I've been a PC gamer for eons, and typing is part of my livelihood. My hands, especially my left, tend to get shaky when I'm nervous about something. Trying to wipe out the last 2% of a boss's health while I'm nearly down in a game can cause serious tremor, for example, but it's been mostly manageable. Most of the time now my left pinky shakes a little when I'm trying to hold it on the left shift key, though, and there's a growing tightness across the outside top of my left hand. I'm pretty sure it's a genetic tremor kind of thing. So I'm thinking about ways to work around that. I'm sad that my twitchy reflex gaming times are probably drawing to a close soon.
General keyboard usage seems like I could find plenty of ways around the left pinky thing if it continues to worsen. Foot pedals, remapping the keyboard, I can figure it out. But it's so irritating to have to have a nonstandard setup for work, for example.
Thankfully, there has been a LOT of work done on computer accessibility in the last decade. Cheers to people thinking about and implementing accessibility functionality.
I remember a support call where I helped a clinically blind person work with her iPhone. It read the screen contents to her, vibrated when her finger was on a button, and had other functionality that allowed her to interact with the phone really well. It was awesome.
I've worked a little with a Phillips SpeechMike and Dragon Naturally to control Windows and effectively handle email. Also pretty incredible.
So there's plenty there to help with computer interaction, and it's just going to keep improving, I'm sure.
But I've been finding my brain doing worse, too. It's the usual stuff you've probably heard about, like losing words, short term memory isn't as good, etc. But I'm reaching correct conclusions from less information than I needed previously, and I tend to grasp underlying meanings from art or conversation more quickly. So the brain's not totally falling apart. I like to think that it's "refocusing". Yeah, that's it...
Other age related stuff like hernias, knee soreness, getting tired easier, wouldn't be a big deal separately, but together they're quite frustrating.
Aging is crap. Paying attention to my degrading body and brain, and knowing that more's coming just suuuucks. I'd almost rather be oblivious. But then I'd miss some amazing things going on now around me, and I wouldn't have as much of an opportunity to help affect some change.
I have a hard time being compassionate with my increasing fallibility and frailness. I'm my own worst enemy, resisting bothering other people for help. I'm working on it, though. Seems to be part of the journey, as embarrassing as it can be.
We humans gotta do something about this damned aging thing, definitely not just for me, but for humanity in general. We have to figure out how to seriously reduce our environmental impact first, though.
Aging should be on the list of big stuff to fix with climate change, fair socioeconomics, COVID-19, and other threats to a healthy human race.
We'll fix it all, I'm sure, because that's what we do.
But I'd like a short nap first.
General keyboard usage seems like I could find plenty of ways around the left pinky thing if it continues to worsen. Foot pedals, remapping the keyboard, I can figure it out. But it's so irritating to have to have a nonstandard setup for work, for example.
Thankfully, there has been a LOT of work done on computer accessibility in the last decade. Cheers to people thinking about and implementing accessibility functionality.
I remember a support call where I helped a clinically blind person work with her iPhone. It read the screen contents to her, vibrated when her finger was on a button, and had other functionality that allowed her to interact with the phone really well. It was awesome.
I've worked a little with a Phillips SpeechMike and Dragon Naturally to control Windows and effectively handle email. Also pretty incredible.
So there's plenty there to help with computer interaction, and it's just going to keep improving, I'm sure.
But I've been finding my brain doing worse, too. It's the usual stuff you've probably heard about, like losing words, short term memory isn't as good, etc. But I'm reaching correct conclusions from less information than I needed previously, and I tend to grasp underlying meanings from art or conversation more quickly. So the brain's not totally falling apart. I like to think that it's "refocusing". Yeah, that's it...
Other age related stuff like hernias, knee soreness, getting tired easier, wouldn't be a big deal separately, but together they're quite frustrating.
Aging is crap. Paying attention to my degrading body and brain, and knowing that more's coming just suuuucks. I'd almost rather be oblivious. But then I'd miss some amazing things going on now around me, and I wouldn't have as much of an opportunity to help affect some change.
I have a hard time being compassionate with my increasing fallibility and frailness. I'm my own worst enemy, resisting bothering other people for help. I'm working on it, though. Seems to be part of the journey, as embarrassing as it can be.
We humans gotta do something about this damned aging thing, definitely not just for me, but for humanity in general. We have to figure out how to seriously reduce our environmental impact first, though.
Aging should be on the list of big stuff to fix with climate change, fair socioeconomics, COVID-19, and other threats to a healthy human race.
We'll fix it all, I'm sure, because that's what we do.
But I'd like a short nap first.