This is one man's experiment in combining technology with creative, stream of consciousness fiction. When I lie in bed at night, I find my mind swimming with narratives and stories, which disappear when I fall asleep. Wouldn't it be great if I could capture these thoughts as they were happening, with a minimum of distractions? This is what I am attempting to do.

This is not a journal. Any murmurings or rants about my daily life, political beliefs, or personal opinions manifest themselves in my written scenes.

This is "blind" due to how I am posting these brain scenes: in bed, in the dark, with a keyboard. No monitor, no spell check, no editing or reviewing. This is an attempt to remove as much of the writing process as possible in order to keep my thoughts untainted. I will not read my posts, any more than I can relive any moment. Once exorcised from my mind, these spirits are free to roam the world, to possess others.

I am a man fascinated by the collision of the digital world with traditional art. Some art forms can and have merged easily, naturally, evolutionarily with the digital: animation, film, television, and writing, for example. I am interested in how the traditional and the digital converge at high speeds: sometimes they merge gracefully, other times they destroy each other. And still other times the two mix into an unstable emulation of techniques and results. I force the latter.

How am I doing this? Here is my technical setup:

A computer running Windows 2000 sits next to my bed. It has no monitor or mouse, only a keyboard attached; it's connected to my network via a WIFI PCI card, though I was having connectivity problems at first. At startup, I have a batch file start pinging www.google.com, which seems to kick the wireless connection into gear.

My keyboard has several "multimedia/internet/hot keys" arranged in rows along the top of the unit. I've mapped these to several important functions. After booting the computer, I hit the "Home Page" hot key, which launches a web browser; my home page is set to my Blogger.com "Create New Post" page, accessible directly since I have Internet Explorer cookies enabled. Luckily, the cursor focus automatically sets itself to the posting form -- I can start typing without the need for a mouse. When I'm finished, I can either type Ctrl+S, which Blogger understands as the command to post, or use another keyboard hot key mapped to the same.

At this point I'm finished for the night. I've mapped a hot key to "Shut Down Computer", which I use to shut down the machine.

Sometimes I need to perform real tasks on the computer, such as making sure that internet connectivity is working. When the Blind Writing computer boots, it launches TightVNC, which allows remote connection and administration of the machine; I can connect to this via my "normal" computer on the same network, using TightVNC client.