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umbraastaff · 8 hours

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SQUARE UP!

[Image description: Fanart of a scene from Dimension 20's Fantasy High: Junior Year episode 14. The Bad Kids and The Rat Grinders square up in the middle of the school cafeteria. Alt text provided and copied under the cut. End ID]

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Image one: The Bad Kids and The Rat Grinders square up in the middle of the school cafeteria. Above their heads is written, "The Bad Kids vs The Rat Grinders."

Image two: From left to right - Adaine readies her magically glowing hand, Gorgug cracks his knuckles, Fig pages Colin Counterspell on her earpiece, Riz hisses, and Fabian steadies Kristen as she smirks down at Kipperlilly.

Image three: From left to right - Kipperlilly glares up at Kristen, Bobby looks on worriedly, Oisin has a hand on Kipperlilly's shoulder as he tries to intervene, Mary Anne has a deadpan stare, Ruben poses moodily, and Ivy smirks behind Oisin.

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#d20 #fh #fhjy

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umbraastaff · 1 day

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This is every time I could find that any of the boys said they died. Sorry if the audio isn’t the greatest, I had to compress it.

Transcript under the cut because it is very long

Keep reading

#balance #audio

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umbraastaff · 2 days

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Balance fic recs

some of my favorite balance fics. various ages, popularities, and lengths. i’ve been wanting to do a rec list for a while!

caramel by nevereverever

The first time Taako is left alone, it isn't pretty. But their lives are stuck in a loop and people come back and die again and again and he wonders if there will ever be a time when he doesn't have to fear being left alone.

2.7k, Taako & Lup Lup dies one cycle and then, years later, she dies again. But she always comes back. Hurt/comfort of the best kind.

Warmth by noxic

"It was a well-known fact among the residents of the Starblaster that Lup, Barry, and Taako slept in the same bed more often than not. It was one of those things that they just did without really talking about it."

2.1k, Barry & Lup & Taako The BLT fic of all time. Quality platonic adult sleepovers.

Taako the Matchmaker by @fantasysamsclub

In which Taako tries to set up his sister. Events take place during Stolen Century.

11.1k, Blupjeans & Taako Taako tries to set up blupjeans. Miscommunication ensues. Very sweet and funny.

red fishing line by @anistarrose

A routine performance of Sizzle it Up goes nightmarishly wrong, and at Lup’s bedside, Taako feels helpless. And when a red-robed guest appears before him, Taako doesn’t know how or what to feel at all.

3k, Barry & Lup & Taako Also the BLT fic of all time. Excellent subtle Taako characterization, and my favorite depiction of the familiarity-but-not of being voidfished. Warning for major character death.

Sunny-Side Up by @barry-j-blupjeans

And the world? The world loved Taako. For once in his gods-damned life, people loved him. They didn’t care about all the flaws, they didn’t care where he came from or who he was before. They loved his food and they loved him. No one would ever quite be at Taako’s level and that was something he thrived on. There would never be anyone who could measure up. Taako deserved this happiness. He worked for it. He wasted his fucking life away for it.

5.7k, Taako A wonderful character study, revolving around the role food plays in Taako's life. Fairly minor but impactful characters like Sazed and Taako's aunt are utilized in a very meaningful way. So well-written and warm. Warning for brief suicidal ideation.

On the Deck of the Starblaster by @papergardener

“What the… what are you all doing? We have work to do!” It’s a justified reaction, Lucretia thinks, to finding your entire crew literally lazing about on deck not an hour into this new cycle. “This one's on me,” Taako says. “It’s a new trend I like to call: taking a fucking break.” Cycle Nintey-Five. Everyone’s maybe not doing so good and could use a little warmth.

6.5k, Lucretia & Taako Near the end of the century, Lucretia is feeling rough. Taako pulls her out of her funk and initiates a much needed rest. Fantastic characterization, of Lucretia as a whole, and the loyal, warm side of Taako. Warning for mentions of a suicide attempt and suicidal ideation.

leaving, as an injustice by @anistarrose

When Mavis is eight, she starts finding her Dad asleep on the couch in the morning. Sometimes, he’s even all the way out on their tiny patio, with his head slumped onto a pillow atop the chess table, and bags beneath his eyes. In one of their following games, he tells her about tactical retreats.

4.7k, Mavis & Merle A study of Mavis and her relationship to Merle. Incredibly insightful into criminally underrated characters. Excellent Merle characterization.

Permission by vaguenotion

She’d been doing this on and off for the last hour, as if daring the men to catch up to them. Daring them to fight her. Every time seemed like a final stand. Here is where I will meet them, her shoulders said, hiked up around her ears. Here is where I’ll make them pay for what they’ve done. But then Taako would grab her hand, and she would turn and see the bruising on his throat, the blood drying on his brow, the tear in his shirt. And she would grip his hand in hers and together they would keep running.

12.6k, Taako & Lup My favorite depiction of the twins as children, both in character and realistic. Beautifully atmospheric, with so many small details that make the setting feel so real. Warning for assault and harm to children.

Come Hell or High Water by @nillial

“Taako,” Hurley asks, “where’s your magic umbrella?” Taako looks behind him. He had tossed the Umbrastaff in the path of a neighboring vehicle, which was beginning to catch up to them. He sees them now, far in the distance, and he sees his Umbrastaff, too, lying dangerously close to its wheels. As if on cue, he watches the tires crush it to pieces. “Whoops,” he says. - Lup is trapped. And then she isn’t. --- In which Taako breaks his umbrella during the Petals to the Metal race, unknowingly freeing Lup, who is almost immediately captured by Kravitz. After becoming a member of the Raven Queen's retinue with Kravitz as her trainer, she has two missions: 1) find her family, and 2) ruin Kravitz's afterlife. A story about enemies becoming friends and lost families finding their way back to one another.

197k (currently), Lup & Kravitz Incredible characterization. I love the way Lup is written. Hilarious shenanigans, sweet friendship-building, and terribly sad sometimes, because it dives deep into the reality of Lup existing in a world that's forgotten her.

Very cold water on a very hot day by @keplercryptids

Sometimes a family is a nerd who can't swim and the crunchy-haired watersport inventor who teaches him how. Surfer lingo required.

3.1k, Barry & Taako Deep dive into the beach year. Excellently in character, well-written dialogue, and a beautiful depiction of their growing friendship.

Children of Atlas by @papergardener

They’ve survived the apocalypse and now as far as they know, they’re the only ones left. Perhaps it was inevitable that they’d consider… repopulation. Lucretia writes up a weekly schedule to try and address that. Absolutely no one is happy with this.

76k (currently), IPRE crew The premise for this one is incredibly offputting, but I'm so glad I gave it a chance. The characterization and quality of writing is absolutely wonderful. I also love the attention to detail of the realistic difficulty of just surviving. Fantastically atmospheric, this fic dives deep into the uncertainty and fear of the first cycle, when the crew are all strangers, and the love that turns them into a family. Warning for extensive discussion of sexual assault.

Emissary Davenport by DragonWrites

A series of stories where Captain Davenport is secretly an emissary of Garl Glittergold, Gnomish god of pranks. And when you're a serious-minded captain on a mission to save all of reality, having a cheerful trickster god as your unexpected patron can get a little strange...

300k, Davenport A series of four works set in an AU where Davenport is an emissary to the leader of the gnomish pantheon. My absolute favorite depiction of Davenport, ever. The first three works are explorations of Davenport as a character and the relationships between people and gods in a DnD world. The last, Lost Gods, is the best fanfiction I've ever read. I can't express how good it is. The attention to detail among myriad plot threads, the building of themes, the characterization across just about every single character in Balance, all come together to create 223k words of a genuine masterpiece.

#recs #writes #balance

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umbraastaff · 3 days

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Cozy babs

#barry #lup #arts #barry lup #balance

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umbraastaff · 4 days

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I lined and colored that one Taako sketch from a while ago

Pretty proud of the way the colors came out

#taako #arts #balance

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umbraastaff · 5 days

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"Blue and skinny? Blonde? What the hell are you talking about? Did you lose your brain when you knocked yourself out on that tree branch over there or something?"

#taako #lup #the twins #arts #balance

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umbraastaff · 6 days

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the real problem with necromancy is all of these necromancers are pursuing immortality instead of dying so all the good necromancer names are taken for like centuries at a time. the other day i met a guy who called himself skull james

#barry #text #balance

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umbraastaff · 7 days

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#floor 20 #petals to the metal #balance #audio

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umbraastaff · 7 days

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hey the adventure zone is a really good podcast, idk if anyone following me is aware of that

#it's fine

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umbraastaff · 7 days

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I love these crazy Kepler kids!

#amnesty squad #amnesty #arts

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umbraastaff · 8 days

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From Sep 2022.

Sketchie for a haunted AU I never got around to fleshing out.

#let's gooooo #lup #barry #barry lup #arts #balance #au

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umbraastaff · 9 days

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finally got around to listening to the adventure zone and OH MY GOD i have been missing out

#taako #arts #balance

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umbraastaff · 10 days

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we should talk about how accessibility is talked about on this godforsaken website

plain text and you

pt. 0: preface

"lune, why should we listen to you talk about accessibility?" i don't have formal credentials or whatever, but i've been learning about html web dev + web accessibility for years now. i read about how disabled people access the web in alternative ways from sources off-tumblr and across the web. i love semantic html a lot. i am fairly handy with a screenreader even though i'm not a regular user (currently i'm learning how to use braille screen input; my grasp of grade 2 is questionable at best and i'm slow as hell, if this gives you a sense for how much i know).

so i feel vaguely confident in throwing my two cents in.

it's also kinda hard to talk about accessibility on tumblr because of how many fucking ways you can use this site. you can be on desktop with new xkit. or with xkit rewritten or whatever it's called now. or just raw dogging the whole experience altogether. or on the mobile app. or on the mobile browser. you could be looking at someone's blog through a custom theme. these all give you different experiences that can be difficult to account for. i'm primarily a desktop user-- my knowledge in general skews toward web browsers, not mobile apps, so that's what i'm focusing on-- and i'm sighted but have the experience above.

pt. 1: plain text

i cannot emphasize enough how much plain text does not exist in the way you're defining it. plain text could refer to plain language maybe? which is when you write something so that it can be more easily read and digested.

alternatively, in computers, "plain text" refers to "text in a file on your computer that can just be read straight-up without any specialized software needed to decode it." a word doc is not plain text; if you open it up in notepad or textedit you'll see all sorts of unreadable shit. a txt file usually is plain text. if i open up the file "mobydick.txt" that i have saved, i'll see the full text of moby-dick: or, the whale and nothing else.

(in the tumblr accessibility world... i honestly have no clue how it started circulating?? or what justification's been given for it? please advise.)

this is not the end-all-be-all of accessibility. in fact, html-- which is the language for describing how web pages are displayed-- is a markup language, which means that when you write the code for a page, you mark up your plain text with how you want your text to be displayed and what you want it to mean. actually, html has standards for what all those markup tags mean, and how they should be used! then, when it gets rendered, all the markup goes away and you see this webpage.

plain text, in some ways, ignores every tool the browser gives us for access and reinvents the wheel. screenreaders already account for "big text" (tumblr refers to these as "heading level 1-2") or bold and italic text (by breaking up a sentence when it's encountered).

it's a bit more complicated than this-- sometimes plain text is necessary, ex. for those non-ascii cursive fonts or for text gradients, neither of which are handled properly by screenreaders. handled properly are the key words here. usually screenreaders handle headings, bold/italics, links-- anything that uses semantic html markup-- just fine.

if yours doesn't, i don't know what to tell you, this is literally the standard for how mainstream screenreaders work and you might've fucked with a setting somewhere.

pt. 2: you

it would help if people stopped spreading info about accessibility that's just plain untrue. a screenreader is a difficult tool to use well, actually! a lot of people talk about web accessibility and most of them are not on tumblr!! if you're looking to learn about this, i like webaim as a resource-- they have fairly well-written pages and it's a fun rabbit hole to go down.

there are easy steps for making your internet presence more accessible-- writing alt text, knowing what to avoid-- but the truth is, learning about accessibility is work. you have to put in effort to know what tools people have at their disposal, to learn how people use their machines. i've been at this for years! and i still wouldn't call myself an expert.

i also think everyone who talks about accessibility should read against access, a beautiful piece about finding different possibilities for accessibility from a DeafBlind protactile user:

We would do well to abandon the pretense that it’s possible to reproduce base things in realms other than those that gave birth to them. Instead, we can leave those things well alone where they belong, or, moved by possibilities, we can transgress, translate, and transform them. We can give foreign things new purposes, which may be slightly or extremely different from their original intent.... Our environment has endless potential for life. For centuries, however, much of our vitality was forbidden. We were forced to stick with the effects of the hearing and sighted world. Now, though, we are all in varying stages of flight.

for me, accessibility features like alt text are not tools for providing an "equivalent" experience. it provides another fully distinct way of encountering a photo, a webpage, a space...! and deserves to be thought of as one. more bluntly: screenreader users won't have the same needs as non-sr users and vice versa, and conflating the two is a disservice.

if you're able to and interested, please take some time to learn about this! it'll be better spent than putting down posts on tumblr.

#actually let me queue this here also #since taz has a higher concentration of people interested in accessible work wrt what i see in my tumblr sphere

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umbraastaff · 11 days

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well now i need a Dungeon Meshi/The Adventure Zone crossover comic with a cultural exchange program where one side brings healthy, meticulous fantasy!Japanese cuisine and the other side brings the most atrocious processed fantasy!American garbage with an ingredients list full of arcane curses

#yells #balance #crossover #dungeon meshi

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umbraastaff · 12 days

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