Alt text is an accessibility tool for many people, primarily those who are blind or visually disabled. It is not appropriate to ever use it as a punchline for a joke to tell a joke. Doing so takes away its reliability and trustworthiness. There are people who are INCAPABLE OF SEEING AN IMAGE OR FULLY SEEING AN IMAGE OTHERWISE. Using alt text to tell jokes HURTS THESE PEOPLE.

This post has like 8,000 notes. I'm so disappointed in how many people think this okay, but even more sad that many people don't understand how this is harmful or what alt text is even for. Please don't propagate or encourage these jokes. You are misusing and actively harming an accessibility tool. If you didn't know that this is what it was for, now you do know! Please do your part and don't spread such things.

Personal edit: I'd like to clarify that if you didn't know this, I don't want you to feel attacked or anything like that. It's okay you didn't know, but now that you do, you can do your best moving on! I said I was sad because I'm a visually impaired person and it can be sad that people don't know these things. I would have phrased this post a bit more objectively if I had known people would see it! It was just meant to be a personal expression of my feelings. I made this post as a visually impaired person myself who uses a screenreader.

Informational edit: This is ableist/bad because it ruins the integrity of the tool and makes people misunderstand what alt text is for. If people do this, it makes people falsely learn what alt text is and use it for notes, captions, or jokes. Misusing alt text ruins the integrity of the tool because it makes it so one cannot consistently rely on alt text to be accurate. It is also ableist because alt text literally just tells someone what an image is/says, so if someone cannot see the image, they don't necessarily have a way of knowing that the alt text is inaccurate, or they might be able to tell that it's a joke/caption, but then still have no idea what the actual image is/says.

Since I’ve been making posts about American/ British entitlement towards Ireland, I thought I’d talk about this video here.

I am a student at this college. It’s a big tourist attraction for many reasons, but the main one being that the book of Kells is kept here. I am also from Kells itself, but Dublin having the book and not Kells is a whole other issue.

So this protest that’s been happening over the the past few weeks is in response to the college once again raising rents for student accommodation to astronomical rates. That being when rent in Dublin (and Ireland as a whole) is already unliveable. You’d find cheaper rent off student accommodation, but it’s hardly easy to find places like this. As well as this, the majority of the student accommodation isn’t even on campus to begin with. Most are about a 45 minute luas journey away. So what the fuck are you paying for?

This protest is necessary. It’s been a long time coming. Time and time again they prioritise tourists over us. Buildings are old and falling apart, equipment isn’t functional, accessibility is god awful. I know this because I am disabled and use a rollator, but I can’t even use it on campus most days because there’s simply no ramps/ elevators in some buildings.

In one of my lectures last week we were in one of the old buildings. We had a lot of content to cover, but of course the projector wasn’t working. The professor spent fourty minutes trying to get the computer/ projector to work, but to no avail. So we have a whole lecture to catch up on! All of this while I was looking out the window at this atrocity:

A new building for tourists! Yay!

They’ve been building new school buildings for years, but of course instead of finishing them, they’ll spend their time and money on the tourists. I’m not even having an exam in one of my modules because they told the professor that there simply isn’t enough room to host our class for the exam. And it would be “too expensive” to book a venue… it’s only a class of about thirty. He had written a whole exam and we were under the impression we’d have one, but now it’s just continuous assessment I guess!

So you have to understand why we’re not exactly jumping for joy for the tourists. There are hundreds on campus everyday, just generally being annoying and entitled. And yes DISCLAIMER; not all tourists, not all Americans/ British people, blah, blah. But from my experience, you do encounter some obnoxious people everyday.

So that’s why they blocked entrance to the book of Kells. That’s why it’s disgusting for the tourists to be arguing with them and demanding entrance. For once we just want our college to prioritise us! So yeah we will revoke your entitlement, because we are the ones who study here, we are the ones who have to LIVE here.

Emerge, post new twisty dragon, recede

Manuscript Monday

This Insular manuscript was created by Irish Catholics, who were well known to be stewards of knowledge and artistic ability during the ‘dark ages’ of the 6th-10th centuries CE. In particular, the Insular style consists of flattened, two-dimensional figures of people and animals accompanied by elaborate ornamentation throughout its pages. We often see interlacing designs and Celtic knots within this ornamentation and the proportions and rendering of the figures and architecture seen throughout the manuscript are not always realistic. For example, in the Book of Kells, produced around 800 CE by Irish monks in Scottish west-coast island of Iona, the columns holding up the arches on canon tables are circular and would lack structural integrity in the real world, for obvious reasons. We can see the flattened, strange rendering of figures on folio 32v (shown below), which is a depiction of Christ Enthroned. Christ’s knee is lifted to hold up the codex in his hand, but the placement of his knee is anatomically incorrect. We also see the flatness of the figure and the inclusion of ornamentation throughout the image, and we can see even more of this decoration on carpet pages throughout the manuscript. The Insular style was not only limited to manuscripts but was also used in metal objects like broaches, chalices, sculpture, and architecture which are also said to have been inspiration for Insular style manuscripts.

Our copy of the facsimile of the Book of Kells was published by the Faksimile Verlag of Luzern, Switzerland in 1990 and includes a separate volume with commentary edited by the noted Trinity College librarian Peter Fox. If you have the urge to see the original Book of Kells, it is shown in the Trinity College Library in Dublin. The library shows two folios of the manuscript at a time and changes the pages shown every twelve weeks.

View more Manuscript Monday posts.

– Sarah S., Special Collections Graduate Intern

Secret of kells

I love the inconsistent height difference between these two.

I'm going to assume that Marshall is actually taller because we see him doing this:

Which would make him shorter, so he's likely doing it again when sauntering up to Gary, especially since he already approached him while making himself shorter. My guess is that he's keeping himself close to Gary's face/lip height (especially since he blushes after getting interrupted from being so close to Gary). However, cartoons often have inconsistent heights, so it could be either way. Marshall seems to be taller for 2/3 episodes where Marshall and Gary are together, though.

Edit: Im too lazy to elaborate for RN but Marshall is definitely shorter

Folio 12 recto, Codex Cenannensis (The Book of Kells)

My copy from the Book of Kells, illuminated manuscript created in the 9th century in Ireland

Happy Wolfenoot! :3

medieval scribe who wrote this poem about his cat, i love you

Remembering how this is all art by official VLD crew members.

"Klance wasn't queerbaiting" my ass

Edit: Since people are misunderstanding my comment on queerbaiting, I'm not saying crew members who shipped Klance are individually or personally responsible for the queerbaiting of Klance, I'm saying that this makes it more glaringly obvious that one can't deny that queerbaiting happened with Klance due to its prominent shipping by artists on the show, as well as the fact that the official art of it made fans even more expectant that it would be canon and I do not doubt that the crew members who made ship art of it were used to further queerbait even though they simply wanted to ship Klance and also wanted it to be canon.

You can also check out this fan website for Klance that will have even MORE official Klance art added soon: https://klanceiscanonking.neocities.org/ ! Note it isn't designed for mobile view.

THE HOOD OF CROTHRAINNE

"Gold is its woof, silver underneath it, soft to the skin is its lining; you will be hound, man, or deer, as you turn it, as you change it." - A Rí Richid, Réidig Dam

The 12th Century poet Gilla in Chomded húa Cormaic is credited as the author of a poem known as A Rí Richid, Réidig Dam, which contains an episode involving the exploits of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. At the end of this episode, we are told of Fionn's most marvellous possession: the magical Hood of Crothrainne, a woven mantle fashioned in the Land of Promise that can change the wearer's shape. Any tales of Fionn using this power have been lost, but the significance of both hounds and deer to the Fenian cycle remains an ever-present motif.

Gayhounds

This is a sticker set I did ages ago

The Irish in Europe

St Columbanus, inspired by St Colm Cille��s example, a generation later, travelled across Europe, founding monasteries as he went. The last of these was erected in Bobbio, northern Italy, in AD 613. Thus, even as the pagan tribes of northern Europe were still rampaging across the continent, the Christianity, learning and Latin-based literacy that had been nurtured in the relative peace and…

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Secret of Kells <3

Not enough appreciated that Gary says "cheese doodles" in fear/shock/surprise and that he also poses like This. With the leg up and hands to his chest. Very gayly. He's such a dork!