Photo via The Canary Report, who writes: “Heralding MCS Awareness Month, profile photos radiating the warmth and vibrancy of yellow are popping up throughout our community on Facebook and on our network. Yellow, for those of us with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, symbolizes the canary in the coal mine, with which we all ...

The Australian Federal Budget is out, and it’s being feted in the media as a sober, sensible fiscally reasonable budget in which there are no really big winners or losers. “No frills, no thrills, no spills”, says the ABC. Except for people with disabilities. What has received a little bit of coverage is the fact that ...

In case of emergency, sprout wings and fly I am sure we have all seen this one in its many guises, but I thought it was a particularly spectacular example given that nobody of historically recorded human height could have reached this pull cord. It’s about 10 feet up. Access win? Calling all adventure service dogs I ...

People seemed to like the first edition of this series! So here are some more music videos set in psychiatric hospitals! In the last post, all of the videos used the mental hospital setting as a visual demonstration of the depth and intensity of love, depicting institutionalization as a result of loving someone ...

sqbr at Poking at Thorns (with gloves on): Disability in Speculative Fiction: Monsters, mutants and muggles Fiction reflects social attitudes, and the social attitudes to disabled people tend to suck. Disabled people are presented as scary, pathetic, exotic, demanding, laughable, etc. But some tropes are popular/unique to SF. It’s not all bad: speculative fiction allows for powerful ...

I love it when well-meaning able-bodied people try to pimp their technology at me because hey, they just got this new gadget, and it’s accessible, isn’t that cool? I should get one! No. No it is not, and no I will not, and I am getting progressively less and less polite about this. Like the random ...

Oh, American Apparel. For those of you lucky enough to evade their reach, AA is a good company with a lot of problems. They started out selling themselves as the sweatshop-free, made in the USA, source for cotton basics like t-shirts, primarily wholesaling to people who would print and resell the clothes. In 2003, AA ...

I’m sorry this is much later than usual. Today was the beginning of Don’s Radioactive Iodine Treatment, and I’ve not been myself. The folks at the hospital are being awesome, though, so everything should be fine. Normalizing Ableism (ahahah like it’s not already) I like this article (it’s from 2005); it’s got some really lovely ...

Via Information Aesthetics, a blog I read because i am obsessed with data visualizations and charts and graphs, I read about a new campaign designed by “eco-design consultancy Giraffe Innovation.” They’ve created a website where a user creates a humanoid form to represent themselves. The site then tracks the person’s environmental impact – things like ...

This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy. What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in ...