#Thanks for including alt text op!

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

Image Descriptions and Accessibility in General on Tumblr for New Users

What are Image Descriptions

Image Descriptions are text following a picture explaining what’s in that picture. They are primarily for blind/visually impaired people with screen readers and visually impaired people who can read text but have issues with pictures.

They also help people who have trouble:

focusing on/understanding a picture

reading text on images (ex low contrast, weird fonts, etc)

getting images to load

Without image descriptions posts are not accessible to many people, so if you can it's best to include a description or alt text every time you post an image.

Alt text vs image descriptions

Image descriptions are written in the body of the post itself, and have some kind of text before and after, to explain that what's coming up. They typically begin short and concise, but can expand to more detail.

Alt text is added to the image itself, and is what is read by screen-readers (which will otherwise just say "image"). There is no need to add any explanation before the description so you can just say "a description of the image". Alt text can only be added by the original poster, by clicking on the three dots in the bottom right corner of the image and clicking 'update image description.' It is typically short and concise.

On tumblr, alt text is currently available on web by clicking on the alt button (or via new xkit - accesskit - move alt text to captions below image). On mobile, alt text is available in some versions of the app through clicking on the alt text button. Image descriptions are visible on all posts, although if you put them under a read-more, that makes them less accessible. (Thanks to @911described for helping with this section)

How to Make Image Descriptions

Awhile ago I made this general guide. I learned from examples, so here are descriptions made by a bunch of different people. I've also made templates for a lot of common images you'll see on Tumblr.

Other Concerns

Gradient or all caps text make most screen readers read out the word one letter at a time. In addition, these plus text that is bold/italicized/underlined, in colors other than black, or in weird/fancy fonts are difficult for many people to read.

How Filtering Works

You can filter out both words/phrases and tags in the filtering section under the general section in the settings. When filtering out words from a post, it will look at both the text of the post/reblog chain and at the url of op and the rebloggers. When filtering out tags it will look at the tags of the specific post on your dash, and at the tags of the original post.

Tagging for Common Triggers

Don't sensor trigger warnings (for example don't tag suic!de) because then people who have them filtered will still see it.

Tagging for Flashing Lights

If you post a gif or video in a post that flashes, you should tag it with something like "flashing lights" and Not "tw epilepsy" because if any of the tags in the original post contains the world epilepsy it will show up in the epilepsy tag, which is dangerous. Check out this post from @photosensitive-despair for more info about tagging photosensitive content.

Tagging for Unreality vs Misinfo

Things that could trigger delusions/psychotic episodes/etc should be tagged with unreality. This includes:

content that has existential themes related to reality/things not existing (example: a philosophy such as solipsism, do not look up the term if unreality stuff is triggering for you)

extremely surreal content(example: sometimes content such as weirdcore/dreamcore aesthetics can fall under this umbrella but again this is very subjective)

content that reinforces or encourages common delusions(example: that one "im living in your walls" meme)

Things like rp blogs and fake/edited tweets should not be tagged with unreality, unless they contain triggering content. Consider tags like "fiction" or "misinfo." See this post for more info.

Edit:

Addition from @mindflamer

You can look through the reblogs of a post to see if someone's already written a description. There is a button to see just comments vs. comments + tags which makes it easier. Scroll through looking for brackets [], ID, or Image Description. This is great to do if you can't write your own IDs for whatever reason, so that you can at least spread the version of the post that's described if there is one.

If you're not able to write IDs consistently, some is better than none. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You can use the tag #undescribed to make it easy for those who need them to filter out those posts. Similarly, if you primarily tag triggers but can't for certain posts, you can use a separate tag on that to be filtered such as #untagged.

Please, if I forgot something, sound off in the notes and I'll update this post with it

[egg04]

☾~It's Tuko/Tokay a.k.a. Egg04!~ ★

[PT: (moon symbol) Heyyy, it's Tuko or Tokay a.k.a. Egg04! (star symbol) /End PT]

━━━━━━ ⟡ ━━━━━━

[JANUARY 2024-ONGOING] Share post linked in here please ♥︎

[ID from Alt Text: OP's 2024 sona giving a tired thumbs up next to all-caps text saying "Semi-Emergency Commissions. Please share, thank you." /End ID]

━━━━━━ ⟡ ━━━━━━

❥ image description blog: @egg04-id / side blog: @eggohfour / instagram / pinterest / carrd

❥ My AU Masterpost

❥ Support me on Ko-Fi! / Cashapp

━━━━━━ ⟡ ━━━━━━

‼️Important‼️ Content Warnings + Content Notes below cut:

‼️CONTENT WARNING‼️

[PT: CONTENT WARNING /End PT]

My art (including my writing) is intended for a generally 16 + audience.

No outright explicit content, however I will post (with appropriate warning tags and/ or content filters): blood, violence, mild gore, partial nudity, suggestive imagery, etc.

Additionally, I may portray content based off my experiences with mental health issues, abuse, religious cult trauma, childhood/teenhood sexualization, and similarly related topics.

━━━━━━ ⟡ ━━━━━━

💜MY FANWORKS💜

[PT: MY FANWORKS /End PT]

I can and will be SELF-INDULGENT. I draw and write a lot of characters according to my headcanons and/or PERSONAL ideas and AUs. Which, of course, aren't always canon or some fanon either.

This is NOT to invalidate or say the canon work is bad or needs to be "fixed," nor is it to say others' headcanons, popular or not, are invalid. Canon is canon. My headcanons are my headcanons. Your headcanons are yours.

You owe ZERO obligation to like my headcanons/AUs, just as I to yours.

━━━━━━ ⟡ ━━━━━━

🌸SHIP STUFF🌸

[PT: SHIP STUFF/end PT]

NONE of my art is ship art unless I explicitly tag it as such.

Please do not tag my art as ship unless it is actually is.

I'm a lovequeer oriented aroace and probably apl-spec too. For me, my personal experience carries into some of my art and how I portray, not only ships, but relationships as a whole (friendships, familial ties, etc).

I'm allowed to dislike ships, just as you may dislike mine.

Please do not involve me in any discussions/discourse relating to "pr*ship" and such. I do not want to get into it, it makes me very uncomfortable, and they are not conversations I want to be involved in.

━━━━━━ ⟡ ━━━━━━

Additional notes

[PT: Additional notes /End PT]

Though I now put plain-text IDs and alt text on most of my posts, I am not experienced, nor am I the greatest at descriptions in general, especially with characters and poses. Please message me if there's any particular post I haven't put alt text on that you want described. And please feel free to DM me about how I can improve my existing alt text descriptions.

[cipher-fresh]

hi! i hope it’s okay to ask this, but i’m trying to write alt text for pictures i include in my own posts and i’m not super sure how to. i’m just kinda worried i’ll fuck it up lol. i see u write image IDs often, so do u have any advice? thank u!!

Hi! I’m delighted you’re asking, I’m always glad to see more people regularly describe images on tumblr.

You don’t need to know every single detail about a post to give a good image ID, just the gist so people understand is fine. I describe a lot of images from TV shows where I don’t know the locations or characters, but usually the dialogue is the most important thing so I focus on what the point of the image is when transcribing.

Phrasing posts can usually feel awkward, I’ve started a lot of IDs like “A screenshot of people standing by a table talking, dialogue reading [something]” but it gets easier to phrase it over time.

One image ID is better than none, even if you’re not describing posts super often, looking through a post’s comments for an ID and reblogging that is really nice. If you want to reblog from a mutual who is reblogging a thread of a post without an ID or want to preserve another comment, you’re welcome to copy and paste other people’s ID’s.

If you’re putting a description in alt text, it doesn’t need an ID introduction, but if you’re putting it in the body of the post (generally preferred), having an ID introduction like ‘image description:’ is suggested, or the ID may look like a comment on the post instead of what the original image says.

I’ve made occasional mistakes when doing IDs, but my other image describing friends usually help me out and tell me when I make typos.

Since I’ve started writing image IDs I’ve tried to be on top of making sure I don’t post undescribed images on my original posts. I usually hold off on posting images to my own posts if I haven’t described them. I didn’t start describing posts until a year and a half ago so I have a lot of old original posts with undescribed images that I’ll find and add descriptions to if I feel they’re worth a reblog.

Asking the OP of a post for details about how to describe an image is also advised if you’re not sure. And it’s alright if you’re not able to get to every post, I know I haven’t.

There is a Google doc of image descriptions for popular meme templates floating somewhere around here, if I find it I’ll link it in a reblog.

Thank you for asking!

[a-captions-blog]

hey there! i mod a discord server and have been working to implement ID and alt text. i wanted to ask what would be the most appropriate way to write IDs for images posted by other people, especially if i can't write and send an ID right after the original image was posted, and would have to post after other messages were sent. should i try @ing the OP and ask them to edit their original message to include the ID? if they don't respond, would using discord's reply function work? thank you!

It can't hurt to @ the OP and ask them to edit their message, and hopefully after a few times, people would start remembering to do it on their own. I can't think of a great native solution to the delays between someone posting an undescribed image and you sending a description, but using the reply function would at the very least create a link back to the image, so someone could navigate back to it if they wanted to.

If anyone has other thoughts on this, please add on in the reblogs/replies!

[empyrean-decay-god-dca]

Hello!!! Your recent ID post has def helped me a lot and I'm slowly adding alt text to past work (and then eventually reblog with IDs in desc :D). However there are some things that I'm still uncertain about:

1) How should someone properly format ID's where you have multiple images that you don't want to/can't separate with IDs (i.e. comics). I'm sorry if I missed an example of that in one of the linked sources ^^;

2) Additionally, as someone with hand/wrist issues I'm really grateful for shortened posts/read mores as it's less strain for my hands to scroll past. That is to say, would it still be rude to place an ID in a read more if the IDs happen to be lengthy (in the event of describing multiple images)? Would it be better to add it as a reblog instead?

I would like to try to make my posts more accessible for others!!! I'm incredibly grateful for those who provide audio captions, so I am very interested in doing the same for visual descriptions :D thank you for bringing attention to this, and providing helpful resources on the topic as well ^w^♡

I'd like to mention there's a Tumblr feature that automatically shortens long posts. Go to Settings -> Dashboard -> Interface --> Shorten long posts.

Hi besties! Also don't worry. There are a lot of links I gave you guys, and even I get lost in the sauce. The most useful thing I found writing IDs for comics is this:

it's for all types of visual media, but it has a comic section. The general formatting is this:

Write comics in a single ID:

Have an introductory paragraph where you describe the context of your comic, or the context of its beginning. This includes your style, the main subjects and how they're positioned, the surroundings (the location), and the basic thing happening between the characters.

Then the later paragraphs will go into specifics of dialogue and action. If there's a visual change, such as a zoom-in or a change of perspective, you're going to describe that, and put that before the dialogue.

End ID

Panel by panel is not good. Comics are narratives and stories and they need a flow. This post talks about it here:

Also, often, describing a comic isn't that long. Unless you're posting multiple full-blown pages at a time, then your typical 4-panel or maybe, 1-2 page comic will span a few paragraphs for the ID. But I answered an anon over at @lab-labrava about comic lengths. If it genuinely is long then @antimonarchy addressed this problem

Put image descriptions first. Don’t hide them under readmores or any other text. If you have something with multiple images and you are the creator, place the description under each image in succession rather than all at the end. Readmores are ableist, as they require someone who has vision problems/one of the conditions described above to do more work to access the message of visual content. 

^^^ This goes more in depth. Check the section with Placement of ID

You guys see me writing IDs in reblogs like this:

ID:

Image 1: (description of image)

Image 2: (description of image)

End ID

This is because I'm reblogging from the OP. I don't own the original post, so I'm forced to format it like this when ideally, I'd place the ID straight after each image. if you have multiple images, then write an ID for each image and place it straight after that image, like the following:

(image 1)

ID: (description of image 1) end Id

(image 2)

ID: (description of image 2) end ID

and so on.

Full-Blown Comics with Multiple Images/Pages

See I'm so conflicted here. When it's a huge ongoing project, then the ID for each page can span multiple paragraphs, and each Tumblr post may have multiple comic pages in a single update. So my formula above, where I place an ID straight after each image can elongate the post severely. In that case, alt text is a good idea. Especially since people using screen-readers may listen to Image image image, and skip past the post, not waiting the lump-sum ID near the end. In this case, you can forgo ID and write alt text. That's what most people do anyways.

I hope that answers some questions

[gotinterest]

To add to your polls master list, I cannot edit any posts with polls I’ve reblogged (where I’m not the op) including not being able to add tags

Ok that's interesting. I tried a test earlier on my post limmy alt blog to see if this was the case and was able to edit my reblog. I wonder if it's also a time out thing where after a certain amount of time you won't be able to edit a reblog. I'm going to now go check if that's the case on my post limmy blog or if its a random glitch that some people get and others don't.

Thank you for letting me know!

Edit: Anon, when you reblogged, did you add any text in your initial reblog? Or did you just directly reblog with no additional commentary and then when you went to edit your reblog you weren't able to add or edit anything?

[mattfoggyfanartarchive]

Posts are tagged according to:

canon (#comics mattfoggy, #nmcu mattfoggy, #earth-65 mattfoggy, #dd2003 mattfoggy, #mix mattfoggy*, #au mattfoggy) *mix mattfoggy refers to both crossovers and art where for example Matt is drawn NMCU style but Foggy is drawn comic style

flavor of au/ship (#genderswap mattfoggy, #trans mattfoggy, #demon mattfoggy, #angel mattfoggy, #vampire mattfoggy, #merman mattfoggy, #pirate mattfoggy, #kingpin foggy, #animal mattfoggy, #poly mattfoggy)

media type/genre (#fan art, #fan comic, #edits, #gifs*, #fanvid, #memes, #ask blog, #fic-related) *gifs must be edited in some fashion to be included

image description availability (#id in op, #id in reblog, #id in alt text, #id tba)

all posts tagged #mattfoggy and #daredevil and artist name when available

Tags may be updated as the archive grows, so check back here periodically!

--

If you are a MattFoggy fan artist planning to post a new work, please consider leaving a description in the alt text of your image (e.g. "digital fan art of Matt and Foggy from the Daredevil comics where x is happening...")! Please note that I will not reblog art without image descriptions and it generally takes me a very long time to get to adding one, so if you want to be reblogged in a timely manner you know what to do. Also, if you have forgotten an image description and I have added one to it in a reblog, you have my full permission to copy and paste it and edit it into your original post without credit. It's much better to have it in the original post as opposed to a reblog. Thank you!

[clubgif]

About Club Gif

A blog dedicated to bringing together Tumblr's aspiring and veteran gifmakers in the hopes of increasing knowledge, support and appreciation among those who keep on creating just for fun! ♥︎

Here you will find gif-related tutorials, tips and tricks.

↓ INFO & TAGS UNDER THE CUT ↓

Club Info

Can you make a tutorial ... ?

Yes! Since Club Gif is essentially about gifs, only gif-related requests will be entertained.

NOTE: Club Gif will no longer be responding to asks regarding other people’s edits and will no longer be asking OP on your behalf. Please always ask OP first, they would love to help you out :)

Thanks for understanding!

What do you reblog?

Gif-related resources and uniquely creative gif sets!

As much as possible, Club Gif avoids:

color grading that whitewashes people of color

oversaturated color grading

dysfunctional gif posts

gifs that are evidently grainy and pixelated (as much as possible)

stolen gifs (do let me know if I've reblogged one)

What are considered gif-related resources?

Resources that Club Gif reblogs include (but not limited to):

tutorials

color psds

templates

ask posts

and more!

Club Tags

⭐️ Club Tutorials (own)

💚 Gif appreciation

📪 Answered asks

Gif Tutorials & Tips

All in one gif tutorials

First Step

Downloading videos

Making Gifs (general tag)

Load Files Into Stack method

Video Frames To Layers method

Save settings

Converting Frame Animation to Video Timeline

Converting gif layers to Smart Object

Transferring gif layers from one document to another

Coloring Gifs (general tag)

Before/After style coloring

Coloring PSDs

Coloring specific to POC

Grouping your coloring layers

Isolating a color

Match the coloring of different scenes

Selective Color vs Color Balance

Two-toned gif background (two-color bg)

Using Curves to color correct

Subtitles

Downloading fonts

Adding subtitles

Styling subtitles

Changing text color

Adding symbols to subtitles (alt codes)

Gif Quality

Sharpening

Improving gif quality

Grainy mobile gifs

Gif Tutorials (general tag)

Typography

Gif effects 

Graphic design 

Multiple gifs

Blending gifs

Adding textures to gifs (video and photo)

Overlays

Blurring gif backgrounds

Fading in 2 scenes in 1 gif

Gif headers

Grainy gif effect

Removing watermarks

Typography (general tag)

Animating text

Glowing text

iMessage text bubbles

Outlining text

Pairing fonts

Wrapping text around a circle

Templates (general tag)

Using templates (how to)

Trending gif templates by Club Gif

If you’re feeling generous, ko-fis are very much appreciated. ♥︎

[minrcrafter]

Vanilla Essence [PVP] {1.12.2} {Custom Features}

Vanilla Essence

Hi there! You have just discovered Vanilla Essence.

Just give me the IP: ve-mc.com

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Introduction

My name is Thanos (also known as Biskotaki in-game) and I launched this server back on May 2017. I am studying computer science in college and I feel Minecraft is a great way to practice on my programming skills. I have been hosting Minecraft servers for a while.

Vanilla Essence is a semi-vanilla server that offers a unique Minecraft survival experience. It's a place where you can peacefully work on the projects you had in mind and never had a chance to start. You can get on with friends, make a claim to protect your resources and get straight into work.

Unlike most servers, Vanilla Essence is not following the pay-to-win scheme. All donations come with rewards that are entirely cosmetic and have no impact on gameplay. You will not see OP guys running around with premium, overpowered kits and equipment.

There's a twist. The standard survival experience that Minecraft offers usually gets boring after a while, so I decided to step up the game a little bit. I have programmed a custom plugin using Spigot that adds a whole bunch of new unique and exciting features into the game. You'll see me talking about loot chests, events, iron coins and player shops in a bit.

Vanilla Essence has a small but dedicated team of three Moderators which ensure that the server is always in one piece and nothing "extreme" is taking place. We truly hope that this is the right place for you and your friends.

Details

The current map is 10,000 by 10,000 (trust me, it's big enough), nether and the end are both accessible.

PVP: Anywhere, Mobs: On, Explosions: Off, Fire spread: Off

Vanilla Essence aims to use minimal plugins yet offer powerful and intriguing features.

Plugins:

Vanilla Essence: Our custom plugin which offers most of the core features on the server.

Advanced Ban: This is our main plugin to punish all the rule breakers.

Core Protect: The standard block history plugins out there to keep track of grieferes and trouble makers.

Grief Prevention: One of the best plugins for player claims, you can protect your chests, make plots, manage land permissions or even build towns.

Votifier: We use this plugin to get notified every time a player votes for our server so we deliver the appropriate rewards :).

Spartan Anti-Cheat: Premium anti-cheat that aims to block most of the commonly used hacks in Minecraft. If someone is trying to use something, Spartan will know.

WorldEdit & WorldGuard: We use those plugins to setup protected regions and plots, nothing special.

Buycraft: This plugin makes sure that all donation rewards are delivered on time. Basically connects our shop with the server.

Custom Features

This section aims to answer this question: What's different from standard vanilla servers?

Loot Chests

Loot chests are normal chests that contain valuable treasure. Every time you mine a solid non-flammable block, there is a chance of a loot chest being dropped. There are three tiers of loot chests: common, rare and legendary. As you've probably guessed, rare loot chests contain better rewards than common loot chests, and the same applies for legendary loot chests. These mysterious chests can give you an extra incentive to go mining.

Events

Every hour you will notice an event is undergoing. Events are special challenges that come with great rewards. You can participate and try to win the objectives of each event. Winners are rewarded with the most powerful loot chests on the game, an event loot chest. Event loot chests contain a fair amount of iron coins and enchanted diamond equipment (tool, weapon or armor).

Coins and Trades

As you probably read in the previous section, there are two types of currencies in the game: iron and gold coins. Iron coins can be acquired by winning events or trading with other players. You can use iron coins to purchase top of the tier items from a villager market at spawn, where each villager has a set of custom trades. Most villagers accept gold coins, where one gold coin is a stack of iron coins (64 iron coins -> 1 gold coin). You can get your hands on some really cool items such as: special pickaxes (ex. break mob spawners), enchanted diamond armor, mob spawn eggs, end-game items and more.

Player shops

We recently added a shops world where each player can purchase a plot with coins and build their own shop (literally). That means, once you have a plot to work on, you are able to sell resources, tools, weapons, anything. The prices can range from ores (coal, iron, gold, diamond, emerald) to coins (iron and gold). Our custom chest-sign system is greatly simplified to make the shop setup less frustrating and enjoyable. Buying from other shops is as simple as opening a chest and clicking on the item you'd like to purchase.

Statistics

All players have a custom /stats menu that keeps track of their progress in the server. For example, one can find the total amount of loot chests opened. This menu also keeps track of deaths, kills and even a death/kill ratio. It can further be customized with a custom description and likes (yes, literally!). A custom description can be set with /description <text> and players can "like" someone by clicking on the emerald of their respective /stats <player> menu. There are certainly a lot of details here, but you'll be able to have a better grasp of those features in-game!

Leaderboards

In order to promote some competition in-game, we have placed leaderboards (armor stands with text basically) at spawn that keep track of the top three players with the highest count for each statistic. Furthermore, milestones such as "100 total loot chests opened" are announced in chat.

Vote rewards

Vote rewards can certain help if you don't have many resources to start with. Those who /vote for the first time are rewarded with a basic Starter Kit and by continuing to vote daily, just like loot chests, several resources are given. Voting is very important because it can help by boost our rankings in the server listing websites (higher rank => more players).

Battle Mode (in development)

Battle mode is a unique mode evolved around the combat aspect of the game. For the PVP fans, this mode is going to get players into arenas and setup fights with a huge variety of kits. Leveling system, experience, unlockable kits, coin rewards are all included. Stay tuned!

Rules

We have compiled a simple set of rules that all players must follow. This is essential so we can maintain peace and order on the server. We have done our best to maintain simple and reasonable rules.

Be friendly, promote a positive attitude and always be respectful.

Do not repeatedly send messages in chat.

Do not advertise other websites or servers.

Do not accuse others of hacking without evidence.

Do not use alt accounts for your own advantage.

Do not use offensive or inappropriate skins.

Do not use glitches and exploits to your advantage.

Do not use hacked clients or xray resource packs.

Staff

Biskotaki: Owner and main server administration

Passionate_Rhino: Moderation

GhostMonkee: Moderation

BirdOfLight: Moderation

What's next?

We are really looking forward into meeting you in-game! We hope you spend some quality and enjoyable time on the server. Here's what you can do next:

IP to connect with: ve-mc.com

Backup IP (if the first one doesn't work): vanillaessence.serverminer.com

Discord: http://ift.tt/2tKroXr

Website: www.ve-mc.com

Support Email: support@ve-mc.com

You made it, thanks for your time.

[stimtoybox]

Image Descriptions

I’ve got two asks by anons on the same theme, so I’ll combine them into one post to save a few spoons:

Hi! I was wondering if you had a guide for writing image descriptions? Something outlining how much detailed is needed and what should and should no be included, any tips really. Thanks! 

hi! i had a couple of questions about image descriptions; do you have/have a link to a guide on how to write them properly (eg. amount of detail, how to write multiple image descriptions on one post and still be clear etc)? and if we dont have the spoons for a full description, would a simple/basic desc (eg: "a jar of blue orbeez on a wooden desk" w/ no more detail) help by giving the mods a starting point to edit from rather than writing from scratch or would it be a hindrance? 

This is actually a hard question for me to answer, because it asks me to do something I do without thinking - convert non-word information into words. In all honesty, my first response was well, just describe it which is so not helpful to anyone. For me, this is like asking someone to explain how they fall asleep - it’s an automatic process that doesn’t involve a lot of conscious decision-making.

So I let both asks lie fallow for a few days until I got past the not helpful first response and figured out what it is I actually do when I describe.

I’ll also observe that while I do need image descriptions myself (for GIFs and videos) I am not the primary target for them, so there might be needs I have forgotten or overlooked. I’m in the position of needing descriptions but still having full access to reading the text, so there’s probably a lot of issues folks who use screen readers face that I haven’t included. Please correct me if so.

First: any description is better than no description.

If you only have spoons for one line, do it and call it done, seriously. Yes, a more detailed description is preferable, but when you look at the vast amount of undescribed posts on Tumblr alone, if even a brief descriptive line makes those posts more accessible, we’re better off. We need to make Tumblr a more accessible place for everyone, so every little bit makes a difference.

(Speaking for my needs here at @stimtoybox, I can always add a description line if there’s something I think needed that the OP has left out, and I have done this in the past. That’s still less work than my having to do it myself, and I’m pretty sure the other mods will agree. Anything that means less work for us means more posts for everyone else. Right now, I have the posts to go up to posting five or six times a day easily, but we can’t format them fast enough to do so.)

I’ve tucked everything else behind a read-more cut. This is a long post and is probably best read when one has time and spoons on hand:

Second: you do not and should not describe every tiny detail in an image.

Look at an image long enough and you’ll see a chapter’s worth of detail you can describe, but nobody wants to read through or listen to a whole chapter just to know what’s in the image. To be blunt, nobody cares about the fine grain detail of the table on which your stress ball is sitting. They’re more interested in the pattern on the stress ball.

We need to describe in more detail the relevant information and in less detail the incidental information. This is all the more important for describers with limited spoons, like most of us, but it’s also important for folks who need the descriptions but don’t have the spoons to read a paragraph for one relevant sentence.

To figure out what’s description-worthy, as in what the majority of your description should focus on, you might want to ask yourself these questions:

- Who is the image for?

- What is the image about?

Take any photo on this blog as an example: this photo is for stimmers, about a given stim toy, and its purpose is to show people what this toy looks like and, often, how it might be used. That tells you immediately what your focus is. Often, it’s the central object in the image, as we have a long history of indicating importance by putting something in the centre of a composition. However, it could also be several stim toys or people; chances are high that any single image is actually about a few different things at once.

Next, we move on to details we think people are going to want to know:

- What do the subjects of the image look like?

This can be broken down into a few different categories:

- Colour: what colour or colours is the subject?

- Shape: is it rounded? Angular? Cube, rectangular, circular? How many different shapes comprise it?

- Texture: is it soft? Hard? Fuzzy? Prickling? Protruding?

- Size: how much bigger, longer or wider is the subject compared to any other items in the photograph?

(Stim toy review shots often have the toy beside a coin or credit-card-sized card for scale, so describe the difference between that item and the toy.)

- Text: is there any text in the image, particularly on labels, signs or packaging? Include this, especially if it conveys meaningful information!

- Material: plastic? Wool? Wood? Metal? How many different materials comprise it? How is it put together?

- Expression: does it look happy? Sad? Indifferent?

Less relevant for stim toys, more relevant for animals/people. I don’t just mean facial expression here, but body language as well. The difference between a dog growling and a dog lying on its side sunbaking is something people will want to know.

Next,

- Is there anything in the background that impacts the subject?

For stim toys, this often isn’t the case. You can write a short line referencing the background or, if you need to save spoons, exclude it. This is where you don’t need to go full-on detail, because it isn’t necessary to the information the image is trying to impart. A reference is good, as it goes some way to giving the reader the whole visual experience, but this shouldn’t be the focus of your description if it has nothing or little to do with the subject. Contrarily, for a landscape shot of mountains, the background is as much the subject if not the subject, so it should be described with more detail.

- Is there anything in your description irrelevant to the subject?

For example, glare, flash, an out-of-focus shot, two sentences describing the wood grain of the table on which the Tangle is sitting. If your description is already tending to the long (more than a paragraph), these are the sorts of things that are first to be cut because they don’t aid in conveying meaning. If you do include these things in your description, keep them to brief mentions: they should not be the focus.

- Is my description too long to be readable?

The general rule is this: the longer the description, the more incidental/extraneous detail you need to cut (and the more formatting it will need, see below). The more photos in one post, like a long photoset, the more you need to cut detail that isn’t absolutely relevant, since nobody is going to read or listen to ten paragraphs of description about said photoset.

This is why I dislike information posts here on Tumblr that contain upwards of say ten images: they’re difficult to describe properly without creating an essay-length description that even folks who need that description won’t bother accessing. Conversely, the amount of information needed to be cut to make the description readable means the folks who need those descriptions just aren’t getting enough information. The very format of these posts makes them impossible to make fully accessible.

(It’s different on other websites, especially for things like tutorials and essays, where you can put the description as alt text and it’s broken up by the body text itself. When you’re forced to put image descriptions as one separate section of text, as here on Tumblr, it is a problem.)

If you want your post to convey information and be accessible to the majority of people, consider the amount of images in your post. This post is an example of why a large amount of images render the post, when described, absolutely inaccessible. You’re better off to make a few smaller posts, that can be described with readable/listenable descriptions, than one massive post, even if you tuck the descriptions under a read more.

Lastly,

- What is the image trying to convey to its audience?

This is less relevant for stim toys, more relevant for photos of animals/people, comics, anything where the image is doing more than conveying factual information. When an image is telling a story, check if the factual descriptions do communicate that story. Your description should be doing, as much as possible, the job of the image, which means conveying information or telling a story.

When describing, keep asking yourself: if I couldn’t see this image, what would I want to know? A description that answers that question without becoming an essay is a good description.

Third: formatting is important.

Paragraphing: in most cases, anything more than ten lines a paragraph will result in nobody reading it. Humans have short attention spans, even more so for non-fiction/non-creative/informative writing, like web writing. Not to mention that many disabilities make processing slabs of text difficult if not impossible. If your description runs longer than ten lines, break it up somewhere. Also, if you need to break up your paragraph, that’s a good sign that your description might be long enough to go under a read more cut.

Make sure you’ve got a line space between each paragraph. Anyone who reads your description (me, for example, if you’ve described a GIF) is used to the standard online formatting of a line space between paragraphs, and just starting a new line throws off the brain’s ability to realise you’ve paragraphed. It will still look like an unreadable block of text, and I can promise you that I won’t read it (can’t read it, in fact). Which is a waste of your time, sadly, since you mean the best, but that’s how much formatting does matter.

(Tumblr mostly adds line spaces between paragraphs automatically for you if you’re typing in rich text mode; you’ll need to add the HTML for paragraphs if you’re in HTML mode. Just add <p> to the start and </p> to the end of each paragraph.)

Indicating: use some indication (usually the words “image description” and brackets) that the description is not the body text, as that signals to sighted readers that they can skip past it. I use squared brackets [] because they’re not in common use in prose/non-mathematical text. I dislike the use of rounded brackets () because they’re in common use, so my brain thinks the description is body text. I realise it a few seconds later, but if we can tell the brain immediately that the text is optional, it’s easier on the reader, especially if they have limited spoons for text processing.

This one is subtle editing; I know most people don’t think about how much text formatting guides and alerts the reader, but there’s a reason we stick to some norms in English. The brain gets very used to certain styles and punctuation conveying meaning, and folks with developmental disorders in particular might find it hard to understand meaning without these cues or have to work harder to get that meaning. Speaking from personal experience!

Numbering: in most cases for multi-image posts, you’ll need to mentally assign a number to the post (left to right, top to bottom) and describe those pictures in order. This is for folks who can see images but need the text to help with processing; if they’re not in order, it’s ridiculously confusing. Start each description with the number of that photo and break each description up into a new paragraph. Here’s an example on my sensory room post.

The exception for this is when there’s only a few images or those images aren’t very different from each other. Then, to save spoons (as I have few myself) I’ll describe the subject of the image and then how it differs in each photo, often in a single paragraph. Here’s an example on a slime post. I admit that this is a less-clear way of describing, but it saves a few spoons!

I’m sure there’s something I’ve forgotten, anons, but this has taken me quite a few spoons. If there’s something confusing or there’s a question I haven’t properly answered, ask and I’ll do my best to answer/answer properly.

Likewise, if folks who use screen readers want to add corrections or changes, please do so!

- Mod K.A.

[troger]

What Happened to Jordan Peterson?

(ami a legérdekesebb, az a történetben meghúzódó Orbán-szál)

Adored guru and reviled provocateur, he dropped out of sight. Now the irresistible ordeal of modern cultural celebrity has brought him back.

HELEN LEWIS

This article was published online on March 2, 2021.

One day in early 2020, Jordan B. Peterson rose from the dead. The Canadian academic, then 57, had been placed in a nine-day coma by doctors in a Russian clinic, after becoming addicted to benzodiazepines, a class of drug that includes Xanax and Valium. The coma kept him unconscious as his body went through the terrible effects of withdrawal; he awoke strapped to the bed, having tried to rip out the catheters in his arms and leave the intensive-care unit.

When the story of his detox became public, in February 2020, it provided an answer to a mystery: Whatever happened to Jordan Peterson? In the three years before he disappeared from view in the summer of 2019, this formerly obscure psychology professor’s name had been a constant presence in op-ed columns, internet forums, and culture-war arguments. His book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, published in 2018, sold millions of copies, and he had conducted a 160-city speaking tour, drawing crowds of up to 3,000 a night; premium tickets included the chance to be photographed with him. For $90, his website offered an online course to better understand your “unique personality.” An “official merchandise store” sold Peterson paraphernalia: mugs, stickers, posters, phone cases, tote bags. He had created an entirely new model of the public intellectual, halfway between Marcus Aurelius and Martha Stewart.

The price of these rewards was living in a maelstrom of other people’s opinions. Peterson was, depending on whom you believed, either a stern but kindly shepherd to a generation of lost young men, or a reactionary loudmouth whose ideas fueled the alt-right and a backlash to feminism. He was revered as a guru, condemned as a dangerous charlatan, adored and reviled by millions. Peterson has now returned to the public sphere, and the psyche-splitting ordeal of modern celebrity, with a new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life—an intriguing title, in light of his recent experiences. The mystery deepens: What really happened to Jordan Peterson, and why has he come back for more?

Growing up in Fairview, Alberta, Peterson was small for his age, which fostered both a quick wit and a fascination with the power and violence of traditional masculinity. He once recounted in a Facebook post how he’d overheard a neighbor named Tammy Roberts joking with another girl that she wanted to keep her surname, so she would have to marry “some wimp.” Then she turned around and proposed to the teenage Jordan. He spent a youthful summer working on a railroad in Saskatchewan, with an all-male group that nicknamed him Howdy Doody, after the freckle-faced puppet. As a student, he visited a maximum-security prison, where he was particularly struck by a convict with a vicious scar right down his chest, which he surmised might have come from surgery or an ax wound: “The injury would have killed a lesser man, anyway—someone like me.”

How to be a greater man was very much on Peterson’s mind. Raised in a mildly Christian household, he decided as a teenager that “religion was for the ignorant, weak and superstitious.” He yearned for a left-wing revolution, an urge that lasted until he met some left-wing activists in college. Then, rejecting all ideology, he decided that the threat of the Cold War made it vital to understand the human impulse toward destruction. He began to study psychology.

Alongside pursuing his doctorate, teaching at Harvard and then the University of Toronto, and raising a family—he married Tammy in 1989, and yes, she took his surname—Peterson started work on his first book, a survey of the origins of belief. Its ambition was nothing less than to explain, well, everything—in essence, how the story of humanity has been shaped by humanity’s love of stories. Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, built on the work of academics like Joseph Campbell, the literature and religion scholar who argued that all mythic narratives are variations of a single archetypal quest. (Campbell’s “monomyth” inspired the arc of Star Wars.) On this “hero’s journey,” a young man sets out from his humdrum life, confronts monsters, resists temptation, stares into the abyss, and claims a great victory. Returning home with what Campbell calls “the power to bestow boons on his fellow men,” the hero can also claim the freedom to live at peace with himself.

In the fall of 2016, Peterson seized the chance to embark on his own quest. A Canadian Parliament bill called C-16 proposed adding “gender identity or expression” to the list of protected characteristics in the country’s Human Rights Act, alongside sex, race, religion, and so on. For Peterson, the bill was proof that the cultural left had captured public-policy making and was imposing its fashionable diktats by law. In a YouTube video titled “Professor Against Political Correctness,” he claimed that he could be brought before a government tribunal if he refused to use recently coined pronouns such as zhe. In the first of several appearances on Joe Rogan’s blockbuster podcast, he made clear that he was prepared to become a martyr for his principles, if necessary. His intensity won over Rogan—a former mixed-martial-arts commentator with a huge young male fan base and eclectic political views (a frequent critic of the left, he endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020). “You are one of the very few academics,” Rogan told Peterson, “who have fought against some of these ideas that are not just being promoted but are being enforced.”

The fight over C-16, which became law in 2017, was a paradigmatic culture-war battle. Each side overstated the other side’s argument to bolster its own: Either you hated transgender people, or you hated free speech. In Peterson’s view, the bill exposed the larger agenda of postmodernism, which he portrayed as an ideology that, in denying the existence of objective truth, “leaves its practitioners without an ethic.” (This is not how theorists of postmodernism define it, and if you have a few hours to spare, do ask one of them to explain.) He was on the side of science and rationality, he proclaimed, and against identity politics. Feminists were wrong to argue that traditional gender roles were limiting and outdated, because centuries of evolution had turned men into strong, able providers and women into warm, emotionally sensitive nurturers. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence” is how he later phrased it. (This was during Donald Trump’s presidency.) The founding stories of the world’s great religions backed him up, as did the hero’s journey: It is men who fight monsters, while women are temptresses or helpmates.

The mainstream media began to pay attention. Peterson had posted some advice on the Q&A site Quora, which he turned into his second book, 12 Rules for Life, a mashup of folksy wisdom, evolutionary biology, and digressions on the evils of Soviet Communism. (His daughter, Mikhaila, is named after Mikhail Gorbachev.) It stresses the conservative principles of self-reliance and responsibility, encouraging readers to tidy their bedrooms and smarten themselves up to compete for female attention—a message reinforced by a questionable analogy involving lobsters, which fight by squirting urine from their faces to establish their place in the mating hierarchy. “Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live,” David Brooks wrote in a New York Times column. “Peterson has filled the gap.” He offered self-help for a demographic that wouldn’t dream of reading Goop.

Yet the relentless demands of modern celebrity—more content, more access, more authenticity—were already tearing the psychologist’s public persona in two. One Peterson was the father figure beloved by the normie readers of 12 Rules, who stood in long lines to hear him speak and left touching messages on internet forums, testifying that he had turned their lives around. The other Peterson was a fearsome debater, the gladiator who crowed “Gotcha!” at the British television interviewer Cathy Newman after a series of testy exchanges about the gender pay gap and the freedom to give offense. His debates were clipped and remixed, then posted on YouTube with titles announcing that he had “DESTROYED” his interlocutors.

I know this because one of them was me: Our interview for British GQ, which has garnered more than 23 million views, is easily the most viral moment I’ve ever had. While dozens of acquaintances emailed and texted me to praise my performance and compare Peterson’s stern affect to Hannibal Lecter with a Ph.D., mean comments piled up like a snowdrift below the video itself. I was “biased and utterly intellectually bankrupt,” “dishonest and malicious,” and “like a petulant child who walked into an adult conversation.” What kind of man, several wondered, would marry a dumb, whiny, shrill feminist like this? (Quite a nice one, thanks for asking.)

Peterson lived in this split-screen reality all the time. Even as he basked in adoration, a thousand internet piranhas ripped through his every utterance, looking for evidence against him. One week, Bari Weiss anointed him a leading culture warrior, including him in a New York Times feature as a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web.” Ten days later, the newspaper published a mocking profile of him, reporting that his house was decorated with Soviet propaganda and quoting him speculating about the benefits of “enforced monogamy” in controlling young men’s animal instincts. After he was accused of pining after Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, he quickly posted a note on his website arguing that he meant only the “social enforcement of monogamy.”

The negative publicity affected him deeply, and it was endless. After the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra charged him with peddling “fascist mysticism,” Peterson tweeted that Mishra was an “arrogant, racist son of a bitch” and a “sanctimonious prick.” He added: “If you were in my room at the moment, I’d slap you happily.” Even sleep brought no relief. Peterson is a believer in dream analysis, and after one particularly ill-tempered interview in October 2018, he blogged about a nightmare that followed. In his dream, he met a man who “simply would not shut up.” The man reminded him, he wrote, of an acquaintance at university in Canada he calls Sam, who drove around in a Mercedes with swastikas on the doors, saying the worst things he could, unable to resist inviting attacks. “I can’t help myself,” Sam had told Peterson. “I have a target drawn on my back.” Eventually, at a party, Sam overstepped the line; he was about to be assaulted by a mob until another acquaintance “felled him with a single punch.” Peterson never saw Sam again. In his dream, the Sam-like man talked and talked and “finally pushed me beyond my limit of tolerance … I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling. I woke up.”

It is hard to resist reading the subtext like this: Peterson had spent months being casually described as a Nazi and associated with the alt-right, labels he always rejected. He had metaphorical swastikas on his car door. He couldn’t resist putting a target on his own back, and he, too, couldn’t stop talking. Indeed, in May 2019, after railing against left-wing censoriousness—now widely called “cancel culture”—he met with Viktor Orbán, the proudly illiberal prime minister of Hungary, whose government has closed gender-studies programs, waged a campaign to evict Central European University from the country, and harassed independent journalists. Orbán’s state-backed version of cancel culture—or, to use the correct word, authoritarianism—apparently didn’t come up in their meeting. Peterson had previously told an interviewer to describe politicians like Orbán not as “strongmen,” but as “dictator wannabes.” Nonetheless, the visit—and the posed photograph of the men in conversation, released to friendly media outlets—gave intellectual cover to Orbán’s repressive government.

All that time, the two Petersons were pulling away from each other. As the arguments over his message raged across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and traditional media, he became an avatar of our polarized media climate. People were consuming completely different Petersons, depending on their news sources. When I saw him on his speaking tour at a theater on Long Island, the first question he was asked was not about pronouns or the decline of Western civilization; it was When was the last time you got drunk? The second was a heartfelt plea that will be familiar to any new parent: How can I get my baby to sleep?

The past two years have clearly been hell for Peterson. In a June 2020 video interview with his daughter, he looked gaunt and restless as he described his struggle with drug dependency, a torment that he revisits in the “Overture” to Beyond Order, his new book. As he describes it, an allergic reaction during the 2016 Christmas holiday manifested as intense anxiety, leading his family doctor to prescribe benzodiazepines. He also started following what Mikhaila calls the “lion diet,” consuming only meat, salt, and water. In 2019, “the tumultuous reality of [being] a public figure” was exacerbated by a series of family health crises culminating in his wife’s diagnosis, in April, of what was thought to be terminal cancer. (She has since recovered.) Peterson—who notes that he had been plagued for years by “a tendency toward depression”—had his tranquilizer dosage upped, only to experience rising anxiety, followed by the ravages of attempted withdrawal. He was at the edge of the abyss—“anxiety far beyond what I had ever experienced, an uncontrollable restlessness and need to move … overwhelming thoughts of self-destruction, and the complete absence of any happiness whatsoever.”

Throughout this turbulent time, Peterson was working on Beyond Order. He makes no claims that his suffering provided a teachable moment (particularly, he notes, when a pandemic has upended lives everywhere). He also declines the opportunity to place his addiction in the context of the prescription-drug-abuse crisis. Peterson seems to have softened his disdain for religion, and as for Tammy, “passing so near to death motivated my wife to attend to some issues regarding her own spiritual and creative development.” Notably, Peterson is not ready to give up on the hero’s journey, despite the terror he has endured. “All of that misfortune is only the bitter half of the tale of existence,” he writes, “without taking note of the heroic element of redemption or the nobility of the human spirit requiring a certain responsibility to shoulder.”

This book is humbler than its predecessor, and more balanced between liberalism and conservatism—but it offers a similar blend of the highbrow and the banal. Readers get a few glimpses of the fiery online polemicist, but the Peterson of Beyond Order tends instead to two other modes. The first is a grounded clinician, describing his clients’ troubles and the tough-love counsel he gives them. The other is a stoned college freshman telling you that the Golden Snitch is, like, a metaphor for “ ‘round chaos’ … the initial container of the primordial element.” Some sentences beg to be prefaced with Dude, like these: “If Queen Elizabeth II suddenly turned into a giant fire-breathing lizard in the midst of one of her endless galas, a certain amount of consternation would be both appropriate and expected … But if it happens within the context of a story, then we accept it.” Reading Peterson the clinician can be illuminating; reading his mystic twin is like slogging through wet sand. His fans love the former; his critics mock the latter.

The prose swirls like mist, and his great insight appears to be little more than the unthreatening observation that life is complicated. (If the first book hadn’t been written like this too, you’d guess that he was trying to escape the butterfly pins of his harshest detractors.) After nearly 400 pages, we learn that married people should have sex at least once a week, that heat and pressure turn coal into diamonds, that having a social life is good for your mental health, and that, for a man in his 50s, Peterson knows a surprising amount about Quidditch. The chapter inviting readers to “make one room in your home as beautiful as possible” is typically discursive, but unusually enjoyable: Peterson knows his Wordsworth. (It is not free from weirdness, however. At one point, he claims to have looked at 1.2 million paintings on eBay while selecting his living-room decor.) His prose also lights up when he describes the wonder of watching his granddaughter encounter the world.

On the rare occasion that Beyond Order strays overtly into politics, Peterson still can’t resist fighting straw men. What Peterson sees as healthy ambition “needs to be encouraged in every possible manner,” he writes.

It is for this reason, among many others, that the increasingly reflexive identification of the striving of boys and men for victory with the “patriarchal tyranny” that hypothetically characterizes our modern, productive, and comparatively free societies is so stunningly counterproductive (and, it must be said, cruel: there is almost nothing worse than treating someone striving for competence as a tyrant in training).

But who is reflexively identifying all male ambition as innately harmful? If any mainstream feminist writers are in fact arguing that the West is a “patriarchal tyranny”—as opposed to simply a “patriarchy” or male-dominated society—he should do the reader the favor of citing them. Is he arguing with Gloria Steinem or princess_sparklehorse99 on Tumblr? A tenured professor should embrace academic rigor.

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism. That chapter concludes by advising readers to put their own lives in order before trying to change the world. This is not only a rehash of one of the previous 12 rules—“Clean up your bedroom,” he writes, because fans love it when you play the hits—but also ferocious chutzpah coming from a man who was on a lecture tour well after he should have gone to rehab.

The Peterson of Beyond Order, that preacher of personal responsibility, dances around the question of whether his own behavior might have contributed to his breakdown. Was it really wise to agree to all those brutal interviews, drag himself to all those international speaking events, send all those tweets that set the internet on fire? Like a rock star spiraling into burnout, he was consumed by the pyramid scheme of fame, parceling himself out, faster and faster, to everyone who wanted a piece. Perhaps he didn’t want to let people down, and he loved to feel needed. Perhaps he enjoyed having an online army glorying in his triumphs and pursuing his enemies. In our frenzied media culture, can a hero ever return home victorious and resume his normal life, or does the lure of another adventure, another dragon to slay, another “lib” to “own” always call out to him?

Either way, he gazed into the culture-war abyss, and the abyss stared right back at him. He is every one of us who couldn’t resist that pointless Facebook argument, who felt the sugar rush of the self-righteous Twitter dunk, who exulted in the defeat of an opposing political tribe, or even an adjacent portion of our own. That kind of unhealthy behavior, furiously lashing out while knowing that counterattacks will follow, is a very modern form of self-harm. And yet in Beyond Order, the blame is placed solely on “the hypothetically safe but truly dangerous benzodiazepine anti-anxiety medication” he was prescribed by his family doctor. The book leaves you wishing that Peterson the tough therapist would ask hard questions of Peterson the public intellectual.

To imagine that Peterson is popular in spite of his contradictions and human frailties—the things that drive his critics mad—is a mistake: He is popular because of them. For a generation that has lost its faith in religion and politics, he is one of notably few prominent figures willing to confront the most fundamental questions of existence: What’s the point of being alive? What kind of personal journey endows our existence with meaning? He is, in many ways, countercultural. He doesn’t offer get-rich-quick schemes, or pickup techniques. He is not libertine or libertarian. He promises that life is a struggle, but that it is ultimately worthwhile.

Yet Peterson’s elevation to guru status has come at great personal cost, a cascade of suffering you wouldn’t wish on anybody. It has made him rich and famous, but not happy. “We compete for attention, personally, socially, and economically,” he writes in Beyond Order. “No currency has a value that exceeds it.” But attention is a perilous drug: The more we receive, the more we desire. It is the culture war’s greatest reward, yet it started Jordan Peterson on a journey that turned a respected but unknown professor into the man strapped into the Russian hospital bed, ripping the tubes from his arms, desperate for another fix.

[entergamingxp]

The neverending quest for Absolver’s ultimate martial art • Eurogamer.net

You’ve heard of the Way of the Dragon, but have you come across the Way of the Magic Right Arm? As you’ve probably guessed, it’s a martial art were every move has to involve the right arm – effective at rattling jaws, less so at sweeping ankles. It’s not, you’ve probably also guessed, an actual combat discipline but one of thousands dreamt up by players of Sloclap’s Absolver, the unbearably stylish fighting game which lets you pick from over 120 beautifully animated kicks and punches to create a bespoke martial art, or “deck”, of up to 16 moves.

Launched in 2017, Absolver’s idyllic open world and RPG trappings such as looting are a little deceptive. This is a duelling simulation above all and as such, many player-created decks are works of painstaking optimisation, born of hours spent weighing up frame counts and hit ranges. There are plenty, however, that are more whimsical than competitive, and the game would be much poorer without them.

Some decks are purely about showing off, stringing together high-stakes moves like the MeiaLua, a grandiose kick which begins with you pointing your arse at your opponent’s head. Others trade on creative handicaps, such as boxer decks that keep your feet firmly on the ground. There are monkish decks that seek to recreate as closely as possible the martial arts (including Kung Fu and Jeet Kune Do) from which Sloclap took inspiration. At the sillier end of the scale are decks which only use moves that spin you clockwise, and “Chad decks” – as lovingly described by r/absolver member Morklympious – which chain together meaty hits with wind-ups so exaggerated you might as well be fighting in slow motion. They’re guilty pleasures for veterans looking to blow off some steam.

There are quite a few of those veterans knocking around – still writing guides and sharing tips on Discord and Reddit for a small but dedicated playerbase now split across PC, PS4 and Xbox. This is heartening given that Sloclap ceased support for Absolver in spring last year, a few months after shipping the game’s first and final expansion, Downfall. A tiny French outfit helmed by Ubisoft alumni, the developer is hard at work on its second, unannounced game (not, its co-founders tell me, an Absolver sequel), but Absolver soldiers on thanks to the brutal alchemy of deck-building, which has fostered an atmosphere of good-humoured rivalry and experimentation. Returning to the game three years after my review, I was curious to learn what the community had made of it all.

First, though, a quick primer on what makes Absolver’s combat so gripping. The game gives you a selection of fictional martial art “styles”, to begin with, each with a different defensive ability on top of regular blocking and evasion. The Kahlt’s style Absorb ability lets you park health loss and win it back by counter-attacking, for example, while Windfall is about sliding around and hopping over blows. You’re free to mix and match moves regardless of style, however: the real heart of deck-building is the stance system. Strings of up to three moves – each gradually mastered by defending against them – are mapped to one of four stances in the editor. You can change your stance manually, but it’s more efficient, and elegant, to do so by performing attacks, which begin and end in a certain stance.

Thus, a combo launched from front-right that ends in a low kick might spin you into a backward-facing stance, opening up a string of ankle sweeps and elbow strikes. This might then rotate you back to front-left, giving you the opportunity to tenderise your opponent’s ribs with a flurry of straight punches. You can also set one move per stance as an alternate attack: these break up your regular combos, and serve as a “shortcut” through your combat deck. If that punch combo seems ill-advised, for example, you could unleash a big guard-breaking alt and switch back to front-right stance in one move.

Locking move strings to stances introduces an engrossing “latency” to Absolver’s fighting, and as such, puts the emphasis on foresight and building momentum. Alts aside, you can’t just pull out the exact move you need at the touch of a button. As I wrote in my review, the fun of deck construction is working out what any given opponent is likely to be doing when, and plugging in a countermove. Just as important, however, is the resulting sense of flow. In many action games, character models blink noticeably between states unless committed to a combo animation. In Absolver, each move carries you organically to the next, the cleanness of the transitions emphasised by highly readable character designs that rank bold shapes and colours over detail and secondary motion. It’s breathtaking stuff, all the more so for knowing that players are free to mash together those punches and kicks as they see fit.

It’s also entirely hand-animated, much to my shock. “We couldn’t really afford motion capture so we didn’t work directly with any martial artists,” says Sloclap’s co-founder Pierre Tarno. “But we were lucky enough to have very talented animators who had a great sense of body dynamics.” It helps, of course, that Sloclap is a studio populated by fighters. Tarno is a lapsed ninjitsu student, while co-founder and combat system designer Jordan Layani is a practitioner of Pak Mei Kung Fu. Absolver’s two main animators are themselves both martial artists and hip-hop dancers, reflecting one of the game’s three taglines: “combat is a dance”.

A few of Absolver’s currently active players also have firsthand martial arts experience to draw on, as I discovered when I put out a call for interviews on the subreddit. Many are also expert fighting game players. “I’m an amateur boxer and a competitive Smash Bros player so the idea of every fight being unique because everyone has their own moves was thrilling to me,” says lidofzejar. Another redditor, xXTHEMVGXx1, has found that certain Absolver moves, though “absolutely ridiculous”, can have some applicability in real-life taekwondo.

Absolver at launch didn’t always do the best job of tutoring the player, but it is very accessible for all the arch-complexities of deck-building – just two attack buttons, a block, a dodge, and each Style’s unique defensive options. This lured in dabblers like Morklympious, who was discouraged by the high skill floors of other fighting games – “I just need to track a few things instead of a million things” – but it was no less attractive to genre devotees because it allowed them to get into the meat of strategy faster.

“Fighting games are hard, and the easy execution of Absolver allows mindgames very early on,” comments SomeAVALANCHEguy. The game’s relative shortage of equipment variables or auxiliary powers, meanwhile, appealed to spartan-minded players irked by such features in the likes of For Honor. “Every move is technically breakable,” adds xXTHEMVGXx1. “Every move is dodgeable. Every move can be absorbed by a full stamina bar. It doesn’t restrict your skill due to stupid gimmicks that are just no fun to fight against.” You can perform a handful of healing or stun spells by spending “tension shards” that accrue in combat, but these only delay the inevitable if your opponent has your measure.

So what’s the trick to crafting an effective martial art in Absolver? I put the question to the subreddit one evening, went to bed, and awoke to a wall of text, which I’m going to do my damndest to break down here. NanoHologuise, author of the subreddit’s mammoth deck-building guide, notes the importance of a safe opener – a cheeky kick that doubles as an evasive jump, perhaps, or a rushdown punch that can be initiated while out of reach. xXTHEMVGXx1 preaches the value of “50/50s”, meaning that a move and that stance’s alternate attack should hit from different angles to catch the opponent out – especially important against fans of the slippery Windfall style. Regardless of style, Absolver players can block anything while they have stamina, so you need to force opponents to open up, either by overwhelming their stamina reserves with a combo that leaves few countering opportunities or, more likely, baiting them into striking back.

To all this, add myriad exploits that are designed to grease the process of moving around “inside” your deck, overcoming the constraints of the stance system. One is step-cancelling, the trick of making a fractional movement after an attack to reset the combo and perform that attack again. Players have also learned to manipulate the game’s lock-on – releasing and relocking in order to switch stances a second or so faster.

Much of which was a world beyond Sloclap’s expectations for the game. “Very quickly after launch the game doesn’t “belong to you” any longer,” notes Layani ruefully. “The studio’s best player gets dominated online by advanced players. You see players break apart the mechanics and tell you ‘actually, this is your game’, this is the meta.” The studio had balanced Absolver before launch using a mixture of Excel formulas and old-fashioned hands-on time. “We regularly did internal tournaments to give ourselves a feel for potential balancing issues,” Layarni explains. “We also set up a tracking system to see which attacks were most used in ‘winning combat decks’, which allowed us to get specific information during the beta test.”

All this fell through the floor after launch, however, as the Absolver team – around 30 people at its largest – realised the scale of the task it had set for itself. Sloclap’s founders had worked on multiplayer games at Ubisoft, including Ghost Recon games, but they had little experience of live ops, to say nothing of tweaking something as fiddly as a competitive fighting game.

“It was complicated for us to determine whether the changes we implemented were going to create other issues for advanced players,” Layarni goes on. “We didn’t have test servers and we had a reduced testing team, focused on bugs rather than balancing. It was never catastrophic, but we went through phases of the game where players would spam fast attacks, and others where players could play turtle, tanking attacks and waiting for their opponent to lose stamina, in order to violently punish them. This was a stressful period for us. We had just finished a rather exhausting marathon to ship the game, and we continued sprinting for a year after the game was released.”

The stresses were offset by the knowledge that they had put together something special – an approachable yet in-depth fighting game that soon attracted a lively audience. “Every time [we updated the game] we were impressed with how fast and how articulate the feedback was, from top players in the community,” says Pierre Tarno. “Three days after the patch is out, they’ve got detailed, structured analysis of all the changes, consequences, side effects.”

One of his great regrets is that Sloclap wasn’t able to maintain a steady conversation with the community, though the developer did run pre-release content by certain more dedicated players. “I think the community may have felt that we sort of ignored them, that we were in radio silence mode, because we just didn’t have the bandwidth to really interact with them. We were reading the Reddit daily [but] communicating takes a whole lot more time than just reading”. Sloclap did hire community managers, but they were tasked with “general community wellbeing and manners” rather than discussing the game’s direction.

The Absolver players I spoke to on Reddit had plenty to say about Sloclap’s post-launch support, good and bad. There are complaints about promised weapons like the Bo staff (barehanded by default, Absolver players can equip wargloves and swords that are fuelled by tension shards – only swords have distinct moves, however), and complaints about the balance of power between Styles. Some players remain confused by certain development decisions – why release a PVE expansion for a game that thrives in PVP? Others lost interest thanks to long delays between updates and certain unresolved bugs. There is particular frustration about the game’s current state. “Absolver at 1.30 is literally one patch away from ending on a sweet note,” says Morklympious. “It’s like listening to a chord progression that never resolves.” Another user, Dsamuss, suggests that Absolver’s pre-Downfall 1.14 update represented the fighting system at its best.

One thing everybody seems to agree on, however, is that Sloclap has always tried to do well by the community, despite its limited resources. “They definitely listened to the community and changes what needed changing,” says NanoHologuise. “They did stuff like implementing frame data for attacks in the deck editor, they ran a closed beta for [Faejin] and actually listened to a lot of the feedback and implemented it.” And while the tug of war between Styles remains a sore spot – Stagger is currently considered overpowered at lower skill levels – few players think there’s an unbeatable combat deck. Most opine that even the most devastating moveset is only as good as its wielder. What keeps people coming back isn’t the hope of achieving supreme master status, but the pleasure of never quite getting there.

“Meta decks aren’t even really a thing,” NanoHologuise goes on. “There’s certain attacks or arrangements of attacks that are strong or commonly used, but most people like putting their own spin on things. I’m very much a player who wants to be ‘optimal’, but there’s plenty of hilarious galaxy-brain decks that aren’t great on paper but work beautifully when you have a read on your opponent.” KurlySaav – a glutton for fighting games whose replies are packed with granular talk of frame advantages – confesses that they sometimes open a deck with a move called One Inch Punch – one of Absolver’s slowest guard breaks, and thus a terrible way to start a brawl – purely for the joy of it.

“Something I do personally is play with range in my decks,” adds xXTHEMVGXx1. “Some moves can hit well over three meters, and some moves send players flying over three meters, so I make sure those moves are easy to access.” Johnfiddleface23, meanwhile, would rather roleplay a Style than optimise a deck to the gills. “Sure, you can stay meta and go with jabs, avoid moves and certain Faejin moves like Low Back Fist, but the best deck is finding a solid middle ground between practicality and how much you love the way your deck looks, and plays.”

For me, this spirit of playfulness represents Absolver at its best. There are more practised competitive fighting games, but few make such a point of relaxed tinkering in the company of like minds. Discussing the game’s score, a simmering medley of percussion and guitar, Tarno notes that Absolver was designed to be “a combat game about making friends” – it’s more of a practice bout at your neighbourhood gym than a fight to the death. Hence the school system, which lets players who’ve graduated to the hallowed rank of Absolver share their decks with disciples. And hence Absolver’s gorgeous networked open world, a landscape of gold, green and scarlet where AI hoodlums lounge like cats, awaiting the next challenger.

It might seem rather gratuitous for a game that comes alive in separately loaded 1v1 arenas. Certainly, as NanoHologuise suggests, it’s hard to square the world’s opulence with the absence of features like a tournament mode, a network/ping indicator or spectator options. “I personally think Sloclap couldn’t decide whether they wanted this game to be a fighting game, or an action RPG, and a lot of the things that affected the community were related to that.” Read as a creative hangout space for dabbling pugilists, however, the ornamental-seeming backdrop makes a lot more sense. If the developer has punched above its weight with Absolver, the fact that decks are still being invented and debated today indicates that where it really counted, Sloclap struck true.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/the-neverending-quest-for-absolvers-ultimate-martial-art-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-neverending-quest-for-absolvers-ultimate-martial-art-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[grabtee]

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The Merry Christmas Grr Argh Ugly Sweatshirt was heartfelt. It may have made her realize that her dad sent this man her way and someone was listening. I don’t know but I was glad that she could finally accept her father’s death and move forward. My best friend from high school who was my maid of honor and who shared a birthday with me, passed away some years ago. Her children and grandchildren have kept her m page going and we all still write comments to her. I consider it a memorial to her. This story is incredible. It made me cry and am sooooo glad it had a happy ending. Hope they stay in touch. Hope they meet each other.

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Merry Christmas Grr Argh Ugly Sweatshirt, T-Shirt, Hoodie, Long-Sleeved

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This is sweet and all. I have had my share with family and friends dying. I will say this here doesn’t make you stronger. We have gotten very weak as a society. We can’t move on and live our lives. That’s why is so disastrous back then people kept a friend’s phone number. Today you can stalk them, bring back the Merry Christmas Grr Argh Ugly Sweatshirt, and never move on. I just saw the actual post on this earlier today. Normally I think these kinds of posts are hoaxes, but I’m really glad this heartwarming story is for real. We need more stories like this in today’s world.

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My mom uses to text her dad’s number right after he passed away. The Merry Christmas Grr Argh Ugly Sweatshirt that had his number messaged her back and it made her day. I used to text and call my baby brother every day telling him how much I missed him and telling him what I was doing or did until his phone was disconnected. That’s so interesting for a rival world power to actually promote American gun rights and ownership. Maybe they want to sell us more of theirs. No wonder the Democrats hate them. They certainly thought they were real swell back when the communists controlled the shots over there.

  I wonder how many of the mass shootings were committed by spies of different countries to make it seem like we have a problem. To get our guns taken away to make it easier to take us over. Right now no one in the there right mind would attack America because we have a standing army of million armed Americans not including the military. That’s great news. Our special ops people do a great job for us as well as all of our brave men and women who serve. Good job and thank you for serving. I can’t help but think that this might have been a calculated decision on behalf of both the administration as well as the intelligence community to lure him out by withdrawing.

[mbaljeetsingh]

How to Get Started With restdb.io and Create a Simple CMS

This article was sponsored by restdb.io. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Databases strike fear into the heart of the most experienced developers. Installation, updates, disk space provision, back-ups, efficient indexing, optimized queries, and scaling are problems most could do without. Larger organizations will employ a knowledgeable dev ops person who dedicates their life to the database discords. Yet the system inevitably fails the moment they go on vacation.

A more practical option is to outsource your database and that's exactly the service restdb.io provides. They manage the tricky data storage shenanigans, leaving you to concentrate on more urgent development tasks.

restdb.io: the Basics

restdb.io is a plug and play cloud NoSQL database. It will be immediately familiar to anyone with MongoDB experience. The primary differences:

there's no need to manage your installation, storage or backups

you can define a data structure schema in restdb.io

data fields can have relationships with other fields in other collections

there's no need to define indexes

data can be queried and updated through a REST API authenticated by HTTP or Auth0/JWT tokens

queries and updates are sent and received in JSON format

there are tools to enter, view and export data in various formats

it supports some interesting bonus features such as codehooks, email, web form generation, websites, realtime messaging, and more.

A free account allows you to assess the service with no obligation. Paid plans offer additional storage space, query throughput, developer accounts and MongoDB integration.

In the following sections I'll describe how to:

configure a new database and enter data

use that data to render a set web pages hosted on restdb.io, and

use the API to provide a search facility for content editors.

Step 1: Create a New Database

After signing up with a Google, Facebook or email account, you can create a new empty database. This generates a new API endpoint URL at yourdbname.restdb.io:

Step 2: Create a New Collection

A database contains one or more collections for storing data. These are analogous to SQL database tables. Collections contain "documents" which are analogous to SQL database records (table rows).

The restdb.io interface offers two modes:

Standard mode shows the available collections and allows you to insert and modify data.

Developer mode allows you to create and configure collections.

Enter Developer Mode (top-right of screen) and click the Add Collection button.

A collection requires a unique name (I've used "content") and an optional description and icon. Hit Save to return to your database overview. The "content" collection will appear in the list along with several other non-editable system collections.

Alternatively, data can be imported from Excel, CSV or JSON files to create a collection by hitting Import in the standard view.

Step 3: Define Fields

Staying in Developer Mode, click the "content" collection and choose the Fields tab. Click Add Fields to add and configure new fields which classify the data in the collection.

Each collection document will sore data about a single page in the database-driven website. I've added five fields:

slug - a text field for the page path URL

title - a text field for the page title

body - a special markdown text field for the page content

image - a special image field which permits any number of uploaded images (which are also stored on the restdb.io system)

published - boolean value which must be true for pages to be publicly visible.

Step 4: Add Documents

Documents can be added to a collection in either standard or developer mode (or via the API). Create a few documents with typical page content:

The slug should be empty for the home page.

Step 5: Create a Database-Driven Website (Optional)

restdb.io provides an interesting feature which can create and host a database-driven website using data documents in a collection.

The site is hosted at www-yourdbname.restdb.io but you can point any domain at the pages. For instructions, click Settings from the Database list or at the bottom of the left-hand panel then click the Webhosting tab.

To create the website, Pages must be configured in Developer Mode which define templates to view the content. Templates contain a code snippet which sets:

the context - a query which locates the correct document in a collection, and

the HTML - a structure which uses handlebars template syntax to insert content into appropriate elements.

Click Add Page to create a page. Name it the special name /:slug - this means the template will apply to any URL other than the home page (which does not have a slug). Hit Save and return to the page list, then click the /:slug entry to edit.

Switch to the Settings tab and ensure text/html is entered as the Content Type and Publish is checked before hitting Update:

Now switch to the Code for "/:slug" tab. Enter the context code at the top of the editor:

{ "docs": { "collection": "content", "query": { "slug": "", "published": true } } }

This defines a query so the template can access a specific document from our content collection. In this case, we're fetching the published document which matches the slug passed on the URL.

All restdb.io queries return an array of objects. If no document is returned, the docs array will be empty so we can add code to return that the page is not available immediately below the context:

<!doctype html> <html> <body> <h1>Page not available</h1> <p>Sorry, this page cannot be viewed. Please return later.</p> </body> </html>

Below this, we can code the template which slots the title, body and image fields into appropriate HTML elements:

<html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title></title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"> <style> body { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 100%; color: #333; background-color: #fff; max-width: 40em; padding: 0 2em; margin: 1em auto; } </style> </head> <body> <header> <img src="http://ift.tt/2wysXbS; alt="image" /> <h1></h1> </header> <main> <p><a href="/">Return to the home page...</a></p> </main> </body> </html>

Note our markdown body field must be rendered with a markdown handler.

Save the code with Ctrl|Cmd + S or by returning to the Settings tab and hitting Update.

The /:slug page template will apply to all our content collection — except for the home page, because that does not have a slug! To render the home page, create a New Page with the name home with identical settings and content. You may want to tweak the template for home-page-specific content.

Once saved, you can access your site from https://www-yourdbname.restdb.io/. I've created a very simple three-page site at http://ift.tt/2ut9U5n.

For more information about restdb.io page hosting, refer to:

Pages and Database Driven Website Hosting

The restdb.io Dynamic Website Demo

handlebar template syntax

Step 6: API Queries

Creating a site to display your data may be useful, but you'll eventually want to build an application which queries and manipulates information.

restdb.io's REST API provides endpoints controlled via HTTP:

HTTP GET requests retrieve data from a collection

HTTP POST requests create new documents in a collection

HTTP PUT requests update documents in a collection

HTTP PATCH requests update one or more properties in a document in a collection

HTTP DELETE requests delete documents from a collection

There are a number of APIs for handling uploaded media files, database meta data and mail but the one you'll use most often is for collections. The API URL is:

https://yourdbname.restdb.io/rest/collection-name/

The URL for my "content" collection is therefore:

http://ift.tt/2uKFM0F

Queries are passed to this URL as a JSON-encoded querystring parameter named q, e.g. fetch all published articles in the collection:

http://ift.tt/2vnljTf;: true}

However, this query will fail without an API key passed in the x-apikey HTTP header. A full-access API key is provided by default but it's advisable to create keys which are limited to specific actions. From the database Settings, API tab:

Click Add New to create a new key. The one I created here is limited to GET (query) requests on the content collection only. You should create a similarly restricted key if you will be using client-side JavaScript Ajax code since the string will be visible in the code.

It's now possible to build a standalone JavaScript query handler (ES5 has been used to ensure cross-browser compatibility without a pre-compile step!):

// restdb.io query handler var restDB = (function() { // configure for your own DB var api = 'http://ift.tt/2uKGivH', APIkey = '597dd2c7a63f5e835a5df8c4'; // query the database function query(url, callback) { var timeout, xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); // set URL and headers xhr.open('GET', api + url); xhr.setRequestHeader('x-apikey', APIkey); xhr.setRequestHeader('content-type', 'application/json'); xhr.setRequestHeader('cache-control', 'no-cache'); // response handler xhr.onreadystatechange = function() { if (xhr.readyState !== 4) return; var err = (xhr.status !== 200), data = null; clearTimeout(timeout); if (!err) { try { data = JSON.parse(xhr.response); } catch(e) { err = true; data = xhr.response || null; } } callback(err, data); }; // timeout timeout = setTimeout(function() { xhr.abort(); callback(true, null); }, 10000); // start call xhr.send(); } // public query method return { query: query }; })();

This code passes queries to the restdb.io API endpoint and sets the appropriate HTTP headers including x-apikey for the API key. It times out if the response takes longer than ten seconds. A callback function is passed an error and any returned data as a native object. For example:

// run a query restDB.query( '/content?q={"published":true}', function(err, data) { // success! if (!err) console.log(data); } );

The console will output an array of documents from the content collection, e.g.

[ { _id: "1111111111111111", slug: "", title: "Home page", body: "page content...", image: [], published: true }, { _id: "22222222222222222", slug: "page-two", title: "Page Two", body: "page content...", image: [], published: true }, { _id: "33333333333333333", slug: "page-three", title: "Another page", body: "page content...", image: [], published: true } ]

The API can be called from any language which can make an HTTP request. restdb.io provides examples for cURL, jQuery $.ajax, JavaScript XMLHttpRequest, NodeJS, Python, PHP, Java, C#, Objective-C and Swift.

I've created a simple example at Codepen.io which allows you to search for strings in the title and body fields and displays the results:

See the Pen restdb.io query by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

It passes the following query:

{ "$or": [ { "title": {"$regex": "searchstring"} }, { "body": {"$regex": "searchstring"} } ]}

where searchstring is the search text entered by the user.

An additional h querystring parameter limits the returned fields to just the slug, title and published flag:

{ "$fields": { "slug": 1, "title": 1, "published": 1 } }

Further information:

Querying with the API

Code examples for REST API

Step 7: Build Your Own CMS

A few steps were required to create a database-driven website and a simple search facility. You could edit pages directly using restdb.io's user interface but it would be possible to build a bespoke CMS to manipulate the content. It would require:

A new restdb.io API key (or change the existing one) to have appropriate GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE access to the content collection.

A user interface to browse or search for pages (the one above could be a good starting point).

A process to start a new page or GET existing content and place it in an editable form.

Processes to add, update or delete pages using the appropriate HTTP methods.

The editing system should run on a restricted device or behind a login to ensure only authenticated users can access. Take care not to reveal your restdb.io API key if using client-side code!

Further information:

Data manipulation with REST

Code examples for REST API

Try restdb.io Today!

This article uses restdb.io to build a rudimentary CMS, but the service is suitable for any project which requires data storage. The REST API can be accessed from any language or framework which makes it ideal for applications with multiple interfaces, e.g. a web and native mobile view.

restdb.io provides a practical alternative to managing your own database software installation. It's simple to use, fast, powerful, highly scalable and considerably less expensive than hiring a database expert! Your application hosting costs will also reduce since all data is securely stored and backed-up on the restdb.io servers.

Finally, restdb.io makes you more productive. You can concentrate on the main application because data storage no longer causes concerns for you and your team.

Start building your restdb.io database today and let us know how you get on!

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