Call for ideas & help : a collective blog-zine-thing about disability & brain weasel repellent &tc

[untonuggan]

I have been brainstorming with partner and some other dw folks about a potentially very cool and exciting project. Also it is one that I cannot do alone (even if I had the spoons I did in high school, which was a LOT of spoons). So I'm going to talk about the idea and then see if anyone else is interested, and what they might want to do possibly.

~Idea~

A blog-zine-website type thing a la The Toast or Autostraddle, but aimed at disability-type issues or interests. Potential posts or sections or topics could include (but are by no means limited to):

• a section of things to look at when you have brain weasels
• "how to do X when your body/brain does Y" (kind of like bitesizedcleaning tips, but not limited to cleaning)
• cross-promoting people who have their own writing sites (fiction or non) or tarot readings
• "why austerity is terribad" and other political topics related to disability
• disability and history
• science!
• recipes for when your body thinks food is the enemy
• fandom reviews and recommendations that deal with disability
• terminology and ableist language
• Artwork/comics
• Poetry!
• Podcasts of written works and other accessible features (like being accessible to screen readers)
• Other things I may not have thought of yet!

Also, some kind of online store to support the site and possibly a collective fund that could be used for (a) monthly charity donations; (b) "oh crap my car died" type hat passes; (c) upkeep; (d) possibly a paid position at some point if someone is doing a lot of upkeep or web-dev or editing or whatever. TBD in the course of "how is this run?"

Kinds of things to maybe have in the store (Zazzle? Cafepress?):

• Coping cards for people with chronic illnesses (as opposed to "get well" cards)
• T-shirts or buttons or whatever (maybe ones that warn readers not to touch you today because your body hurts, or perhaps say things like "not your inspirational crip")
• A print zine of things on the site
• Funny shit to look at when you feel like crap
• Other possibilities!

Plus probably some sort of advertising but hopefully not terribad advertising.

~Kinds of tasks I can think of atm (but we can totally bitesize it and share srsly folks)~

• Organizing system/emotional labor of "how does this work, how do we make decisions, how do we handle conflict, etc"
• Legal side of "how do we do banking, setting up non-profit or whatever kind of corporation status, etc"
• Web development (accessibility important)
• Web maintenance (moderation, posting, etc)
• Content creation!
• Content decision making (when to post certain things, how often to post, etc)
• Are there things we decide *not* to post? How do we handle conflict about that?
• Networking (social media promotion, finding new creators, outreach to other sites, etc)
• The store - content creation for that, legal side, banking! homg

OK now that *I* am kind of overwhelmed...I still think this is allllll kinds of awesome and can start slow and steady and build, bc I know that is how I operate these days.
~In the comments or via PM~

• Your preferred username (dw, tumblr, whatevs) and pronouns
• What you might be interested in helping with, if anything. Any mad skillz?
• Some sort of ranking of how realistic helping is right now or in the future? ("I am finishing my degree right now, but later..." or "This sounds amazing and also I have a couple of spoons I could use for this while I lay on my recovery sofa" or "I would totally read this but I can't commit to anything new right now" or "I have ideas but I can't help implement them right now")
• name ideas?

Note: not helpful right now, anything along the lines of, "This is cool but totally unrealistic." My brain weasels can rain on the parade on their own without contributions so it would help if you did not feed them.

If there is a lot of interest I would be up for starting a dreamwidth comm about this, but would need a name.

Signal boosting appreciated

Comments

[jadelennox]

I am in like Flynn!


Your preferred username: This one (jadelennox) dor now, but if I do my professional stuff (see below) probably wallet name. She/her.
What you might be interested in helping with, if anything. Any mad skillz?

So, most important fact about me in this context:

I'm a web developer professionally and web accessibility expert. I don't want to commit to being the sole code monkey or accessibility remediator because see above re: you can't trust me consistently to follow through. But this is my profession, and I'm passionate about WCAG testing and remediation, so please call on me for it. Hmm, if it comes to coding work I'd probably wallet name it.


Some sort of ranking of how realistic helping is right now or in the future?
My grief issues this year are combining with my natural mega flakiness, so before you call on me to do a part of this, remind me to ask myself if I really think I can fulfill the commitment I'm making. If not, I'm worse than useless. After January would be best for me: let me get through my first year anniversary and have a misery breakdown and then pull my shit together.

name ideas? I am literally the worst. I just started looking for terrible string matches:

"FleetinGIMPulse"
"ManusCRIPs"
"Gimperator Furiosa"
"Protected By A Silver Spoon"

For what it's worth I am aware these are all appalling.

Although spoon titles aren't so bad: Runcible Spoon; Silver Spoon; etc. Or just "Runcible".

Things I'd like to see for sale:

• licensed Allie-Brosh-gets-some-money Hyperbole and a Half painscale products http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebola-probably.html -- I admit I've adapted her far superior text into my own pain diary.
• Maybe some spoon based chatckes
• cute "I can do [___________] for you [_________] often" cards to give to sick friends, who get sick of "let me know if there's anything I can do tl help" and would actually like to know who is willing to do the grocery shopping or call Medicaid in a pinch.
• Comfort food snacks for a variety of food limitations, maybe packed with cute // funny cards. I don't know how hard that kind of thing is to create.

Resources I'd love to see (articles or forums):

• Funny shit!
• How to discuss issues about your pain management without being labelled a drug seeker
• What to do when pain meds are off the table and you need another strategy.
• How to talk to your doctors about your meds and their possible interactions.
• How to manage a team of specialists who don't talk to each other.
• How to manage emotional / physical / cognitive illness/disability interactions: the shared soon drawers.
• How to manage your friends and acquaintances: the different types of "have you tried" and "why don't you just" and "let me grab that from you" and "that wheelchair is making you lazy".
• Oh, how to manage employers in the US, and navigate the ADA -- I could contribute to that one. Though I an Not A Lawyer.
• How to make your online resources accesible, which I could just write for you off the copy I've already got. Subsections: being a good citizen of: Tumblr; Twitter; DW; a Wordpress blog; HTML you write; Facebook; Youtube; anything with Javascript.
• Accessibility tools you might not know about which may be useful to the reader, which I could also just write for you. (eg free screen readers, free speech-to-text; web browsing mouselessly; magnifying on demand; no-distraction mode on the web; etc).
• I second SCIENCE.
• Also politics: general and region specific, with activist options where they exist.
• Also, intersectionality within the big tent umbrella. eg. Things I want as a physically disabled crip can often get in the way for people with cognitive limitations. Autistic and Deaf and CP communities are often ones which have a very anti-cure rhetoric (100% social model); I'm in the chronic pain camp so I am social model but sure as hell want a cure and wish to hell I could gain back lost function (bikes. cars. fencing.), my sister would have wanted a 100% cure and now that the goddamn disease has killed her that's a case where I am 100% CURE HELL YES. And that's just one very loaded topic! Or the pro and anti institutions camp is another. I'd love a place where we as gimp and sick folks can talk about these issues productively among ourselves, without performing politics for the implied healthy reader.

I love your ideas of food and cooking -- both when your body can only eat some food / demands foods, and how to cook with limited function. I'd add housework to that, and negotioating with living partners. I feel like you and I are at opposite extremes of helpful housemates, and could both have ideas for that one. Also I wish I could share some of my housemate awesomeness with you. D:

Also, fandom reviews, both of canon and fanworks, would be totally awesome!

[syntaxofthings]

*snorts* I'm trying to put together a spreadsheet of all the offered ideas and such, and I just am going to paste a link to your comment instead of all of them individually. So THANK YOU! Such great ideas.

Also, as for coding, I think there are a lot of not-professional people willing to do the grunt work (I'm one of them, learning bits and pieces of web development), but it will be EXCELLENT to have your expertise in polishing stages or if there's a quick question we just can't figure out. Would that work for you?

[worlds_of_smoke]

I would 9000% love all the ideas related to pain management. And "What to do when pain meds are off the table and you need another strategy" should also cover interventional pain treatment, like radiofrequency ablation and steroid shots. I can totally write about those two things, since I have them done on the regular.

[jazzyjj]

Something on pro vs. anti-institution would be awesome as far as this user is concerned. My state cannot, for the love of God, figure out a way to put that debate to rest. It has honestly gotten so out of hand that it's interfering with other important issues such as ADA paratransit and other advocacy issues. But I'll get off my soap box now, perhaps even before I've gotten on it lol!