#no image description because i don't have the spoons for it i'm sorry

[dragon-swords-prophecies]

Herald At Dawn World building: religion & gods & stuff

@rivenantiqnerd here, look!

So, in herald at dawn there are six main gods. (In the fae human pantheon. Other people might have other gods, I just don't completely know what they are) Collectively they are called the Council of 7. This name makes total sense, cause there are six of them (i'm kidding. there used to be 7, but they lost of one of them). They all have separate domains, but some of the domains interact/overlap. They are as follows:

Aalis, Lady of Rivets and Gears

Ife, Knight of Ravens

Luz, Lord of Light and Dark

Ercan, Protector of Dreams

Ara, Keeper of Time

Oren, Shield of Nature

they all have titles! this relates to their domains.

i was going to talk about magic in this post too, but its already quite long, so I'm not going to and thats a post for another day. there's also a cut because, as mentioned, this is quite long.

First up:

Aalis, Lady of Rivets and Gears

Domain: Discovery, knowledge, invention, creation

Patron of: Tinkerers, inventors, scholars, blacksmiths, those who seek out new things.

Patron god of Volimere.

Aalis is fun! She's the god of learning things. I really, really like her title. It was the first one I thought of and I love it. She's the patron god of Volimere (where the story takes place), which ties in with how Volimere is a city thats very big on airships and trains and inventing.

Aalis is most commonly depicted as a very tall black woman in her 40s, wearing the outfit of an airship pilot/engineer. With a cane sword, because what am I doing with these blorbos if not giving them cool shit (yes I'm aware putting a sword in a cane makes the cane structrually weaker HOWEVER she's a goddess so hers is magic and is structually sound anyway. my logic may be flawed but thats for future me to deal with)

Ife, Knight of Ravens

Domain: Love, death, loyalty, friendship, violence, protection

Patron of: lovers, warriors, mourners, embalmers, knights, protectors, raven keepers, and those with a cause.

Ife is a knight, but no one knows who they serve. They're generally depicted in full plate armor, with or without a helmet. Their image can often be found in graveyards and cemeteries, sometimes with a chainmail veil in place of the helm's facemask. They also have raven wings, cause it's cool as fuck. (In herald at dawn's world it's good luck to see a raven on your wedding day or at funerals).

oh, and they're also polyamrous. :DD at one point they were in a relationship with Oren & the now missing, presumed dead, god of Oblivion, Geffin, but they're now in one with Luz, too! (and still oren!) (I mention this entire paragraph only because they're the god of love, so it seems relevant).

Luz, Lord of Light and Dark

Domain: Light, Dark, night, sun, moon, day

Patron of: meteorologists, astronomers, splunkers, those who seek light, those in darkness, the lost.

Patron god of Lutetia.

Luz is the patron of people who get lost. This has not helped them with looking for that one god (Geffin) who went missing, no one's found him. They're also the patron of Lutetia, which is the city Blake is from.

Luz is generally depicted with half black, half white hair, and wearing robes that are a mixture of both colors.

Ercan, Protector of Dreams

Domain: Life, hope, curiosity, wonder, children, dreams, medicine

Patron of: children, those who dream, midwives, healers

Ercan is most commonly depicted as a young child (approx. 7) in white clothing, or as a young man in the outfit of a healer. (their heroforge isn't really the best, but I also don't have a solid image of what they look like in my head yet so)

Ara, Keeper of Time

Domain: history, time

Patron of: Archeologists, historians, some scholars, recorders, and those who watch.

Ara is really, really good at fucking with time. This makes sense, because she's the god of time, however it felt important to me to state it.

Ara is generally depicted as a woman of any age in a purple dress, holding an hourglass.

Oren, Shield of Nature

Domain: nature, farming, plants, animals, the Unknown, oblivion

Patron of: most Fae, nymphs, farmers, gardeners, frogs, and those who seek to forget

Oren is generally depicted as a man with black eyes wearing green robes, holding a pitchfork. He's the guy responsible for giving the fae magic. he also was not the original god of Oblivion! that was Gethin, his partner, who Vanished.

Gethin, The Hidden One

Domain: oblivion, the Void

Patron of: those who seek to forget

Gethin is, you might notice, the only one without a fancy title like ''lady of rivets and gears'', or something. this is because he is missing, and his presence has not been felt/seen/noticed in the world in some 250 years. (the god of oblivion went and got lost and this is very funny to me. (one of) his partner(s) got his job)). Everyone assumes him to be dead! This is also why he is called, ''The Hidden One''. He is generally depicted as a male figure in black robes, and is never shown facing the viewer. That's the other reason he's called the hidden one.

hey anyone wanna hear about religion and magic in herald at dawn?

[mickeys-malarkey]

So, I Think I Know Who Ruth/Noone Is

No, I don't think she's Six nor Alone. But I don't think she's a totally new character like Otto/The Counselor (who, by the way, I noticed upon my relisten also identifies himself as “The Counselor” in his first audio log; an incredibly weird decision for one counselor in an asylum full of other counselors that he mentions constantly to make if it has no significance), either. And, I'm sorry, but this will mean that she is yet another poor child who doesn't get a happy ending.

Point One: Her Name

We… we know that Ruth's other name is “Noone,” not “Six” nor “Alone,” guys. That alone is proof that she's neither of them, just like how knowing Otto's other name is “The Counselor” alone is proof against the theories that he's either The Doctor or Mono/The Thin Man.

From what I can tell, it looks like people who've lived in both worlds get a Human Name and what I'll call a “Nowhere Name” or a “Nightmare Name.”

“The Janitor” is for sure Roger's in LN1.

“The Doctor” seems to be “that celebrity doctor” from TSON's in LN2.

“The Counselor” is for sure Otto's in TSON and potentially LN3 if he shows up there.

“Noone” is for sure Ruth's.

Some might choose their Nowhere/Nightmare Name, some may be bestowed it, but it certainly looks to me like the only time someone gets multiple Nowhere/Nightmare Names (excluding The Candleman/Ferryman because, from what Otto said at the beginning of Ch5, he's like literally some sort of Eldritch god or personification of an abstract concept or something who probably doesn't even have a concrete True Physical Form seeing as he's described very differently by mythologies all over the world throughout history, “‘The Guardian At The Threshold,’ an archetype that parapsychologists have obsessed over for centuries. A mythic entity who's appeared in the stories of innumerable cultures. No matter their description, his roll is always the same: to confront anyone who dares cross into unseen worlds . . . The Candleman. The Ferryman. Indeed, The Guardian At The Threshold. An eidolon [googled definitions: ‘a specter or phantom; a ghost or elusive entity; an unsubstantial image; an image or representation of an idea; an apparition of some actual or imaginary entity, or an aspect of reality’] on the inside, determined to keep. Me. Out.” So, I think we can just assume that, because he's an ethereal being, everyone who encounters him perceives him varying degrees of differently [I mean, just look how difficult Noone found it to solidify her perception of him enough to describe him in the first place] and, unless their perceptions just happenstance into matching up enough or they decide to call him by a name they heard someone else use, they all call him something different and therefore, to use Tumblr terms: he's Spiders Georg and shouldn't be counted) is specifically in the case of kids surviving to adulthood in The Nowhere. Because, then, they transition from having a “nickname” type of Nowhere/Nightmare Name to having a “title” type, like Mono (ain't no way his parents put “Mono” on his birth certificate, that's definitely a nickname) growing into The Thin Man (an incredibly weird title, but a title nonetheless 🤷🏻‍♀️).

Sisi could easily be Six, or Raincoat Girl, or Portrait Girl (more likely Raincoat Girl or Portrait Girl), there's evidence for all three (but stronger for Raincoat Girl and Portrait Girl) and Otto/The Counselor never mentioned whatever her other name is, only “Sisi.” But, as I said, we know Ruth's other name: Noone!

Now, there is an unnamed girl that Noone is a little too similar to for it to be a coincidence: Spoon Girl (aka Girl With Pigtails, aka Nosebleed Girl, aka Hospital Girl, whatever you wanna call her) from the LN2 comics.

Point Two: Narrative Parallels & Matching Imagery

• Ruth/Noone: has an eye-looking “pea-size tumor on [her] right-sided amygdala,” as Otto said (“they maintain it's benign, despite the unusual ocular appearance”).

> Is “helped” to escape the asylum, Otto/The Counselor, and her tumor in the horrible, corrupting nightmare world that is The Nowhere by The Candleman/Ferryman after he brings her back and forth for a while, manipulating her into thinking The Nowhere is the lesser of the two evils.

• Spoon Girl: has a right-side nosebleed, which could mean Ruth/Noone was incorrect that living in The Nowhere would cure her of her tumor (not surprising, given that “ocular appearance.” Of course she couldn't escape it in its own domain) and now the cancer has spread to her nasal cavity (nosebleeds come up as a possible side effect of olfactory neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nerves that allow you to smell which starts growing in your nose and can spread into your brain. They could've researched that and thought it seemed perfectly reasonable that a tumor growing in the opposite direction would do the same exact thing)?

> Is “helped” to escape her hospital cell by an unseen person repeatedly pushing spoons under her door only to find that she's actually dug herself into an identical cell, all the way down to the hash marks she put on the walls presumably counting how many spoons she broke while digging. The door then opens to lure her to where she's found by The Doctor and, presumably, is either killed by him or “saved” from him by The Thin Man (if her Glitching Remains that Mono can find and absorb in the actual game are an indication that he attempted a rescue after the pair encountered each other through The Mall), likely turning her into a monster similar to Monster Six and locking her away somewhere until her tumor finally killed her.

Wouldn't it just wrap Ruth/Noone's story up in a positively hideous bow if, once she thought she'd escaped the horrors of her real life, she literally just found herself delivered into the hands of the very same man who traumatized her and got her face plastered all over the telly in the first place, where she basically lives through a metaphor that makes her realize what a terrible mistake she's made before she succumbs to whatever her final fate was (the latter option would mean also into the hands of someone so similar to Otto/The Counselor that the writers were able to use him to foreshadow how his part of her story would end)? 😬😢

If you need more proof, let's look at the TSON cover art…

Looks an awful lot like those bottom two hands are gripping pigtails, doesn't it (in exactly the wrong place for her to be Alone, might I add. Alone's pigtails stick up, Ruth/Noone's hang down)…? The fact they're also specifically covering the area where her bangs would be is pretty suspicious, as well… Now, let's compare her to Spoon Girl's concept art from the LN2 art book…

…Yeah, I think it's her. The face, head, shoulder, and collar shapes are much too similar for this series whose artists very much do not suffer from Same Face nor Same Body Syndrome when characters aren't meant to just be members of a faceless/masked/cloned throng. Hello, Ruth/Noone… R.I.P. 😔

[dontforgetyourmedstoday]

I want to thank you for your response — I searched your blog and went back weeks, and found so many without sources, and no mentions of you using creative Commons or free use images. And with two weeks of no response, I decided that that meant you were ignoring the message, and got angry — so many people steal artwork, and so many claim they can't find the source, and then I open tineye, and one sort change later, I have a source for it.

In hindsight I definitely should have waited longer. I'm sorry for that. And that art isn't mine, I just hate seeing unsourced art.

It may be beneficial to specify either in your pinned or in the posts that it's free use/creative Commons.

Thank you for your time, and thank you for this blog <3

Hello again Anon,

I've been thinking about how to reply to these messages for nearly a day now and I've spent more than an hour (make that 3 now) trying to write a reply. I've written and rewritten this multiple times. I'm finding it hard not to see these as a continuation of the accusation that I am deliberately and maliciously stealing other people's work so I'm going to take a step back and just say this:

Despite my early promise to myself that this would always be a safe space where people could anon with questions, queries, wins, worries, or whatever-related to health things, I'm turning off anons. Unfortunately, my various flavours of neurospiciness mean I will always want everyone's approval and for them to like me and so even if I don't respond publically I will still ruminate on things - for, well ever.

I'm going to let my current queue run out and then, most likely, won't be posting again - I may or may not deactivate the blog. This has been in the wind for a while now, I have found that something that was meant to be relaxing for me has become super stressful - particularly with feeling like I have to do it perfectly and not offend anyone, and make sure I give attribution (that I'm giving it to the right person), and add all possible triggers and warnings, include image descriptions, etc. etc.

While I agree with anon that attribution is important, I will not be going back through all my posts to add attribution in a format that works for everyone. Partially because this is Tumblr - the site renowned for being a complete dumpster fire to navigate and just use in general (I say this as someone who had some oranges I crocheted for my niece's Very Hungry Caterpillar present blocked during the great nipple witch hunt). But mostly I'm busy, permanently tired, and filled with forks (It's a variation on spoon theory people - not a swear!). However, if anyone wants to go through the posts and add attributions where they are missing or add them in ways that people on mobiles can see them - great - thanks :)

Lastly, let me just say be kind to yourselves and each other and,

Don't forget your meds today xxoo

[honeybeekao]

hi! always welcoming song recs and asks ♧

-Starlight / Dino / +many. ask if interested

-he/him + kit/kits (i like neos. use Any of them on me. close friends can use she/her on me 💙)

-okay with all gendered terms

-18

-i talk about being autistic and struggling with adhd a lot. and also fatigue sometimes

-legally blind. if i can't comprehend an image you send please be patient with me

-all posts ok to rb unless stated otherwise

-spam like/rb is encouraged

-i forget to use /p often but all affection is platonic.

-i swear and use all caps untagged, if you send an ask and are uncomfortable with that just lmk somewhere in the ask and i'll make sure to accommodate ya when answering.

-i try with image descriptions, but don't have the spoons everytime.

interests!! (* next to major ones)

-JJBA (mainly 5 and 7, i adore 4) *

-Ensemble Stars *

-Paradox Live *

-Pokemon (i LOVE gen 6)

-Sk8 the Infinity

-Breaking Bad

-BNHA (i don't touch the fandom anymore, haven't since last year)

-Zero Escape

-Ace Attorney (on T&T rn)

-Beyblade Metal Saga

-Danganronpa (love hate relationship)

-my little pony + eqg

-sonic

-the magnus archives

-project sekai

-Vocaloid

-Bandori

-puzzles like picross and sudoku...

fav chars are mama, kaoru, rei, izumi, chiaki, and kanata. i dont hate anyone in es. i also loooove bae and akyr. Big fan of noivern

i'm insane about madarei and izukao. sorry

DNFI if you're under 14, attack queer people for..being queer, are a dsmp fan, or post about incest.

-note; i dont go out of my way to harrass people because i think it's childish and Literally does more harm than good. if you make me uncomfortable i will block. just don't be weird to me. feel free to dm me about anything. if you're ever unsure about something or need reassurance, don't be afraid to message me

.

~tagging~

art: starlight doodles

writing: dino writes☆

random talking: dino wont shut up

music: star's playlist 🎵

singing: starlight singing (yeah im really creative with these /s)

aaaand that's about it! here's some of my art :] (my ao3 is tttodorokii, i write Sometimes. if you wanna check anything out. i write angst and hurt/comfort mostly)

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

Sorry I am not treating your post as less important, I was reblogging it to get eyes on it and to try to get tumblr to crowd source a tutorial from someone who knows how and has the spoons.

I recognize your post was a simple request to do it, but all the posts about it I see are a request to do it and I cannot ever find instructions anywhere on how in a way that's confirmed to work, and I was hoping someone could confirm a process. So there is usually a button to submit alt text, and if not there's html code that can be inserted into the post directly, is what I am getting from this?

Sometimes i just add text to a post describing the image but I have no way of knowing if it is "tagged" correctly, etc for the screen reader to acknowledge it as the alt text for the image, like as proper official alt text as a proper descriptor to a program, like the name of a string it would retrieve and output, which is why I was putting it in quotes. That's what I mean by "formatting", do we just add html to the post and then what is html that someone knows actually works on tumblr, because a lot of inserted html doesn't [I have tried].

These questions are rhetorical and to the larger audience, not me trying to grill you personally for answers. I am asking this of anyone who wants to answer on tumblr at large.

I have looked for a button on tumblr or an option and have never seen it, does someone [not to be passive aggressive, but to literally ask for someone who might need to be able to visually describe tumblr and knows where it is] know where the button is and can they add it to this post? Or to any post they see asking for people to add alt text, because the only reason I don't do it more habitually is I literally can't figure out how to. I am not saying that argumentatively, I am trying to give the literal reason it isn't happening more from my personal experience of the site.

I'm saying if someone wanted to figure out how this actually works on tumblr and the actual process of how to do it, and add that to the posts asking for alt text, someone who has the time and energy to figure it out, it might get a lot done. Not "more than your post" but as a helpful addition to all of these posts so that the people who only aren't doing it because they don't know how to get their answer.

I would have made a separate post asking if anyone knew how, but generally if I make a post asking questions myself they sit there with 0 notes forever and don't help anything. It seemed like asking the question where people would see it and could respond much more publicly might get more done.

The reason I didn't look it up is because I had before multiple times and gotten nowhere and I didn't have the energy, I was busy going through boxes and totes and am suffering with some cognitive symptoms at the moment, but since I'm typing this anyway, now, I tried again and it says this:

"After adding an image to your post, tap the 3 dots in the lower right corner to add alt text. The alt text should be a brief description of your image, as if you were describing it to someone over the phone, to make your post accessible to folks using a screen reader."

Which I was never able to do before because I can't find the circles they are talking about.

So let's try to confirm if this is updates and works!

The option doesn't show for me except as a transparent -now grey- circle in the bottom right and it took actual work to click on at all because of how skinny the image is, but it is not three dots and I am not sure it has always loaded properly for me before because I could never find it. It is showing as a grey shadow behind the red x button to close the image and I am not sure if it always does that or if it's the image dimensions, but it would explain me not being able to find it.

it should read: "A badly drawn image of 9 dots coloured red, orange, yellow, bright green, cyan, royal blue, purple and magenta, the last one being split between black and white. They are sloppy attempted circles by someone with poor coordination using a mouse"

Did that work? [anyone who wants to answer]

Is that the preferable process compared to:

[image id: A badly drawn image of 9 dots coloured red, orange, yellow, bright green, cyan, royal blue, purple and magenta, the last one being split between black and white. They are sloppy attempted circles by someone with poor coordination using a mouse"]

?

Which is what I usually see done on posts. Should we use both? Are other people having trouble finding the option/button to add alt text?

My frustration isn't at you, and was never intended to sound that way, if I sounded frustrated, it has always been that no one seeing -who knows how to describe the process- has been piping up to actually explain how anyone is supposed to actually go about adding alt text. I see posts all the time asking for it to be done, and I always reblog them to boost the issue, but -as a tech savvy person who can program and is good with computers- could not find a button or get a straight answer about how to, until now, which no one was adding to any of the posts.

It has been my thinking that it shouldn't be up to the visually impaired to know the exact process, because I am assuming they are not the ones ever actually adding the description, and may not even be able to see the site at all. The "someone" isn't me passive aggressively saying "you", it's me putting out a general call to help.

I was fully expecting some other seeing person would know the answer and do the work of explaining it to the class, so that someone in your position doesn't have to, but no one ever has.

For anyone else curious, it is supposed to be 3 white dots at the bottom right of the photo that only comes up if you mouse over it, and for me is a circle that ranges from grey to invisible, and if the options load at all, one of them is "update image description", which gives you a box to type in with some instruction. I personally just put plain text in the box and someone is probably going to tell me whether or not it worked.

Maybe part of my problem has been parts of tumblr refusing to load properly or at all for me, but if other people are unable to see the option at all, maybe staff could check on that and do something to at least optimize the page or prioritize it loading properly?

There was, up until just now, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere to actually input a description on this site other than just literally adding a text description under the image, which I figured would have to be denoted or 'tagged' a specific way if screen readers were going to catch it and realize it was a proper description of the image.

Part of the problem is that most people who don't use them do not know how screen readers work or how they are coded to function with the site, and the people requesting descriptions largely maybe don't know how visually hidden or -absent- the option to add alt text is, and I was trying to get this disconnect solved, because I figured that was the fastest rout to way more people adding proper alt text.

I literally have not seen that grey circle until today, but also sometimes the site just loads up blank for me for a half hour at a time and I was shadow banned for something like 3 years, so it might mostly be me. I just keep going "okay I have a banger of a description to add but WHERE" and I figured a lot of people were in the same boat as me.

Please forgive how horrifically this was recorded (the screen reader mutes itself in recordings, which made it entirely useless for this post, which required a second camera) but I wanted to show people what alt text Actually Does for screen readers because I think a lot more people would take the time to add it if they knew why.

This is how the default screen reader function built into my phone "reads" an image, one without alt text and one with.

(I can't add alt text description to videos, it seems, which feels a little ironic given the post.)

When the first image, without alt text, is selected by a screen reader, it just reads out "photo".

When the second image, with alt text, is selected, it reads out the alt text - in this case, "A blurry picture of a gray tabby cat sitting on a white carpeted floor.".

Being able to use alt text is far easier on screen readers because the image is a larger object to select - descriptions in plain text below an image are still helpful, but require enough vision to accurately select, and enough vision to know they're an image description to begin with.

So please, when possible, add alt text to photos, art, and screenshots you're uploading! A lot of phones can copy text from images now, which is how I add image IDs to other people's text heavy posts - there's really no reason to post a bunch of text heavy screencaps and not at least copy and paste the text into the alt text, and it makes a huge difference for accessibility.

Thank you! ^w^