Thorns

I was happy with my addition, so am going to crosspost it here. Just had my second vaccine dose so hopefully this isn't incoherent.

Advantages to younger people from knowing older ones.

Age poll!

Apologies to those who already did it, feel free to do the poll for people who already did the poll.

Inspired by this post about aging:

I think seeing people in their 20´s and 30´s as “old” is pretty unhealthy... Let people enjoy being young adults, stop making teenagers anxious that their life ends the minute they hit twenty, or adults feel like they can’t have fun anymore.

Yeah, like...there are changes that tend to happen as you get older, and power dynamics to be aware of. But there isn’t this clear line between Being Young and Being Old, where you become a Grownup with the same tastes and needs (or lack thereof) as All Other Grownups.

The world is controlled by grownups...but by conventionally minded, privileged grownups.

The progression we're taught to expect is that young people get along with each other, but not with adults. And then they grow up into conventional adults and enjoy a world designed for and controlled by people like them.

But to the extent that this narrative applies at all, it's only to conventional, privileged people who fit comfortably into mainstream society.

An unconventional young person finds the world frustrating on two levels: the grownups in charge don’t understand or accept them, but neither do most people their own age. Such a young person finds pressure to be “normal” doubly crushing: not only do they find conventional grownup roles impossible, they also can’t fit into “proper” roles for people their age. The only way to find happiness is to accept themselves and find other like-minded misfits.

And such a young person doesn’t suddenly become a conventional adult who is happy to fit entirely into the mainstream. It often gets easier once they get older, partly because the world is designed for grownups (if not ones like us) but partly because we generally have more ability to control our own lives and avoid, say, toxic parents or stifling social environments. Forcing ourselves to be Normal is just as impossible and soul-destroying for misfit adults as it is for misfit teens.

Saying that unconventional grownups are pathetic and predatory, or even just boring, is damaging to us and to the young people who will grow into us. They need to see that they have a future, that they can become adults and still hold onto who they are, and what they need. Yeah, being unconventional or even disprivileged doesn’t make the power dynamics between older and younger people go away, and that’s something we need to be careful of, but being older doesn’t make all the other distinctions go away either.

Signed, a 39 year old queer, disabled, nerdy weirdo who hasn’t stopped being all those other things just because I’m pushing 40.

Inspired by this twitter thread via tumblr:

I think millennials are taking a longer time coming to terms w/ the fact that we’re adults b/c a lot of us can’t afford to live like adults.

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Hacking at Education: TED, Technology Entrepreneurship, Uncollege, and the Hole in the Wall The anti-social libertarian intellectual emptiness underlying a lot of TED-esque ideas.

On political and value neutral Everything with any message at all has a political subtext.

Why I don't like the dragon argument Points out that "if you can have dragons why can't you have POC" has some unfortunate implications that work against it.

words against communication and Also you get things like... The way worrying about appropriation/stepping on disabled people's toes can stop some people from realising they are disabled themselves. (Not that able bodied people shouldn't worry, just that it's complicated!)

Refusing to have the “What You Did” conversation "1 The ‘what you did’ conversation implies the ‘what you are’ conversation. 2 The ’what you are’ conversation is uncivil and silencing. 3 Therefore, it’s uncivil and silencing to discuss ‘what you did.’"

Frustrations of being a black gamer playing BIOSHOCK INFINITE

Sweatshops still make your clothes

Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement

Vilification and 'just having a laugh' About the racist jokes in my old Uni's satirical newspaper

Righteous Wroth Rarely Is OMG a criticism of excessive social justice where the group making the criticisms (in this case, women) are the victims of the oppression ostensibly being attacked with too much zeal (eg sexism) I have Thoughts about the very complicated way mental illness (which often creates an inability to behave in the way society demands) interacts with the somewhat narrow sets of behaviours expected of a Good Ally/Activist but am not quite up to articulating them.

$300 for Julia Gillard's NDIS scheme? Please, my wheelchair costs $22,000 Apparently some Australians are ok paying taxes and levies for roads and schools but draw the line at helping disabled people.

And from the hahaha what department...
( Worse than global warming??? #followateen )

Since I've been doing my fanart prompts for a while, here's some somewhat undirected thinky thoughts.

I've encountered a lot of talk about writing The Other, trying to be inclusive and respectful when writing characters who are outside the "default" of white straight able-bodied male etc. I've pondered this with regards to my own (small amount of) writing, but about a year ago had the sudden realisation that it applied to my art too: When I tried drawing the original SGA team for a prompt I realised that my drawing style really didn't suit dark skin. And when I looked back at my art I realised I'd never drawn anyone very dark, and instead had lots and lots of skinny able-bodied youngish white people, both in my original characters and my fanart. Even the comics I drew about I and cameronm have us much skinnier than we really are.

So I've been trying to fix it. I made my mental default skin tone for original characters darker, and made an effort to draw more dark skinned characters in fanart. When I'd been doing that for a while I decided to branch out and asked for Fanart prompts: not skinny youngish white people.

And it's been a really interesting experience. I guess the two different aspects are the apolitical practical issues around drawing a different skin tone or body type etc, and the deeper issues relating to how we see such bodies and who we choose to draw.
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