The Interwebs League

Posted by Charlie Stross

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/04/a-quiet-patch.html

So, I had my second round of eye surgery, and it worked fine. I got a short distance lens, leaving me myopic, which was expected, and I've booked an opthalmology appointment for the earliest possible date post-surgery (in mid-May, the eye needs to settle for six weeks post-op). In the meantime, I'm without visual correction.

And guess what? My vision is changing. My left eye is increasingly myopic, to the point where it's now difficult to read on screen. (And I can barely read with my right eye at all, due to a retinal occlusion that covers about half the visual field.) For writing/editing I've blown up the text size to 250%, which is just tolerable but gives me a headache after a while: new prescription specs can't come soon enough.

NB: don't suggest half-assing corrective lenses using off-the-shelf stuff, my eyes are kinda complex and I'm not just myopic, there's other stuff going on there. Also, don't suggest dictation software: I use a complex vocabulary and punctuation that aren't a normal part of the use case the designers of such software anticipated, i.e. business correspondence. And absolutely don't suggest podcasts or text-to-speech software: I can't absorb information that way. I'm fed up with people trying to convince me to try something I've tried repeatedly to use (and that has failed for me) over the past 30 years: it's irritating, not helpful.

... In other news: despite the above I'm still plodding along at book 2 of the proposed duology (but making very slow progress because writing 1000 words in a day is the new writing 4500 words in a day). And I'll be at Satellite 9 in Glasgow next month, probably before I have new glasses, so if you see me and I fail to make eye contact across a room it's not you: I'm just blind as a bat.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/04/a-quiet-patch.html