black hole in b flat

Before A Slow Poison quest is completed, there's no banner hanging there.

If A Slow Poison quest is completed, Fletcher's banner can be seen next to their store. If the player saved Minrathous, it'll disappear later, along with Fletcher themselves.

After completing For the Love of Treviso quest, three banners of de Acutis (Neri and Noa's house) appear in the casino. I think it's because they were actively involved in that quest earlier.

And after completing A Time to Kill quest, the final two banners of Egrativi (Jacobus' new house) are hung.

Unlike Fletcher's banner, the city choice doesn't affect the others.

There's still some space left in the hub, but I don't know if that means there was supposed to be another banner here, or if it's just to make the crow statue at the entrance visible.

But that did make me think about Lucanis specifically, and his excruciatingly precise timekeeping while keeping Spite locked down, and how, if you hate your host and the prison he's built of himself, one way to really fuck with him would be to destroy the very thing he uses to mark time against you,

I completely agree with this! I have a lot of headcanons about new & unexpected things Lucanis struggles with after leaving the Ossuary, but one of them (which I think he does bring up in Lighthouse banter early after his move to the Fade) is that it really bothers him that he still can't tell time in this place. Between being underwater at the Ossuary, his deep fear of losing time to Spite, and the fact that he's surrounded by total strangers who could easily make up answers when he asks, I think he would be desperate to have some kind of mechanical, trustworthy metric of the passing hours.

As a result, my Rook asks Bellara to make him a fantasy quantum clock, which is the elven artifact that eventually shows up next to his bed in the pantry.

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

And what are you that, wanting you, I should be kept awake As many nights as there are days With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you, As many days as crawl I should be listening to the wind And looking at the wall?

I know a man that's a braver man And twenty men as kind, And what are you, that you should be The one man on my mind?

It's also how we know that most dinosaurs had round pupils. It's pretty common for people to depict dinosaurs with slit pupils, probably because of Jurassic Park, mostly because it looks really cool, but nope, they were round. There are very few, if any, birds with slit pupils, which is further evidence for round pupils. And most extant animals with slit pupils are on the small side. Many people think of cats having slit pupils, and they do, but it's the little ones. Lions and tigers have round pupils, because slit pupils are most useful closest to the ground and they actually sacrifice some of their visually acuity for the sake of being better at judging distances in low-light conditions, and most animals with them are ambush predators that jump out at their prey. You ever seen a video where someone throws or bounces a ball towards a cat and it bops them on the head and they seem surprised? That's why; they struggle to track where the ball is going, especially horizontally. So for anything over a certain size, slit pupils are a detriment, especially if they chase down prey.

Stand-alone versions under the cut!

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.

It's time!

The goal of this survey is to collect data on the demographics of and choices made by the Tumblr-based Dragon Age fandom. Everything is 100% anonymous, and all questions on the form are skippable - just keep in mind that the more questions you answer, the more accurate and thorough the data will be!

The form is split into the following sections:

Voter demographics and series-wide preferences - this asks things like your age range, gender, favourite game in the series, and which mainline and side-content installments you've played

Choices specific to and your preferences within Dragon Age: Origins

Choices specific to and your preferences within Draon Age II

Choices specific to and your preferences within Dragon Age: Inquisition

Choices specific to and your preferences within Dragon Age: The Veilguard

And a very optional bonus section where you're invited to share your more specific opinion on each individual main game and companion, along with a place to share any feedback on the blog and suggestions for future tournaments!

This form will remain open for a month - submissions will be accepted until July 7th, and results will be shared shortly after.