They are not some anonymous “a tribe in India”, they are the War-Khasi. Speaking as a former anthro student and as a reference librarian, I am beyond sick of posts (and articles, and emails, and museum displays) like this that present the work of a people without actually naming the people. It’s erasure, it’s reducing the great works of a culture to an Ozymandias-esque curiosity for foreigners to consume rather than an accomplishment that should help bring awareness of that culture’s existence.
They are the War-Khasi, a division of the Khasi, a people who call themselves Hynñiew Trep. They live in Meghalaya, and they have been building these bridges in the town of Cherrapunji for longer than anyone knows. They are not anonymous.
this poor baby showed up at my house a few days ago, refused to leave, isn’t microchipped, and is currently hanging out in my front yard while i look for a possible owner and figure out if he could potentially be a good fit with the rest of my fur babies. he’s very sweet, but he’s not fixed, which is an issue i would definitely have to take care of and don’t know if i have the resources for. but he’s so sweet???
(p.s. dog side of tumblr, any ideas on what kind of pupper he is? don’t know if you can tell from the pic but he has one ice blue eye and one dark brown. not pictured is his big, fluffy tail.)
additional pics
just dropped the baby off at the vet for a bath to get rid of his ticks and probable fleas as well as a general health work up. they’re running a special this month on spaying/neutering for $99, so i’ll probably talk to them about setting up an appointment for that when i go to pick him up. still looking to see if he’s been lost, but i get the feeling he’s mine now. dude definitely picked the right house to fixate on. god knows i’m the softest of soft touch when it comes to animals.
frankie is currently sulking and making sad puppy whines because his new best friend has disappeared. dude. he’ll be back this afternoon. chill out. you’ve known him all of four days. there’s no need to go all romeo and juliet about it.
indiana bones is home from the vet. he’s all vaccinated up, confirmed to be heartworm free, has had a flea bath, was held down and force fed an oral treatment for the many many MANY ticks on his poor self, and has an appointment to get his manhood removed on friday.
so i guess i have another dog now.
at least frank sinpawtra is happy about it.
i really, really, REALLY debated doing this, because it seems like so much to ask, but i’ve set up a ko-fi account. my bills are high because of the holidays and i’m currently looking at my next bi-weekly paycheck being roughly half of what it usually is and while i’ve always budgeted to account for my pets in the past, i was seriously not expecting a new one to turn up out of no where. if you can spare even a little bit to help offset the unexpected vet bills i’m currently looking at, i’d be so incredibly appreciative.
I think he might be a husky mix, between the brown/blue heterochromia and the face markings and some things about his overall shape. Not sure what else might be in there, though.
If you were Australian, I’d think he was a Cattle Dog mix, but they’re not as common in the USA.
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the asl sign for “transgender“ is basically the same as the sign for ”beautiful“ but signed at the chest instead of in front of the face.
so that’s cool.
this is my imperfect not-a-fluent-signer understanding but:
(based on a presentation by a deaf trans guy i was at in 2005 where he was promoting that sign)
it seems like that sign was invented and implemented by trans people over the last 10-ish years. before that the predominant vocabulary was “sex change” and then some deaf trans people were like “yo fuck that” and came up with the current sign, which starts off with the sign for “myself,” then motion that indicates both change and coming together, and ends with the closed hand held against the sternum.
and in the process it also mimics the sign for “beautiful”
and because of spatial grammar, things closer to the front of your body in ASL are generally more vital, more emphatic, more immediate, more present.
so it’s actually a case where the word coherently indicates “beauty” and “self transformation” and contains hints of the complete thought of “my self transforming, through a coming together of disparate factors, into something more real, immediate, and vital than I was before.”
so yeah. that’s just fuckin’ awesome.
and that’s just the way to express that concept now.
*sighs heavily* So okay here’s the thing. It actually does matter that Clint wasn’t deaf. It really really really really matters. And you know why it really matters? Because for YEARS I have been super self-conscious about being Hard of Hearing, to the point that I didn’t tell people. I’d just pretend to know what people were saying even if I didn’t (believe me, I didn’t). If I had, at an earlier age, seen a deaf superhero asking his colleagues to speak up, to face him so he could read their lips, wearing hearing aids– god I would’ve been so much less embarrassed about doing those things too.
I think about the kids I see at my work in the grocery store and at Lush, kids with hearing aids, whose hands fumble over signs, and I feel this pang in my chest for them. Not because they’re “pitiful”, but because there are people who don’t realize what kind of community they’re going to grow up in. People who don’t care about the way the world works for them, for us. They don’t know they could be superheroes. Because people like Joss Whedon take that away from them without blinking.
Representation really matters. Especially when it comes to some sort of disability or shift in the perspective of what is “normal”. The same way you wouldn’t write a fic in which Matt Murdock wasn’t blind, you shouldn’t film a movie in which Clint Barton isn’t deaf. Because that is part of who he is. And by writing a script in which his deafness isn’t recognized sends a very clear message to the deaf/hoh community, which is: “people like you could never be superheroes” and even worse, “representing your community is not worth the effort”.
Secondly, I need you to read this very clearly: I will never ever write a fic in which Clint Barton is hearing, or a fic in which he does not utilize ASL. If that “bothers” my audience, or they feel disrespected by this fact, they are very kindly directed to this website and may follow the directions as follows.
Is it an autism thing to panic whenever someone yells (due to aggression)? Or is that just a conditioned response?
This seems to be really common amongst autistic people.
I think it may be due to difficulties reading people. We often don’t notice signs that a person is getting angry until they start yelling which can set off sensory sensitivities as well.
I’d also like to add that a high percentage of autistics have been physically, verbally, emotionally and/or sexually abused, and have PTSD that can be triggered badly by people shouting or getting in their space or moving in a way that brings back those memories. Our bodies have a warning system highly tuned to recognise when a situation is flipping from ‘weird & uncomfortable’ to ‘last time this happened I got whipped with a belt so hard I bruised’. Given a lot of us also have memories that are different from the norm, sometimes photographic or eidetic, you can see why we might react poorly to highly charged situations.
My therapist asked me to create something “motivating” so I made these.
lol.
I really love these, and I reblog them every single time. Some of you don’t realize how easy it’s to forget to do some of those stuff or how hard they can be some days.
knitting in the dark 