The Polaroid Wall
The wall in Enid’s Room is grey rectangles. They are placeholders for photographs of our community, and they stay grey until somebody sends one — because the one thing a wall like this cannot be filled with is stock photography of strangers pretending to be us.
WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR
A photo of you, or of you and your people. Not a good photo. Not a flattering one. The one where nobody made you smile.
There is no standard to meet. Blurry is fine, badly lit is fine, half a face is fine, a photo of your hands or your dog or the ceiling you were looking at is fine. This is a wall in a room named after a character who does not match the house.
What we promise
| The promise | What makes it true rather than nice |
|---|---|
| It comes down when you say so | One message. No reason required, no conversation, no asking whether you are sure. This is why your photo is excluded from the site’s Creative Commons licence: CC BY-SA cannot be revoked, so a photo published under it could not be taken back even after you withdrew. Yours carries no onward licence at all. |
| Nobody else gets to reuse it | The rest of this site invites reuse. Your photograph does not. It stays yours and the photographer’s, used here with permission and nowhere else. |
| You write the caption and the alt text | Both. You know what is in the picture and what you want said about it. We will not describe you in our words, and we will not publish a photo with no description at all — a picture nobody can hear is not on a Disabled people’s site by accident, it is there by neglect. |
| Your name is however you write it | Full name, first name, handle, or nothing at all. Anonymous is a real option and does not make the photo worth less. |
| The location data is removed | Photos carry hidden metadata — where you were, when, on what device. We strip it before publishing, and our own tool refuses to publish a file that still has it. Sending us a photo should not tell the internet where you live. |
Everything else this site keeps about anybody, including the people who only visit, is on the privacy page.
What we need with the photo
Four things, and the tool that builds the wall will not publish a photo missing any of them:
- A description of what is in the picture, for anybody who cannot see it. A sentence is plenty.
- A caption, if you want one — the handwriting under the photo. This can be a joke.
- Who is in it, named the way you want to be named, or marked anonymous.
- Who took it, if that is somebody else, and their permission too. A photographer owns their photograph; being in a picture is not the same as owning it.
Photographs of young people
We publish photographs of young people who are doing the work and who have said yes themselves. A lot of Stimpunks volunteers and self-advocates are teenagers, and a rule that kept them off our pages would take the credit for their own activities away from them and hand it to the adults standing next to them. Nothing about us without us has no lower age bound.
Two things do not move. The young person gives the consent, not a parent on their behalf. A parent can be part of the conversation and often is, but an adult’s yes is not a substitute for theirs — and the worry that first put a rule here, that somebody else makes a permanent public decision for you, is answered by asking the person themselves rather than by keeping them off the wall. And withdrawal works for them exactly as it does for everybody else, for as long as they want it: say so once, and the photograph is deleted rather than hidden. That is what the photographs carrying no onward licence is for.
Where somebody is too young to give that consent themselves, we do not publish the photograph, and a parent cannot give it for them.
What we are not going to do
Ask for a better photo. Crop you. Filter you. Put your photo in a fundraising appeal, a grant application, or an advertisement. Use it to represent Disability in the abstract to somebody who needs a stock image. Keep a copy after you have asked us to stop.
How to send one, and how to take it back
Reach us through the Stimpunks contact page or in our community. Tell us what you want said about the picture and how you want to be named.
To take it down, the same routes, and the word remove is enough. It comes off the wall and out of the repository, and the record of your consent goes with it.
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.
Job marker — a spare drawing pin, stuck in the board and not in anybody's picture
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: What we will not do to a picture of you
Before the code: The wall promises two things it will not do to a photograph of you. One is crop. What is the other? One word.
Hint 1
Two short sentences, one after the other, near the top of the wall.
Hint 2
It is a thing people do to photographs on their phones.
Last hint
The tool that builds the wall refuses one of these outright, in CSS or inline.
Give me the answer
The answer is Filter. A frame, a shadow or a mat goes around a picture. A filter is done to it. That promise is made to everybody, so it is not waived by the person in the picture asking for it — the next photograph would arrive under a rule already bent once.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: DRAWINGPIN
That is the one.
A frame, a shadow or a mat goes around a picture. A filter is done to it. That promise is made to everybody, so it is not waived by the person in the picture asking for it — the next photograph would arrive under a rule already bent once.
Quest code: DRAWINGPIN