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And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

also kids intentionally or not will beat the everloving shit out of their instruments, so we often had to mend bent keywork, never mind redoing the pads

and before that, we were a classical percussion teacher at a youth music centre (where we had learnt as a kid), and we were in a meeting with other staff and said "oh and hey, our timpani desperately need new heads, the current ones are old and stretched and really hard to tune"

Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations!!!

Great things must be said thrice! Congratulations to our Sect Leader Yue Qingyuan for winning the 2026 tumblr mpreg polls!!!

May the Cang Qiong sect thrive in the fertility of their sect leader!!!

MQF who is smart enough to recognize that reporting the child abuse to Zhangmen-Shixiong is pointless actually (he's been trying to surreptitiously get NYY in to assess her for many things for years but fucking Yue Qingyuan keeps Qing Jing LOCKED DOWN on Shen Qingqiu's behalf). So, he tries to poison LBH juuuuust enough to justify keeping him for ever-longer periods of observation on Cian Cao. But nothing works on this kid!

The demons attack QJP and threaten the whole Without A Cure thing and no one else believes it was real (just a bluff since Binghe was fine). But MQF knows there's something about Binghe that made it not work. He keeps testing weirder and weirder combinations on Binghe (who is starry eyed and pleased as punch at how much care and attention Mu-Shibo keeps giving him - especially all the nice food and genuinely useful strengthening tonics).

When SQQ pushes Binghe into the Abyss and reveals that the boy was secretly a demon all along MQF feels both extremely vindicated (he isn't losing his mind) and extremely disappointed he now knew exactly what kinds of experiments to run but he'd lost his test subject.

Everyone else writes LBH off for dead but MQF keeps an eye out and starts researching demons and when LBH crawls out of the Abyss and goes to find doctor shibo, MQF greets him enthusiatically, makes him sit down, and immediately gives him several varieties of new and improved poisons to consume.

Spoilers ahead too:

His work was centered around providing relief to Palestinians such as distribution of food, housing the displaced, and removing rubble.

hi everyone, its puppet! you may know it from getting terminated constantly and having to remake its dono posts a lot. sadly it has to aaagain.

so, puppets a homeless and disabled trans woman, and it cant work, has been couch crashing, and has been living purely off donations from tumblr as they keep terminating it. and now on top of that, it is living with its girlfriend, @phantomqueen10001001! while this has been great for both of us,, puppet already only has enough money for food for the next 1-2 weeks, and we both really need to eat. and so we would really appreciate if anyone could help!

puppet has a paypal here, and cassie has one here.

also, in august we are going to lose our current crash spot, and we need to look for another, but we're very disconnected in the city.. if anyone here knows anyone in seattle who needs a roommate or who could give us a place to stay for a while,,

we'd really really appreciate any help.

So many dog owners are practically allergic to doing anything to alleviate human anxiety around their dog, even things that would greatly benefit the dog like keeping it leashed and not bringing it into high stress environments* without cause. If a friend told me they were afraid of cats, I’d tell them it is best we meet outside of my home because that is a completely reasonable accommodation. There are so many horror stories about someone being told another person is afraid of dogs and repeatedly putting them in situations where they have to be in close proximity to a dog without that person’s consent because they think it’s funny or because ‘My dog is such a good dog. It’ll definitely change their mind about dogs. This is like impromptu exposure therapy.’ and it makes everything worse.

Someone being frightened and on the verge of a panic attack at your little Shih Tzu mix may seem like an amusing overreaction to you but those bitches (pun absolutely intended) do bite and the safest thing to do for that person and your dog is to keep them separated. You don’t know what life they’ve lead.

What are image descriptions and why are they important?

Image Descriptions text following a picture explaining what’s in that picture. They are primarily for blind/visually impaired people with screen readers and visually impaired people who can read text but have issues with pictures.

They also help people who have trouble:

focusing on/understanding a picture

reading text on images (ex low contrast, weird fonts, etc)

getting images to load

Without image descriptions posts are not accessible to many people 

How to make image descriptions in general

Do something to indicate you are starting a description

That way people know you’re describing the image and not commenting on it.

Describe the image

You want to be concise but also include all relevant details. 

Indicate you’re ending the image description

That way people know that whatever is next is commentary etc and not part of the image description

I learned from example, so here are lots of examples to look at (it’s basically all the descriptions I reblog but didn’t make, so there’s a whole lot of different styles. 

I am in the process of making a guide specific to tweets and tumblr tags/replies/posts that I will link on this post when they’re done I’m just very disabled. 

Things not to do a

Bold, underline, or italicize words; use small text, all caps, fancy colors, fancy fonts

This makes it difficult for many people who need image descriptions to read them

In addition, all caps and gradient text tend to make screen readers say one letter at a time instead of reading out the words

Correct misspellings or grammar mistakes

We want to be as accurate to the image as possible. 

If the spelling mistake is to the point a screen reader wouldn’t be able to read it, I recommend putting the actual word next to it. 

If there’s just a wall of text, you can add paragraph breaks, commas or periods, etc, just put a note saying what you added 

Sensor curse words etc 

This is probably the question I get asked the most. And I’m glad, because it means people are starting to think critically about how they share content on the internet, and they’re wanting to do better. That’s awesome! I’m super grateful for the opportunity to educate more folks about this.

I have a secret, though: there isn’t a secret to writing good image descriptions.

Here’s a guide on how to write image descriptions and alt text. You can also check out my how to ID tag for guides and other tips and tricks. There are many approaches to writing image descriptions, which is why I think checking out multiple guides is useful.

But I wanna stress: you don’t have to write image descriptions just like someone else. There isn’t a secret formula or code. How I write image descriptions isn’t going to be exactly how someone else does it, especially when describing something subjective like art.

And I want to make another point: ANY image description is better than none. Literally. If you share an image and just write “a photo of a family reunion at the park,” that’s providing information that was not there before. You are making that image more accessible!

Here are my tips for describing fan art specifically:

I start with what I typically notice first about the image. That usually means that I write things in about this order: Character ID, hair/skin color, pose, clothing, background. This varies, of course.

Because it’s art, sometimes it’s useful to describe the lighting and mood of the piece. Is it dark? Illuminated by a single light source? What’s the tone of the piece (both the literal color and the feeling)? Is it referencing another visual work, like a scene from a movie or another famous art piece? Is it bright and colorful or dreary and moody? These are all good things to mention, if you feel so inclined.

Some people like to go into extreme detail when writing image descriptions. Some keep them very brief and to the point. I fall somewhere in between, but I do try not to get too bogged down in the details (for my own sake, honestly).

And, Tumblr-specific points:

Add the image description directly beneath the image in the main text portion of the post, before any commentary (if you’re the original artist). Add it in the text portion before your own commentary if you’re reblogging. That way, your commentary will make sense to someone using a screen reader.

Don’t hide the description under a read more link. Simply because…well, imagine if that was how Tumblr worked for sighted people, and you had to click through to people’s individual blogs while scrolling through your dash to see any images. That’d suck, right?

Accessibility should be built into your posts from the start. So don’t post an image, then reblog it from yourself with a description. Put the description in the original post so that there’s just one accessible version of the image floating around.

Let me know if you have any questions that I didn’t cover here! I’m not an expert on image descriptions and I hope I don’t come across as one. I’m just a person trying to do their best in this cold, inaccessible world. 

One of the most profound things I read in my original journey to ADHD diagnosis was what Dr. Ned Hallowell calls “the cough drop sign” in the book, Driven To Distraction. I’d never felt more seen before reading this quote. It comes from one of Hallowell’s ADHD patients: “Someone left [a cough drop] on the dashboard of our car. The other day I saw the cough drop and thought, I’ll have to throw that away. When I arrived at my first stop, I forgot to take the cough drop to a trash can. When I got back into the car, I saw it and thought, I’ll throw it away at the gas station. The gas station came and went and I hadn’t thrown the cough drop away. Well, the whole day went like that, the cough drop still sitting on the dashboard. When I got home, I thought, I’ll take it inside with me and throw it out. In the time it took me to open the car door, I forgot about the cough drop. It was there to greet me when I got into the car the next morning, Jeff was with me. I looked at the cough drop and burst into tears. Jeff asked me why I was crying, and I told him it was because of the cough drop. He thought I was losing my mind. ‘But you don’t understand,’ I said, ‘my whole life is like that. I see something that I mean to do and then I don’t do it. It’s not only trivial things like the cough drop; it’s big things, too.’”