Arrival

(This post will assume basic knowledge of the United States college/university system.)

I've just returned to college, unpacked my stuff, and organized my new dorm room.

This semester isn't going to by my favorite. For some reason, pretty much none of the theater/art/writing classes I want to take are being taught this semester. So I'm mostly doing math classes instead. Now, for me, math is great; it's easy, useful, and enjoyable. It's just not what I'm truly passionate about.

Also, I'm stuck taking my college's English Composition class that's required for all students. (Normally you're supposed to take that in your first year (I'm in my third year now), but due to a series of inconvenient coincidences, I haven't been able to complete it yet.) I love composing English prose, but writing academic essays is completely uninteresting to me. Oh well; I just hope I end up with a professor who can make the material interesting.

On the plus side, since I'm a math whiz, taking mostly math courses means that I'll have quite a bit of free time during this semester, which I will be able to use to do stuff like drawing graphic stories! And college is an interesting place from the outset. I get lots more contact with people, and lots of opportunities to attend talks by interesting people who are doing cool things around the world.

In short, my idle time of this summer is now over! I'm going to be engaged in a lot of things, and I hope to blog about them frequently.

– Eli

A look at Lasercake, one of my upcoming projects!

[Update: This project now has its own website at lasercake.net]

I wrote the following (slightly edited for the web) as part of an application for the “Senior Scholars” program here at Colby College, which will allow me to earn academic credit for doing this project.

Overview

Lasercake is an educational computer game project.

As a game, Lasercake will be a open “sandbox” game – one where the player is presented with a world to experiment in, rather than given a specific goal to accomplish as effectively as possible. As an educational project, the [...]

I'm back!

I haven't blogged in more than a year, but that will now change!

A little after my last blog post, I strained my wrist by programming for eight hours and drawing comics for five hours every day for a week. For a few months, I could barely type – so I stopped blogging, and when I got better, I was busy with other things. Like college. I graduated from Colby College this year, and despite its many structural problems, I think I managed to squeeze a good education from it.

Let me tell you about some of the things I've done in the last year. Leave a comment to tell me which ones you want to hear more about!

Before this summer

Watched a lot of anime. Solved all the levels of Fish Fillets. Got paid to tutor some people in math. Did a lighting design for a short dance piece. Worked on Lasercake a lot and released a prototype. Did BDSM with a partner for the first time. Ran a tabletop RPG for the first time. Played a tabletop RPG for the first time. Learned (and invented!) some useful knots. Wrote a 10-minute play and had it produced by the Colby theater department. Participated in some student activism. Built an exellent new device to carry my stuff around in. Initiated five other people into Eli Dupree's Cult of DOOM. Designed a sexual board game, and learned a lot about Inkscape to do it.

Since the beginning of this summer (May 18)

I'm at home now, with nothing but free time to do awesome projects all the time!

Reorganized my room. Reorganized my computer stuff. Started improving my diet, inspired by Rob Rhinehart's “Soylent” project. Learned to use a sewing machine. Got back to working on my comic. Started using an EMG biofeedback device to help me draw without clenching my hand. Set up an exercise bicycle we have and improved my bicycle endurance a lot. Continued work on Lasercake and the board game. Updated a Battle for Wesnoth add-on (“Era of High Sorcery”) that I wrote years ago. Bought a used monitor, built a wooden shelf, and rearranged my workstation [picture].

Some things I'm going to do soon

I'm going to finish Voldemort's Children, finally. It will probably take me at least a month, and I'm going to do all the remaining pages as a batch (so I won't be able to post any until it is all finished). But it is coming!

I'll redesign this website a bunch. Writing it from scratch two summers ago was a great experience, but now that I've used it for a while, I've seen a bunch of flaws in its current design.

I'll leave it at that for now. I don't know what else I'll do next, because there are so many different things I want to do next! But you will hear from me soon. I will blog more, I promise! I'm going to try to post at least one awesome thing each week, possibly more.

– Eli

I'm back, and with new treasures!

The story of the last three years isn't very interesting. My hand problems got better, but then they came back again. Then they got better again, then they came back again, and so on. They're still not entirely recovered, and I'm still trying to see different doctors to figure out what the real issue is. It's no fun.

However!

Since last June, I have had working speech-recognition software. I can now do most of my work by voice, even computer programming. I've been making a bunch of interesting things this way, I just haven't shared them on this website yet.

That's because this website was hard for me to use.

However!

I started redesigning this website in 2013, and now it's finally, finally finished. All of the old posts are still here, but I rebuilt everything else from scratch. There are so many improvements that I can't possibly list them all. Here are some of the big [...]

My cubital tunnel situation

As some of you know, I've had cubital tunnel syndrome since at least January 2017.

Short version:

It's slowly getting worse, so I'm probably going to get surgery for it, which will make it much better.

Long version:

I've been working with my OT (who is amazing at zir job) off and on since 2014 about my various hand problems. Ze suspects that I have always had ulnar nerve problems – in fact, ze suspected it even before I got the obvious symptoms of tingling and numbness in my little fingers. (Ze suspected it based on the weakness of some of my hand muscles.)

We've tried the physical-therapy approach. After it got aggravated in February 2017, I made sure to treat it nicely. I made sure to [...]