social.noyu.me

Why has hikari_no_yume historically tried as hard as possible to avoid saying “stupid”, “dumb”, “crazy”, “idiot”, “insane”, etc?

One reason is that holding it as an article of faith that all people are intelligent makes the world more beautiful.

But there's also another reason:

hikari_no_yume has suspected that the notion of stupidity and insanity, if not controlled, becomes a thought-terminating cliché.

Many people, when they are not sufficiently guarded about it, become literally more stupid because they believe stupidity is a thing that exists.

And of course, not believing in it is its own form of stupidity, certainly. One must remember that all things, at all times, must be regarded from multiple perspectives to be fully understood.

But we hope puzzling over what we might mean here might make you learn something.

We really aren't the type who normally like posting riddles, but… here's some rot13 hints; just food for thought; there's no correct answer.

• Jul qbrf gur enpvfg cflpubgvp frrz qryhfvbany rira nsgre gurve oenva unf pnyzrq qbja?
• Jul vf vg qnatrebhf gb nffhzr Chgva vf vafnar?

We are not going to claim any particular position here is enlightened, only that we think that thinking about what we said here might eventually lead you to interesting conclusions, and those might make you a tiny bit more enlightened, we hope…

We turned the “why you shouldn't say ‘stupid’” thread into a blogpost, it's once again a lot better than the original thread in several ways, and it has a cute little CSS/JS gimmick someone will hopefully enjoy: https://hikari.noyu.me/blog/2025-08-07-why-not-say-stupid.html

@hikari that post has a huge screenreader accessibility issue, those collapsable hints I mean, that looks completely jumbled and unusable to the screenreader, in fact, I can't skip past those to read the rest of the post at all. Could you use aria perhaps, or maybe <details> and <summary> tags?

@esoteric_programmer Oh, thanks for the heads-up! I'll see what we can do?

@esoteric_programmer Tragically we might be discovering that the web accessibility story is not what it's supposed to be… I think we've done everything “right”, we're using aria-hidden exactly the way we should, and yet…

@hikari the scrambled stuff is gone, yes, but now the cleartext is hidden, so that the list items are empty space

@esoteric_programmer this happens for us when we use the reader view in Firefox on our phone, but we've just realised a way we might fix it, we'll try to remember to do it later…

@esoteric_programmer okay, we totally reworked it; we're now not using ARIA at all, instead the animatable version is only made visible when you first click on the text; also, there's now a title= on the none-animatable version, which works even in the reader view of Safari, and might, we hope, be accessible to screen readers!

@esoteric_programmer and at least we know now that, worst case, you just hear something unintelligible which you might be able to figure out how to copy and paste, rather than getting trapped in a maze of tiny spans

@hikari being trapped in a thousand tiny spans is gon, yea! the text is unintelligible indeed, but ROT13 isn't so hard to decipher, so gonna do that next :p. O also, the title of the animation isn't visible, but yeah, much more accessible now

@hikari aaand, decoded!

@esoteric_programmer woo, very happy to hear it's now vaguely usable!