Notices by Ryan for a permanent ceasefire (ryanrandall@hcommons.social), page 2

The best at being convicted.

Bigly convicted, beautiful felonies.

@jonny Furthermore, this particular campus was designed as a series of chokepoints in the wake of 1960s student uprisings.

Its campus design highlights how much of the last 60+ years of American built space is a physical apparatus for the police state & social control.

The Tortured Poets Department (Data's Version)

@meganL And on top of that, just typing fairly descriptive alt text would almost certainly take less time than all this chest-inflating asshattery.

@tokyo_0 @hugo Do you happen to have anything useful you found for the Chen style? That's the one I learned way back in the late 90s, and I really wish I were able to remember the full forms better than I do after all these years.

One of the best ways I can think of celebrating Trans Day of Visibility is making every day a Trans Day of Viability.

Here's to a world where everyone is supported and celebrated for who they are.

@blogdiva btw, I'm 99% certain that jacketed person is the artist / photographer / writer / musician / etc David Wojnarowicz.

His book _Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration_ is incandescent in how it lights up Reagan-era eugenics. Really a formative book for me that I can't recommend highly enough.

Also, since it can't be said enough: fuck cancer!

Who running Mastodon dot social could possibly imagine that having unrestricted sign-ups and far too few volunteer or paid admins could possibly lead to waves of spam?

This whole "internet" thing certainly does not contain any precedents for this sort of behavior or problems of scale.

Gotta re-learn everything, every time.

Regarding @/AltTextHealthCheck@mastodon.social results at any given time:

I'm all for calling each other in and/or out in order to increase accessibility.

But you know what?

Not only have I worked with a lot of professors who don't know the basics of alt text or textual equivalents, but I've also worked with a lot of academic librarians who treat it as somehow highly specialized arcane magick and also somehow beneath them.

These are people with advanced degrees. Knowledge workers, some of whom are also specifically information workers whose library degree almost certainly involved direct instruction about this at some point.

Clown on specific instances if you think it'll be productive.

But we all can do better when it comes to alt text and other simple steps toward #accessibility, both online and off.

And if the point is to get people to do better, let's share practices, not just expect that "name & shame" will be sufficient.

Here's one of the most approachable guides to #altText I've encountered, written by someone who uses both screen readers and magnification: https://axesslab.com/alt-texts/

"Roman Empire"?

You mean 99% Invisible and the rest of Radiotopia?

@aral "rage.love" is indeed a very odd way to spell "boot.lick"

That thing where you must create & sustain momentum on complicated projects that require deep attention

WHILE ALSO

other people are expressly encouraged to launch projectiles directly into the spokes of your… uh… mind bicycle.

(Yes, that analogy screeched to a halt just like my mental momentum.)

I cannot fathom how utterly dismissive people become when faced with technology requests that don't fit their own use cases.

There are many requests in the forums for #ObsidianMD for better keyboard accessibility. I know because I'm searching for ways to improve my own experience as someone with ADHD!

Anyways, someone has linked to an article from 1989—yes, 1989—to "support" the dodgy claim that "users think keyboard shortcuts are faster, but they're not."

Yeah, every single user of keyboard-centric things like emac, vim, Pop! OS, etc is clearly delusional about their own experience. And nothing could conceivably have changed with computing, with user familiarity, etc. since 1989.

Just recognize that other people might in fact understand their lived experience & needs, that accessibility includes neurodiversity, and *gasp* that neurodiverse users might understand their own needs better than a $DEITY-forsaken article from 1989.

@aral That bites—your work definitely deserves support.

Speaking of which, there's a typo in that URL ("-is" when it's almost certainly "-us").

@aral No, you don't understand. Now that I've been eaten by the leopard, I can finally change it from the inside.

Reminder that "foolish mortal" is an all-purpose, gender-neutral term of address.

@natematias @dansinker @danhon @jessamyn @darius Cost-benefit is where my mind goes first, too… but at the risk of "responsibility-splaining" to folks with more experience, if the analysis is done uncritically, it's easy to mistake "we" for a constant, when "we" live within a varied matrix of interlocking oppressions.

"Our" harms will be unevenly distributed.

Analyzed uncritically, cost-benefit data'll show you that being Black & gay & an immigrant is inherently high-risk, when our problem is having far too many systems which each quite efficiently route harm toward such a person.

Right now, the lack of QTs seems to act as a Jersey barrier, with just enough friction to safely redirect low-effort, but occasionally intentional harms.

Taking the analogy further, hopefully there's an elegant design to let traffic cross lanes and change directions more safely… but any data analysis needs to be careful about what it mistakes for a constant, whose benefits / harms "count," & how they do.

@darius @jessamyn @dansinker @danhon I personally would love to see explicit consent built in to any kind of quote-boosting feature.

Perhaps a DM notification that would require the initial poster to approve a quote boost before it goes out?

It not only would give them power to approve, but also provide warning that they might want to lock down their accounts if they've been found by a group trying to brigade against them.

This second facet would hopefully act as a deterrent against bad-faith, weaponized decontextualization.

Should anyone be interested, here's a short thread with more of what I've been mulling over about this: https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109553154946648210