Category: writing

Information garden parties

Posted on by Liz

I asked today on Mastodon (which I approached cautiously as if it were a loaded gun) for people to share their blogs with me so I can work on building a more current feed reader. I use The Old Reader which costs money but does much of what i want with a minimum of fuss. I might throw that out and go with Planet (though must figure out which one) or moonmoon.

We need to bring back things like blogrolls, blog carnivals, and construct our own feeds. Yes I know I’m going to have to explain “blog carnivals”. Later!

I suggest we all host some little local garden parties. Not necessarily in a garden – but to “garden” our information feeds.

We can give each other recommendations – we can build some systems that don’t utterly suck!

I am very much enjoying NOT reading news, social media, reddit, or anything Fast or Scrolly. It’s good here! Try it!

Let’s encourage each other to curate our own information feeds that are noncommericalized, not being SHOVED INTO OUR EYEBALLS by an unknowable ALGORITHM, and that nurture, feed, and connect us like actual humans!

(I do love tiktok and the endless fountain of creativity there! HOWEVER.)

What do we love about blogging? It’s so personal and strange! It doesn’t have to fit into anything that is a made up “genre” motivated by money! (though it certainly can!)

Anyway, just from my one post to my very tiny mastodon account with not many followers at all, I got back some fun blogs! I favor rambling eclecticness, wit, diaries, anything people are either obsessed with or know a lot about, and noncommercial, non-categorizable approaches to blogging. You will note I already have my old fashioned blogroll over there on the oldfashioned sidebar. Here’s some more from today, lightly and irreverently annotated!

* jr conlin’s ink stained banana – entertaining short essays, tech infused but happily not lacking broader culture. Maybe my favorite of the new blogs I riffled through today

* ddurst’s blog – opinions on tech stuff, music production geekery, rock music criticism, and more

* ODonnellWeb – one of those blogs that has been many things but right now is all about birding, with lovely photos of places to go birding!

* Our Magic – Metagrrl’s blog about rpgs and building a very elaborate miniature landscape which I hope to see in person sometime! Honestly, Dinah is one of my early blogging heroes, so good and thinky, versatile, and someone who always comes up with new interests & projects. Discardia! Cocktails! Methodically walking the entire map of San Francisco! ::hearteyes::

* Long story short pier – Kip Manley’s gonzo criticism and far-ranging overthinking of just about anything and everything, everything and nothing. A good kind of blog! (Does have some ads for Kip’s books; we’ll allow it!)

* We Don’t Agree – Frank Miroslav’s very interesting essays, more a list of well thought out essays than “blog”, which I expect to be more off the cuff. Political, tech, economic analysis.

In short – I have gone full “FUCK THIS”. Seriously.

Generous with their links

Posted on by Liz

In what may have been the heyday of independent blogging, just as it turned to eyeball grabbing ad fodder, I remember my blog being reviewed by someone who described me as “generous with her links”.

This struck me as shocking on a couple of levels.

I realized they thought of my linking out as generous because I’m referring traffic outside of my own domain; the SEO strategies of the time probably recommended that you link only to your own site, directing readers to hit more of your pages, making you look more important to paying advertisers.

Needless to say (as you can tell from my own lack of fame, fortune, and ambition) I was not “optimizing” anything. Mostly I was just flinging posts into the public void out of being a compulsive diarist and having some ideals around women’s writing being mostly private, in diaries and letters, for most of history & wondering what would happen if we all split the world open by writing about our lives as part of public discourse.

younger liz peering over sunglasses wearing a beanie hat with the blue, white, and orange Blogger logo

Monetization aside, the good angle on the generous nature of linking would be the sense of taking the time and energy to add depth, to help the reader discover interesting things, like footnotes and appendices that knit information together and expand our minds – but that isn’t what the reviewer meant.

The whole point of the web is links! Creating a meaningfully interlinked body of knowledge and text! Consider Ted Nelson! And Vannevar Bush! Bring back the thinkertoys! But also just consult your own common sense and conscience!

If I remembered where that review appeared, I’d link to it!

white woman with a wry expression wearing a tshirt that reads "no one cares about your blog"

Rebel Girl and the Human League

Posted on by Liz

My sister and I went to see Kathleen Hanna talk about her autobiography, Rebel Girl, last week. I recommend it! She was interviewed by poet, musician, and zinester Brontez Purnell and that was a joy because they had such lovely friendly chemistry and were able to laugh and enjoy themselves.

What a story – that Brontez was one of, as he describes it, “the 5 total riot boyzz in the world” who were writing letters to Bikini Kill and getting answers back from Kathleen. She described his 1993-ish letter, accompanied by a selfie he took of himself on the school bus, and how she had it taped up over her desk for the next 10 years. Write to your heroes everyone! They may like it! Then years later his band was opening for her band and now they are friends! A fairy tale that I love so much. I will likely review his recent book Ten Bridges I Have Burnt in a different post, since I bought it at the talk but have not read it yet.

It shouldn’t have been surprising to find Kathleen is tremendously funny. I had this reaction seeing her age up into a mid 50s person who is happy and has a secure life who deals with the intense trauma of their past with wry humor and is hard as nails but also soft as fuck and able to let it hang out and tell her stories and have a different kind of creative freedom where you get to explore your art while also — shocker — impossible — being supported. Maybe it sounds a little arrogant but that is how I feel about my life trajectory and it was so good and moving to know she is in a good place with her bands and singing and writing and her Beastie Boys husband and their loved and cherished child.

I did not know but also probably should have if I thought for 5 seconds that she has some also similar experiences being a person who other people report their trauma TO. By talking about rape and harassment you become kind of a magnet, you have freed others to talk about their traumatizing experiences and they want to tell you about it. Like the boxes of riot grrrl zine mail I was getting (and still have in the basement unsorted, unarchived) while still super fucked up in my early 20s from girls just a bit younger than me – it can be hard to take and she had to do that in person while having that level of indy fame where people make a lot of assumptions but you are desperately trying to scrape $40 together for medical care and eating dry ramen noodles and working at a strip club while you are ill as hell. My point was that when you talk about fighting rape & harassment you become the respository of everyone’s worst and hardest stories, and that is a hard load to carry no matter how much you feel honored and are willing to do the work of it. I vibed with all of this.

Of course I could talk about riot grrrl shit for fucking ever but that can wait.

Loved her joy in figuring out recording and mixing stuff (much of that, later on, in Julie Ruin era).

Loved the Kathy Acker stories both about being told no one listens to poets – better to be in a band — and about being smacked with a challenge to feminist essentialism (which I don’t 100% agree with actually, but it sounds like it was good for Hanna to be taken seriously & challenged by Acker.)

You can think, well what if Kathleen Hanna and so many more of us could have made our art without all this abuse and trauma and constant harassment? What if we could have support and love from family and have friends who don’t rape us and people who support our artistic careers without grossly hitting on us every fucking 5 seconds ? WHAT IF. But you cannot eat your heart out over it. & just hope for the youth to be MORE OK or at least to have that love and support and freedom.

Instead of eating my heart out I just feel tremendous respect for all the punk rock women making their music and expressing their feminism against all the things that made it difficult – poverty – racism – family – gross men – addiction & alcohol’s pull – hostile media – And so on. They did it and they survived (or didn’t) and it gives me immense strength just to think of them.

(I still miss you, Johanna Lee.)

I’m also 100% ok with her telling her own story about herself. This isn’t a collective story written by everyone who was involved and it isn’t trying to encompass everything that happened. It’s quite hard to make a coherent narrative out of a life, even one’s own life! I also liked the style of the short vignettes (which I have also been trying out.)

I hope it is immensely (further) healing for Kathleen to talk about her book and her life on stage in venues where she is respected and listened to and celebrated as an artist and for her whole self.

I enjoyed her stories and the book. She left out countless assaults and rapes I’m sure (which she joked about on stage) And I read with some sadness but also interest, about “Susan” who I instantly knew who it was, and I’d link but, What the actual Fuck, apparently there is still shit you can’t talk about? Of course it is fraught but it was interesting to see Hanna frame that interaction as encountering someone who she could not deal with because of their intensity and over-familiarity and having repeated mental health meltdowns on the bedroom floor of someone who didn’t actually want to let you into their house. However I was kinda sad to see her throw shade on “Susan”‘s writing and zine output, which I thought at the time was great and still love for its raw energy and realness because it spoke to me. I always appreciated “Susan’s” zines, mail, and mutual distro activity. At the time I did not know about the ridiculous and horrible problematicness of their behavior and their claims. The information about how it went down was not super visible to me either at the time – a little bit thru zines but I only really got it a few years later once we had web pages and then i forget who explained it to me (pre-blog.)

As gossip comes to me over the years I continue trying to unlock levels of understanding about things that affected me and my art and friendships even tho I was incredibly peripheral to those things. Why must it be so mysterious. But then I can SO easily imagine the queer anarchist collective meetings, or the personal arguments and angst, or whatever, that probably went into the non-links in this non-entry: https://zinewiki.com/wiki/Riot_Grrrl_Press Though you can get closer with this thoughtful post by ciarra.

there was also a lot of really interesting stuff about REDACTED & her crew. the book didn’t get into all the race controversy that happened after REDACTED wrote in her zine about the racist antebellum “one-drop rule” & how it is possible that she may have a black ancestor & so she can speak on behalf of all people of color everywhere–basically turning into a denier of privilege & positioning her identity in a big sick game of oppression olympics in which she can do no wrong. but it did kind of edge in that direction & shared a bunch of other ridiculous shit REDACTED did that was pretty similar.

it made me think about all the ridiculous arguments i have had with people over political things–things that sometimes seem like pointless internecine in-fighting, especially in retrospect. it made me think about how imperfect riot grrrl was, but in a way that didn’t really make me feel sad. it made me think more about how these girls were just muddling along, trying to make something out of nothing, doing what girls do, & because they managed to concoct this historical movement that has created such an intense feminist legacy, all the fights & snap decisions that didn’t seem so huge at the time, are being documented, & then they become evidence of the fractiousness that has plagued feminist movements since the inception of feminism.

WHY MUST OUR HISTORY CONTINUALLY DISAPPEAR. AAAAAAAAUGHHHHHH.

(It is because, the more marginalized your group is, the more vulnerable/more precarious everyone’s situation is so there is more at stake if you reveal the problems you will all be attacked personally in the worst ways and your internal / personal problems used to represent your entire category of people.)

Once I tried to trace what “actually happened” (as if that is possible) with the ending throes of the Combahee River Collective and whoooo. It’s none of my business on most levels. But it is interesting because of the way the dynamics are so similar to other groups who do amazing things and how they do not always last for a long time because Reasons.

It is so fraught to realize that sometimes the people you are THIS close to ideologically and personally are also the ones you cannot stand to be near, maybe they are just that bit of extra fucked up or chaotic that means they will drag you into their worldview or their own mess. Or you realize (like I did with “Susan”) that their racism is real and super harmful. I mean, we all want to “fix this mess”. Sometimes we can’t do it together I guess! I’m glad that “Susan” seems to have a more stable life now too. I am also extremely glad I was not close enough to any of that to be anywhere near the actual drama. WHEW.

In comparison, Hanna makes an attempt to talk about her own and white punks’ racism and the harm it did. Her big example is when she co-hosted a forum about undoing racism without realizing at all what was about to happen, which was white women’s tears to the max to the point where all the women of color left the event by the end except her very upset black co-host. There are many lessons there and one is probably, know how to just stop an event like that in its tracks. Like disrupt it or tell off your own audience or just full out end the event in the middle. As I get older that is part of what I think I may have learned or am learning. Sometimes things that seem good or well intentioned need to be stopped or destroyed, because they are so full of shit that allowing them to continue under your watch, is harmful and you’re complicit. “BURN IT DOWN.”

ANNNNNNNYWAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY

I promised some Human League commentary in this blog post. I was randomly listening to their first (?) album this morning in the shower after reading all the way through Rebel Girl in my pajamas, and I realized how much I appreciated their most famous song when it was new, because of how it wasn’t the usual fucking thing of a man complaining about a girlfriend who broke up with him and doesn’t appreciate him with an extra helping of “veiled” threat. Here is my freshmen composition essay about it! (I taught freshman comp briefly and read many a hastily tossed out song analysis! Why not.)

In Don’t You Want Me, which honestly is a bit insipid, but whatever, we all know the song — the dude has his say – he claims he discovered and “made” her in some way (assuming a musical career or something similar) – Then the threat. “I can put you back down too” and “we will both be sorry”, disturbing! He doesn’t accept that she is breaking up with him, and even tells her she doesn’t know what she wants, a total denial of her agency. So far, par for the course in pop songs and movies and books and like, everything. (This is why I hate most movies by the way, along with all the rapey fear bullshit and more general hetero/sexism/gender essentialism. I don’t need to consume any more of that toxic shit!)

But then the song totally redeems itself by Susan Ann Sulley giving our former waitress and now successful (artist) a voice in this!

I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar
That much is true

Already, I’m happy because she instantly makes it clear she has a different version of this story! He doesn’t have a lock on the truth!

But even then I knew I’d find a life on my own
Either with or without you

Yes! Tell it! She also wasn’t pathetically waiting around for a man to come “discover” and “make” her! She had ambitions and plans and knew what she was doing! Thank you Susan Ann!!!!!!!

She acknowledges they had some good times together and she still has feelings towards Mr. ExBoyfriend, but…

But now I think it’s time I lived my life on my own
I guess it’s just what I must do

No argument, not a lot of explanation, no room for argument, just a clear message that it’s over and she is moving on.

I found this heartening and refreshing in the 80s. A woman could just break up a relationship and move on because it’s what she wanted to do. Duh! The end! (We hope, despite Mr “I made you, I can destroy you” making his gross threats.) It seems like a low fucking bar to set for one’s basic humanity.

Morning book – Cid Corman

Posted on by Liz

photo of three small books

Found in my basement after years of being in storage – a handful of tiny books by Cid Corman. I got these at the estate sale of a University of Texas professor who had just died probably in 1986 or 1987 – I remember riding my bike to follow signs to the sale and then being absolutely in love with this woman and her books and all her things, and being sad she was dead and I would never know her. I could only afford a few books and a velvet pillow with a siamese cat print. I have forgotten her name but I think it was Elizabeth something. The books bear labels from the Ruth Stephan poetry center.

The feel and look of these few booklets inspired me in printing later books for Tollbooth Press (and sometimes Catalyst Press) like Woodbird Jazzophone and Inamorata. They are handmade, but stapled, not hand-sewn, with the beautiful textured paper folded around the print booklet in dust jacket style.

Stead is a collection of short poems, beautifully typeset and bound in soft thick brown paper with almost iridescent wood fibers. It’s dated 29 May 1966, Utano.

I like this little gem – We don’t need to even know what the quote refers to!

“So
slow the rose . . .”

All-at-once
light!

And this is lovely too,

Three small girls
in Sunday dress
racing down

the street to beat
each other –
I can guess – to

the candy
store – forgetful
there who won.

At the time when I read these, I had already gone looking for poetry translated from Japanese from various anthologies – definitely including A Book of Women Poets From Antiquity to Now, which I bought in the Brown University bookstore on a family trip in early high school and studied till it fell apart, and then in the various paperbacks edited by Kenneth Rexroth and whatever else I could find. (As I had read quite a lot of English and American lit by early high school, and decided it was a goal of my life to read work from everywhere and everywhen else.)

I think David Wevill told me to read Basho and other Japanese poets in translation. We would talk in his dimly lit office about short poems vs. long poems, Ezra Pound, imagists, Garcia Lorca, translating from Spanish, and all sorts of stuff I wish I could remember better, but which I’m sure sunk in deeply. David was very kind and gentle to me at a turbulent time in my life and gave me a point of stability, letting me sign up over and over for “independent study” poetry courses with him. Without that, I am sure I never would have graduated from university.

Nonce is another tiny book bound in beautiful shimmery paper with faint brown and blue stripes.

As the sun
lights mountains,
the child’s hand

lifts to its
grandmother’s
thoughtlessly.

A treasure,

Someone will
sweep the fallen
petals away

away. I know,
I know. Weight of
red shadows.

But I have to say, the book is immortal to me for this poem surrounded by evanescent little dreams of willows and cherries and the moon,

No one here,
time for a
good slow shit.

Imagine how this would have made Nettelbeck laugh! Anyway, it makes me laugh.

In this little trove originally (though, still lost in my files for now) was a mimeographed translation of Liu Xie’s Wen Fu. I wrote to Corman, though I have no memory of how I found his address, pre-web, asking for permission to make a zine of his translation (and praising his work, and likely sending him poems as well) and he wrote me back giving me permission very charmingly. Maybe David Wevill had his address. Periodically I find this letter and resolve to publish the translation and then lose the whole folder of stuff again somewhere in my papers.

Later (I think) I read a bunch of Origin and got the big paperbacks collecting work from the magazines. And realized there was some connection with Lorine Niedecker (who was connected somehow to the “Minor Poets” I was hanging with in the 00s on the Peninsula and in San Jose).

Corman gets some criticism for translating or co-translating without knowing any of the source language, but I think he does amazing work and I’m a fan of co-translation (having done it myself with Yehudit Oriah on her book Mandala). Of course that is a somewhat controversial take and I also know it can be done with ridiculous disrespect and disregard for a culture and language.

As I re-encountered these books which surely were not printed in any great numbers or distributed with an eye to the mass market I feel a surge of affection for Corman across time. He sent these little books out into the world and by random chance they ended in the hands of a young poet and publisher (me). My books that have some echoes of or roots in this paper encounter, if only in their printing and binding and philosophy, are probably the (much later) Short, artless, and Woodbird Jazzophone. Which you can now read as ebooks!

I’ll write about the other Corman books (and the translation) another morning.

Oh those Golden Dawns

Posted on by Liz

Storytime! Brought to you by two small poetry books I just found in a box. In 1988 or so I went to the Yeats International Poetry School in Ireland and it was an interesting round of small workshops and classes (Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and a guy named Tom Paulin who clearly didn’t want to be there) And deadly boring poetry readings / drinking sessions where Yeats’s grandnieces’s cousin would play the harp and someone would beatifically recite When I went out to the hazel wood on a little stage while people chain smoked.

Most of this trip is a haze to me because I had a killer sinus infection and a fever for half of it and had to stay in the horrible youth hostel on codeine and antibiotics absolutely dying while brutally healthy German girls played the guitar and sang far into the night, but I do recall amidst the nervous chain smoking academics and the earnest poets these two complete weirdos absolutely swanned into the entire scene and they were real live serious devotees of Aleistair Crowley.

The guy was small, skinny, ferretty, wore a giant gold medallion and I believe often some sort of robe and he would stroke his little goatee like a caricature supervillain while he talked in a weird nasal voice about the Order of the Golden Dawn in its modern day incarnation, and how he was a Druid. He came across as just a giant creep. The girl in this couple was more interesting and nice, with a giant smile, tall, floofy blond hair, big chunky hippie jewelry, kind of seemed rich, and had a cheerful breezy manner — and she would talk constantly about druid sex magick. I actually liked her. One could not figure out why this perfectly nice lady hung upon every word of the fool Druid.

I thought they were hilarious especially because everyone was so disapproving of them (why were they THERE? I mean, I get why, but, ?! somehow? Money?! They were both Yeats Enthusiasts and were also very clearly out to do lots of psychedelic drugs and sleep with anyone who was interested in a little Druid Sex Magick as a palate cleanser between the Baileys and the bee-loud glades. (I did not partake) I also didn’t think either of them wrote very good poetry (neither did I but I had an excuse: being 18 years old)

So coming across these books, I looked them up. The Druid died in 2014 and you can read all about him and his translating and how he liked to spend summers in the basement of the Cairo Museum. I wonder if he was a legitimate translator, or what? https://www.darengo.co.uk/terence-duquesne/

The druid Priestess, Dwina, now that I look her up, seems to have been in a long and successful open marriage with Robin Gibb from the Bee Gees. Interesting! “Dwina Gibb, his second wife, whom he met through her cousin in 1980, when she was running a beanbag factory in London while trying to make it as an artist….. The couple lived together in the Biscayne Bay mansion once owned by President John F. Kennedy and a 100-acre Oxford, England, estate, where tapestries and tarot-card tiles adorn the walls of their 12th century converted monastery and the Gibbs built a druid place of worship.”

It was truly hilarious like being inside A Dance to the Music of Time, maybe at the end where Widmerpool goes running off in robes or whatever. Maybe it’s time to re-read that whole series again!

Lots of bookshelves

Posted on by Liz

As I sit down to write I’m mostly thinking about putting up more bookshelves. Neighbor Colin, who is a retired carpenter, gave me two long, long redwood boards which are at least 100 years old and have been weathering outside. We scraped them a little and hosed them off, and he split them lengthwise for me so now I have four very long and narrow shelves.

Today I plan to start sanding the boards by hand and then oil them. To avoid hurting my hands with repetitive motion, I’m figuring to sand, then oil one board, then hang it and arrange some books. Most of my books are out of boxes now, but double or triple stacked.

It’s so exciting to have them all back after their 10+ years in storage. While unpacking I felt my brain sort of waking up in different places – all my poetry books in Spanish – a ton of feminist science fiction – weird literary criticism – a huge section of the history of sexuality – all my zines and papers and letters and notebooks and other projects.

So that’s going on with me and actually generative creativity is in tension with the amount of domestic work to get the books and papers out and up — and the feeling of this enormous backlog of my own work that is a huge mess. I glimpsed entire book projects and zines that I forgot even existed – an entire Manifesto – Oh, help!

So, a little “curation” and archival ordering, a little spelunking through lost caverns, I hope will be balanced by new ideas & new writing.

Wish me luck with the sanding, as I’m a little afraid I’ll do it “wrong” by my neighbor’s judgement. He loves every piece of wood like a brother. As we were out on the sidewalk scrubbing dirt & lichen off the boards, he looked around dreamily at the painted Victorians of our street, & said, imagine if there was NO PAINT on all these, just beautiful, beautiful wood, century old virgin redwood and pine… Grain exposed… the history…

And the sins of our other neighbors, or contractors they hired in the past, have been pointed out to me: SOMEONE USED AN ORBITAL SANDER ON THAT REDWOOD!!!

Word generator

Posted on by Liz

This pun generator seems amazingly useful for making up words!

Check this out, putting in liberation and subway (Danny’s idea) got some good stuff:

https://www.punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator/liberation+subway

A “represstroom” should just be the new word for an inaccessible or locked bathroom! Playing around a bit, you can come up with distressroom and depressroom!

And an “oppresscalator” is just amazing no matter how you use it — the opposite of an accesscalator! When it’s covered in poop, it’s a grotesqualator! A pee filled elevator is a repelevator!

I may never get anything accomplished ever again other than playing with this.

Early astronomer commitment schemes

Posted on by Liz

Today I learned that early astronomers were hella clever. I was looking up good colony sites or just interesting topographic features for each planet or other solar body that I think would make a good future BART stop in Transitory and came across this:

Early astronomers used anagrams as a form of commitment scheme to lay claim to new discoveries before their results were ready for publication. Galileo used smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras for Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi (“I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form”) for discovering the rings of Saturn.

Working on this game is an endless delight!

Huygens did it too.

Huygens observed Saturn and in 1656, like Galileo, had published an anagram saying “aaaaaaacccccdeeeeeghiiiiiiillllmmnnnnnnnnnooooppqrrstttttuuuuu”. Upon confirming his observations, three years later he revealed it to mean “Annuto cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam coherente, ad eclipticam inclinato”; that is, “It [Saturn] is surrounded by a thin, flat, ring, nowhere touching, inclined to the ecliptic”

The Terraforming Wiki is very useful for my descriptions of the Solar Line stations.

Meanwhile, have a look at this cool delta-v subway map of the solar system!

I also direct your attention to the fabulous Interplanetary Transport Network wikipedia page.

Exploring multisensory descriptions in Inform7

Posted on by Liz

Over the past week I’ve been experimenting with different ways to make an interestingly playable game where the player’s point of view can be multisensory in various ways. So, for example, a character who is hearing and sighted would experience visual, sound, touch, and scent based room descriptions, while a Deaf character would not get the sound descriptions.

One way is to use Touchy Feely extension by Quantum Games. I ended up forking this and adding a few things to fix a couple of errors in the extension, and then adding more options as default descriptions for items. This extension builds in some commands like smell, touch/feel, listen, and taste. You can set the sound of a room, a person, or an object very easily just like you set the (visual) description.

With those rules, and a few others, I started writing rooms like this:

The Bedroom is a room.
The description of the bedroom is
"[if the player is sighted]A small room with white walls and some posters hanging up. The bed has a colorful striped bedspread and paisley sheets. The doorway is in the west wall.[end if]
[if the player is hearing] There is an air filter humming loudly in the corner.[end if]
[if the player is not sighted and the player is not hearing] A small room with a bed in it. The west wall has a wide doorway.[end if]"

The sound of the bedroom is "A loud air filter in the corner fills the room with white noise."
The scent of the bedroom is "The air in here seems very clean and fresh."
The bed is scenery in the bedroom. The description is "A soft, comfy bed. You give it an experimental bounce."
The pillow is scenery in the bedroom. The description is "A nice, soft, squishy pillow."
The bedspread is scenery in the bedroom.
The bedsheet is scenery in the bedroom.
The air filter is scenery in the bedroom.
The doorway is scenery in the bedroom.
The walls are scenery in the bedroom.

Things that are scenery aren’t described until you examine them. I wrote a general search command called (explore, or tap ) which conveniently lists all these “scenery” aspects of a room for non-sighted characters. Sighted characters have to examine them one at a time.

The problem with this method is that it is clunky and I’m repeating various elements of the room description. Ideally, I’d be able to replace a bunch of Inform7 behavior so that:
– Each room (and thing) can have a visual, sound, etc description.
– The game checks if the player has those senses
– The game concatenates the various sensory descriptions appropriately

This turns out to be difficult. I got into reading the Standard Rules (which, from the Inform7 IDE, you can see as an extension) and then realized what I wanted to do was basically happening in the Carry out looking (this is the room description body text rule): section of code. I thought maybe I could hack in a check on the sound of the room and print that.

But! This code refers to the Inform6 core of the game, with

To print the location's description:
(- PrintOrRun(location, description); -).

I tried copying THAT and doing something like PrintOrRun(location, sound), which didn’t work because location and description here are constants from Inform6, I think.
Not sure how to pursue this further. Maybe in future as I get more familiar with the guts of Inform.

So, I tried another way. I suppressed the room description body text rule like so:
The room description body text rule is not listed in any rulebook.
And copied it and pasted it into my example game with a slightly different name.

Carry out looking (this is the room descriptions body text rule):
if the player is sighted:
if the visibility level count is 0:
if set to abbreviated room descriptions, continue the action;
if set to sometimes abbreviated room descriptions and
abbreviated form allowed is true and
darkness witnessed is true,
continue the action;
begin the printing the description of a dark room activity;
if handling the printing the description of a dark room activity:
now the prior named object is nothing;
say "[It] [are] pitch dark, and [we] [can't see] a thing." (A);
end the printing the description of a dark room activity;
otherwise if the visibility ceiling is the location:
if set to abbreviated room descriptions, continue the action;
if set to sometimes abbreviated room descriptions and abbreviated form
allowed is true and the location is visited, continue the action;
print the location's description;
if the player is hearing:
say "[sound of the location][paragraph break]";
otherwise:
say "[feel of the location] [scent of the location] [taste of the location] [paragraph break]";

Because I’m not using the “print” function the sound and other sensory qualities of the room are described under the actual room description. That might be OK but now I need to learn how to elegantly write a room description that is broken out into visual, sound, and other qualities. I also need some kind of bare bones description that doesn’t show to the player unless the player character is deaf-blind. This will take some practice to learn to write well, and some more refining of how I show which bits of the descriptions.

Note that I will probably be adding in low vision and hard of hearing (by taking the visual and sound descriptions and munging them a bit.)

Building accessible infrastructure into writing and coding style

Posted on by Liz

As you may be aware by now, faithful reader, I am obsessed with my game, which is set in the Bay Area on and around the BART train system. It is science fictiony and magicky, with time travel and weird stuff abounding. I set out with the intention that the player should be able to pick a mobility level and sightedness, possibly in elaborate gradations but for now, at a minimum viable level, the player can choose to be walking or a powerchair user, and blind or sighted, in any combination. For the powerchair character, they can’t do stairs and that’s about it. The blind player (simulated at this testing phase by providing the player a pair of wraparound mirrorshades) will have the “look” command replaced by listen *(maybe) or all room, object, action, and NPC descriptions will have non-sight-based descriptions.

Just as a note, I have not written the system yet for cane tapping but that will likely be integrated.

I am finding it interesting to try out the alternate description route. For example here is a super easy case where the description is written to make it very flexible, with only one word difference in the description:
The description of Calle 24 Northwest Corner is "A busy corner at a busy intersection. You can [if player is blind]hear[otherwise]see[end if] a steady stream of cars, buses, and people passing by."

Or, a little bit longer example,

A flower seller is a person. In Calle 24 Southwest Plaza is a flower seller. The description of a flower seller is "[if player is sighted]A short, smiling woman in a baseball hat and a red checked scarf pushes her wheely cart full of roses and carnations. Her jacket has a ladybug pin.[otherwise]You can hear a short woman just next to you, fussing over a metal cart.[end if]".
Every turn when the player can see a flower seller:
say "A flower seller [if player is sighted][one of]beams at you with a huge happy grin[or]watches the people passing by[or]smiles as she stops to talk with a friend[or]offers you a little bunch of carnations tied with string, saying 'Flores para ti?[otherwise]calls out, 'Flores!'[or]'[or]shares a coffee with a friend, chatting[or]fusses over her bunches of flowers, arranging them nicely[end if][as decreasingly likely outcomes]."

It becomes clear to me that I have to train myself to structure the experience of the reality of the game in particular ways. I might establish a convention (enforced with tests) where each thing defined in the game is required to start with a description for the blind point of view character, then have a description for the sighted. Each clue for the puzzle needs to be playable both ways, as well, and both should have a richness and depth of experience that makes the game fun & action compelling, hinting at possible avenues to explore. So, it will affect how I design the puzzles and clues as well as just some sort of “layer of extra text” to think through. One result is that talking with other characters will likely be more important than it might have been otherwise.

This shows very clearly how important it is to design an environment (whether it is a game, a novel, a class, a web site, software, a real life building, or a city street ) with the point of view of different people in mind. Having written only 6 sample rooms and couple of NPCs and objects and their behavior, I’m very glad that I’m doing this now, and not trying (as so many designers, programmers, and architects do) to staple on a half assed ramp or some probably flat braille a month before finishing a 2 year long project.