A Mighty Octopus

We all know that feeling, we think our image descriptions are not good enough. We think they’re too short and insignificant. We wonder if it’s worth it posting one at all, but it’s always worth it. And here is why:

Even if an image description doesn’t mention everything in the image, it tells you a million things which aren’t in the image.

If your description is [ID: Reaction image of a nodding woman. /end ID] it tells you one million things. Such as: The image is not a tweet adding further information or context, it’s not a screenshot of a Snopes article debunking the post, it’s not someone disagreeing.

Those six little words, that nodding woman, it might not seem like a lot. It might seem like you can skip right over it, like it’s not worth mentioning - but it is.

An image could always be a wall of text explaining why OP is wrong, and simply knowing that’s not the case is super useful. Knowing that it’s just a reaction image, just a meme, just a photograph, is super useful.

Some general info on screen readers and accessibility:

Accessible censoring of words (Please don't use * and $)

IDs in the main body vs alt text

using both alt text and main body IDs (with examples)

Common accessibility issues for screen readers, large text + some ID tips

Start ID/ End ID tags explained

I love my screen reader

An ask about emoji and capitalization (spoiler: emoji are fine)

Accessibility of formatting and Purpose of Plain Text (spoiler: bold and italics are fine)

Using colored text in image descriptions

How tags are read

Inaccessibility of gradient text

Zalgo text is inaccessible

My #accessibility review tag

Posts aimed at screen reader users:

How to open a link in a new tab using VoiceOver

Some general info on what a screen reader is

Burning Eyes on AO3 (An introduction to VoiceOver through a fictional story, starring Zuko and Toph from atla)

Posts about writing:

The abled saviour trope

Writing Sokka from atla as disabled

I occasionally update this list, but I have a bunch more posts on my blog, so feel free to browse or use the search function.

My asks are always open (including anon), so feel free to ask, but I am very slow at responding so it might be easier and faster to look up accessibility related questions online.

"am i normal" is not as helpful question to ask as "are intrusive thoughts causing me frequent distress?" and "would my life be better if i could find a way to feel less distress/learn to tolerate the distress?"

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.

And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.

This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"

And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.

i mean, i just think it's perfect at doing what it sets out to do: showing a huge multiversal war with plane-wide stakes. there's a bunch of ways it does so, but i think there's three elements that land the set's storytelling for me:

the battles

the battles are a masterful piece of storytelling -- not only does having cards like 'invasion of ravnica' and 'invasion of alara' really sell the phyrexian attack as something happening across the whole magic multiverse, but each of these cards is also a carefully crafted love letter to that plane. like, look at the invasion of innistrad:

first of all, the -13/-13 is pure innistrad, calling back to tragic slip from dark ascencion specifically and the whole host of cards that care about the number 13 from magic's three visits to that plane, most notably blasphemous act and triskaidekaphobia. then, the art: we see the plane's humans and werewolves, usually at odds, fighting together against phyrexianized versions of the very same. having heroes and villains team up to establish the threat of an external danger is a classic storytelling maneuver and this is far from the firs time we're doing to see it here. but then it flips into:

this card also pays mechanical homage to innistrad in a big way, being a 'graveyard matters' card that makes 2/2 black zombies. but it also--flipping when the battle is 'defeated' does a lot of narrative work explaining how innistrad repels the invasion. these battles are a piece of storytelling genius for that--you can't fully tell a story of dozens of planes, each complex and rich enough to have had their own set (i mean, there are a few fun invasion cards for planes that haven't had a set, but focusing one hte ones that have) all individually repelling the phyrexian invasion, unless you have a george rr martin wordcount to do it in. trying to do this is one of the reasons the Magic Story accompanying this set was terrible. '

but this? this is brilliant. it, and the other invasions, tell you with spectacular economy of storytelling 'this thing that's iconic to the plane, this thing that's an inseparable part of its identity and why people love it, they brought that to bear and fought off the threat'. like, innistrad is the gothic horror plane, it's the plane where there's three distinct factions of sinister undead walking around, and saying 'yeah, that's how they win' on a card that also celebrates the plane's mechanical themes is a triumphant and cool-ass moment!

a lot of other other battle reverse sides feel like similar payoffs to huge elements of a plane's themes or story: special shout out to the backside of 'invasion of mercadia', which pays homage to classic magic character squee while also being a quasi-spellshaper, probably the iconic type and mechanic from that--frankly--not very beloved set

i'm also a huge fan of how these get to show some known characters being, in effect, the heroes of their own story. seeing the students from strixhaven unite to invoke the power of the elder dragons that founded their school, or queen marchesa standing bloody but defiant amid the ruins of her palace: it's hype as fuck!

(these are also fun mechanical references to the instants/sorceries matter theme of strixhaven and to the monarch mecahnic from conspiracy)

finally, some of the battles show the immense cost of the war. one of the big complaints about the set's stroy is "the phyrexians were defeated too easily" -- but again, i think this is a complaint founded in the Magic Story, where elesh norn kills two praetors and two more die in comically anticlimactic ways and we don't get to see much or any of the actual War happening. but the flipside of 'invasion of kaldheim' and 'invasion of vryn' don't convey that, they convey "this is a hard-fought war and huge sacrifices are being made"

so, like, the battles--while managing to fit fairly cohesively into the set and its limited archetypes as a whole--are these amazing homages to the game's entire history, each of them telling what feels like a huge epic story while being only a fraction of the set and its conflict. big love for the battles.

2. the transforming cards

phyrexia has always been Transformation Horror. the terror of phyrexia is not that they'll kill you, but that they'll make you One Of Them. now--let's take a brief sidebar and acknowledge that the root of this genre of horror in 50s scifi is anticommunist myths about brainwashing, and one of the driving forces behind it in the modern day is cultural fears of disability and gender transition (read the excellent transformation, horror, eros, phyrexia). but yknow, i don't think you can lay this at MOM's feet when it's kind of an original genre sin, and an inevtiablity of massculture udner gender hegemony more generally. so with that as a given, MOM rules because it's the first set to use transforming cards to show phyrexian, well, transformation:

fun fact: some of these transforming cards (the ones without portals clearly visible) include a hidden phyrexian 'phi' symbol in the art. can you spot the one in order of the mirror?

umm but anyways not only do these cards rule, showing phyrexianization as a process, as a before and after, really inviting you to dwell in the horror of that (and also managing the nearly impossible task of brigning back phyrexian mana in a non-gamebreaking way--here being used in such a way that the loss of life implies a painful, difficult transformation) -- they also help make the set feel less one-sided. yes, we see phyrexia driven back on all the battles: but on these cards we see the invasion pressing onward, turning eldraine's knights and amonkhet's khenra, professors at strixhaven and imps on innistrad. they tell you 'it's everywhere, everywhere you look people are turning, transforming into monsters and fighting their own plane'. and best of all are the legends:

heliod and etali are pretty big deals to the metaphysics of the planes they're from! these are like, characters who were on powerful, beloved cards, with real meaning, phyrexianized permanently until their erstwhile allies have to take them down. gaining the color of the specific faction of phrexians that got them is a really neat bit of mechanical storytelling on all of these, by the by.

but, yeah, if the battles sell the resistance against the phyrexians, the compleated cycles sell the threat and the damage they've done. and speaking of selling the threat...

3. the teamup cards

the teamup cards are the final set element in the trinity that makes MOM land for me. each one consists of two legendary creatures from the same plane, fighting against the invasion together. just like the battles, they're celebrations of planes, harkening back to iconic characters and those characters' mechanics--in a really neat touch, they all have alternate art treatments with a frame that was unique to the plane they're from. some of them, like errant and giada or zimone and dina, are culminations of the characters' arcs and bonds from their own sets:

others, and these are even cooler to me, are characters who are an extremely unlikely teamup, deadly enemies who just this once have to fight a threat that's bigger than either of them. it's a classic narrative beat, and one that does so much to sell the scale of the conflict.

and then, leaving all that aside, even just random draft chaff commons and uncommons are telling this story, of everything on every plane coming together when it counts the most, of things we've seen and know and understand being changed and twisted

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

- poll

1. seemingly obvious answer 35%

2. not obvious answer 12%

4. I'm bald 54%

- reblog

Africa 12%

I dont knowwwwwwww 75%

im bald 13%

- reblog

The lily in the valley will wither. The flowers in the forest will decay. But this friendship will last forever, when all other things fade away.

March 4, 1885.

they don't know how to read and this makes them mean and dumb. also even though their meanness and dumbness are the result of poor education, they are still personal character flaws that deserve to be mocked.

they are responsible for wide scale censorship in schools and on social media. because, as we all know, children are famously politically powerful, never want to see horny or edgy content, and love it when books are banned in their school libraries.

they love to spread misinformation around so they can all armchair diagnose each other and act like they have learning disabilities in order to excuse their laziness about doing school work. obviously they are all liars and just need to just get their acts together and grow up instead of shirking responsibility for their actions like this.

they are uniquely cruel in comparison to past generations, and this is because of Phone. and also TikTok. no one has ever been cruel like this before.

my daughter cannot, through action or inaction, harm a human or allow a human to come to harm

a daughter at rest or in constant motion remains at rest or in constant motion unless acted upon by another force

daughters are never created or destroyed, only transformed

always treat every daughter as loaded, even if you know she isn't

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

someone else shaves the barber (that would make the barber someone who does not shave themself, which would mean the barber shaves them)

the barber shaves themself (this would make the barber someone who shaves themself, which would mean they aren't shaved by the barber)

the barber is shaved by a different barber (a different barber still counts as a person.)

the barber is shaved by a razor and not a person (if this counts as not shaving themself then nobody in this town is being shaved by the barber and this does not actually fit any part of the scenario described)

the barber is a woman (women actually count as people so she still needs to be shaved)

the barber is bald (bald people are people too.)

Looks like this corrupt government is gonna have to find another grounds to arrest him. And hey look there’s this incident with a hotel and some money’s left unaccounted for….. perfect excuse to jail an enemy of the state.

The story of the incident never included the barber in any of the tomfoolery, but changed were made as the story was gossiped about. Characters and events were forgotten and replaced with new ones until no elements of truth remained. Is it still the same rumor?

The barber is arrested for this fake story. They take him in. Now, cops are allowed to lie, but if all they do is lie then the barber is safe believing the opposite of what they say. The cops grill him by playing the role two opposite characters— truth cop and lie cop, and the barber isn’t told who’s who. Luckily the cops are kinda dumb and don’t realize that if they answer ask questions this makes it trivially easy for the barber to figure out who to ask for an attorney. Soon, he’s slated for trial

The judge doesn’t care if the story’s fake as long as the prison pays them. Many call this place tyrannical. But at what point in adding unjust laws, one by one, does a government become a tyranny?

Back to the barber though, he’s through with it. He’s making a daring escape. Because the cops have no idea what he’s got in his pocket.