shenanigans

[ID: Event infographic for Be A Goldfish: A Multifandom Multimedia Microbang, dated 1 July to 31 August 2026. Across the middle, a variety of mediums are listed in three columns: "meta, zines, podfic, poetry, ficlets, drabbles, playlists, fanvids, (web) weaves, recipes, crafts, paintings, graphics, sketches, textiles, gifsets, icons, and more!"

The bottom left reads "No sign-ups or check-ins, award banners and tokens, small fanworks, 1,000 words max, comment bingo." A star in the bottom right reads "join today!" /End ID]

Welcome to Be a Goldfish: A Multifandom Multimedia Microbang! Join us for round 3. This is an event dedicated to small fanworks, taking the time to appreciate the little things, and big fun. Whether you’re a returning participant or you’ve just heard of us, dive in!

Participation is easy: just share as many small fanworks as you like, in any medium you can dream of, from 1 July through August 31, and comment on works shared by your fellow goldfish.

Fancy a bit of structure and inspiration? We offer weekly prompts and medium suggestions, as well as a comment bingo and a punch card. Use one, use none, use all: that’s your call! Participate on your own terms.

Want more information? Read our RuleDoc, which includes guidelines for a variety of different mediums, a few content restrictions, and image accessibility and commenting resources.

You can share works to our Dreamwidth Community, our AO3 Collection, our Pillowfort Community, or tagged #beagoldfish 2026 here on tumblr. You can tag us directly @bag-bang, too. Once you’ve posted, log your fanwork via our handy Entry Submission Form. At the end of the event, you can request awards for all your hard work!

Flex your fins and swim with us to new fannish heights. Experiment, explore, get excited, try new things, and share with us and other fans along the way!

Not in the creative mood? Join us anyway! Leave comments with wild abandon, cheer your fellow goldfish on, find new favorite works and compile them in a rec list or several. This is an event for everyone! Discover new works, new fandoms, and new friends. Your new favorite thing might be just one microbang away. Don’t forget: be bold! Be brave! Be kind! Be a goldfish!

When Grace first meets both of them, he tries to run away. They both end up racing him/chasing him down.

Stratt’s first words to Grace are “knock-knock”. Grace and Rocky’s first greeting is a knock on a wall.

Stratt and Rocky are both established to be bad at jokes, and have a very literal way of speaking.

Grace calls both Rocky and Stratt “mysterious”.

Grace asks Stratt: "Can I think about it?" She replies: "You have three hours." Grace asks Rocky: "Can I think about it?" He replies: "Yes. Think about it long time." (Addition from @inkyrainstorms)

Stratt takes Grace away from his environment to help solve the problem. Rocky leaves behind his environment to join Grace in his.

Hello everybody it's poll time again! Happy 10th kpop anniversary to me and happy 9th birthday to this blog, crazy time flies. This month is tough lots of great songs, we have 97 to vote for.

Click here to vote

Spotify Playlist

All votes and reblogs much appreciated. If you don’t want to miss polls join our discord!

If you are someone who is willing to be a beta reader, repost this image and share the fandom(s) you are willing to beta read.

Other information you might want to include in your post:

Rating(s) you are or are not willing to beta

Ship(s) you are or are not willing to beta

The kinds of tasks you can take on as a beta (here's a checklist that might help)

Length of fic that you think you could take on (in hundreds/thousands of words)

How an author can reach out to you to see if you'll work well together

Ryland Grace was not a sad man waiting for his demise. He was happy. He loved teaching, his students were SO important to him. He had a good life.

But he didn't fit societal norms and that somehow made his life less valuable? The way Stratt saying "oh you're not married, you don't have any immediate family or even a dog" was treated as part of an explanation as to why he should be more willing to go on a SUICIDE MISSION?! As if that somehow made his life less important? As if it made him some sort of expandable material?

It's genuinely so sad how realistic it is. It's also part of the reason why I wholeheartedly believe in aroace Grace. It's just such a common experience within the community that even if it's unintentional it feels like finally getting some sort of representation.

A little tiny microscopic dragon, rotifers passing by.

I'm gonna be a bit of a Debbie Downer for a second and point out that it's not just people who use screen readers who have difficulty with those fonts. It's also people with dyslexia, lower reading comprehension, lack of familiarity with cursive or fancy fonts, and non-native speakers.

I myself am none of the above, but I still can't read more than one or two words of either strikethrough or Zalgo text before I can feel a strain in my eyes.

For those who are able to visually read the words, I'll explain what the issue is with screen readers. Fancy Unicode Text isn't actually text. It's letters formed by unicode symbols that were created for use in, for example, mathematical equations. Each of those symbols has a name, and a screen reader will read out each "letter"'s name instead of reading the whole word. I'll put an example below, as an image, to save people who are using screen readers to read this post (there's a brief alt text though).

example courtesy of https://givemefonts.com/blog/accessibility-in-unicode

So, now that everyone is up to speed on the question, I have one question and two possible solutions.

The question: What is the purpose of using the fancy unicode text?

First possible solution: If you just want to be able to differentiate the font and/or colour of text within a fic, you can do that with a work skin and leave the text fully readable by screen readers. Here's one that was created for Undertale and has a whole bunch of web safe fonts you can switch between. There's one for Homestuck as well. And a third workskin that does lots of formatting, including fonts and colours.

Second possible solution: If you're going for a specific look that can only be achieved by fancy unicode text, then you might want to include that as an image and set the image's alt text to be the plain text version.

In most cases cases the snarl of glitch text or long strings of unicode-symbol-names-being-read-aloud is an automatic 'hell no'. Basically either is right up there with overly long ASCII/emoticon dividers in terms of annoyance factor. Also, a lot of the look of unicode-symbols-as-text can be more-or-less replicated by font and style changes such as using bold and italic or a cursive font, which are at least TTS friendly even if not always particularly great for people who sight-read with vision/perception issues. Though I would hope people with those issues are at least using software that ignores document CSS and forces the use of friendly-to-them fonts and formatting (the software I use has such features in addition to TTS, you just have to have enough sight to go through the menus changing things to your particular satisfaction).

So I highly second just using Cool Regular Text instead of unicode text, with maybe an optional skin if you want to be particularly spiffy about it (though note that skins get thrown away when the fic is downloaded, so I and my ereader likely wouldn't even notice any difference... unless the lack of skin causes a bunch of stuff to break in creative ways). So yes, look at the skins linked in the above reply, if you're really ambitious maybe even hit up the W3 Schools site and learn some CSS for ways of affecting text appearance yourself.

There's that scene where Grace is sitting alone in the Don't Go Crazy room looking at an image of a beach, and he looks to the side and sees himself walking towards him. Waves splash over his sneakers, and you wonder for a tiny moment if this is real, maybe it's one of his memories. But then, the ship alerts that it's decelerating, he rushes upstairs, and the moment is never brought up again.

The version of Grace walking on the beach is wearing the same outfit that he wears at the end of the movie on Erid.