Re: Monthly chat September 2015
@Aaron, cool, I have my ticket now and have also got the convention website details, I'm looking forward to it.
@Pitermach, interesting, glad your training to be a massive terrorist is going well and your learning how to get money out of people .
Actually in the Uk any therapest or other medical person accepting cash from a patient would be in severe trouble, so interesting difference there, though i do like the idea of a massage therapy program including actual hospital placements.
As to Viri, well the two coolest ones I recall from the windows 9 x days were one a friend of mine got that was literally called "the black spiral" sinse that's exactly what it did, stick a moving black spiral on the screen that got in the way of your mouse pointer (it actually was very creepy). The other one was a virus that someone made in hommage to the gam
e Xenogears, the intro sequence of which involves a huge space colonization ship being taken over by a computer virus and crashing to the planet the game takes place on. Just before everything goes very wrong the computer flashes repeatedly the message "you shal be as gods" and someone did indeed create an xp virus which did just that, stopped your system and flashed that message at you .
Well I've been doing a few random things, I got my blood of dragons review finished and sent off so hopefully it should be appearing soon, I also have finished skallagriggby William Horwood and will likely be writing a review for that.
Skallagrigg is a book I've always meant to read, sinse it's Horwood, who is one of my favourite authors (especially his Duncton books), writing about disability and about disability and a computer game designed by a girl with
ceribral palsy. A lot about technology and about the treatment of disabled people changing over the years, including some very shocking stuff, indeed the webmaster of oneswitch.org.uk uses "skallagrigg" as his online handle.
So, definitely a book sort of designed for me, and yes, it was amazingly awesome. Sort of magical realism I think, though I was astonished on it's similarities in theme and style to the Duncton series, despite the characters and situation being so different, indeed one thing I will say is Horwood's experience not only of disability generally (apparently he wrote the book partly based on his own daughter Rachel who has cp), but also of the older 80's dos style computer games, (he doesn't mention Zork, Eamon or Adventure but he definitely had such in mind).
The only slightly sad thing from a modern reader's perspective is the book is very much based on the idea of that point in time when a very ordinary person (such as a girl with cp), could become a skilled enough programmer to create commercial standard games on their own based on independent ideas which companies would then market, not like today.
Then again the sort of disabled access tech he mentions is also rather primative by today's standards, nothing like a touch screen or even touch pad much less a head or ker, and sinse one of the major human problems involves-= people with little to no movement who cannot communicate with so called "normal" people maybe things aren't so bad.
Then again the computers theme is only part of the book, a sort of jumping off point for disability, helplessness, mysticism and religion I've ever seen who recognizes that very disabled people can still have feelings of love and attraction), and a lot of other things besides.
I wouldn't say it's a book for everyone, there are no monsters (other than some very human ones), and no big action sequences, I will
say I was quite amazed and will definitely be writing a review.
Actually I think Skallagrigg, along with Salman Rushdi's Midnight's children is one of the few books where the term "magical realism" absolutely applies, indeed I'm slightly surprised the book even has a listing on fantasybookreview.co.uk sinse the fantastic elements are very subtle indeed.
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