#on the one hand I'm not the kind of person to get EXTREMELY granular about this based on other people's made up rules

[blujayonthewing]

accidentally getting into mixology is dangerous for the kind of person who uses different specific drinkware for coffee vs tea vs GREEN tea and who has a glass she informally but insistently thinks of as The Milk Glass

[connorsnothereeither]

Hi! this is a mainly DnD based question that sorta runs into Fable-

So I'm currently running an entirely underwater campaign! The species I've included is basically every aquatic DnD species (some with a few twists) along with some homebrewed underwater dragonborn, etc-

However, I'm having trouble with choosing a clothing type to put on the sea elves? My version has them more telchin-ish- aka, maybe funky colored human base with longer legs, a tail, and I've given them webbed, frog-like feet and fins in a variety of places.

Logically, they honestly really wouldn't wear clothes- but I'm not doing that because that'd make certain scenes very hard to draw-

so what do you generally imagine the telchin wearing? normal clothes, edited versions of those, etc? Right now I have the two sea elves my party interact with on a regular basis in sort of tank-top-esque wear and edited shorts of a kind.

:]

Ooooh okay that’s a really fun question my worldbuilding gears are turning lmao-

I have a post somewhere here on my blog about Telchin clothing and specifically my development of Ulysses design and the cultural influences, which basically boils down to “Telchins at the start of war = Ancient Greek clothes (chitons, togas, cloaks, etc). Telchins during the projects = WW2 fashion (pants, jumpsuits, jackets, etc)”

If you wanted my thoughts on how I would maybe clothe them in a broader sense/outside the context of Fable, I have some ideas! ✨

I think tank tops and shorts definitely fit the vibe. More-modern style clothing just underwater is always a super fun route to take, even for the visual of just clothing underwater being funky and something that’s a little different and new!

Typically in my mind, when it comes to clothing in world building it usually boils down to resources and purpose.

Resources is more the boring side of things. What kinds of materials do they have access to, how do they manufacture the clothing, blah blah blah. Not really something you need to worry about in fantasy worlds cause usually the answer is “cause magic” and “because it’s cool so I said so” which is the more fun kind of fantasy imo, and getting too bogged down in the granular details as a DM/storyteller just ain’t very productive.

Purpose on the other hand is where you can really have fun with underwater clothing! Is it designed to be functional, or stylistic? If its purpose is to be functional, maybe their clothing develops like swimsuits, almost? Like you said: shorts, crop tops, swim-shirts, etc! Something that covers enough or the body while still not being too cumbersome in the water, prioritizing movement when swimming! Or maybe you want to take that to the extreme; maybe their clothing developed like wetsuits! Skintight, smooth, shiny, and insulating! Designed to move with them, just a layer of covering for their bodies to make them more hydrodynamic! Or, if the purpose of the clothing is to be attractive and fashionable and flashy, maybe they do go in a more Greco-Roman route! Maybe it’s all about togas and dresses and cloaks and veils! Layers of long, flowing fabrics which shimmer and billow out in the water and draw attention to the person wearing them! These huge billowing clothes which make a statement, rather than help with movement or anything!

And it doesn’t have to be one or the other, either. You can mix and match both! Maybe the skintight wetsuit-like clothes are designed with patterns that ripple and shift as the wearer moves and they become beautiful and hypnotic! Maybe the large billowing cloaks are useful when avoiding predators underwater, making the wearer seem bigger, scarier and more imposing to any underwater monsters! The telchin’s clothing in my eyes follows a direct path almost: the fashionable pre-war clothing in billowing fabrics which allow freedom of movement and expression, that slowly transition into cleaner, more tailored clothing as they need to conserve fabric, and avoid being grabbed by drowned, losing that expression in the process. There’s so much room to play around with elements of either or both when it comes to it!

I know this was very rambling but I hope it was somewhat helpful!! Your campaign sounds really cool, an underwater campaign is such an interesting concept!! I hope you have fun running it!

[citrusella-flugpucker]

https://www.tumblr.com/can-i-make-image-descriptions/704588725997404160/general-guide-for-image-descriptions?source=share

Hi! Thanks for sending this, and I imagine I can figure out how you decided to send it to my blog! (Specifically (this parenthetical is for my followers' benefit, not yours, since I know where you found me), I replied to someone on a post calling out some users' behavior in requesting image descriptions (can link the post if needed but am avoiding at present for de-escalatory reasons), explaining why I thought someone who writes image descriptions themselves would still advocate for others to write them (and why not everyone who doesn't ALWAYS provide them is necessarily ableist--they can be, of course, but there are myriad reasons someone might not). Other people in the post's replies reported also getting sent this link, so this anon is probably monitoring the replies of that post and contacting everyone who gives it a note of any type.)

I know all of the guidance the post you've linked here shares, so I thought I'd elaborate more on my personal philosophy regarding image descriptions.

...I love creating accessibility where I can manage to do so! I was a longtime contributor to community captions on YouTube before the feature was shuttered, and I do my best caption or transcript my own content or to provide alt text where my posts contain images (I know there have been a handful of times I've forgotten to do so, though, especially on the alt side of things). Heck, I'm thinking of creating a zine (as in a physical one, to distribute locally) and trying to figure out how to offer it in braille and described!

I actually recently attended a panel hosted by the Longmore Institute on Disability at SFSU where blind/low-vision/partially-sighted people (and the attendees) were given three different audio descriptions of a comic produced with different description philosophies (one described like a movie's video description track, one the artist's extremely detailed sort of description intended for editors, and one a hypothetical narrative-like (i.e. written like book prose) description). The panel was a discussion and Q&A regarding what they liked best, some thoughts on best practices, and some ideas specific to art and comics. One thing I found striking was one of the panelists thought it'd be an interesting idea if it were possible to have multiple granularities of description available to choose between, kind of like how sighted users can zoom in on something or look closer at the detail. (This is only tangentially related to your ask, but I just think it was a really cool panel so I decided to take the opportunity to gush about it. Hope that's okay. XD)

Here's what happens when an image or video is not mine, is undescribed and/or untranscripted, and it crosses my dash:

I give the first reblog I see of it, by the person I've followed, a like. That was my introduction to the post in question, after all!

I open the notes and start looking for an existing description of the image(s) in the post (or transcript, if it's a video) that I deem satisfactory. If I find one, I reblog that version. Sometimes a description exists in the notes and I deliberately avoid it because I think it's so bad as to be about as useful as not providing one. Usually in such a case there is more than one description I can choose from, thankfully. (This was not the case a few years ago, when image description was... like... less cool or something.)

If I don't find one and I'm up for doing it myself, I do it myself. (I am more likely to be up for doing it myself right now if an adequate description would be fairly simple/short. More on that later.)

If I'm not up for doing it myself and it's a video with open captions, I may be likely to still reblog it. (I do understand that this can still present inaccessible content for deafblind people especially (and also hearing blind people as well, but to a lesser extent).)

If I'm not up for doing it myself and it's a video without captions or an undescribed image, I consider whether or not I want to reblog it. Sometimes I still do. (I understand that this is bad for visual accessibility.)

Those last two bullet points sound TERRIBLE! I'm deliberately choosing inaccessibility when I led with saying I love it?! Hypocrisy!

But here's the thing: I do things this way because in the past those last two bullet points used to be "I don't reblog it until I am up for doing it myself". Yeah, I made a full-on resolution that I was going to make sure all my posts were fully accessible! Great!

...But then it started to actively be a problem, because my workflow went like this:

See post

No description on post or in notes

Draft post to describe later instead of reblogging immediately

Forget draft (my disability makes this distressingly easy to do in Tumblr's last few layouts, more on that in a sec, but you should know I currently have 3292 drafts for all sorts of reasons (mostly not description, I'd imagine), that date back to before I graduated college eight years ago)

Never reblog post

Repeat

Mutuals wonder why I never reblog things anymore

...Which started to actively make my life worse because it was basically like I wasn't on Tumblr anymore.

Which in some ways I'm sure to some sounds like the "I can excuse racism" meme:

...But, like, I mean it was actively interfering with my mental health to a degree, because one axis of my online social life had basically been reduced to nothing. And it wasn't making anything more accessible, when I was completely forgetting to follow through like that.

So I stopped doing that and started letting myself reblog things again, so that I can have some connection to others on this site. XP

There are myriad reasons that someone might not be able to consistently provide image descriptions, but for me, writing an image description requires me to interact with a post in a very specific way, which is a way shared with the following activities:

Writing and timing closed captions

Writing transcripts

Actively monitoring edits and performing admin functions on the handful of wikis I admin (particularly ones without other active admins)

Probably other stuff, IDK, but it's a really weird analytical approach that I don't use for too awful much else

All of these are presently being affected by the fact I've been in disability-related burnout since February of 2020.

I don't provide image descriptions (or transcripts) as often as I used to.

I uploaded a minute-long video to YouTube last week and, as I always do with my content, manually created a caption file for it to avoid CRAPtions; even with YouTube's automatic speech to text and timing, I took twice as long to correct and accurately time the video as I used to take to do a full video of that length back when I was community contributing captions in 2019/2020.

I mostly only wiki admin in the sense that I'm not letting the wikis burn down. A few times for an especially important edit that required admin functions (or AWB to do a lot of little edits faster) I've put together the time and energy to try to get it done.

I cannot get my brain to do it. This is even though I can spend the same amount of time doing something else that I might have used to image describe, because whatever that something else is usually doesn't require the same headspace/skill I need to use to describe.

I'm not going to branch out to the other ways this burnout is affecting me (for instance, at my actual literal paid job), but the fact I've been in it for four years now should... say something. XP I'm slowly digging out, but I'm not there yet.

I'm not going to be like some others I've seen and stamp my foot and refuse to provide descriptions for anyone now because you did this. That would just make things bad for other people. I'd love to provide them more! But I'm not currently in a place where I can do that.

I do understand that by not providing one when one does not exist, I am not doing anything to make the post more accessible, and that I might be presenting some of my followers with content they are unable to access. However, my own current access needs regarding trying to nurse myself out of disability burnout are in direct conflict with being able to regularly provide them. I'd love for that to be over, so that I'm at least describing more often, even if I still occasionally don't describe things.

But in the meantime: If you care about access needs, I'd hope you care about mine, too.

Lastly:

If you meant this link to be for actual information, I regret to inform you (again) that I already know all of the information in it. I've been trying to look at more advanced resources, talk/listen to blind people discuss the topic, attend things about image description (like that panel I mentioned), because useful and understandable image description is very important to me even if it's very difficult for me to do right now, and I'd like to learn all I can. At this point, I need more advanced resources than what you've provided.

If you meant this to be some sort of "own" for the people who gave a note to the post you probably were monitoring to see my reply: [Velma voice] You stop that. Sending it to everyone, regardless of what they said on the post, gives off an air of "look, it's so easy, you're just not trying hard enough!" and makes it seem like you didn't actually read what they said in some cases (like mine, where I shared a very short version of this explanation in the replies where I basically said "image describing good, more people should do it, brain making it hard right now").

For people who agree with the cause of spreading the act of describing images so it's not all on a handful of people, that might not result in anything bad happening (though you might be preaching to the choir, i.e. telling them something they already know). But if someone's less wholeheartedly on the description train, the fact you're sending this to everyone unprompted might come off a bit condescending, and might actually backfire into having them decide not to image describe. (Which is not a course of action I agree with. I think it's silly to purposely choose inaccessibility because a few people were condescending, weird, or jerky about it to you. But it is a possibility, you may or may not be aware.)

TL;DR: Thanks for the link but it's too surface-level for me. I love providing descriptions but some things are making it hard for me right now. I want those things to get better but until they do I'm probably going to be at a lower describing rate than usual. Sorry!

EDIT: Mutual dared me to add a jokey longpost tag I was originally considering tagging this post with so it's now the first tag on the post, lol

[lichfucker]

Hi! (feel totally free to ignore btw!) I used to looove starkid back in avpm days, but I haven't seen anything since Starship. You posting abt Black Friday is making me want to go back tho! What starkid/tcb shows should watch vs skip? I know twisted, saf, (&apparently bf) are great - which of the others have you seen & liked? Thanks! ☺️

twisted, saf, and bf are all TOP TIER and you absolutely should watch them

the guy who didn't like musicals is, like, technically kind of a prequel to black friday? they take place in the same town and there's a handful of overlapping characters (and since black friday is generally a lot. heavier in tone, a lot of the Jokes that get big audience reactions are just references to tgwdlm). you don't HAVE to watch tgwdlm to enjoy bf, and in all honesty I really didn't like tgwdlm very much (it's just not my kind of humor personally and the ratio of songs I liked to songs I didn't is just a little too low, y'know?). you'd be missing out on a LITTLE bit of context my watching bf without watching tgwdlm but not even really that much, they do a good job of re-explaining all the plot-relevant details and the relationship between the shows isn't quite as straightforward as prequel/sequel. so it's up to you whether you'd think it's worth it to watch tgwdlm in addition to bf

you mentioned starship which I LOVE. worth rewatching. starship and holy musical b@man are maybe the most underrated shows in the company's oeuvre. I love hmb so much it makes me insane. I'm so sick of superhero media that takes itself really seriously lmao the concept is inherently absurd and ridiculous, and hmb really leans into the idea that, like, this is all dumb as hell. the characters don't THINK it's dumb as hell, and they DO take it super seriously, but it's still very much dumb as hell

trail to oregon has a lot more potty humor than I usually like, but I absolutely fucking love it. tto makes me so happy makes me go 🥰🥰 turn my brain off and watch ppl be dumb abt The Frontier. (in case you couldn't tell, most of starkid's shows revolve around people being extremely stupid and they're soooooo good at it.) trail to oregon also has a choose-your-own-ending thing which is fun and because I'm me I have extremely strong opinions about which one is the best lmao but I won't tell you which bc I don't want to influence your decision-making

AND THEN THERE'S FIREBRINGER. the perfect lauren lopez vehicle. dumb idiot cavepeople my BELOVED. if you were On The Internet in 2017 you probably saw clips of the song 'work to do,' the "I don't really wanna do the work today" song. 'twas a big meme. it's very very good. and the music?? my g-d. heavenly harmonies. firebringer is just... fun. it's fun and very bisexual, if that means anything to you

don't watch me and my dick. it's good for corey dorris having a solo and bad/uncomfy for almost everything else. most people dislike ani; I have mixed feelings abt it. I'm not THAT into star wars so a lot of the references were lost on me, and a lot of people really didn't like that they don't sing (they did it in rep with tto, and tto took most of their best singers). that's not to say there's no music-- there is!! but the band does it all, movie soundtrack-style, instead of the characters. a lot of the songs are really good, though!! and clark's voice is soooooo 🤩. but it's, y'know, stylistically a very different experience than most other starkid musicals, and it's steeped in the granular details of star wars canon far more than the other parody musicals are in their source material. and in all honesty I haven't really watched much tcb beyond saf so I don't feel qualified to rec any other tcb stuff, though iirc people seem to really love solve-it squad

thank you for allowing me to ramble abt starkid lmfao :3