Intresting Oddities

My friend sent me this with a "this made me think of you."

"*****smut marked with asterisks so you can skip!*****""

Don't. Don't do this.

You let readers know what your fic contains through proper tagging and rating. Content warning notes at the top of the chatter are also great. You can even summarize key "this is the plot relevant stuff you missed of you're skipping this chapter" notes at the bottom too! This is a much smoother reading experience.

This is HELL on screen readers which is a disability access issue. Screen readers will read out every single asterisk you put, which I have seen done as entire page breaks. It's an awful reading experience. Please just don't.

Readers do not need their hands held through the reading experience. If they're enjoying the fic but don't care for smut, they can just skim until it gets interesting again. If they REALLY don't like smut, you warned them. There's a back button. You don't have to do a special song and dance isolating out the specific parts you think might be "icky". (If you think those bits are icky and don't like writing them, consider just don't! Fanfic is a hobby we do for fun and you don't have to write anything you don't find enjoyable. There's plenty of readers for gen fic and smut free ship fic).

Please, please don't try to span the entire page with whatever symbol you're using for your scene breaks. It takes an eternity for screen years to get through, and typically has me noping out of even the most interesting stores.

Instead, use just three (or fewer) make. Three is standard, and does the job without making your story unreadable.

It is hell

It is absolute hell

From navigation to listening to the voices

It's just awful

Since then I've tried to write with screen readers in mind because the number of websites that think about accessibility is SO SO SMALL

If you don't believe me, use NVDA which is a free accessibility tool. Otherwise you have to spend thousands of dollars for a slightly better one. Then try to navigate a website.

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

just.

wolf, staring down at the signature page of his first ever official report, absolutely terrified and absolutely furious because his general told him he should sign with his name and not just his number, but it’s been so long since he read that damn essay about wolves that he can’t remember how “wolf” is spelled.

he’s memorized how to spell so many words--he knows he’s spelled every other word in this report correctly, he knows he has--sounding out each syllable the way fox helped him learn to do because none of the sounds want to stick to the right letters. but his name was not a word he thought he’d ever have to write down.

now he can. now he wants to. and so he has to get this right, because his general asked him too and because that’s his name and he should know this. it’s not even that long. this should be easy.

finally he just puts down the letters he knows are there. but that looks too short, so he adds a few more. and that looks fine, and this is due in two minutes and he doesn’t have time to experiment with every possible spelling until he finds the one his brain likes best so he just tries to breathe and submits the report.

and the next day plo koon thanks him and says something about individual expression but absolutely nothing about spelling. and so wolf keeps signing his reports wolffe.

... until the day he does a holosearch for a picture of a wolf’s head to use as reference for painting his armor, and gets the whole “did you mean--” thing that shows up when you spell a search term wrong. by then it’s too late to change the spelling back, and he’s gotten attached to the shape of his name on paper, and if anyone wants to tease him about it they can take it up with his right hook.

Women scientists made up 25% of the Pluto fly-by New Horizon team. Make sure you share this, because erasing women’s achievements in science and history is a tradition. Happens every day.

.

That’s fucking insane.

So some asshole has thought up a new Tumblr scam: it's a post on a Tumblr account that's named something to make it look official-ish.

Variations include:

account-help

account-sync

account-update

account-updating

These posts show up on your dashboard, telling you that because they think you've monetized your Tumblr account, they're putting you in the penalty box sending you to the cornfield setting you to "Lurker Mode" where you can post but no one will see your posts. And, naturally, all you have to do is click on the helpful link to give tumblrsupport your account data to get it fixed.

Friends, this is a big fat lie.

The official location of Tumblr Support is https://www.tumblr.com/support or https://support.tumblr.com. And guess what? They'll already have your account information.

Tumblr has no such thing as Lurker Mode.

If you right-click on their link, you'll see it's a munged/shortened link. You can go to a site like https://www.expandurl.net to expand that link and see where it takes you: it's not Tumblr Support.

@staff, please be aware this is happening.