Check out this banger of a game-poem analysis! lavieenmeow takes a 6.4K-word deep dive into the stylistic habits around the text of text adventures, and how Drew Cook manipulates and uses those expectations as a poetic form:

https://the-rosebush.com/2026/06/parser-poetics-in-portrait-with-wolf/

New blog post: Zines for allotmenters

The beginnings of me making a collection of resources for my #allotment community.

https://notes.laurenheywood.com/zines-for-allotmenters/

Reading about the new generation of Recaptcha requiring android phones to pass google play attestation and I'm thinking this will have accessibility implications for blind users. Beyond the point that this will lock out custom roms and mobile devices that aren't iOS or Android, at least where I live for example there's a lot of people who use Blind Shell phones (which are essentially an Android phone with a oldschool keypad to work more like a Nokia phone of the past.) And those don't have google services either which is increasingly causing more problems. How that OEM is handling the software aside, something else Google will apparently do is if you use a computer is a verification will require scanning a QRCode on a compatible phone and oh boy that's gonna be fun. Many blind people run their computer without a screen, and even if you do have one, scanning a QRCode can be a crapshoot. It might take a few seconds if it's big and you have enough lighting, or it might take a few minutes or not work at all if you don't or the code is obscured by some other window you're not aware of. And I bet the service will have a timeout so if you're not good at scanning QR codes you could just be locked out.

So yeah, things are going great. The service that used to previously be the most accessible might be far less so going forward. That then leaves cloudflare turnstyle, which is also very accessible but can really screw you over if you use a VPN and isn't liked by privacy concious website operators for very valid reasons. I hope this doesn't push more companies to adopt HCaptcha which advertises itself as the most privacy friendly ReCaptcha alternative... Unless you're blind in which case if you're lucky you might get a text challenge which has to be enabled by the website, otherwise you have to give them your Email address, send a text to a US phone number to request a cross-site accessibility cookie which now doesn't work in most web browsers. Things are going great!

I received an email from Draft2Digital today that says it is no longer free to use; there will be a $20 activation fee for new accounts.

There is also an annual maintenance fee of $12 if your annual earnings (after Draft2Digital's commission) is less than $100.

This seems like a significant change that will probably push many authors back to Amazon.

I wonder what the disengagement process with Draft2Digital would be? It is entangled with at least a couple of dozen external accounts. If you close your Draft2Digital account, do they just keep all the future proceeds from your books on Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and all the rest?

#Draft2Digital #writing #WritingCommunity

SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHOR FRIENDS
This *INSANE* email from Barnes & Noble WTF
—no more than 100 books and they start deleting??
—removing titles that don't meet minimum sales?

What the hell? I've been publishing since 2011... I have 145 titles.

AI deluge screwing us but still...it's war on indies.

During this year's "Games for blind gamers" jam on #itchIO, a #game was submitted that tried to accurately portray a #blind protagonist. This game was developed by a developer who is not blind, but believed to have done adequate research into this. Some people did not agree and came down on them rather hard, but I saw an opportunity.
In this video I break down what was represented well, what wasn't, and we get into some really interesting #blindness and #disability topics along the way. Hopefully it might teach a thing or two :) https://youtu.be/qE81d4Pcw9E

#disability #disabilities #blindness #representation #indieGames #gaming #youtube #selfPromo

There's still time to register for the writing workshop @maryannemohanraj and I are teaching May 30-Jun 3 in Oak Park IL (or the accompanying low-stress writing retreat)!

https://speculativeliterature.org/register/writing-sf-and-fantasy/