Jan
10th
2014
Annotations: "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream" by Azusa, /Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire/ by Titanium Dragon · 6:03pm Jan 10th, 2014
Annotation fever is spreading!
Azusa has gone and annotated a short passage from Harlan Ellison's classic very very dark story "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream". Parts of it are thick with beautiful adverbs. He should be hearing from Harlan's lawyers shortly, so read it fast. I warn you that the full story is more nightmarish than anything I've written.
Titanium Dragon annotated excerpts from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, looking at "showy" vs. "telly" language, finding a lot of both, and explaining why telling makes more sense here than in The Last Unicorn.
I created a group for story and episode annotations: Story & Episode Annotation & Analysis. Let's hope it fares better than the other groups I've created.
This is one of those things where I follow the link, find out it's color-coded, and sigh as I close the tab.
Then again, it's meant for those with more mental capacity. I'm a mare of little brain.
1702551
Do you have a better suggestion for how to mark things out? Always willing to listen.
Odd. I read I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream, and it didn't affect me badly at all. I mean, yes, it is dark, but it is an academic sort of darkness. Or maybe I was a teenager and lacking in empathy.
Huh.
Meh, I'll just offer to buy a copy of the anthology for every sale that he "lost" if anything should happen.
1702594
I'm color blind, which is essentially the only reason it's an issue for me. I tend to write off color information subconsciously, so reading something with color coding as an integral part makes it harder for me to internalize the information, even if I can process the colors involved. (I have a number of other defects in terms of my learning strategies and coping processes.)
Having said that, there are techniques that can make coding systems more friendly to the visually defective, but mostly it's things like "don't use red and green together, pick one or the other" and "don't use similar tones of colors that can be easily confused by the atypically trichromatic or dichromatic" (i.e., don't use pale blue and pale lavender, since a viewer unable to see red can't always tell them apart).
The Round Stable did a piece on this, actually, and I found it enlightening. I can tell the differences between the typical trichromatic frames and the 'dichromatic treated' frames, but only with real attention. Pinkie does look pink to me, but it's a barely-pink thing, not a vibrant pink (because I don't see reds correctly). Pink and gray in general are frequently indistinguishable for me or nearly so.
Colors just aren't as big a part of my life. (Every now and then it causes problems. For a while I had a few nasty nicknames because of shades of lipstick that I thought were perfectly appropriate but turned out to be, well, borderline advertising for johns. Color coordinating my clothing is vaguely nightmarish, but that's why I've learned to grill other people about that particular aspect of my clothing a bit more.)
It's something I've gotten used to not having access to, overall.
1702709
Ah, I see. Well, fair enough I suppose.
Though mine is not wholly such; at the end I discuss what I went into, and the most important bits were bolded by me rather than using colors, though you'd miss out on some of the other information.
I would have used italics instead of orange but, alas, the text actually included italics already.
The show's palette is extremely striking though; the colorful nature of MLP is a major part of the show's visual nature. Kind of sucks you can't really see that.
Incidentally, do the "Add Comment" and "Preview comment" buttons actually look like they're different colors to you?
1702842
I'm planning to take a look at yours afterwards, but the first one put me off because of the color legend. Usually anything with more than two or three colors rapidly becomes beyond me.
And yes, they do look different. I'm seeing a jewel-tone red on the left and a jewel-tone blue on the right, roughly. Which is actually an example of good interface color choice, because red and blue are distinguishable by all except the achromats (i.e., folks who see no color information at all, just shades of gray).
1702709
Not sure if this would help you, but there is an add-on for Firefox that will show tags around colored text. I can't remember its name, since I only remember a color-blind friend using it a few years back, but back then it seemed pretty useful for situations like this.
1702995
Thank you! I hadn't heard of such a tool, but I suspect it'd be quite helpful. There are a number of tools I use for certain graphic work needs, but it really never occurs to me to try to find a way to handle things like colored text. This is the kind of thing I should think about using!
"Description isn't somethin' you analyze, y'just do it."
media2.firstshowing.net/firstshowing/img7/monstersuniversity-mike-sulley-classroom-full.jpg
This has all been a pretty interesting exercise. The only reason I'm not jumping to join this group is because I'm scared of being overwhelmed by my feed on this site.