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It's that time again

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You ever realize that you have, like, a shit ton of experiences? Not like resume experience, but things that have happened to you. There was that time you fell over when you were three and that’s why you have a little scar on your chin. There was the time you won a gold medal for a sport (and that other time you got a participation ribbon). There was the time you and your best friends had a sleepover and you told them things you’d never told anyone else. Then, when those friendships ended, you wished it had never happened even though at the time you felt so loved. There was the time you graduated from school, the time you got your first job, the time you met the love of your life. There was the time your beloved dog died and you cried for a week. The first time you felt like a real adult was when you signed the lease for the first place you lived without your parents. Then the first time you felt old was when you helped your younger sibling do the same thing and you wondered if you had also tried to hide your giddiness behind an unconvincing mask of coolness. The time your first child was born and you realized that you were now responsible for an entire tiny human’s safety and wellbeing. The time you found out that your dad was sick and would never get better. The time you went to his funeral and cried when Louis Armstrong’s version of What a Wonderful World was played. The time you realized that you had built your own family, however unconventional, and that that was how you got through everything life sent at you. The time you realized that you were getting older and had to start thinking about what would happen to your family when you were no longer around. The time you said I love you to someone and you meant that you loved who they were, yes, but also that you loved the decades you had spent together building and laughing and working through things and living life. You ever realize that you’re a whole entire person with everything that entails?

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The secret to making any food the most delicious thing you’ve ever tasted is to be really really hungry.

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sorry but im always gonna be the supporting sluts kinda feminist. u cant convince me that harassing sex workers or accusing horny women of "setting all women back" is the way to a better future

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quiz: why do lobsters have one claw bigger

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are you ever scrolling through tumblr and you have a thought and immediately lose it so you have to scroll back up to give your brain the conditions under which it originally created the thought so you can bring it back

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“and i’ve actually been friends with tyler hoechlin for a couple years now, and it was just ironic that we were on the same show together. he’s like family to me.” - holland roden

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Julien Rivoire, Winamp Portable Player

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i’m sorry kink fans but i just can’t see the suffix ‘con’ without thinking it means convention

‘dubcon’ will skrillex be there??

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If a fandom is literate, it’s not a normal fandom.

What a wonderful piece of media! Surely the fandom will be literate and normal

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So Tumblr glitched on me and wouldn’t load more of my dash or any of my own blog, and I had a brief moment of worrying that the site had finally met its end. I took a screenshot of what I was seeing in case it was my last Tumblr experience ever, and I’ve got to say, if this were the last Tumblr post I ever saw, it would feel right. He is proceeding. Thank you @hurglewurm for your excellent gif.

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stop earning advanced degrees i need you to finish your fanfiction

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sure i guess sex is okay but have you ever closed a dozen tabs after finishing an academic paper

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Making Your Podfic (especially with Music and/or Sound Effects) More Accessible and Listener Friendly

So you're planning to make a podfic with music and/or sound effects, and you want to think about ways to make it more accessible? Awesome!! This will guide you through some steps you can take to make your podfic more accessible, some of which will also make for a more pleasant listening experience for listeners without accessibility needs, but the focus will primarily be on accessibility. Some of this will also be applicable to podfics with multiple recording sessions without music or sound effects, but again, that's not the focus.

What's the number one thing you can do to make your podfic with music and/or sound effects more accessible to those with noise sensitivity, auditory processing conditions, who are somewhat hard of hearing, or other auditory accessibility needs?

MAKE A CLEAN VERSION, with NO music or sound effects! This can be a very easy change to your process for most people! After editing out mistakes and doing your audio clean up but before you add music or sound effects, simply export your audio. Upload it wherever you upload your final version, drop in a second link to the no music/sound effects version, and that's it! Of course, this may not be trivial for some people, depending on your individual process or other factors. I hope you will decide that it's worth doing anyway. As someone with audio accessibility needs myself, I can tell you it makes a HUGE difference. There are podficcers I love who I can't listen to some of what they've recorded because there's no version without music/sound effects, or sometimes I can only listen on a good day. There are fics I love where there's a podfic version, but I will never be able to listen to it because there's more music/sounds effects than I can handle. This one change will make people like me VERY happy and will expand your audience!

Secondly, especially if you've got a lot of audio dynamics (really quiet whispery bits and also really loud shouty bits), be sure to use the Compressor tool. Long story short, the compressor makes the actual noise level of the quiet bits louder and the loud bits quieter, while still leaving the impression of whispering or shouting. In other words, keep the emotion, but don't force your listeners to keep changing the volume on their headphones/speakers/hearing aid to be able to hear what you're saying or avoid getting their ears blown out (very useful for other listeners too, especially people listening on headphones or in the car). A quick overview of how to use the Compressor settings (this is for Audacity, which is what I'm most familiar with, but most audio editing tools will have something similar):

Threshold: how loud do you want to go before starting to make things quieter?

Make-up gain: after compressing the loud bits down, how much do you want to make everything louder to make up for it?

Knee width: how quickly and starkly do you want the compression to apply? At 0db, this will be a very sharp change. Lower levels will lead to less sharp changes

Ratio: for the loud bits that are getting compressed, how much compression should be applied? The higher the Ratio the more the loud parts of the audio will be compressed.

Okay, but maybe you want to ALSO make the version with music and/or sound effects more accessible, since that's your vision for the podfic and you want as many people as possible to be able to experience it? Great! PLEASE still make a version without music/sound effects as noted above, because even doing everything you can won't be enough for everyone. But it's also great to do what you can to make your music/sound effects version accessible for those that are able to enjoy it with some changes. So….what are some things you can do?

As much as possible, avoid putting music or Foley over your words. For people with audio processing issues especially, it can be very difficult to parse words when there's background music (and especially background music that itself has words).

If you're going to have music or Foley over words, make sure the words are significantly louder than the music. You can use the Analyze Contrast tool (in the Analyze menu in Audacity) to compare the relative loudness of two selections.

For music or Foley between words (like in a section break), make sure it's not too much louder or softer than the sections that come before and after. Again, use that Analyze Contrast tool to compare selections.

You can also use Analyze Contrast to even out the sound between recording sessions!

For sound effects that modify your voice, go only to the point where your voice still sounds very intelligible to you. Someone with auditory accessibility needs will likely struggle with intelligibility well before someone without those needs.

Hope this was helpful!

(This is written from my perspective as someone who has audio accessibility needs, as well as being a podficcer myself. Beta help and additional thoughts from @writerproblem193 @keriarentikai @xiaokuer-schmetterling and others not on Tumblr. But this is not The Definitive Guide To Accessibility or anything, so please add your perspective!)