Art sideblog: @alchemeowst-art
My comic (soonish): @fragmented-comic

pixel skylines

JBB: An Artblog!

titsay
ojovivo

shark vs the universe
Claire Keane

No title available
we're not kids anymore.
Xuebing Du
NASA
noise dept.
No title available
cherry valley forever
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
🪼
Monterey Bay Aquarium
No title available

#extradirty
Jules of Nature

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
seen from France
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States

seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United States

seen from India
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seen from TĂĽrkiye

seen from United States
seen from Portugal

seen from Belgium

seen from T1

seen from United Kingdom
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seen from TĂĽrkiye

seen from Malaysia

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@alchemeowst
Art sideblog: @alchemeowst-art
My comic (soonish): @fragmented-comic
Hey yeah sorry I don’t have time to risk my life in the extradimensional radiation pit I have a discussion post due in 2 hours.
“scientists don’t want you know” is a phrase that always cracks me up because if you actually meet a scientist they will be shaking and crying like an overstimulated chihuahua with the need to let you know
A short comic I made about my experiences as a seasonal worker, and the way places change you.
Prints & PDF
Health classes really ought to teach people what the beginning stages of addiction are like because a lot of people don’t realize they’re addicted to something until they’re years deep into it.
Signs you might be getting addicted to something:
If you go without it you feel unwell in a way that you never usually feel unwell. Sweating, tired, sleepy, headaches, irritable, depressed, etc. For example when I was in opium withdrawal I got incredibly depressed in a way that I’ve never been before or since. When you quit caffeine you might get super bad headaches even if you never usually get any headaches.
Thoughts of it regularly bother you and the thoughts go away once you’ve taken it but only temporarily. Unlike with a food craving which usually stays away once you’ve satisfied it or distracted yourself from it.
You find yourself rationalizing with yourself why you should break your own rules about how much you can take and how often. For example you might only let yourself drink alcohol every four days but start thinking that three days is actually close enough to four days, right? Especially if this happens regularly.
You’re using it so often that you feel the need to lie about how much you use because other people might think it’s concerning
If the substance or activity is nearby it’s genuinely difficult to not consume it or participate in it in a way that’s really frustrating.
You feel bad when you’re not on it and your brain tells you “if you just take the thing you wouldn’t feel this way”
You can only feel “whole” or “normal” when you’re on a substance even though it’s a recreational drug
And if you read this and think you might be addicted to something, don’t panic and don’t feel ashamed. Realizing you’re addicted to something isn’t a failure. It’s more information about your health that you can use to manage your condition, whether you want to get rid of your addiction or not.
Nasty and sophisticated scam: BEWARE of this!
If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call 855
Don’t get caught off guard by this. It’s quite a slick one.
What to actually do If you get one of these, the answer is boring and it works every time: Don't call the number. Don't reply. Don't click links in the email — not even the unsubscribe link. Open a fresh browser tab, type paypal.com yourself, and log into your account. Check your activity. You'll see either nothing, or a tiny incoming payment from a stranger that you can ignore. Then forward the original email as an attachment to [email protected] and delete it. If you want to go a step further, report the phone number to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov — every report makes it slightly harder for these operations to keep running. And if you've already called? Don't beat yourself up — these scams are designed by professionals to fool smart people. Hang up, run a malware scan if you installed anything they asked you to install, change your PayPal and bank passwords from a different device, and call your bank's real fraud line (the number on the back of your card) to flag your accounts. Move fast, but you don't need to panic.
from the above linked article. For the UK the email to forward phishing scams to is [email protected], texts can be forwarded on to 7726 (for free!) and as a victim of fraud you can report it here (or here for Scotland)
— If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call (855) 629-1161" — don't call that number. Don't click anything. And whatever you do, don't panic-dial to "stop the charge."
You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.
The trick is in the subject line, not the email
When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.
So how is it a scam?
Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.
Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.
The actual transaction in the email body is for 1 forint. There is no $987.90 charge. There never was. But by the time most people read carefully enough to notice that, they've already dialed the number. —
For a city to be walkable. It must also be sittable.
#every time I read this phrase the same thing happens#I read it as shittable and go wait that can't be right#oh right they were talking about public benches that makes more sense#but public bathrooms available without fees should also be a thing tho#cities should definitely be shittable#it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME
it must also be shittable
"accessibility" needs to stop meaning "low-engagement"
"we are making our TTRPG more accessible!"
"oh, did you make the font bigger and more legible?"
"no we're just doing the next edition in D&D5e"
"we're making our video game more accessible!"
"oh did you add an option to remap the controls?"
"no we just added an option to remove combat so the game is just a bunch of cutscenes"
"we made it accessible!"
"which part? what did you make accessible?"
"why, not playing the game at all of course! games are much better when they don't have any pesky game in them, especially for the disabled, who typically access the game parts even less."
To further elaborate (very long)
it is a very popular trend right now to add, like, features that skip the engagement with an interactive work of art, such as skipping combat or making combat impossible to lose in a combat-focused video game, or in the scene of TTRPGs making your TTRPG completely dumbed down or just hastily and mindlessly making it a D&D5e hack "because people already know how to play D&D5e and I want it to be accessible" instead of expecting people to actually read and learn and engage with a set of specific rules, and call all of that "accessibility" instead of adding "accessibility" features that would actually help disabled people access the "meat" of whatever the interactive art is.
If it's a combat-focused video game, some examples would be helping them engage with the full depth of the combat by allowing the controls to be fully remapped to something easier for their hands(or lack of hands), or the option to disable flashing lights or reduce the intensity muzzle flashes on the guns or something.
I think I have come up with a good example to illustrate this point. Let's say there is an FPS where you shoot aliens. Pretend it's, like, Halo but not specifically Halo.
And let’s say there’s a group of disabled gamers who are excited for this video game.
Missing Finger Guy, Deaf Guy, Colorblind Guy, and Poor Eyesight Guy.
Missing Finger Guy is missing at least one finger that corresponds to the Dodge button, he can’t reliably press it especially on short notice when aliens are coming at his character. So, he can’t really play the game because dodging is required to beat the levels. The game devs provide an “acccessibility” easy mode that turns off combat or makes the enemies do so little damage that he never needs to use the Dodge button. So, Missing Finger Guy can play the game now, right? Wrong. Dodging enemies *is* the game, and he still never gets to play with the Dodge button, or engage with any of the other elements of the game that are watered down by making enemy attacks not matter. To make the fun gameplay of dodging enemies accessible to this player, the answer is to allow remapping the Dodge action to a button that he can reach.
Deaf Guy
The game expects the player to rely on audio cues to know when enemies are sneaking up behind them or when a grenade lands at their feet or when an enemy is about to do a specific attack. Obviously the deaf player can’t hear these and can’t play the game because he’ll just die all the time to attacks which are literally impossible for him to predict. Again, this could be “fixed” by a mode that makes it so it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t hear a grenade land at his character’s feet by removing the consequence of death for failing to notice the grenade, or you could add the option to turn on subtitles for both story dialogue and sound effects like “[grenade beep]” and “[screatchure scream].” One of these allows the deaf gamer to play on roughly the same playing field as other players and react to threats the same way that hearing people can do that he can engage with the meat of the game, and the other doesn’t.
Colorblind Guy
The video game features enemies that are identifiable by their red and blue armor. Red aliens throw red grenades that you can catch and throw back, and blue aliens throw blue grenades that explode by proximity and you just have to fully avoid. Obviously, a colorblind player cannot reliably tell these apart, and would either have to try to throw back grenades at random and hope for the best, or just avoid all grenades to be safe. You could “fix” this by removing the consequence of death for getting exploded by a grenade, or you could fix it by adding a togglable colorblindness mode that switches the color distinction to something visible or adds some other distinctive feature besides color to one of those grenade types. One of these allows the colorblind player to engage with the intended gameplay of the game by taking informed risks by trying to throw back certain grenades, and one of them doesn’t, making it just not matter what decision he makes.
Poor Eyesight Guy
You get the formula by now. The *actually* accessible feature would be allowing him to adjust the text to be more readable instead of making it not matter if he can read the directions that tell him how to get through the minefield safety by removing the consequences for stepping on a mine.
A mode that simply removes consequences for failing to engage with and react appropriately to the threats the game presents is, at best, appealing only to people who don’t actually *like* the gameplay in the first place, while still shutting out the people who *want* to engage with the full depth of the gameplay but can’t because of some disability that prevents them from doing so as intended.
Because the gameplay isnt just seeing the cutscenes and getting a “level cleared” achievement, it is dodging the enemies, throwing back the grenades, listening for the screatchure screams, etc..
If there is an enemy who is super tough from the front and will kill you if you can’t get around behind him, you don’t make the game more “accessible” by making him so weak from the front that it doesn’t matter where you shoot him, or making his attacks so weak that you can shrug them off long enough to whittle him down from the front, youve actually removed this enemy from the game by making him just like the common enemies that can be shot from the front. You have actually made the element of the gameplay provided by this enemy inaccessible by doing this, because the quick thinking and tactical usage of the game’s features required to get behind him *is* the gameplay.
It’s much easier to explain this via video games but it goes for tabletop games as well. A TTRPG is more truly accessible for having big easy-to-read font and clear explanations so that players that want to engage with that game’s rules can do so even if they have reading difficulties, than if it just went “eh it doesn’t matter if you read the rules or not.”
Difficulty levels are not disability accomodations. OP explains that very well through their examples here.
I like difficulty levels, sometimes I don't enjoy a specific aspect of gameplay or I just want to blast through from cutscene to cutscene, and being able to toggle a zero-consequences baby mode is a nice option to have.
But most of the time I want to play the game, and to do that I need to remap half the controls. Let me remap them, don't treat me like I'm incapable of playing video games or like I don't deserve rewarding and engaging gameplay just because I can't move the mouse as precisely as the other guy.
It's like, you make a museum accesible by putting in ramps and elevators, not by telling wheelchair users that the art on the upper floors isn't all that great and they shouldn't want to see it in the first place.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, and most people who follow me are very much of this opinion. But like... So much accessibility talk is not actually about letting people engage with your game who otherwise couldn't due to a disability or physical limitation. Rather, it's an idea of accessibility in the way a CEO would want a movie to be more accessible to a wider audience. As in like, "This movie's audience is too niche and it's ideas are too lofty, make it more accessible." Both of these are "accessibility" in a sense, but those are two VERY different definitions of the word, you know what I'm saying? Ideally, I'd like art which is naturally inaccessible through it's themes and difficulty and ideas to nonetheless be something people who have physical limitations (Or... Well, technological limitations, economic limitations, whatever else) can experience
Yes, this is a term that is being co-opted to prioritize corporate profits by appealing to a "wider audience" which includes people who don't actually like the product, while leaving disabled people shut out and, in many cases, calling them ableist for saying "an invincibility mode is not an accessibility setting, instead give me tools that will let me play the game without an invincibility mode the way everyone else who likes the gameplay can."
People in the tags are already going "hello i am the strawman from your post! I bought a game without realizing there was combat in it and i don't like combat so invincibility mode was an accessibility setting to me because it let me avoid the game i don't like!"
ACTUAL ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES IN GAMES:
Option to hold or toggle buttons for running
Quick Time Events on a toggle, or not involving quick, successive button presses (just one press)
Ability to change the colour, font and size of subtitles!
Ability to re-map buttons
ABILITY TO USE A NONSTANDARD CONTROLLER
Ability to change brightness, colour saturation, lighting intensity and filtering
ABILITY TO TURN OFF FLASHING LIGHTS OH MY FUCKING GOD
Volume control that lets you turn up the dialogue and atmospheric sound but turn the music down
Ability to turn off camera shake and blur
And you might ask 'well how is x an accessibility feature'
But consider:
People who have issues with their hands (muscle weakness, missing fingers, impaired reflexes)
Folks who are hard of hearing or have other hearing issues
Epileptics and other folks with light-sensitive seizures
invented a game called “I throw dice at the cat”
hey your cat kinda lowkey was giving god of probability and gambling and chaos so i drew her. yeah.
Divine Being: Schrodinger's Cat
Oops! Looks like another tiny dragon has gotten loose. This one had the misfortune of finding an ink bottle…
my biology professor has such a chaotic energy about him, last week i went to his office hours and somehow we ended up on the topic of gay marriage:
he said that when he lived in texas they changed the law to define marriage as “between a man and a woman in a house of religious worship with the intention to have children” so he filed his taxes as single and when they called him up like “you filed married last year” he was like “you changed the law, i was married by a judge in a courthouse and i have no intention of having kids” and they told him “you know who that law was for” and i guess he hung up on them and did not, in fact, pay taxes as a married man that year
Chaotic good
NO! This is Lawful Good! He is following the LAW! Chaotic doesn’t just mean cheeky!
this is like how Sweden stopped classifying homosexuality as an illness because people started a campaign of calling in gay to work
malicious compliance is one of the best tools in the arsenal of civil rights activism
Always reblog for malicious compliance
sometimes following the letter of the law works even better than ignoring it.
In Utah the new book banning laws apply to the bible, and there’s already someone petitioning to get it removed from schools and libraries.
I hope no English teacher ever puts up with “banning pronouns” for even a moment
Update: The Utah book ban has, in fact, resulted in the Bible being banned in elementary and middle schools in Davis County, and high schoolers now only have limited access to the King James Version, due to “vulgarity and violence.”Â
Now the Book of Mormon is under consideration for a ban as well. The parent who complained said that it was very violent.
"no"
By yuki_illust19
seagulls i need u to terrorize them for me
I think it's insane that even in the most leftist and "progressive" spaces the idea of equating morality with looks is alive and present and no one fucking bats an eye at it. like racists and mysoginysts are always portrayed as fat and hairy and generally unkept, as a contrast to the morally good and attractive leftists of course; people will have no problem being genuinely fucking awful about someone's appearance if they're deemed to be a "bad person". and the worst part is you point all of this out and people act like you're reading too much into things like no dude you gotta start using your brain more
Don't be a Eugenicist!
đź’€
I don’t say this often, but you really should unmute and listen to the song

no one can even enjoy The Character anymore on account of the exams
Annual deer post:
If you see a fawn laying down on the ground all alone, leave it alone. It is not lost, it does not need your help, do not pick it up, do not move it.
This behavior evolved to keep deer young safe. The baby is very small, very quiet, and hard for most predators to see. A young fawn cannot keep up with a fleeing mother deer, which is their primary problem-solving strategy. So while the mother goes elsewhere to graze, the fawn stays safe and hidden. The mom will be back.
Leave the fawn alone.
This is always good to pass around this time of year, but I would like to add something for the few of us who might be encountering the moose kind of deer.
Moose are deer, but moose have the opposite strategy. They stay close to their babies, and their primary response for anything getting close to their babies is immediate violent murder. If you do see a baby moose by itself, leave. Leave the baby alone and leave the area, preferably quickly. Momma is at most 30 yards away and has already kicked on the kill bill sirens.