Hello Steemit, I'm Terraset...

...Not really sure what to do for my first post so I’m just going to write out my feelings. I’m @spudfuzz ‘s writer for our project, Strawberry Riot. I’m legally blind, being born with a genetic defect that causes a condition called X-Linked Retinitus Pigmentosa which slowly kills off the photoreceptors in my eyes. My main passion is the paranormal and probably has been for my entire life but I only noticed a few years ago. I wanted to avoid the “cuz magic” cliché in my stories so I started looking into physics to see if tehre was any plausible explanation I could use to justify what I was seeing in my mind. Or at least something that sounded plausible. The more I looked, the more I found that magical abilities were actually possible. It was in fact harder to find an ability that couldn’t exist than one that could. I started dabbling in it myself at one point to test the theories, turned out they were right and a shit ton of paranormal stuff started happening around me that, as far as I’m concerned, ultimately ruined my life more than my blindness ever could. Now I research and develop magic to teach to others.

My main relevant finding has been that it is possible to condense energy, that is probably electromagnetic or photonic, in such a way that it “sticks” together and gains inertia. This inertia allows the energy to proportionally interact with the physical world in the same way as any other material. This resulting energy can then be manipulated in any number of ways for any number of effects. However, due to this manipulation being done through the mind, it is incredibly finicky and sensitive to mental states. My main work for the last few years has been focused on increasing reliability, accuracy and efficiency so that I can get it to a level that can be plainly demonstrated on demand. Since, until that happens, it’s just worthless words on the internet that no one should care about or take seriously. The possibilities it opens up are so huge that I can’t justify spending my time doing anything else. Technologically, Star Trek syle replicators aren’t out of the question. But even better, doing it with your hands.

I mulled over whether or not I should talk about any of that given the general attitudes I’ve encountered in the past. Especially given I’m @spudfuzz ‘s writer, I didn’t want any flak coming her way. However, I don’t really think I have much of a choice. Magic is the only real thing I care about doing. It’s the only thing that has any chance of leading to a life I even want to bother living. And I’d much rather do it than talk about it. Despite multiple attempts to be social I’ve always failed. I failed twice to run a podcast, which was really for the best given my attitude at the time. I failed to keep to my own writing schedule for Wattpad. I’ve failed at absolutely everything else I’ve tried to do outside of magic. And to be honest, I’ll probably fail at contributing anything meaningful to Steemit too. Everytime I sit down and try to write something all I can think of is how I could be using that time to work on magic. And how, even if I did succeed at something else, like writing or programming, it would still leave me blind and otherwise in a situation I don’t want to be in. But at least now I’ve learned not to stress so much about it. I’m not going to try setting up my Steemit as a serious job like I would’ve before. I know I’m not going to have the drive to follow through on it. But I do intend to be active to some degree. I’ll probably be posting philisophical things, maybe a few short stories, maybe a little about some of my experiments and methods, I don’t know yet. More than likely I’ll be getting into fights with other people elsewhere on Steemit over philisophical things.

All that being said, I do still work on Strawberry Riot. If there’s anything good that’s come out of all my work on magic, it’s that I can recycle a lot of it into the story as it’s magic system. Strawberry Riot was never originally my project, it was @spudfuzz ‘s. But she didn’t know how to write and had a very, ahem, anime view of characters and storytelling. So I agreed to help her out and have since more or less taken over the story of SR. For better or worse. We function as co-authors and I think the overall story is better for it.

I’m actually pretty proud of what I’ve come up with so far. My intent is to completely finish the story so that I can hand it to her and go “figure it out” and leave her to translate it into all the panelling and visuals. It will hopefully make production much faster, smoother and with less chances of plotholes or deus ex machinas assuming I did my job right. As practice a few years ago I wrote Bumbleberry Pie for her, a story which I’ve since changed and refined. It’s not meant to be groundbreaking or necessarily thought provoking. I designed it to see if I could handle a common trope in a better way than I normally see.

Other than that, when I’m not working on magic, recovering from working on magic, or coming up with more things for Strawberry Riot, I have been trying to get myself back into writing for fun just like I used to. If I write any short stories I’ll be sure to post them here. I also dabble in programming, knowing a decent amount of Python3 and learning D, and have started attempting to play Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead while I still have enough tunnel vision to do so. I have some intention of programming my own, blind friendly, roguelike in D but I’m not sure how far that will get given the other stuff I’m doing.

In any case, I’m glad to be here, so, umm, hi!