Entombed!

As you all know, I’m an avid game player and spend man

Technorati Tags: accessible gaming,Entombed!,game dev,roguelike

y precious life hours on such things as killing goblins and looting the laboratories of evil wizards.  Back when I still had functioning eyes, I used to play a game called Nethack.  Nethack is a species of game referred to as roguelike, after Rogue, the game in the early 80’s which turned a million college students like me into craven junkies after our next fix of orcs and heroism potions.  Then optic neuritis hit me and I could no longer play.  There was  a set of instructions floating around the Net about how blind people could, after a lot of baffling rigamarole, get NH to work with a screen reader, but it was difficult and not very much fun anyway.  You can’t really enjoy a game if you’re stuck struggling with basic game mechanics issues.

 

Now something miraculous has happened.  A talented blind programmer named Jason Allen has created a roguelike game for blind players.  It’s called “Entombed, and it’s powers to divert and distract from my ongoing task of writing a novel border on the supernatural.  In addition to playing the game, I am an enthusiastic member of the development community around the game and have made a number of suggestions which I expect will find their way into future versions.  Right now, Entombed is in beta testing, but the full version will sell for about $40.00, –in my opinion a steal of a price, given the time, effort and genius it has taken to develop this game.

 

Multi User Dungeon?  What’s that?

 

 

 

 

Entombed!

Of Hells and Sky Daddies

 

 

It’s now been a few years since I bailed out of the Catholic Church, and today during the season of Advent, I’m doing just fine.  There are things to miss about the Church, at least the little corner of it with which I was involved.  St. James Cathedral is a beautiful and a holy place, and I always feel safe and welcome there.  Father Ryan, as I think I may have noted before, is a wise, funny, humane priest;  the sort of priest they try to portray on TV and always get wrong.  And I really got into the ritual of Mass.  In many important ways, in fact, I haven’t broken my ties with those aspects of my Catholicism. They represent the more grounded, human aspects of churchgoing with which I have no conflicts. 

 

The trouble comes when I start cranking up the theology and let it bounce off things in my soul.  What I’ve decided is that I don’t want any part of some blanket insurance plan for the human soul.  I simply don’t think it’s necessary, and I certainly don’t buy the story of Original Sin any more, if I ever did.  For a while, I found it to be a useful shorthand for talking about the fact that human beings are flawed, often tragically so, and that we need as much mercy and forgiveness as we can get our tragically grubby mits on. But I never really bought the economics of Christian salvation, which in its essentials is blood magic and Bronze Age hostage trading. Make no mistake, blood magic is real and its powerful mojo, but I don’t think its something with which I need or want to involve my 21st century soul.

 

Having said all that, I am paradoxically very comfortable with aspects of pagan spirituality.  I love the winter holiday season, and sing the carols of the infant Christ with great joy and verve, if sorrowfully off pitch. But I am not celebrating the birth of the Christian Messiah as much as I am grooving on the Birth of the Sun and the hilarious truth of the Winter Solstice, the truth of renewal, the grave necessity of we human beings to be generous and forgiving with each other.

 

I think there is a great Mystery at the cosmic core, a field, being or energy who is old and wise and yes, even loving.  But I don’t conceptualize it as some kind of anthropic Sky Daddy.  My idea of god is more that of a wise and sapient ocean, through whom we swim, sometimes in joy and sometimes in a kind of terrible amnesia, like minnows.

 

Christmas, then, is a time set aside for breaking through that amnesia and waking back to our cosmic fishhood, and the crucial awareness that we travel, not alone,  but in schools.

 

Merry Christmas.  Happy Winter Solstice.  Kundun.

 

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Christmas,Kundun,minnows,Sky Daddy

Frustration and Feral Cats

 

 

Recently, I’ve had a certain amount of frustration in my digital life in that interfacing with Jaws, the screen reading software which allows me to write novels, email, this blog and surf the Webhas been difficult to manage.  Ever since I loaded Office 2007 onto my XP system, Word 2003 has disappeared, forcing me to deal with the new ribbon interface which is decidedly blind-hostile.  It was clearly designed by some arrogant prick at Microsoft who doesn’t care that millions of people were working comfortably with the classic menues interface and don’t want to migrate to some other wild goose scheme.  Happily, someone has written an add on which enables you to use the classic menues with Office 2007.  This will provide an acceptable stopgap measure until my new Dell comes in the post sometime this week. 

 

Besides the problem with menues, I was finding that Jaws would simply refuse to echo menues properly.  I’ve  bitched about this for about three weeks when it suddenly occurred to me today that I have both JFW 5.1 and JFW 9 on my system.  When I bailed out of the earlier version and lit up Jaws 9, I had no more problems –at least, no more of THAT problem.

 

Finally, I applied for a loan from the Washington Assistive Technology Fundso that I could secure the Dell without paying outrageous interest after nine months have elapsed. The very kind and gracious Andrea there helped me with the application process and gave me some hope that the loan might well go through, even though my credit history is, to put it nicely, a little bit on the wobbly side. This morning, she called with the delightful news that I had been approved for the loan and that we just have to complete some paperwork to make it final. 

 

This is crazy wonderful news for my productivity.  My Dell, which is about four or five years old, is acting more like it’s nine or ten years old.  It’s kludgy and slow and I think the file system is zonked.  It’ll be nice to keep around as a spare, and it’s served me well in my writing life.  But it’ll be nice to break in a new computer that doesn’t act like it has to CONTEMPLATE every command before executing it.  A computer should do what you tell it to do as soon as you tell it to do it.  If I wanted a Zen master, I’d learn Japanese.

 

Oh yeah, and feral cats are in the title because my reality was starting to seem like rounding up a herd of feral cats.  But today, it’s seeming more like marshalling a little squad of handsome German shepards.

 

 

Technorati Tags: WATF,Dell,Zen,digital reality

Sailing with Captain Varney

 

 

As of two days ago, I’ve reached page 120 of my second novel, which is tentatively titled “Dragons and Angels”.  My hero, Pol Dairre, has learned that sorcerors have imprisoned the Archangel of Light and are draining him for energy with which to fuel the kingdom of Ryze.  Through the device of a gem called sangold, the King learns that Pol has discovered the plan and imprisoned him in the Spyre  --rather like the Tower of London.  Pol has escaped, has visited his wife Vyessa and is now going abroad.  He seeks the dragon Akloganzurrat who, the angel has told him, holds the key to the angel’s freedom. Having taken some money saved by his wife, Pol meets Captain Varney, who offers to take him on board the good ship Fortitude to hunt a sea monster called the harrowfish, or simply Harrow.

 

Well and good.  All of that sounds really meaty.  And I’ve written the hell out of those first 120 pages.  The thing is, I know nothing about sailing vessels of the 16th and 17th century, the general time frame in which my novel is set.  Very often, I can parley what is effectively a scant handful of facts into a believable tale, but that is simply not going to fly here.  People are going to insist that I know the difference between a scupper and a mizzenmast  --and why a square-rigger is called that, and what a spanker is, and what the crew on such a ship consists of and oh just name your poison. The fact is, I’ve been dreading this for some time.  I hate being stalled to do research when what I want to be doing is writing, writing, writing.  You know, talking about sea monsters and terrifying storms is much more entertaining than learning what a focsle is.

 

But oh, it will all be worthwhile once Captain Varney jumps into the sea with a knife clenched between his teeth for a climactic confrontation with Harrow. Call Borders and put your orders in today, kids, because –once the bleeding research is done—this is going to be lightning in four hundred pages.

 

Neil who?

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: research,persistence,novel writing,chutzpah

Post Turkey Blues

 

 

 

Actually, it just made for a decent title;  I don’t really have the blues that much.  I’ve been trying to reach my friend Todd Washkoska for a week and a half, ever since he got out of the hospital after having a minor stroke.  I’ve been worried about him, and worried more since he hasn’t been returning my calls.  But today he called and other than sounding a little bit tired, he sounds okay.

 

In other news, I’m buying a new Windows 7 tower from Dell, even though I vowed not to do business with them several years ago after they royally fucked up with a laptop order.  But it’s hard to get a decent warranty out of someone like Frye’s or Office depot so I got squishy about it.  I’m pretty satisfied with the item, though.  Three years warranty and three years of McAfee protection for a reasonable amount of money, plus Worx Plus, which has a version of Word without the accursed ribbon system devised by Microsoft for Office 2007.

 

Now my only area of concern is my novel.  My hero, Pol dairre, is going on a sea voyage on a whaling vessel –and I know nothing about whaling vessels, except what I was able to glean from Melville.  I expect I’ll need to stampede someone into reading a book for me and spoon-jfeeding the details to me so I can write a halfway convincing chapter.  I did post relevant questions to Yahoo, and got a snarky answer from some asshole who obviously knows something about whaling but couldn’t share it without being a prick.  For some people, it’s always tempting, isn’t it, to be superior about something when they could just as easily be gracious.  That’s the psychology of the Internet in a nutshell.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: snark,grace,Moby Dick,sailing

Down the Drain

 

 

Tonight, I had what amounts to a domestic catastrophe.  ON Sunday afternoon I made an enormous pot of chicken noodle soup.  It had noodles, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, pepper and four pounds of chicken.  The first bowlfuls, ladled out Sunday and Monday,  were delicious.  By tonight, though, the remainder was beginning to smell like a pair of old sweatsocks.  It probably wouldn’t have killed me, and might have gone down fine, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.  So shamefully, in the middle of this recession when people are going hungry, I had to pour half a kettle of chicken noodle soup down the drain. 

 

As I say, it was smellling quite bad, but I still feel terrible about it.  It was supposed to last through tomorrow at least, and maybe, if I was lucky, until the day after Thanksgiving.

 

I knew I was going to do it by this noon, since I went out for a bowl of pho instead of ladling something from my pot.  i have to say, though, that although I feel guilt, I also feel tremendous relief that I’m not going to eat a sixth or seventh bowl of chicken noodle soup in less than half that many days.  A day or two of savory, nicely spiced soup is a grand thing for a day or two, but do it for four days in a row and it begins to feel like prison slops, even if the soup is good,and mine was turning into something evil.

 

This is another example of the way in which, though I am poor by American standars, I am almost unspeakably wealthy in relative global terms.  Probably two thirds of the world’s six and a half billion people wouldn’t have turned their noses up at what I threw down the drain tonight.  But though I am in the bottom rungs of the American economic scale,I am surely near the top in global terms.

 

Beyond that, I have enough to buy pho and pay rent while writing a novel.  Hundreds of artists in Seattle alone, to say nothing of the United States, would like to be in my position, though I daresay none of them would like to lose their eyesight to get here.  And that brings me exactly to the reason why, though I have some uncomfortable feelings about it, I can bring myself to waste that much food.  Simply put, I’ve lost half the things which once gave me joy.  I can’t read books the way I used to, or watch movies or participate in a thousand activities which used to round out my day.  I don’t complain about that very much at this point.  But I am simply not going to add unpalatable soup to my list of sufferings. A large part of dignity in my situation, I find, is the ability to draw lines, to say:  only this much and no more. Some things, I find, are more precious than food ethics, which are very precious indeed.

 

Technorati Tags: food ethics,poverty,rationing,chicken noodle soup

ON Being Poor

 

 

It’s fairly common for me to hear otherAmericans talk about their poverty.  Well, I know a little about this.  I live on less than $15,000 a year, and when I need something I often have to wait and save for it out of my monthly SSDI check.  I am more fortunate than some, in that I have a good friend with a higher paying job who helps me out if things get really rough.  IN general, though, other than my DSL connection, I live pretty close to the ground.

 

But unlike many of my fellow countrymen, I almost never bitch about it.  Because while I am poor in terms relative to other Americans, I am quite wealthy when I understand myself as a citizen of the world.  I can walk eight feet to my kitchen sink and get a cup of cold clear water, clean and free of pathogens.  Also relevant to the water issue are my bathtub, shower and toilet.  I can stay clean from day to day, and my life is thusly more healthful and pleasant than it is for people in many parts of Africa and Asia, for whom personal hygiene and sanitary waste disposal are major public health problems. 

 

And I can eat inexpensively too.  I can drink clean cold milk, or buy fresh vegetables cheaply, wonderful greens, tangy onions and  ripe red tomatoes, with which I make cheap nutritious salads. Finally,while I can’t go overboard on the more select cuts of meat, I can enjoy hamburgers and inexpensive fish fillets.

And though I’d rather that certain people in various State agencies aren’t aware of this, I can afford to go out for some cheap pho and even the occasional helping of sushi, if I mind my quarters.

 

It took me years to come to this understanding of things. And I wish this blog had more clout, because I’d love to counsel people that you can get along without seemingly crucial things –money, a car, your eyesight— and still be reasonably happy. It’s not so hard.  It just requires the deeper part of yourself that doesn’t have anything to do with bank accounts or credit offers.  You have to get wiley and you have to get grateful.  It’s Poor Punk, capiche?

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Poor Punk,thrift,poverty,coping with the recession