We all know that feeling, we think our image descriptions are not good enough. We think they’re too short and insignificant. We wonder if it’s worth it posting one at all, but it’s always worth it. And here is why:
Even if an image description doesn’t mention everything in the image, it tells you a million things which aren’t in the image.
If your description is [ID: Reaction image of a nodding woman. /end ID] it tells you one million things. Such as: The image is not a tweet adding further information or context, it’s not a screenshot of a Snopes article debunking the post, it’s not someone disagreeing.
Those six little words, that nodding woman, it might not seem like a lot. It might seem like you can skip right over it, like it’s not worth mentioning - but it is.
An image could always be a wall of text explaining why OP is wrong, and simply knowing that’s not the case is super useful. Knowing that it’s just a reaction image, just a meme, just a photograph, is super useful.
Adding a bit of context for people who don’t know what image descriptions are for: Blind and visually impaired people (among others) use software called screen readers when using a computer/smart phone. It reads the text on the screen aloud and makes digital content accessible to them. Images can’t be read aloud, so they need an image description (often abbreviated as ID) to know what’s in the image.
By adding an ID, you’re helping me and many other disabled people.
Some general info on screen readers and accessibility:
Accessible censoring of words (Please don't use * and $)
IDs in the main body vs alt text
using both alt text and main body IDs (with examples)
Common accessibility issues for screen readers, large text + some ID tips
Start ID/ End ID tags explained
I love my screen reader
An ask about emoji and capitalization (spoiler: emoji are fine)
Accessibility of formatting and Purpose of Plain Text (spoiler: bold and italics are fine)
Using colored text in image descriptions
How tags are read
Inaccessibility of gradient text
Zalgo text is inaccessible
My #accessibility review tag
Posts aimed at screen reader users:
How to open a link in a new tab using VoiceOver
Some general info on what a screen reader is
Burning Eyes on AO3 (An introduction to VoiceOver through a fictional story, starring Zuko and Toph from atla)
Posts about writing:
The abled saviour trope
Writing Sokka from atla as disabled
I occasionally update this list, but I have a bunch more posts on my blog, so feel free to browse or use the search function.
My asks are always open (including anon), so feel free to ask, but I am very slow at responding so it might be easier and faster to look up accessibility related questions online.
There’s widely recognized accessibility standards and guidelines (like WCAG) which cover most situations, unless it’s very niche or tumblr specific.
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
I don't know how to address this properly because I feel like every time I write about it I get the same misunderstandings from every direction.
the thing happening right now (at the very least in the US and UK) is that trans youth are actively and systemically losing access to healthcare. this has been gradually escalating since the start of the pandemic, and more young people lose healthcare every single year.
when I talk about this I tend to get two responses
"why do trans adults want to expand these experimental treatments to children who can't consent"
"providers offering care to trans adults is a step in the right direction, even if they aren't offering it to trans youth. the perfect is the enemy of the good. we can't fight our allies."
do you see how both the overtly transphobic version and the nominally "pro-trans" version replicate the same misinformation?
this is not a question of "should we expand access to trans youth?" trans youth have had access to medical transition care for a long time. what is happening is the care they already had access to is being made inaccessible and then criminalized systematically.
am I making sense? places refusing to offer care to trans youth are not "a step in the right direction" because that implies that the trend is expanding access that "begins" with trans adults and innately will gradually encompass young people. that is not the case. this is not a hypothetical thing that we can all have different theoretical opinions on. what is happening is the systematic revoking of healthcare.
the further this progresses, the more healthcare is restricted for more demographics. that's how this works. healthcare is being restricted across the board as part of the broader eugenics project. abortion is being restricted. vaccines are becoming more expensive. insurance companies are denying more treatments to disabled people. anti-fatness is surging. ableism is surging. there are active campaigns to get people to mistrust the very idea of healthcare in favor of "wellness" grifts. no one wears N-95 masks. this is the trend. it's been the trend.
I don't know how to communicate that we are not at an early step in a progressive trajectory, we are mid-stage in a eugenic order. please understand what I'm saying.
I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting
People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.
For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.
And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.
These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.
So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results
>research shows testosterone HRT is not a contraceptive so you still need to use protection!
>ok. do you know if it has literally any effect on fertility whatsoever?
>lol no
>ok. so hypothetically how would a trans man on HRT know if he's pregnant?
>well silly girl :) you just check your period :) if you missed your period you might be pregnant! duh!
>ok. testosterone HRT stops your period after, like, 3 months though
>[windows error sounds] well then you can usually feel your breasts get heavier and more tender :)
>ok. what about people who don't have mammary glands anymore? how would that even work?
>listen i don't know. why don't you have a pregnancy test?
>those tests work by detecting a specific hormone. does HRT interfere with this hormone by either making it undetectable or stopping its production entirely or anything? how do i know the test itself is reliable?
>have you tried the morning after pill?
>the morning after pill is also hormone-based. how do i know it's reliable? does taking testosterone HRT have any impact on its efficiency? could it potentially cause an adverse reaction? could a trans man with updated ID documents even access it in the first place since the pharmacy only delivers it to people they think, at a glance, could be pregnant?
like i dont know . i keep thinking of that doctor i saw three times at the goddamn hospital and to whom i explained the concept of taking hrt (prescribed) (controlled) (medical setting) three times and i still don't think he actually understood. "but you look different!" bingo doc that's what it does! "but ... can it actually change your body? :o" bingo doc ! that's what an """hormone"""" does . that's like its whole thing actually. that's what , it does ,
it's like the people at work (transcription) (remote office work) (linguistics) (spelling) (grammar) (writing) (language) (grammar) being confused at the concept of "pronouns". "what do you mean by "pronouns"?" cindy my belovedest ! i think the problem might not actually be that you don't know about The Transsexuals? i think you might actually just be worryingly bad at your job. you know? the job which is "know about grammar"? that job? the grammar job? the job that is about knowing grammar rules? that job? the one that you have? cindy? cindy. cindy look at me. CINDY,
in the dungeon you will have to face a monster with the nose of a tiger, the teeth of a tiger, the ears of a tiger the eyes of a tiger , the cheeks of a tiger , the neck of a tiger, the torso of a tiger, the arms of a tiger, the paws of a tiger, the belly of a tiger the back of a tiger, the the legs of a tiger, the claws of a tiger, the ankles of a tiger, the tail of the tiger, the mind of a tiger, and the power of a tiger
"When I saw Faker crying in the booth, I thought it was amazing. He had won so many championships, but he still had the passion for victory and anger for losing. It was really moving to see that." -- Jo "CoreJJ" Yong-in, on the 2017 League of Legends World Championship
"Ill never watch this stupid racist sport for the rest of my life for at least another 4 years" -- tumblr user @tamamita, on the 2026 FIFA World Cup
let's do a spectacular volleyball dunk on the elephant on the court first of all--beastieball is a lot like pokemon. you collect little themed creatures to challenge a bunch of wacky larger-than-life characters with their own teams of themed creatures in hopes of going to the little themed creature-off championship. it's a comparison the game wears on its sleeve (one particularly funny moment stands out where an NPC explicitly says "there's no super effective or anything like that", as does a running joke about Beastie-themed videogames). i first picked the game up on a recommendation stemming from me literally asking my followers for a game that was "like pokemon but good". but i was not prepared for How fucking good beastieball is.
one huge and crucial difference at the heart of what makes this game click so perfectly for me is that your beasties aren't battling or fighting; they're playing two-a-side volleyball. this gets you away from some of the uncomfortable rationalization and suspension of disbelief you need to get through most creature collectors, where you no longer have to dance around the existence of real-life animal bloodsport. but this also unlocks so much in terms of gameplay; because you don't have to Wipe the whole enemy team for a win, but instead simply score match point (1 point for wild beasties, 2 points for npc encounters, 3 points for ranked matches against coaches), enemy teams can have a full roster without dragging out encounters intolerably--which beastie has the ball and whether they're up by the net become two huge factors in how matches go down, opening up a deep library of support and setup moves across the game's beasties.
and the designers of beastieball clearly want every one of those beasties to have its own role and place in the game. this is perfect for a creature collector--if you have a favourite beastie, i guarantee you can build a crown series-winning team around it, even if it is a "silly" one with a design that suggests weakness (like Trat, the mouse that lives in a can of peaches). but what really wowed me is the strength of the encounter design. you can absolutely get through the first half of the game by overlevelling your starter and slamming down serves--but the ranked coaches in beastieball have gimmick teams, specific strategies that go far deeper than just an aesthetic or typal similarity (no complicated type chart in beastieball, thank fuck, just three damage types and corresponding defense stats). i found myself having to slot in new team members, or shuffle moves around, or switch up my starting order, or straight up get better at the game to get past some of the later coaches. (re: shuffling moves, your beasties never forget plays. i'm trying to review beastieball as a game in its own right nad not by comparison as much as possible, but please rest assured that nearly every quality of life feature i have ever wished for from a pokemon game is present here).
there's extremely little randomness in beastieball--it's a near-perfect information game, you can see each enemy beastie's plays and how much damage they'll do, so the trick is in learning to predict moves, how and when to tag in, when you can afford to drop a point to get your beastie on the bench and recovering… i haven't even touched the postgame content or the PVP, and my mind's been abuzz the whole back half of the game with this type of stuff. so purely as a turn-based battler, incredible.
i also have to shout out the absolutely amazing concept artists and animators on this project--webbounce, the clown spider with a beachball abdomen, and yueffowl, the little bird that holds its wings up like the dish of a flying saucer, are probably my favourite designs in any creature collector ever. there's always a little extra secret sauce to beastieball's designs, either a clever or innovative link (eg, yueffowl and its evolution albrax drawing on the history of UFO/alien/cryptid sightins that were 100% just An Owl Looking Kinda Freaky) or a sense of real thought put into how the beastie exists in the context of its environment, and the beasties that have animations feel so incredibly alive and charming.
that charm is a real big part of beastieball's emotional core. okay, i PROMISE this is the last time i say the p-word, but beastieball let me engage in the core fantasy of pokemon better than any pokemon game has--the fantasy of there beign a weird little creature that's your friend. before every match, you get scenes of your beasties hyping themselves up, or discussing strategy… you can high-five them all before going in. the reactivity is light, but it really sells the fantasy of like, the /team/, of this being an adventure you're all in together. the fact that beasties can develop relationships, becoming rivals or besties or sweethears, is the real cherry on top of this. by the end of the game, i'd become so dearly attached to my squad that seeing them all posed together at the finale made me a bit weepy.
and i say all that… all that, and none of that's even my favourite thing about beastieball. my favourite thing about beastieball is the story. it's a sports story. i've been a fan of esports for a decade. most of my positive memories of university were playing for my uni's Overwatch team. and i've been a fan of fútbol for--well, i'm a latin american who lived in the UK, do the math. and, like…
i mean, now, fucking look at the state of things, right? every other major esports event is an astroturfed saudi sportswashing venture. the world cup 2026 is a masterclass in showcasing FIFA's corruption and willingness to stand by whistling while a host country enacts punitive racism on competing teams. you can't watch any kind of sport or esports without being drowned in ads for gambling and cryptocurrency and gulf monarchy playground cities for rich white people. how can anyone talk about the "beautiful game" when the white house can press for red cards to reversed? how can i square my love of league of legends esports, the cocktail of lows and highs and thrills and joy i felt watching MSI, with riot games' institutional culture of racism and sexism?
unlike some other games in the genre, beastieball isn't about saving the world. instead, it's about… well, it's about the feelings i just described. it's a surprisingly down to earth, sometimes downright somber story about people and little themed creatures who love a sport, who have loved that sport their whole lives, who live to play it, and how that comes up against the realities of these sports as instituions and the people who make money off of them. the PC's best friend, riley, is the biggest representative of this conflict--even as you find out, throughout the plot, that the beastieball league isn't all it's cracked up to be, she still dreams about one day winning the championship. she confides in you how painful and strange it is to still feel that way knowing what she knows about the corruption and flaws of the organization… and damn, i don't know, that hits me like a truck. sports can be so beautiful and so powerful and it sucks so fucking much to love this amazing, wonderful thing for what it is at its best when you are constantly having the worst parts of it waved around in your face by some of the worst people alive.
beastieball would be a great game even if the story was just servicable, i think. i mean, like, i make it sound like a super serious meditation--it's mostly quite silly, and goofy, and light. it's a funny game. and i'd give it five stars even if it was just that, because it's a game that finally delivers perfectly on a fantasy that dozens of titles have tried and failed to hit the mark for me. but something about this story, told the way it is, told now, really spoke to me. shout out to EDIE #02, HATTIE #08, GOSSPER #96, DR LALA PHD #99, and BOAT #75, my crown series team and if i may speak purely as a fan of the sport, shoe-ins for the beastieball hall of fame
I get in theory why people complain about het ships or whatever, I get wanting to watch queer media I really do, but I guess where y’all lose me is like. I saw some asshole on a post about Sinners complaining it was “hetslop”—this person was specifically doing so while also claiming Remmick was a queer character and thus they were justified in caring more about him than the Black protagonists. which is a whole other disgusting can of worms that has been well addressed by others at this point. but even in the absence of that part of the argument, like, no, i actually don’t think that a hunger for queer stories is an especially good excuse to deride and dismiss a piece of landmark Black filmmaking, especially as a non-Black person. I have a post that’s been going around encouraging folks to engage with more Native stories and characters, and I had someone come onto that post saying in the tags that they’d need these stories to be queer in order to care. and I just think that, you know, sucks! like obviously as a queer Native I also want to see more of those stories too. but idk how else to put it other than to say that Black people and people of color shouldn’t have to be like you in order for you to care about our narratives and experiences. and I think some of y’all are using this disdain for heterosexuality as a cover for your unexamined racial biases. it’s not okay to be racist to people just because those people happen to be straight, and you continue to be white before you are queer.
on an even more basic level than that, also, I simply just think some of y’all NEED to learn how to interact with media and storytelling without ships and fandom in mind. like if not being able to write fic about two men kissing is genuinely going to be a dealbreaker for you I think that’s actually something you need to work on within yourself because at that point I think you’re no longer really interacting with art and themes and narrative so much as just kind of playing with toys. which is, like, fine I guess. have fun. but it wouldn’t kill you to disengage from that from time to time. especially if would allow you to actually appreciate rich and deeply moving cultural stories from communities of color that you desperately need to learn how to see as human
"Diaspora voices are all bad". Rohingya? Eelam Tamil? Palestinian? I understand people aren't talking about these specific groups but that doesn't really mean much if making a statement that talks about "diasporas" as though they're like monolithic entities.
When people are forced to leave their nations due to US imperialism or the nationalist ambitions of small nations does that immediately give them reactionary tendencies and immediately implant a CIA chip into their mind? No.
Reactionary diasporas develop due to specific circumstances and these circumstances can change over time as a result of changing political and economic situations. I think rather than discounting "Diaspora voices" as a whole, we could try an approach wherein we don't innately believes narratives because they are spouted by the correct kind of person but do research into those narratives to verify them yourself, whether diaspora or national.
Since Canada is currently trying to sell itself as an "ethical alternative" to Iran's oil, I would just like to remind folks / share some quick information:
More than 50% of Indigenous communities in reserve areas in Canada are at high risk of pipeline spills. When there is a spill, reserves are disproportionately impacted.
The National Energy Board and Supreme Court of Canada has a history of declaring the "public interest and economic interests outweigh Indigenous and treaty rights." Basically, Indigenous peoples don't count enough as "public" to matter.
Pipelines are built without proper consent from the Indigenous Nations they choose to occupy. Keep in mind I say choose, because this is the case even when alternative pipeline routes are suggested that could avoid reserve land. This is a direct, constant, and often violent threat to Indigenous sovereignty.
The MMIW crisis is funded by the oil industry through the creation of worker's "man camps" near reserve land. These "man camps" are nothing but pits of sexual violence and human trafficking of Indigenous women and girls. I am not exaggerating; this is well studied and well documented.
Resources & Sources:
To become an ‘energy superpower’, Canada wants to bulldoze Indigenous rights (START HERE!)
Indigenous Resistance to Alberta Oil and Gas Development Report
When the environment is destroyed, you're destroyed: Achieving Indigenous led pipeline justice
First Nations Consent Ignored as Canadians Asked to Subsidize LNG Expansion
Oil pipelines and food sovereignty: threat to health equity for Indigenous communities
Is Violence against Indigenous Women in “Canada’s interest”? Liquified Natural Gas in B.C., Sexual Violence & Narratives of Terra Nullius
The colonial playbook never ended, Canada’s pipeline deal proves it
Stand together: Alberta's First Nations and non-Indigenous unite against Big Oil
Panetta argued—in a probably conscious paraphrase of Anne-Marie Slaughter—that “girls don’t have to change who they are” to become arms dealers and military officers. Rather, the war machine must change for us. And which female “us” is that? The writer and journalist Rania Khalek once sardonically declared that, in American geopolitics, “all that actually matters is breaking glass ceilings, even if that means breaking the actual ceilings of women in Yemen.”
Real events bore out Khalek’s observation with spine-tingling crudeness when, in 2019, the weapons manufacturer Raytheon (responsible for many lethal drone bombings of Yemenis) wrote a check to the Girl Scouts of the USA, after which the two organizations cosponsored a series of “Cyber Challenges” themed around juvenile females’ career advancement. Smiling cadettes learned code and received “mentorship,” all courtesy of the “defense” megalith that ongoingly profits from selling bombs to Saudi Arabia, which end up obliterating Yemeni school buses.
There is this sort of paradox in unhealthy relationships where the victim will waver on if what their partner is doing to them does or does not rise to the level of abuse. I want to say that it does not matter if what your partner is doing to you fits the dictionary or legal or your personal definition of ‘abuse’. If you are in a relationship where it has gotten to the point that you’re wondering if you’re being abused or not, it’s time to start thinking of an exit strategy and putting it into motion. So many people stay in terrible relationships because ‘it’s not abusive’, so many people are waiting for their partner to do something egregious and undeniably abusive before they give themself the permission to leave, when that moment happens, when they hit you or break your phone or scream at you all night before a job interview, the goalpost for what is unacceptable will shift further and further away. Ultimately, it does not matter if your toxic partner is or is not abusive in this moment, if they are doing/saying things that make you feel worse about yourself, feel embarrassed about yourself, feel unsafe, feel smothered, feel dependent on them, feel stupid, etc., it is time to go. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually the problem repeatedly setting them off, stop weighing that, maybe they WOULD be happier with another partner, all the more reason to get the fuck away from them and focus on yourself instead. If your partner is making your life worse, go. If your partner is making your life sooooo much better but there are just these little moments where they make you hate yourself, go. Stop qualifying and looking for a justification to go, just leave knowing life is too short to have misery inflicted on you, whether it is abuse or not.
[ID: post in subreddit r/mildlyinfuriating by u/china_rider titled, “When you go to lunch and the marketing department erases your whiteboard for this.” attached is an image of a whiteboard drawing of a right scalene triangle with the wrong corner labeled as a 90° angle. /end ID]
the fact that the notes on this post are like, largely people arguing about how “18-24 year olds are still baby” says a lot about how y’all would rather miss the point on purpose than like, change the way you talk to/about asian ppl
TikTok from the user @/mokiMoki444, a person with short black hair. At the beginning of the video, the scene was titled, "Any Asian guy on this app." The spoken words of the creator are captioned k the center of the video. They start out wearing a grey and white sweatshirt and say, "Hi everyone, my name is Shota! How are you today? I am very, very happy."
The scene cuts to the same person in a different outfit, now wearing sunglasses and a black hoodie. The title is now changed to, "The comment section." The creator is squishing their cheeks as they say "Awww look at you, you're such a little bittle baby (pleading emoji/🥺). My little baby!"
It cuts back to the first character the creator was impersonating. They're gesturing with their hands while saying, "No I am 22, twenty two no baby."
The scene cuts back to the second character, who's laughing in a now almost demonic voice. The scene is suddenly tinted in red light as evil-ish choir music starts playing in the background. The second character says, "No. You. Are. Baby. I don't care how old you are. I don't think you understand, I like fetishizing Asian men, okay? I will now go into your comment section and belittle you by comparing you to a literal infant. Just because you're not as fluent in MY native language as I am."
It cuts back to the first character, who's looking nervously around the room. Cutting back to the second character with red lighting, the latter continues, "And I'm just gonna assume that you're super pure, okay? And if you do anything that doesn't match my infantile perception of you, I'm just gonna assume that you don't know what you're talking about." They smile condescendingly before saying, "But don't worry, it's a compliment, alright? Just remember that you'll always be my… baby marshmallow" after a cut. They pull down their glasses and wink at the other character off screen.
There's an attitude I've been seeing more and more of where having any kind of artistic opinion that isn't praise is seen as some kind of faux pas designed to yuck people's yum or whatever, and while I understand the kneejerk response behind it I do have to wonder like. How sustainable do you think it is to foster an environment where even the most casual criticism is met with hoards of defensive with Whoa Mama Mia Cunt Let People Enjoy Things style comments
OK so yes feedback is necessary specifically in art but I have seen people just be full on mean or unnecessarily harsh. There's creative criticism and then there's just being a dick for the sake of it.
Okay. And I'm saying people are allowed to, when they want to, on their blogs, be a dick about things for the sake of it if they feel like doing it. I'm wildly skeptical of the idea that constructive critique is the only kind of feedback one is "allowed" to make in their own siloed corner of the internet, or that insistence on this will somehow create a healthier space for expressing opinions.
Once again. I can understand the kneejerk impulse here, I do. It sucks to imagine, say, a creator scrolling online coming across some needlessly vitriolic post about something they worked on. But anyone is allowed to go "That's dickish" and move on, or people can engage with "I think this is oversimplified blah blah" if they want to but at the end of the day it isn't some kind of crime against the hobby or a fandom or even a singular person if someone just shoots off "This sucked I wasted my night" in their own accounts.
Like. A lot of people are trending towards thinking I'm talking about the importance of constructive criticism and like, sure, I think that is probably a more interesting avenue of analyzing something's flaws, but once again if you're not like, addressing an artist or interested in doing a deep dive that doesn't mean you're Not Allowed to be flippant or quick to judge. It's kind of startling how many times I've seen someone be like, "I can't stand this album" on their blogs, untagged, had that shit shared, only for it to come across someone's feed and for them to respond with "Why? What's wrong with it? People are allowed to like it, why are you being so negative, why are you tearing people down for no reason, this isn't even real critique," as though the intention in the first place ever was or ought to have been substantive critique in the first place.
It's difficult to articulate my feelings on this, but I do increasingly feel that the insistence upon there being a correct form of disliking something that precludes the possibility of making anyone feel insecure or hurt because they like it is significantly more stultifying than an atmosphere where people can shoot off "Fuck this" and be blocked or ignored for it
Having been through art school with a BA as a result let me just stop you there.
OK sometimes you don't like a certain art style. That's fine. Doesn't mean the art is bad, it's just not to your tastes.
That doesn't give you the right nor even a reason to be a dick on the Internet because you don't like something. If you want to be a dick, do it to someone who has time and energy to give it back. Because at that point you deserve shit in return.
If someone is outright asking for constructive criticism, that still doesn't give you the chance to be a dick. It means they want help learning something they're putting time and effort into.
By all means, be a dick, just do it to people who have earned it.
I feel like you're misunderstanding the entire thrust of this conversation.
Why do I need a "right" or "reason" to post anything online? Why is it that my enjoyment of something is intrinsically justifiable, but my lack of enjoyment requires justification? And based on whose standards? If I can thoughtlessly tweet out a "This album rocks," without expecting people who hate it to demand a longform review from me to explain my enjoyment, I'm not sure I understand why I can't say "This album sucks" without having to go into the trenches about its positive qualities and negative ones. Why do I need to formulate every opinion I have in the form of an art school critique addressing nobody at all?
Why can praise be thoughtless but criticism must, at all costs, be formulated in art school constructive form in case the creator happens to see it and get their feelings hurt or a fan finds it harmful? Particularly when someone could very well have their feelings hurt by thoughtless praise of something as well! I'm not even trying to claim a more substantive form of criticism isn't more interesting or more valuable for one's interpretive abilities. I just think this notion that there is a moral obligation in all online spaces-- no matter how siloed-- to tiptoe around the potential hurt feelings of a hypothetical audience that may or may not even be courted, is at best stultifying for any real plurality of opinion and at worst enabling people whose insecurities about their own hobbies lead them to confidently dictate what people say in whatever passes for privacy in an online space nowadays.
I dunno, I've read works of brutal polemic that I've found immensely creatively engaging, thoughtful, and substantial in its knowledge of a particular form or medium. I've read works of praise I've found miserably trite. Why is the former not allowed to exist because of its dickishness? Why is the latter beyond critique itself?
A lot of people seem to be laboring under the idea that this is describing a situation where someone is literally walking up to someone and going "Your shit sucks" and walking off, but I clearly indicated in that first reblog that that's not even what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about how to talk to people who solicit criticism. I'm not even talking about how to talk to creators at all. I'm talking about this ongoing, deeply insecure assumption held by a number of people in a number of spaces where any kind of negative opinion, regardless of who said it, whether no one was tagged, whether they intended this for a massive audience or for two mutuals, is treated as a personal attack on one's identity rather than a (perhaps douchey!) articulation of one's own tastes. I personally would deeply prefer an environment where people can feel comfortable just saying whatever shit they feel like on their blogs/accounts and just getting blocked if someone's feelings are hurt over it than this constant assumption that there's a morally acceptable formatting one must adhere to for fear of reducing some hypothetical reader to tears, IN CASE they were to, by whatever means, encounter that opinion in the wild
You can be a dick, and you can expect people to listen to your opinions. You can't do both.
Constructive criticism is the art of walking that line. Good critics aren't good because of their good taste. Good critics are good because they can appropriately contextualize and dose dickish opinions so artists can build the art they want to build.
I think you, too, are misunderstanding the primary thrust of this conversation.
Why do you think someone being a dick is "expecting" someone to listen to your opinions? Why do you think that person is "expecting" any sort of audience at all? I am critiquing the inherent assumption that people who are "rude," however this is defined (and I believe it is ill-defined specifically because so much of this is conflated with whose feelings are hurt rather than the actual substance of whatever hypothetical comment is centered here), and have repeatedly emphasized in multiple places that there is a difference between approaching someone and insulting their tastes and creations versus airing an opinion in the (admittedly, increasingly decreasing) privacy of an online space.
I don't disagree with your definitions of constructive criticism or what makes a good critic, I disagree fundamentally with the notion that online users are morally obligated to be critics at all, that the standards of what constitutes criticism needs be imposed to the average user who has any kind of negativity to opine, and the double-standard of not applying such lofty standards to praise.
