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.

Transcript: I thought that perhaps I had dumbed it down to the dumbest and easiest level, but now we are going to do Misogynoir for Cavemen.

Black have oppression. Woman have oppression. Black woman have oppression. Unique to Black woman, not simply Black oppression or woman oppression. New Black woman oppression. Black man have unique oppression. Black woman have unique oppression. Both under white oppression.

White oppression like Swiss Army Knife, many tools. (Drawing of multitool labeled with ableism, homophobia, capitalism, patriarchy, classism, and racism.) Many Black men try to put away racism, but keep patriarchy. Many Black women point out whole tool fucked. Point out patriarchy hurt Black women.

Black man bitch about accountability. Black man very unwilling to part with patriarchy. White woman buddy up for convenience. White man stay winning. Black man very unwilling to say patriarchy bad. Black man want power, low key like white man, from patriarchy. Big problem for Black man cause it don’t work that way.

Anytime Black woman point this out, Black man get very angry. Black man say, “Guess we blame Black man now.” Black man still won’t let go of patriarchy. Black man Black woman have other dynamics that if me no make aside for, people get pedantic.

My mom (72) recently downsized and moved close enough to me that checking on her in person regularly is not really out of my way, but when I was obvious about it she wouldn’t let me “stop-by” because she was, “fine”.

- ask for something they can actually help you with. Elders have skills. Mending? Advice about knitting, gardening, home repair, nevermind professional training?

-ask about their experiences. “I was reading about xyz event the other day & I would love to know what that time was like for you. Can we chat about it over tea?” Goes double for family history for relatives.

-“Someone gave me this [or, I ended up with extra] & I don’t need/want it, but I bet you have a use for it. Can I bring it over? I would hate for it to go to waste.”

The thing about higher education is that it is a scam and will also change your life. I was lucky enough to get a significant scholarship and was able to get out without massive debt, so it mostly changed my life only for the better.

I ended up writing TTRPGs because my medieval studies degree didn’t help me get a job in any sort of actual history-focused field like research, museum curation, etc., because it turns out those job markets are extremely competitive. There are very few job openings.

Fresh out of my degree program i could only get a job teaching, which was totally miserable, and then I ended up doing archival work (which is a job my degree actually did help me get).

TTRPGs and game design in general were things I always had an interest in, and Eureka started as something just for fun. But when that archival work dried up, it became a way for me to take control of my own career by utilizing a skill I am both good at and enjoy using. I have never had hardly any success with any other more conventional jobs. I struggle with interpersonal work because I’m socially inept, and I struggle with manual labor because I’m physically disabled, so A.N.I.M. is kinda my last shot.

As for using my college education, I actually use it all the time in my line of work, in Eureka, not just Death Bed. I happen to also have a Bsc in psychology and MA in psychiatry. Most branches of psychology are 80-90% pseudoscientific woo-woo, but my focus was on behavioral psychology, which is only maybe about 50% pseudoscientific woo-woo.

Having a basic understanding of behavioral psychology is a great asset to game design, because it focuses on how the environment encourages and discourages individual “behaviors.” (No, this isn’t “mind control, it’s just knowing that people are less likely to want to do something if the process or result sucks.)

Studying psychiatry helped me learn that the field is about 80% pseudoscience and at least 70% concentrated evil. Psychiatric research is almost always more concerned with eliminating mentally ill people, rather than eliminating the suffering mentally ill people endure. I also learned that “mental illness” is a very nebulous category and “mental illnesses” don’t even really exist half the time.

In theory, any given “mental illness” is supposed to be a shorthand term for a particular pattern of symptoms appearing together, so that treatments that worked on previous people with that specific collection of symptoms can be tried on the person receiving the diagnosis. But in practice, this isn’t how a lot of researchers or medical professionals really treat it. They treat it like a physical virus or bacterial infection that can be eliminated from the body entirely to produce a perfectly healthy normal person, not acknowledging that these symptoms are behaviors, personality traits, and perceptions. In other words, they often *are* the person, or at the very least it’s hard to separate “the person” from these undesirable behaviors, traits, and perceptions. (And another thing, what traits are “undesirable” is a delineation that is very rarely in the best interest of the patient.)

A lot of these themes appear in Eureka, particularly with the Vampire Trait. For instance, how quite a lot of the Vampire Trait’s features which embody classic “everybody knows vampires act like this” things are heavily implied to be learned behaviors in response to how other people treat them for being a vampire. Also, the implication that the vampire you see is an illusion, an effect created by something you can’t see. Because you can’t see the true source, the only thing that can be studied and reacted to is the effects. Treating the effects as the source themselves, or pretending you can see the source when you can’t, is bound to lead to erroneous conclusions. This is how I feel about much of psychology.

Also, my medieval studies MA is super helpful for, like, knowing what people actually used to think about vampires and werewolves and how they interact with historical Christianity and stuff.

Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.

bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.

Also, following this, I asked my mom what her thoughts were on the matter, and she said that while she “wouldn’t put it in those terms” she broadly agreed, and thought that anyone expecting any sort of exclusivity when a marriage proposal wasn’t at least on the very immanent horizon was “nuts, honestly.” I hesitantly asked if she was including relationships with premarital sexual activity in that, and her response was “Of course. I mean, gosh, you know your Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week before she finally settled down.”

And this was when I learned, to my shock, that the oft-repeated story of how “Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week” didn’t just mean “Aunt Terri had a full dance card” but rather meant that Aunt Terri had a period of her life where she literally dated exactly seven guys at once, all of whom she was sleeping with (or, my mom was quick to disclaim, “well, fooling around with, I don’t know how far she actually went with any of them, but they were definitely all fooling around behind closed doors”), on a literal weekly rotation. Like, they had a schedule. A schedule that all seven of the guys knew.

Wait! Wikipedia DOES mention cruising/bathhouses as an example of gay hookup culture, citing this source. Like the way these terms are discussed, it sounds like straight people participate in hookup culture less anonymously bc they're the overwhelming majority of the population and can just go to any nearby party/event/venue to flirt and hookup with someone they vibe with and who likely lives in the same area and could be a recurring encounter, whereas gay men eliminate the "flirt" and "vibe with" part to make things easier when showing up to a place that may not be conveniently located and where the only commonality is wanting to have sex with other men.

And like... you do get that that is kinda insane, right?

Because this is something that so often leads to suffering. And I am saying this as someone disabled, who had so many issues due to this in his childhood.

Just three examples: when I was 7, I was supposed to get checked for autism. My mother did not want an autistic child. Since she just could have a "neurotypical" child by refusing diagnosis, she did just that.

When I was 12, my mother had decided I needed a certain plastic surgery (one that had a minor health benefit, but still was largely a beauty thing). I did not want it. I really, really did not want it. We still went through almost the entire process until thankfully there was a doctor who went: "Wait, this is elective. I am refusing to do this on a child that does not want it."

And when I was 14 my mother refused to get me to the hospital when I had severe food poisoning. She refused me hospital treatment for almost two weeks. By the time I got actually taken to the hospital I was almost dead.

And here is the thing: all of this should just not happen. The doctor when I was 12 was cool, but... he refused to do the surgery because he had the right to make a conscience call. Legally my mother was in the right to force me into that elective surgery. And that just should not be the case.

A lot of children die and suffer due to their legal inability to consent - or refuse consent - to medical treatments. And I wish y'all would understand that.

it might also be fruitful to consider which of the problematic aspects of the book are there because the author didn't see anything wrong with them (the orientalism, I should say), versus which of them are there intentionally, because the author wished the reader to find the protagonist monstrous (the count's boasting of owning Haydee as a slave). you might also like to contemplate the way these two problematic aspects intersect with each other: namely, that the count's ownership of Haydee functions to code the count as an orientalist despot and that this is what is meant to make him seem monstrous.