#I may be searching for a clip that does not exist

[ghosts-and-blue-sweaters]

Does anyone possibly know if Phil’s stream from December 7 2020 contains any Ghostbur clips because it is. very long. very, very long. And I have been trying to look through it but there’s just So Much and I haven’t found any Ghostbur lol

[makeste]

Plus One For All

so guys. can we talk about how there’s somebody chilling out inside of Katsuki’s mind who’s not supposed to be there.

hello there Mister All Might Vestige sir. you should not exist, just FYI. you’re not some Nighteye-type plot hallucination. because if you were, you would not be appearing here as Cloud Might, a version of yourself whom Katsuki has never met and has no frame of reference for. ergo he did not imagine you. ergo you are, in fact, real.

which means Katsuki has One For All.

because that’s the only way he could have a Vestige -- which is indisputably what this is -- inside of him. he has OFA. so. where did he get it. how does he have it. and why is it only making its presence known now.

let’s discuss.

okay so I’m going to try and lay this all out as clearly as possible while also attempting to be as succinct as I can. but knowing me, I’m probably going to wind up sacrificing the latter in pursuit of the former. I’ll do my best though. here goes.

1. Heroes Rising is canon.

which is a fact we’ve recently been reminded of not once, but twice -- first with the appearance of Katsuma and Mahoro in chapter 405, and then in chapter 406 with the “Bakugou no Kacchan” callback. the timing of this almost certainly isn’t coincidental. Horikoshi wants this to be fresh in our minds.

mind you, it is extremely unusual for movies, even technically!canon ones, to actually be relevant to the plot. but BnHA may be one of the few exceptions. we’ve already seen movie 1 impact the series both with Star & Stripe’s backstory, and with Deku’s new gauntlets. so there’s precedent, and it’s something I am paying very close attention to.

2. Deku giving OFA to Bakugou is canon.

just in case anyone here hasn’t yet seen or been spoiled for Heroes Rising, that is in fact what happens in that film! so yeah, that certainly seems like an extremely relevant detail right about now.

3. we never found out why and how Deku got OFA back at the end of the movie.

okay so I was looking for a clip to link before we discuss this next part, but I unfortunately couldn’t find one that hadn’t been edited to avoid copyright issues, so you’ll just have to make do with this.

skip ahead to about 7:10 for the relevant part. for the purposes of this theory, we’re just going to ignore everything All Might says here, because tbh he has no fucking clue what’s actually going on and is just guessing wildly lol. however, I do want you to take note of one thing which will be important later. and that’s the fact that, when OFA “returns” to Deku’s body, it’s only his body which starts glowing, and notably not Kacchan’s. the latter just keeps lying there unglowingly. nothing to indicate any kind of transfer is actually happening between him and Deku, in other words.

moving on.

4. OFA and AFO are probably the same quirk.

as summarized here and here. which is relevant because if they are the same quirk, or close to it, then OFA can most likely do anything AFO can do. so file that away for later.

5. AFO was able to split his quirk and give it to Tomura while still keeping a piece of it for himself.

what’s more, he was able to do the same with Garaki/Ujiko’s quirk, and presumably other quirks as well. while it’s possible that this quirk duplication has nothing to do with AFO and is simply something Garaki was able to figure out using ~*~Science~*~, I think it’s more likely that the two of them used AFO’s quirk in some way to accomplish this feat. particularly since Tomura not only received AFO, but a bunch of its stored up quirkdata as well, such as the information stored in Ragdoll’s stolen Search quirk.

6. OFA responds to Deku’s feelings and desires.

or at least this is the case according to Banjou in chapter 213. recall this interesting conversation on how Deku first activated Blackwhip.

he was thinking that he wanted to capture Monoma, and so OFA obediently activated his “capture Monoma” quirk. despite him being unaware he even had said quirk. it responded to his need, even though he wasn’t consciously trying to activate anything.

now then, let’s revisit that scene in Heroes Rising one more time.

7. during the climax of Heroes Rising, Deku was NOT thinking, “I need to give OFA to Kacchan.”

here’s the scene one more time for reference. this time you’re gonna want to skip to about 3:57.

here’s where we are going to get extremely technical, because this scene right here is the key to everything. Deku’s lines in this scene are, and I quote: “a way we can protect [everyone]... there’s just one way...!” but he very notably does not specify exactly what that “one way” is.

until we get to this scene a minute or so later, which spells it out for us very clearly.

two One For Alls. as in, “with two One For Alls, we could win this battle and save everyone.”

that’s what he was thinking at the moment of the “transfer.” NOT, “give OFA to Kacchan.” but, “we need two One For Alls.”

which, I think, may have made all the difference.

8. OFA created a copy of itself to share with Kacchan, so that both of them could have OFA and use the two OFAs to defeat Nine.

let’s recap. OFA is AFO. AFO can clone itself. so it stands to reason that OFA can presumably clone itself as well. and that’s exactly what Deku wanted to do. make a second One For All.

he didn’t know that he could do that. but as previously established in the Blackwhip incident, OFA is more than capable of making its own executive decisions in key moments just like this in order to help him out.

which would mean that what we saw at the end of Heroes Rising was not OFA being transferred from Bakugou back over to Deku. it was actually just Deku’s OFA briefly self-activating (possibly in response to his delirious apology to All Might -- kind of a “no worries bro, you’ve still got your quirk actually, so go back to sleep and stop stressing over it” type of thing). and Kacchan’s OFA doing... absolutely nothing. it didn’t actually transfer back into Deku. it didn’t actually go anywhere.

let me repeat that: it didn’t actually go anywhere.

in other words, Kacchan still has OFA. and has had it ever since Heroes Rising. he just didn’t realize it. and neither did anybody else.

9. Kacchan’s OFA went dormant once Nine was defeated.

okay, so. remember all of this exposition from chapter 304?

basically, if someone who already has a quirk receives OFA, using it will slowly destroy their body until it kills them. the Vestiges learned this from All Might while he was researching the past generations of OFA in chapter 241, incidentally. Heroes Rising takes place right around this same time (immediately following MVA if I recall). so by the time the film’s climax rolled around, the Vestiges would have known that giving OFA to Kacchan could have devastating consequences down the line if they did not take action immediately after the fight.

so they did.

once Nine was defeated, the Vestiges shut the whole thing down. the crisis was averted, and they no longer had need of a second OFA. they have this boy who is way too similar to Deku in terms of his willingness to put himself in harm’s way in order to achieve his goals. and they absolutely do not want any harm befalling this boy. more on that momentarily.

so they go dark. and they even seal his memory so that he’s no longer aware of even having the quirk. they are essentially in sleep mode. and if circumstances hadn’t eventually become desperate enough to force their hand, they might have remained inactive for the rest of Katsuki’s life.

now, you might be wondering to yourself, “why is OFA willing to go to such unusual lengths in order to protect Katsuki?” and well, the answer to that is pretty simple.

10. Kacchan does not have the same version of OFA as Deku.

Deku is ninth gen. Katsuki, however, is tenth gen. which means that his version of OFA has one additional Vestige. a Vestige whose presence immediately explains why OFA is so goddamn determined to protect him at all costs.

:’)

long story short, while Deku’s version of OFA has proven itself all too willing to enable him in his increasingly suicidal mission, Katsuki’s version of OFA is very much a different story, on account of it being under the management of what I’m guessing is the most willful Vestige ever to exist. and said management being just the slightest bit unhinged when it comes to Katsuki’s safety in particular. seriously, you can’t tell me this is not exactly how a Deku!Vestige would behave. “oh hell no. no OFA for you!! and no memories either, because you can’t be trusted, goddammit. we never should have done this. what the hell were we thinking. if anything happens to him I will kill everyone in this room and then myself.”

so yeah. dormant.

right up until they literally couldn’t afford to be anymore.

11. OFA can self-activate in moments of crisis to protect its user.

Sports Festival. chapter 33. Deku vs. Shinsou.

aw yeah. it’s all coming together.

12. OFA reactivated itself in order to save Katsuki’s life.

I would now like to briefly draw your attention to this scene from chapter 405, in which Edgeshot explains how Katsuki was finally saved. please note my man is very clear that he did not restart Katsuki’s heart himself. he was basically just performing quirk CPR up until Katsuki’s own quirk returned him to life apropros of nothing.

“what brought you back... was the power you’ve honed.”

except... that should have been impossible. because Katsuki was dead. meaning he should not have been able to activate his quirk on his own, on account of the whole “being dead” thing.

however, if he by chance had a quirk with just enough of a mind of its own to activate in critical situations in order to help its user. situations like being forced under mind control. or, perhaps, being stabbed through the heart. well then. that would certainly go a long way towards explaining all of this.

and oh hey, when exactly was it that we saw this guy, again?

oh? it happened at the exact moment when his heart was stabbed through? you don’t say. well that certainly is interesting.

in summary:

Deku cloned his quirk in Heroes Rising and gave Kacchan a copy of OFA. owing to the hyperprotective Deku!Vestige inside Kacchan’s copy of OFA, it shut itself down once Nine was defeated, and all of Katsuki’s memories of having OFA were deliberately wiped, or sealed away. OFA itself remained inactive until TomurAFO stabbed Katsuki through the heart, at which point OFA was forced to reactivate itself to save his life. which it did, by forcibly restarting his heart.

that’s it. no idea how close to the money any of this is, but I think it would explain most of the lingering mysteries and questions about what exactly is going on with Katsuki. and I’ll throw in one last observation as well -- Katsuki has a nine in his name (BaKUgou), but not a ten. which I know sort of contradicts what I was saying earlier about him being the tenth gen, lol. but he both is and isn’t. if Deku split his quirk, Kacchan would in theory receive everything that’s currently in Deku’s quirk right now, and that includes Deku’s own power that he’s been adding to the mix. so he’d still have the Deku!Vestige. but he’s also still ninth gen, because he and Deku are sharing that distinction now. or at least I think the argument could be made at any rate.

so yeah. I’ve been obsessing over all of this for the past few days lol. what do you guys think?

[habaaa]

I don't know if it's a good time, but I wanna share some things I've found about Franklin, they're so interesting and overall chill like him.

Disclaimer: These are official! You can search more at gta.fandom.com, also in little missions, voice clips, and also in hangouts Franklin can have with different characters.

1. He sleeps 8 hours a day:

According to a little observation, when you save the game by putting the characters to sleep it also advances their time, for each character there is a certain sleep cycle. Michael sleeps 6 hours, which is little, Trevor being Trevor puts him to a 12-hour sleep, which sounds good, but it's too much, finally, Franklin sleeps 8 hours, which is necessary.

2. He (maybe) is musical:

There is not so much detail about this, but if we analyze his room (in both houses) he has a guitar, mixer, radio, speaker, and more (there's A LOT of music-related stuff in his room in his and Aunt Denise's house).

Here:

2. He has three favorite radio stations:

These are Radio Los Santos, West Coast Classics, and The Lab, each one ofc has their genre:

Radio LS:

Genre: Contemporary Hip-Hop.

Styles:

Alternative Hip-Hop

Cloud Rap

Conscious Hip-Hop

Contemporary Hip-Hop

Dirty Rap

Drill

Gangsta Rap

Mumble Rap

R&B

Trap

West Coast Classic:

Genre: Classic Hip-Hop

Styles:

Old School Hip-Hop

West Coast Hip-Hop

East Coast Hip-Hop

Southern Hip-Hop

Alternative Hip-Hop

Comedy Hip-Hop

Conscious Hip-Hop

Political Hip-Hop

Gangsta Rap

R&B

Horrorcore

G-Funk

Golden Age Hip-Hop

Hardcore Hip-Hop

The Lab:

Genre: Hip-Hop

Styles:

Electronica

Rock

Synth-Pop

Dancehall

R&B

Gangsta Rap

Pop Rap

3. He may be a Christian?

In the second mission, Franklin got with Michael, this one says sarcastically a vesicle from the Bible "It's a foolish man who builds his house in sand, baby" to which Franklin answers "I don't think my boy Matthew was thinking trucks when he wrote that shit."

4. He's the only one who uses lockpins:

When you take or steal cars with Trevor or Michael, it will always result in a broken window, but with Franklin, this doesn't happen since he uses lockpins.

5. He may like the sky view (Not official, just a thought):

This is just a speculation of different pictures you see in Franklin's page in gta.fandom.com, some of those are Franklin admiring the sky (especially at night) and the city in his Vinewood mansion, but honestly, who wouldn't?

Edit: He does, in one of his switch scenes you can see him using the telescope of his mansion.

6. (NSFW!) He (Probably) lost his virginity to Tonya at 13 years old:

Yeah, strong right? When you hear these two speaking to each other in little missions with Tonya, she revels that she and Franklin had, yk a moment, in the back of Burger Shot, however, Franklin denies it and says they didn't do anything serious.

7. He cannot play tennis:

You can play tennis with Michael, Trevor's a fan of it, and there's no reason behind of why Franklin can't play tennis (This can be used for like headcanon idk why).

8. Both him and Michael are know to smoke cigarettes:

At Franklin's mansion, you seem to find lots of ashtrays along with Redwood cigarettes scattered on tables.

9. His email address:

His e-mail address is Frankie@eyefind.info (I hc than he likes being called Frankie, idk why).

10. He exists:

Not irl, but the fandom (not all of them) tends to forget him, and it's very sad, he's so cool and precious.

11. He seems to be more compassionate towards animals:

For this one, I'll use the information straight from the gta.fandom.com page, since it's better and more detailed.

"Of the three protagonists, Franklin appears to have the most compassion for animals, possibly because he is the only main character to have a pet. When he runs over a wild animal, he usually responds with compassionate quotes, such as: "Sorry, little dude!" or "Watch out, little dude!" whereas Michael usually responds with sarcasm and Trevor with dark humor."

Anyway, that's all from my part, I'll try to post more content abt him and Lamar, I think they're such interesting characters, wish there was more content abt both of them.

Tysm for reading, bye :)

[eddsworld-the-masquerade]

SABBAT!

New designs for Bing and Larry, designs for the other two members, a relationship chart...more art and info under the cut! (trust me, there's a whooole lot)

A curious bunch. Kind of an unlikely match (I mean Lasombra and Ventrue under the same roof sounds like a recipe for disaster..lol), but circumstances played their part. They may not be ideal for each other but it's all they have. Family, woof 👆

Why would I assign them with animals and elements? First off, it makes the designing process so much easier, since it creates direction. Second, it makes thematic sense. They've been denied humanity, and then they chose to keep it that way. "You see me a monster, well then, I'll be the monster" kind of situation. So, they'd rather associate with animals and elements than humans.

I could go on, but I'd rather have you experience the thing first hand in game (also doubt people would read further into this post otherwise lmao). Onto the characters!

Bing

Animal: Serpent

Element: Earth (Nature)

Main shtick: Change; Pain

Bing has more backstories than he does fingers, so nobody is quite sure on his origin. The one thing that seems certain is that he spent most of his existence in Russian Empire but fled when the civil war broke out in the 1910s. You'd think a Tzimisce of this age and history would be up to something nefarious now in Britain, but Bing is more concerned with "self search" and identity crisis. You could say he spends his retirement days here, or rather...used to spend, before one thing happened. But this, you'll learn more of playing the game XP

Bing dresses up kind of similar to the way he used to, back in the XVIII century. The outfit is rather loose (before I added clips onto the coat, I was told it looked more like a bathrobe...which, I suppose, is kind of fitting too XD), in order to leave extra room for when Bing uses Vicissitude (more on that later).

Bing's main gimmick is Tzimisce's signature, Vicissitude and the way he chooses to use it. Instead of turning his head into a giant pickle (Andrei lmao), Bing turns into different people. Not just appearance wise, it also includes voice, mannerisms, even personality. This is what I mean when I say he doesn't need to make clones - he IS the clone.

What he chooses to turn into most of the time are personas he used to "play out" during his glory days, XVIII century coups. Sometimes when prompted, sometimes just to troll others (if they dislike certain mannerisms or find the general idea of shape-shifting weird/scary).

These were crafted in accordance with the "ruler of the week", to win them over and then later "direct" them towards what Bing's Tzimisce sires and mentors needed. In a way, they are "clones" of these rulers (except maybe appearances), cuz imitation is the highest form of flattery lol

Though Bing also likes to experiment with his default form, as he doesn't find it ideal (his "true face", the one he forgot). Bing switches pronounce depending on current form (he/she/they, or anything else he feels like at the current moment).

Bing's battle form, aka the pinnacle of his Vicissitude mastery. If you happen to see it, usually it means you'll die a painful death in the next five minutes X)

Larry

Animal: Jackal

Element: Water

Main shtick: Loyalty and betrayal

Larry was dealt some shitty cards and forced upon the life of crime since early childhood. First a pirate (where he got his tan, scars, and vision problem), then a mercenary for a, uh, "dubious company" sponsored by Lasombra clan. Certain events made him overly sensitive to betrayals, so if you betray Larry, or hurt those he swore loyalty to, he will loathe you. And Larry's hatred runs deep. He always means business.

Larry's outfit is like, a modern take on pirate fashion. A bit rough around the edges, just enough to give him that "jackal" look. Larry's second name is practical, so he carries lots of belts. Never know when you mind need one.

Larry's signature, Obtenebration, comes from the Abyss and runs on his negative emotions. Which is why he's prone to lashing out and general bad mood. Needless to say it is extremely unhealthy, but power is power.

The story behind him coming to know Bing is fun. Originally, Larry was sent to kill him, but it was a set up, since Larry didn't stand a chance against that. So they kind of bonded instead, "enemy of my enemy is my friend". And after a while Larry just grew attached XDD He still goes on about murdering Bing "one day", but at this point everyone is aware it's not gonna happen like, ever.

Adella

Animal: Raven/Crow

Element: Fire

Main shtick: Control

Adella is half-chinese born in Britain. Do I need to say she didn't have a particularly fun time or is it obvious enough? From a very young age she was forced to believe she can only count on herself. Adella strived to climb the corporate ladder and get on top. To "burn her way through the obstacles". Might be lonely up there, but she was used to it either way, and she'd have the power and control to smack down anyone who tries to harm her. For now, let's just say she ended up upsetting the wrong people and had to run for her life. Sabbat was "kind" enough to let her stay under their wing.

Adella's relatively fresh meat, so her grasp on Sabbat "culture" is rather small for now. Though she is attempting to fit in more. She's determined to stay, despite whatever Larry says about her "looking for the opportunity to dump them". Adella insists she'd rather die than go back to the cammies. Bing is willing to give her the chance to prove herself.

Her and Larry's relationship is quite fun in how disastrous it is. Both constantly looking for jabs to throw at each other. The irony is, their stories and goals are kind of similar. But they're also different in ways that make their blood boil when they have to interact.

Zephyr

Animal: House centipede

Element: Wind

Main shtick: Security

Zephyr is truly a victim of circumstance. Lost ability to speak, lost all his loved ones, lost his home. Not a penny to his name, and no name either. His mind in ruin. He roamed around in the wild, until Bing found him. Seeing something familiar in him, Bing let him stay by their side. Found him a new name. A new purpose. A reason to keep on existing. Slowly, Zephyr is learning ways to communicate again. Perhaps he'll be able to remember, and tell his story one day.

Zephyr is the least human-like kindred, and looks like an atom bomb fell on his face. Despite the first impression he might create, Zephyr is a rather meek soul, doesn't seek conflict and is fine with following orders. That attitude changes when something threatens rest of the "family", though...

Zephyr is generally adored by his packmates, one could call him the "gentle giant" of the pack. Adella loves spending time with Zephyr, even Larry tolerates him. Though I'd say the most sympathy for him comes from Bing. As mentioned earlier, Bing sees a kindred spirit in Zephyr, so he is most invested in Zephyr's well being. Bing was the one to give him his new name. He's also the one learning sign language with him, so they'd have a better way of communication.

[kimjimagery]

While on the search for this 2D animated series that may or may not exist I came across one of the people who worked on Goomer and found his website.

This guy does the layout and other stuff for many shows and I saw quite a few layout pieces from Goomer that he did.

And I saw an opportunity to test out more experimenting with Clip Studio Paint, so I picked this one interesting drawing he did and went to work!

What I did was inking, coloring and adding filters to give it more of an old '90s cartoon look.

And you guys know me, I always credit my sources so I will leave a link to this guy's site.

Source: https://jdanweb.com/work

My hunt for this 2D animated series continues!

Finished art © KimJ Original Layoutart © José Díaz-Alejo Negro Characters © Nacho Moreno and Ricardo Martinez

[stubbornessissues]

Hellooo!!! I realllyyy wanna cosplay Nibbly, but I am STRUGGLING to find all the bits (or any of the bits) and I was wondering where u got the stuff for ur cosplay??? No problem if ur not comfortable or just don't want to share, but I would be very grateful 🩷

Hi!

Always happy to help get more Starkid cosplays out in the world 😊 Just bear in mind some things may only be available in the UK if you're not also living here currently.

Also fair warning, this gets surprisingly pricey. I was in a rush to get things together quickly, so if you've got time deffo poke around and find yourself cheaper options

I'll go top down:

The hat/visor I originally got from ebay, but you can get on amazon, etsy, or probably a few other places, just search for a rhinestone visor and you should find one.

The wig is from coscraft, it's two curly ponytail clip ons and their Charlie wig, both in fuschia. If you're outside the UK your best bet is probably epic cosplay who have very similar ponytails and base wig

The site I bought my shirt from was sketchy as hell and doesn't even exist any more, so I can't link that unfortunately, but a white tank top or tube top will do you fine, but if you're concerned with being super accurate, the shirt Kim wears does have a thin strip of fur around the neckline, that's super easy to get from any craft store and glue/stitch on.

The fluffy arm things also came from ebay, but I've seen several sites that do like party/festival wear things sell these. They're actually boot covers, so if you again search etsy/amazon/ebay/your preferred site for "fluffy pink boot covers" I guarantee you can find them. Just make sure the elastic is the right size for your arms.

The skirt I made myself because it seems to only be available in XS in the Hot Pink colour everywhere it's sold, and would have had to have shipped from the US and would have taken too long/cost too much.

It's Allegra K A-Line Mini Suspender skirt, and I've seen it on Amazon, Walmart, Target and couple of other random sites. Here's the official Allegra K site (which unfortunately just links through to Amazon)

My version of the skirt is a simple 3/4 circle skirt with a wide waist band and some straps attached.

The socks are from a lovely seller on ebay (my favourite cosplay resource tbh) who makes pole dancing gear. Again, they're generic enough that you can probably find them on your site of choice. Just search for "Glitter thigh high socks"

And finally the shoes are by a company called Lucky Step, and thankfully also sell in the UK via Amazon again. I had to buy a size up, but a half size up would have been ideal if they did them. They're super comfy too, so much so I got myself another pair in black for everyday use.

Wow that got surpsigingly long. Feel free to message me if you need a hand with anything else!

[bts-polls]

hi. i know this blog is just for fun, and i don't want to be a downer, but jk rowling is a terf. she actively does not want trans people to exist. as a trans army, it makes me wildly uncomfortable when people who aren't fans are called 'muggles' or when people Sort the members. again, i know it's all supposed to be fun, but. i don't feel at all safe anymore whenever hp stuff is brought up. i hope you have a good day though <3

Hi anon,

First, before I get into the rest of my response I want to say that I while i can't truly empathize on this specific issue, I do sympathize with not feeling safe due to a marginalization from 'the mainstream'. I do apologize for any part my posts played into this for you and anyone else that may have seen them. I'm going to put the rest of my thoughts on this topic below a cut for anyone that isn't up for a discussion-type post from this blog.

HP was my first real fandom and as someone who was raised in an extremely conservative rural area, I'm unfortunately very familiar with this mindset and viewpoint.

I also had to do a hefty amount of soul-searching when deciding how much of hp-fandom I would continue to engage in. I've never been a merch-focused person (which honestly gave me some heartache getting into kpop..there are legit ppl out there that try to make you feel like a fake fan if you don't spend serious money on this interest... but that's a discussion for another day). Anyway, back to HP, I'm not into merch and I didn't like the movies, (I've still only seen the first two and a handful of clips from some of the others) so I'm personally not contributing anymore to the money channeling in but money isn't the only thing that fuels this massive engine.

Again, I had to have a very frank heart-to-heart with myself to see where I personally feel comfortable continuing to engage. For me, being involved in the Fandom to any degree and even having casual conversations about the themes and meanings was an essential part of learning to be curious enough to see more lifestyles different from the one I was raised in. And my story is not dissimilar from many that I knew in situations similar to mine. So I know that this body of work has actually had cases where it fosters discussions and mindsets for minority groups more than anything else of its time. I really cannot overstate how significant the HP books and fandom were in creating the first space where we were able to even explore the idea of being different from those around us, let alone feeling comfortable or even celebrating it. To us, HP was less about the magic of being able to move items without touching them but more about the magic of finding your own worth when everyone around you said otherwise. This concept takes different forms each generation, for some it's superheroes or musicians; for my generation, it was HP.

Do the unveiled viewpoints of the original creator now undo all of the progress that was triggered by her work? And should we all attempt to bury it as if it never happened? Another point of discussion, especially where I now live in the southern US with many entrenched systems of racial discrimination. (Again, another tangent but we're not here to talk about tearing down ugly statues that don't add any value to the current population).

There's also the literal logistical issue of deciding that I can't engage in anything because I don't agree with the views of the ppl in charge, then there will literally be no viable method to exist. My professional expertise is in systems design, implementation, and maintenance; and let me assure you, the world is legitimately run by people who have despicable beliefs. From entertainment, food manufacturing and distribution, to health care and politics; there are scummy mindsets infecting it all. The biggest lie in our society is that good ppl do good things and bad ppl do bad things. No. People with awful motivations do good things continuously. And the inverse is true as well. There is remarkably little black and white in the world, everything is on a spectrum.

Attempting to cut myself off from ALL of it is not possible, nor do I want to engage with ALL of it. So again, I need to decide where that line is. And it needs to be re-evaluated frequently as both myself and the world around me grows and changes.

But this really comes to my main point of this whole post. I had to do my own personal soul-searching to decide where my own boundary is with this issue. And each person should do so as well. We are all so beautifully different in our life experiences and thoughts and mindset. I would NEVER want to claim my personal boundary on any issue should be upheld for ANYONE else. That's where we must empower ourselves to understand our own sovereignty. I have complete control of how I choose to respond to a push of my boundary but not to dictate that others must place their own boundaries.

This is where we are right now. I recognize that my past actions have induced some harm, intentional or not. Again, I apologize for that. I've shared a few reasons why we have different viewpoints and may continue to create similar polls in the future. So, to move forward, I will be more diligent in tagging any polls so that anyone trying to avoid such content may do so. You will have to decide if that is sufficient for you or if you will need to also disengage here.

Whatever you choose, I do wish you the absolute best and thankyou for bringing this lapse to my attention. Like you said, this is intended to be a fun place where we can vote in meaningless tumblr polls about a group of guys in Korea that make music. I would never want to compromise someone's peace with something so trivial but I am just another stranger on the internet. The one thing I can do is try to give you the tools so that you can make informed decisions about what type of content you may encounter in my space.

I'm not looking to turn this blog into a discussion one, so if anyone wants/needs to chat further, please reach out in DMs or through my main blog @curio-queries . This blog will continue to focus on BTS polls.

BORAHAE 💜

[horizon-verizon]

Huh so people are using Hill's Alive videos in arguments now? Why, her videos are out of context and biased as hell. Even her ASOIAF ones.

Because she affirms their hatred of Dany and the Targs, or just their affirmative biases and bigotry. and she is hot right now with many followers, so she has to be correct, right? That's basically it.

A more credible YouTuber who I personally follow is Phoenix Ashes, or you may know them by their current Tumblr name "ozymalek".

Here is one of their videos:

This is from their pinned comment:

Every single comment in this video thus far has proven that HA's army of trained, yapping chihuahuas could easily fall for every single propaganda imaginable as long as it was their favorite Internet personality saying it. They repeat claims that have been throughoutly shredded to pieces IN THE VIDEO PROPER and think that I call that liar a "liar" because I disagree with her "interpretation" of Daenerys. In reality, I call her a liar because I have substantially proven that she lied to her audience in her videos and built arguments around those lies.

Hill's Alive said at least two times that George RR Martin has DIRECTLY STATED that the show's ending matches the broad strokes of the ending that he will write, but there exists no video or an interview in which he makes such a statement, definitely not DIRECTLY. Hill's Alive did not include any link or a clip in her videos of him saying it, because that statement does not exist. The only thing that I was able to find (even though it should be HA's job because proving the claim lays on the one making it), GRRM revealed broad strokes to D&D, but has never confirmed that D&D followed them. I also included two sources of him claiming that the ending will not be the same: Not a Blog post from 2019 (right after the show ended) AND a statement from summer 2022 where he claimed that the ending will be QUITE DIFFERENT. And I even said that I don't hold HA accountable for not knowing the most recent statement because that particular video was from a year before it was made. Nevertheless, there is no direct confirmation from GRRM about broad strokes, and even if there was, GRRM's recent statements prove that even if that was the case, he changed his mind. I suspect that in 2019 GRRM was still binded by NDA's and now, that he has wrote so much of "Winds", the differences in endings has become even more apparent. I linked both of those and even read it out loud for those who may have trouble with reading comprehension.

Hill's Alive said that "Westeros has never been particularily peaceful, but it has never been as chaotic as it's been under the Targaryens". This is a lie because it contradicts canon: a) F&B directly says (contrary to some other "direct statement" that doesn't exist) that before the conquest, wars in Westeros have been such a common occurrence that if there weren't wars for a year, that was a success b) all of Jaehaerys' reign, which was exceedingly peaceful and prosperous, contradicts that + the Targaryens brought limited progress to Westeros, too, for example by outlawing the right of lords to rape newlywed women. By nature of feudalism, wars could not be eliminated, but there objectively was progress. [I am inserting this here link where ozymalek calculates peace years under the Targs here on Tumblr]

Hill's Alive has built an entire theory on how Daenerys will be killed by Arya based on Daenerys' talking about Maegor right before she walks into the funeral pyre. Except, Daenerys does not bring Maegor THEN. She does it much earlier, after Eroeh is killed. And while I can, to some degree, accept someone mixing two scenes, especially if they read the books a while ago, I am not willing to do this when a) the person in question talks to a substantial audience and misleads it in the process b) this is so easy to check. All you have to do is google "A Game of Thrones" pdf, click Control+G and search "Maegor". This is what I did.

[lizardwithacomputer]

Finding A Specific Missing Announcer Voiceline from DDR: Mario Mix

I just went though unimaginable torment (spent 5 hours trying to do this) in order to obtain the following sound byte:

What you hear above is the voice of Londell "Taz" Hicks (I'm 90% certain of this) who was the announcer for several Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) games, both in the arcade games and games for console, particularly Max, Extreme, and SuperNOVA. Based on ear and the release timeframes, he is also the announcer in DDR: Mario Mix.

The above voiceline has been an inside joke in my friend group for more than a decade. It has tormented and taunted us every time we boot up the game. It comes up any time performance is in the question. Speeches, presentations, concerts, D&D games, everything. I wanted this sound byte for the purposes of psychological mayhem and figured I'd do some quick searching and have it downloaded in time to get groceries.

This isolated voiceline does not exist in any archive I could track down.

So, obviously, I figured I'd get it myself. That it would be easy. And, I'll be frank, despite all my struggles, it could've been so much worse if not for the hard work of media archivists before me. Here's how I was able to track this voiceline down:

Getting into Stepmania/ITGMania/Project Outfox necessitated that I know a thing or two about where to get simulation files for the game. In fact, I'd already gotten the simulation files for DDR: Mario Mix, which is what prompted the idea of finding the same announcer. The files only contain music, album art, and step data (the arrows in DDR), and not, reasonably, anything from the game. So I had to look elsewhere.

Stepmania has a large customization and creation community that makes themes, custom charts, and, most importantly for me, announcers. The first thing I did was figure out the most likely announcer for DDR: Mario Mix, then headed to the Stepmania archive and started downloading. I started sifting through the files, but all I could find was this voiceline from DDR Extreme2:

As you can tell, these may be the same words, but it is NOT the same voiceline. It isn't smug enough. It's too supportive. This will not cause the torment I desire. I started to despair. I trawled every single other game Taz had announced for and only found this same inflection. The smugness of DDR: Mario Mix eluded me.

The next thing I did was try to get them from the game itself. The Dolphin Emulator has a really cool feature that lets you extract the contents of "discs" (in this case, a mounted .ciso file). Once I had that, I started to sift through, praying that it wouldn't be embedded in an obscure bin file.

Instead, I found this, in a folder labelled "sound":

What the hell are these file formats.

Briefly, I gave up on trying to extract things from the disc and started looking in different archives. I found one archive of video game music, that had happened to back up all of DDR: Mario Mix, and it happened to include some sound effects in it! I was hopeful, but after clicking going through every unhelpfully-named file, I was out of luck. Why would an archive lack part of the game? Well I went to the forums tied to the archive and:

DID YOU REMOVE THE VOICE CLIPS I'VE BEEN SEARCHING FOR, 1425720626? DID YOU?!?!

Anyway. Searching this forum still provided me with some other options. Mainly, a post talking specifically about the msm and pdt files I was confused by before!

And this was figured out 11-12 years ago!! Remarkably, the download for the script still worked. So I loaded it up into VSCode, fixed some of the outdated code (specifically, had to change ord() calls to int(), some bytes stuff, I could ramble about this, but-), and ran it. This python code produced 465 dsp files. A dsp file is an older type of data sequence file that is common in older videogames and is used to play audio.

Since its on the older and obscure side, it's not something a native media player can play out of the box. The forum I've been searching through, it turns out, is actually part of a bigger website (hcs64) that has tools related to video game music archival, including audio ripping tools and, more importantly, a program that can play and convert dsp files called vgmstream.

I used the vgmstream web player to listen to a couple randomly chosen dsp files I had from the 465 I'd gotten from the python. Luckily, there was a small form of organization, and when I hit the files starting with 0003, I heard the sweet, sweet voice of Londell 'Taz' Hicks. And to my elation, the very second file I tested was the glorious, smug, tormenting words:

Everybody is watching you!

This is generally where you stop, because you've got the file now. But since I'm writing this primarily for my own archival purposes, there's a couple other steps I took after downloading the voiceline.

See, vgmstream converted the file to a wav file and I needed an mp3. This is actually easy enough. If you open up VLC (traffic cone video player) and go to Media>Convert/Save, you can convert it easily. I threw the file in there, made a new profile for the conversion settings, adjusted the bit rate to be the same as the wav file...then, instead of making the sample rate the maximum, like I should've done, I left it at the minimum and, uh...

whoops.

[kate-les-bridge-stewart]

Ok I need to rant about breaking bad again

First of all, this fucking song...

This has to be one of the best songs I've heard all year. It's so fucking eerie and heart stopping and droning and terrifying

AND THE SCENE IT PLAYS IN IS JUST-

I firmly believe this is one of the greatest scenes in cinema history

It's this scene, at the precise moment where the music suddenly... stops

Something changes in walter....

(Spoilers ahead)

I'm not saying that annoying thing like "THIS IS WHERE WALT BECOMES HEISENBERG" cus i believe he always was Heisenberg. He was there from the start. I don't think Heisenberg is some "EVIL ALTER EGO 0000000 SPOOKY" type shit, although I will admit it makes for a hilarious meme. I think Heisenberg is simply a manifestation of walts inner insecurity, emmasculation, and self loathing. this moment isn't where "heisenberg takes over" or whatever, rather it's where Walt is so overwhelmed, so trapped, so helpless... he genuinely believes his family is going to be killed because of him, and there is nothing he can do to stop it. At this moment, all the stress and trauma and agony reaches its climax and he just... breaks

From this point there's a noticeable change in Walt's behavior. He's far more risk taking, more ballsy, more confident, more calculating. Taking this into account its understandable why people would immediately jump to saying he's been taken over by some alter ego because it certainly looks and feels like that at first glance. But I don't think it works that way. Psychology doesn't work that way and not even in the world of breaking bad does it work that way. Even after a major traumatic and mind altering event like this scene sure he'd definitely be different in a ton of ways but he's still the same guy.

I think from a psychological point of view this shift is a subconscious defense mechanism crafted by his brain in response to the overwhelming traumatic stimuli. Sure it may not be as cool as "HIS EVIL ALTER EGO IS TAKING OVER" but I feel like it is the most realistic and fitting for the story.

Now whenever anyone talks about this scene they understandably go straight to praising and dissecting the acting, cinematography and framework. This is all completely valid since there's so many incredible layers in this clip. But one piece I notice few have really delved into is the music.

The first minute or so is chaotic and rapid, a backdrop of deep scrambling beats with a subtle repetitive ringing over top which almost sounds like an alarm. The whole thing feels like a crowd of people scrambling in a panic.

And then as the background fades out and gives room to the main beat, another rough, fuzzy sound starts to drown the main beat out. Soon all of that fades to just a constant hazy drone accented with deep vworping sounds. Suddenly there's an upsweep and then-...

Silence...

A very quiet, deep vworping starts playing, it's rhythm even like the beating of walts sinking heart. For a while that's all you hear, just that lone beat. In comparison to the absolute chaos you were hearing just moments ago, this near silence is jarring and eerie.

And then it changes...

I don't know about you but when I heard those louder deep droning beats for the very first time, I can only describe it as nothing short of haunting...

It sounds completely unnatural, unlike any instrument that exists. It sounds... metallic, as if you were hearing a giant sheet of metal being hit by strong gusts of wind. Or like the poor quality audio recording from a submarine of a glacier scraping against the sea floor. This droning gets louder and is soon accompanied by additional unnatural tones and screeches, all gradually getting louder and louder until some warbling, shrill whitenoise soon overpowers all of it.

The music gives you a glimpse into walts mind and body, what he's feeling and the tone of his thoughts. He starts panicked, desperately searching for the money. But as he learns what happened to it, he freezes... his racing mind and heart all come to an abrupt halt. He realizes he's helpless, and he finally snaps.

[channeleven]

The History of Sonic’s Schoolhouse

Sonic’s Schoolhouse is an enigma. While educational games based on popular video game icons aren’t uncommon, they happen to be the weirdest offerings in their respective franchises. Sonic’s Schoolhouse needs no introduction, all we know is that it’s a weird Sonic game that served as an inspiration for Baldi’s Basics.

But there is one thing nobody ever really looked into. Why does this game exist, and what led to it? Tying together what info I could find through basic searches, hopefully I can offer an explanation.

History

The year is 1996, the Saturn is SEGA’s principal console at this point, and they were without a mainline game for their flagship franchise, due to stress and other factors halting the development of Sonic X-Treme, but that’s a tale told by someone who’d know more about it than I do. They managed to keep the series afloat with auxiliary titles like a remake of Sonic 3D Blast, the compilation Sonic Jam and a dumpster fire of a racing game.

So SEGA’s goal at this point was to keep the property relevant, and it seems they would take any offer they could at the time. Two of the three games I mentioned were outsourced to Traveler’s Tales, so it seems they were willing to experiment in order to clip along. It seems this game was among those experiments, and given it never landed on SEGA hardware it was likely they had nothing to lose.

Major gaming franchises are no stranger to edutainment, albeit, gaming franchises that appeal to young and old like Mario, Rayman and Sonic. At the time, a combination of both would be beneficial. They could throw a stake into the edutainment market and gain new fans who’d be enticed to check out the mainstream counterparts, and be used by parents and maybe teachers to educate people. A win-win as far as anyone’s concerned.

With the exception of Rayman Brain Games, these kinds of edutainment titles would be outsourced to third-party developers while the first party would continue to develop yet to be new installments to the main series. Outsourcing is used as a cost-cutting measure by bigger publishers, so without any competition among developers it’s anyone’s game to get involved with edutainment titles. But when you take into account Sonic’s Schoolhouse’s developers have quite a limited backlog that goes well against what was asked of them here, you’d have to question if SEGA just wanted something done as quickly and cheaply as possible.

We’ll get back to SEGA in a while, for now, I wanna go into the developers.

The game’s development is credited to two studios, BAP Interactive and Orion Interactive. Both companies were only involved in two games, this included, but their other titles are more adult, with the former’s being a game based on a horror slasher movie, and the latter’s being an adult mystery game. These developers are different, but they all share one connection, two men by the name of Brad Krevoy and Steve Stabler.

For the uninformed, these are two unknown game developers, but no, they are fairly known… in the film industry. Krevoy and Stabler ran a production company known as Motion Picture Corporation of America, dedicated to more unconventional independent films, but they do have some notable titles to their name.

They produced classics like Dumb and Dumber, Bio-Dome, Dracula 3000 and Kingpin, as well as disasters like Bloodwings: Pumkinhead’s Revenge. You may be thinking, well of course this game turned out bad, they have no experience with game development and this is starting to sound like a front. Well yeah, they didn’t develop games, they just helped publish them.

MPCA managed a video game label in the mid-90s, mainly joining the then thriving FMV market with games based on their own movies, well two of them, Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead’s Revenge and Soldier Boyz (whose game is an early directorial role for Darren Aronofsky if you could believe it.) The former game, was developed by Sonic’s Schoolhouse’s other developer BAP Interactive, or Bruce Austin Productions for a fuller identity.

Bruce Austin had no experience with game development before Bloodwings, but simple programing tricks would suffice as long as you make a functional game. What sufficed at the time was a DOOM-like corridor with basic sprites, secondary 3D environments and other cosmetics. Though Bloodwings sucked, by then Krevoy and Stabler had access to a functional game engine.

So, BAP provided the engine for Sonic’s Schoolhouse, along with other details I will address later on. But where does Orion come into play? First things first, just want to make it clear that this was during Orion’s pre-bankruptcy period. You may be thinking this was an experiment by Orion to expand into new mediums, but through a stroke of bad luck were only able to land trashy titles, and you’d be wrong.

It was important I brought up Krevoy and Stabler, because they actually became co-presidents of Orion after the latter’s parent company Metromedia acquired MPCA in 1996, the same year Sonic’s Schoolhouse would hit the scene. MPCA’s gaming label would be temporarily replaced with that of Orion Interactive. It checks out, Krevoy and Stabler are listed as producers in the game’s credits.

So to sum up, BAP Interactive produced the game’s engine, while it was funded through Krevoy and Stabler via Orion Interactive. To also clarify, MPCA’s last game title Soldier Boyz was released in 1997, the same year Krevoy and Stabler were removed from Orion upon its sale to Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

Before we go on, let’s discuss unused assets. Supposedly, the game was gonna be something entirely different, featuring a talking clock as the main character and the game being called Answer Hunt. Based on portions of the gameplay, I can see where the connection lies. I imagine Answer Hunt was scrapped early into production due to most assets not really fitting with what it could’ve been.

Now for how SEGA got involved in this. I’d like to mark an important distinction between SEGA and SEGA Entertainment. The latter was a short-lived edutainment subsidiary, otherwise made as an off-shoot to handle the publication of this game. A key figure behind this label was Greg Suarez, who had previously and afterwords worked on two titles for Delphine Software International, Fade to Black and Shaq-Fu.

Either he had little funds to procure bigger developers to work with him, or he was willing to take whatever pitches were offered. Orion very likely got to Suarez first, and after landing a successful pitch worked to reconvert what they had to fit the Sonic essence. One obvious factoid is that it uses assets from the cancelled Sonic X-Treme. As this was developed at an in-house SEGA studio, it was easy to obtain these. It is easy to determine which assets were provided, and which were made by BAP/Orion, like, really easy.

The limited educational games owed to what they had completed at that point, hunting for answers… to math and counting problems, and combined it with Sonic elements like ring collecting and owing to Krevoy and Stabler’s background in FMVs, educational videos relating to animals. For the title screen, call it something made on short notice.

Why was Sonic played by a girl even though he had a male voice in the cartoons? Simple, the cartoons are not cannon to the game, so Sonic’s main voice hasn’t been determined at that point. They probably had the actor on hand, so they worked with what they had. The dialog is specific enough to imply so anyways, especially with the talking clock detail.

Anything else can be owed to the mild experience the programers had, trying to make something cartoony, but minimal experience in model work leads to some unintentionally creepy results.

Conclusion

And there’s an idea for why Sonic’s Schoolhouse came to be. It looked to be an experiment helmed by an off-shoot SEGA subsidiary who wanted something as cheap and quick to produce as possible, allegedly, and accepted a pitch by a third party developer. It never saw a release outside of the PC, so SEGA themselves would not face any drawback (if not it’s a misunderstanding on par with DICE and their former Canadian subsidiary in regard to the development of Shrek).

No longer seeing the benefit of educational titles, SEGA never bothered to try it again. Sonic’s Schoolhouse continued to float around with a budget re-release by Expert Software, who also handled Sonic & Knuckles Collection and PC re-releases of Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic CD and that dumpster fire of a Sonic racing game previously released for Saturn.

So now let’s do a little “where are they now?” bit.

Greg Suarez left the gaming industry after this game was released, returning only in 2014 to aid in producing a Halloween special made by Lloyd Kaufman. Bruce Austin had taken up cinematography as late as 2011, and interesting fact, he served as an on-line editor for two movies Brutalmoose covered time ago, Invisible Dad and My Magic Dog. Yep, Bruce Austin had involvement in b-movies like Krevoy and Stabler.

As for Krevoy and Stabler, both are still active, but have since split. Stabler formed his own production company, but both he and Krevoy would return to produce Dumb and Dummer To. Krevoy is the lone operator of MPCA, and had recently carved a niche for making holiday movies for Hallmark.

Once you take into account the factors behind the development of this game, it puts a lot of things into perspective. It was a cheaply made game made by people with minimal experience with programing, with connections to the b-movie industry.

[corviknight-appreciator]

//I WANT THE LORE GIMME THE LORE I CRAVE IT

//Understandable! Feel free to DM me if you're curious and want to know right away, since I don't want to spoil it for everyone in case someone does want to figure it out themself, and I do think that I've given quite a few hints that could give it away when put together.

//I'm going to compile a list of what I consider a hint that's been on the blog under the cut, just for reference for if anyone does want to figure it out themselves. It'll probably be addressed on-blog eventually, but I don't want to spoil it until it is.

//Going to drop the slashes after this but do know this is all ooc.

-Persephone is a nickname given to her by friends "a long time ago", and rather than being pronounced normally, the "phone" part is pronounced like "phone". (She will answer to it pronounced the normal way, but it takes her a second to register that she's being addressed.)

-She does not react well to fire, apparently badly enough that accommodations on the Gym Challenge were offered to her after she started to panic during a battle where there seems to have been a lot of it, and forced herself to keep going regardless. She seems to consider it particularly deadly.

-She doesn't keep her pokemon in pokeballs most of the time, because she doesn't want them to feel trapped. (Given that she has posted about having a nightmare where she can't move, she may be projecting.)

-She does not particularly trust or like gods, conceptually, and has mentioned wanting to kill gods at least once.

-her phone that she uses in day-to-day life is a rotary phone with an oversized receiver, the rotary unit of which clips to her waist. This does not have a camera or internet access, which is why she tends to not post on rotomblr when she's out and a lot of her pictures she posts are scans of instant photos.

-She has (phone?) buttons on her face.

-She used to like her old job, which was as an athlete playing a splort ("splort" described by her as "kind of like a sport but. Different."). She grew to Not Like It after people started dying (after "Fans voted to open a Forbidden Book at the end of [her] first season of play"), gods started showing up to mess with people, a necromancy happened (where the affected player's plays could mark people for death), etc, but she (and all of the other players) couldn't quit.

-She physically cannot sleep during the onseason of her old job, and thought it was the same way in Galar until shortly before she got her third Gym Badge. (She technically doesn't have to sleep, either, and is fairly certain she can't get sleep deprived.)

-Apparently people can be Released from her old job so they no longer have to play.

-A week is 9 days long in her home world.

-Weather from her home world includes: birds, some sort of weather that "certain league officials" kill people during that isn't birds

-Alternate worlds existing is normal to her.

-She has a brother (who is also in Galar, but I will note that as a canon divergence from where I've pulled her from, instead of the thing that happens to him in canon, he got Faller'd.)

-A team that she wasn't on has different classifications of rival because they consider everyone their rival. These classifications are: major rival, rivalliance, and antirival.

(I will note as a last thing due to how things work re: lore in her source media that this is my interpretation of her character, a lot of people tend to interpret her as being meaner/caring about her brother less than I interpret her as. I tend to interpret her as "she's tired and burnt out but she cares about the people close to her so, so much".)

Edit: second note, apparently the nonsense word that’s “sport with an l added to it” yields unrelated nsfw results when googled. Be careful when actually searching for stuff.

[fredbsmith]

On "Scientism" and Objective Beauty

Dear ___,

Thanks for sharing the links to these videos with me. I enjoyed watching them. I was not familiar with Roger Scruton; I expect to be learning more about him via my You Tube autoplay.

What was appealing to me about Prof. (? Sir) RS was the evident kindness and civility with which he employed his rhetorical skills, in addition to the level of those skills themselves. I see he is identified in Wikipedia’s index as a “conservative philosopher.” It’s good to see that such individuals exist; our noblest institutions created in the past deserve articulate defenders who can argue—in contemporary language—for their preservation in the face of those who would purge and radically reconstruct the culture.

I had some thoughts in regard to the first clip, the argument against “scientism.” RS’s position is reminiscent of (the late) Stephen Jay Gould’s concept that the arts, religion, and sciences each comprise their own “non-overlapping magisteria,” with their own associated axioms and rules of argumentation, their own sources of authority, not applicable beyond their own boundaries. But what is the nature of those boundaries, just what makes them so impermeable? Certainly it is true that works of art are created by human beings and, that human beings, having existence in a material universe, must be made up entirely of the elementary particles that comprise all matter. But the number of such particles, and the complexity of their arrangement, constituting even a single human being would make it impossible to use the scientific laws governing the behavior of elementary particles to deduce anything at all about the nature of art created by that human being. No sane person would carry reductionism to such a ridiculous extreme. But does this mean that the methods and knowledge from the sciences should never be brought to bear in considering issues involving art? Do considerations of the esthetic need to be mentally walled off from all other intellectual endeavors?

In pondering these questions, I’ve found the thinking of David Deutsch quite valuable; DD is a quantum physicist and polymath, who writes on a wide range of subjects, always searching for explanations to tie together the various aspects of reality. He invokes the concept of emergence as a way to understand the relation of highly complex systems to the simpler systems of which they are composed. One would speak of a system of high complexity (inorganic chemistry, poetry) as emergent from a lower-complexity system from which it derives its existence (particle physics, psychology of human emotions). Emergence arises when rules governing the behavior of the high-level system can be formulated simply and intelligibly without resorting to complicated explanations based on the underlying low-level system.

DD’s point, if I read him correctly, is that the boundaries between disciplines studying high- and low-level systems arise from what are essentially computational limitations, of both the human mind and artificial intelligence in its current state. The vast numbers of constituent low-level systems, and the complexity of the ways they are functionally integrated to produce the high-level system, make it impossible —practically impossible in most instances, I should say—for chains of deduction and inference to be carried across from low- to high level disciplines. But DD’s concept allows that there may be rare instances in which it is possible to make such deductions, and, in such rare instances the deductions should not be dismissed just because they are reductive. We should prize all valid explanations that we can find, regardless of their logical construction.

I’ve attached an excerpt from one of DD’s books which presents his ideas of emergence and the status of reductive explanation at greater length, and much more lucidly, than what I’ve just attempted. In a different source, DD provides what I think is a splendid example of a (valid) reductive explanation of a topic in the arts, the nature of beauty, using Darwinian logic from modern biology. He begins by posing the question of why flowers are beautiful, and then devotes a chapter to its answer. Remarkably, that answer includes an argument that at least some things have beauty as part of their objective reality, that this beauty is independent of the subjective experience of the perceiving individuals or their cultures, or even of the human species. I’ve attached an excerpt from this, also.

Fred

At present, we have only approximations to a reductive ‘theory of everything’. These can already predict quite accurate laws of motion for individual subatomic particles. From these laws, present-day computers can calculate the motion of any isolated group of a few interacting particles in some detail, given their initial state. But even the smallest speck of matter visible to the naked eye contains trillions of atoms, each composed of many subatomic particles, and is continually interacting with the outside world; so it is quite infeasible to predict its behaviour particle by particle. By supplementing the exact laws of motion with various approximation schemes, we can predict some aspects of the gross behaviour of quite large objects – for instance, the temperature at which a given chemical compound will melt or boil. Much of basic chemistry has been reduced to physics in this way. But for higher-level sciences the reductionist programme is a matter of principle only. No one expects actually to deduce many principles of biology, psychology or politics from those of physics. The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances the stupendously complex behaviour of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence: high-level simplicity ‘emerges’ from low-level complexity. High-level phenomena about which there are comprehensible facts that are not simply deducible from lower-level theories are called emergent phenomena. For example, a wall might be strong because its builders feared that their enemies might try to force their way through it. This is a high-level explanation of the wall’s strength, not deducible from (though not incompatible with) the low-level explanation I gave above. ‘Builders’, ‘enemies’, ‘fear’ and ‘trying’ are all emergent phenomena. The purpose of high-level sciences is to enable us to understand emergent phenomena, of which the most important are, as we shall see, life, thought and computation. By the way, the opposite of reductionism, holism – the idea that the only legitimate explanations are in terms of higher-level systems - is an even greater error than reductionism. What do holists expect us to do? Cease our search for the molecular origin of diseases? Deny that human beings are made of subatomic particles? Where reductive explanations exist, they are just as desirable as any other explanations. Where whole sciences are reducible to lower-level sciences, it is just as incumbent upon us as scientists to find those reductions as it is to discover any other knowledge. A reductionist thinks that science is about analysing things into components. An instrumentalist thinks that it is about predicting things. To either of them, the existence of high-level sciences is merely a matter of convenience. Complexity prevents us from using fundamental physics to make high-level predictions, so instead we guess what those predictions would be if we could make them – emergence gives us a chance of doing that successfully – and supposedly that is what the higher-level sciences are about. Thus to reductionists and instrumentalists, who disregard both the real structure and the real purpose of scientific knowledge, the base of the predictive hierarchy of physics is by definition the ‘theory of everything’. But to everyone else scientific knowledge consists of explanations, and the structure of scientific explanation does not reflect the reductionist hierarchy. There are explanations at every level of the hierarchy. Many of them are autonomous, referring only to concepts at that particular level (for instance, ‘the bear ate the honey because it was hungry’). Many involve deductions in the opposite direction to that of reductive explanation. That is, they explain things not by analysing them into smaller, simpler things but by regarding them as components of larger, more complex things – about which we nevertheless have explanatory theories.

Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality (pp. 20-22). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Occasionally it happens by chance that the parochial criteria of attractiveness that evolved within a species produce something that looks beautiful to us: the peacock’s tail is an example. But that is a rare anomaly: in the overwhelming majority of species, we do not share any of their criteria for finding something attractive. Yet with flowers--most flowers--we do. Sometimes a leaf can be beautiful; even a puddle of water can. But, again, only by rare chance. With flowers it is reliable.

It is another regularity in nature. What is the explanation? Why are flowers beautiful?

Given the prevailing assumptions in the scientific community—which are still rather empiricist and reductionist--it may seem plausible that flowers are not objectively beautiful, and that their attractiveness is merely a cultural phenomenon. But I think that that fails closer inspection. We find flowers beautiful that we have never seen before, and which have not been known to our culture before--and quite reliably, for most humans in most cultures. The same is not true of the roots of plants, or the leaves. Why only the flowers?

One unusual aspect of the flower-insect co-evolution is that it involved the creation of a complex code, or language, for signalling information between species. It had to be complex because the genes were facing a difficult communication problem. The code had to be, on the one hand, easily recognizable by the right insects, and, on the other, difficult to forge by other species of flower--for if other species could cause their pollen to be spread by the same insects without having to manufacture nectar for them, which requires energy, they would have a selective advantage. So the criterion that was evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations; and the flower’s design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it. Thus both the criterion and the means of meeting it had to be hard to vary. When genes are facing a similar problem within a species, notably in the co-evolution of criteria and characteristics for choosing mates, they already have a large amount of shared genetic knowledge to draw on. For instance, even before any such co-evolution begins, the genome may already contain adaptations for recognizing fellow members of the species, and for detecting various attributes of them. Moreover, the attributes that a mate is searching for may initially be objectively useful ones--such as neck length in a giraffe. One theory of the evolution of giraffe necks is that it began as an adaptation for feeding, but then continued through sexual selection. However, there is no such shared knowledge to build on across the gap between distant species. They are starting from scratch.

And therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard- to emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty. Consequently the only species that are attracted by flowers are the insect species that co-evolved to do so--and humans.

If true, this means that Dawkins’ daughter was partly right about the flowers after all. They are there to make the world pretty; or, at least, prettiness is no accidental side effect but is what they specifically evolved to have. Not because anything intended the world to be pretty, but because the best-replicating genes depend on embodying objective prettiness to get themselves replicated. The case of honey, for instance, is very different. The reason that honey--which is sugar water --is easy for flowers and bees to make, and why its taste is attractive to humans and insects alike, is that we do all have a shared genetic heritage going back to our common ancestor and before, which includes biochemical knowledge about many uses of sugar, and the means to recognize it.

Could it be that what humans find attractive in flowers--or in art--is indeed objective, but it is not objective beauty? Perhaps it is something more mundane--something like a liking for bright colours, strong contrasts, symmetrical shapes. Humans seem to have an inborn liking for symmetry. It is thought to be a factor in sexual attractiveness, and it may also be useful in helping us to classify things and to organize our environment physically and conceptually. So a side effect of these inborn preferences might be a liking for flowers, which happen to be colourful and symmetrical. However, some flowers are white (at least to us--they may have colours that we cannot see and insects can), but we still find their shapes beautiful. All flowers do contrast with their background in some sense--that is a precondition for being used for signalling--but a spider in the bath contrasts with its background even more, and there is no widespread consensus that such a sight is beautiful. As for symmetry: again, spiders are quite symmetrical, while some flowers, such as orchids, are very unsymmetrical, yet we do not find them any less attractive for that. So I do not think that symmetry, colour and contrast are all that we are seeing in flowers when we imagine that we are seeing beauty.

A sort of mirror image of that objection is that there are other things in nature that we also find beautiful--things that are not results of either human creativity or co-evolution across a gap: the night sky; waterfalls; sunsets. So why not flowers too? But the cases are not alike. Those things may be attractive to look at, but they have no appearance of design.  They are analogous not to Paley’s watch, but to the sun as a timekeeper.  One cannot explain why the watch is as it is without referring to timekeeping, because it would be useless for timekeeping if it had been made slightly differently. But, as I mentioned, the sun would still be useful for keeping time even if the solar system were altered. Similarly, Paley might have found a stone that looked attractive. He might well have taken it home to use as an ornamental paperweight. But he would not have sat down to write a monograph about how changing any detail of the stone would have made it incapable of serving that function, because that would not have been so. The same is true of the night sky, waterfalls and almost all other natural phenomena. But flowers do have the appearance of design for beauty: if they looked like leaves, or roots, they would lose their universal appeal. Displace even one petal, and there would be diminishment.

We know what the watch was designed for, but we do not know what beauty is. We are in a similar position to an archaeologist who finds inscriptions in an unknown language in an ancient tomb: they look like writing and not just meaningless marks on the walls. Conceivably this is mistaken, but they look as though they were inscribed there for a purpose. Flowers are like that: they have the appearance of having been evolved for a purpose which we call ‘beauty’, which we can (imperfectly) recognize, but whose nature is poorly understood.

In the light of these arguments I can see only one explanation for the phenomenon of flowers being attractive to humans, and for the various other fragments of evidence I have mentioned. It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness local to a species, to a culture or to an individual. The other is unrelated to any of those: it is universal, and as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge; but the second kind requires knowledge with universal reach. It reaches all the way from the flower genome, with its problem of competitive pollination, to human minds which appreciate the resulting flowers as art. Not great art--human artists are far better, as is to be expected.  But with the hard-to-fake appearance of design for beauty.

Now, why do humans appreciate objective beauty, if there has been no equivalent of that co-evolution in our past? At one level the answer is simply that we are universal explainers and can create knowledge about anything. Bur still, why did we want to create aesthetic knowledge in particular? It is because we did face the same problem as the flowers and the insects. Signalling across the gap between two humans is analogous to signalling across the gap between two entire species. A human being, in terms of knowledge content and creative individuality, is like a species. All the individuals of any other species have virtually the same programming in their genes and use virtually the same criteria for acting and being attracted. Humans are quite unlike that: the amount of information in a human mind is more than in the genome of any species, and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information unique to one person. So human artists are trying to signal across the same scale of gap between humans as the flowers and insects are between species. They can use some species-specific criteria; but they can also reach towards objective beauty. Exactly the same is true of all our other knowledge: we can communicate with other people by sending predetermined messages determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new. Bur in the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we had better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths. This may be the proximate reason that humans ever began to do so.

Deutsch, D: The Beginning of Infinity, p. 361

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[polaranimal]

Skybell hd bronze wifi video doorbell

I received prompt push alerts whenever someone rang the doorbell or if motion was detected, the 1080p live feed was solid (although this could vary based on the quality of your Wi-Fi connection), the built-in LEDs captured low-light very well, and I was able to record, review and download video clips for free, as well as take photos.

It might take a few more minutes than some other in-app configurations since you have to wait for the LED to blink red and green, but it was still very easy to get up and running.Įverything worked very well.

Add the details for your local Wi-Fi network and you're done.

Select the SkyBell Wi-Fi network in your phone's settings.

Wait until the LED indicator on your SkyBell HD begins to flash red and green (if no indicator light appears, there may be an issue with your installation).

Create an account with a unique username and password and select "Add a new SkyBell".

Download the SkyBell HD app for Android or iPhone.

Like any good DIY software, the SkyBell HD app walks you through the steps you need to take in order to get your new Wi-Fi doorbell online. Check out this tutorial video for more information. SkyBell does also provide a digital door chime adapter, but that requires some additional effort. Note: This unit will only work with a hard-wired system and is easiest to install with a traditional mechanical chime. If you aren't rerouting wiring to a new location (which could require a specialized drill if you're installing it on a brick facade or some other tough surface), all you really need is a Phillips-head screwdriver, which SkyBell includes in the box. Just switch off power to your doorbell, remove your old buzzer and attach the existing wires to the included SkyBell mounting plate. It's little wonder, then, that Ring's newest model, the Video Doorbell Pro, looks a lot more doorbell-y at just 1.85 inches wide.ĭespite the whole doorframe overhang issue, the SkyBell HD was simple to install. But, these in-your-face designs aren't particularly door-frame-friendly. It's as if every smart doorbell brand was searching for a way to differentiate itself from your everyday buzzer that's small and rectangular and unobtrusive. August's $199 Doorbell Cam clocks in at 2.9 inches wide, and the $199 Ring Video Doorbell measures 2.43 inches.

Pro version of the Ring Video Doorbell swaps flexibility for refinement.

DoorBird takes on other Wi-Fi-enabled smart buzzers.

You won't have to guess who's coming to dinner with these smart doorbells.

Is Ring a better smart buzzer for your buck?.

The second-gen SkyBell is one stealthy door buzzer.

Knock, knock: August's Doorbell Cam helps you see who's there.

[blindbeta]

Your Content and Accessibility For the Blind

Hello everyone! I was thinking about accessibility and wanted to make a post to help creators. This is going to cover general accessibility for blind people interacting with your content. Some of it may be obvious to some and this is by no means comprehensive, so feel free to add anything you think of that is helpful. Also, I wanted to include some ideas for DeafBlind people, but I am not DeafBlind or D/deaf, so I simply listed some general accessibility ideas. If anyone has any other tips or things to consider, please add them in a comment or message and I’ll include it here.

Remember, blindness exists on a spectrum. This post will focus on making things accessible for totally blind people, although these tips can also be beneficial for people with residual vision who use screen readers to reduce eye strain, for small text, for clarity, etc. D/deafness and DeafBlindness are also on spectrums. Some DeafBlind people have some hearing, some vision, a little of both, or none of either. If someone asks you for better or different accessibility services for your content, listen and try to accommodate them as best you can. I have provided some links and resources here to attempt to explain accessibility for blind people, which will include blind people who are DeafBlind. The point is accessibility issues can come from both sides whether it be the audio or visual sides.

Some general helpful links:

AFB’s Advice for image descriptions here

Screen-readers here

Improving Accessibility for the DeafBlind community here

How DeafBlind People Use Technology and The Importance of Braille and Transcripts: Understanding Assistive Technology

Online Content:

GIFs, Pictures, Fan-art, PSA and info posts, Memes, Screenshots of Text Posts or Screenshots of Twitter Threads- Provide an image description on your original post! This is the best option, as you probably know your content best and what you wish to draw attention to. More importantly, every reblog will include an image description, which means the blind person doesn’t need to hunt for an image description in the reblogs! If you know more than one language, include image descriptions in those languages.

Note: Always include descriptions when you post images with or about blind people or characters. Particularly fan-art you made of blind characters. If you don’t, consider why and think about how it would feel to be shut out of something about yourself.

What should you include?

Write Image Description in brackets and include End of Image Description at the end for clarification. As for what you should describe, it depends on what the picture is. Include where it is from. For example, “a screenshot of a Twitter thread by BlindBetaIsAwesome”. Include the text and describe any GIFs or images it includes. Write everything out as they appear. Describe emojis as well. When writing out screen names or hashtags, capitalize the first letter of each word. Otherwise screen-readers read it oddly. For example instead of #accessibilityfortheblind try #AccessibilityForTheBlind. If you think someone will want to search a name, include a link.

You should describe what is important in the image, especially for conveying information or humor. General ideas include: image origin, who is in the image, what they’re doing, any relevant colors or clothing, objects they’re holding, their facial expression, any emojis, and any text in the image. Blind people do like to know about color. For NSFW stuff, include ‘NSFW’ at the start, but other than that, yes, blind people also generally like NSFW things described.

Fanfiction:

Generally, fanfic is very accessible to screen-readers and Braille Displays. However, there are a few ways you can make it more accessible.

Pictures: Include alt-text for any images you post such as artwork or character social media posts. Describe it like you would any other image. Alt-text is different from an image description because instead of a screen-reader saying “image” when it finds an image, it will describe the image. An image description is the text included beneath the picture that everyone can see. Including some kind of description, especially for plot-relevant images, can allow all blind readers to experience the fic.

Chat conversations: Again, for hashtags and screen names, capitalize the first letter of each word for the ease of screen-readers. For characters who don’t use capitalization much, you can add a hyphen between each word to make it easier to read like this: blind-beta-likes-fanfic-too.

Emojis: Screen readers can’t fully read emojis like this one that uses keyboard slashes and symbols to create an image ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (image description: emoji of a person shrugging with both palms lifted upwards. End description.) However, they can read emojis that come on a phone such as 🧁which screen readers read as “cupcake”.

Podfics are also good for hearing people with no vision or reduced vision. Having a podfic with good quality (maybe one that can describe images found in the story) will reduce some of the issues listed here and give blind people another, fun way to interact with content. However, I would try to keep in mind the things I mentioned above for the sake of screen-readers and Braille Displays, which are particularly important for some DeafBlind people who may want to read your fanfic and may not be able to hear well enough to use a screen-reader.

Lastly, keep in mind that any kind of comic may be inaccessible to some blind people. Write with them in mind. Include a message at the start of the story, maybe that it contains material from the comic, graphic novel, or print cartoon. If you know of a comic dub, link to it. If there is none, include details in the story so that a non-manga or non-comic reader would be able to understand.

Web-Comics/Web-Graphic-Novels:

First, I did research and found a comic book store for the blind called Comics Empower. Unfortunately, when I click the link provided on Twitter and the articles I read, the site seems to be down.

However, this is about you all and sharing your comics with blind readers. You have a few options:

Alt-text. This is descriptions directly ‘inside’ the image, which is not visible to everyone. You can read about alt-text for comics specially here and you can read general info for alt-text for screen-readers and Braille Displays here.

Image descriptions. These are descriptions of each comic page (hopefully with a paragraph for each panel) that can be visible to anyone. You can describe your comic, who is in it, what they’re doing, and what they’re saying, probably beneath the image.

Comic Audio Performances. These are accessible to both blind and sighted audiences. These are videos using actors for the dialogue, sound effects, and moving comic panels. Pros for this style include increased viewership, increased accessibility for the blind, and perhaps more revenue if you have a way to monetize the content. Cons include that it is more work, could potentially cost money when hiring actors initially, may not be accessible to anyone with hearing loss, and may still require a bit of audio description for some panels that are hard to follow with only sound effects.

What can you do?

A few ideas I had were to use a combination of image descriptions and audio performances to make the comics accessible to a number of people who may be blind, or DeafBlind. Having options is helpful. For ther issue of some panels needing extra description in order to make sense, I thought of including time-stamps and descriptions in the description section, labeling it as image descriptions for the blind. Include dialogue for reference. Or an audio description could be added such as:

Audio narration: “Bee sits on a couch writing.”

Sound Effect of a purring cat.

Audio narration: “Blind Beta picks up an orange cat and puts him on the couch next to them.”

Dialogue: “I’m so glad I have a cat to cuddle with!”

I will touch on this in the video section, but while it is sadly not possible to add audio descriptions onto YouTube as of 2021, you can add them manually through websites you like YouDescribe. For your comics, I suggest, reading about YouDescribe, downloading the app, creating a narration transcript for your web comic performance, and posting the described audio performance onto YouDescribe. Post both versions as close to the same time as you can, and include a link to the described version in the YouTube description. A glance at YouDescribe will tell you not all videos are available with descriptions and not all blind people are aware of this service. Not all videos are searchable in their library either. However, it is an option I wanted to include.

You could also simply include the audio narration in your main YouTube video if you would like. Or any combination of my suggestions you feel comfortable with.

YouTube Videos/Video Clips:

I wanted to cover YouTube videos and video clips shared on websites like tumblr. For small clips, image descriptions and transcripts could probably be listed together. I have seen this done and it seems to help people.

Again, the original poster should post the description with the video. This is because they know the most important parts and because all reblogs of the post will include the description, so no one will have to hunt down a description that may not exist.

For the clip or clip compilation, mention where the clips come from, who is in them, and what they are doing. You could probably have a separate paragraph for each clip and include times-stamps if possible.

For videos you post on YouTube, descriptions can be very helpful! Unfortunately, YouTube does not support adding an audio description track at this time. Ideally, YouTube would have a description track one could turn on and off such as with subtitles. Until then, if you want to add a description, you should add one yourself when you post the video onto YouTube or any other website.

Before I get into how, let’s go over something else.

What videos need descriptions?

-Recipe videos - especially ones with only text. Ingredients, steps, measures, methods, any flourishes or special scenery (such as when shopping for ingredients) should be described. Blind people don’t just want you to read the recipe to them. They want to know what is happening in the video and how it is being done.

-Tutorials - These often contain a voice-over and accompanying images to demonstrate. A creator can opt to simply include more visual description along with the other information in the voice-over or add extra narration later (see the “How?” section below). For these videos, make sure to avoid or expand on any visually dependent parts such as “click here” or “fold here” or “when you finish, it should look like this”. Videos that contain only text and demonstration, however, will need a more traditional audio description the same as any other video.

-Silent aesthetic videos - Sometimes containing music or focusing on natural noise, these videos are usually vlogs with soothing activities or daily routines. They often show scenery, pretty things, or tours. Because these videos are silent, sometimes containing only text, they are not accessible. However, they can be easy to describe, perhaps in a soothing or educational fashion.

-Music videos - Because these videos are by nature visual, they may not be accessible. They may also have inconsistent, poor, or changing lighting for aesthetic purposes or set changes. This means audio descriptions would be helpful.

-Text-based videos - Obviously these are not accessible or may be difficult to read depending on font size, style, or background. For these, putting the text in the description may suffice. Label it so that blind people are aware they are getting the same material. If the text includes pictures or short clips, you could also simply include your own narration on the video itself or see the “How?” section below for another alternative.

-Game Play-Throughs - Games can sometimes be completely inaccessible pe very difficult depending on the person’s level of site. A lot of video games a not accessible or difficult to play, with quick-moving graphics, perhaps small text, or other difficulties. Because of this, blind people may enjoy game plays on YouTube for video games and mobile games.

-Skits or other performances - Think of these as Netflix shows with audio description tracks. Blind people may miss out on some visual humor, plot elements, or other fun visual aspects like costumes.

-Original Films, Animation, Clips From Shows - Again, think of it as any TV show that needs to description to cover visual aspects of what is happening. Scenery, characters, what they’re doing, any text, facial expressions, etc.

Pet videos- Because pets are cute and they should be described! Especially because these videos are sometimes hard to follow, such as a pet doing a trick.

How? How Do We Provide This?

There is always the option to add your own audio descriptions. However, that way confuse already-existing narration or may not be possible for already-published videos. You may also have trouble speaking and wish for someone else to provide audio descriptions. The video may be a music video or one you want to remain silent for the aesthetic. You may want to add a description to a video you enjoy that is not one you uploaded personally.

A free website and mobile app called YouDescribe can help with that. It allows people to add audio descriptions to videos on YouTube. You can even describe videos on a wishlist. Find out more here.

If you describe your video or have it described, be sure to link to the YouDescribe video in the description of your YouTube version so that people can find it easily, or note that it is available on YouDescribe.

Here is a link to the website

And a link to the app.

This site may be a bit too niche, but I figure if it helps one person, I’ll be happy. My entire blog is niche, when you think about it- targeting writers who specifically want to write and read about blind characters. It’ll be fine.

Keep in mind that audio descriptions may not be accessible to all DeafBlind people. An inclusive option could be to include a description under your video so people with Braille Displays can read it.

Print Books, Audiobooks, Large Print Books, or Braille Books?

Let’s get into something you writers might be interested in. Books! Let’s say you wrote a book with a blind character. How do you make sure it can be accessed by blind readers? You want to have a few options.

Print books - These are accessible to people with reduced vision. It is also possible to scan print books to read with voiceover, but I can’t imagine many people buying books simply to scan unless they borrowed/found it. So it could be an option, I suppose. Scanning books also takes time because you need to do each individual page.

Audiobooks - Audiobooks are great. They are accessible to blind people who can hear. They are cheaper to produce than Braille books, take up less space, and are better for the environment. They can be expensive when you buy them. Libraries have extensive collections now, however, because libraries don’t usually have any Braille books and very few large print books, not all blind people use them, even for digital access. However,many blind people love audiobooks so it a good way to make sure your content is accessible.

As of now, my library app is accessible with a screenreader, so reading audiobooks is possible. E-books are not currently accessible with a screen-reader on this particular app.

Make sure to release your print books and audiobooks at the same time or as soon as possible. It isn’t fair for blind people to have to wait, although there are cases where not having an audiobook is understandable. Keep in mind that the less options you have, the less accessible your content will be.

Large Print Books - I used to get large print books myself. I would say it is less likely publishers will want to publish large print books because they are, of course, larger and take up more space. (Not as much as Braille books, but we’ll get into that.) As you may assume, they are also less popular with readers. Publishers make exceptions for textbooks, so if you are making a textbook or an educational book, particularly one with drawings, publishers might allow it. They also might consider making large print editions of children’s books. Large print books can sometimes be found at libraries, although they are usually crammed into their own limited section. That shows how rare it is for large print books to be printed compared to regular-sized books. I have an extra note about this in the children’s book section, but for the most part, I think you can get away with not having a large print edition of your book.

Braille Books - I should you one doesn’t just make a Braille book. Feelings toward them are generally complicated. They can wear down over time, cost a lot, and take up a lot of space. One volume of a book is several volumes of Braille books. Libraries don’t generally have them- you have to request them from various places like The National Library Service for the Blind (NLS). For more information about obtaining or borrowing Braille books, look here.

Braille Books have largely been replaced by refreshable Braille displays and audiobooks. However, they are still important. They can also help DeafBlind people, if a book cannot be read on a Braille display (see the section on e-books below). My suggestion would be to skip Braille books unless you are writing for children (see the Children’s Books section) or your book contains many diagrams that need to be embossed.

Children’s Books -

I wanted to briefly discuss children’s books. With children’s books, you will, of course, want to have a print book and an audiobook available, perhaps even someone reading the book on YouTube. If the book has pictures, descriptions of the pictures would be nice. This is also where I think large print and Braille books may be not only possible or more likely, but important. Children are just learning to read and will continue to explore a love for reading. Therefore, a lack of reading material can be challenging.

If possible, you may want to consider asking your publisher if large print or Braille versions are possible. While websites are available so that children can get books, you may want to ask for your book to be published in these formats if your story has a blind MC.

Braille literacy is declining in the blind community, with children (and frankly many others) choosing to use VoiceOver and audiobooks to read rather than Braille. Being able to read helps reinforce spelling, grammar, meaning in ways that are not possible with having things read to you. That said, children should also be encouraged to learn technology and use audiobooks when they feel comfortable.

If you are publishing a children’s book, particularly with a blind MC, consider what your options are for increasing accessibility.

E-Books:

This is one of the more accessible options, as it can be read with a screen-reader or Braille display. E-books are also common enough that they are released at the same time as print books. The text can usually be adjusted and readers usually have a Search feature. However, accessibility is still a problem with e-books. While authors cannot fix this, they should be aware of it. You can read about accessibility issues here.

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I hope all this helped somewhat. I provide sensitivity reading for blind characters for anyone who is interested.