Wrong End of the Telescope

E-----: library person

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Happy annual Dracula Paprika Discourse Day to those who celebrate!

[kurulover]

I hate that when you’re stressed enough your body just starts falling apart. I think it should realize you’re already stressed and don’t need that and start functioning better actually

[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.

[strangehorse]

Is anyone else starting to feel kind of wary about the increasingly common narrative that "women's bodies are so different to men's that modern scientific recommendations do not apply to them"?

Like. There is a significant gap between 'a lot of studies do not take into account variations caused by things like female hormone cycles, which can limit how generalisable they are' and 'medical science does not apply to women', and the latter just seems to create a situation rife for bad faith actors and snake oil salesmen to reassure you that actually, THEY have the answers, because THEY listen to women, and if you simply pay them for their online subscription service-

[kaygarde]

Dragon tiles

[misfitwashere]

Here be dragons.

[timemachineyeah]

Spirit Animal is racist.

Patronus was invented by a transphobe.

I think it’s time we all suck it up and say what we mean: fursona.

[xxlovelynovaxx-deactivated20241]

I know this is a jokey post (rip OPs notes) but a fursona is typically an animal REPRESENTATION of YOURSELF, not an external animal that is strongly meaningful to you and your life/journey.

I've seen daemon and familiar proposed, but to keep in line with the cursedness of the original post, may I suggest: spiritual tamagotchi

[timemachineyeah]

do you have any idea how refreshing it is to see a correction/suggestion to this post that actually understands the assignment

[bashcrandicoot]

Based on a true story

[c3rvida3]

I just learned that a lot of vintage perfumes and fragrances were intentionally created to blend well with the ever-present smell of cigarettes, and in specific a lot of iconic ones that are super musky and floral and civet-heavy were intended to compliment the smell of fur coats or even "refresh" that new fur coat smell, which is one of the reasons (besides just shifting preferences and trends) that a lot of them smell really, really bad to modern noses.

I bet there's some stunning genius diva out there right now who meticulously coordinates her Victoria's Secret body mists with her vape flavors.

[transxfiles]

[cannibalchicken]

[icedoatmilkmatcha-deactivated20]

also

[yeahokayillreblogthat]

Yeah okay Ill reblog that!

[aggressivelybicaptainamerica]

Not a scholar at first, but the guy who wrote Jaws hated that people used it to justify hating sharks so much he dedicated the rest of his life to shark research and advocacy.

[ruffboi-mags]

The woman who popularized gender reveals wishes she hadn't, afaik.

[fall1ngfeather]

(afaik- the woman who popularized gender reveals did so because she had a long history of miscarriages. The reveal was a celebration of the fact that one of her pregnancies had gotten far enough that there WAS a physical sex to reveal. It was never intended to be like... *gestures at modern gender reveals* all that. That same kid later came out as trans and yes, the family had a second gender reveal for that lol.)

[p00pym00py]

This whole thread is so beautiful to me that I can explain it

[my-random-fandoms]

[pouncequick]

K-Cup coffee pod creator wishes he'd never thought of them | CBC News

The man who invented the K-Cup coffee pod almost 20 years ago says he regrets doing so and can't understand the popularity of the products t

[jackironsides]

L. David Mech, who popularised the idea that there were 'alpha' and 'beta' wolves in his 1970 book The Wolf, has spent the rest of his career trying to debunk this. (The original studies were done on captive wolves, and thus didn't simulate an accurate model of wolf pack dynamics.)

Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth?

The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator, or alpha wolf, comes from old studies of captive wolves. In the wild, wolf packs a

In the wild, researchers have found that most wolf packs are simply families, led by a breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.

“What would be the value of calling a human father the alpha male?” says L. David Mech, a senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied wolf packs in the wild for decades. “He’s just the father of the family. And that’s exactly the way it is with wolves.”

[busket]

I remember when it was a big shared sentiment in the queer community that "sex =/= gender =/= pronouns =/= physical appearance or expression" and. I feel like everyone even other trans people have forgotten about all that except the first part. and in many cases people forget the whole thing entirely

[littlestpersimmon]

The Stellagrapher

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

modern medieval fantasies don't have enough weasel-based necromancy

[maniculum]

Please elaborate on this topic at length

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

i think i've made my position clear

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

anyway here are some medieval discussions of weasels and their necromantic abilities:

gerald of wales: The weasel also, when its young are dying from any hurt, recovers and restores them to life by the use of a yellow flower. We are told by persons who have witnessed the fact, having put the whelp to death to make the experiment, that the weasel brought the flower in its mouth, and first applied it to the wound, and then to the mouth, nostrils, and other orifices of the little animal, that it might inhale the odor, by which, through the efficacious touch of the plant, breath was restored, though life seemed extinct, some slight and imperceptible vestiges of it only having remained.

aberdeen bestiary: it is said, also, that they are skilled in healing, so that if by chance their young are killed, and their parents succeed in finding them, they can bring their offspring back to life.

thomas of cantimpré: Accordingly they are said to be expert in all the arts of medicine, so that, if they find their offspring dead, they make them naturally recuperate by means of a herb

also in marie de france's lai eliduc, guildeluec uses a flower she got from a weasel that was resurrecting its weasel friend to resurrect guilliadon

conclusion:

behold, a necromancer

[more about medieval weasel beliefs]

[nature-hiking]

Autumn forest stream - Adlerweg, Tirol, Austria, October 2022

photo by: nature-hiking

Instagram: nature__hiking

[xeansicemane]

I love how here on tumblr dot website we regularly cast the greatest curse we can muster on each other by pointing our long creepy fingers and intoning "10,000 notes" in a voice that carries the winds of the mountain with it.

[xeansicemane]

I might have made an error here

[theodoradove]

#here we have the classic case of tossing apollo's dodgeball in the air and standing directly under it as it comes down (via @qqueenofhades)

[anak1n]

no rest for me and im not even that wicked ?

[byjove]

King Arthur had prophetic dreams about everything BUT the affair. OR! He was having dreams about Guinevere fucking Lancelot’s brains out the whole time but he kept assuming they were just wet dreams and not prophetic in the slightest.

[byjove]

King Arthur waking up from a vivid dream where Guinevere pegged Lancelot within an inch of his life: I need to get right with God.

[ellewantsrevenge]

my favorite fantasy world is tortall