shout out to my folks with insomnia & depression & delayed sleep phase disorder & sleep apnea & disabilities & other sleep disorders diagnosed, undiagnosed, and just my plain old night owls & night shift workers!! we r so fucking cool & exist every day in a society not made for us at all. and NONE of us are lazy bums or bad people for staying up late & sleeping in till noon or two or whatever whenever you get up!! no matter what anyone says!! you’re incredible and i love you!!!
I’ve been teaching my character design students about drawing head angles and expressions, and during reference hunting came across this iconic exercise from 2007! Drawing the sillier expressions actually really helped pick me up 😊 Which is your fave?
A general cane guide for writers and artists (from a cane user, writer, and artist!)
Disclaimer: Though I have been using a cane for 6 years, I am not a doctor, nor am I by any means an expert. This guide is true to my experience, but there are as many ways to use a cane as there are cane users!
This guide will not include: White canes for blindness, crutches, walkers, or wheelchairs as I have no personal experience with these.
This is meant to be a general guide to get you started and avoid some common mishaps/misconceptions, but you absolutely should continue to do your own research outside of this guide!
ALT
The biggest recurring problem I’ve seen is using the cane on the wrong side. The cane goes on the opposite side of the pain! If your character has even-sided pain or needs it for balance/weakness, then use the cane in the non-dominant hand to keep the dominant hand free. Some cane users also switch sides to give their arm a rest!
A cane takes about 20% of your weight off the opposite leg. It should fit within your natural gait and become something of an extension of your body. If you need more weight off than 20%, then crutches, a walker, or a wheelchair is needed.
Putting more pressure on the cane, using it on the wrong side, or having it at the wrong height will make it less effective, and can cause long term damage to your body from improper pressure and posture. (Hugh Laurie genuinely hurt his body from years of using a cane wrong on House!)
(an animated GIF of a cane matching the natural walking gait. It turns red when pressure is placed on it.)
When going up and down stairs, there is an ideal standard: You want to use the handrail and the cane at the same time, or prioritize the handrail if it’s only on one side. When going up stairs you lead with your good leg and follow with the cane and hurt leg together. When going down stairs you lead with the cane, then the good leg, and THEN the leg that needs help.
Realistically though, many people don’t move out of the way for cane users to access the railing, many stairs don’t have railings, and many are wet, rusty, or generally not ideal to grip.
In these cases, if you have a friend nearby, holding on to them is a good idea. Or, take it one step at a time carefully if you’re alone.
Now we come to a very common mistake I see… Using fashion canes for medical use!
ALT
(These are 4 broad shapes, but there is INCREDIBLE variation in cane handles. Research heavily what will be best for your character’s specific needs!)
The handle is the contact point for all the weight you’re putting on your cane, and that pressure is being put onto your hand, wrist, and shoulder. So the shape is very important for long term use!
Knob handles (and very decorative handles) are not used for medical use for this reason. It adds extra stress to the body and can damage your hand to put constant pressure onto these painful shapes.
The weight of a cane is also incredibly important, as a heavier cane will cause wear on your body much faster. When you’re using it all day, it gets heavy fast! If your character struggles with weakness, then they won’t want a heavy cane if they can help it!
This is also part of why sword canes aren’t usually very viable for medical use (along with them usually being knob handles) is that swords are extra weight!
However, a small knife or perhaps a retractable blade hidden within the base might be viable even for weak characters.
ALT
Bases have a lot of variability as well, and the modern standard is generally adjustable bases. Adjustable canes are very handy if your character regularly changes shoe height, for instance (gotta keep the height at your hip!)
Canes help on most terrain with their standard base and structure. But for some terrain, you might want a different base, or to forego the cane entirely! This article covers it pretty well.
Many cane users decorate their canes! Stickers are incredibly common, and painting canes is relatively common as well! You’ll also see people replacing the standard wrist strap with a personalized one, or even adding a small charm to the ring the strap connects to. (nothing too large, or it gets annoying as the cane is swinging around everywhere)
ALT
(my canes, for reference)
If your character uses a cane full time, then they might also have multiple canes that look different aesthetically to match their outfits!
When it comes to practical things outside of the cane, you reasonably only have one hand available while it’s being used. Many people will hook their cane onto their arm or let it dangle on the strap (if they have one) while using their cane arm, but it’s often significantly less convenient than 2 hands. But, if you need 2 hands, then it’s either setting the cane down or letting it hang!
For this reason, optimizing one handed use is ideal! Keeping bags/items on the side of your free hand helps keep your items accessible.
When sitting, the cane either leans against a wall or table, goes under the chair, or hooks onto the back of the chair. (It often falls when hanging off of a chair, in my experience)
When getting up, the user will either use their cane to help them balance/support as they stand, or get up and then grab their cane. This depends on what it’s being used for (balance vs pain when walking, for instance!)
That’s everything I can think of for now. Thank you for reading my long-but-absolutely-not-comprehensive list of things to keep in mind when writing or drawing a cane user!
Happy disability pride month! Go forth and make more characters use canes!!!
Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!
Heads up that this is a very extensive questionnaire and might be daunting to a lot of writers (myself included). That being said, it is also an amazing questionnaire and I will definitely be using it (or at the very least, some of it).
Man, I’m kind of bummed out that the best resources for deer anatomy and body language are all on hunting sites. I mean, it makes sense, but it’s still kind of disorienting to be reading along and then have a description end with like, “…so if you see the buck’s ears do that, stay still and keep your gear from making noise”. I’m not crouching in the grass with a compound bow, I’m just an artist! I just want to draw a bunch of fake fictional deer and deer-adjacent creatures, not put on some forest camo and hunt me a Big Antler Boy or w/e in real life!!
Yeesh, I bet I’m going to get targeted ads about hunting equipment now. Just another way that the Research Struggle can be really real sometimes.
Here are amazing deer skeletal references by Rico LeBrun! They were created during production of Disney’s Bambi, to help aid the artists.
The link to download the images in their full glory:
Don’t get me wrong, I love it when people design medieval fantasy clothing based on western European fashions, because they were awesome (did somebody say chaperon?) but there was lot of great design in eastern Europe and the Byzantine Empire too.
I’m pretty sure the second picture is actually 16th century Hungarian dress, but I’ll let it in because it looks cool.
“Hi, I’m Europe, and I fucking love dragging the bottoms of my lovely outfits through the inch-high pools of human waste everywhere”
Not quite! Different clothes for different classes and situations, ya know? This is mostly rich people fashion, and I can bet you it was mostly meant to be worn indoors (believe it or not, medieval people cared about hygiene and didn’t exactly wade through turds in their own homes).
I don’t have any sources for Eastern Europe in particular, but I have some examples from Livre de la chasse for what people would wear hunting:
Almost everybody has their skirts knee high or higher. Those chaps on horseback are noblemen living in a time when long houppelandes were in fashion*, but outside they obviously had to wear something else. No hemlines dragging in the dirt or getting caught in the brush. These elaborate outer garments were much harder to wash than the linen underwear you’d have on underneath, so people really tried to not get their fancy clothes all grubby.
*I’m pretty sure these illustrations are from the early 15th century English edition.
Also, people generally wore pattens outdoors, which were wooden overshoes that were slightly elevated, so that your feet, and the bottom of your clothes, wouldn’t be in direct contact with the ground. They looked something like this:
Because yeah, people did understand basic hygiene, even in Europe, and didn’t want to get dirt and shit everywhere. I mean, come on.
In general, I think that ‘people don’t just poo anywhere and leave it there’ is a pretty solid historical constant.
So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body.
If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.
But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:
DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.
Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.
Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.
(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)
headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.
Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.
fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!
here is a fact:
during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.
So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.
Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it.
Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.
So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense.
This has been a rant and I apologize for that.
As a microbiologist, I think the main advice here is to take into account real diseases and conditions before you make up a fictional disease or condition.
Some bacteria have physical effects on the body that cause symptoms (EHEC varitype of E. coli ruptures cells at the site of infection, which is usually the large intestine, hence, you have bloody stools from it). If your alien or “made-up” bacteria or virus causes a certain symptom, find a real bacteria or virus that causes the same symptom. They need to behave in a similar fashion and have similar physical traits. Bacteria and viruses do not evolve functions because they’re cool. They evolve them because they’re useful.
There are also dietary issues, medications and chronic diseases that cause physical changes–copper toxicity can cause an orange ring around the iris, an eyelash lengthening “medicine” causes darkening and/or color change of the iris, hemochromatosis (sometimes known as “Bronze Diabetes”) causes darkening of the skin etc. If you want to use this sort of thing, again, find something real that causes it and work through things logically.
Play your cards right, do your research and you will have hordes of readers in the scientific and/or biological community cheering, screaming and crying because they love your work.
@biologyweeps, this feels up your speculative alley - anything to add?
Ohhh.
I’d like to add that the same goes for parasitic infections, more or less. If you want a certain trait for a diseases, cross reference with existing parasites to see what’s happening, and also make sure you check what happens if you put a parasite in a host it’s not meant for. We can sensibly assume that alien parasites that encounter a human would be ‘wtf’ and potentially cause complications that would never happen in the native species. Maybe in the native species it causes a cold like reaction at worst, but in a human the parasites may attempt to nest in a totally different tissue. Maybe that causes widespread tissue damage by the parasite itself as it tries to borrow in? Again, check existing cases to see what horrific things could happen.
While we’re on it, also check how your disease is communicated. One of the things that annoy me so much with zombie movies is that ‘biting’ is supposed to be a very effective way to spread it. It’s not. Anything that requires such intimate contact is actually kind of hard to communicate. Airborne things? Now there we are at potential ‘oh shit’ territory. So if you want your disease to sweep the country/planet/ship, pick something that’s easily communicable.
Also consider the incubation period. How long until someone shows symptoms? Are they already infectious to other people before showing symptoms or still after they stopped? As mentioned above, illness symptoms are in most part immune responses and the immune system needs time to get up and run. Give it that time.
And while we’re at it… there are symptoms that aren’t immune responses. For example the cramps that accompany tetanus are caused by a toxin the bacterium produces that damages/destroys nerve cells. Viruses can cause tissue damage when they insert in cells, replicate in there and destroy the cell on exit. Think of how HIV can wreak havoc on the human immune system by killing of a specific kind of cell. Depending on where your viruses likes to replicate it can massively impact the look of it. Something that destroys liver cells will look different (and if survived may come with different long term damage) than something that prefers skin or muscle cells. If it’s alien also consider how it might behave differently in its original host.
Fantastic post, I can relate to OP 100%. More points:
Nothing makes me groan harder than a made-up plague which gives anyone X diseases within seconds to MINUTES. I’m looking at you, most zombie movies. And if your alien/synthetic/sci-fi pathogen is at all like a virus (read: no metabolism of its own, just genetic material of some kind which it uses to reprogram host cells), then the rate at which it mupltiplies is limited to what normal human cells can do. Now, viruses can multiply pretty damn fast. But give you symptoms within MINUTES? Nope.
So long as we’re on the subject of epidemiology, and speed:
"Oh no, patient died less than a day after being infected! We’re all doomed!“ Wrong. While that SOUNDS scary, a plague that kills that quickly would not actually be that dangerous, and would be unlikely to have evolved to begin with. A disease needs to pass itself on to at least one other person, on average, before it kills its host, or it’s doomed to extinction. Any virus that kills its host before it has a decent chance of being passed on will basically quarantine itself. (Of course, you CAN do this if you handwave its origins as being made in a lab or whatever, just know it won’t realistically pose a truly terrifying threat on a population level.)
Mmore ideas for a realistically scary made-up plague:
- Long incubation period (say, a couple of weeks), making quarantine much more difficult, disruptive to everyday life, and unlikely to succeed.
- Infectious period != symptomatic period, i.e. someone can spread the disease before they appear sick. (Note: if this condition is met, then dying very rapidly after *manifesting symptoms* becomes plausible again, more plausible than dying quickly after being infected.)
- The possibility or relative prevalence of healthy carriers - think Typhoid Mary. I.e. rare people who skip the symptoms part entirely but are still infectious.
- The disease is transmitted through an animal that is hard to keep out, the definition of “hard to keep out” would depend on the setting here. Poor water sanitation means waterborne bacteria and microscopic parasites would be a huge danger. Insect or arachnid (e.g. tick) bites could be a danger in almost any setting..
- As an alternative to above point: the bacterial/viral/parasite/whatever can form spores that are fucking EVERYWHERE. (Read: the reason for both tetanus and botulinum poisoning.)
- The pathogen is both dangerous and impossible to fully exterminate through vaccination because it has a huge population of reservoir hosts. (Reservoir hosts are entire SPECIES that can carry and propagate the disease without being affected much by it.) Same way the Black Plague is still out there because a shitton of rodent species passively carry it.
And many more things if you do some research for inspiration! Pathogens are scary, fascinating things, and I really wish we had more realistic fictional representation of them than “virus which causes zombie behaviour in 3 seconds flat” (looking at you, 28 Days Later) and “virus which can MIND-CONTROL people who view the main carrier through a COMPUTER SCREEN” (wtf???) (looking at you, Jessica Jones).
![[Image text] Arm bends a little. Cane height at hip joint. Many canes have adjustable height. Cane sits within the natural center of balance. Causes stress on: Triceps, upper back, wrist (pressure) fingers (grip). Helps with: Joints (lower back, hip, knee, ankle, foot), weakness, balance, pain.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/0c8731401f496885dc8d4309a7dbe7ee/f831b3159e1d7635-e7/s500x750/6e5fe00081a6ce3b64cbe1a648f0c967f9f601e9.jpg)
![[Image text] 4 Major Handle Shapes (significant variation and uses). Tourist/Crook/Hook. Classic shape, fashion and medical, easy to hook on things (arm, door, chair, etc), generally solid wood (stronger, heavier). Offset. Newer design, not a fashion handle, only handle for quad-bases, generally better balance, usually aluminum (light + cheap), soft handle, adjustable (rattles/clicks when swinging). Derby/Fritz/Anatomical/Contour. Classic medical shape, many fashion variants, some fashion + medical, varies in many ways, sometimes contoured to hand, comes in foldable styles, many aluminum styles, many customizable styles. Knob/Decorative. Fashion exclusive, knob shape hurts the hand after prolonged pressure (especially with designs), tend to be heavy, "sword canes" have the same issues.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/102d2e5f13a88817eaa44974bc5a7486/f831b3159e1d7635-e2/s500x750/887023dbcfc758db12a7fcf3f258bca52eba2d53.jpg)
![[Image text] 4 Major base shapes (significant variation and uses). Adjustable base. Aluminum, standard modern medical, adjustable height, rubber base, wears down over time. Tripod/ quad base. If you need extra balance. Terrain attachment (varies, this is for ice). Removable, helps stop slipping on ice/snow/sand/etc, some canes have a retractable tip for ice. Classic base. Non-adjustable, custom only, modern standard still has a rubber base.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/78d350cfac4077376b7ce521a9a7d929/f831b3159e1d7635-ab/s500x750/4b4a6b8062c06686baf17c83c28b793bfb89e05b.jpg)
