mint-is-here

[mint-is-here]

it’s never too early to teach children about the devaluation of labor!

(from an American Girls book)

[mint-is-here]

im making this post to call attention to the fundraiser of Doaa Jad al-Haq @dodooomar this is a verified campaign.

doaa is a 38 year old woman with an autistic 5 year old son who escaped the genocide in gaza a few months ago but is now alone in egypt with very few resources. her son already needed special therapy and treatment before, but hes now been traumatized by the war and is suffering extreme shock and trauma. treatment for his trauma and fees for special education in egypt are very expensive, far beyond what she can afford. doaa lost her source of income when her sewing business was destroyed in the war. she is also raising money to get the materials she needs to restart her business here which you also can donate too. she told me that her sons condition is getting worse and its very difficult for her, especially since she separated from all of her family members, most of whom are still in gaza. this is a post with information on her and her sisters campaigns.

shes raising this money to support her sons treatment, as well as to help her family members who are trapped in gaza and living in horrific conditions of famine disease and death. shes extremely worried about them and struggling by herself in egypt.

we've heard a lot of news about refugees from gaza being treated badly in egypt and suffering because they had to leave with absolutely nothing. its often the case that refugees and genocide survivors are taken advantage of the most because they dont have any leverage, resources or community to depend on. its a really fucked up situation to be in, and i know that most people on tumblr seeing this would be at a complete loss for what to do if you were in her shoes. its not a position that anyone should have to be in.

because of that, i really implore you to donate to this campaign and help her and her family. its in swedish krona so USD and other strong currencies go a long way. especially if you have a degree of disposable income i encourage you think about what you could contribute because it could really make a difference.

52 SEK = $5 USD

104 SEK = $10 USD

261 SEK = $25 USD

1044 SEK = $100 USD

currently: kr 112,191 SEK out of kr 300,000 SEK

(converted– $10,744 USD out of $28,730 USD)

[mint-is-here]

Cringetober day 5: gijnka

[ID: A black and white digital drawing of a man and a woman. The woman is wearing a coat with a white shirt underneath and has dark but graying hair. She is leaning on the man while holding a Reino beetle and is talking to him. The man, who is blond and wears glasses and a pladded shirt, just looks concerned at the beetle. End ID.]

This day just proves that the prompts are merely suggestions to me becuase i had NO IDEA what to do for this day(i was iniatly going to do pokemon but idk) until i saw that people were doing human designs of inhuman character and i was itching to draw checkmates(kinger X queenie) so i found a confortable in between.

I want to try and change their designs in the future(especially kinger's, i really dont like it) so i might draw them again! Yay!

[mint-is-here]

its like 10 minutes until the end of day 5 of cringetober but fuck it let me finish my doodle of the silly check pieces

[mint-is-here]

I’m just going to leave this here…

[mint-is-here]

rb this post to give the person u rbed it from a pretty fall leaf :]

[mint-is-here]

Reblog this if you think a trans person is their identified gender even without surgeries

I need to prove a point to my stepdad. This is absolute bullshit.

So if you think a trans man can be a man without a penis or a trans woman can be a woman without a vagina, please reblogged.

[mint-is-here]

The Amazing Digital Circus Episode 3 Analysis and Theory (MAJOR SPOILER WARNING!)

Am I the only one who felt like this line was a little out place in the context of what Kinger was saying before?

Until I realized something.

It implies something specific. And it's foreshadowing.

What it implies:

People abstract when they feel not wanted or not loved. Queenie didn't feel wanted or loved (we don't have enough information to know why).

Kaufmo didn't feel wanted or loved and we have enough information to give us an idea as to why (people stopped laughing at his jokes; he was convinced there was an exit and nobody supported him in this idea/gave up on him/couldn’t help him in his obsession).

We're given a red herring to divert our attention. Pomni thinks Ragatha is feeling unwanted, unloved, or unappreciated by her because Pomni has ignored or been cold to Ragatha’s efforts to support her. So she turns to Ragatha and thanks her. It is important, but it distracts from who this was really alluding to.

It's Jax.

Everytime somebody shows another person that they care, he looks upset.

When Pomni shows care for Gummigoo by trying to take her with him after his reality has been shattered.

When he asks Pomni how “being stuck with the nutcase (Kinger) was” and Pomni says it "wasn't that bad, actually."

And most infamously, the face he makes for a fraction of a second before Kaufmo’s funeral.

He knows nobody likes him. He knows he isn't wanted. Gooseworx herself said that nobody likes him (which you can find on her Tumblr blog as I have hit the image limit on this post.)

Even without that statement, it’s obvious in the show. And following the logic presented here, it’s likely he will be the one to abstract. If not fully abstract, then something drastic will happen with him and he might come dangerously close to it or he may partially abstract similarly to how Pomni did in her dream sequence at the beginning of episode 2.

It would be up to the others to catch him before it’s too late and talk him down from it… somehow. Despite everything he’s done. Despite being a jerk and a bully at every opportunity.

Gooseworx said it would be somebody we wouldn’t expect. Jax seems to be the only person consistently having fun on Caine’s adventures by trying to cause as much chaos as possible, so we wouldn’t have expected him to just give up. But because of what we’ve seen and Gooseworx herself saying nobody likes him, I’m betting on him being the most likely and vulnerable candidate for abstraction.

Unless this too is a red herring and Goose is playing 5D chess with us. But that’s just a theory.

[mint-is-here]

when you realize that kinger's been there the longest and his wife almost certainly helped with keeping him stable for so long and now she's gone and literally everyone keeps expecting him to go next but he's still holding on even though he really wants to be with her again he's still holding on and that's probably because he knows she wouldn't want him to give up and we have no idea how long she's been gone but he's STILL HERE and he's going insane and losing his grasp of reality but he's still managing to find ways to care about the other circus residents even the one he just met a couple days ago because he knows that they all need someone to care about them just like SHE cared about HIM and I am NOT OKAY

[mint-is-here]

tubbo korea vlog :D

[mint-is-here]

The Akira bike slide and every animation ever made since the 1988/1990 film releases

[mint-is-here]

[mint-is-here]

@cloroxcasserole

KILL HIM

ooh violence

shoot his ass pomni please

[mint-is-here]

Hey....

So um...

🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪🦷🎪

WHAT THE F#%$?!?!?!

🎩🦷🎩🦷🎩🦷🎩🦷🎩🦷

So, would you call me crazy if I said I genuinely cried for this stupid, stupid little man?

[mint-is-here]

Casually brings up my au where kinger secretly hides Queenie in his room and has never told Caine or anyone

[mint-is-here]

The Jaws Effect and what it means for media representation

The Jaws Effect is the name of a phenomenon that described the panic and fear that sprang up around sharks, fuelled by Steven Spielberg's movie, Jaws. While the fear of sharks and other marine predators had always been a thing, Jaws launched the fear of sharks, and Great White Sharks in particular, to new (and mostly unfounded) heights. Most people will never encounter a real-life shark and so their only knowledge about the creatures come from movies and other forms of entertainment. Entertainment that largely portrayed them as mindless, unfeeling killing machines. After Jaws, sharks became a staple in the creature-feature genre of movies, which only perpetuated the idea of sharks as dangerous monsters even further, reigniting and reconfirming the beliefs the public held about them in the process. These ideas about sharks are, of course, not true, but the misconception and fear has had a real, observable impacts on shark populations, shark conservation efforts and even laws and legislations surrounding sharks and shark conservation around the world.

Ok but Cy, this is a blog about disability and disabled representation, what do sharks have to do with anything you talk about? Well, Because The Jaws Effect is just one of many examples that shows how massive of an impact representation in the media can have, for better or for worse, especially when talking about subjects the public generally knows very little about.

This conversation is not unique to disability representation, nearly every person I've seen who's talked about how to write and design characters from any minority brings it up eventually, but the media we consume, the movies we watch, the books we read can all have big impacts on people's perceptions on those topics. When talking about disability specifically, it's an unfortunate reality that not many people know all that much about us, and so, much like sharks, for many, their only real exposure to disabled people is through the media they consume.

If you don't know anyone in a wheelchair, and your only knowledge of life as a wheelchair user comes from books and movies like Me Before You, of course you're going to (spoiler) come away thinking that life in a wheelchair is horrible and death is better than living like that. If you don't know any DID Systems and your only exposure to a condition like that is through movies like Split (and honestly, a number of other horror movies and crime shows) of course you'll think people with DID are unstable monsters who could become violent any moment. If your only exposure to autistic people is Music, then it's not shocking that you might think Autistic people are "trapped in their own minds," completely unaware of the world around them and lacking any kind of agency. As much as I'd like to be able to say these are "just movies" or "just books," and that if we don't like them, we can just not watch them, they all had an impact on the real world and real people's perceptions of the disabilities they depicted, as do the many, many smaller examples of bad representation.

This is why I personally spend so much time focused on the portrayal of disability in the media, why so much of my content is focused on creating resources for creators to represent us better, and why I think writers, artists and other types of creators should care about the representation they include.

Unfortunately, people believing misinformation and stereotypes, while annoying, isn't the worst of the impacts bad rep can have. If a stereotype is prevalent enough, and enough people believe it, it can both put us in harms way and cause us to loose access to things we desperately need and things designed to help us. One really common example of this is when movies and TV shows show a character getting up out of their wheelchair, and use this as proof that the person is faking being disabled. However, in reality, there are many disabilities that might mean someone has to use a wheelchair, even if they can still walk a little bit or stand up. The stereotype of someone standing up from their chair being a fake, especially when it's reinforced over and over again in the media, leads non-disabled people to believe that anyone who stands up from their wheelchair is faking, and results in a lot of real disabled people being harassed and denied things like access to disabled parking, toilets and other accessible spaces. There were even a few cases of people reporting those they see get out of their wheelchairs to Centrelink (The Australian "welfare" department, for those not familiar) as frauds, and while these investigations don't usually go far before someone realises what's happened, it has, on occasion, resulted in people loosing the income they depend on to survive, even temporarily.

But the impact of representation, of course, can go both ways.

I was in high school when the first How To Train Your Dragon movie came out, and at the time, I didn't really like people being able to see that I was a leg amputee because I was sick of kids in particular staring, pointing at me, asking their parents "what's wrong with them?" or asking me directly, "what's wrong with your legs?". I wore long skirts and big, bulky tracksuit pants to keep my legs covered, something that became dangerous in the hot Australian summer, but I didn't care.

But the impact of How to Train Your Dragon came in two ways. The first, was that it was one of the first times I'd seen an amputee (or rather, multiple amputees) who didn't keep their prosthetics covered or hidden, and it gave me the little boost in confidence I needed to do that myself and wear clothing that was more comfortable and functional. And second, the comments from children changed, albeit slightly, but enough that it was noticeable. The questions and comments went from "what's wrong with you?" to "oh cool, your legs are like Hiccup's!" I even had one little girl ask me once if I had a pet night fury. They went from being scared of me and my legs, or at the very least concerned for me, to genuinely curious and impressed. While reactions like that did become less and less common over time, they didn't fully go away either. Even today, I occasionally get young kids asking me why I have legs like hiccup. A friend of mine who was born with one arm shorter than the other and without fingers on that side had a similar experience with the movie Finding Nemo. Her disability was a bit more complex than what I described here, and she always found it hard to explain "what happened" to small children, however, after Finding Nemo came out, she was able to simply tell kids "this is my lucky fin, like what nemo has!" and that was enough to take her from someone "scary" to these kids to someone like their favourite characters.

Of course, it's much easier to see the impact positive representation can have on people's perceptions when we're talking about kids media, but it's not exclusive to it either.

When it comes to a minority like the disabled community who are so thoroughly misunderstood by the wider public, misinformation can and does spread easily. What people see and read in the media they consume plays a big roll in how people perceive the real people attached to the stereotypes. We often hear people say "Fiction imitates life" but the reverse can and often is also true, life can imitate and be influenced by fiction, and those of us creating should be mindful of this, especially when we're talking about a group of vulnerable people.

[Thumbnail ID: An illustration of a Great White Shark swimming near the rocky bottom of the ocean, surrounded by silver fish. In the bottom left corner of the image is "The Jaws Effect and what it means for media representation" in big, white bubble text. /End ID]

[mint-is-here]

river from underworld office