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[while being redirected to another website] woah woah hey easy now hey stop it what the hell get your hands off me man

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Good morning Baltimore

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if you're responding to the shit that's happening with 'yes this trans woman got brigaded off the site by shitheads falsely mass reporting her BUT she had an incest kink so who's to say if it was good or bad really' you should just shut your gob and fuck off

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If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

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writer culture is telling all your friends about how you've been working on your cool new wip and you're actually liking how it's turning out but the second they ask you what it's about - or worse, ask to read it - you run away screaming

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video game with an arachnophobia setting that removes all the spiders and an arachnophilia setting that puts all the spiders in lingerie

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"Your cute animal stickers that promote survival spread dangerous ideaology" okay

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I think the solution to kids on the Internet is to have specific, kid friendly spaces on the Internet. Kids wouldn't come across "adult content" on YouTube if barbie dot com still had flash games and this is a hill I will die on.

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When you daydream about your story and it doesn’t magically write itself onto the page:

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i’m gonna say something that doesn’t feel good but you might need to hear it: bending over backwards being a people-pleaser, being conflict averse and not telling anyone your needs, and then being resentful and upset when your needs aren’t met is a You problem first

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said this as part of a larger point in a reblog but I'm gonna make it its own post:

humans have the right to do things that are mildly bad for us sometimes.

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be careful with what series you watch/read during emotional points in your life because they will forever contain a ghost of your past self within it now

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it's that time of year when countless people in countless schools and universities start thinking about running a d&d night, and I'm here to tell you: that's the devil talking. listen, I play a lot of games, D&D among them, and I run a LOT of events for college students. what you want is a game with dirt simple mechanics, character creation that can be completed in about a minute or less, and a contingency plan to split your attendees into groups if too many of them show up to reasonably play together. maybe something that doesn't even have dice idk. I'm not being a buzzkill I SWEAR I'm sincerely trying to save you from the horrors of a D&D night where 20 people show up and half of them have level 20 characters packing 16 magic items and a bad case of Main Character Syndrome and the other half are going to need to spend 45 minutes making their first character sheet ever. just play a different game man.

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I was blown to a smithereen, just the one