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Creating Accessible PDFs: My Learning Journey—Part 1

Sometime toward the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was “voluntold” to be part of a universal design committee at my job—a prospect that held a *little* bit of interest for me given my background in psychology and my current position as an editor/writer for our university’s instructional design team, but it wasn’t really my passion. Nonetheless I am happy I was steered into this because I have learned *so much* that is directly applicable to instructional design—namely: the goal to bring all our digital instructional assets into ADA compliance as a general best practice across all university departments.

This isn’t to say that none of our collateral was accessible before; like any college, of course we have a team dedicated to guiding and supporting students with disabilities that includes ensuring that all the course and other learning materials they need for their programs are accessible. But this requires a team to do a lot of on-the-fly PDF remediation and other workarounds, whereas if we simply start creating all our assets in an accessible format going forward, we might not need an entire team dedicated to transcribing videos by hand and testing PDFs with screen readers for every new student who presents a need.

The first issue is that making digital assets accessible when you don’t really know what you’re doing is no small task. It’s a lot like coding in that you have to do a lot of trial-and-error and testing of creative workarounds depending on the level of interactivity within a specific PDF.

The Project

The first PDF I was tasked to “just make it read” included a TON of interactivity. It is a pamphlet about how to identify and prevent student plagiarism, and since we are a school with some unconventional programs, such as recording arts, audio engineering, and filmmaking, there is a plethora of ways in which students might plagiarize, however unintentionally. To help illustrate some of these types of plagiarism, the PDF in question includes links to audio samples relating to audio recording and digital marketing. These were originally created in Flash, which—if you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud user—you are aware by now is no longer supported by Adobe. That means that we needed to do some creative workarounds to get the audio files to play at all within our current PDF without the use of Flash, which was an ordeal in and of itself.

The Process

Luckily, all staff, faculty, and students have an account with LinkedIn Learning, which hosts this incredibly thorough 5-hour crash course on Creating Accessible PDFs with Chad Chelius. While this course covers the bulk of what you need to know to even begin the process, he has another one that goes more in depth when encountering specific scenarios: Advanced Accessible PDFs with Chad Chelius. If you happen to have access to LinkedIn Learning, I highly recommend these courses! There is also a Facebook Group dedicated to this topic.

What I learned immediately is that our team is already at an advantage because we already use defined character and paragraph styles in Word and InDesign [cue Bon Jovi’s chorus line “Whoa, we’re halfway there!”], so an exported PDF with the basic “Create Tagged PDF” and “Use Structure for Tab Order” options checked—as long as it’s flowing text with defined heading levels—should result in an exported PDF that is more or less already accessible.

Of course, this same magic won’t work so seamlessly on something that employs a lot of design elements, tables and figures, and interactivity. While many of the accessibility settings can be set up in InDesign and any source documents, such as Word, Powerpoint, Bridge, or Excel, there will always need to be some additional remediation done in the PDF to ensure it reads as intended and to tweak a few things where InDesign has limitations.

Stay Tuned!

I will be using this blog to post about my learning journey into how to create PDF documents that are accessible to screen readers, sharing useful tips I encounter along the way. This is mostly to help me familiarize myself with the process and aid learning. If you have any additional tips [or corrections!] on the specific topics I’ll be posting about, please leave them in the comments! I’m hoping these posts will help others as much as me.

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The Little Mermaid: Disney Changes and Omissions That Might Ruin Your Childhood

The Little Mermaid is a Disney favorite of 80s and 90s girls. What’s not to love about Ariel and her fabulous red hair? We all wanted to be mermaids; we all sang the songs in the shower and attempted to brush our hair with a fork (don’t try it; it doesn’t work). We couldn’t figure out why Ariel wanted to leave her life beneath the sea, but we were rooting for her to marry the handsome Prince Erik, whom she’d rescued from an ill-fated birthday party at sea.

That part of the story is the same in both the original Danish tale by Hans Christian Andersen and Disney’s 1989 film version.

As a child, my grandma gifted me the 1975 Japanese animated adaptation on VHS (I highly recommend it). Despite a few small differences—including that the little mermaid dies and goes to heaven after she jumps from the ship rather than becoming sea foam—this less popular film follows the original story fairly accurately.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I realized not many people know the original story or have seen the 1975 film. A professor one day, to the horrified gasps of my millennial classmates, recounted the traumatic un-Disney ending of the Hans Christian Andersen version during a lecture:  ” . . . so the little mermaid loved the prince and couldn’t bring herself to kill him, so she threw the dagger into the ocean and jumped in after it, where she died and became sea foam.”

Although I’d seen the 1975 movie many times, I’d never actually read the original Danish tale. So recently I decided to read it. I was struck by it so much that I then read it a few more times and revisited both animated movies. It became a bit of a weird obsession. In this article, I outline the most significant differences between the original and Disney’s tale (with a few callouts to the 1975 version as well).

Here goes!

Who’s Ariel?

None of the characters have names in Andersen’s version, and the little mermaid is referred to as thus throughout the narrative. There’s also the Sea King, the sea witch, the grandmother and sisters, and the prince. No additional ocean-dwelling companions, Flounder, Sebastian, or otherwise, accompany the little mermaid at any point. Instead of singing fun songs with her fishy friends, the little mermaid tends to her garden in the sea palace. Notably, she plants only red flowers and has a statue of a prince that she’s fond of staring at, and behind which she planted a rose-colored weeping willow. Unlike the extroverted Ariel, the original little mermaid is is described as “a strange child, quiet and thoughtful.” Like Ariel, she is the youngest of six sisters and described as being the fairest and having the most beautiful singing voice of all the mermaids.

In the Japanese adaptation, the little mermaid’s name is Marina. She’s blonde and has a dolphin companion named Fritz.

Different Rules about the Surface

In the Disney version, Ariel breaks her controlling father’s rule to never go to the surface. In Andersen’s tale, going to the surface is a rite of passage among adolescent mermaids once they turn fifteen. The original little mermaid, being the youngest, waits patiently for her turn, listening with quiet wonder as each sister tells of her experiences on the surface. As the novelty wears off, the sisters mostly lose interest in the world above the surface—except to occasionally attempt to lure unlucky sailors to their death:

Before the approach of a storm, and when they expected a ship would be lost, they swam before the vessel, and sang sweetly of the delights to be found in the depths of the sea. … But the sailors could not understand the song, … and these things were never to be beautiful for them; for if the ship sank, the men were drowned, and their dead bodies alone reached the palace of the Sea King.

The original little mermaid’s first above-the-sea experience pretty much mirrors Ariel’s and Marina’s: she sees a  party on a ship and watches mesmerized as the people dance to the music. She sees the prince and becomes transfixed. After a hurricane comes out of nowhere and she sees the prince get knocked unconscious by falling debris, the little mermaid rescues him and swims him to shore.

In the Disney version, Ariel sings to Erik on the beach in an effort to wake him but has to leave when his two manservants arrive. In the original, the little mermaid leaves the prince when bells ring from a nearby church, followed by the emergence of a bunch of girls who start walking toward the beach. The little mermaid hides behind a rock in the bay and watches as a dark-haired girl goes to him and holds his head until he wakes up, and the little mermaid goes home, satisfied that the prince is OK but unhappy that he had no idea it was she who saved him.

Motivation for Becoming Human

While it’s true that the little mermaid falls in love with the prince after rescuing him in all versions, that isn’t the only reason she wants to marry him. Shortly after rescuing the prince, the little mermaid has quite the existential conversation with her grandmother in which she is informed that mermaids have no soul.

We have not immortal souls, we shall never live again. … Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever. … they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see.

It’s not so bad, says her grandmother, because mermaids live very long, carefree lives and can grow as old as 300.

She goes on to explain that it is possible for a mermaid to obtain an immortal soul, but to do so, she must first obtain the unconditional love of a human:

Unless a man were to love you so much that you were more to him than his father or mother … and he promised to be true to you here and hereafter, then his soul would glide into your body and you would obtain a share in the future happiness of mankind.

That’s some heavy stuff for a little kid to grasp, so it’s not surprising that Disney left it out.

The Sea Witch Had No Ulterior Motives

Since the drama about mermaids having no souls is arguably a bit much for an audience of tots, Disney turned to the sea witch as an easy villain, named her Ursula, and gave her reasons to hate Ariel and want to sabotage her.

Ariel’s father, King Triton, had banished Ursula from society because of her use of black magic in an effort to dethrone him and rule the ocean as queen, so when we meet Ursula, she is living in exile in a creepy cave infested with evil eels and sea snakes. Her goal to one day dethrone King Triton is not exactly a secret, nor is her jealousy of Ariel, so why Ariel would take such a risk over a guy she’d never even spoken to was beyond me. The original little mermaid’s motivation for becoming human is what makes Andersen’s tragic tale so much more compelling.

Ursula’s deal is that Ariel can live as a human for three days. If she can get prince Erik to kiss her before the end of the three days, she will remain a human; otherwise, she will revert to mermaid form and belong to Ursula forever.

The sea witch, like Ursula, lives in her own super scary lair surrounded by unsavory, serpent-like sea minions, but the reason for her own isolation is unstated and presumably self-imposed. Like Ursula and her “poor, unfortunate souls,” the sea witch makes black-magic deals to help unfortunate merfolk achieve their desires for a price. Despite being an obvious misanthrope, she has no beef with the little mermaid’s father or the little mermaid herself.

Controversial therapeutic techniques notwithstanding, the sea witch at least makes an effort to talk the little mermaid out of wanting to become human, warning her that events are unlikely to work out in her favor and bluntly explaining the consequences should she fail to win the prince’s heart:

The first morning after he marries another your heart will break, and you will become foam on the crest of the waves.

The sea witch has no motivation to betray the little mermaid and never interferes in her relationship with the prince. In fact, the sea witch isn’t even mentioned again until she later accepts the little mermaid’s sisters’ hair in exchange to help them save the little mermaid’s life (more on that later).

Every Step is Agony

Beyond some early stumbling to get upright and take her first awkward steps on land, Ariel experiences no ill effects from her newly sprouted human legs, but Andersen’s little mermaid isn’t so lucky. She endures life as a human not only voicelessly but with excruciating  pain at every step. The sea witch warned of this as well:

No dancer will ever tread so lightly; but at every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow.

Fun.

The Sea Witch Cut Out Her Tongue!

Yeah—like with a knife:

Well, have you lost your courage? Put out your little tongue that I may cut it off as my payment; then you shall have the powerful draught.

In the Disney version, Ursula just sort of magics Ariel’s voice into a conch shell for reasons that should be obvious.

The 1975 animated version leaves this part to the imagination; we hear the sea witch say she needs Marina’s voice, and the next thing we know, Marina’s swimming out of the lair voiceless, and Fritz is waiting outside lamenting that he “heard everything.”

The Prince Never Loved Her

At least not like that. As it turns out, the original prince can’t be won over by a hot bod  and “expressive eyes” alone, although he does care for her…

The prince said she should remain with him always, and she received permission to sleep at his door, on a velvet cushion.

… like one would care for a dog.

And then he leads her on with a bunch of quasi-dates that any fifteen-year-old girl can reasonably be expected to misconstrue, which she happily endures in excruciating pain secretly:

He had a page’s dress made for her, that she might accompany him on horseback. … She climbed with the prince to the tops of high mountains; and although her tender feet bled so that even her steps were marked, she only laughed …

Ariel’s and Prince Erik’s courtship, for the sake of little girls everywhere, went down a little differently. Ariel figures out some way to sort of quasi-communicate with Erik using adorable gestures, and he starts to fall for her regardless of her muteness. A fun song and a romantic canoe ride ensues.

The Other Woman

One day, the prince informs the little mermaid that his parents want him to travel to a neighboring kingdom to meet “a beautiful princess.” He tells the little mermaid that he doesn’t want to marry the princess; that the only one he can really love is the beautiful dark-haired girl who found him on the beach—the one who saved his life.

‘I cannot love her. … If I were forced to choose a bride, I would rather choose you, my dumb foundling, with those expressive eyes.’ And then he kissed her rosy mouth, played with her long waving hair, and laid his head on her heart, while she dreamed of human happiness and an immortal soul.

So the prince grudgingly goes to meet the princess, and it’s her—the dark-haired girl from the beach! They lock eyes, and the wedding ceremony begins that same day.

Now, this really sucks for the little mermaid, who’s legit about to be sea foam, but she loves the prince and doesn’t want him to know how miserable she is, so she kisses his hand and smiles. She participates as a bridesmaid in the ceremony and dances more gracefully and beautifully than anyone can all throughout the wedding reception, smiling and laughing atop her bleeding feet, the pain of which she hardly noticed with the knowledge of her imminent and permanent death:

All present cheered her with wonder. … Her tender feet felt as if cut with sharp knives, but she cared not for it; a sharper pang had pierced through her heart. … This was the last evening she should ever see the prince, for whom she had forsaken her kindred and her home; she … suffered unheard-of pain daily for him, while he knew nothing of it. … An eternal night, without a thought or a dream, awaited her: she had no soul and now she could never win one.

Disney’s other woman is Ursula disguised as a dark-haired girl—a callout to the original dark-haired girl?—named Vanessa, who uses Ariel’s voice and hypnotizes Erik to marry her instead of Ariel. With the help of Ariel’s fishy friends, however, Ursula’s plan is thwarted, her disguise is discovered, and Ariel gets her voice back in a dramatic scene in which Ariel’s singing snaps Erik out of his hypnosis and he identifies her as the one who sang to him on the beach that morning.

Ariel and Erik are finally about to kiss when Ariel turns back into a mermaid and is taken by Ursula. King Triton shows up and offers Ursula his trident in exchange for Ariel’s freedom, which Ursula uses to make herself all huge and terrifying and tries to kill everyone including Erik. Erik then valiantly impales Ursula with a chunk of shipwreck, and the Disney trope is complete: the evil villain is dead, the spell is broken, the prince and sea-princess marry, and everyone lives happily ever after.

In Andersen’s version, the little mermaid is standing alone and heartbroken above deck long after everyone aboard the ship is in bed awaiting sunrise and the oblivion it will bring her when she hears her sisters’ voices. She sees their heads rise between the waves, their once-alluring hair cut up to their ears. They had heard of the prince’s wedding—and their sister’s fate—and went to the sea witch for help:

We have given our hair to the witch … to obtain help for you, that you may not die to-night. She has given us a knife. … Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the heart of the prince … and you will be once more a mermaid. … Haste, then; he or you must die before sunrise.

So the little mermaid goes below deck to the prince’s cabin and finds them asleep, his  bride’s head resting on his breast, and he speaks his bride’s name in his dreams. The little mermaid then flings the knife out into the ocean, and red bubbles that look like blood rise from the sea where fell, and the little mermaid plunges herself into the sea to die.

But—and now this is where the Victorian-era technique of guilt-tripping children into behaving comes in. An alternative ending was later added in which the little mermaid does not become sea foam but instead rises up and becomes a “daughter of the air,” a spirit with the ability to eventually obtain an immortal soul following about 300 years of  servitude to the good of mankind.

Additionally, well-behaved children alone have the power to decrease the daughters of the airs’ length of servitude by being good little children, as one companion spirit tells the little mermaid in the new ending:

“For every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. . . . for we can count one year less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial!”

You better be good, kid, you’re denying other littler mermaids their eternal souls!

Accessible PDFs Part 3: Web-Based Solution

As you can probably tell from the title, we ultimately decided that a web-based solution would best serve this particular product given the different types of media examples. That doesn’t mean that an accessible PDF isn’t still useful, but they are better served for simple documents composed of running text and, at most, a some tables, bullet lists, and hyperlinks in terms of interactivity and formatting. If you want to embed any type of audio/video media, a web-based solution might be the better option.

My only gripe is that it took me over a month of learning and wracking my brain for a solution before the Occam’s razor solution hit me all at once one day: our in-house LMS was recently overhauled to include a slew of new accessibility features in its already intuitive and user-friendly editing client.

The LMS allows users to directly embed document files, such as PDFs and Word files, as well as images, audio, and video files. It also supports alt text and different heading levels.

Testing it Out

It was a slow week for our team, and I didn’t have anything pressing on my to-do list, so I set to work building the content in a sort of “playground” or edit-only section in the LMS; I wanted to make sure that everything I needed to solve my most pressing issues would even be possible first before presenting the idea to the team.

I started with the biggest issue: ever since Flash Player stopped being a thing, we struggled to get the audio files to play in the PDF even before encountering the accessibility issue. We were able to get the audio to play in an inaccessible PDF through some creative maneuvering previously, but that didn’t solve the issue of getting the audio to play for students navigating using a screen reader. After much Googling, re-reading of various accessible PDF forums, and asking members of the Accessible PDFs Facebook group, the best solution I could glean was to host the audio files externally and link out to them from the PDF.

While this solution sounded workable, it also struck me as a frankly annoying user experience. Really it should’ve struck me then that we could simply host the entire thing online, but it was almost as if I forgot the LMS existed. To be fair to myself, I’m not faculty, so while I have used the LMS in the past, our team sticks mainly to creating things in Word and Adobe.

Our LMS supports MP3 and WAV files, so I first checked to see what file format our audio clips were in. They are WAV files. I dragged and dropped to upload, and it went off without a hitch! The button works, and they are navigable via screen reader.

Fast-forward to the final product: all media files are embedded and navigable, video transcripts have been uploaded, CC has been activated in the Vimeo links, content has been edited where needed for this new format, and everything is looking and working flawlessly. We present our solution to the Liberal Arts team. Their issue is that there’s too much scrolling, and students might get fatigued. Ugh. Back to the drawing board!

So now our designer is trying a different accessible format whose abilities really blow Acrobat Pro out of the water—a reflowable ePub made in InDesign. This requires a bit of coding knowledge, so we’ll need to learn and consult with someone else on staff who knows more about coding than we do. Stay tuned for how that turns out!

Accessible PDFs Part 2: The Project in Progress

I am in way over my head. I can do this!

Just when I was starting feel so confident. It’s just gonna take some creative thinking!

But I could use some help…

The project

It is a ten-page interactive PDF describing different types of plagiarism and includes multiple examples of how to properly cite various types of sources. All ten pages are littered with hyperlinks to outside references and parenthetical citations in APA format. A lot of the things that need to translate via a screen reader include special characters (in a programming coding example), audio files (in a music composition example and a radio advertisement example), and images of sheet music and print advertisements.

I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’ve been watching courses on LinkedIn Learning and trying to wing it. I’m going through feelings of confidence one minute followed by hopelessness the next. Could there have possibly been a more complicated document to hand over to an accessibility newbie with instructions to “just make it read”? It sounds so simple! And yet…

The original PDF, in addition to what’s described above, is laid out in a magazine style; there’s horizontal lines being used for design purposes, pull quotes, boxes of “quick tips” sprinkled throughout, and images galore. Obviously most of this stuff is not necessary to understanding the actual content and only serves to make it “pretty” and give the information some breathing room between points to aid in navigation for sighted users.

To use this PDF as is and remediate it to be accessible would be a nightmare. The sheer number or useless [to a nonsighted person] design elements that would need to be artifacted in the PDF or InDesign, and the amount of logical reordering of the content that would need to take place to make it make sense would be a monumental task for a team of just me and one coworker who is also brand new to this.

So, since we were [thank God!] the original creators of the file, I was able to go back to the original Word doc—which already had defined paragraph styles applied—and make some basic tweaks to at least just make it readable as a logically flowing document. All imagery that served no contextual purpose was removed and alt text added for the images that are necessary. Lovely; it reads.

Heads up! If you’re using the Read Aloud feature in Word to try to test things out as you go, it will not read your alt text. You’re just gonna have to test that out in the PDF [or InDesign if you’re placing in there afterward—get it? After Word?]

Hurdle 1: Audio Files

With the discontinuation of Flash last year, I thought this was going to be our biggest issue, but it turns out we can just place them as buttons in the PDF with alt text instructing students to click the button to hear the audio examples.

Update: This actually might not be possible, but a possible alternative is to host the audio files online and link out. This idea will require collaboration from our Production department.

Hurdle 2: Chunks of Code

This is the part that has me really scratching my head. To preface, I am not a programmer. Beyond some standard HTML and that one time I dabbled through half of a MOOC about Python on Coursera, I’m not very adept at understanding random chunks of code or how to explain in a visual way what’s being shown. I also know that certain things like spaces vs. tab characters and line breaks vs. hard returns carry special meaning in this arena, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the subtle differences from looking at an image of some code with no “nonprint characters” showing.

While the code itself can be retyped from the image as live text, a large portion of it includes special characters, which most screen readers will not read. Most popular screen readers, such as JAWS and NVDA, have “verbosity settings” in which users can set the reader to read all punctuation, but I have yet to be able to test these features because 1.) we don’t have access to JAWS, which isn’t free, and 2.) NVDA, while open source and free, is Windows only, and our whole team uses Macs [I don’t even own a PC, or at least not one that’s reliable and up-to-date].

The best idea I’ve been able to come up with *so far* is to make an audio file of an actual programmer reading these examples out loud in a way that will be clear to those student cohorts. We could then possibly host the file online and link out to it. The same solution might work for the citation-formatting examples [and would presumably sound better and easier to understand than the weird AI voice].

In the meantime, I’ve been searching for blogs specifically by nonsighted computer programmers in an effort to figure out what tools they rely on the most and what accessibility features and methods work best for blind programmers/coders/computer science students, etc. to see if I can glean some more helpful ideas.

Also, if anyone is reading this and just so happens to have personal experience, links to blogs or other resources, or is part of the community I am desperately trying to serve, I would 1000% welcome and love the help! Please comment your insight! This is such an underserved community, and I really want to help get our institution fully compliant in all collateral, not just the ones that students specifically ask for via accommodations requests.

Anne Rice’s Passing Part 2

As I continue to grieve my favorite author’s death, I’ve now entered a new stage in which I’m grateful that she lived as long as she did and was therefore able to gift us such a vast collection of books spanning multiple arenas of the gothic genre.

I find myself also thinking of two of my other favorites, Shirley Jackson, who died in her 40s, and Flannery O’Connor, who died at just 18, just barely getting started and already with so much talent and potential. They both had so many more fascinating tales of the uncanny and unsettling to tell us when they were taken too soon.

Had they both lived as long as Anne Rice [80], I wonder about the progression and evolution of their works. Would we have been able to watch them struggle with and then reconcile—or ultimately reject—their religious beliefs through their work like Anne? Would they have used the internet or other means to engage with fans like Anne, or mostly chosen to stay out of the spotlight? [Shirley Jackson was famously agoraphobic, but the internet might’ve been a place where she could’ve felt less anxious]. Would their styles have changed with the passing decades that saw such significant transformation since they were prominent in the 50s?

I’m sad but excited to celebrate her life in New Orleans next year. And though I wish she could’ve lived at least as long as Betty White is and keep telling us more stories, I am grateful that we were graced with her as long as we were, and I’m sure she is taking copious notes in whatever realm she’s in currently to inform her next series, in whatever form that takes.

“What a ride you took us on, kid.”

Per Christopher Rice’s Facebook post on Anne Rice’s personal page, that’s what her younger sister, Karen, said to her after saying her final goodbyes when she died of complications resulting from a stroke over the weekend. I wrote that line at the top of this week’s page in my little agenda planner. It really was quite a wild ride—one that helped shape so many aspects of my identity and one that is the reason why I am obsessed with reading, and with reading [and watching] period dramas in particular.

No one could take me on a visual journey quite like Anne. No one.

To read one of her books meant to literally walk the streets of the New Orleans Garden District, or 1800s Paris, or ancient Rome, or the Holy Land during the time of Jesus—among other stunning and thoroughly researched settings.

I’ve never been one to get all crushed over a celebrity death, but this one hit me hard. After seeing Interview with the Vampire in theaters with my mom and grandma when it came out in ’94, I was obsessed. As soon as it came out on VHS, I had to have it and watched it over and over. A couple years later, at 12, I finally felt confident enough to pull my mom’s worn paperback book of the same name off the shelf and get the whole, real story and was hooked forever after.

As a hyperlexic child, reading came easy to me. Unfortunately, comprehension often did not. I’ve always had a tendency to zone out while reading, even while reading things I enjoy reading. Once I realize I’ve been doing it, it’s frustrating because I have to go back and try to figure out the last thing I actually remember reading.

This never happened to me while reading an Anne Rice book. [Ok, so maybe it did at a few points somewhere in the middle of The Witching Hour; there’s a lot of dry family history throughout the middle of that beast of a genealogical family drama!], but that’s it. Her writing was just so immersive as to immediately pull me in, like I was being physically transported through space and time.

This news was the first thing I saw after checking my email in the wee morning hours of my 37th birthday. I had barely taken my first sip of coffee and stared gape-mouthed at my phone unsure if I was seeing correctly. In 2003, when Blood Canticle had just been released, I’d planned to meet her at our local Barnes ‘N Noble for a book-signing tour. But I was 18 and a high school senior, and something came up. “It’s ok,” I thought, “I’ll catch the next one. She tours a lot!”

But I never did catch the next one.

That will forever be a regret of mine now.

Rest well, Anne. Thank you for my formative years; your words made them beautiful and immensely more tolerable.

Obligatory Pandemic Post

I’ve more or less ignored this blog since the COVID-19 pandemic began—er, not so much ignored it as became so overwhelmed every time I opened up a blank page to write that I would stare for an hour and nothing would come out—or what I did produce didn’t meet my standards. This post might not be any different, but alas, I’ll give it a solid try.

The overwhelm come primarily in what, exactly, to address, and whether or not I even should. There’s so much. So much happened in 2020 that it almost feels like to choose one topic to begin with is to, however inadvertently, rate them in order of importance. In that sense, one could argue I’ve had anxiety in feeling a need to censor myself in such socially fraught times, and the fact is that wouldn’t be untrue. But it also wouldn’t be the only reason.

Another is the unshakable feeling of “who gives a s**t about my experience?” To be honest, aside from the regular stressors that come along with a person’s daily routine becoming suddenly and completely upended for the unforeseeable future and the normal effect of living in a prolonged state of social isolation and a general need for more vitamin D, I haven’t been particularly impacted by the pandemic, at least not financially. Which brings me back to who gaf about me? But I suppose we all have free will, and no one is being forced to read my admittedly disorganized thoughts, so move forward at your own will, I guess.

Because I’ve spent so much freaking time in my house for the last year, I’ve had a lot of time to read a lot of things and form a lot of opinions; I’ve also changed a lot of previous opinions based on new information as well as further solidified a few I’d held since I was a teenager or younger—namely that we need more than two legitimate political parties if we are to stand a chance of avoiding at least some type of civil war. At the very least, we can’t go on like this, with both sides becoming increasingly radicalized and so many families, long-term friendships, and other relationships being destroyed over the inherently divisive nature of a government controlled by only two vastly (and growing vaster) different legitimately recognized political parties. But what do I know; I have a graduate degree in psychology, not political science.

Emotionally, this year has been a roller-coaster. I’ve never been too prone to depression, but there were some entire weeks when I couldn’t stop intermittently weeping throughout the day. I had to go on a full news hiatus for a couple months because I sank into a deep depression that every story had me crying in frustration, and they were hard to avoid even with a social media timeline meticulously and strategically curated to only show me content about cute animals, music, and special interest groups. Everything from the disinformation to the baffling hate and vitriol from both sides, the memes intended to misinform and belittle each other for every difference in opinion… And most frustrating of all is that a lot of these people debasing each other in endless comment-thread wars actually agreed on many of the same issues but disagreed on the semantics lobbyists use to gaslight people. Just think of how the names of bills and proposals and political hashtags mislead:

  • Patriot Act (early 2000s): Implied one who did not support it was unpatriotic, which was basically a slur in immediate post-9/11 times; denied 4th Amendment rights to citizens
  • #DefundThePolice: Implies supporters want to “fire all the police,” while a more transparent hashtag might be #HireMoreSocialWorkers
  • Black Lives Matter: Easy target from white supremacists; really means “Black lives matter too”
  • Not quite related, but don’t even get me started on identity politics. It’s simply getting out of control and leading to more violence toward the LGBTQ+ community, which was definitely not its intent at all.

Social media has been one of the few ways to connect to people during this time since I’ve historically had a back track record with reaching out to people on my own, but at the same time, it has been depressing seeing everyone’s posts about how they’ve had to block and unfriend so many people they were otherwise close with over differences in ideology. I have a lot of connections with people whose beliefs I vehemently disagree with, but not “muting” or otherwise cutting them out of my life is essential to understanding where people who disagree with you are coming from. Also: I know they’re otherwise perfectly “good” people, wo why TF would I cut a good person out of my life because they voted for whomthefuckever? It’s asinine.

If we are going to live together in this diverse society and be tolerant, we need to be respectful and tolerant of everyone’s point of view if we’re ever going to make progress toward solutions that work for most (if not all, which is simply not possible) people. It’s just… so frustrating that we can’t see that we’re dividing ourselves by continuing to spew bile at each other instead of listening, reflecting, and carefully considering that other peoples’ life experiences have and deserve merit.

And… this rambling, incoherent summary of how I feel about some of the main things that went on during the time that I’ve been avoiding writing about it is the reason I’ve been avoiding writing about it. Every time I stop to try to form a coherent expression of … just … all the things: straight-up word salad. If I attempt to go back and edit this, I won’t even end up posting it at all, so here goes! You honestly deserve a prize if you’ve made it this far.

Student Loan Progress: What We Know So Far

US DOE Official Update: March 20

Edited March 21, 2020 to add current information
As of Friday, March 20, the US Department of Education formally announced that “all borrowers with federally held student loans will automatically have their interest rates set to 0% for a period of at least 60 days. In addition, each of these borrowers will have the option to suspend their payments for at least two months to allow them greater flexibility during the national [COVID-19] emergency.”

President Trump had originally promised at his March 13 Rose Garden address to halt all student loan interest for the unforeseeable future, so the addition of the ability to  temporary defer payments comes as a huge relief to borrowers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic or financial hardship of any kind for any reason.

“Right now, everyone should be focused on staying safe and healthy, not worrying about their student loan balance growing,” said Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The “administrative forbearance” granted by the DOE includes, for any borrower who requests one via their loan servicer, “will be in effect for a period of at least 60 days, beginning on March 13, 2020” and authorizes “automatic suspension of payments for any borrower more than 31 days delinquent as of March 13, 2020, or who becomes more than 31 days delinquent.”

Borrowers who can continue to make payments, however, definitely should, and take advantage of this temporary halt on interest accrual. For borrowers whose accounts have amassed years or decades of interest that has been capitalized—applied to the principal—the lack of interest accrual during this time offers an opportunity to pay down much more of that interest than usual for those who can still afford to make payments. For those able, making extra payments during this time would be especially advantageous, especially when targeting individual loans with the highest interest rates.

Unfortunately, payments made during this time will not go directly to the principal balance until “all interest accrued prior to the president’s March 13 announcement is paid,” so it’s a little less helpful for borrowers with many years of capitalized interest.

Original Post from March 14

If you’re one of the millions of people buried in student loans or being crushed by  interest capitalization, you’re not alone, and you’re hoping that the government might take steps that will enable you to dig your way out of this seemingly bottomless hole the same way they bailed out big banks and automakers in response to the 2008 recession.

Democratic politicians have been calling for various student loan-debt relief programs to help the 44.7 million American student loan borrowers. With Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders calling to cancel all $1.64 trillion of the US’s student loan debt with no provisions by taxing Wall Street transactions and Joe Biden’s plan for a more generous and efficient income-based repayment plan system, either choice would definitely feel like a win for student loan borrowers with the only remaining question being the likelihood of implementation for either plan.

What Is Joe Biden’s Student Loan Relief Plan?

Biden’s offers a greater chance to garner bipartisan support while greatly benefiting current borrowers by capping monthly payments at 5 percent of discretionary income (current repayment plans charge between 10 and 15 percent) over $25,000 of the loans with forgiveness after 20 years of responsible payment. Borrowers who earn less than $25,000/year would not have to make payments while their income remains below that threshold, and interest would not accrue during this deferment. Additionally, the remaining balance forgiven after the 20-year repayment period plan would be tax-free, whereas current income-based repayment plans charge income tax on the remaining balance that often results in a huge, unexpected tax bill for borrowers.

What’s Being Done Right Now to Address Student Debt?

On Friday, March 13, President Trump promised during the Rose Garden address a pause to all interest on federal student loans during his National State of Emergency declaration in response to the novel Coronavirus, “and that will be until further notice.” This “interest waiver” will apply automatically to students with federal student loans only, but at this time, many questions remain—including whether the waiver to apply to borrowers enrolled in all of the many different repayment plans or only to those enrolled in income-driven repayment plans, whether interest not charged during the waiver period will later capitalize, and whether loan payments made during the waiver period will go toward accrued interest still owed or if it will all go toward to principal balance.

Last year, Florida Republican Marco Rubio proposed to end interest on federal student loans altogether. H.R.4603, called the Leveraging Opportunities for Americans Now (LOAN) Act, is currently “referred to the Committee on Education and Labor, and in addition to the Committee on Ways and Means, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker” as of October 4, 2019. The Education Department reports that it charged $100 billion in interest for fiscal year 2019. It’s rare for a Republican to support any help for student loan borrowers, so I am hopeful that this will result in a larger trend toward bipartisan efforts to help not only borrowers but the economy as a whole by agreeing to pass some form of relief.

Poshmark Seller’s Campaigns: November 2019 Rundown

It took a while for the rollout of Campaigns since the Posh Affiliate program was first announced, but now that it’s here, I just spent the better part of my Saturday perusing the interface and the available campaigns for this month.

To participate in campaigns under Post Affiliate one must either be a Posh Ambassador or a social media influencer with at least 5,000 followers on Instagram or Twitter.

What Are Campaigns?

Poshmark Campaigns are a way for Posh Ambassadors to leverage their social media habits to increase exposure to potential customers as a reseller while earning money—Poshmark credits per campaign that can be direct deposited to a seller’s linked bank account or spent as cash on Poshmark.

Through bimonthly contests, participants are rewarded up to $10 in credits depending on the reach, engagement level, and campaign type (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) of their posts. To be eligible, posts must fulfill specific criteria regarding photo type, captions, and hashtags.

Example: Instagram Campaign (Deadline Nov. 16, 2019)

For a Poshmark Ambassador, campaigns are accessed via My Campaigns under the profile menu.

InstaCampaign_01[1]

In this campaign, which is advertising the launch of Poshmark Home—a new category to expand from the traditional clothes, makeup, and handbags—participants are required to list five new items for sale under the Home category, along with a social-media post containing an original, stylized photo of one or more of those Home listings.

InstaCampaign_02

Participants must tag @Poshmark and include the hashtags #PoshAffiliate and #PoshHome in the caption, along with a custom tracking link that will be provided after you Accept the Terms of the campaign.

_Campaigns_AcceptTerms

I have not tried a campaign yet due to my low following on Instagram and Twitter (I just started using them recently), and although there are campaigns for Facebook, I’ve been hesitant to appear annoying; however, I can’t sufficiently report on something without seeing how it works firsthand. Since I am currently in possession of some regret purchases that don’t quite flatter me, I might as well start putting Poshmark Campaigns to the test!

I will follow up when I have more firsthand insight.

If you are a Posher who as experience with Campaigns, feel free to share your experiences in the comments!

 

10 Game of Thrones Characters Still Alive in the Books

While Game of Thrones has ended as a TV series, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books series still has two books yet to be completed. In order to fit the huge and complex world Martin built into a digestible television format, many plot points and characters were changed or omitted, including a whole cast of interesting characters you’ve never even met if you’ve only seen the HBO series.

Without further ado, here are 10 characters who are reasons you should give the books a shot:

1—Lady Stoneheart

Lady Catelyn Stark was taken from us during the Red Wedding, but in the books, she comes back as a nonverbal undead badass whom we assume is seeking vengeance for the Red Wedding. She is discovered by the Brotherhood without Banners, who decide to follow her and basically do her bidding, and there are some grim results involving one of our beloved characters who was still alive in the season eight finale of the show.

George R. R. Martin has been vocal about his disappointment in Lady Stoneheart’s exclusion from the show, so we can only assume she plays an instrumental role in our journey to the end of the story.

2—Margaery Tyrell

And by extension, King Tommen.

Yep; in the books, Margaery is still imprisoned by the Sparrows, and Cersei has just recently completed her infamous naked walk of shame from the Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep, so we have no idea what Cercei will plan and whether or not King’s Landing will erupt in wildfire, leading King Tommen to dive to his death from his bedroom window.

3—Five More “Sand Snakes”

Fans of A Song of Ice and Fire have been critical of the existential beatdown sustained by the Dorne story line in Game of Thrones. For one, we only got to meet three of the eight “Sand Snakes,” the surname given to the eight bastard daughters of Oberyn Martell, the Red Viper, who we saw almost defeat the Mountain in Tyrion’s trial by combat for the alleged murder of King Joffrey. The moniker “Sand” is of course in reference to the deserts of Dorne. When we leave the Sand Snakes in the books, they are all still alive.

4—Myrcella Baratheon

Near the end of season five, we see the sad and untimely end of Myrcella Baratheon, Cercei and Jaime’s secret bastard daughter, who is the recipient of a kiss of death by Ellaria Sand for revenge for the death of Oberyn, her lover and father of the Sand Snakes. However, in the books, Ellaria doesn’t want Myrcella dead; in fact, two of the Sand Snakes have a plan to crown Myrcella Queen of Dorne. This plan is [at least temporarily] thwarted by another character we’ve never met in the show, Areo Hotah. The last we see of Myrcella in the books, she is a little beat up but still very much alive and in Dorne with some very powerful allies.

5—Ellaria Sand

In the books, Ellaria Sand doesn’t kill Myrcella and in fact has little interaction with her at all. She also has no beef with Prince Trystane, so he is also still alive and still betrothed to Myrcella. That means Cersei has no reason to want Ellaria or any of her daughters dead. Therefore, all of the Sand Snakes as well as Ellaria are still alive in the books. I’m really looking forward to reading about the real fate of Dorne and the roles the Sand Snakes, as well as Myrcella, Trystane, and Ellaria, will play since their entire story line was abandoned in the show.

6—Ser Barristan Selmy

Ser Barristan Selmy, or Ser Barristan the Bold, dies at the hands of the Sons of the Harpy back in season five in Mereen, but he is still alive and well and fighting for Daenerys’s cause in the books. He’s pretty old though.

7—Shireen Baratheon

In season five, we see Shireen’s shocking ending as a sacrifice to the Lord of Light at the hands of her father, Stannis Baratheon, and the Red Woman, Melisandre. This never happened—or hasn’t happened, anyway—in the books, which means Stannis’s wife, Selyse, is also still alive, since she never hanged herself in grief over her role in her only living child’s sacrifice. This brings me to:

8—Stannis Baratheon

The show gave us a satisfying end to Stannis by Brienne of Tarth shortly after Shireen’s horrifying death. In the books, Ramsay Bolton spreads a rumor that he killed Stannis, but we never actually read about Stannis’s death, so we don’t know whether or not Ramsay is telling the truth. However, Martin confirmed that Stannis is alive “beyond a doubt” in response to a fan’s question in his LiveJournal.

 9—Jeyne Poole

Jeyne Poole is Sansa’s friend who does needlework with Sansa under Septa Mordane. She is not seen again after season one of the show, after her family is killed by Lannister men-at-arms at the Red Keep. We have no idea what happened to her in the show.

In the books, Jeyne is Sansa’s best friend and plays a prominent role involving Ramsay Bolton that could potentially change the entire course of one major character’s arc.

10—Jeyne Westerling (Talisa)

In the show, Robb Stark married Talisa, a noblewoman from Volantis whom he meets and falls in love with while she is tending fallen soldiers on the battlefield. She is gruesomely killed at the Red Wedding while visibly pregnant.

In the books, Robb marries Jeyne Westerling, the commoner daughter of one of the Starks’ vassals, and she never attended the Red Wedding. The last we hear of her, she is still very much alive and presumably pregnant and in mourning for Robb.

Final Note

A Song of Ice and Fire contains numerous additional and equally interesting characters who never made it to the television series. The vast world Martin created is filled with many diverse cultures and characters, each with their own complex histories, religions, and traditions, and his entire book world simply couldn’t fit in an eight-season television series. If you are one of the many fans who is unhappy with the way Game of Thrones ended and have not read the books, now would be a great time to re-immerse yourself in your favorite universe and get to know the characters you’ve never met, along with your favorites with potentially different character arcs.