Lost my gender in a McDonald's play place

One thing I see a lot is people suggesting canes as a catch-all mobility aid for everyone who has mobility issues. Canes are not for weight bearing! If you use a cane for heavy weight bearing long term, you will hurt your wrists and back! Canes are for balance. There are also different types of canes, but someone else can probably explain those better than I can.

A crutch/pair of crutches is better for bearing weight, particularly forearm/support crutches if you're going to be using them a lot and don't want to strain your wrists, or platform crutches if you don't have a lot of arm strength.

Walkers/rollators are good for if you do have arm and hand strength and need a place to sit down or need to carry a lot with you, but very very bad if you can't weight bear well with your arms or pull the brakes easily. You will often need to be able to use your foot to maneuver it over a slight lip, too. If you can't do all of those things you will hurt yourself.

Wheelchairs are a whole lot more complicated and I don't feel qualified to speak on that (I've only ever used improperly fitted chairs, and have suffered permanent damage because of it).

Mobility scooters are great for going outside alone if you don't have the arm strength for a manual chair, as they can handle terrain that an motorised wheelchair often can't, but are harder to maneuver in small spaces (especially bulky class 3 scooters, which aren't designed for indoor use at all) and usually aren't suitable for full time use. If you need more support they most likely won't be suitable either, the seats are usually not designed with support for people who cannot hold themselves upright and generally do not have a seatbelt by default. I'm working on a proper guide for this and will hopefully post it soon!

There's also deconditioning to keep in mind, which is very important to think about if you aren't doing physiotherapy. You also need to consider things like pressure sores, which you will be especially prone to in seated mobility aids if you aren't able to reposition yourself regularly or have loss of sensation in or awareness of any part of your body.

Here's a link about choosing a cane style and fitting it to yourself:

They take him home. They give him the Hebrew name Kal-El and the American name Clark so he will fit in. They know what it is to be different. There is no Hebrew school in Smallville so they teach him at home, and study Torah together. When he shows special abilities, they wonder to each other if he is the Moshiach. Not for the strength of his body, but for the strength of his kindness. He always seems to be helping others, delivering them from harm, as he was delivered to them. They never tell him this, but they teach him about the obligations without measure. He's a natural.

At school, he is side-eyed for being different. When he displays eccentricities, the villagers shrug and say "maybe it's a Jewish thing." The Kents make sure he values his education, and is always home for Shabbas dinner.

His is bar-mitzva'd at the nearest shul, a few towns over. They didn't know his birthday, so they chose one near Parshat Shemot. Now they worry that was too on-the-nose, but he gives a moving d'var about the obligation to speak truth to power.

As he comes into his own and tries to be a hero, he hides his identity from the public, not out of shame, but to keep his adopted parents safe. They've been persecuted enough.

When he moves to the big city for a job at a newspaper, Pa is so proud he cries. Clark uses his journalistic skills to expose corruption, give voice to the neglected and oppressed, and research his own origins. When he learns the truth about Krypton and his birth parents' desperate bid to send him to safety, Ma and Pa are not at all surprised that they were right.

When Clark brings Lois home, he assures his parents she is a nice Jewish girl, but they're just glad she's a mensch. They step on a glass to remember the destruction of Krypton, and stand under a chuppah quilted by Ma.

A white billionaire spews lies about him, trying to spread fear of the stranger in their midst. He comes out in public and says "There's nothing more American than being an immigrant."

When the government turns against immigrants, he stands on the side of the protestors and protects. Tear gass does nothing to him. He makes himself a shield. He writes article after article in the Daily Planet, making sure the public knows what their government is doing, that immigrants know their rights, that the powerful are put on notice. When they start rounding people up, he says "Never again."

They were! Superman was created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish boys, sons of immigrants.

dude.

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.

Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.

Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both

Funny enough this post was prompted by learning this fact about book!DuBois. Looking at Andy Weir saying “Dr. DuBois has three PhDs” straight in the face and going. Dude. No He Doesn’t.

The favorites people are tagging here include Bruce Banner (7 PhDs), Engineer Team Fortress 2 (11 PhDs), and Stanford Pines (12 PhDs), and like, of course that is not how it works, that is not how anything works, but they come from cartoony universes that operate on cartoon logic. Looking at TF2 and going “that’s not how that works” is not the point of it.

Andy Weir is supposedly trying really hard to make everything in his books realistic, or at least plausible. That’s his whole schtick! This is a world meant to be taken seriously! But his aversion to learning/acknowledging how human social institutions work in the name of Not Being Political™ produces some real howlers that are impossible to take seriously. Eva Stratt’s “I can do what I want” permit is the famous one, and the idea that Grace got a personal attack paper petty enough to end his career through peer review really strains credulity to me, but DuBois’s three PhDs in very closely related fields is another. That’s just not how PhD programs work. This is not about any given character’s capability, this is about how PhD programs are not things you just keep adding to like that—once you have one, you go on to do research, write research papers and monographs, not more PhDs. Your PhD already proves you know how to do research! That’s the point of it, you don’t go prove it again, and any subsequent PhD program you apply to will seriously question why exactly you want to! Weir presumably wants to convey that DuBois is both very smart and very accomplished, that Project Hail Mary recruited the best of the best. Instead I look at this and go “this is a fake character and Andy Weir does not know what he’s talking about” and it breaks my suspension of disbelief.