Category: [Personal]

Disability Pride Month

It’s been Disability Pride Month all month, and I’ve said nothing about it cos, frankly, I don’t know what to say about it. But I think this video nails at least some of my issues about it (you should also watch it because Jo uses a microphone attached to her prosthetic foot in this video which I think is fucking MARVELLOUS), particularly the use of the word “pride” in a context like this. Cos I know it’s not about literal pride in being disabled as such, it’s like not being ashamed of being disabled. I’ve just always found the use of the word “pride” in this sort of way to be… I don’t know what, exactly, but off-putting. It’s using a word to indicate you are not the opposite of that word rather than that you are that word, they’re not the same thing. “I’m not this thing!” That’s nice, good for me… what am I supposed to be in a positive way, then?

Anyway, Jo also brings up the idea of being “differently abled” and yeah, FUCK THAT TO HELL. I am able to feel pain (physical and mental) I might not otherwise experience if I weren’t disabled, that’s as far as THAT goes. I am able to stumble in a way that I couldn’t before. I am able to only walk rather than run as well. Bah. This is why I’ve always been enamoured of the cripple punk movement since I first discovered it (yes, something good and useful did come from Tumblr! Unimaginable), there’s none of that bullshit and it’s actively opposed to that “inspiration” Jo also talks about, i.e. the pressure she feels as someone who’s a public figure in the disabled community to put a brave face on things all the time. And I’m not a public figure of any sort, but even I feel that sometimes. I kind of like having cripple punk there as a corrective to that. More useful for me than disability pride.

25 years

Today marks 25 years since I first got the Internet at home. Do not ask how I remember this date, just accept that I do. My brain actually does remember things sometimes, including frankly pointless things like this. I had been on the wonderful world of the WWW before this (at the computer lab at UNSW) though I don’t recall exactly when, but it was sometime in 1994. IMDB was still the Cardiff Internet Movie Database at that time.

Anyway, the Internet came home on Saturday evening July 25th 1998. Old school friend Adrian set it up for me with a modem he’d, er, borrowed from work and life changed forever, sometimes for the better too. At that time I was still running my Windows 95 machine which had come with MSN pre-installed, as Windows 95 did, so I had an ISP built in all along. Easiest to just use what was already available. Also, preposterously expensive, cos, well, MSN’s dial-up chose to route its call through some long-distance regional line rather than one in Sydney, and we didn’t realise this until a phone bill for seven hundred dollars came in a fortnight or so later. That was nearly the end of the Internet in this house…

So a complaint was duly filed with MSN though we stuck with them and just made sure the number it called was local. However, after they kept trying to switch back to the long-distance number, we dropped them and went with an actual ISP based in here in Sydney. As a sign of just how different things were back then, my initial plan with them was, if I recall rightly, thirty dollars a month for 100Mb of downloads (the aforementioned “borrowed” modem was a 14.4kbps model too). Yes, one hundred MEGAbytes. More than that cost extra though I forget how much the rate was. And I rarely exceeded that, weirdly enough; these days I can go through 100Mb in minutes with what the Internet is like now, but back then about 3Mb a day was more than enough most days. And I wasn’t online the entire day like I am now. That 100Mb soon went up to 500Mb and then unlimited for the same cost (and the modem upgraded to 56kbps!) as things rapidly improved.

It was a different world back then, getting harder to remember what it was like as the years go by… Google only came into being a couple of months after I first went online at home, there was a whole panoply of search engines, hardly anyone knew who Elon Musk was, Usenet was still a thing and Facebook wasn’t, instant messengers were what passed for social media, even the ads weren’t quite as egregious as they would soon become… I kind of regret that world’s passing in some respects, for all its many undeniable issues I don’t think it was as psychotic as it often is these days.

I don’t think I have anything else to say cos most of us know the way things have gone since then, I don’t know if I even needed to say this. But 25 years is still quite a milestone so I thought it should be marked somehow. Like I said, though, just don’t ask me how I remember the date 25 years later when I barely remember things that happened a few days ago…

The very picture of health

Hmm.

More than a quarter of patients on antidepressants in England – about two million people – have been taking them for five years, the BBC has found.
This is despite there being limited evidence of the benefits of taking the drugs for that length of time.
A doctor who runs an NHS clinic helping people off the pills says withdrawal symptoms can make it hard for some to stop taking their medication.
Withdrawal guidance was updated in 2019, but he says little has changed.
More than eight million people in England are on antidepressants – which are prescribed for depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and other conditions. That’s one million more people than five years previously, NHS prescribing figures show.
The new figures on long-term use – for the period 2018-2022 – were provided to BBC Panorama by the NHS, following a Freedom of Information request. The data gives an overall picture but does not reflect the circumstances of individual patients, some of whom could be on antidepressants long-term for good reason.

—sigh—

Continue reading “The very picture of health”

Boo

Your humble scribe has just had his first haircut since 2019, and goddamn is his head cold right now (winter may not have been the best time to do it)…

…I’m actually happier with it than I look, that’s just my standard selfie bitchface. The last time I actually got it “properly” cut was actually some time in 2018 when Joe shaved it all off for me; after that, however, when it grew back it did so unevenly, coming back longer on the left side than the right. So, in 2019, April the 9th thereof according to Instagram, I got a trim to try and rectify that… which didn’t work in the long run, unfortunately, and also it took off more hair than I’d really wanted.

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Strokeversary

Fourteen years (almost to the hour as I post this) since The Cerebro-Vascular Accident.

I wrote about it on Facebook in 2010 for the first anniversary of the event, and I’ve just cut and pasted that here cos it doesn’t need to be newly rewritten or anything, I’ve just added a couple of links. Also, before you read this, maybe take this on board first:

https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/stroke

* * * * *

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I wanna be straight?

Rainbow Capitalism time again!

It’s Pride Month, and to be honest, I don’t really care about it. Plenty of my friends do and good for them, most of them are the target demographic in a way that I don’t feel that I am. Cos I don’t fully know what I am myself. I’m not trans, that much I’m sure of; I’m he/him binary and have never felt that I was anything but a man (if not much of one, admittedly). And I’m interested in women, not men, when it comes to that. Does that make me straight as such, though?

Cos I always thought I basically was, but about ten years ago my friend Lara came out as asexual, and the more I read about that the more I wondered if this was what I actually was, cos it seemed to explain some things about me. But I’ve never been able to convince myself fully, if you know what I mean, that I am. I don’t know if I’m a “proper” ace, or some subset of ace like grey or demi, or if it’s just the many and varied pills I take each day driving down my libido (come back my testosterone! All is forgiven!). If I were some flavour of ace, would that then make me queer? Cos a certain part of Ace Discourse is the debate about whether or not aces are queer as such by virtue of not really being straight either. And I’ve never felt “queer” myself, so… what, then?

Am I just “heterosexual without motivation”, to quote a splendid phrase I once saw on Tumblr said by someone who had considered themselves ace in the past? Maybe… I read another interesting comment recently, where the author described himself as never having doubted he was male but also not being attached to being male. I forget the exact wording, but something like that. Like being male didn’t particularly matter to him. And maybe that’s the case with me? It’s not as important to me, perhaps, to be big and male and straight as it is to some…?

Cos it’s awfully important to some people out there, and I kind of hate those people. I’ve seen them too many times by now, their very existence shits me to tears quite apart from the things they say and do to demonstrate what STRAIGHT MEN they are, and what their idea of being STRAIGHT MEN involves, and… I don’t know. I don’t do very well at being interested in many of the things STRAIGHT MEN are supposed to be interested in or doing the things they’re supposed to do—you know, being a home handyman, cars, sport, subjugating women, invading other countries, continuing the family line, that sort of this.

I’m kind of a failure as a “normal” man in some respects, and, frankly, I can cope with that. Cos I look at these shitheads on the right and realise how little I want to live up to their preferred stereotype. They make me want to be even less of a STRAIGHT MAN than I already am. One day they’ll even make me feel like celebrating Pride Month out of spite.

Anyway, happy Pridemas to all my queers who are into it. Just watch out for the dickheads who aren’t into it, or you.

Who’ll buy my eyes?

This week’s edition of God Awful Movies is another Ray Comfort video, of which they have done several in the past…

I think Ray’s memory of his own books is what’s lacking here…

Ray Comfort is a despicable piece of shit from New Zealand, a Young Earth Creationist, evolution denier, idiot, liar, and serial harrasser of people in public. America, where he has been based since the late 80s, is more than welcome to him. I haven’t actually watched any of his videos myself because life is too short I don’t get paid to watch them, which the GAM crew do (I know, I pay for them myself), so I go by their coverage, and what I’ve gathered from them over the years is that going up to people and trying to debate them in public is the chief content of his videos, whatever the nominal theme of any given video may be.

Ray’s standard tactic is the “are you a good person” question, which is the pretty much inevitable part of the video where he asks whoever he’s pinned down if they think they’re a good person, and then batters them with a bunch of biblical “proof” that they’re not. But in this video he apparently has another question for one of his victims that I actually found properly thought-provoking: “would you sell one of your eyes for a million dollars?”. This is a… berserk thing to ask a person, clearly, but it made me wonder. What answer would *I* give in that situation? If I were unfortunate enough to encounter Ray and he asked me that, what would I say?

Continue reading “Who’ll buy my eyes?”