Wake the Sun

Between the constant state of emergency at work (I *hate* prepping for back to school season), the heat, and my brand new allergies, my ability to brain is non-existent. Gone. Kaput. On the upside, I'm too tired to be angry at everything!

Except The Real L Word, which I'm watching with my roommate. Where 'watching' means 'yelling at the screen because some of these women are abusive assholes, holy shit.' Also Hell House, which upset me so much I had to make hot cocoa and mainline some Studio Ghibli. Anyway.

* Your thinky post for the day - Ablism bingo: when you fail, you win!. In which lightgetsin dismantles some common anti-warning/anti-accommodation arguments.

And I've got to say this. Personally, as an artist/writer/designer, my desire to elicit a particular emotion or reaction from my audience DOES NOT PRECLUDE my audience's right not to be hurt by my work.

Let's use me as an example: Two and a half years ago, I was in a depressive funk. I went from my empty apartment to my empty office (I was freelancing) and back again every day and didn't see or talk to anyone but my family (and the waiter at lunch, and occasionally a friend over the phone). It was bad and had been bad for over a year.

One evening, at the end of a particularly bad day, I admitted out loud to my brother that things were bad and I didn't know what to do.

He decided this would be a good opportunity to, as he later put it, 'shock me.' To point out some things about my current existence that he believed I had missed. To help me get over my funk. It took him maybe 3 minutes to say his piece, after which he left. I smiled as I waved him off.

I started to shake while I climbed the stairs to my apartment. By time I got to the door, I was crying and having trouble breathing. I got as far as the living room before I collapsed on the floor, shaking, sobbing, hyperventilating, the works. It took me ten minutes to get my phone out of my pocket and call my mom. I was still on the floor when she got to me, half an hour later. (The whole thing depressed my immune system enough that I finally lost against the flu I'd been fighting, which morphed into pneumonia and left me bedridden and anemic for a month because I didin't have insurance and was too damn stubborn to ask my parents to pay for the doctor, where they eventually hauled me anyway. But that was a side effect.)

That's what being badly triggered is like for me*.

When an author, artist, or vidder creates a piece, especially one with common triggers, with the intent of getting a specific message across and does not warn for those triggers (or clearly state Choose Not To Warn) because they believe warnings (even 'whited out', even linked elsewhere, even on a list controlled by the concom) will lessen the intended 'shock', they run the risk of this happening to someone else.

That is wrong. Being triggered is a horrible thing and your desire to shock/discomfort/disturb me does not outweigh my desire to not go through it again**.

* My experience of triggers is not everyone's.

** I'm choosing not to get into the 'then just don't look at/read anything if it bothers you that much' "argument" because my faith in humanity's in the green today and I'd like to keep it that way.

On to more pleasant things:

* NASA's website for astronaut photos of Earth is amazing.

* So's the art of Simon Lok. The part of Southern California he paints in is very close to where I grew up; looking at these paintings gives me a wonderful, achy homesickness.

* Via the Digital Democracy Project Einstein Project: Photos by children in Guatemala's Zona Reyna.

* thingswithwings just put up a really excellent Lem/Phil Better Off Ted vid. Yay, Better Off Ted love!

* A little older, but I keep going back to watch tavven's Jack/Ianto Torchwood vid. Ianto's little face. I miss it.

* brownbetty gives excellent instructions on the correct way to pet a dog.

* Did you know that most of Wodehouse's work is up on Project Gutenberg? And you can download the ebooks for free? No, me neither.

* And speaking of Wodehouse, James Nicholl has a chart up comparing Bertie and Bruce Wayne (I am also firmly in the 'Bertie is smarter than he seems' camp. I mean, the books are told as if he had written them. Think about it.).