[ID: A gif of a classic wizard made from rather clunky CGI. He holds a staff and a blue magical sword, the sword in the foreground. The wizard stares ahead of himself with a slightly blank gaze. The background is dark. The staff throbs with white light, and the sword glitters. Blue and green sparkles cover the whole frame at varying levels of brightness, seeming to emit from the staff. At the bottom it says Have a Magical Day. End ID]
VAMPIRE HUNTER D: BLOODLUST
God they cut off all the internet and cellular networks in Gaza
We are isolated now’: Communications lost with many parts of Gaza (from Al Jazeera's live update, by reporter Tareq Abu Azzoum, 16:25 GMT)
We don’t know about anything that is happening in other districts in the territory. Maybe there are new bombardments taking place in these areas. We don’t know how many victims. We can only hear bombardments everywhere, but we don’t know any anything about the casualties, about the situation on the ground. We don’t know anything also about the medical conditions of doctors, medical workers, even at the Al-Shifa Hospital [the largest in Gaza]. The situation is catastrophic right now. We can no longer communicate with the international community to send our voice to the world to know what is happening on the ground. I hope that this message might reach and have an access to the world despite what we have experienced throughout the last hour. We are now in a hospital and we are going to be live by satellite as much as we can and every single hour. So please, if you can hear us, send that message to the world that we are isolated now in Gaza. We don’t have any phone signals. We don’t have any internet connections. We found great difficulty even to communicate and contact with our relatives in different parts of the territory. Journalists here, even the citizens inside the hospital, they don’t have any access to the networks. They don’t have any kind of communication even with their neighbors. There is a great problem in the network connections. We don’t know how it’s dropped. We don’t know if it was targeted. The situation on the ground is really terrible. Everyone is afraid, everyone is terrified. Please ,guys, if you can hear us send this message to the world that we are becoming isolated. Al Jazeera currently only has sporadic communication with correspondents in Gaza following the latest strikes on the besieged enclave.
May Allah protect and honour our men. Ameen.
Are there any video games for blind people? I guess you’d call them audio games instead of video games, but I mean a computer game that gives basically zero visual information and the player must navigate the world purely by sound, and perhaps a button to reach out and “feel” what’s in front of you, which would be conveyed by the player character just saying out loud “I feel tree bark.”, “I feel concrete.”, etc.
I know there’s plenty of video games where the protagonist is “blind”, but they still convey this entirely through visual information to the player. That’s not what I’m curious about.
i kinda know how to use inform, which is a coding language specifically designed for text adventures which seems like a pretty good match for this kind of game, and in theory you could use a screen reader to play although i have no idea if one exists for inform or if one that is used for web browsers would work for inform games uploaded to the web
im also like, not blind and wouldnt really want to appropriate how blind people feel so if i were to help with a project like this itd be through coding nigh exclusively
*randomly stumbles upon a post on a subject I have looked into*
Yeah, they are called audio games, and there’s a bunch of them! Check out AudioGames.net or The Audio Game Jam.
Also, I don’t know much about Inform, but Ren'py has in-built screenreader compatibility, and I would expect most basic Twine games to be screenreader compatible as long as they just use simple html text.
As a Ren'py dev: Making the average Ren'py game fully enjoyable for blind players does take some extra work to avoid accidental inaccessibility with things like image buttons or purely visual storytelling. But there are blind gamers out there who appreciate it!
If you wanted to make a game primarily for blind players I’d start by asking blind players what sort of game they want. When I asked a forum of blind gamers about what they’d want from screenreader friendly narrative fiction they appreciated the thought but mostly had the same sort of taste as your average sighted gamer, eg they’d rather shoot something than read/listen to a story.
But I’m a visual novel dev, not a shooty game dev, so I just accept that my games will have niche appeal to gamers both sighted and blind. I try to make them accessible anyway, because the tiny niche of blind people who ARE into what I make deserve to be happy too.
If you get inspired to make a game that would be pretty easy to make accessible for blind people, such as something purely auditory or largely text based, then if you do make that effort there are definitely some blind players who’ll enjoy having the chance to play it.
I went looking into Multi User Dungeons (like an MMORPG, but text based, and from the days before World of Warcraft). Several MUD clients had full screenreader support.
I am not blind and I’ve never played a MUD in my life, but I am only a few late nights away from creating an account on Legends of the Jedi.
Oh, cool, nice to know the old school gaming traditions are alive and accessible :)
I don’t know if this game is already on the linked website but there’s an awesome game I played called Shadow of The Vale
The game is specifically designed so that blind people can play. By default it has a screen reader for the main menu and the game itself has nothing but a black screen with some warm lights but they don’t actually do anything. The game tells the story of a blind warrior princess who gets lost and is trying to find safe passage. You have to listen to how your enemies armor shift to block attacks and counter. I played the demo on Xbox and it’s also on pc.
if i were a woman, i would tweet “ginger snapped so jennifer could body”, but i’m not a woman, and i don’t use twitter, and i haven’t seen jennifer’s body, and i don’t make a lot of money or have a car or look nice
and i don’t dress well or know how to tie any knots besides the regular one you tie your shoes with. my taste in music is lacking and i need a haircut
if i got jigsawed and woke up in some moldy room with a makeshift bear trap on my head or whatever i wouldn't even let it phase me. i'm not willing to be taught lessons i'm not paying attention to a puppet. i would close my eyes and visualize abstract forms in jewel tones until a machine tears me asunder. now we've both wasted our time and you won't be able to return anything in this room to ace hardware. what did YOU learn, old man
Sometimes I think my brother's at that age where the opinion of a lame old fart like me doesn't mean shit to him, but sometimes he'll call me into his room and have me watch as he plays a video game where he kills other people and he'll look to me for approval and I'll be like "🥹 Yeah kid... you did a great job killing that other team on ValoFortDutyStrike. I'm so proud of you :')" and then he'll be like :) And then the next day I'll be like "How are you doing, sport? 😃" and he'll be like "[Boris Karloff Frankenstein's Monster voice] hrrmpgh"
How come there's basalt but no bapepper?
This pun made me smile, and has earned you one(1) Toggle Point, anon!
That said, 'basalt' as a word has a rather storied history. The true association isn't with salt, but with gold.
Originally, at least as far back as ancient Egypt, the word meant 'touchstone'; though of course back then it was baban, not basalt. As you may know, touchstones are a common method for testing the properties of minerals and, especially, economically valuable metals like gold. The idea is simple, really. Take a very hard, very dark slab of stone, and scraaape your metal across it, like so:
With a little practice, you can get a fairly nice streak of residue, and the light tone of gold really pops against the dark stone. Then, if somebody is trying to sell you a lot of precious metals, you can perform this streak test using them on your touchstone, and compare the streaking pattern against metals that you trust. If they're similar, the metal is pure, and if the streaks are different, the bastards probably aldulterated it with something cheaper. There you have it- a straightforward, fairly reliable, and very pre-modern method of rooting out Ea-Nasirtesting the quality of your precious metals during high-stakes trading. To this day, it's still a tool in any geologists' kit; you can see how it's handy for mineral identification when you're out in the field.
Anyway, the substance we now know as basalt was particularly good for this task, so (as humans will tend to do) the function of the stone and the type of stone itself started to get mixed up and share the same name. Greek contact with Egypt taught Europe the word, with the slight modification to basan, and then there was a typo in one of Pliny's books, so when they dusted it off in the Renaissance, it became Basalt instead. But it's all the same thing and the same word.
One of my favorite cul-de-sacs of this history is that at one point in ancient Greece, when the word was still more 'touchstone' than 'igneous rock', the word had expanded enough to take on some metaphorical and maybe mythic proportions. Basanos meant 'touchstone', yes, but also 'trial' or 'test' as applied to our own more human ambitions, a thing you endure to show your quality. So basalt became the stone that could find true gold among false metals- not just in the marketplace, but in the soul as well.
I set my Discord banner to random photos of deer being silly on trailcams resulting in multiple people asking about My Collection so here are some of the finest photos from my unreasonably sized gallery of goofy deer trailcam pictures
Did you know deer will sometimes just straight-up box/slapfight with each other which often involves standing on two legs and it looks really silly
Here's some kisses
Some weird chaotic ones. I call the first one of these four "girls night"
bonk (this is one of my most favorites)
This one's my halloween/autumn banner
Spring-loaded animal
getting a lot of questions about my shirt that says “I WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY” that are already answered by the shirt
walkable cities also means sittable cities send tweet
some people are responding to this like its a joke and im going to assume u are the type of people to say "its only a 3 minute walk" when i tell them the nearest bench is too far away
also anyone who thinks "3 minutes isnt THAT bad" you will be old one day. and you will wish the bench was closer
If there's nowhere to sit at a place, I can't risk going there. The potential damage from standing too long is absolutely real and I have to take it into consideration. Hostile architecture is hostile to everyone, it doesn't become OK just because you can evade the effects.
all the world will be your enemy, prince with a thousand enemies
hey man i get that it’s your thing but you are making people uncomfortable by, and these are your words, “blair witching it” in the corner
#she doesnt know how to turn it off and shes drinking it so she doesnt drown
im sorry i literally cannot get this out of my head since last night
this is for you melinda 😔 ✊i hope you like it 🥺🎵they ought to teach 🧑🏫 this in school 🧐its not ❌ always cool 🥶 to be cool 😎what⁉️ (what❓)they 🫵 try to play 🎲 you for a fool 🥴like 💭 you see a girl whos unique 😲 its a treat 😃 cause shes sweet 🙂and she always seems to knock 💥 you off your feet ☺️you wanna say hey 👋 but you dont 🙁 (you dont 🙍♂️)your mom says tell her how you feel 🤒 but you wont 🙅♂️cause youre just too cool 🧊 to tell her truly ✅that your feelings are gettin unruly 💢 dont try and school me 🚫so she passes you by 🚶♀️ in the hall wayyoure staring at the wall 👁️👁️ tryina play 🤾♂️ while i sayyeah youre cool 😏 (what❓ 😨)really cool 🥶 just like ice ❄️ (ice❗)but you did nt real ize you never 😔 get this chance twice 2️⃣so youre busy playing cool now shes gone 😢 (shes gone 😩)gone unto a nother 🧍♂️ while i sing my funky song 🎶 i never passed up the chance 🤬i know this story 📖 seems long 😴 but when i know 🤔 the time 🕰️ is right for me 🤙 and you 🫵 i justflame on 🔥 flame on 🎆and on 👆 and on 👆 and on 👆 (flame on 🔥 flame on💥) (yeah 👊)flame on 😱 and on 😤 and on 🥵 and on 🥵 and on 🥵flame on 🔥 (i just flame on 😔 👊)🎵keep calm 🧘♂️ everyone 🫡don't panic 🗯️FLAME ON 👿w… ww whats happenin 😨we're sinking‼️ 👇into the center 🔥 of the earth 🌎
i love thermodynamics because its like no…. my toaster waffle did not get cold… it simply tried to warm this big cold world all by its little self… her heat was given… and she asked for NOTHING in return … ;_;
