It’s not like me to be proud of a tweet. Hell, I barely want to be on Twitter at all and have come close to deleting my account a few times since all this honk honk anti-vaccine overthrow the government truck shit started tormenting cities and blocking borders across Canada. But I’m pretty pleased with myself here, I must say.
I clicked the link out of curiosity. It is not, as the tweet text suggests, a happy ending to the freedom convoy. https://t.co/2Z6dQufLuY
I do have Twitter to thank for one thing, though. Without it, I may not be familiar with some of the much better and far more accurate names for the protests. Things like “the Flu Trucks Clan”, the “Omicronvoy”, “the Ivermectin Insurrection” and “Vanilla ISIS”. Those are absolute gold.
Here’s something I’ve never seen before. A music video with audio description for the blind.
As a blind person, I appreciate the idea behind this. If I’m going to get anything at all out of the video portion of a music video, somebody is going to have to tell me what’s happening. I’m quite thankful for the patient family and friends who used to get stuck doing running commentary on shows like Video Hits or the CHUM FM 30 for me back in the day. Made me feel like I was part of the shared experience instead of just listening to the music from the radio through the TV.
But as cool as built-in DVS is as a concept, it was extremely distracting to watch. I think I know why, though.
My introduction to the song was this video. That’s too much simultaneous input, quite simply. Yes, I want to know what’s happening in the video. But I also want to listen to the song. My brain could not get a handle on which of those things was more important, and so I wound up not getting as much out of either incoming stream as I should have because I kind of shorted out after a while.
If I ever watch another one of these (I definitely will assuming artists make more of them), I’m going to do my best to listen to the song once or twice first. I think that will make it much easier to handle the competition for my attention.
Hit play on Christina Martin’s latest music video and you’ll hear an unfamiliar voice.
Instead of the Nova Scotia singer’s vocals, an audio description begins for those who are visually impaired, describing Martin’s wavy blond hair, black dress and a shadowy setting in a historic house before the music kicks in.
“I didn’t know that anybody would care, and people do care. People have listened to that version who would not have otherwise,” Martin told CBC Radio’s Mainstreet on Tuesday about the audio described version of her Stay with Me video.
“For me, I’m reaching new audience with the art, making a connection, which is, I think, a goal for a lot of artists.”
I’m impressed with the composure on display here. If this was me, I would almost certainly be rolling around like a baby and getting the station thrown off the air with my language.
So…this Wordle thing…I talk way too much about it. After I discovered the ways to make it accessible, I excitedly told mom and dad about it. Of course, they already knew. So on days when the Wordle is super hard, I’ll get a text about it. I got talking about it to friends, and I think I’ve gotten 3 of them hooked. People say Wordle is the new Sudoku. I could never figure out Sudoku. I tried and tried and tried! At least I have success with Wordle!
I was worried about what would happen when it moved to New York Times. I was worried the accessibility wouldn’t follow. I was wrong to worry. So far, so good. But what didn’t follow was my stats! Boo! I had a sweet streak. Oh well. I know the truth. My streak is unbroken!
I heard about this song, and then my friend found it and sent it to me. So, so, so very true!
I hope this Wordle thing lasts for a long time. I’m weird and try to do it on the phone while taking the dog for a crap. One of these days, I’ll drop my phone in the snow doing that! Wouldn’t it be funny if the Wordle word of the day was “Drift” or something like that?
I’ve noticed watching the Jeopardy College Tournament the last few nights that I like the way the game flows a little better than I do on regular Jeopardy. It’s a small thing, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the show proper drop the extra commercial break in the middle of the Jeopardy round. It’s always felt out of place to me, and this proves that it’s not really necessary not that the absence of a similar break in Double Jeopardy didn’t already do that. It makes more sense to play a round, take a break, meet the players, play Double Jeopardy, take a break and then come back for Final. And both complete games done that way fit into an hour, so there’s no reason not to do it on the half hour version unless it’s some sort of weird syndication rule that I don’t understand.
This time, Device Orchestra busted out 14 gadgets for its composition — including electric toothbrushes adorned with googly eyes.
One electric toothbrush with pipe cleaners for arms stands front and center, belting out the familiar chorus in a tone comparable to a musically-inclined bumblebee. It might be the star of the show, but it has plenty of backup.
A line of receipt machines mimics the sound of synths, while another electric toothbrush undulates beneath a white sheet. A typewriter clicks away in the background, accompanied by the buzzing of a body trimmer, a nail polishing device, and an epilator (which is a hair removal tool, in case you didn’t know). And even though the iron doesn’t contribute much to the overall composition, it provides the visual effects, pumping out puffs of steam to achieve a spooky vibe.
Not sure how many people this will be news to at this point since it’s so old, but if I didn’t know there was a Windows version of The Great Escape until today, somebody else who might care probably didn’t either.
The great Escape is an updated windows port of a classic accessible dos game, so may bring nostalgic memories to many. You are trapped in a maze of 100 rooms, and need to find your way out in as few moves as possible.
As well as moving in the four cardinal directions, you can also use secret passages if you become stuck, though these will take many more moves. Of course, the maze is far from empty, there is a Villain out to find you who will throw you to random locations if he catches you, and a lepricorn you can gain gold and wishes from.
Rooms in the maze also contain a number of challenges and obstacles, including a vending machine, an evil merchant who requires paying to proceed, and guns and amo to pick up should you run across any monsters.
Typos in that description are theirs, not mine.
This is one of the first computer games I ever played independently. We got an Apple IIe computer when I was about nine years old. It came with a couple disks worth of games, and Great Escape quickly became one of my favourites. Playing it now definitely brought back a lot of memories, even though it isn’t quite the same without the Echo voice mangling pronunciations left and right.
For the record, I won when I played today. It took me 89 moves because I had to use so many secret passages, but in the end the villain wound up helping me out when he threw me into room three after mugging me for about the fifth time.
Also worth noting: When you launch the game for the first time, your computer may need to go out to Windows Update and grab some old .Net Framework files in order to run it properly. It took a few minutes for them to download and install and at one point I thought the wizard had crashed, but everything worked out.
The 47-year-old patient was on vacation in South Africa at a wildlife reserve when the cobra surprised him from below. He waited three hours for a helicopter to fly him to the nearest trauma center, according to the report, during which he felt a burning pain spread from his genitals up into his abdomen and chest.
When he arrived at the hospital, he had “swollen genitals with a deep purple discoloration, indicating scrotal necrosis,” the researchers wrote; doctors administered eight doses of snake venom antiserum, as well as medications to control his fever, dialysis for injury to his kidneys, and debridement of his sack and shaft that involved excising a lot of his genital tissue.
Oh, and then there was a lot of surgery, including a skin graft on his…I was going to say trouser snake but that just feels wrong now.
If you need to see photos of his injuries, there are some here in this paper published in Urology Case Reports. It ended up published there because this fellow is one of the first documented cases of what they call “Scrotal necrosis after cobra (Naja annulifera) envenomation.” Yes, that is in fact a fancy way of saying “oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck this poor sap’s nads almost died of snakes!”
Happily, after a year, he is said to have made a full physical recovery. The mental part of sitting on the can ever again may take a wee bit longer, I suspect.
By the way, I wish more writers would creatively describe images. That sort of inadvertent accessibility is handy for us blind kids. It’s nice to know, for instance, that our pal’s initial patch job resembled “a badly-sewn Tim Burton puppet, with a long, thick stitch running straight up the middle” and that the images are “not safe for life.”
Again, I know that it’s January and that this post is therefore either very late or very early depending on how you look at things. But we’re about to get another snowstorm plus I just found out that Norah Jones covered the Chipmunks, so Christmas content it is.
Of course there’s no replacing the original. It can’t be done. But that’s…not bad. I’d probably even listen to it on purpose. I think it could go well with a fire and some hot apple cider.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdN_8OlJGs0
So Aira has a promotion where people can get free minutes to do COVID-testing-related things. I guess they’ve had to help a lot of people do at-home rapid antigen tests. I was intrigued by this, because even with someone on a phone directing me, it sounded pretty hard to do. Like, how do I get the precise number of drops into the precise spot? Can I feel if there’s a border between dab here and for the love of Pete that’s not the testing surface!? And, how do I avoid accidentally getting some of the solution on my hand? I was under the impression that was going to cause bad times, either because the stuff was dangerous or coming in contact with my hand would screw it up. So I was worried, Aira or not, about whether this was possible.
Well, they have come up with some tips for preparing for an at-home test that might even work if you were using BeMyEyes or someone’s help over Facetime if that someone knew what they were doing.
Hopefully I never have to do this, but if I do, at least I have a shred of a clue about what I could do. There’s no telling how well it would work, but…I have some kind of part of a plan.