Sunday 30 September 2007

Pic of the day: The unfinished novel was illustrated by this screenshot from the old game Master of Magic. Blue magic was supposed to play an important role in the last part of the novel, but that part was never written. As usual.

Gwalawala found!

I had a question from a reader about the program Daghex, which was used to edit certain values in the game Daggerfall. I wrote a lot about Daggerfall way back when, and recommended the program. It seemed to have vanished from the face of the universe, though. I looked through my computers but prospects were not good: The last Daggerfall computer crashed beyond hope and was handed in for destruction last year or perhaps early this year, it sure hadn't worked in a while. My best Daggerfall computer was thrown away by Superwoman's father when I had let her borrow it and they didn't find room for it in their car. Later computers can't run it at all.

But in my eagerness to help, I went through numerous IOmega Zip-disks. Many of them were unreadable because they used a proprietary file compression system only available under Windows 95. But some were readable, and one of them contained the program. It doesn't work under modern operating systems either, but I gave it to my reader anyway.

But before this, I also to my joy found a backup from around the year 2000 or so. And it contained all of my written chapters of the fantasy novel Gwalawala, which I had long lost and lamented in these pages. What was preserved was HTML files. I am not sure whether I wrote it in HTML originally, quite possibly I did. Anyway, I have uploaded it among other unfinished novels. And that's how it will stay, I'm afraid. But it was pretty good as far as it got, although I consider my modern "magic realism" stories better. Not that I completed them either, although I did write 50 000 words on one. Of course, those words included chapters where the characters played The Sims 2 and City of Heroes...

Anyway, it is back. Gwalawala!