#altminder

[littlemxhoney]

Discord Accessibility!

The Altminder bot for discord channels sends a reminder to any user who forgot to add alt text or an image description when posting in a discord channel!

This helps ensure your discord server is accessible for folks who use screen readers!

[altmind]

Do the twist 🙃

[riseoftheradiotrons]

“This is taking too long.”

Cytoskel - the system’s optics and accents were pink, letting others know he was fronting - sighed. “Nanotube has been missing for a total of one day. And the system’s been too unstable lately for a search mission to really gain useful information if we’re sent on one.” He looked at Quicksilver, and gestured with one hand. “More time, and then we’ll send a search mission out.”

Quicksilver sighed. “Nanotube waits for nobody, and neither does-” 

The sound of Megatron hitting the ground, right in front of Quicksilver. Once at an impressive height of seventy-two feet, he was knocked down to just twenty in his current form of little more than a head and torso.

“Nobody waits for Nanotube, either,” he grumbled, “from what Strika would tell me.”

Probe’s spherical head poked out of the laboratory that made up its body, along with two spindly arms, each with a claw-hand at the end . “Well, you aren’t being kicked around by her, at least. Also, Greenscreen will be out in a minute, he’s busy trying to find Blurr.”

Quicksilver sighed. “How do you lose a hostage you’ve strapped to the table?”

Probe pinched a claw together, and pressed it against its forehead. As close as it could get to pinching the bridge of a nonexistent nose. “He didn’t even strap Blurr to the table.”

“Well, that explains why he walked right out.” Quicksilver threw their hands in the air, exasperated. “How’d Blurr even learn the password to the door?”

Probe looked unamused. “You don’t know what the password is?”

The laboratory doors hissed open, and Greenscreen walked over to the little meeting circle Quicksilver, Cytoskel, and Megatron had formed. [Are we revealing my top secret passwords to everyone we come across?]

“No, they’re just easy to guess.” Cytoskel shrugged.

Greenscreen’s face couldn’t show disappointment. An absolute shame for everyone on the team in that moment, since none of them could laugh at it.

[Well, I’ll just have to change them, then.] He crossed his arms - barely, due to the size of his chest - and looked up at the gigantic gold figure in the distance, now coming closer to them.

They came to a stop in front of the rest of the group, carefully picking Megatron back up. He grumbled something about “don’t know why you threw me if you were just gonna pick me back up”.

“Why have you got a little meeting circle going?”

“There’s been no communications from Nanotube, and, according to Probe,” Cytoskel pointed to the laboratory behind him, “the captive’s gone.”

A huge, gold fist punching the ground. “That’s what we get for trusting Greenscreen with keeping the captive safe.”

[Look, this isn’t ALL my fault. Probe’s head of laboratory security - it IS laboratory security.]

Everyone looked at Greenscreen, disappointed.

[Nobody respects me around here.]

Quicksilver pointed to Greenscreen, “Why don’t we send him to find Nanotube?”

[I’m the only medically qualified metamech here. Why don’t YOU go?]

“I’m the only mechanically qualified metamech here.” They put their hands on their hips, looking back at Cytoskel. “And the Star system’s going rainbow, and-”

“And Probe and I bigger than every podship we have. We have no choice but to wait. Starborn will be first to go - make sure to tell them that, Cytoskel.” The gigantic gold Cybertronian picked Megatron up from his spot on the ground. “Meeting done, done done done. Nobody here.”

Heavy pedesteps signaled that Megatron, as well as the metamech carrying him, were leaving. Greenscreen crossed his arms again, sulking about as well as he could without a face as he headed back to his labs. Quicksilver was next to leave the meeting circle, and Cytoskel... didn’t move.

It was nice here. It was nice here, when nobody was around, and he got to be blissfully unaware of his status as a war criminal slated to work for the rest of his life.

Blissfully unaware.

Nice here.

Nice here.

Starborn’s eyes and biolights flashed in every color, undisturbed for hours.

[untangle]

DEAD DASH? NOT ANYMORE

Follow the blog(s) corresponded with your favorite Christmas Song <3

Baby it’s cold outside: @illbeokay  

Rudolph the red nose reindeer: @qhlowinq 

Silent Night: @raspberrysugah

Santa Baby: @ghostbarbie 

Joy to the World: @the-toxicbutterfly

All I want for Christmas: @plugsanddrugs- , @vividwarm

O’ Holy Night: @arthemiss

lol The Darkness: @rumbeling

Jingle Bells: @altmind , @crispymoreforme

Sleigh Ride: @bittrsweeeeet

don’t see your blog? you didn’t follow all the rules! Follow 4+ blogs and tell me who for a detailed blog rate to 109k! Brought to you by @cosmosnetwork

[findteenpenpals]

18 years old 

European

Love film photography

love music (Glass Animals, Gus Dapperton, Allan Rayman, Mac DeMarco, Arctic Monkeys,  Parcels, dope lemon, king krule, metronomy and more)

enjoy to appreciate and discuss beauty (it can be photography, music, paintings or generally nature)

I truly appreciate hearing live music, so going to concerts might be my favourite thing in the world

email: kornelij00a@gmail.com

tumblr: altminded

[shirlleycoyle]

The Hieroglyphics That Appears When No Other Font Is Available

The thing they always say about good typography is that it often blends into whatever setting you’re using so it gets out of the way and you barely even notice it.

If that’s the case, the font LastResort may be the greatest font of all time. (For fans of Papa Roach, I’m sorry to say it has nothing to do with the turn-of-the-century nu-metal classic.)

If you’re a Mac user in particular, it’s a piece of typography that only occasionally shows up in technical settings, and when it does, it doesn’t scream at you, in part because most of the time it only shows a single character—the type of character that is missing from the font you’re trying to use. If you’re in a country with a language based on Latin script, it’s generally this one:

But LastResort is a more interesting font than it seems. It’s essentially the typography form of hieroglyphics, showing unusual characters intended for people building fonts to have some sort of error system that helps them figure out what might be missing from their typeface.

LastResort is not an easy font to dig up. It does not appear in the Mac’s emoji interface. When I downloaded the typeface from the Unicode Consortium to analyze it, I found that it didn’t display in MacOS’ default Font Book app. (If you want to see it there, download a font that doesn’t have any lowercase characters.) Downloading a third-party app got me a bit closer to seeing it, but even then, it only showed me a single character.

The truth is, there are a lot of characters there, but you don’t see them because they are only designed to signify a certain type of character. Most users don’t see these because they largely stick to one language.

But Apple, reflecting its focus on accessibility, has to account for everyone. For example, if you go into your Mac’s /System/Library/Fonts folder, you might be surprised at the sheer level of interesting fonts in there that you probably never use, one of which is LastResort. Buried inside my Mojave-based system, the first font that shows up is “Apple Braille Outline 6 Dot.ttf,” a font that, unlike LastResort, is easy to uncover in Font Book. Numerous other languages appear as well. Most of these fonts are not intended for you; they’re intended for whatever tiny edge case that a multilingual operating system must account for.

(But be careful in that folder: As a 2005 MacWorld article notes, if you remove one of a handful of fonts from the system, it won’t boot.)

LastResort is the edge case that appears when all the other edge cases have been exhausted. First developed in 1998 for MacOS 8.6, the font was initially a part of the Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI) stack, and was intended to offer an internal fallback for typography that appears within the operating system.

As an Apple website from the era explains of its use case:

These glyphs are used as the backup of "last resort" to any other font; if the font cannot represent any particular Unicode character, the appropriate "missing" glyph from the Last Resort font is used instead. This provides users with the ability to tell what sort of character it is, and gives them a clue as to what type of font they would need to display the characters correctly. 

(Compare it to how, if you don’t have a certain font that a website needs, it will use an inferior backup like Times New Roman instead.)

Reflecting its age and dating it, the edges of LastResort’s blocked outlined characters, even to this day, feature numbers and descriptive characters displayed in the font Chicago, an iconic part of the Mac’s distinctive look and feel for many years, but a font that was retired in most Apple products by the late 1990s (with a notable exception being the early versions of the iPod).

LastResort, though with a front-facing use case, is largely intended for developers, as it lets them know characters that might be missing in their Unicode-compliant typefaces. But even though that’s the use case, there is some generally weird stuff in there, including a Saturn-shaped planet, an alien, and a ghost, along with references to private and undefined characters.

Even the characters that were intentionally meant to be useful are fascinating—Aztec pictographs make an appearance, as do literal Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, as well as the Easter Island rongorongo glyph system. If it’s a type of character, it’s probably represented in this list.

But while the ATSUI stack didn’t last in MacOS, being replaced more than a decade ago by Apple’s current Core Text technology, LastResort is still there—and is in fact (fittingly) the basis of a Unicode standard that is maintained by typographer and linguist Michael Everson.

If you go to the Unicode website, in fact, you can find characters sorted by the LastResort codes.

If you want to dig through the LastResort characters yourself, the user altmind on Github has high-resolution renderings of the glyphs worth checking out. There’s some pretty wild stuff in there.

The Hieroglyphics That Appears When No Other Font Is Available syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[neverprogrammingagain]

Objects can help you reflect the real world relationships

(via altmind)

[altmind]

Instant Classic 🎸

[altmind]

heart is aching and you can’t explain it

[altmind]

Don’t let ‘em whisper in your ear.

[altmind]

HØWL

[altmind]

put a little fire on it

[altmind]

still alive.

[altmind]

Cheap cigars

[altmind]

🎲

[altmind]

What's she runnin' from now...