WELL I did have 500 followers last night, but lost one shortly after. BUT that’s their loss. I’m throwing a giveaway anyway.
Anyway thank you all for the support! I know I haven’t really been posting as much art as I did previous years because of work and school, but I DO appreciate all of the support – and what better way to repay you guys than to throw a giveaway?
Winners receive:
1st place – Colored full body
Like:
2nd place – black & white waist up
like:
3rd place – Lined bust:
AND A FOURTH PLACE WINNER – Chibi, full body & colored:
Winners will be determined using random.org.
Rules:
1.) Must follow me by the end of the giveaway
2.) You can reblog more than once (not necessary but greatly appreciated :D)
3.) Winners have up to 24 hours to send me a note on Tumblr to claim their prize. If they don’t send me a note, I’ll choose someone else.
As a strategic planner one of my areas of expertise (stay with me here) is facilitating up-to-8-hour workshops with multiple breakout sessions full of presumptively neurotypical corporate and professional grown-ups from different departments and getting them all to work together and collaborate productively and “think out of the box” and stay focused enough to actually deliver whatever plan is the objective at the end of the day. And a major tool in the toolbox for making those kinds of meetings succeed is pretty much …. fidget toys? Spinners specifically seem to be a new thing, but in the broad sense?
It’s standard operating procedure for making a strategic workshop successful to put piles of toys in the middle of all the tables so that people have something to do with their hands. Koosh balls, gummy things, ideally even more “distracting” things like Lego, Play-Doh. It makes the quiet ones less self-conscious, tamps down the potential conversation dominators, occupies the antsy nervous top layer of the mind and frees the rest to go to work and get into a productive thinking flow, it signals fun and makes everyone happier to be there and more inclined to engage as a result, people think it’s hilarious to see their bosses and clients making Play-Doh animals.
From a professional perspective here are no perceived downsides to this. It’s all upside. I mean one time I had an awful set of clients who threaded Play-Doh into the conference room carpet, but that was once. No one worries it will decrease overall focus because we all know empirically that it will INCREASE overall focus. You know how hard it is to sit through an all-day workshop? Much less so with toys. No one in this corporate context thinks of it in terms of disability or divergence, either. Fidgeting is literally, simply, considered an aid to productivity. For everyone.
So my $0.02 fwiw from over here is that teachers opposing this are shooting themselves in the foot due to false assumptions and premises and they could use a good workshop to help them think in new and more constructive ways and develop a more effective approach.
You actually just hit something that I was not fully braining about why fidgets and doodling help me with meetings: one of the noticeable signs of the hyperactive-impulsive part of my ADD is that I do tend to dominate conversations or steamroll people in group/meeting/classroom settings.
But give me something to do with my hands, or a place to write down thoughts and ideas and doodle, and I’m much more likely to chill.
And, like, I posted that doodle page from my last organizational non-work meeting, where the head of my department saw me in the front row doodling away–but also actively participating. Something something something. Regulation of impulsivity? Words go here.
You see, while some people are very much excited for a new show about our pompous king of the assholes (and I say this as a term of endearment, having loved Lestat since I was a depressed teenager living in New York, shuffling through my mom’s fiction section) we need to pause and remember this:
Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.
Read it again, slowly.
Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.
This is difficult for younger fans to understand, but let’s take a walk down memory lane.
She has threatened to sue writers in the past. She is one of the most prolific writers of our generation, and she does not support people using her characters for their own work.
In fact, in 2000 she went on a binge-attack against her fans. She threatened legal action against fans who wrote or drew her characters, but especially those who wrote with them. She sent them weeks of harassing letters and doxxed them on the internet.
Let me repeat that.
She doxxed people who wrote fan fiction.
She harassed them online and threatened to contact employers.
She used her fans to outright attack other fans.
This isn’t even something she can just shake off now, with the comment of “It was so long ago” because she did this to a writer who wrote commentary on her story in 2013.
In 2013.
While it was not that she wrote fan fiction, she still shows that she has no respect for people who are in fandom.
Remember those disclaimers used in fan fics, at the beginning? “I do not own …. ”? Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Anne Rice and others like her would attack fandoms and threaten them, and was in hopes that they would just leave us alone. She didn’t.
In short: Do not trust Anne Rice. I love her writing, I have read every book she has even written, but I do not trust her.
You shouldn’t, either.
Anne Rice was and still is a bully. Don’t support her work.
She’s been like this since Geocities was the big place to have spec (that’s what fics used to be called, specs, as in speculative fiction) pages back in the mid 90s.
She use to threaten to sue anyone she found posting specs anywhere, and there was a whole underground network of people to share specs and fan art (which she also would threaten to sue over).
Anne Rice has always been kind of a twat about fan works based on her mediocre writing.
She’s harassed people quite recently. @jennytrout Wanna gossip?
What was that? “Raise your hand if you were ever personally victimized by Anne Rice?”
DISCLAIMER: this is not about fanfic, but it is about what she can do to you.
So, I totally idolized Anne Rice. Fully and adoringly so. One day, she shared one of my HuffPo articles with her “people of the page” and it was probably the greatest day of my entire career.
But she has this thing where she’s OBSESSED with bad reviews. At one point, she complained about a bad review she got for Interview from the New York Times or some such thing like forty years ago. She used it as an example of how reviews can hurt authors. I was like, seriously, lady, you have how many millions of copies of your books sold? How many movies have been made from them? *People try to find your house to take pictures of themselves in front of it.* But okay, everybody has their quirks. I just kind of rolled my eyes over it.
Not long after that, she made a post about this website that was made by a writer who apparently wasn’t getting the sales numbers or accolades they so richly deserved. The problem wasn’t like, the nature of the business or anything, nay, my friends, nay, but the fact that people–BULLIES!–left mean reviews on Amazon. So these people whom Rice so admired would make posts where they would reveal Amazon/GoodReads reviewers names and home addresses and such. One post even mentioned something like, “Between this time and that time every weekday, they go for a walk by the sea wall.” Scary, scary shit. And Rice LOVED these people.
I don’t know why I took it upon myself to argue with her. I really don’t. Maybe because I respected her so much and her support of the site was so disappointing? This was the result.
So, I’m a bully. Big whoop, right? And my feelings were a little hurt, but hey, never meet (or follow on social media) your idols, right? Lesson learned, and it wasn’t like this could destroy my fond memories of how much I loved her books, right?
So, fast forward, I think it was the next year, or at least a few months later, when I wrote a post about a dumb $0.99 Kindle book about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in a BDSM relationship. A pathetic little troll with too much hair gel and not enough parenting ran to his goddess Anne Rice to tell her how mean, mean, mean I was being. She posted a link to a blog post made about me on the reviews-are-bullies site and said something to the effect of someone needing to teach me a lesson or someone needed to show me how it feels or something like that. To THREE. MILLION. PEOPLE.
As a fan of Anne Rice, I am confident in stating that many of her fans are not okay people. And they heeded the command of their “queen.” Yes, they referred to her as such, flooding me with emails, tweets, FB messages, anywhere they could reach me. They posted my address, screenshots of google earth images of my house, they threatened to kill me, they made graphic threats against my children, one charming gentleman on parole from his assault sentence offered to make a necklace of my teeth to present to “my queen.”
When confronted about the fact that she had unleashed all of this on me, her response was basically: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
She insisted she hadn’t done anything wrong, she couldn’t control what people were doing, and oh yes, it’s terrible that people are saying this, but she NEVER. ASKED. THEM. TO. STOP. In fact, she joined her “people of the page” in mocking my appearance, mourning the horrible lives my children must have, and continuing to insist that my “prison tats” indicated that I was a member of a gang (I have “TIME LADY” tattooed across my knuckles in the 11th Doctor era Doctor Who font). Egging them on with this coy, “Well, we shouldn’t say things like that, we’re better than that, BUT” bullshit.
This all went on for weeks. Some of these people still occasionally pop up to threaten/antagonize. So, yeah. Steer clear. She holds a grudge, she can and will mobilize her fanbase against you, if she dislikes you she will ruin you, and she doesn’t care if her readers literally kill you.
I’m angry about the sudden popularity of fidget spinners, but probably
not for the reasons you think. I’m not mad that they’re disruptive in
class, or obnoxiously trendy. I’m furious because of what they reveal
about societal power structures, and the pathologizing of disabled people by non-disabled persons.
Autistic people (and others with developmental disabilities) have been
fighting a war for decades. It’s a war against being forcibly, often
brutally, conditioned to behave more like neurotypicals, no matter the
cost to our own comfort, safety, and sanity. And those of us who need to
stim in order to concentrate (usually by performing small, repetitive
behaviors like, oh I don’t know, spinning something) have endured
decades of “Quiet Hands”
protocols, of being sent to the principal’s office for fidgeting, of
being told “put that down/stop that and pay attention!,” when we are in
fact doing the very thing that allows us to pay attention instead
of being horribly distracted by a million other discomforts such as
buzzing lights and scratchy clothing. We’ve had our hands slapped and
our comfort objects confiscated. We’ve been made to sit on our hands.
We’ve been tied down. Yes, disabled children get restrained — physically
restrained — in classrooms and therapy sessions and many other settings,
for doing something that has now become a massive fad.
Think about this: Decades of emotional punishment, physical violence,
and other abuses. And then some guy (who just happens to be in a
position with more social clout than most disabled people will ever
attain) writes an article about how having a fidget toy helps him
concentrate during meetings, and all of a sudden, every neurotypical
person in America is falling all over themselves to get a fidget toy of
their own. The first time I heard about the fidget spinner craze on the
news, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. But I was leaning toward
“cry,” for the reasons I just explained, and because the irony made me
feel ill. Sometimes the universe has a cruel sense of humor.
This is important. Really important, so read this next sentence twice: Something
that was considered entirely pathological and in dire need of
correction when done by disabled people is now perfectly acceptable
because it is being done by non-disabled people. This should make
you stop and think, especially if you are someone who works with,
educates, or researches people with diagnoses like autism.
What else might we de-pathologize overnight once the “right” people, the
“normal” people, the “healthy” people start doing it? Will somebody
write a tweet that makes it socially acceptable to avoid eye contact?
Will a Facebook meme make it suddenly trendy to have texture
sensitivities? Will hand-flapping become cool after it shows up in a
music video?
Normality is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. Human culture is constantly
changing, and our everyday behaviors are changing with it, more than
ever in the fast-paced digital age (yeah, I’m old enough to remember
when phones couldn’t go everywhere with you, and believe me, social
norms were very different back then). Even if “normal” did exist,
setting it as the goal towards which disabled people should strive is
unacceptable.
Because insisting that disabled people act more like non-disabled people
is not about improving functionality, it’s about who has the power to
set social standards. It’s the same reason certain accents and dialects
are considered less “educated” and the people who speak that way
snubbed. It’s the same reason people with one skin tone are portrayed as
less capable, or more dangerous, than people with the majority’s skin
tone. It’s why “women’s work” is devalued and underpaid. In short, it’s
oppression, plain and simple.
Perhaps I should be more hopeful. Perhaps we’re moving towards an era of
acceptance. Even before the fidget spinner hit the spotlight, more and
more professionals have agreed that sensory needs are real, and should be acknowledged and met. Many websites now sell chewy toys,
app stores abound with sensory relaxation apps, and plenty of autism
“treatment” programs (though certainly not all) have moved away from
their prior focus on sitting still with immobilized hands while
grudgingly accepted that stimming is actually a perfectly healthy thing
for autistic people to do.
But the power structure is still there. There’s still a rigid hierarchy
of who gets to decide which behaviors are normal or pathological.
There’s still a societal subtext that tells people who are different “be
less like yourself and more like us.“ We need to work on that.
Ok so I wasn’t the only one feeling upset like this
probably my favorite thing abt being a millennial is that i can lie on my resume abt shit like being proficient in excel bc i have the common sense to just google anything i dont know how to do which gives me a giant fucking edge over gen x in the job market bc somehow that strategy never occurs to employers and my underqualified ass looks like steve jobs every time i use a youtube tutorial to make a spreadsheet
Everyone in my office sings my praises for what I can do with excel for this exact reason, even though I joke with them that “I have no idea how to do that – but give me half an hour and an internet connection and I’ll figure something out for you.” I even once specifically said in response to my grandboss commenting on my excel skills, “You do realize that I just like…google stuff when you ask me to do something with excel that I don’t know how to do, right?”
But his praise didn’t change at all. There was no “Wait, that’s all it is?”
Instead, he said “Yes, but the fact that you think to do that – and that you know exactly how to phrase your searches and how to sift through the results to get the right answer, and you then integrate what you’ve learned and use it going forward – is still so much more than any of the rest of us [the other 5 ppl on my team are all mid-40s and up] can do. To you, it’s “just googling stuff,” but it’s still a unique and valuable skill you bring, so don’t shrug off the compliments so cavalierly, okay?“
And this was coming from an executive with an MBA. Don’t undervalue your googling skills, kids. It’s not lying if you know you can figure it out.
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