, glasses with subtitles appearing on them are infinitely more useful than aids that let them hear, because hearing when you've always had silence is going to have a steep learning curve and be ridiculously overwhelming.

Your rule of thumb?

Try to give them something they're used to.

Note: This is different with very small children, because they're already learning how to use every part of them. If a toddler in your sci-fi was born without legs, they can be taught to use bionic legs at a very young age, but it has to start early or it'll run into the problems above.

Cheat code 1: How to avoid eliminating disability in your setting

Cheat Code 3: How to make your setting itself disability-friendly

Don't change humanity, change what's available to humanity.

i.e.: If your magic removes/fixes a defect or your sci-fi lets you select for traits at birth, that's changing humanity. That's altering a fundamental aspect that real humans live with, and distancing your fictional version of humanity from the real deal by cutting out a portion of it that your setting deems "undesirable."

If your magic/sci-fi aids a defect (like magic netting that acts as a brace, or a wheelchair with wheels that transform to fit the environment), then you're taking humanity as we know it and saying "wouldn't it be cool if we had these tools?"

Don't change what makes us human, change what humans can create.

Cheat Code 2: What kinds of aid to use to accommodate disability

Cheat Code 3: How to make your setting itself disability-friendly

Audio: Let's BEEP go! Subtitle: Let's (censor tone) go!

Audio: Let's fucking go! Subtitle: Let's fucking go!

Removing swears and slurs from the subtitles without removing it from the audio is implying that deaf/HoH people need babying, unlike their hearing friends and family sitting right next to them. Which is frustrating.

the only relevant women are (menstruating) cis women, so there's no need to add any qualifiers (like "cis")

womanhood is central to menstruation & menstruation is central to womanhood by unnecessarily bringing up gender right before using a gender neutral phrase

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

Are you okay?

That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.

Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?

This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.

Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.

Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?

If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.

I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

Can we please get a working disable autoplay for these on all devices. Mobile AND DESKTOP?

the government does nothing for the silent dead, the humble dead, the polite dead. a dead body is shoveled into the ground and forgotten by the next business quarter.

safety regulations are not written in the blood of silent, disposable victims. they’re written in the blood of those who split their knuckles and screamed their throats raw for a better world.

“The dishes were only bland soups and maybe some moldy bread”

I’m studying English language and literature, not History, but like… Pork vs Pig… Deer vs Venison… Cow vs Beef… May give you the idea THEY FUCKING ATE MEAT AT LEAST GODDAMIT

And not even like we do

Where’s the feast with venison? The ridiculous amount of salmon and other fishes? The little gardens full of spices? Or the trade of exotic foods? Slaughtering season was celebrated in some places not that much ago (like… I saw one when little), why not portray one?

And more importantly

WHERE’S THE CHICKEN WITH HELMET???

Medieval people loved their spices; The Forme of Cury has a lot of flavours I’d associate more with Indian food than anything else. Even if you weren’t a wealthy seasoning-loving king like Richard II, you could still have garlic, onions, and herbs.

Here’s a link with more info. Apparently the dish is called Singing Chicken… But that’s a chicken with a helmet

that clearly showed the people of the time valued color, had style, and only occasionally made horses look like a dog made out of play-doh. even people who didnt live in a castle still had access to paint to liven up the plaster walls of their homes, brightly dyed fabrics and flowers were as available to them as and they sang, constantly. what we assume was a life of toiling in the mud from dusk till dawn the whole year was typically a relaxed paced life of 10 hour a night sleep in a comfortable bed where work didnt start untill you had your flagon of ale and a song with your buddies as you walked to the field, you sang as you worked, took three ale breaks from work while singing, and then you sang as you walked to the tavern so you could sing while you played nine mens morris or cheated at mancala because you thought the miller was too soused to notice. we barely know any of the songs they sang and humanity is less for it, a scant handfull of them do remain and its just beautiful to hear what a table of tavern patrons would break into song about to prove they werent too drunk for another round song and story were all day every day, theres a reason the most well known middle english text was canterbury tales- whose narrative was that a selection of travelers on the way to the same location had an ongoing bar-bet about who could tell the better story, asking bartenders to judge the complexity of these stories, all of which were absolutely valid as just shit you would say to another drunk in a tavern, would give modern soap operas a swift kick in the pants and its sad that it takes a historian to tell you just how crass and lowbrow humor they were on a similar vein to how so many people somehow forgot that shakespear was lowbrow humor for the commoner and not somehow too sophisticated for rubes it wasnt just bards who would own an instrument, instruments are wood, leather, string, bone/horn, or even clay… those are all commonly available and affordable if not straight up FREE items to someone in the medieval world so a hefty chunk of the population would have an instrument and know how to use it, anything from a wood flute to a simple drum to an ocarina. many designs were even specifically for travel so you could always have it at the ready

But yeah, I know that some people get exasperated by the number of songs that Tolkien has in his books, but I really think it completes the world. It makes it feel fleshed out and more enjoyable and individual in its own right but also ties it to history. Singing is such an accessible pastime and I really don’t think people in fantasy do enough of it. (And as a bonus, Tolkien also gives us some Middle-earth lore in his lyrics. Which is great for the reader and also reflects how important an oral information-sharing tradition is within the world itself.)

I studied late antique textiles in undergrad. Late antiquity is a weird period with multiple different scholarly definitions, but the gist is that it’s the transition period between the ancient and medieval worlds. Christianity was a thing, but people were also still heavily influenced by older stories/mythologies/religions (the vast majority of textiles that survive from this period come from Egypt because of the climate, so in this case it’s Greek and Roman traditions that still hold influence).

Anyway. The textiles from this weird nebulous period of history are straight-up gorgeous, and not just to a nerd of my particular type. Take a look at Dumbarton Oaks or the Met’s collections and come tell me that ancient/medieval hand-woven textiles were all rough and poorly made. And you know why people spent so many hours making these beautiful things painstakingly by hand? (Every single step of the process, by the way - shearing, carding, spinning, dying, all before you get to the actual weaving. This stuff was incredibly skilled, intensive labor.) They did it because textiles were incredibly important. We don’t think much of them now that they can be mass-produced, but there was a whole Thing with the Virgin Mary spinning and metaphors about her weaving Christ on a loom, and textiles were used for protective magic, and they were part of everything important in people’s lives.

There were dyes that were prohibitively expensive, yes - Tyrian purple is literally still so expensive that we couldn’t buy a big enough sample to test our actual antique textiles against effectively. In the Byzantine Empire, it was controlled exclusively by the imperial family - hence the whole royal purple thing. But guess what? There are so many purple textiles, because people used other things! Madder and indigo! Both affordable! Mix them together and you get a very pretty color. Change up the mordants you use to seal the dyes and you can get a whole range of different colors out of one plant!

And people took these things and they wove them into literal artwork and wore it around on their clothes. They had hangings on their walls for decoration, sure (and also insulation and noise control), but they also had curtains! Textiles separated rooms the way wooden doors do now! The reason I have a weird thing for liminal spaces is because textiles were associated with them, and they were given power. The hanging in your doorway could protect your home from misfortune. Protective symbols around the neck and sleeves of your tunic could keep you from getting ill. And all of these things were pretty and colorful and painstakingly crafted by laypeople and professionals alike, and they were everywhere.

Basically, the ancient and medieval worlds were alive and full of color and magic. Not gray stone and plain cloth and misery.

“They were unwashed”

Entirely incorrect.

At a MINIMUM, your average Christian peasant would have bathed once a week, to be clean for church, and they likely bathed more frequently than that, including a decent rinsedown of face/hands/pits daily. Jews and Muslims would have bathed daily due to ritual bathing, and Christian peasants would have washed their hands before meals to clear away whatever physical remains of their work might taint the food (field dirt, sheep smell from yarn, etc. and so forth). No, they didn’t wash their hair with soap (the soap available at the time wouldn’t really…work…on hair), BUT: hair was covered for the most part, and combed out daily, which distributed the oils evenly and removed dead skin from the scalp. Their hair didn’t smell all fruity like we’re used to in the modern era of perfumed everything, but it was in fact cleaned and cared for.

ALSO WHERE ARE ALL THE FUCKING BLACK PEOPLE

"What does that mean," he asks. "It's free if you're gay," he's told. "Ah. Would I have to like, prove it, or...?" "Just put in a check mark here."