Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I had a pretty dispiriting conversation with my parents this evening.

Whenever I think "wow I'm shit at speaking up when I should," I hope I remember how far I've come.

My mom won't argue with the people in her life who persist in Trump support despite living in Minnesota in 2026. "We just don't talk about politics," I remember hearing this when I was growing up (once or twice; one didn't even need to talk about not talking about politics very often), and it seems so nonsensical as well as enraging these days.

And when she told me about a parent being ableist toward his young son, after said child's disability had been explicitly compared to mine... She was talking to the parents and made that connection herself, saying that how they described his sight reminded her of me, which got the mom to ask if I'd ever "had to" use braille. At this point I was wincing a little, she made it sound like an emergency plan I didn't have to resort to (when actually I taught myself (by sight, not touch) Grade 1 braille when I was 11 because I so desperately wanted to learn it), but whatever. Mom replied, accurately, that I did not learn braille. The kid's mom said that she'd asked because they as his parents had been told braille might be relevant to their child, and I guess here the kid's dad interrupted their conversation to say "absolutely not, he will never do that."

I was so upset. I shouted "that's horrible!"

Mom was upset...with my outburst. "I'm only telling you what he said," she told me, clearly not interested when I tried to explain why I thought this is horrible.

I've been having a bad-brain time anyway, but the idea that there are people out there who insist that their visually impaired kid will never learn braille is bad enough... and it stings to see that my mom isn't even interested in advocating otherwise even when she had been explicitly treated like an expert by the kid's mom by drawing this parallel between my condition and his.

My mom isn't really much of an expert on my condition -- she told me that people in her church prayed for me to stop being blind when I was a baby and I'm a miracle; Wikipedia tells me it's normal for people born with my condition to acquire some sight by the time we're five years old. And her own ableism was baked into the conversation: she's intensely uncomfortable with wheelchair users unless they are expected to "walk again some day" and she was just so paternalistic about the kid that even modeling better reactions (which is usually all I can do when my parents are like this) didn't feel good enough for me.

It just felt like the last straw: a difficult weekend, I accidentally broke the fastening on my current-favorite glasses chain while I was trying to clean glasses that always seem to be dirty lately, I have realized only tonight that all my train journeys this coming week will be even more complicated because Manchester Piccadilly is effectively closed... D kindly tried to fix a problem with my phone not sending e-mail only for it to confound him, leaving him frustrated and confused.

And now it's past my bedtime? I somehow have to go to sleep when I'm so dejected? Bah.

I stayed in London last night, an extremely good idea after a ten-hour work day full of travel, the last thing I wanted was almost three more hours' travel to get home.

So I worked from the London office (gosh I sound like a wanker saying things like this) for most of today -- my manager suggested yesterday that I sleep in or leave early but I couldn't do much of either because of long-planned engagement with campaigners where I'd have really been letting my team down if I wasn't around.

So when I booked this train ticket I calculated that if I left right as that meeting finished this afternoon I'd be able to get the last train before afternoon peak time (which rendered my ticket unusable) would start.

And I would've been right but of course the meeting overran. Campaigners!

I got to Euston like six minutes before my train, so I didn't have time to go ask for passenger assistance. But since they have display screens I can actually read now, I could try to run and get the train myself.

Platform 3. So far so good. I rushed there, fishing out my work phone as I did because I have an e-ticket.

I have an e-ticket because I've had problems collecting paper tickets from the inaccessible machine or the office that's staffed for two hours early in the morning...except when it's not.

Neither paper tickets nor e-tickets are actually accessible.

Normally this is better (although I couldn't charge my phone today because Apple chargers suck and also my work laptop sucks but whatever).

But the app logged me out!

It never logs me out! It was fine yesterday! There was no warning or anything.

I was at the ticket barrier freaking out, shaking so I couldn't type my email address or password.

Even when I did finally manage it, it demanded a code sent to the email address. Which Outlook hid from me (all the other many many emails I get from this benighted institution go to the Focused inbox but for some reason these went to Other, which I don't get notifications of and which are more difficult to locate. Especially when you're freaking out because your train is visible and you can't get to it yet.)

I had to ask for another code and then I had to pay attention to which was the newer one so I didn't use the older one. This website has been known to lock me out for twenty minutes when I got my password wrong twice, so I was terrified of that happening too.

I copied the code and pasted it accordingly. Only at this point did I remember that my work phone doesn't let me paste anything. Because it lets me copy things as normal, oh yeah, no problem there. But when I try to paste them, my phone instead spits out a sentence something like "Your organisation does not allow data to be copied" or something like that. It tells you off. For expecting that you might ever want to copy something even when you have logged in with the same account to Teams and Outlook and Word and SharePoint... Surely no one ever needs to copy things right? Especially not a blind person who now has to memorize a string of random numbers...

My session timed out.

I had to start over again from the beginning. The shaky typing of my email address, the concentration it took to make sure my password was right when it's just showing up as a row of black dots... Getting a new email and knowing at least to check the Other inbox for it now. Trying to paste the six digits because my panicky brain had already forgotten that I couldn't. I had to do that three times before I got it to work.

I was almost in tears by that point.

I had also gone from hoping that the staff member standing just the other side of the ticket gates would help me, to worrying that he was seeing me about to cry or scream or more obviously have a panic attack, to wondering how Euston finds its staff because they really are an extraordinarily unhelpful bunch. I tried to imagine being as physically close as he was to any living being in such obvious distress as I was and just not reacting in any way.

When I finally got logged in and could access the lovely magical QR code, I tried to line up my phone and the scanner -- which is ridiculously hard to do, two smooth featureless panes of glass, and I find it ridiculously difficult not to accidentally touch any part of my phone screen in the process of trying to hold the phone there because if I do it'll select something, close the app, do something to ensure that the QR code isn't available for the scanner...

Turns out I was trying to use the outbound part of the ticket and not the return part.

This whole time the staff member stayed so exactly on the other side of the ticket barrier from me that when it finally opened for me I almost had to shove him out of the way.

Nothing but empty space in either direction and he still didn't move.

I can't help but think he didn't expect me to actually get through and get on my fucking train. I know that kind of stuff sounds paranoid but, it's not like it'd be the first time someone was waiting to laugh at a disabled person being prevented from doing something ordinary that everyone else is managing to do.

But: fuck that guy and fuck the app and fuck Microsoft and Apple because despite them all I did get my train and now I'm happily back home.

I knew it'd be awful but the PIP assessment was really awful.

I've mostly had nice assessors in the past, which helps as much as anything can. But this one wasn't doing a good job of hiding her glee at her petty power over me. Mean-girl vibes.

When we told V we were having coffee and cake afterward, they expressed their approval and said they'd hoped I would be. I said I learned this from them the first time I had one of these fucking assessments and they went along with me: they had to buy me the cake after that because I was too poor to do it myself, so I remember it.

V replied: "They will not be allowed to take away our joy." Damn right.

I've been struggling with not being able to articulate how I'm feeling about the overlap between disabled and trans issues in light of the Supreme Court ruling, the overambitious interim "guidance" from EHRC, and how widely the decision is being interpreted by police forces and NHS bodies and etc.

Around the time I started testosterone, I realized that medical transition is effectively acquiring a long-term health condition and while, yes there is specific transphobia in healthcare, there is also endemic ableism and a lot of the negative experiences that heretofore-non-disabled trans people are shocked and miserable about are just part of how healthcare treats people with any chronic health conditions.

So yesterday I read something on Facebook shared by a page called The Disabled Eco-Enby. It's so good ( but so long. )

( depressing shit )

"Things blind or partially sighted people wish sighted people knew..." goes the social media post.

The third comment is already from the parent of a blind child.

And of course it's saying "my child can do anything a sighted person can do!"

Yeah. Including grow up with a lot of ableist thought patterns, which is what I did in that environment.

When I went back later, it was a whole thread. Full of stuff like "nothing will stop my VI grandson!"

Okay I hope he can get a job or benefits, I hope he can get a bus or a train!

I know we're still fighting the same misconceptions that were old when I was young, that if the default assumption is that blind people can't do things it's an improvement to say we can. I just wish there was a bit more nuance and less defensiveness, less evidence that the adults in the situation have accepted the ableist premise of society and are still defining success as "exactly the same as a sighted person."

I dunno. Maybe I was just seeing this in the middle of an incredibly busy and kind of demoralizing work day, maybe I'm just projecting from my own visually inspired childhood.

But if nothing else, the question was what blind and partially sighted people want sighted people to know. Can we not have one social media thread without sighted people immediately butting in?

The most horrifying detail in this story about a wheelchair user not being able to get to the stage to receive her award for disability work is hiding in the caption of the photo.

I am so jaded and cynical when it comes to ableism that I'm not often surprised any more, but I did a whole Mike-Hobbes-style wheezing, hyperventilating laugh when I read the caption under a photo of this white woman using a power wheelchair holds a fancy plaque while rolling her eyes and pointing over her shoulder to some steps up to a stage. (There's a podium behind her that is only suitable for a standing typical-height adult, so in the absence of other microphones she wouldn't have been able to be heard even if she had been able to get to the stage.)

The caption is "Despite a ramp being available, staff presumed Ms Landre didn't want one."

There was nothing else about this in the story! I want to hear how the staff that presumed that are never going to do so again.

Why not always have the ramp out? Why ever "presume that somebody didn't want one"?

The many possible answers to this (it's poor quality, they lied about the existence of the ramp, they assume no one ever wants a ramp because of systemic ableism and it didn't occur to them that this event would be any different...) are all bad.

It really threw me when I realized that I'm much closer to the deadline for returning my PIP review than I thought I was. Not least because I had to factor in shit like weekends and the mail because I actually had to mail this form in like it's the goddam 1990s.

When my original PIP form was done digitally, and when the DWP knows to send me letters in large print, it's fucking bullshit that they send me their normal-ass form.

I sent it back with four pages of typed additions to my previous claim, so mostly about my ankle (but also I wasn't even on the current brain drug yet, and then there's testosterone...).

I was close enough to the deadline that I had to pay eight pounds in postage to make sure it'll get there in time, fuck everything about this.

I walked home from the post office feeling really deflated.

Having to work on this today was the last straw for deciding whether I am going to this black-tie gala dinner for work: a few days ago when I'd been a stresshead about everything to do with work, D had said "okay how about we go to Slaters after the gym on Saturday and sort this out" so that had been the plan but then I tried to imagine dealing with strangers about my body in an inadequate binder and then I tried to imagine carting all these clothes with me to London, working like normal that afternoon, getting myself into these clothes, finding a place I've never been to, being the only person wearing a mask, somehow eating enough food, getting from there to a hotel I'm supposed to book myself but am not at all sure how to do...

...and I couldn't. It was just literally unimaginable. Way too many difficult things in a row, without a breather between any of them. So I'll have to fess up on Monday that I'm not doing this. I hate that prospect, but I hate it a lot less.

But the weather was nice and since we didn't have to go clothes shopping and some people at the gym had mentioned it's Salford Pride, D and I planned to go to that. I was really glad for something to look forward to.

By the time I got home and D had had his post-gym shower, he'd learned that Salford Pride is now a ticketed event for crowd-control purposes, and that tickets were sold out. I'm so used to going to these small Prides that I forgot about tickets (I've bought a ticket for Manchester Pride once and it was in like 2009)! I'm glad Salford has been successful enough that they need to limit numbers, but I was disappointed to be kept out by this.

I had an okay afternoon: I sat outside, I helped MB re-pot some mint and oregano, getting myself and the patio covered in topsoil and water. I'm feeling a bit restless but utterly unambitious.

For lack of a better way to mark the occasion, I went back and re-read a social media thread I'd started while trying to fit both dayjob and PIP into yesterday. People showed me nice photos of animals and plants and other good things, and some said nice things about me.

( To spare my blushes and your scrolling finger. )

I've saved my favorite for last:

one of the most Erik-Supreme-Competence I can think of is how, despite the overwhelm of the task at hand, you are taking the time to not merely acknowledge all the cool things people are sharing, you are enthusiastically being excited about them. What a joy it has been to read this thread - as much for your generous responses as the wonderful sharings.

You are the key to this - the insight to ask and ask for things that will brighten not just your day but anyone lucky enough to find this thread - and then enrich the whole experience by folding your joy into the mix. This is amazing and so utterly you being yourself and I wish you could be building a list of all the ways you shine at being Erik (and we could all blurb that list like on a book jacket "astonishingly important... 100% makes the world a better place")

And then five heart emojis in a row. Five!

She's right, I absolutely did dive in to this thread, almost everyone got me reflecting their reply back at them: it's great to see ducks, I'm glad your dog is enjoying the park, and yes that whole thing about the Iron Pigs... It really does cheer me up to get out of my own head, that's what helps the most at times like this. I can recommend it, if you're having a tough time yourself.

And I kinda found some way to mark the occasion of having finished the terrible disability hoop-jumping. I might not have gotten to partake of the queerness and sunshine at Salford Pride, but I manufactured something similar.

Next weekend D and I are going to Electromagnetic Field, "a non-profit UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, geeks, scientists, engineers, artists, and crafters." We have friends who go/have gone, and D has been interested in this since the last one -- it has happened every other year.

About three weeks ago, we were invited to look at the list of workshops, talks and other suchlike that people had volunteered to give. Showing an interest at that point would help organizers prioritize and allocate space to things, so I was keen to help out, especially as someone only interested in the less-techie things.

I spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes on the website after dinner, and by the end of it I had vertigo, the beginning of a migraine, and had to go to bed at like 7:30 that evening.

All because the website only has dark mode. This is what happens when I try to use dark themes.

I was really surprised, at first, that such a nerd thing didn't have any other options. But then I shouldn't have been surprised; my "favorite" example of how light themes are treated is in how Discord explained their approach to theirs:

Even within our office, it was hard to find more than one or two actual light theme users. Our small team of designers didn’t design with it in mind when creating new features. It became an afterthought. Testing on light theme was rare, and considered a chore.

It eventually became a Discord community inside joke that light theme was bad and you were bad for using it.

(That post is almost five years old and it was written to announce the new golden age of light theme; I started using Discord after that and I still hate it, haha. But it's amazing to see how much worse it was! The sidebar was still dark! Because no one could need to read those words too! The contrast is terrible! If you love dark so much why is the text medium-grey?! The fonts are so thin! Fonts are the thing that shouldn't be light even in light mode! (Wow that link is from 2016, read it when it was new, I've been referring to it ever since, and the problem still exists!))

D kindly emailed EMF to ask about a light mode for the website at that time. He never got any response.

Yesterday and today we've been sent emails with a much more detailed schedule and a request to sign up for things by Wednesday. I idly clicked on the link and when I saw the website open I panicked at the sight of it and quickly closed the tab again. That's when I asked D if he'd had a reply to his email. He hadn't, so he opened am issue on their github, explaining that the lack of a light mode means I'm unable to engage with or contribute to EMF. This quickly got a reply, but not an encouraging one.

Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately adding a different colour theme is quite a lot of work - we certainly won't have time to add it for this event, and I don't think we can really commit to maintaining two colour themes in the long term at this point either.

For what it's worth, the website does meet the WCAG guidelines for minimum contrast (with one or two exceptions I just spotted and will try to get fixed). Not trying to diminish your partner's experience here, but we do take this seriously.

Personally I think the light-on-dark design is getting a bit tired and my preference is to try and move towards a dark-on-light theme for our next redesign. So we will definitely take this into account then.

Neither of us know anything about web development, but I'm not used to hearing that it's prohibitively difficult to have light and dark modes...and indeed an online pal has confirmed for that it shouldn't be, for what that's worth.

It all seems overly defensive to me. Mentioning the WCAG standards for color contrast felt off; I never mentioned problems with the contrast. It does actually matter what the colors are, as well! Combined with "not to diminish [my] problems, in the midst of absolutely diminishing my problems, it was just not great.

I'm sure from this person's perspective it looks like "someone waited until the last minute to complain, we can't overhaul everything in a few days..." which I get makes me sound like an asshole. Especially when this is all done by volunteers. But it's frustrating because a few days before the event is when I've been asked to interact with the website. Previously I'd sort of ignored it and gotten my information through the sighted person I'm going with. Which is not great, but that kind of thing all disabled people will recognize because that happens a lot!

D, bless him, was willing to brush off his rudimentary CSS skills and bodge something together that I (and anyone else who wants a light mode and doesn't care about the aesthetics too much) can use. He had a briefly frustrating but apparently educational afternoon figuring out how to make that happen!

For years now, diffrentcolours has been saying he wants to take me to the Isle of Wight to see the WWII bunkers whwre British space rockets were tested in the 50s, because he knows I love space history. He'd been to this site with mother_bones previously, so he knew that while cars ordinarily don't have access to it, blue badge holders can drive up to and park at the site.

So today we woke up early to get the ferry (I'd never been on a ferry before! and despite learning most of what I know about ro-ro ferries being on a podcast about engineering disasters, I had a great time), at what his mum warned us was prohibitive cost (it really was eye-watering), drove to The Needles, and found a sign at the car park that said "no unauthorised vehicles can go this way, call this number to get authorised for accessible parking." The person in the ticket booth said the same: we had to call that number because there's only one accessible parking space up there. So it was just a matter of logistics?

D tried calling the number, no one answered. He tried again and couldn't get through. I didn't do any better trying on my phone. He was really upset by this point because the other option was paying for parking here and paying for the tour bus that is allowed to go up to the New Battery as its called (WWII is new if the old battery is from the Napoleonic War), or walking a mile uphill which he was assuming my ankle wouldn't be up to.

I was so angry at this -- why make everyone call once they get there? why can't the person who's dealing with parking down here also make these arrangements via landline? -- that I was more than sure enough I could walk. I didn't want to wait half an hour for a bus.

And I did enjoy the walk, though it was very windy. (Apparently we're having another named storm; I can hear the wind howling outside the window now and I guess it's worse at home. I'm glad it doesn't seem to have bothered Gary; wind often does because he doesn't understand where the noise is coming from and it clearly unsettles him. But MB has said he's been good all day and took himself off to bed at a very reasonable hour this evening.) But I did not enjoy the terrible inaccessible system that made it necessary.

To top it all off, two cars came past us on their way down as we were walking up, and when we got there, there was one car parked in enough room to have held four cars. We would have been fine. It would've saved me a lot of energy I could've used on more of the area. My ankle is still healing, and I'm lucky to have felt pretty good the rest of the day (and extremely glad for my all-terrain cane, which was perfect for this situation), but I'm still very definitely only given a certain amount of walking spoons a day and I shouldn't have had to spend them all on this.

D and I had a lovely day together, as we reliably do no matter how we spend the time with each other, but it was a new way for accessible routes/parking to be completely inaccessible, and that's never fun to discover.