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Hey folks, this is Cy's partner, they're taking a mental health break at their parents for a bit and they don't really get any signal there, so they asked me to close their dms and ask box until thy get a chance to go through everything once they're back in the new year

[cy-cyborg]

Hey folks, this is Cy's partner, they're taking a mental health break at their parents for a bit and they don't really get any signal there, so they asked me to close their dms and ask box until thy get a chance to go through everything once they're back in the new year

[cy-cyborg]

I've been trying to re-learn how to use Unreal again because we went over it briefly when I was in uni and I really liked using it, but I found myself running into a road block I just couldn't figure out. so I head to google and it shows me an old reddit thread describing my exact issue. What a score. The advice is looking very familiar. In fact so does the model in screenshots, but it's really zoomed in so I couldn't quite place where I'd seen it before. Maybe I'd come across this thread before or something, this isn't the first time I'd run into this specific issue after all. Then I look at OP's name, it's a modified version of my deadname. It's a pretty common name so I just chuckled at the coincidence and kept reading.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise I was OP. It was my model from my final project 😂

Unfortunately, I did not share how I ended up fixing the issue, just that someone in my class helped me figure it out - and evidently, the solution didn't stick in my mind so, thanks for that younger me 🤦

[cy-cyborg]

Do you think the NDIS would accept "I'm the designated bug/spider catch and release person in my relationship and thats hard to do when you need to use your hands to move" as good enough reasoning to get an all-terrain chair?

Side note, check out this giant stick insect that my partner found in the house that I took outside lol

[ID: a photo of a slightly spiky, mottled brown titan stick insect sitting on the handle of a green dustpan. a hand is visible in the corner of the image for scale, showing that it is bigger than an adult hand /End ID]

[cy-cyborg]

I have an appointment with centrelink tomorrow that was supposed to be yesterday (the 3rd) but I managed to convince them to reschedule because I had stuff on.

I know it was just an automated thing, but making someone on need to attend a centrelink appointment about their disability pension on International Day of Disability feels ableist lol. Like "hey, we know we determined you couldn't work because if your disability, but we're cutting your only source of income for some arbitrary reason, happy day of persons with disabilities!"

/joking

[cy-cyborg]

I got to try out some all-terrain wheelchairs yesterday and it was so fun! With me potentially moving back home to my parents farm, we thought it would be a good idea to look into some options and a family friend (who's also a wheelchair user) invited me to an event he was hosting at his place where they would have a few available to try.

I tried two different kinds of powerchair, one with regular off-road wheels, and one with those big tank tracks, as well as an Omeo, which is a hands-free chair that works kind of like a segway, you lean in the direction you want to go.

The powerchairs, especially the one with the tracks, was the most practical option, but they're too heavy to transport in a normal car, so I'd only be able to use it at home without some kind of modified van (and getting NDIS support for those is not easy) or accessible public transport which doesn't exist this far out of town. It was a lot of fun though, and they really meant it when they said all-terrain. Even the smaller chair with the wheels handled terrain that my car couldn't even get through without making some concerning noises (very steep hills, in and around creeks, a pile of mulch in the friend's garden)

The Omeo was the one I'm most excited for though! I had some trouble with the standard ones they had at the event because they do kind of depend on you having legs, even if you can't use them. Legs, even unmovable ones, impact how your weight is distributed, and the Omeo uses shifts in weight to determine where you want to go, so if your weight is not distributed the way it expects, its a bit harder to use. Even with that issue though, I was still able to use it once we tweaked the seating a bit and the OTs present were confident we could make further adjustments to make it better for me, mainly replacing the foot plate with some kind of knee-pad for me to brace/push against when I lean forward. It was able to handle all the same terrain as the other powerchairs (though I wasn't that adventurous, others at the event were) and it was able to be put in the back of my car, so we would be able to easily take it to other places, unlike the other options. I'm going to look into trialing one that's a bit better suited to me, if the NDIS allows it lol.

[cy-cyborg]

This is your regular reminder that amputees are not to blame for being poorly represented in media. We deserve representation that accurately depicts our disability, and saying things like "amputees with prosthetic don't count as disability rep" is just adding to the misconception that amputees stop being disabled when we get a prosthetic. It's bad enough when that comes from abled people, but it's especially frustrating when that idea is getting pushed by other disabled people and is being given as writing advice to authors. There's a reason why "the perfect prosthetic" is considered a BAD trope. Because it's not a good reflection of actual prosthetics and amputations. The fact that the vast majority of amputee rep uses that trope doesn't mean we should stop considering amputees with prosthetics disability rep, it means we need to push for better rep that doesn't use a harmful trope.

(Btw, this is not an invitation to discuss what media does or doesn't use that trope, or what you think is a good or bad example of amputee representation)

We ARE disabled, our prosthetics aren't cures just because the media treats them as such - irl I'm less independent, less stable, less mobile and overall slower on my prosthetic legs than I am in my wheelchair, even with some of the best prosthetics available to civilians. We are still disabled, even with prosthetics and we still "count" as disability rep. If it's poorly done and uses tropes that make us seem like we're not even disabled, that just makes it poorly done rep.

[cy-cyborg]

Can you draw your rook as a crow saying the phrase "The crows send their regards."

I assume you mean my Rook from the post on my main account.

I was planning to do some silly sketches of her anyway, and this was supposed to be one of them but I… got a little carried away lol. It just dawned on me though, you probably meant like, a literal crow, which would have been way funnier. I'll include that if I post any of the sketches in the future lol.

For the folks who only follow me here, I made a jokey post over there saying that Dragon Age The Veilguard is the only game that lets you play as a canonically transgender furry stopping the end of the world in a fursuit, or at least a partial one lol.

The character in this piece isn't my cannon Rook, I mainly just made her as a file to test mods on so my main play-throughs didn't get corrupted, but I was having too much fun with her, so now I'm doing the whole game this way. My headcannon for this Rook (named Cory) is that she was an Antivan crow who took the "crow's flair" thing a little too literally lol. Rook was actually the name of her fursona, Rook the crow, and Varric just kind of ran with it lol.

[ID: A digital illustration of a character from the waist up, from Dragon Age The Veilguard, wearing a helmet resembling a crow fursuit head armor. The armor is mostly blue and purple tinted leather with a cape and feathered shoulder-pads. the sleeves are made of silver scale-male made to look like feathers, and gloves with embroidered feathers. The character is holding Solas's Dagger, a blue crystaline dagger with a golden hilt. The tip of the blade is covered in blood. Above the character's shoulder is a floating orb of fire. They are looking at something off-screen, and a speech bubble reads "The Crows Send their Regards". /End ID]

[cy-cyborg]

Dragon age the veilgaurd: the only game where you can choose to canonically be a magical transgender furry and everyone's just cool with it (though Katarina gave me the "elderly woman stare of disaproval" earlier lol). I love this game 😂

As much as I wish the screenshot was of lucanis acknowledging the fursuit head, it's just because of my background. It was too funny not to screenshot though

[ID: a photo of a laptop playing Dragon Age, the Veilguard. The picture on screen shows two characters, the one in the foreground is dressed as an anthropomorphic crow. The subtitle reads "Lucanis: you're a crow." /END ID]

[cy-cyborg]

A family friend of mine (and fellow wheelchair user) is starting a business centred around getting disabled people back into nature and has invited me to trial some all-terrain wheelchairs which im super excited for! He heard I might be moving back in with my parents for a bit (which is on a farm in the bush) and since I'm a lot more dependant on a wheelchair now than I used to be, he thought it would be a good thing to look into. he's pretty confident he can help me get one of my own if I can demonstrate to the NDIS how it would benefit me - and no better way to do that then to just show them (my OT will also be attending lol)

He has a few available. One is a hand-free wheelchair that works kind of like a segway - you lean in the direction you want to go. Apparently, these are quite popular among disabled farmers in the region because they let you carry things and still move easily, something that a traditional wheelchair struggles with, and it lacks the small front wheels that tend to get caught on rough terrain. Another is more like a dune-buggy than a wheelchair for VERY off-road use, and the last is a power chair with tank-tracks for wheels, which apparently hss a standing feature. We were both very curious about whether I'd be able to use this though. He was, as a paraplegic man, and the manufacturer insists double leg amps would be fine, but my experiance with standing wheelchairs so far has not been great, as they still kind of expect the legs to be there even if you can't use them. It seems to mess with the way the chair's weight is distributed I think? Well see if that's still the case, maybe they've fixed that since I last tried one.

Either way, I'm very excited!

[cy-cyborg]

something that should be taken with a grain of salt are the statistics talking about the high rates of mental illness + neurodivergence among trans people (ocd, bpd, adhd, autism, etc)

I see both sides of the political spectrum taking these studies at face value - conservatives say we're broken, and trans people try to come up with reasons why for example autism + gender dysphoria makes sense and why one of them feeds into another

at the end of the day you have to remember that we're the one category of people on this planet who are legally required to go see a psychiatrist in order to receive non-psychiatric medication and surgeries.

more trans people are in therapy by law than any other demographic of people, and as a result, this captures more comorbidities.

if I had to look at my own family & rates of mental illness?

mom, dad, 2 maternal aunts, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, sister, sibling, and me all have OCD.

7/9 of them are cishet, never been to therapy, never diagnosed. 2/9 are trans, required therapy for hormone treatment, and were diagnosed.

you don't have to do any math to just see that the resulting statistics end up intensely skewed.

and we can think back to how autism was virtually never diagnosed more than 50 years ago - ruling out any grandparents being included in statistics - and even my parents' generation (they're in their 60s now) wouldn't have been included either.

I don't think it's to anyone's benefit to accept these studies uncritically. a lot of these things are hereditary and far more prevalent in the overall population than people realize

[cy-cyborg]

I'm finally going to be able to start working again!

Bad news is the reason I couldn't before was because I messed something up with centrelink for my disability pension. I have a meeting next month to get it sorted out (ill talk more about it after that), and the lady i spoke to insisted it wasn't a big deal, stuff like this happens all the time, but I'm almost definitely going to owe them... a lot of money 🫠

[cy-cyborg]

I really wish non-disabled folks would stop commenting on weather or not something is good disability rep, especially when people with those disabilities are critiquing the specific things these folks are bringing up as examples of why the character is so good.

I swear, if I hear one more person say "I didn't even realise Neve was an amputee, that's such good representation!" I'm going to scream lol.

Also just to clarify, I don't think Neve is bad, my feelings on her from a disability representation stance are more complicated, but her disability having such a small impact on her that a shocking number of players said they didnt even notice it until she tells you how she lost her leg is NOT what makes her good. "You cant even tell she's disabled" is not a flex. We've talked about this. Twice.

Same goes for the inquisitor and Hezencost but they're pretty minor characters so I'm seeing less of it there.

[cy-cyborg]

If you're using Mocap to animate an amputee character, you need an amputee actor!

I know there is a lot of debate about disabled actors playing disabled characters, but with amputees, even in mocap, it does visibly and negatively impact the performance if you don't get an amputee to do that roll - unless you're going to majorly adjust the animations later, but that would require so much additional work that it kind of defeats the point of using mocap at all. Amputation (and limb differences in general), weather a prosthetic is present or not, changes how you move and how fast (stumps and limbs with prosthetics often move faster due to less weight), the poses you can do (abled actors often physically can't always do the same poses because the limb their character lacks is in the way) everything. It will even impact how other parts of the body will be posed (e.g. lots of leg amputees have altered spinal curves, which will effect things in the upper body, because of slight changes to their center of gravity and the pressure applied from prosthetics. The higher up the amputation, the more limbs missing and the longer the character has been without them, the more noticeable this will be)

I'm glad that we're starting to see more amputee representation in games, truely, but you can't just slap motion capture data from a non-disabled people onto a disabled character and expect it to look right, especially when it comes to disabilities like amputation, where a massive chunk of weight is gone or altered. It's exceptionally noticeable.

I've worked in 3D animation and games. I understand crunch, and I understand sometimes it's a technical issue or limitation, especially in older games, but I also know how much work goes into this stuff, how much love and care these folks put into it to get things looking right. Even mocap cleanup is a lot of work, and a lot of skill is still need it to get it looking right in-game. I've seen first-hand the almost obsessive attention to detail some animators have - so why is this the thing that gets consistently overlooked?

A lot of this also applies to live action where a charcater's missing limb or prosthetic is just added in post too...

[cy-cyborg]

Dragon age, specifically inquistion, has been my go-to comfort game for me for the last decade or so, and it feels kind of ironic in a bitter sweet way, that one of my worst health declines in my adult life came right when veilguard released, so ive had a lot of time to play it lately lol. I finished veilguard today and while I do have some criticism, most of it is pretty minor and I honestly really enjoyed it. It was a pretty good way to end to the series, all-in-all. Also I absolutely adore Taash!

I want to eventually talk about some of the disability stuff in the game, because I think there's some interesting things that warrent discussion, but I'm going to hold off on that until the transphobes and biggots get board of yelling about the optional top surgery scars in cc and the mirror "conversation", or until my body decides to stop being such an asshole to me, whichever comes first 😂

[cy-cyborg]

Please, spread this for those who might need it right now

U.S. suicide hotline: call or text 988 (available 24 hours)

U.S. trans lifeline: (877) 565-8860 (when you call, you’ll speak to a trans/nonbinary peer operator. full anonymity and confidentiality)

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357) – provides 24/7 confidential support and referrals for individuals and families facing mental health and substance use disorders, including panic attacks and anxiety.

LGBT National Help Center: (888) 843-4564

Trevor Project: Call (866) 488-7386, text START to 678-678, or chat online.

Take care of yourself and each other. Please stay safe ♡

[cy-cyborg]

I got to the bit that the Dragon age devs were asking people not to talk about in pre-release reviews and omg, my little queer heart 😭