So! A few years ago I realised that not only did I pretty much only draw white people, but that I wasn't sure how to draw anything else. There is a long history of dark skinned people being made to look pale and POC being made to look white in order for them to be more palatable to pale white audiences. So there are ethical as well as artistic reasons to try not to screw this stuff up. I made a post poking at the problem, what have I learned since then?
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Articles like ReWalk: A Plea for Common Sense remind me how little ablebodied people understand the sheer joy a good wheelchair can bring. Mostly because the alternative for someone like me is not being able to move, but there are some advantages even over being an able bodied person.

A lot of this would apply to manual wheelchairs too but I've never used one myself.

• Crush the feet of your enemies. Or don't, and feel magnanimous in your mercy.
  
• "Run" with the wind in your hair, or for a bus, without breaking a sweat or getting tired.
  
• Unsettle "more radical than thou" able bodied activists with your very presence.
  
• Be an unsettling centre of attention in general. Works well with goth/macabre/alternative clothing choices.
  
• Never bump your head on low ceilings (admittedly this has never been an issue for me)
  
• Have a comfy chair wherever you go. Fantastic for queues.
  
• Put heavy loads on the back or next to you and not have to carry the weight yourself.
  
• Wear gorgeous but impractical shoes you can't walk in.
  
• Work to fight against stereotypes about disabled people and poor awareness of accessibility simply by going out in public and doing your thing.
  

Any others, fellow wheelies?

Crime Against Nature Kids book about same sex and other "unnatural" relationships in nature. Not sue it works as a kids book but still interesting! Couldn't get it to download though.

When Depression is Contagious Captain Awkward post about how to draw boundaries and look after your own emotional well being when in a relationship with a depressed person.

Say hello to The Old Republic's gay planet All the same sex content in Bioware's Star Wars: The Old Republic MMMORPG is on one planet. Uh huh.

AMAZINGLY OFFENSIVE: On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human Inspired me to make a More machine than man shirt because screw you, self obsessed technophiles.

Why I play violent video games Not the same reasons as me, but still an interesting read from another woman who likes violent video games (and no, not despite the violence)

The secret life of them: What it takes to shift class in Australia Quite different to my experience as an upwardly mobile child of downwardly mobile ex-middle class white people, but that's what you'd expect.

the positive side of socialism

Health Panics in Historical Perspective

“Oh, You Sexy Geek!”: “Geek Girls” and the Problem of Self-Objectification

I've been reading through Pervocracy, I particularly liked
Using my vagina about the validity of having unsexy sex if that's genuinely what you want.

From a different POV, You Need Help: Let's Talk About (Having More) Sex

Conservatives can be persuaded to care more about the environment, study finds

Multiple Sclerosis, Kepral’s Syndrome, and Why I’m Glad Thane Dies The importance of illness narratives with no magical cure.

I've been slowly working through this book, it's fairly light but still a bit dense for my foggy hard-science-oriented brain.

Basically it's about demolishing gender essentialist pseudoscience.

The first part is a whole bunch of examples of how amazingly easy it is to affect people's decisions and abilities by "priming" them with stereotypes, either by putting stereotypes into their heads or just by reminding them of the stereotypes they've already been exposed to. Just putting a gender tickbox at the start of a maths test lowers women's scores, since they go "That's right, I am a woman. Women are bad at maths." (And thinking "I AM NOT BAD AT MATHS DAMMIT" still takes up valuable mental energy that could be spent calculating) And of course there's all the examples of exactly the same resume being judged differently depending on the gender/race etc associated with the name attached. People THINK they're being objective but really aren't, and will come up with complicated justifications for why their choice is logical, eg if you swap the "male" and "female" names on a pair of different resumes suddenly the traits that were unsuitable for the job when they belonged to a woman make a man the perfect choice.

She also demolishes some of the specific claims of Bad Gender Science, like "girl babies look longer at faces therefore women are naturally more intuitive therefore men are better at hard sciences" and so on (and of course as gender roles change the arguments have to twist themselves into stuff like "Women are attracted to forensic pathology and microbial biology because they...like faces and people")

Overall I'm finding it really informative but I am annoyed by how it assumes the reader is a cis het woman living in Australia/the US etc who is probably going to get married and have babies. She does acknowledge trans people, intersex people, same sex relationships, people from other cultures etc but mainly for what they can teach us about heterosexual cis etc people rather than as examples of everyday people who have to deal with gender stereotypes themselves. And, ok, most of her arguments are statistical and so the "average" woman is what matters, but she could still do better on being inclusive and intersectional. She does mention assumptions about race every now and then, but not in a very meaty way.

I'm onto part two now and she seems to be implying that there is some evidence for men and women (and male and female primates in general) being biologically hardwired differently in one particular way: men care about fitting into the male gender norms of the culture they've been brought up in whatever those norms happen to be and the same goes for women(*). The nice thing about this theory is that it says that specific gender roles are socially defined rather than innate, but that gender identities and divisions themselves are hardwired enough to debunk radfem etc dismissal of the trans experience.

(Second post)

(*)Non binary gendered people seem to be entirely off her radar, though being a small and poorly defined/understood group I guess it would be hard to come to many useful conclusions right now.

I would post this to alias_sqbr, but this is the paid account.

Imagine yourself pondering playing a free steampunk vampire f/f dating sim/visual novel. Which title sounds more appealing?



In other news my visual novel project is coming along pretty well :) I keep being paranoid that we've wandered into unfortunate implications with various plot points despite all of us trying very hard not to, I will definitely be asking if any of you guys want to be in on the alpha once we get to that stage.

I may have already posted some of these, sorry!

Objecting to Objectification A post that really annoyed me. It basically says that queer women shouldn't, say, check out another women's breasts without stopping and thinking seriously about her ~thoughts~ and ~feelings~. Personally I am totally fine with random strangers (regardless of gender!) thinking I'm hot without wondering about my inner life, as long as they treat me like a person should we actually interact.

I really dislike the way ALL sexualisation of women is demonised within certain progressive spaces (while other "sex positive" progressive spaces are more likely to celebrate the sexualisation of women by men), meaning that there is pretty much nowhere it is accepted and normalised for women to sexualise other women. I realise that some women want safe spaces where they don't feel sexualised, but there's a difference between "Please don't sexualise women in this space" and "sexualising women is bad".

A criticism of yarn bombing

Identity should always be part of the gameplay N K Jemisin talking about how oppression and privilege are dealt with in the Dragon Age world. I know some people prefer fantasy worlds with no sexism/racism etc, but personally I tend to enjoy ones which DO have some bigotry as long as it's handled well and in a way that allows for happy endings.

The Naked and the TED A criticism of various books to come out of TED and TED in general.

The missing stair, My friend group has a case of the Creepy Dude. How do we clear that up?, “I am the Lorax, and I speak for the creeps!” Posts on dealing with creepiness (and worse) in other people

Fallacy Watch: No True Klansman Redefining terms like "racism" to refer to attitudes so heinous that nobody actually believes them, thus allowing the speaker to avoid being labelled with the term.

self-care: a buncha links, or something Not all self care can be ~enlightened~ acts like doing activism or eating organic free trade vegetables, but it's still necessary.

Lincoln Against the Radicals "Lincoln is not a movie about Reconstruction, of course; it’s a movie about old white men in beards and wigs heroically working together to save grateful black people."

I've been going out in my wheelchair more recently, and also trying to get back into paying attention to my clothes (constructing outfits is a form of creative expression for me) Which has meant navigating the new and exciting world of wheelchair fashion.

As mentioned in this rather sweet article about design students making wheelchair fashion there's issues with pant length and stuff (mostly less of an issue for me as a short legged woman with an electric chair, though I miss wearing long skirts) but there's also more subtle issues with the meaning of clothes changing when you wear it in a chair.

For example I stopped wearing this threadless shirt saying "This was supposed to be the future. Where is my jetpack...where is my cure for this disease" after someone read it then gave me a look of intense pity and said "I'm so sorry!"

But being in a wheelchair isn't all about limits. I can wear pretty but uncomfortable shoes now since I'm not going to be walking in them. I've also been looking for tshirts with slogans which gain meaning from being in a chair: here's me wearing an "Also I can kill you with my brain" shirt and I also have a we were not meant to be octopus shirt.

This got me thinking about making my own sloganed tshirts. I don't know how many if any of these I would actually wear, but they were fun to come up with. I particularly enjoy subverting people's image of disabled people as cheerful, earnest, and harmless.

• Cyborg in progress
  
• Future cyborg overlord
  
• Bad cripple
  
• good cripple
  
• more machine than man
  
• your awkward stares only make me stronger
  
• Stairs! My archnemesis! We meet again!
  
• Being an inspiration: $10
  Answering invasive questions: $50
  Accepting unsolicited medical advice: $100
  Crushing the feet of the unworthy: Free
  

If anyone wants to take/adapt these ideas for themselves feel free.

A while ago I had a brief conversation with Shreen Ayob about her pdf "Pick Your Battles: a practical guide to social activism" and promised to give her further feedback...then didn't. (Sorry Shreen /o\)

Having been reminded about this promise I think I have to give up on the clear summary I was hoping to produce, so instead here are some rambling general thoughts. I'm making this a public post since she said she's after feedback leading up to the next edition and this way other people can have a look and comment.
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So, Pictures for Sad Children is a webcomic full of wry, self aware melancholy about dysfunctional people. I get linked it a lot but have always found it hit and miss.

The creator recently put up a post on his Kickstarter saying that he had been pretending to be depressed this whole time because that's just what artists do. Cue many depressed fans who had really connected with his comics feeling betrayed, and many ableist fans rejoicing at a chance to go on about how depression isn't really a thing.

But it was apparently all a joke, which anyone who was friends with him or familiar with his other work would have recognised, so all that outrage was for nothing HAHA TUMBLR. (The other, much more understandable "ARGH TUMBLR" reaction is to all the people who have been told that it's a joke but are still acting like it was meant literally, and the inevitable death treats etc. ARGH TUMBLR)

This attitude really pisses me off. I'm all in favour of satire and sarcasm (see: the title of this post, the previous paragraph), and not all humour has to be accessible to everyone. But if you tell a joke where it would be really bad if people took you literally, and most people DO take you literally, then you told the joke badly and you are responsible for the consequences.

Sure, there's only so much you can do about overly literal minded people, and it I think it's justifiable to cause SOME pain with art/humour, or we'd never get to use them at all. But having patchy reading comprehension or "not being a true fan" doesn't somehow make a person unworthy of compassion. Afaict most PFSC readers thought this was real, and a great many were deeply hurt. This could have been avoided if he made the satire more obvious, and I can't see any real advantage to being so opaque except...making the joke funnier for the people who get it? Being more effective on the tiny sliver of bigots who got the joke? Woo.

And even if we decide that everyone who doesn't get the joke is a humourless moron unworthy of respect, think of all the bigots who took it as support for hating on depressed people. Not actually being on their side doesn't magically make the pro-bigotry effect go away.

This is not someone's private blog that got taken out of context. It was a public and actively promoted kickstarter aimed at people who read PFSC, and it clearly failed at being clear to it's intended audience.

Since this apparently does need to be said: I'm not saying we should all go chasing after John Campbell with pitchforks, and the people who are harassing him need to step down. I do think he's a bit of a pretentious douche, but to be honest I kind of thought that anyway. Mainly I'm defending the people who are fans of PFSC and felt hurt from having their feelings dismissed.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about Atheism+ as a better alternative to the existing sexist and generally bigoted Atheist community.

I've been reading with interest. Cam was all "pfft, it's just Humanism", the two counterargument I've seen seem to boil down to
(a) Humanism may be pro-equality on paper, but the Humanist community does a pretty bad job in practice.
(b)Not all atheists want to be humanists. For a start, Humanism tends not to be sufficiently anti-religion for anti-religious atheists.

Now (a) is a good argument for me not getting involved in humanism. Alas, (b) is a good argument for me not getting involved in Atheism+, since I am not anti-religion, and find broad strokes anti-religious argument irritating.

In the comments to one of these posts I saw people talking about how alienating they found the post The New Atheism +, the main response to which seemed to be "But if you're against bigotry why do you feel alienated?" And I have to say I found it pretty alienating myself and not because I am pro bigotry.

I really dislike the framing of there being Good People and Irrational Dead Weight. In general I am very uncomfortable with the way Irrational is used as the worst possible insult amongst atheists, even if it is at least being more accurately applied by including sexism etc now.

I mean... Our compassion entails we will and must always be the enemies of the uncompassionate. When for me compassion means trying not to think of people as enemies at all. Sure, some people are so totally opposed to what I stand for that I am unlikely to ever find compromise with them, but they are far outnumbered by the people I currently oppose on on or more issues but would like to think could be my allies one day.

The cynical part of me thinks this kind of rhetoric appeals to male feminists (or white anti racists etc) because then they can draw a bright clear line between themselves and the Bad Guys. And if you disagree then clearly you are PRO SEXISM. Then when they are called out for their own sexism (and they will be eventually) they often get all huffy because zomg they're not one of THEM.

(nb this is me slowly crawling back to sentience after SUCH a stressful few weeks, including a tumnmy bug, cold, and my cat being temporarily BURIED UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS. So this post may not be entirely coherent)