Yes, That Too

I see a lot of folks upset that NG will financially benefit from residuals and other compensation surrounding his involvement in the adaptation of Sandman and Good Omens (and he will.) But the answer isn’t “rage at the fans who are so emotionally attached to their blorbos because they grieve differently, and then somehow NG will be financially punished.” That’s lower-class/middle-class thinking. NG is too rich and financially diversified to really be hurt by little boycott or a couple of show cancellations (though said cancellations can cause life-changing poverty to the little guys who signed contracts and turned down other opportunities before all of this came out. Boy does NG love women in poverty 🤮)

So if you want to substantially reduce the wealth of someone at NG’s financial level—you need to do it with professional services fees.

Details below the cut:

Text on the screen reads,

four cellists play Ravel's Bolero ... on just one cello. Bolero has long been a test of endurance for snare drummers, but here, every part is played by a cellist. With only one instrument in sight, Wiener Cello Ensemble 5 + 1 leap to the task, involving a fair amount of acrobatics! Watch it all unfold ...

It's not the main "story", but Mel Baggs closed the post with:

Communication pages like this are not just for people who absolutely can’t ever speak. They are for anyone, anywhere, who for whatever reason would be unable to say things like this in situations where they need to be able to say it. I’ve run into too many people lately who desperately need something like this, but are afraid to use it because they don’t fit the popular image of someone who needs a communication device. Some of them have even been told that it’s horrible or disrespectful of them to even consider using a communication device. But my position on it is that having the most effective communication method possible can result in better emotional and physical health, in some situations it can even save lives. So given all that? If something like this can make your life better, for any reason at all. Whether you can’t ever speak, can only sometimes speak, can only speak about certain topics, can speak but it isn’t what you mean, can speak but typing or using picture icons works better or uses fewer mental resources. Or anything else like that. Do whatever works best for you, and screw anyone who tells you different. Anyone who feels the need to act as the supreme gatekeeper of all things assistive technology… not only do they have too much time on their hands, but they are letting ideology get in the way of real people leading better lives. And that is just plain wrong, and fundamentally unfair to people who could benefit from a communication aid.

I don't want to assume your neurotype, anonymous, but I also don't think these paper's ideas of "if it helps, use it" only applies to autistic people -- that's just the group I was focusing on at the time:

AAC for speaking autistic adults: overview and reccomendations

Everyone deserves AAC

Professionals are certainly not in universal agreement about this, but some are catching on: it is technically possible to get insurance funding for an AAC device for a part-time AAC user! Some of us (not me, and probably not most) have had formal AAC assessments with SLPs.

Sure, you don't have to be enrolled to be Native but that's much easier to say than to live with, between fakeclaiming online and so many cultural and community things only being available to enrolled members.

Zaimid didn't go to the Copper Isles to find love. He found it anyway.

SO GLAD SOMONE FORMULATED WORDS FOR THIS THOUGHT

COZ I'VE FELT THIS WAY FOR SO LONG BUT DIDN'T HAVE THE WORDS TO EXPLAIN

Class: Dentist!

Me: okay, so in this scene you are going to be a dentist. :)

Child 1: WHY DID YOU STEAL MY TEETH!

"UniSeg, preciso que você fique parada aí até eu chegar."

[SecUnit, I need you to stay still (female form) until I arrive]

"Elas não eram os robôs-assassinos mais astutos, (...)"

[They (feminine plural) weren't the (masculine plural) most astute murder robots, (...)]

...feminine pronouns for Unidades de Segurança, SecUnits, and masculine pronouns for robôs-assassinos, murder robots...

It wasn’t the end of the world. Maybe if this place was my livelihood I’d start panicking or packing up, but it’s not. I’m a vet, I own my own home, and I’m not hurting if my vegetables get looted. The garden’s a hobby at best, and yeah, maybe it was Grandma’s pride and joy, but I warned her I killed my mom’s geraniums when she told me she was leaving me the house, so it’s not like she has room for disappointment.

If anything, the rabbits are lucky they picked my land to figure out civilization on, because I’m pretty sure my neighbor Carl would be dropping dynamite down the burrows in my shoes.

I won’t lie, I came close. Monster Truck got out while I wasn’t looking, and when he came hobbling home with a goddamn spearhead embedded in his leg, I was about ready to rain my own personal Iliad down on the little bastards. Lucky for them, treating arrow wounds on my cat gave me enough time to calm down and think. I figure it was self defense. I don’t like letting my cats outside off-harness anyway, and I would’ve been plenty upset if he’d come home with a dead bunny in his mouth.

Children are often taught to think “I can’t do that *yet*” as a form of encouraging growth mindset. That’s a really useful strategy when it’s applicable, and it also needs some nuance in order to be more disability-affirming. 

Growth mindset has to be grounded in reality.

Growth means that I am always learning new things and developing new skills and getting better at things. It doesn’t mean doubling down on pursuing impossible dreams; it means doing real things. 

Sometimes growth mindset means thinking “I can’t do that *yet*,” and continuing to try until I can.

Sometimes it’s more like, “This isn’t working. Maybe I need to do it another way.”

Or: “This isn’t working, and maybe it’s not going to work. What else can I do?”

Or: “I can’t do *that*, but I can do the important part a different way.”

Or: “I can do that with help.” and/or “Let’s figure out what supports would make it possible to do that.”

Or: “We can do that collaboratively, together.”

Or: “I could do that with appropriate assistive technology. Let’s figure out if some exists and/or if there’s something we could invent.”

In those instances, realizing that something isn’t going to work is part of how we find out what *can* work.

There are also cases in which growth mindset means realizing that something may not be a good use of our time and effort and resources. A skill that is broadly useful to nondisabled people might not be worth it to me, even if I’m technically capable of doing it. (For instance, handwriting is a useful skill for most people, but it’s always been so hard for me that it’s not really worth it. Losing the ability to  handwrite more than a few words at a time has freed up my abilities to do other things, like focus on typing words.)

There’s something powerful about seeing your body as it really is and working with it rather than against it. Sometimes figuring out what isn’t possible or what’s not worth the cost in time and effort is how we find areas where we can grow and flourish. 

Growth mindset means that I *don't sabotage my growth* by wasting time and effort pursuing impossible things. I don’t stand on a chair or a roof and expect believing in myself to make it possible to use my arms as wings and fly. If I want to fly, I need an airplane, and that’s ok. 

At the same time, I think that claiming the power of “yet” is really important for disabled people, and especially for people with developmental disabilities. 

Sometimes there can be a lot of pressure to see ourselves as incapable of doing things every time disability makes it harder or means we need to do things differently or it’s not obvious whether or how we could do the thing. 

Sometimes we get pressure not to try things unless there’s some certainty that we will be able to do them. (And for something as complex and poorly understood as developmental disabilities, there’s rarely much certainty. Having other people’s doubts limit what we’re allowed to try makes the world very, very small.)

Sometimes disability-affirming growth mindset means saying “I can’t do that, let’s do something else,” and sometimes it means saying, “I might be able to do that, and I’d like to try.” Sometimes it means saying, “I want to keep trying even though it’s harder for me and I’m not catching on as quickly and no one seems to know how to teach me.” or “I don’t know if this is going to work but I think it could, and at this point, I’d like to keep trying.” Or, “I know most people learn this by the time they’re four, and I know I’m much older than that, but I’d like to try to learn this too.”

I severely underestimated the degree to which this is a banned subject. the sheer number of people who chimed in to thank me for making them feel better about their history of self-harm is an extremely direct example of the actual harm done by banning it as a subject. I didn't even mean to at first, I was just sharing a way that I show love.

the fact that it's possible to do that by accident is a tragedy, people are not getting the bare minimum. people should not feel like they have to hide their scars.

the systemic force that I've been running into is an obvious problem. I can't fix that, but even on a social level self-censorship does harm. if you treat it as this somber, terrible thing then people who actually need help can't talk to you. please get comfortable with being uncomfortable, it saves lives.

And they were like "What?"

And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."

And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"

And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.

And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.

The core to a successful emergency response is everyone knowing what to do ahead of time. That means having plans in place that everyone has been trained on, that have been validated via exercises, and that are updated on a regular basis (every year to five years, depending on the type of plan). Those plans should include roles and responsibilities, governance, etc. so there's no question when something is a problem who is doing what and who is in charge.

When I learned about planning, we always talked about "all-hazards" planning, though it seems like some people may be moving towards the term "risk-based", but the gist of all-hazards planning is that you make one plan to cover how you do emergency responses, not a different plan for every potential scenario. You will never be able to imagine every possible scenario, and it's not a great use of time to plan for every option.

Then, you make more tactical documents/tools for more specific scenarios/locations/etc. You might have some tactical plans/standard operating procedures for hazardous waste spills for firefighters, hazmat, etc., but they all fall under the top-level emergency response plan, so you know that whether it's a hazardous waste spill or a fire or a hurricane, there will always be an Incident Commander who is designated in the way laid out in the plan. That way, you don't have people scrambling around to figure out who is in charge every time an emergency happens.

Agility is important in all of this because you need to be able to react quickly to whatever is going on. You get that from well-trained people using well-written plans. If you have documented key decision points and roles and responsibilities, and the emergency response personnel train regularly, they will be able to respond more quickly to whatever is going on, which can be vital. They will know how and when to shift gears, and who has the authority to make that decision, because it is already documented.

Contingency planning is important because, to your point, sometimes your existing plans/equipment/etc. fail. But you generally don't contingency plan to scenarios--you contingency plan people/processes/places/stuff.

For example, you plans should have a line of succession for all leadership roles. It should be clear who is in charge if person #1 is unreachable, and their secondary needs to be equally as trained and as ready with the same authorities as person #1.

It should be documented somewhere what happens if you don't have sufficient money, personnel, or equipment to do an essential job (this is often in the form of things like mutual aid agreements, or in the case of disaster response in the US, sometimes FEMA support).

If a function or capability is tied to a location, you should have a secondary and possibly tertiary site or alternate way to handle that capability if you lose that primary site or access to it. This can be distributing the function/capability to other places, teleworking, relocating to a secondary site, etc.

What you're describing sounds a lot like continuity of operations (or business continuity if you work in the commercial world), which is where you document what your essential functions are and how to keep them going even during a disruption. The process of creating this involves doing a business process analysis (BPA) and business impact analysis (BIA) which together identify what is needed to do those essential functions (including dependencies), what happens if they fail, and what risks there are that may cause them to fail. A lot of the continuity of operations plan will be about contingency planning--if something goes wrong, then what? But it's still largely not scenario-based so much as "if this system goes down, switch to this system" or "if this system goes down, call Bob immediately."

Emergency response organizations should ideally have continuity plans so they can account for disruptions to their own organizations/functions, but (depending on how you're defining emergency response), simply having a continuity plan does not tell an emergency response organization how to do emergency response, it just tells them how to keep up or restore the capabilities required for emergency response.