ppl who dont even like shakespeare: WOW how DARE you alter the original text these are CLASSICS have you no RESPECT, going around DESECRATING these sacred texts in the name of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!!!!!!!!!
people who love shakespeare: im going to stage a production of hamlet where all the actors are dogs
it’s what he would have wanted
Okay so the universal law of Shakespeare, as I’ve heard it, is that you can take things out, you can rearrange them, you just cannot add anything in that conflicts with the original texts. So while you cannot have a production of romeo and juliet where the houses get along and they get married, it’s perfectly acceptable to replace all the actors with dogs in hamlet because the characters are never outright stated to not be dogs.
“The characters are never outright stated not to be dogs”
“It was never a part of their journey” but better.
personal favorite: when the script just says “they fight” and you can add whatever kind of combat or competition you want there because like… it doesn’t say you can’t
[Image: tweet by Titanium Cranium (@FelicityTC) including three screenshots of a Harry potter book in three different formats on Amazon. Text:
“Harry Potter on Amazon –
Print: $6.39
Audio: $44.99
Braille: $100.00
#CripTax”]
So, let me explain this a bit.
The defenders of CripTax prices will say that those prices cover the cost of production. This is, without a doubt, true. I work at a university where we often have to take written materials and convert them into braille – it takes a LOT of people hours, special software, and a braille embosser.
But those defenders of higher prices are reversing the argument to justify fleecing disabled readers.
What do I mean by that?
Braille is not magic. It is done by taking plain text and feeding it through fairly affordable translation software, creating a document that can easily be printed in braille.
All that time and effort and special software? IS NOT FOR THE BRAILLE.
It is to take the document provided by the publisher (usually in PDF format, the same file they send to the printers) and turn it into plain, unadorned text, by hand. Text has to be “stripped” (OCR/text recognition); images have to be described; footnotes have to be embedded; special pullouts and other formatting shifted or removed.
Printing in braille is cheap; reverse engineering a finished text to print it in braille IS NOT.
Same with those audio books. After a book is completed and, often, after it has already been published, the publisher arranges to have the book recorded by a professional voice actor/reader, which usually also involves a recording producer, if not a recording studio, which all stacks up to $$, no two ways about it.
However: that cost? IS RARELY FACTORED INTO THE BUDGET OF PRINTING A BOOK.
Oh, it might be, if the author is JK Rowling and it is well known that readers will want audio versions right away. But most of the time, nope, the audio book is produced only after the hard copy book has become a decent seller, and so it’s an extra cost which is claimed must be covered by making the audio version extra expensive to buy. (Even then it’s somewhat ridiculous, since honestly, creating an audio book is, in the end, cheaper than printing, factoring in the cost of paper.)
If publishers factored audio book production into the assumed costs of publishing a book, they would have very little reason to price it higher.
If publishers factored in creating a “plain text” file – including having editors/authors describe images – that could be used to print braille copies or to be used with refreshable braille readers (electronic pinboards, basically), then there would be zero reason to price those books higher.
tl;dr: Yes, it’s a #criptax, and the excuse that “those formats are more expensive to produce so they have to be priced higher” is only true if you completely throw out the premise that publishers have an obligation to account for disabled readers when they are actually budgeting for and publishing the book.
I’m really glad you brought this up, because this is exactly the sort of argument thatpeople try to use to justify inaccessibility in all kinds of areas. When we tell a company that their website or appliance or piece of technology isn’t accessible, they frequently tell us that they are sorry to hear that but that the accessibility is too expensive and time-consuming to add in now. There is also a provision in the law that allows companies to not bother including accessibility in their products if the cost of building in the accessibility is more than 5% of the total cost to build the whole product in the US.
That seems reasonable on the surface, doesn’t it? Except here’s the thing—the accessibility should have been a part of the original plans to begin with and designed in from the very beginning and should have been considered a necessary element and just another ordinary part of the cost of producing the product, not some extra feature that can be opted out of if it’s too expensive. The problem is that these companies do not understand the fact that if you cannot afford to build the product with the accessibility included, then you cannot afford to build the product and that is that. It’s exactly the same as not being able to afford to make the product with all elements up to safety and health codes and standards. If you can’t afford to meet the legal standards, then you can’t afford to make the product, and it’s that simple. Accessibility is not an exception to this and it should not be considered as such. It should be just as much an ordinary required part of the design process as any other element, not an extra, shiny, fancy feature that you can just choose not to bother with if it costs a little bit of money.
Accessibility should be part of the standard design process just as much as safety codes and health standards and other legal regulations. The ADA has existed for 20 years so companies have had ample time to catch up and learn to plan for accessibility from the beginning as a part of the standard required design process. If you can’t afford to create the product fully up to code, standards, and accessibility laws, then you simply can’t afford to make the product. No excuses, no exceptions.
I have often said that, very often, the high cost of disability accessibility is not actually for the accessibility itself. The actual high cost is often due to the lack of foresight and planning for accessibility from the design stage onwards.
Let me explain what I mean with an example. Take accessibility in a building. Usually making a building accessible means you need things like braille signage, ramps to entrances, wide doorways that leave plenty of room for a wheelchair to pass through, and so forth. If you design a new building from scratch to incorporate all of these design elements from the beginning, literally before the building is a hole in the ground, then the total cost of integrating accessible features into the building is less than one percent of the total cost of constructing that building.
On the other hand, if you don’t bother to account for the need for disability access and just build the building first, and then go, “oops, we didn’t design for accessibility”, then you will need to literally tear down parts of the building and reconstruct it from scratch. If this is your primary approach to accessibility, then of course the cost of accessibility may seem expensive. But it’s not actually the ramp or the wide door ways that are expensive. What is expensive is all the extra cost and effort of completely undoing parts of what you had already created wrongly so that you can recreate it correctly. In other words, the actual expense is the lack of planning ahead for accessibility.
This is the first I learned how books could be more cheaply accessible if this was planned for ahead of time. But it’s the same principle at work. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand all this and blame disabled people for wanting accessibility instead of blaming designers, architects, inventors and book publishers, and so forth, as well as the people responsible for contracting them, for having failed to consider the needs of disabled people when there was still time to integrate accessibility during the design and initial construction phase, when it could have been done cheaply.
What we need is for more designers, architects, inventors, book publishers, policy makers, program managers, and so forth to learn about the principles of universal design.
Humans are a communal species that have banded together and cared for their sick, disabled, and elderly since before we were ever modern man. Resources were shared even as skills specialized.
Capitalism isn’t natural. A community should not have members dying of starvation or exposure while there is an abundance of resources. That isn’t how it works. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
ok so my roommates are anthropology students and their favorite example for debunking the ‘survival of the fittest’ bs is shanidar 1. (x, x, x)
shanidar 1 is a neanderthal who, at a pretty young age, was hit in the head hard enough to blind him. this also led to that side of his brain shutting down and withering his right arm, and possibly crippling his entire right side. not only that but his skeleton also shows that at some point, he broke a bone in his foot and, in addition to the other factors, resulted in a noticeable limp. there are some sources which say he likely had degenerative diseases. (arthritis was really common in neanderthals)
going off of widespread ideas of “”primitive”” (no longer the word used in anthropology/academia to describe early-modern humans) societies, shanidar probably died really young, deliberately abandoned or killed. i mean, he was severely crippled, blind, etc., he couldn’t contribute anything, he would have been a “”burden to society””, right?
except he lived to be between 40 and 50 years old. (about ~80 in human years)
this means that his social group had to have taken care of him for a minimum of two or three decades without his ‘contributing’ anything significant to the group. this discovery (and Shanidar III’s) was huge because it basically proves that early humans had a concept of hospice. early modern humans cared for the sick and the elderly, greatly extending their lifespan, simply because they cared.
tl;dr: the concept of someone needing to be ‘’useful’’ or ‘’’productive’’’ in society in order to be valued and cared for is a very modern concept and our quasi-predecessors would be ashamed
Also, Shanidar I was buried with flowers. They cared about him after he was dead, too.
My boyfriend and I were downtown and he saw fresh sunflowers, which is his best friend’s favorite flower, and he not only bought one for him but had me drive him to his best friends house so he could surprise him with it and I just think this is the type of male friendship that should be normalized
please listen to this poor man losing his shit as he reads an article blaming millenials for killing the mayonnaise industry that was written by a babyboomer upset people don’t want to eat her bland salads anymore
If I don’t see this somewhere on my tl every Friday, I’m gonna be very upset
oh… she can sing
Why didn’t she release this version originally??
because she was 13 and had no control over it and now shes in her 20s lol
So when she was child, she was taken advantage of by her stage parents and a record label that seems very predatory (I believe it’s called lunchbox records or something) that promised said stage parents they would make her child into a star.
Remember that guy who did the rap part who was way older and seemed really out of place? Yeah, he’s the owner of that record label. He is also in ALL of the music videos they produce, and the singers are all young girls.
Rebecca was humiliated and bullied after the release of “Friday” and while we were all making fun of it in our private lives, she had to be homeschooled for the rest of her education.
Was the video terrible? Yes, but I feel bad for making fun of a girl who was really just a victim. I really hope that she has a good life and perhaps even a good career.
This needs more context. The Monsanto seed was free, true, but required millions of dollars worth of Roundup to grow properly, (not free,) and one of the first genetic modifications allows Monsanto to produce seeds which will not produce fertile offspring. Haiti would have been desperate for seed next growing season. Several developing nations are essentially offer a barrel for Monsanto after taking “free” seed.
Haiti wasn’t stupid. They know colonizer tactics.
Yeah, Monsanto’s fucking evil, and it’s not “because GMO.” In this case it’s literally “you will be forced to buy seeds from us from now on in perpetuity, which we are hoping you’ll fall for under the guise of charity”
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 