#visual sensitivity

here is your reminder that many many devices have options to reduce the intensity of color/light.

as somebody who doesn’t do well with high contrast images i am very displeased with the new tumblr theme. it hurts my eyes, it makes my head hurt, i can’t look at it for long and it makes me anxious.  I understand it helps people who deal with visual impairments, but there’s people on the other end of this spectrum, too. Why can’t you let us choose how we would like to view tumblr? I thought this site is for everyone?

Brain Activity Shows Development of Visual Sensitivity in Autism

Research investigating how the brain responds to visual patterns in people with autism has shown that sensory responses change between childhood and adulthood.

I have barely started reading it and I’m completely mesmerized and so far always wanting to know what happens next.  

However some parts are videos and animations and some of those contain things flashing super-fast -- like the way things flash at the beginning of Big Bang Theory, series of photos going faster and faster until it feels like a strobe light.  If you’re photosensitive epileptic and can’t control that in any way, I wouldn’t risk it.  Photosensitive anything else, use your judgement.  

I’m photosensitive with migraines and general visual overload but I can handle this sort of thing on a good day, and I handle it better if I’m more forewarned and prepared than i was here.  Hence telling people.  Most of it so far is not doing this, but it definitely happens.  And the parts in the videos convey essential information so skipping them you won’t fully know what’s going on.

Mostly unrelated comment on the content itself:  I didn’t expect to find it interesting and thought I would have to force myself through it to read it at all.  It yanked me in and I haven’t yet gotten bored or disinterested.  If you’d told me the premise there’s no way I would have expected to like it.  

This is the thing... I swear that whether I like something or not depends the most heavily on how much I care about the characters.  It’s not the plot, not the ideas contained within it, etc.  Those things affect it, but the characters and the particular ways they’re developed can make the difference between being deathly bored by something, and loving it so much I can’t tear my eyes off it.  17776 was so good at making me care about the first character within a very short period of time, that all the rest of the considerations faded into the background.

It’s not always the main character I like, either.  I can’t stand the main character in Orange is the New Black, but I watch it anyway because I love Suzanne and identify with her painfully much.  (Although the last season, the main character managed to at least hold my interest despite not really becoming more likable.)  In Firefly I don’t know who the main character is exactly supposed to be, but I both love the character of Kaylee and sort of wish I could date someone like her, and she’s one of a few characters who keep me coming back.  In The Book of Night With Moon I love every cat character in the whole book, I love the fact that the characters are not only cats but realistic cats except possibly inasfar as they’re wizards.  (But reading it made me wonder if my cat was a wizard and that’s what she was doing when I couldn’t find her.)  Like they could just sit around all day and do nothing and I’d find it interesting -- the fact there’s also a good plot and some fascinating ideas buried deep underneath it, is just a bonus.  

And with Tolkien I am always a little upset that he didn’t write more of something he really enjoyed -- hobbits just being hobbits.  He made up plenty of such stories but only told them to relatives and maybe close friends.  He assumed the public would never be interested.  I think a lot of the public, and especially fans, would’ve been totally enthralled by what Tolkien called ‘hobbitry’ and seemed to worry there was already too much of in the books.  Like... I used to be part of a MUD where some people just endlessly role-played hobbits doing hobbitry, and it was a lot of fun both to take part in and to read the logs from.  I’m not normally good at role-play but someone coaxed me into it and it was fun.  I’m sure anyone in the hobbit section of that MUD would’ve loved an entire book of nothing but hobbitry, so certainly stories here and there would’ve done well in some circles.  Writers need to remember that if they enjoy telling a certain kind of story, there are people somewhere in the world who will enjoy hearing or reading it.  It may be lots of people or just a few, but you’re never so unique that only you would like your writing.  And I think Tolkien felt that only he and his family would enjoy random bouts of hobbitry.

Anyway, all that is to say, I can’t explain why 17776 pulled me in, or how.  Nor will I explain what it’s about, because discovering what it’s about and who the characters are is already a spoiler.  And I don’t think I would be able to handle it if the animations/videos were nothing but flashing, but since they contain other things, I’ve so far been willing and able to put up with it -- today at least -- entirely because it has pulled me in so thoroughly.  

YMMV, I know people who are driven by other things who love things I can’t stand and can’t stand things I love.  Like I can’t stand The Hunger Games.  I read the entire series but it felt like watching paint dry.  Or worse.  I actually found the characters and story interesting in the abstract.  And I’m glad I read it so I can make references to it and understand references other people make to it.  But I hated -- consciously -- every single moment of reading it.  It was never easy.  No part of it flowed past quickly.  Every part of it was an actual mental struggle in a way I can’t describe.  And I honestly don’t know what made me keep reading.  And yet, I know people who liked it, even people who loved it.  And it’s not just that I’m not usually into dystopias, there was just something about the book that utterly refused to interest me.  Like I could think back on it and be interested intellectually.  But my emotions wouldn’t connect at all.