Good Morning Mastodon and Fantasycon! Hope you’re all ok? Today I’m currently reading the engrossing SF tale on Hamlet that is The Death I Gave Him by Em X Liu. What are you reading at the moment?
@RunalongWomble Hello, Womble. Just finished 'The Dentist' by Tim Sullivan, a UK crime procedural set in Bristol. Main detective character is on the autistic spectrum, which makes him very good at details and patterns but not so good at interacting with colleagues and the public. Compelling mystery, well-paced but not sure how I felt about the writing style. There was a lot of jarring head-hopping (jumping between POV and POV), often within the same paragraph. @bookstodon
@RunalongWomble
Hello Womble, just started 'The blighted stars' by Megan O'Keefe. Fun space opera so far. Sabotaged ship leads a group of survivors to crash land on an Earth-like planet which is not as hospitable as they were led to expect... @bookstodon
I'm wanting to reach out to #gaming fans who have personal challenges that make some - or many - games difficult to access for them.
Visual acuity issues. Hearing loss. Dyslexia, or missing limbs or anything else.
I'm planning an article on accessibility features in video games, and would love to hear stories from people for whom those features aren't merely a convenience, but necessary for them to be able to participate in the hobby.
@GuerillaGrue I’m a designer and accessibility expert. I’ve been working in this field for over two decades, but unfortunately never had an opportunity to work on games. But I really want to. I can’t wait to read your piece.
I'm not sure what to offer because my disability has made it so that I have had to give up most games.
I have a few issues, but the main problem when it comes to gaming is dystonia. I get cramps in my hand, wrist, arm, and shoulder from repetitive or rapid mouse clicking or button pressing, from having to heavily use a thumb stick, and similar motions. It's made worst by the fact that controllers keep getting bigger while my hands stay tiny. This has made it so that I can only play a very limited selection of games. I haven't found any solutions.
#Autistic special interests are really about hierarchy of motivations…
I spend a lot of my time being pissed off at interruptions/intrusions/diversions to whatever I happen to be focussed on in that moment, however compelling or tedious it happens to be.
If, however (as just happened), someone asks me a question about stationery, or dog breeds, or the astronomical tides, or the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement, I’m going to drop literally ANYTHING else I’m doing to deal with that.
The dodgiest example of this is when I’m driving, and I see someone walking an interesting dog… 8-|
And now I consciously understand how it works, I see that I intuitively have been working it against fellow monotropic neurodivergents my whole life - parents, siblings, colleagues and PhD supervisors - to derail their efforts to talk about things I don’t wanna talk about. 😳
@drandrewv2
I am known to drive of the road in order to engage with what the person in the other seat is trying to tell me. 🤣 (noone got hurt)
But really if I did not have uninterrupted space to myself, I'd never get anything done. My self defense is to make people around me engage with whatever I happen to be focused on at the time. Can be annoying I guess, but can also create intense closeness. It's a lifetime of learning how to respect these things, both inside myself as in others and find wise ways to deal with it socially. @actuallyautistic
@elonjet Let us know if you see Musk's plane headed toward Moscow since Kim Jong Un is meeting with Putin and Elmo won't want to miss out on the party, no doubt.
This is probably the wrong place to ask but can someone explain the funky mosaic looking court badges they wear during Una's trial in SNW? (Pretty sure I've seen them before somewhere too.)
I tried looking it up but only got Star Trek badges in my search results and it was pissing me off.
#OTD in 1845, 250 veterans of the Battle of Baltimore were honored in Washington DC on the battle’s
31 st anniversary – and they took time to honor their wartime First Lady.
(1)
(2)
The Weekly National Intelligencer reported that, after marching from the railroad depot to the White
House to meet President James K. Polk, the “Old Defenders of Baltimore ... marched in admirable order
to the residence of the venerable Mrs. Madison, where they saluted that much-respected lady, as she
stood on her front steps, attended by the Mayor and several of her friends in the city.”
(3)
Dolley Madison,
by then 77 years old, had become an icon of an earlier time in American history.
William Elwell, 1848 portrait of Dolley Madison, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
I would like to thank #Romancelandia for all the info on fair use and copyright from a few years back when blogs were getting dinged. My work has us doing a training and my Twitter friends taught me more than my work
Deine Lakaien is a German band project active since 1985. It is formed by the vocalist Alexander Veljanov and by the composer and multi-instrumentalist Ernst Horn. The group unites influences from dark wave with pop music and elements of avant-garde
Labor Day weekend is always a time of both anticipation as well as trepidation.
Apart from the usual variables, COVID has brought us new generations of high school students who learned under very challenging different conditions from their predecessors.
I am delighted to report that when I met with entering students to discuss the common reading on Friday, they were very engaged, interested, and interesting. A good omen for the first-semester seminar I have to teach
Academic snapshot 2: Just back from the wedding of 1 of our daughter's friends. The father of the bride shared a treasured childhood drawing of her with him.
As a historian of science, however, he was compelled to point out that the position of the 2 figures violated the universal law of gravitation & the figures lacked the full articulation of human joints, as a result of which he was glad his daughter would be working in emergency medicine rather than as an orthopedic surgeon like her husband