These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruin...

Kirkwall’s Finest - New Range of Handmade Dragon Age Goodies Launches!

For the last couple of months, I have been working away behind the scenes with two incredibly gifted craftspeople to create a range of fan-inspired, handmade Dragon Age goodies. And today, I am completely over the moon to announce the launch of Kirkwall’s Finest: a collection of Dragon Age-based clothing, jewellery and perfumes!

The idea for the collection came out of an obsession shared between myself and the exceptionally talented SaraWen. We started talking about working on something together, and after a little bit of poking around we found the third part of our little trinity in the form of JewelrybyJosh. At that point, we were well on our way!

Let me tell you a little bit about each of the market stalls that we have managed to cobble together…

[caption id=”attachment_482” align=”alignleft” width=”200” caption=”A dark, amber-coloured perfume vial against a background of purple and gold brocade.”][/caption]SARA’S OILS & UNCTURES
Here, you can buy a selection of different scents and perfumes sourced from the finest herbs and oils in all of Thedas! Sara has created three scents that will especially of interest…

Arcane
A unisex scent created especially for Anders from labdanum, cloves and vanilla. Starting out fresh and herbal and mellowing slowly to something sweet and warm. We shall leave it up to your imagination what this infers about Kirkwalls most loved (or loathed!) apostate.

Fugitive
I have to admit to having a little (ok… a lot) of a crush on Fenris, so I’m looking forwards to trying this one very much indeed! A unisex fragrance made from some of my very favourite things: amber, incense, dragon’s blood and ylang-ylang. Broody, musky, and very, very sexy!

Queen of the Seas
We couldn’t rightly let Sara create a range of Dragon Age-inspired perfumes without making something special for everyone’s favourite pirate queen now, could we? Isabella’s fragrance is feminine, floral and aquatic, and made from a feisty combination of violet and geranium.

(Needless to say that I have already begged and pleaded with Sara until she agreed to send me some samples of these, and so you can expect a little review of all three just as soon as they get here…)

[caption id=”attachment_479” align=”alignright” width=”200” caption=”A circular, silver-coloured metal pendant stamped with the ubiquitous ‘dragon’ design from Dragon Age 2”][/caption]JOSH’S TRINKET EMPORIUM
Once Sara and I decided to creat a shared range of Dragon Age goodies, we started to talk about trying and supplement our skills at perfume- and clothes-making respectively by finding someone interested in creating geeky jewellery.

Fortunately for us, we found Josh, who was already making pieces of high-quality, geek-friendly jewellery that was right up our street!

Josh creates video game inspired pendants from stamped/cut metal in a variety of really striking, intricate designs. For Kirkwall’s Finest, he has turned his hand to making jewellery inspired by a number of the symbols that recur right the way through DA2. Including the awesome ‘Kirkwall Rebels’ pendant that you can see here, and even some Qunari earrings!

[caption id=”attachment_510” align=”alignleft” width=”200” caption=”A dark-haired woman in a forest, wearing a dark grey vest trimmed in white lace, and embroidered in silver with the stylised, ‘winged sword’ design of the Kirkwall City Guard.”][/caption]HAUNTED SUMMER’S GALLOWS CLOTHING
One of the things that I love most about the second Dragon Age game (all right, apart from Fenris) is the endless conflict that you have between various groups all fighting for their freedom, for power, for control, for order, or even for the status quo.

I’ve tried to capture a little of this feeling of the ‘Battle for Kirkwall’ in the clothing that I’ve created.

All of my pieces are one-of-a-kind in that they are upcycled from things that have been donated to me, or that I’ve found in charity shops—and you’ll find everything from casual t-shirts to understated blouses and shirts suitable for office wear!. I’ve then taken these things home and embroidered with one of four designs that represent two sets of opposing factions: the Kirkwall rebels vs. the City Guard; and the Templars vs. the Circle of Magi.

The first three of these symbols are pieces of fanart based on the sigils and markings that you see in the game itself: the flaming sword of the templars, the stylised ‘winged sword’ of the city guard, and the ubiquitous ‘dragon’ symbol that you see throughout the game scrawled on Kirkwalls walls and doorways.

However, despite a couple of in-game references to the symbols and marks of various circles of magi, you never actually see the symbol for the Kirkwall Circle at any point. So, I went away and designed something myself! An arcane eye, surrounded by chains.

Please do go and have a look at what the three of us have managed to put together, and let us know what you think!

Many thanks to Sara and Josh for all their help in getting the collection together, and to Tez, Anna and Dylan for spending an afternoon in a forest with a bottle of wine and a camera to photograph all the clothing!

Original Article

In Defence of Ruins

[caption id=”attachment_472” align=”aligncenter” width=”500” caption=”A photograph of the shell of a ruined building in the Palladian style—its pillars and windows overgrown with ivy.”][/caption]

I took the photograph above a couple of years ago, while visiting a favourite haunt of mine: the ruined Baron Hill mansion just outside of Beaumaris on Anglesey.

Last year, I found out that a large construction company intends to turn this wild, beautiful place into a set of private, executive apartments. And so, in February, I went back to wander amongst the ruins for what may well turn out to be the last time.

Baron Hill has fascinated me ever since I first discovered it. Hell, when I commissioned the artwork for Vagrants Among Ruins, I even asked the artist to work from photos that I’d taken of the place.

There seems to be a huge movement around at the moment—in steampunk, yes, but also in the rest of our society—to fight to save such buildings from the point of destruction, to restore them, and to put them to fresh use. I have absolutely no problem with that. In fact, I have a lot of respect for the people that put in so much hard work to try and save these beautiful old places that we are blessed with. However, I also think that ruins have an important place in this world—not just as physical spaces in our communities, but also within the landscapes of our psychology, our minds, and our souls.

Anyone that’s ever tried a bit of urban exploration, or found some half-ruined building (in the woods, or at the edge of town) and felt the urge to explore it, can tell you that there is a kind of magic in these buildings. They are the places where we tell our child-like stories of ghosts and horrors when our parents don’t know where we are. And they are the places that we can revisit as adults and daydream about the people that used to live there. What they might have been like. They are places that belong to the realms of the unfettered imagination. And they are places that belong to no one, and so by contrast belong to everyone—or at least anyone that has the desire and bravery to get to them.

They are not the safe, sterilised places that many of our castles and old houses have become: Where all the sharp edges have been filed off, and your imagination is limited to the path laid out for it in velvet ropes.

Ruins are not solely the province of only those who can pay to get inside.

They are dangerous, untamed places where a false step can have real consequences on your continued health. They are places of true wildness. Places where things like death and decay are facts that we cannot avoid… and I happen to believe that it is only our society’s detachment from these things that has so many of us so knotted up with a thick, black fear about them in the first place.

In short, ruins represent everything that our society in the Western world tries to protect us from, and so they are one of the few places in our worlds where we can experience true freedom of ourselves, our bodies, and our minds.

I’m not saying that we should let every single piece of our history fall to pieces around us. I am saying that I think that ruins have a place in our world as well. That we should value them. That we should dedicate ourselves to exploring them with open hearts and open heads. And that we should be careful of being so determined to save them for ourselves, that we are prepared to put them into the hands of people that want to take them away from us.

[caption id=”attachment_471” align=”aligncenter” width=”500” caption=”The back of the same building, where the ivy and undergrowth is growing over a curved, Neoclassical wall.”][/caption]

Original Article

Disempowering the Unions

[caption id=”attachment_433” align=”aligncenter” width=”450” caption=”A meeting of Unite the Reistance in Birmingham on 28th June. With members of UNISON, NUT, UCU and PCS attending.
Photo from Geoff Dexter on Flickr.”][/caption]

If you didn’t get the chance to watch the urgent questions in the House of Commons yesterday (I am aware that watching the Parliament Channel for fun makes me odd) then you should, because the ‘debate’ there was entirely indicative of the petty moral one-upmanship and underhanded tactics being used by the Conservative government in the face of tomorrow’s strike by five of the UKs teaching unions.

I’m not going to pull my punches: I find Education Secretary Michael Gove to be an utterly miserable little man. The main force of his argument over the strikes appears to be that teachers are not just letting the public down by voting for industrial action, but that they are actually also letting themselves down, and bringing the profession itself into disrepute by daring to leave negotiations early. But it’s even worse than that, because he goes on to threaten that a strike would cause the public to begin to ‘demand’ stronger union regulation.

I run into this argument time and time again in ‘discussions’ about sexism and other forms of discrimination: Unless the victim is a perfect paragon of patience and understanding, never gets angry, and never loses their temper, then they are harming their cause by re-enforcing negative stereotypes. This sort of talk is useful to those who are trying to derail a debate, because it entirely removes a person’s agency to fight for themselves, and means that you don’t have to bother engaging with their argument at all. It doesn’t matter how right you are any more: Because you haven’t conformed to their idea of what a victim should look like, your point is void. It’s a particularly malicious and odious technique, and one that Michael Gove seemingly isn’t above using.

Between Wisconsin and Canada Post, we are increasingly seeing the erosion of the power and collective bargaining rights of unions across the Western world. What’s more, the UK is also starting to see some of the tactics employed by the Tea Party on the other side of the Atlantic, who manage to continually undermine anyone that speaks out against them by calling them a socialist or a liberal—both of which they have ensured are now dirty words.

In fact, in the case of tomorrow’s teachers’ strikes, so intense is Michael Gove’s offensive on public opinion, that he is actually proposing to use the general public themselves to break the strike.

Currently, United Kingdom Employment Law protects teachers and other unionised workers from having to inform their employers of their intention to strike. According to the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat allies (most of whom I hope a busy hanging their heads in shame), this further compounds the injury to hard-working families who certainly don’t have the same luxurious pension scheme afforded to workers in the public sector. They would much rather see these teachers forced to declare their intention to strike, so that the government and the general public can properly prepare for it. Following this to its logical conclusion, this would give the government the opportunity to minimise the impact of a strike, and thus would destroy the unions’ ability to bargain for their members’ rights by depriving society of the one thing of value that they possess: their labour.

Of course, all of this is a result of the collapse of the world’s economy: a disaster which (in the West) front-line workers and the poorest communities are being asked to bear the brunt of. All the time while Members of Parliament, Bank CEOS and even celebrities continue to exercise their wealth and position to maintain privacy rights and personal fortunes that the country’s general public (not least the teachers who will be going out on strike tomorrow) are not afforded.

But then, of course the government is going to be more scared of public opinion than it is of any industrial action, because should there actually be any degree of public support for these strikes, then maybe they really have begun to lose control.

ETA: And now you should go and read the post on this issue written by the eminent Dylan Fox, over on his blog. It’s not only excellent, but takes a slightly different look at things.

Also, this article has been reposted by the kind folks over at Infoshop over here: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20110629135735982

Original Article

Perfume Reviews and Sarawen Perfume Art

To date, one of the the most fantastic people that I’ve met through going into business for myself is Sara, who makes a whole plethora of dark, magical, Victorian perfumes through her small business: SaraWen Perfume Art.

I have always loved the sense of smell, and how scent can evoke different thoughts, feelings and memories. For the last few years I have been finding all of my perfumes through the indomitable Black Phoenix Alchemy Laboratory. But I recently got four samplers of Sara’s perfumes in the post, and now I’m not so sure that I won’t be getting everything from her from now on…

One of the things that I always found most useful when choosing a scent through BPAL were the forums, where I could read through reviews that people had written of the different perfumes, and unpick the ones that I thought would suit me. And so I thought that I’d start by reviewing some of Sara’s work, so that it might be of use to others who might find themselves wondering where to start.

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VAMPIRE PRINCESS

This is the scent that I’m wearing at the moment, so it makes sense to start with it!

For some reason (maybe it’s just because it’s got the word ‘Princess’ in the name!) I expected this scent to be quite sweet. However, straight out of the bottle it smells strongly of jasmine, and has an almost talcum powder scent. Something I found back when I was buying from BPAL is that a lot of their scents (especially ones with jasmine) would turn into this talcy smell when they hit my skin (something to do with my body’s PH, I guess). Luckily for me, however, the longer I wear Vampire Princess, the more this talcum powder smell disappears.

When dry, the smell of the jasmine mellows out a little, and you can smell the musk and edge of honey-sweetness lurking underneath it. To me, I imagine that it smells like a few stolen moments in a New Orleans courtyard at midnight: jasmine underscored with an edge of darkness and sweetness that seems to whisper of age, candlelight and decay.

A perfect stroll through some wonderfully rich, dark memories for anyone that read as much Anne Rice as a teenager as I did.

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ARTEMIS

I have only had these samplers for a few days, and already my vial of Artemis is almost empty, which is a testament just how easy to wear it is.

When it is wet, you can definitely smell the sweetness and the fruitiness in this perfume, but there is also a slightly herbal smell lurking in there that kind of reminds me of Jägermeister. Kind of fitting for a Lady of the Hunt, I suppose!

When it’s wet, you can also smell the citrus that gives the perfume almost a bitter (but not unpleasant) edge.

As it dries, I found that the citrusy and herbal smells faded away a little. Now you can really smell the grape and pomegranate scents that Sara has put into the perfume. It also smells warmer when it is dry, and has slightly spiced, almost incensy note behind the light, sweet fruity smells.

It smells good enough to eat, and is a lovely, gentle smell that you could easily wear all day.

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THORNFIELD

Note - Thornfield was a limited edition fragrance for Spring 2011, and is no longer available. However, I have it on good authority that it will be returning again in Spring 2012!

I’m going to be honest, when I first put this one on, I really didn’t think that I was going to like it very much at all. Out of the bottle it smells strongly of a mixture of lavender and furniture polish. It is pretty overpowering, and doesn’t sit well on me at all.

However, as I let it dry I increasingly became a bit of a convert, as with a little wear this perfume becomes more and more sexy and sophisticated. That smell of furniture polish slowly fades away, and the lavender muted by some seriously gloomy floral smells that make me feel as though I’m walking into the garden room of an old Victorian mansion that has been abandoned for years: Shadowy and musky with the memory of what all those flowers must once have smelt like.

Thornfield is named after the home of Lord Rochester in Jane Eyre, and it’s easy to imagine Mrs Rochester’s attic room having this same shadowy, floral smell. However, to me it smells more like the perfume that the femme fatale would wear while walking the dark, rain-soaked streets of the city in her full length, button-down coat.

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LORD FOGG

Of the four scents that I’ve tried so far, this one is definitely my favourite. Sara describes it as “It’s elegant, Victorian, and VERY male,” and I figured that it’d be about perfect for when I was in one of my boy moods. And it is! Although, I have to say that it’s not so overpoweringly masculine that I wouldn’t wear it the rest of the time as well. No doubt it smells great on the boys (and if I’m ever feeling particularly generous then maybe I’ll try it out on mine), but I’d say that it’s also perfect for women like me who enjoy wearing powerful, assertive fragrances.

Wet on the skin, the first thing you get is the orangey, citrusy smell of the blood orange, but that is swallowed almost immediately by a musky scent that is both forceful and male.

However, my favourite thing about this perfume is what it smells like when it’s dry. When that happens, that blood orange smell starts to creep back in again, and it’s underscored with ylang ylang—one of my absolute favourite scent combinations! Underneath all of that, there is the smell of musk and rum and spices that make this scent seriously sexy.

Dark, powerful and magical.

It is absolutely the kind of smell that you would expect to find on the skin of a gentleman magus as he stayed up late in his library deciphering alchemical symbols and practising his spells.

Doubtless I shall be doing some more reviews like this one in the future, however in the meantime, if you would like to keep up with Sara and what she’s up to, then here’s how you do it:

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Sarawen Perfume Art Online Shop

Blog: http://www.sarawenperfumeart.blogspot.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SarawenPerfumeArt
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/SarawenPerfume

Original Article

International Steampunk Day!

As some of you may know already, today is International Steampunk Day!

To celebrate, we thought we’d put together a whimsical collection celebrating the fun side of steampunk in all its cog-like glory!

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‘International Steampunk Day!’ by HauntedSummer

Today (June 14th) is International Steampunk Day! We thought we’d celebrate with a collection of some of our favourite steampunky Etsy items.

honeypunk1 $24.00	ukapala $40.00	PrintsByFormed… $10.00	stephmel $28.00
labellefairy $799.00	Milesstones $45.00	EllaGajewska $149.00	TrashAndTrinke… $38.00
GeahkBurchill $118.00	parkersandquin… $179.00	SaraWen $10.00	kharaledonne $40.00
gringrimaceand… $160.00	nouveaumotley $125.00	techdragon $375.00	punqd $12.00

Treasury tool by Red Row Studio.

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Also, in celebration, today and today only you can use coupon code ISD2011 at the checkout. This will give you 15% off of anything you order, including our newest item: an upcycled top with words and pictures from ‘Liberty’ in Issue #7 of SteamPunk Magazine.

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Upcycled ‘Liberty’ Teesize> Haunted Summer This deep purple, fitted t-shirt has been upcycled and embroidered in very pale purple with three small designs of sky lanterns and jellyfish. The illustrations were drawn to accompany my story ‘Liberty’, which appeared in Issue #7 of SteamPunk Magazine. £15.00 GBP

Original Article

Handmade Dreampunk

I have been scouring Etsy high and low looking for other people that are working out of the same sort of ethic that I am—this strange and wonderful thing that I call dreampunk.

Over the past few months I have been working on a manifesto of sorts, trying to define exactly what dreampunk means to me personally. However, until such a time as I can make the words do what I tell them to, here are some of the things that I’ve found that convey a sense of beauty and wonder, and some things with some really excellent hot air balloons on them.

Because everyone knows that they’re so much cooler than airships.

‘Dreampunk for Summer’ by HauntedSummer

Dreampunk is a kind of steampunk that seeks to inspire a sense of wonder, awe and beauty. It is more Romantic than it is Victorian.And it LOVES hot air balloons.

cindythornton $120.00	SunroomGlass $15.00	AlexandraSophi… $210.00	gypsymoonart $30.00
JenniferMorris… $25.00	livingferal $16.00	ukapala $40.00	Carouselink $42.00
Scoop51 $32.00	RanunculusMark… $90.00	lucietales $85.00	TrashAndTrinke… $38.00
whatanovelidea $16.95	JocelynsInkwel… $140.00	pygmycloud $13.50	EmilyGibbs $40.00

Treasury tool by Red Row Studio.

Original Article

Introducing Haunted Summer

I have been pretty rubbish at keeping up with this blog recently. Part of the reason for that is that I have moved house, left the job that I’ve been in for the last few years, and struck out on my own.

That is to say, I have set up my own business hand-making clothing and jewellery. Some of it is unique, some of it is made to order from historical patterns, some of it is upcycled, some of it is for plus sized men and women, but ALL OF IT is dreampunk.

Please take a look at the shop and join us on Facebook and Twitter if you can.

I am just one woman trying to make a living doing what she loves, and desperately hoping that she can make enough money that she doesn’t have to go back into the rat race.

I will be using this blog, along with Facebook and Twitter, to share a whole series of ‘How To’ style articles that will walk people through the process of how to make everything from corsets to upcycled clothing and necklaces to dread falls.

Spread the word!

Original Article

Whitewashing Dragon Age

Here is another article written for the fantastic Border House.

I’m also delighted to say that it’s my first ever article to have been reposted on the frankly brilliant Racialicious

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[caption id=”attachment_323” align=”aligncenter” width=”500” caption=”Concept art for the default male version of Hawke from Dragon Age 2, showing a Caucasian man with black hair and a beard, covered in bloody markings and symbols and wearing a mixture of fur, armour, and ragged clothing.”][/caption]

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing myself for the release of Dragon Age 2, which is set for release on 11th March. I only managed to get my hands on the demo today, but already there are a few problematic elements bubbling away in the background.

The demo begins with a Chantry seeker named Cassandra calling on Varric, a dwarf who she knows spent time with Hawke—the game’s protagonist. In response to her questioning, Varric begins narrating a story in which Hawke and his/her sister Bethany are fleeing the darkspawn only to encounter a dragon. At this point, Cassandra calls shenanigans on Varric’s story, and he promises to relate ‘what really happened’.

The problem, however, is that BioWare have chosen (at least for the purposes of the demo) to give you the character creator only after this initial opening sequence. In fact, the beginning of the game gives you a simple choice between male/female and warrior/mage/rogue before throwing you into the action. This means that the first ten minutes of the game are always going to be played as BioWare’s default male or female Hawke, which in turn means that they are going to be Caucasian.

At the time of posting, the discussion on BioWare’s forum about this issue is already over twenty pages long (and really not recommended reading for the most part, with a lot of people making the point that this opening sequence presents Hawke as a legend, rather than who they really were. However, this raises the uncomfortable subtext that, while the real Hawke may be customized to suit the player’s tastes, the Hawke that people know from legends is always going to be white. Personally, I can’t help but be reminded of Jesse Houston’s assertion that BioWare’s female characters are less iconic than the male ones, and Stanley Woo’s utter failure to handle racial issues surrounding the Dragon Age games in the past couple of months.

BioWare’s reasoning behind this bizarre choice seems to be that they have concluded that they’re losing a lot of players who don’t want to be confronted with a character creator at the very start of a game. As Mike Laidlaw says in this interview:

“We saw a lot of people disengaging at hour one, hour two […] You get to an RPG and fire it up, and it hits you in the face with a thousand stats. Those stats are very cool, but you may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with them as your first thing to do in the game.”

He also goes on to add:

“Part of the glorious advantage of the frame narrative is [that] Varric kind of lies about you. We establish how people perceive the Champion. This figure is of some import to the world.”

And, apparently, the way people perceive the Hero of Kirkwall is as a white man or white woman, regardless of their actual ethnicity. Granted, this could make for a very interesting plot device should BioWare wish to use Dragon Age 2 to challenge this assumption in game, but unfortunately the demo makes no sign of doing anything of the sort.

Granted, there has been some progress since the days of Dragon Age: Origins, where your Warden of color was furnished with an entirely white family. According to the Dragon Age Wiki, the skin tones and facial structures of Hawke’s family members will now adapt themselves to compliment your customized character. However I can’t help but feel that this is at least a small step back from Mass Effect 2, where the pre-character creation sequence has been craftily put together to only show Shepard in full armour obscuring her/his skin tone and facial features until you’ve played through the opening scene.

I have to wonder: would that have been so difficult to do this Dragon Age 2, as well? Why choose to present a legendary version of the main character, and their entire family as potentially whitewashed versions of themselves, without challenging or questioning it? Will this depiction of the Caucasian Hawke of legend appear in the full version of the game? And, if so, is it plot device that BioWare have used in a ham-fisted attempt to ‘hit the ground running’, or will we be seeing more cutscenes featuring the default versions of Hawke throughout the game?

Thanks to Marissa for the tip-off, and to half the staff of Border House for the discussion :)

Original Article

Allegra Writes for Border House

A few weeks ago, I posted a roundup of a few articles of interested I’d found online, two of which came from Border House: an excellent website that deals with the intersection of feminism, activism and gaming.

A little while after that, I dropped the people at Border House an email, and I’m very happy to say that I’ve recently been accepted onto their list of regular contributors.

My first article, Shooting Fish in a Barrel - Part One, is about the atrocities reaped upon feminism by the new Castelvania game, Lords of Shadow.

I’ll be reposting the article here shortly, but in the meantime you should all be sure to go and check out Border House. It is one of the most excellent websites that I have seen in a very long time, and a place that I’m really honoured to get the chance to be a part of.

Original Article