Steampunk sex toys

Lady Clankington's Cabinet of Carnal Curiosities
http://s334583533.initial-website.com/

And this is the blurb posted to the Art of Darkness blog where I first read about this:

block quote start
Right now her “infernal devices” consist of the Little Death Ray, but the Butt Rogers Uranium Pistol is coming soon. Just right for playing “stern Victorian explorer and naughty Morlock.”
block quote end
Naughty Morlock is a phrase which is just going to haunt me for the rest of the day. And I would not be surprised to see that costumed pair appear at Arisia this year.

How is literary interpretation like Guy Fawkes Day?

Apologies to those who have already read this, but I thought I would repost a comment I made earlier this week. The comment was a response to a post made by a friend on the modes of imposing specific meanings on literature in college courses.

I think such inclinations to control the outcome of interpretation
spring from the same sort of attitude,
shared across centuries, literary movements, and institutions of learning, which is to say,

Nno student should ever be entrusted with a poem, it isn't safe,
and thus the teacher is of godlike importance within the process of interpretation, otherwise one or the other, the student or the poem,
is likely to become excited and produce an irreversible explosive event,
though I can't say which is the spark and which the gunpowder,
but just imagine all those Guy Fawkes running amok amongst the Parliament of poetry--
it's no wonder professors put on their Inquisitor caps
and try to smother every glowing ember.

I'm beginning to sympathize with Frankenstein

One doesn't really appreciate how incredibly challenging it is to create something even vaguely resembling a human body until one rather audaciously attempts such a Herculean feat.

The slithery serpentine limb issue seems to be mostly resolved for the nonce. However, the creature has now begun to manifest a certain...amoeba-like lumpiness.

Structural integrity remains problematic (and trust me, I know how that feels).

Also, I made a head which is even roundish but how to attach it? The human neck is a mystery to me. Really, the entire spinal cord is quite a wonder, although now I appreciate why most guys get ported about in a wheelbarrow--they don't so much recline as flop.

While I comprehend that there is only so much materiality and mobility to be attained through means of pillows and pantyhose, I still feel a certain degree of gilt in not being able to make my creature more...normative.

This experiment could be itneresting to replicate within the scope of literature and disability studies courses.

Playing Echo Bazaar with a screen reader

by Kestrell

It's one of the ironies of my life that I have a degree in media studies and am married to a game designer, yet have only recently found a game which Alexx and I can share with equal enjoyment.

One of the major issues I've had with accessible games is that, while they may be fully accessible to people with disabilities, they aren't really as exciting for non-disabled players to play, not compared to all the other games they could be playing. Isn't it possible, I often ranted, to develop a game environment which from the very beginning is just as fascinating to the disabled player as the nondisabled player?

Echo Bazaar
http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com/
answers that question.

Echo Bazaar is a highly-decorative text-bassed game set in a pseudo-Victorian city called Fallen London. Most of the gameplay occurs through story fragments referred to as "storylets." To get a sense of what a storylet is, you can read an intro page at
http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com/Home/FindOutMore
and you can read more about Fallen London at
http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com/Home/AboutFallenLondon

The description of Fallen London actually implements one of the ideas I often used in my own thought experiment for an accessible game: due to a catastrophic event, natural light and electricity have become extinct, so everyone exists in a strange subterranean world of perpetual twilight full of uncertain shadows and surreal beings. This not only contributes to the gothic atmosphere of the game, it means that vision is not an entirely reliable sense for distinguishing friends from enemies or safe pursuits from dangerous ones.

How to get started
( continued below cut )