Rocketmouse: Stronger, faster, lazier

[midnightskywrites]

writers really will spend twenty minutes pacing around the kitchen thinking “this scene is genius” and then sit down to type and suddenly remember approximately three words and one emotional vibe

[shivgirly]

BURTON GUSTER & SHAWN SPENCER in PSYCH (2006-2014)

[2nd-massachusetts]

*gently takes your face in my hands* hey. remember that fandom is for fun. if you're not having fun it is ok to step back. if you're intentionally making it unfun for others it is ok to step back. none of this is real. go sit in the sun and smell a flower. i love you.

[blazeofbones]

Happy Pride Month

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[ao3commentoftheday]

Hiya, was wondering if you know if it's possible to sort of save a set of filters on Ao3's search?

Im a picky picky person who knows what they like and I use the filters liberally. But it's a pain to put it in every time I accidentally close my Ao3 tab or I wander into a new fandom. I'm well aware you can favourite a single tag, but I'm talking multiple tags included and excluded.

Thanks for your time and thoughts!

If you want to look up the same filtered tag again and again, the easiest way is to bookmark the results page. The URL has all of the filters in it, so reloading that URL will give you the latest results with all of the filters applied.

sidenote: it's possible to throw an error by applying too many filters just because it hits the max length of URL allowable by the browser

If you want to apply the same filters to lots of different tags, then you might be better off using the Saved Filters Bookmarklet creatied by reisling on AO3.

[daydreamorama]

I'm a HUGE fan of this script https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/8382-ao3-tracking

It allows you to search for something, add all your filters/exclusions you want on it and then save it, and then with one button have it tell you if there are any updates to that filter and how many. Really helps with rare things that get maybe one update a week and you're constantly refreshing them...

I like to use it with https://greasyfork.org/scripts/5835-ao3-kudosed-and-seen-history which puts a red bar on fics I haven't even seen in a search result before.

[rocketmouse]

I use AO3 Savior (https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/3579-ao3-savior) which lets me blacklist or whitelist tags universally across the AO3. So if I never want to read High School AUs, I can block that in the script and it's blocked no matter what tag I'm in. It works on multiple types of tags, and includes wildcard searching.

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[smadsel]

would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.

[smadsel]

that’s not the whole flag, now is it

[manuciruja]

hey staff what the fuck

[romanceyourdemons]

we need fewer songs about falling in love and breaking up and MORE songs about famous disasters of the sea

[romanceyourdemons]

being told you’d cruise the seas for american gold you’d fire no guns, shed no tears, now you’re a broken man on a halifax pier might not be a universal experience, but like neither is the club. so a little perspective might be nice

[memegetter]

happy pride month.

in new zealand, our evil government are trying to legislate definitions of women and men, in ways that are legally incoherent but clearly trying to pave the way for more horrifically transphobic legislation. we have an election in a few months but our main opposition party, and all our mainstream news media, are so spineless and cooked that there's a good chance the ghouls will win reelection.

it took 2 whole months for local terf group 'speak up for women' to get 2,000 signatures on the petition that led to this new bill in our parliament.

it's taken five days for this pro-trans 'they don't speak for us' petition to get 17,000 signatures.

this is a show of support that is really heartening for a lot of trans people in our corner of the world.

cis/ish women, if you're from here but haven't signed yet, please do. and if you're not from here and you know any new zealanders, could you send them this petition? a full fifth of our population lives overseas, and there's a good chance they don't follow the news.

LINK

[tinsnip]

"In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”

Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”

It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option."

--Against Access, by John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind educator

[endemiccharm]

I think this also includes the important idea of imagining the other. Sighted people (like myself) often consider visuals the *most important* part of an experience. This isn't and can't be the case for a blind person. If you don't have sight, then the particulars about the color/expression/etc. aren't necessarily going to be important to you.

Smiling matters because it's an indicator of emotion. The quality of the teeth only matter if it's relevant to the joke. Striped shirt only matters if the text describes it as polka dots and that's the point.

Describe the parts of the image that give context, because a person whose primary mode of interpreting the world is not sight will most likely not want extraneous visual information.

[androdragynous]

As one of the blind bitches, my best advice for alt text is to lead with the main context in a single sentence summary and get more specific later if it's relevant. Alt text is read in the order it's written: if a summary is short and simple, I can know if it's something I care about listening to the whole of.

"A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge", for example, gives me the subject matter immediately - it's a photo of a cat - and the detail descends from there. Anything else in the image is coincidence or unnecessary; the photo was taken of the cat, and anything else in the frame is unimportant. The reason why the image exists should be in the first two lines - and comedic timing still works in alt text form! "A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge. A second cat is falling off a cat tree in the background." still gives that moment of realization that a build up to a joke usually would.

(Defining if it's a real thing or an illustration or a movie scene or whatever is also pretty important for context - "an illustration of a dead dove" is pretty different from "a photograph of a dead dove".)

"A sunny room with a large window and a park outside with children playing in it. There is a wide, sunny windowsill with plants on it and a cat lying next to them, looking outside" describes the same hypothetical image, but the order of it changes the importance; while it would work to establish a scene in fiction (well, clumsily worded fiction, at least) it's missing the point as alt text - the cat's the reason the photo was taken, but everything else gets described first!

I'm no expert, nor do I intend to speak for Everyone With Vision Loss Ever, but as endemiccharm said, unless the details are relevant to why the image exists, they're probably not necessary to mention! Get Shorter.

[theimaginatrix27]

All of this!

I am also totally blind, and frankly do not care what kind of shirt someone is wearing unless it is relevant to the surrounding post. Tell me what's relevant, keep it as brief as possible.

I know there are circumstances in which it is more likely that you do more in-depth descriptions, such as, for example, comic panels, and of course there are the alt-text transcriptions of screenshots containing tweets or text from articles or the like. But if describing a photo, or an illustration, unless more detail is required, keep the thing brief. We want to understand the post and move on, not get bogged down in meaningless details.

[vash-the-trans-catboy]

Cute little rainbow heart for pride month tumblr but how about you stop disproportionally banning trans women and marking sfw queer posts as mature

[escuerzoresucitado]

[foone]

Friendly reminder that Popeye is bigender, because their gender is "amphibious".

And when the official Popeye Twitter account was asked what Popeye's pronouns were, Popeye answered:

I ain't use pronouns on account o' all me nouns are amateurs!

Popeye is a non-binary icon, and that's a fact.

[knottahooker]

Hey, it's Pride Month! As a librarian, we are doing Pride Month programs! And we are seeing so much backlash online for it. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok...the hate comments are there. I'm not posting them because a) no one needs to see that and b) I don't want to dox myself, but they're there.

If you're a member of your local library, find their social media and say something nice about these programs and posts, please? Especially if you're in one of the less liberal leaning areas. It would mean a lot to us. And attend them too! Say something nice about a Pride display (or any themed display) if you're in the building!

We'd really appreciate it. It's really hard out here.

[isuggestusingyourlocallibrary]

I suggest using your local library!

[hxneyfarm]

Happy pride month specifically to folks on the asexual and aromantic spectrum who oftentimes feel isolated and left out of the conversation. You belong here as much as the rest of us and I hope that you are all loved in a way that is comforting to you.

[userfish]

this pride month we’re all going to be radically pro transgender. or else.

[userfish]

hey so this means radically pro ALL transgender. don’t put limitations on this. all trans people are radically accepted here.

[unseenphil]

Since this is going to be an ongoing issue, apparently:

I've bit the bullet and set up a gofundme to try and keep my phone on while I look for work. The lack of unemployment is really starting to hit.

It also has links to most of the other ways you can help out.

Donate to Help Phillip Keep His Phone On During Job Hunt, organized by Phillip Ames

Last month, I lost my job of 5 years. The job hunt's not going well- I've … Phillip Ames needs your support for Help Phillip Keep His Phone

[unseenphil]

About halfway to the starting goal, so thanks to everyone who's shared and donated so far, I really appreciate the help.

[padawan-historian]

Centering Black environmental thought and indigenous medicine ways is to recognize that food deserts are not naturally occurring but designed to displace people from resources for profit. Food deserts are in fact food apartheids.