"there’s as much in here about me as there is about somebody who’s not me. I’ve been spending the month trapped more than usual in an apartment
this might ring for you too" - busted
i got sent this by busted and now i want everyone to read it
I don’t even care about 3D printing that much and I’m not sure I even agree with the points being raised but something about the writing style grabbed me.
Our world is increasingly fractured, with extremism on the rise globally. The collective will for long-term cooperation and achievement has diminished. Faith in and commitment to political parties, neighborhoods, corporations, countries, and fellow human beings have waned. Numerous political entities aim to erode democracy in their countries, and some state actors seem intent on sowing chaos, instability, and death. Several governments have essentially become criminal enterprises. The power of the press has been severely curtailed, making it almost impossible to hold slippery leaders accountable in the court of public opinion. Assaults on truth abound, and there’s a troubling eagerness to reverse the gains made in women’s and minority rights since the 1960s.
damn yeah going pretty hard for a 3D printing keynote address
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—
Take the card game UNO, one of the games widely available in a Braille version. The standard cards have dots at the corner that say things like “Y5” for a yellow card with the number five. In practice, playing the game with the Brailled cards is painfully slow. If Protactile hadn’t given us permission to rip sighted norms into shreds, I would still be fingering those dots like a fool. The way to go is with textured shapes, as in our homemade version of UNO, called Textures and Shapes. In this Protactile version you feel the player ahead of you hesitate and make a joking gesture before depositing a velvet star. Now the attention shifts to you, with some hands feeling yours as you deliberate, while a couple of knees tauntingly jostle your knees. Should you unload your velvet square or your rayon star? But the transformation doesn’t end there. Ideally, there are up to four players, who can feel everything at all times if they want to follow the action, or can chatter in three-way Protactile while the fourth attends to their turn. With four players as the ideal limit, there are somewhat fewer textured shapes than there are UNO cards in a set, and there are further tweaks to the rules. And the “wild card” is a delightful eruption of fabrics! It’s a different game, and one that is naturally more inclusive than UNO could ever be. Our environment has endless potential for life.
REALLY COOL
just pulling a huge quote from this
In April of 2020, I made a small but telling gesture. An online journal wanted a photo of me to go along with three poems it was publishing. I had long wanted to do something about this photo business, even if there were an image description to make it “accessible.” Since I don’t see author images, I’m not immersed in the conventions of that particular species of media. So why should I provide a headshot as if I knew what it conveyed and knew that it was what I wanted to convey? To my surprise, the magazine agreed to my request: No photo! Instead, a few words, a tactile description suggestive of what it’s like to touch me in person. I now tinker with it like I do with my bio. My current line goes something like this: “Short hair of feline softness. Warm and smooth hands. A scent of patchouli. Flutters betray his exhilaration.”
A few months later, I went aflutter when Terra Edwards, a dear hearing-sighted friend and a leading Protactile researcher, told me she wanted to henceforward avoid images as much as possible for the materials we publish related to Protactile. Our research team set up a website called the Protactile Research Network. No pictures, icons, or graphics. Text only! Under “People,” where our bios and CVs reside, there is a “tactile impression” of each member of the team. I love Terra’s: “Strong hands. Heats up in conversation. Frequent and enthusiastic tapping likely.”
And here is Hayley Broadway, a DeafBlind researcher currently working with DeafBlind children on Protactile language acquisition: “Wears fashionable, textured attire. Wiggles her fingers on you when she is deep in thought. When you talk to her, you feel a steady stream of taps and squeezes. Sometimes, when she is really excited, she slaps you. Engage at your own risk.”
As always, Jelica Nuccio—my dearest friend, personal hero, and rock of the Protactile movement—has the last hug: “Her stories are smooth and come with the scent of lavender. She draws you in slowly and then grips. When she laughs on you, you can’t help but laugh too.”
not really an article per se but this is the best fitting thread for it.
this lady fuckin owns
https://riotrevolver.neocities.org/schoolwifi
“What I’ve learned from using school wifi.”
I can’t get over the way this person writes their lowercase as, like when their two lines don’t attach right it looks nuts
I hate it
if you like don’t super focus on it, it doesn’t even look like they’re writing words
Voynich Manuscript ass notes