People don’t like to admit it bcs cringe or w/e but Homestuck really did revolutionize the webcomic as a storytelling medium and I am endlessly frustrated that before webcomic artists could really stretch our legs fucking webtoonz swooped in, set a new, more restrictive standard, and then monetized and monopolized the ever living fuck out of the concept of The Webcomic until it drove away anyone who couldn’t be a professional quality manga artist for free, and now the only webcomics that actually feel like spiritual successors to Homestuck are so obscure they’re basically cult classics that you have to beg people to read.
Like it’s just so wild to be in high school and see Homestuck be like “we’re using like fifteen different artistic mediums to tell this story bcs we can” and be really fucking inspired by that, only to grow up and see basically every webcomic ever have to conform to One Single Standard or fucking perish.
Actually, I realized my real point here: we all need to make our art weirder. Please make weird art. I want more stuff like Prequel Adventure and 17776 and MyHouse.wad and I want it now. Capitalism thrives on conformity. We must be weird at all costs.
Replacing physical buttons and controls with touchscreens also means removing accessibility features. Physical buttons can be textured or have Braille and can be located by touch and don’t need to be pressed with a bare finger. Touchscreens usually require precise taps and hand-eye coordination for the same task.
Many point-of-sale machines now are essentially just a smartphone with a card reader attached and the interface. The control layout can change at a moment’s notice and there are no physical boundaries between buttons. With a keypad-style machine, the buttons are always in the same place and can be located by touch, especially since the middle button has a raised ridge on it.
Buttons can also be located by touch without activating them, which enables a “locate then press” style of interaction which is not possible on touchscreens, where even light touches will register as presses and the buttons must be located visually rather than by touch.
When elevator or door controls are replaced by touch screens, will existing accessibility features be preserved, or will some people no longer be able to use those controls?
Who is allowed to control the physical world, and who is making that decision?
just a reminder - do NOT boycott streaming services or not watch new things. the unions have not called for one for a reason. for one, it affects residual payments, which as minimal as those currently are, actors are still getting them during this time, and for two, studios will use lack of viewership as an excuse to cancel shows because you are showing them there is no demand. it deeply affects the industry the writers and actors stand to come back to once the strike is over
hey I wanted to wish a very special disability pride month to every disabled person who’s getting worse. to people who are losing the ability to do things they used to do. people whose symptoms are increasing in severity. people who are developing new symptoms. people with degenerative and terminal disorders. people who are dealing with new disorders on top of preexisting ones. happy disability pride month to everyone who knows they’re not getting better. there’s nothing wrong with that, and you deserve to take pride as much as anyone else.
I already submitted this to Support under “Feedback,” but I’m sharing it here too as I don’t expect it to get a response, and I feel like putting in out in public may be more effective than sending it off into the void.
The recent post on the Staff blog about changing tumblr to an algorithmic feed features a large amount of misinformation that I feel staff needs to address, openly and honestly, with information on where this data was sourced at the very least.
Claim 1: Algorithms help small creators.
This is false, as algorithms are designed to push content that gets engagement in order to get it more engagement, thereby assuring that the popular remain popular and the small remain small except in instances of extreme luck.
This can already be seen on the tumblr radar, which is a combination of staff picks (usually the same half-dozen fandoms or niche special interests like Lego photography) which already have a ton of engagement, or posts that are getting enough engagement to hit the radar organically. Tumblr has an algorithm that runs like every other socmed algorithm on the planet, and it will decimate the reach of small creators just like every other platform before it.
Claim 2: Only a small portion of users utilize the chronological feed.
You can find a poll by user @darkwood-sleddoghere that at the time of writing this, sits at over 40 THOUSAND responses showing that over 96 percent of them use the chronological feed. Claiming otherwise isn’t just a misstatement, it’s a lie. You are lying to your core userbase and expecting them to accept it as fact. It’s not just unethical, it’s insulting to people who have been supporting your platform for over a decade.
Claim 3: Tumblr is not easy to use.
This is also 100% false and you ABSOLUTELY know it. Tumblr is EXTREMELY easy to use, the issue is that the documentation, the explanations of features, and often even the stability of the service is subpar. All of this would be very easy for staff to fix, if they would invest in the creation of walkthroughs and clear explanations of how various site features work, as well as finally fixing the search function. Your inability to explain how your service works should not result in completely ignoring the needs and wants of your core long-term userbase. The fact that you’re more willing to invest in the very systems that have made every other form of social media so horrifically toxic than in trying to make it easier for people to use the service AS IT WORKS NOW and fixing the parts that don’t work as well speaks volumes toward what tumblr staff actually cares about.
You will not get a paycheck if your platform becomes defunct, and the thing that makes it special right now is that it is the ONLY large-scale socmed platform on THE ENTIRE INTERNET with a true chronological feed and no aggressive algorithmic content serving. The recent post from staff indicates that you are going to kill that, and are insisting that it’s what we want. It is not. I’d hazard to guess that most of the dev team knows it isn’t what we want, but I assume the money people don’t care. The user base isn’t relevant, just how much money they can bring in.
The CEO stated he wanted this to remain as sort of the last bastion of the Old Internet, and yet here we are, watching you declare you intend to burn it to the ground.
You can do so much better than this.
The CEO is 100% behind the changes. In fact I suspect half of the post from yesterday comes straight from him “correcting” an earlier version of those core values.
Today has been a culmination of fighting to better my understanding of Unity.
This weekend is the GMTK game jam which I had been excited to join, but my current skill level is not viable to complete a small game in such a short amount of time with any kind of decent quality. But at least I attempted it and learned some new techniques using the camera! A small achievement!
So, instead of letting myself burn out with the game jam, I instead pivoted into trying to learn how shaders worked so I could make one for a character of mine as an experiment. It… did not go as well either as I struggled to even begin to understand how to approach or even to find the correct windows or tools to edit a shader’s construction. I would love to be able to teach myself this but it just seems that my current way of learning isn’t going to help moving forwards. But! I am learning despite this, which is very exciting!
hey now that it’s disability pride month can you please remember to include people with Down syndrome and other chromosomal defects into your activism. they’re so often left behind. I literally never see anyone spreading Down syndrome awareness that isn’t close family of someone with Down syndrome. They exist and they’re living breathing humans who deserve just as much activism as every other disabled person
At the end of the day, the sad reality is that masking is a necessity for Autistics*.
When you don’t understand social interaction, social hierarchy, language, and have limited frontal lobe development, going to school is a nightmare.
Yes, it would be great if everyone let us be who we are. But the plain fact is we can’t. We’re not allowed. It’s dangerous. And as it is, that mask still doesn’t keep most of the bullies away. Many of us will be traumatized before high school and definitely after high school.
And then we spend our adult years trying to unmask.
It’s the autistic version of “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be an archaeologist and eat ice cream whenever I want and to stop destroying myself with a fake personality to keep neurotypicals comfortable so that I don’t risk violence!”
*this is in reference to moderate to high masking Autistics only.
“High masking autism is hard because people don’t take your struggles seriously and often refuse to accommodate you,”
and
“Low masking autistics do not automatically get support and are often denied basic autonomy,”
are two thoughts that can coexist btw. You can be upset about the lack of support in allistic society as a high masking autistic without assuming that low masking autistics are somehow always taken seriously and given all of the support they need.
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