The Bloggess writes about Porn for the Blind

Okay, I already knew about Porn for the Blind because the day Wired did an article on it at least three people sent me the link, so it is nice to know that people are listening when I give my speech about blind people are sexual, too, but really, all the porn bits submitted for description were obviously submitted by guys and really, when I was sighted I once had to explain to a blind woman what was going in during a dorm viewing of "Deep Throat," which seemed to put a damper on things for the guys present because once two women start discussing the details of a porn movie, well, talk about sucking the fun out of the room.
Sorry for getting sidetracked, here's the link tot he column
http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/adult-humor/bloggess-irony-71691/
Note, the Bloggess is totally not about being PC, consider this a warning, and someone should explain to her about text-to-speech, but it won't be me 'cause the Web page formatting for the site she is on is a mess.
Also, check out
last week's column on the unicorn dildo
http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/adult-humor/bloggess-irony-71691/
which was just so strange and wonderful I felt the need to mention it, appropos of absolutely nothing, while having dinner with LJ user Issendai and a mystery woman (okay, I know who she is but I'm not sure she's on LJ, so that part is a mystery) at ReaderCon.
Sometimes I think The Bloggess sounds a little like me, if I was from Texas and married to a Republican and wasn't an orphan and had a father who was a taxidermist. Or maybe The Bloggess just acts like crack on my own hyperventilating prose style.

And today's theme is: accessible porn

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Dirty talk for blind people
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8144793.stm
Kes: Hey, I thought the Brits were supposed to be repressed and uptight! It's still pretty difficult to find erotica/porn through the National Library Service (the Library for the Blind and Handicapped, branch of the Library of Congress), and forget the RFBD; I once ordered an audio cassette version of "The Pearl" (the Victorian erotic journal, not the medieval poem), and it sounded like they wheeled out the oldest most disapproving old lady from the collection of ancient retired librarians. Seriously, listening to someone read as if she is sucking lemons just kind of detracts from one's reading pleasure. Thank goodness for Bookshare, which accepts what the users scan and upload, so it reflects all flavors of sexuality. Ironically, I read a lot less erotica now than I used to.
Still, if you go to Google and enter the search terms
kestrell porn
I'm the second hit you get. The first features live kestrels, so I don't hold it against my fellow blogger.

Adult brain can change within seconds

From the MIT Web site

Cathryn M. Delude, McGovern Institute
July 14, 2009
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/blindspot-0714.html

The human brain can adapt to changing demands even in adulthood, but MIT neuroscientists have now found evidence of it changing with unsuspected speed.
Their findings suggest that the brain has a network of silent connections that underlie its plasticity.

The brain's tendency to call upon these connections could help explain the curious phenomenon of "referred sensations," in which a person with an amputated
arm "feels" sensations in the missing limb when he or she is touched on the face. Scientists believe this happens because the part of the brain that normally
receives input from the arm begins "referring" to signals coming from a nearby brain region that receives information from the face.

"We found these referred sensations in the visual cortex, too," said senior author Nancy Kanwisher of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT,
referring to the findings of a paper being published in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. "When we temporarily deprived part of the visual
cortex from receiving input, subjects reported seeing squares distorted as rectangles. We were surprised to find these referred visual sensations happening
as fast as we could measure, within two seconds."

Many scientists think that this kind of reorganized response to sensory information reflects a rewiring in the brain, or a growth of new connections.

"But these distortions happened too quickly to result from structural changes in the cortex," Kanwisher explained. "So we think the connections were already
there but were silent, and that the brain is constantly recalibrating the connections through short-term plasticity mechanisms."
( continued below cut )

GameAccessibility.org: a great place to start when thinking about game access

This
http://gameaccessibility.org/
seems to have gone up just in the past couple of weeks, so there is still development going on, but it already has
lots of FAQs
http://gameaccessibility.org/learn-essential-info-topmenu-69/1-game-design.html
to help anser your questions concerning what kind of disabilities affect game access and design elements which can provide access.

Michael Dirda Speech at Library of Congress+6 Degrees of Lovecraft

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MPSTMfAYVM
I'm stealing this from Paul Di Filippo (pgdf) who posted it to the Inferior Four LJ community
http://community.livejournal.com/theinferior4/510304.html
I was pleased to hear Michael Dirda and others, including Charles Brown, speak about reviewing at ReaderCon, and I will be posting my brief notes from that panel later. For now, I want to mention my latest case of book lust, which I discovered through a review from The Washington Post Book World site:
The Annotated The Wind in the Willows (2009)
A review by Michael Sims
http://www.powells.com/review/2009_07_17.html
It occurred to me while writing this post how often one can indulge in a little game of 6 degrees of Lovecraft. How do I get from Michael Dirda to Lovecraft in this post? Michael Dirda gave the speech I linked to above, and he also reviews for Book World, which posted the review for _The Annotated The Wind in the Willows_, in which the reviewer mentions his own childhood copy of
The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, written by William S. Baring-Gould. This Baring-Gould was a grandson of Sabine Baring-Gould, who was one of those eccentric antiquarian scholars who wrote the classic _The Book of Were-Wolves_ and a book about the castles of the troubador country and a book about medieval myths admired by H. P. Lovecraft (refer to Steven J. Mariconda, "Baring-Gould and the Ghouls: The Influence of Curious Myths of the Middle Ages on 'The Rats in the Walls'",
The Horror of It All, p. 42).
So there!
Also, acccording to Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Baring-Gould
William Baring-Gould, when he was creating a biography of Sherlock Holmes, based Holmes early life upon that of Sabine Baring-Gould, and this has led to much intertwining of SBG's biographical details with those of Holmes.
Project Gutenberg has a number of SBG's works online
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/b#a1766