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

Thanks for the nice comments on the previous entry. They, along with just writing it out in the first place and D holding me tight (normally I am the big spoon but he did a great job at it last night!) helped me have an okay night.

D had asked me, after we turned the lights off, if there was anything I wanted to do today -- the family had no real plans beyond making the homemade vegan wellington for my birthday dinner that D's sister had suggested and I'd gotten excited about before I remembered quite how much work it was last year, oops. But D and I helped and it felt a lot less of a production this year.

Anyway, before that we had no plans and I thought it might be nice to get out of the house and see something of Birmingham. We didn't actually make it as far as the city centre but the local high street allowed D to browse charity shops while I got a long-overdue haircut (I went from the longest hair I've had in quite a while to the highest skin fade I've maybe ever had, so it feels like a dramatic difference!), and we went for a very nice birthday lunch.

My birthday present from D might still be trapped in DRM hell but he told me what it is, and The Feminist Art of Walking by his old pal Morag goes very nicely with the birthday present I've already gotten from angelofthenorth, of short walks/hikes around Greater Manchester. I also got a bookshop.org voucher from D's mum, which can be added to the one that comprised the other part of my birthday present from Miriam, so I have to decide what to get there too, which is so fun.

Weirdly, my birthday also marks a year since Gary died. It feels so long ago but also I can still conjure him so clearly in my memory, and there probably hasn't been a day all year that I haven't thought of him. I still miss him so much.

I've had a much better day, and I'm looking forward to being home tomorrow.

I had one of those "leave for London at 6:30 am, get home at 10pm" work days today, so I'm too tired to say much tonight (which is a shame because I was actually there for something interesting this time!).

I will say that on the train to and from I read about half of a book called I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones and I'm enjoying it very much. It is gory, but as usual the real horrors for me are the emotional pain, which this book is describing very well. I just have to be careful about things with teenagers dying...especially in small towns.

According to this, and a new book I maybe have to read now, a gay pioneer in the UK was blind.

In 1960, seven years before the law in the UK changed to permit sex between men, he had written to the national press declaring himself to be gay. Roger believed that the only way to change public opinion about homosexuals was for them to take control of the gay rights movement – and this required them to unashamedly identify themselves on the national stage. But nobody else had been willing to do it.

It's because of his blindness that this person had to come in to his life: an Oxford student, also gay, who could be trusted to read his papers and write and generally be a kind of personal assistant.

To gay when it was illegal, and then to be blind, required a lot of access intimacy when everything was still on paper.

The article ends:

In the years since, it has often led me to wonder how many other quiet revolutionaries live among us, ready to share their stories, if only we knock on their doors.

So many. I'm sure of it.

I read every Cybertruck takedown I find, and this is easily the best.

Tesla’s baking sheet on wheels rides fast in the recall lane toward a dead end where dysfunctional men gather.

That's practically a Springsteen lyric level of vivid poetry.

But the article is really the best because it's written by an indigenous person.

Cybertrucks are sold on tribal land, but they are not in spaces that Native people, or any real truck people, go. They are simply taking our space.

My Indigenous upbringing taught me to give back to this land, which belongs to my ancestors. That value is real and spiritual for me; I remember where I came from. But these cyber-things are made of rare minerals extracted from the land. They give nothing back, only take.

It's also just a love letter to trucks in general (as a friend said, "fuck I have never seen my deep-seated 'little girl in pigtails and a tutu who wants to drive their grandparents' giant F150 that brings back incredible antiques from auctions' articulated so well...." For me, so many chores were done with my dad's and grandpa's pickups, and my first time steering a car was my grandpa putting me on his lap and letting me take the steering wheel when I'd have otherwise been too small to reach it).

I walked [my niece] in her stroller to take in the colors and sounds of classic rides. These trucks are an inheritance for people; they are works of art. Nevaeh, now 9 months old, grins when I seat her behind a white leather steering wheel in a finely crafted truck assembled 50 years earlier. “That’s something you’ve never seen before!” Marco, the truck’s owner, says, smiling at Nevaeh’s focus as a smooth bass drops on the radio.

When we leave and I return her to the car seat, I tell her that she can have her own truck one day to drive and haul things and bond with people she loves.

The survey also found that most Britons (53%) don’t consider listening to an audiobook to be equivalent to having read that same book. Just 29% said that they think of listening to audiobooks to be the same as reading...

Okay.

I don't think it's a very well-worded question.

I don't think audiobooks are "the same" because I prefer to read some kinds of books as audio and others as ebooks.

I think a good narrator can add a lot to a book. (I can't imagine the Murderbot series without Kevin R. Free's amazing narration.

I also love Scott Brick as an audiobook reader, he's a big reason that a book about salt has become a comfort re-read for me.I can't imagine the Murderbot series without Kevin R. Free's amazing narration. I also love Scott Brick as an audiobook reader, he's a big reason that a book about salt has become a comfort re-read for me. Both Nigel Planer and Stephen Briggs make Terry Pratchett books better.)

But I don't think that's what people mean here.

I think at least some of those people are saying that audiobooks aren't as good as reading. They're not "real" reading.

And I think that because people regularly say that audiobooks "don't count."

Some of this is the same kind of snobbishness that doesn't even "count" ebooks as "real."

But some of it is specifically ableism.

The article keeps referring to books "read or listened to." The implication is that these aren't the same. Listening isn't reading.

I actually wonder what would happen if braille was explicitly included. Like we don't say that braille users touched a book, we still say they read it.

I'm not in Brussels this weekend, like I was last year.

Last year, D and I did not attend FOSDEM but were in the city that same weekend, went to a "fringe" event at the hackspace, met up with people who were attending.

D didn't attend (I might not have anyway, let's be real) specifically because of its poor policies around covid mitigation, and it seems that this year there's been enough of a sea change or critical mass of people put off by how much FOSDEM has outgrown its venue: insufficient public health provisions, talks being overfull before people have a chance of getting in the room, and what sounds like overcrowding to the extent of actual safety concerns around fire or people just getting crushed. I guess it's been described as physically difficult to move around amid all the people.

Someone who was there who we didn't get to hang out with as planned was an online pal of mine, Anna e só. They were a keynote speaker at FOSDEM last year. And while they had a free day at the end of the conference where we'd intended to meet up, they found thsmelf so exhausted by that point that they had to stay in their room and rest that day.

They have contributed to something called #FluConf this year, and I hope their piece gets the huge audience deserves. It's about their experience at FOSDEM last year, and the necessity of moving away from "FOSDEM as the only important conference or the only significant way we can cross paths and find each other."

What they describe in the volunteers being interested in their blindness and their individual experiences when they want to talk about systemic issues is so familiar to me too.

I think their thinking and their writing are so clear, I really admire it. I hope they get what they're calling for.

(Me this morning: never heard of Crowdstrike

Me until this afternoon: assumed Crowdstrike was a video game)

I'm 3/4 of the way through Deb Chachra's excellent How Infrastructure Works, so having a day of people talking about all these systems that are usually so transparent (in that we don't see it) and opaque (in that we don't understand it) just feels like a continuation of the book!

Stories about 999 using paper and pens, and passengers unable to get on planes but empty planes have to fly to get to where they're expected to be next, make a lot more sense in the mindset this book has gotten me in to!

Wow. I just read a whole book in a day.

And, y'know, a day that was not lacking in other things I had to do!

I've been reading Lyz Lenz's newsletter for a long time, I watched this book progress and then I've had it on my library hold list for a long time and today it appeared. It's called This American Ex-Wife and it's about her own divorce and her life since.

I started the audiobook when I started doing chores this morning, and unloading the dishwasher while hearing about someone who decided her marriage had ended when she got home from a work trip in the middle of the night to a trash bag that her husband had left just inside the door for days made me feel like I'd been knocked off my feet. The juxtaposition to my calm, orderly chores that I welcome most mornings, and the recognition not of the exact situation but so much that felt like she described feeling then, was a lot.

I enjoyed the book, I got a lot out of it -- not least because she is about my age and grew up so similarly to me that I know I went to an open day at the college she attended (though I chose another myself) even though she never names it. Her book makes me wish I'd written a book, even though hers is about motherhood and the political failure to provide childcare and staying in the Midwest and mine would be about disability and so many forms of queerness.

But one of the things that stands out most strongly to me right now is something a transmasc online friend said a few days ago in a conversation mostly about something else: "It also really bugs me when people project masculinity onto my child or adolescent self in photos. She was a girl. I'm not. Both can be true." I feel that anyway, and this book has made me particularly feel like it matters that I was a woman when I was married. Everybody thought of me as one and treated me as one for almost or entirely the whole time I was married. An agender friend once said they "caucus with the women" and that's how I feel here: the dynamics of my marriage and how it ended fit many patterns and a lot of those patterns are about women and about heterosexual marriages.

I saw this post, by a disability rights lawyer, talking about extending accessibility features to more people who've aged into disability and who don't think that they're disabled or that accessibility menus are for them, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

I love that it includes good questions, answers, and good strategies to get more accessibility into the hands of more older people, and they sound like good ones. I think it was silveradept who I saw muse on how older people benefit most from learning about new/unfamiliar tech things through sources they trust and consider authoritative, and I love to see that reflected in these strategies, where the sources might be AARP, phone store staff, or their loved ones who found out about this via TikTok.

This topic also has me thinking that another way to address people not knowing about things that may become relevant to their changing bodies as they age is to address ableism as far and wide in society as possible.

The writer asks her dad great questions, like does he consider himself deaf (no), a person with a disability (no), disabled (no), or hard of hearing (yes). And there can be lots of reasons why someone who watches TV with no sounds at all, captions only, says he doesn't have a disability and he's only aware of accessibility because it's relevant to his daughter's livelihood. I wouldn't speculate on a specific stranger's reason for not thinking of themself as disabled, but one of those possible reasons is internalized ableism. Just ambient, systemic ableism that we all (including people who do identify as disabled!) can be affected by. Heretofore-able-bodied people have decades of thinking of disability as Other. Quite a lot of decades, in the case of an elder who's only recently acquired an impairment in something they'd previously not been impaired by. It can take a real paradigm shift for someone to start thinking of themselves as something that's been distant and by overwhelming consensus worse than their previous identity.

Of course I'm thinking of my own parents too. My dad just had surgery to repair a torn meniscus. Before he knew that this is what was causing his pain, he hoped he could "just get a cortisone shot and go back to normal." Didn't know the word ibuprofen (literally he struggled to pronounce it, and that's a whole week after I suggested it to him!). My mom said after the operation he walked with a walker only for "a few days."

She's no better: the very first thing she told me about his surgery on Skype today was to grumble "not that you'd know it" after mentioning that it had happened earlier this week. She resents him for getting better quicker than she was after a broken ankle a few years ago. My parents are both desperate to not think of themselves as disabled even temporarily.

Meanwhile here I am, taking advantage of every ambient mobility aid or adaptation available in my household in the wake of my broken ankle, whether technical (grab rails, waking cane, shower chair) or social (we've all agreed that until further notice I have dibs on the spot in the living room where I can sit with my foot elevated all the time).

But I grew up thinking the same way as my parents. It's the disabled friends I started to make only in early adulthood that taught me a better culture is possible. One where we work on ridding ourselves of shame and of the veneration of individualism. One where we recognize that everyone is interdependent, there's never been only one right way to succeed and that success isn't going to look the same for everyone anyway, that there's as many ways to live a fulfilled life as there are people.

I think younger disabled people can play a big role in helping older people can learn about the benefits of this kind of culture as well.

And devs can learn it too, to go back to the iPhone example. Maybe the 29 accessibility options don't only have to exist in their own special section. The article writer's dad was never going to look at a menu on his phone called "accessibility," even though there was an option there that makes his life better every day. A lot of people benefit from, say, larger text or live captions or reduced animation who never think of themselves as disabled or these as accessibility options. They can also be just "options," other ways for the display or the notification sounds or whatever to behave. (While also staying in the accessibility menu ideally, because that's where many people are used to finding them, and also it can be way more accessible to go "okay, here's the 'vision' section, that's what's going to be relevant to me" rather than having to wade through screenfuls of irrelevant-to-me bells and whistles in the display options to find "high contrast mode" or whatever.)

It's a tricky balance, between disability pride and wider awareness, a tension I feel in all my thinking about how I as a disabled person interact with an ableist world. Being "integrated" or "mainstreamed" isn't good because it makes my access needs less shameful by being more "normal." Numbers don't legitimize them; they'd be just as important if it were only me who needed magnification and good color contrast and no animations. But it's not just me, so it's good to put such options in front of as many as possible or the people who would benefit from them.

Lately I'm beginning to wish I had a more academic background in disability. I can see so many ways it would be useful for my job.

I've been finding links from social media like this which I lifted the list of disability models from -- particularly Critical Disability Studies and the social justice model of disability -- to include in a work e-mail (the work e-mail was a thing of beauty that I probably spent too much effort on especially because it will never have the audience it deserves).

And this was written four years ago and is articulating ideas directly relevant to my job role and which I'm only beginning to fumble toward because I'm starting from first principles.

( If you want to know what I think about and am frustrated by the lack of in my work, here are some long quotes )