A New Beginning

Hello, everyone. For some time now, I've been maintaining a blog at a site set up specifically for blind people. I started the blog partly in order to help test the Blindspots site. Prior to that, I wasn't at all inclined to start one of these things. The more insulated community who are allowed to comment on that site was also a good way to get my digital feet wet. The prior entry of this blog is basically an archive of all my postings to Blindspots since I started. It will certainly bring folks up to speed with how life has been going over the past while. I couldn't find a way of more neatly importing all the entries so they're all in one huge posting. This site, I suspect, will put me much more out there into the digital mainstream.

I'm very much hoping I can leave things open for everyone to be able to comment. That was one of the things I couldn't do with the old blog. Despite limiting comments to registered community members only, it seems that Blindspots is not as immune to spam postings as I had previously assumed. Should I find it necessary to institute safety measures, I'm reasonably happy with the audio captcha system offered by Blogspot. It won't automatically lock out blind users. I may be going more deeply into the sighted world these days but am determined never to produce anything which is inaccessible to blind people

Things are fairly quiet today. I've been following the BBC as they've been covering developments in Cern where it seems things are off to a cracking good start. Technology has always fascinated me. So has history. It'll be interesting to see the outflow from work done at this new accelerator. Nobody quite knows what to expect when these particle collisions begin. There's a nifty sense of audacious wonder about the whole thing which I deeply appreciate. I think that sense of exploration is a fundamental need. It excites us, keeps us humble, and prevents us from becoming so trodden down with everyday life that we can no longer look beyond it. Through my creative writing, I hope to help other people in a similar fashion when my next projects are finally ready for release.

Things are going quite well with Janene and I. She's started her classes and things don't seem like they're too stressful for her just yet. We'll be getting together this weekend. Precisely what we end up doing hinges on a couple of things. One of which is a good friend of mine whose marriage to another friend seems to have hit rock bottom. If he's ready to come back home and break the absurd stalemate matters have hung in for the past month and a bit, we've offered to help him return home. At least then, his wife will have to actually talk to him. Despite his many attempts to contact her via email, she's given him no indication of where she's at mentally. Unfortunately, she doesn't want to face up to what her depression has influenced her to do and how that has impacted those of us who have tried to help her. In an earlier attempt to get them communicating again and help her to see that, I removed myself from those who she feels she can trust. That's what happens when you expose facts which don't conform to her interpretation of people and events. It doesn't matter that I've known her since grade school and have been long-standing good friends to them both. Depressed people seem to want to distance themselves from people who try to help them see reason. My ex-wife certainly did. Unless she's had a substantial change of heart over the past period of silence, it'll all happen again. All that effort and good will from friends and families, all the expense, all the idealism that dies when you have to walk away from a marriage. Once you've experienced it first-hand, it's ... haunting to have two friends go through it. There's no better word to describe the feeling. It's almost like a painful after echo. It's a final nail hammered into the coffin containing a chunk of my formerly largely unlimited optimism about people. When you see what such thoughts as: "Everyone deserves a chance." can truly cost to implement, you begin to truly appreciate the courage of people who live by such ideals. As much as I'm able to, I hope to continue helping everyone I can and show why it pays to be an optimist in this world.

I've been working on the design document of the accessible game I've begun to develop. For the past little while, I've been at a bit of a crux. I can try to create either a text-driven board game with story elements dependent on piece placement or do it as essentially a game book with board-game aspects being secondary. I actually laid out a game board over the Summer but am now leaning very heavily towards the game book approach. This would be somewhat closer to the original game concept. My problem lies with how to have location and distance meaningful within the game without requiring a map. I'm toying with having an internal map with actual routes plotted out but would rather not go through the trouble if there's another way. Searching the Internet for games which have perhaps tackled this problem hasn't yet proved inspirational.

Well, I guess that pretty much covers things for a first entry. If you want to see some of my writing elsewhere online, check out:
www.blind-planet.com/content/personal-power
and to get to know me better as a person:
http://www.blind-planet.com/content/life-word-and-sound