Hey :) I'm Also Looking To Find A Sherlock Calendar, Why Is It So Hard To Find?! They Are Either Out

[two selfies of auden, short blue hair pushed back with a white and purple flower crown. they wear a dark purple shirt, large-framed glasses, and magenta lipstick with glitter. they smile, revealing a single dimple.] 

there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell -walt whitman

hey reblog my selfies, tell me i’m cute

Ot3 bubble butt squad: Steve 2, Bucky 3 (dem thighs) and Matt 8 pls and thx ily bab

MAGICAL BUTT SQUAD IS HERE TO SAVE THE DAY!!

20K SKETCH GIVEAWAY !

So in celebration of hitting 20,000 followers this week (vague panic) I’ve decided to do a little giveaway for all of you lovely people who put up with me on your dashboards.  I will be giving away 10 traditional sketch requests for 10 of my followers, randomly selected from those who like or reblog this post!  I will ship anywhere! Each piece will be a hand drawn work of the winner’s chosen subject, and shipped straight to them. CONDITIONS: 

You may reblog and/or like to enter, if you do both, your name will be entered twice.

You must be following me (this is to thank my followers, so duh).

You must have your ask box open! I will be contacting winners via ask, if your ask box is closed, I’ll choose another winner.

If you don’t respond within 24 hours, I will choose another winner.

Entries close on 5:00pm AEDT on Friday the 20th of February 2015, I will be contacting winners on the 21st. 

GOOD LUCK !

I know I don’t have very many followers but for those of you who do, a notice that I changed my URL to “Ionlyrunfromshame” 

It’s been THREE YEARS since I opened my etsy shop to boldly hold, and in honor of that I am having a quilt giveaway! (my last quilt giveaway)

There will be ONE prize: One custom quilt made by me for you! I’ll give you the fabric options; you’ll select the one you like, as well as over all design and I’ll make a quilt just for you!  Awesome right? You will have the option of Star Trek theme or a ‘plain’ quilt.

To enter you are allowed ONE REBLOG and ONE LIKE per day. Each note gets you one entry and I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winner. (I’m not responsible for any tumblr fuckary i.e. lost reblog’s or likes.)

You do not have to follow me to enter- however, when I select your name, if I see that you’re following me, you’ll get several more options in fabric and design of the quilt.

The giveaway will close on Sunday February 14th 2016 at 9PM PST. The winner will be tagged in a post and I’ll also send an ask, so be sure yours is open. The winner will have 24 hours to respond to the message. If I don’t receive a response within 24 hours, I will select another recipient.

Good luck!

If you don’t want to wait to get a quilt of your own, check out my shop To Boldly Hold

my intent is not to be mean but I am sure it will come off that way anyways so I'm sorry for asking, but I am genuinely curious how you, a sighted person, reading braille is any different than a sighted person cosplaying as matt murdock.

wow, i, uh. i don’t really have an easy way to answer this question.

cosplaying matt murdock - or any other disabled character - if you’re nondisabled is taking on a set of experiences that’s associated with a tremendous amount of stigma and systemic oppression for the sake of a costume. it’s approaching the tools and aspects of lived experience and turning them into something fun for a day that can be taken off and cast aside when it gets inconvenient.

 it’s an action that’s totally ignorant of the impact of media, the social and historical contexts of spectatorship and disability, the lack of prominent disabled characters as representation, and the real life accusations of ‘faking disability’ that disabled people face every day (and which severely impact availability of needed resources). it’s disrespectful and harmful. 

so. that’s cosplay. 

now, i’m working in a broad sense to become more knowledgeable about accessibility, alternative formats, and the representation and misrepresentation of disability so that i can explore these things in more formal academic contexts and hopefully work towards more relevant and valuable change. i’m probably going to graduate with a focus in disability studies. 

as far as braille comes in, i’m in the process of writing a 100+ page research paper on the representation of disability in daredevil. i’ve read about 200 daredevil comics, but i realized pretty early on that my paper would be absolutely valueless if my only point of attention was the comics themselves, so i did a lot of really varied reading and study. i am sighted, and the experiences matt murdock has as a blind person aren’t in any way something i would ever feel like i could just like, assume to be able to talk about. they’ll never be something i’ll be fully aware of, ever, but i think research remains important, because a paper like the one i’m writing doesn’t exist in the world and i think it’s valuable. 

i’m working on learning braille because of its inclusion/lack of inclusion in the daredevil comics and its subsequent connection to my research topic, but also because a major part of what i’m working on is making a piece of media that centers so fully on a blind character accessible to blind/visually impaired people. because i think structures of accountability are really really key to representational work, and right now that’s basically impossible. braille is one aspect of a potential ‘accessibility kit’ that i’m working on for comics. 

primarily, though, i’m learning braille because my attention to disability, representation of disability, accessibility, etc. extends well beyond this specific piece of media in a way that’s very distinct from the lack of awareness in cosplaying this character. i think it’s important to effectively address situations of inaccessibility and ableism, and doing so requires being knowledgeable and aware. i don’t know if things are improperly or incompletely labeled if i can’t read those labels. i don’t know how things should be formatted correctly, i don’t know if something’s a valid alternative format, i don’t have a method available to try to help make things suck less. like, many many many of the buildings at my college are incompletely brailled. so i’m working with the office of disability services and independently to try to approach that issue. 

a lot of people accessorize basic braille. in those contexts, braille is stripped of its significance. it’s reduced to a fun thing for sighted people to play with and throw aside. the same thing is true of ASL. those uses of braille and ASL are absolutely in the same sort of vein as cosplaying a disabled character, because they’re disrespectful and unaware. but i don’t think that learning braille and ASL are inherently damaging or thoughtless. learning braille allows me to become a resource for translation and a prompt towards accountability. 

ultimately it comes down to this: i’m working really hard to be aware of my positionality and how easy it is to accessorize experiences of disability. of course i fuck up, and i really encourage you to call me out if you see that happen. but for me, learning braille isn’t like. collecting action figures and t-shirts and reading as many comics as possible. it isn’t about the character. it’s about developing more tools to approach accessibility, accountability, representation, awareness. 

One of my favorite bit characters in Les mis is the poor random porter of Gillenormand who has to deal with Jean Valjean and Javert showing up at night with a mostly-dead Marius. He’s just so confused! He hasn’t read the first 1000 pages of Les Miserables so he has no context for Jean Valjean and Javert. He spends the entire conversation being utterly baffled.

POV: you’re just trying to sleep when you hear loud knocking at the door. Outside are two weird old men. One is a bizarre cop who seems to be operating on autopilot— he keeps mechanically saying incorrect nonsense like “here is Gilleormand’s dead’s son” even though Gillenormand has no son and the man they’re carrying isn’t dead. The other old man is some horrible-looking buff weirdo covered in sewage. They clearly have a History but you don’t know what it is.

They try to drag you into their relationship drama. One says Marius is dead, the other says nothing but exhaustedly shakes his head in disagreement in a way that makes him seem very Done with all of this. You are even more confused. You do not want to be part of this drama.

Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government, and the presence of the porter of a factious person.

“Some person whose name is Gillenormand?”

“Here. What do you want with him?”

“His son is brought back.”

“His son?” said the porter stupidly.

“He is dead.”

Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert, and whom the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign to him with his head that this was not so.

The porter did not appear to understand either Javert’s words or Jean Valjean’s sign.

Then you try to ask for clarification. The cop just repeats that the not-dead Marius is actually dead, vaguely says he got himself killed at the barricades—and then he very helpfully states that when people die there are funerals, as if he’s just stating a random fact he knows about death. This clarifies nothing. You finally just walk away and make it someone else’s problem. Good for you.

Javert continued:

“He went to the barricade, and here he is.”

“To the barricade?” ejaculated the porter.

“He has got himself killed. Go waken his father.”

The porter did not stir.

“Go along with you!” repeated Javert.

And he added:

“There will be a funeral here to-morrow.”

For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were categorically classed, which is the beginning of foresight and surveillance, and each contingency had its own compartment; all possible facts were arranged in drawers, as it were, whence they emerged on occasion, in variable quantities; in the street, uproar, revolt, carnival, and funeral.

The porter contented himself with waking Basque. Basque woke Nicolette; Nicolette roused great-aunt Gillenormand.

And then the two of them leave, and youre left with all the confusion of someone who’s been plunged into the middle of Jean Valjean and Javert’s weirdness without any of the context of Victor Hugo’s hit 1862 novel Les miserables:

The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched their arrival, in terrified somnolence.

I've seen the movie quite a few times and have decided that Petra and the teacher (who's name has escaped me) have been having an affair since she came into his class. Because he thinks so highly of her he decides James is not suited for her. It seems to me she is depicted as an intelligent character. Far too intelligent for the teacher. The teacher tried and failed to break them up by failing James by using the cards that was his job and sexuality. Honestly it still confuses me.... I love it!

So which of the endings do you think is true? Or do you not think any of them actually happened?

so i’ve been thinking a lot about the moment when karen comes to visit matt after he’s beaten by nobu

he answers the door without wearing his glasses, which i believe is the first time since he’s spoken to karen about being blind in the first episode (when he takes them off and then immediately puts them back on) that he’s not worn them when she’s there; he even puts his glasses back on when he’s sitting with foggy going over files and karen comes in 

so matt answers the door looking like this

[image: screencap of matt, battered and bruised, no glasses.]

karen and him exchange what passes for a greeting between them at this point, and then matt immediately goes to the counter and puts his glasses on while karen takes off her coat

[images: two screencaps of karen taking off her coat in the hallway while matt puts on his glasses at the counter]

then he grabs a beer and turns back around, glasses firmly in place

[image: matt, beer in hand, standing behind the counter with his glasses on.]

so i’ve been thinking about why he would put his glasses on so quickly if he’s willing to answer the door without them on. because it makes sense that he answers the door without them because he’s hurt and tired and sick of everything, whatever reason he’s had to keep them on seems unimportant in light of everything that’s happened, etc. and i’d say it would make sense that he went to the door without his glasses, realized it was karen, and then put his glasses back on (because karen is different, because it’s Karen, because he knows how karen reacted to seeing his eyes before) but matt has supersenses, matt knows it’s karen long before karen reaches the door. so what makes him put his glasses on? 

i think what’s different is this 

[image: karen stands in the doorway, matt turned away from her. CC says: “you look like shit.”]

matt hears karen say that, hears karen say “you look like shit,” and matt murdock puts on his glasses, which do next to nothing to hide his abundant injuries or uncomfortable gait or obvious pain, especially given that karen has already seen them. matt murdock, who is so rarely seen without his glasses in the comics and the show, who wears glasses even in situations that seem incredibly deeply impractical, even in his own home, even with people who know him well (and here’s a post about this, and tw for some well-meaning ableism + in-comics ableism) - when karen says “you look like shit,” he puts on his glasses. because matt associates looking like shit with people being able to see his eyes- with being visibly disabled. because matt has to live with not only all of the guilt that comes with his daredevilling and with his super senses and with only being able to do so much, but also with internalized ableism.