2018-09-10 15:28:20

Well, I thought recreating this topic would have been one of the things Dark would have done after deciding not to wait for their host to restore a backup, but I'd imagine he's busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest, so I'll get it started and he can just "sticky" it. big_smile

Because our trip out to Seattle to visit our mother got cancelled because she suddenly died, my sister and I will be going to New York City and Chicago in a couple of weeks to see the sights and to see if I can find an apartment I like to move to in Chicago.

Happy September everybody! And don't look now but the holiday shopping season is just around that corner up there a little ways.

2018-09-10 16:12:58

I'm sorry to hear about your mother Orko.

Do you have family in Chicago, or are you looking to move there for a different reason?

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2018-09-10 21:40:26

Second time lucky? (shrugs)

Mom:

Thanks, it was a surprise because I didn't know how bad her health was, one of my sisters knew but decided not to share that information with the rest of us siblings, it is now a bone of contention between me and her, especially because she has never apologized for it.

Chicago:

I just like it there, I moved there back in 2005 to accept a job and fell in love with the place. Then moved back to Florida in 2012 to be close to family while I adapted to life without vision, and now that I'm pretty much adapted, I want to go back to Chicago to get away from all the family drama.

2018-09-11 10:42:20

Well as regards recreating this topic, I was actually hoping the older topics might have come back, but as it seems not we obviously need to just carry on.
Sorry to hear about your mum Orko and  that its caused so much by way of ructions, though good luck on the move to Chicago.
A good friend of mine was also very much in love with the place as well, though most of my experience of Chicago comes from the Harry Dresden books big_smile.

I definitely sympathise on the family matters though, My lady's mum died in December of 16, and her dad is extremely unwell. Actually we're looking at going to visit him and my sister in law in Pennsylvania at Christmas, since its likely to be his last one, but as she's got a new guide dog we've needed to wait to get the okay since flying with a new dog might not be a good idea so soon, though  seems that's likely to work out.
That's a trifle of a complicated situations since my lady's relationship with her parents hasn't always been a straight forward one/

As for me, right now I'm still waiting for my lady to qualify and bashing out book reviews and articles while I look for a course in creative writing or similar since I think that's what I'd like to do with my life post phd.

More immediately we now have echo buttons, plus it seems like amazon ordering is going to work out okay after all (we even got a load of random shopping including tins of stuff).
The ordering is going to be good since our local Morrisons is being a right pain. Its just around the corner (one reason we chose this house) but they have a great habbit of ignoring me when I ask for assistance.

Its funny, my lady doesn't have  half of the problem in this respect that I do, but being tiny and cute and female  in addition to being blind seems to help, however after the third time of standing around not getting assistance saying "excuse me" at the counter and being ignored I said bugger it and tried amazon instead.

Its odd I don't have this problem in most shops, and usually once i can persuade someone to actually help in Morrisons it works okay, albeit I still have to sit through a long stream of

"Well this man wants some help"

"I'm busy"
"can you ring through to the desk"

"I can't ring anyone right now I'm busy!"
~"well I'll ring the desk"
Then (to me),

"Is anyone giving you assistance?"

me: "I'm not actually sure"

"Okay I'll try to get someone"
"Is anyone free this man wants some help getting shopping"

Talk about valued customer big_smile.

I was also disappointed when my lady's trainer saw all of this and suggested I phone the guide dogs engagement officer, to be told:

"well you need to write to the management yourself"

when I asked if there was anything they could do I was told.

"well we try to empower people"

Aka we don't do anything!

Of course I can! phone the management and have all the hassle, I've done it before but yee gods I'm sick of having to do this and when an organisation for the blind is basically telling you to piss off you wonder what the hell people are paid for.

Its odd, I've always usually thought guide dogs were half way decent, but this so called "engagement officer" seems like a real prat, I wonder what the hell she's being paid for.

Anyway in other news we have the amazon buttons! these are pretty cool when we find a workable game with them. The problem is a lot of games with them involve colours. This is fine if you have some vision (since the buttons light up very well), but not quite as good for my lady, though we have found a pretty cool trivial pursuit game we can play with the buttons.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-09-11 14:30:22

After seeing your "This is taking too long" message, with the decision to forget the back up and just carry on, I noticed this monthly topic was MIA, since I follow it each month I decided to create it to get the ball rolling again.

One of the reasons I chose the apartment I'm living in now is because it is within walking distance to a grocery store without needing to cross any lined highways or heavily traveled roads. The biggest problem I have with getting assistance is that to save expenses, they often don't have extra employees so they usually have to pull a cashier off the line to help. They never give me a run around about it, its just that now there is one less checkout lane for other customers to use.

If I can move back to Chicago, I'll be going back to using PeaPod, an online grocery store that delivers your groceries to you, no need to go anywhere or get sighted help to shop.

That's great that Amazon is working out for you, I have completely quit using them, I pretty much find everything I used to get from Amazon on eBay now. I still use Amazon's site to shop because they have some nice tools to help with finding what you want, but once I know what I want to order, I look for it on eBay. My last experience with Amazon was distinctly unpleasant such that my trust level in them is zero. I tried to buy a new laptop from them, the package tracking showed that it was picked up by the shipping service, then disappeared, it never showed up at the first sorting facility which is where the truck that picked it up would have been unloaded. After a week, I notified Amazon about the apparently lost shipment. Their response was to tell me I had to wait 30 days before I could declare it lost and at the same time they had my money and would not replace or refund the order. I finally got my money back by filing a charge dispute with my bank. The whole experience did nothing but convince me to avoid Amazon like the plague.

I then found the same brand and model of laptop with the same specs on eBay, and just carried on from there.

2018-09-11 14:48:40

Is My house a portal to another dimention?

It started with an old fashioned bottle opener that my wife carried in her purse.
It was from her father and worked on old 1950 to 1960 bottles.
The fact that you can't buy these bottles anymore was not important.
Its significance was that it came from her dad who had died twenty years ago.
Next to vanish was a pair of finger nail clippers that I was using as I sat in my office chair contemplating what to write.
They dropped from a distance of two feet to a carpeted floor.
When I reached down, they were gone.
I searched the office chair and the floor from a radius of six feet around the landing area and there were no clippers to be found.
I had to order a replacement from Amazon.
The third object was eventually discovered, but in a strange place.
My wife bought a small bag of M and M candies.
They were left on the kitchen counter next to the toaster.
They vanished but eventually two days later, showed up in the refirgerator next to the cheese.
Maybe the objects go forward in time.
But I don’t think there are any time warps here.
The last item to go away was a four cup plastic bowl.
We had three bowls, but yesterday one just went into that other dimention with no warning.
I went ahead and ordered a set of four Nordic Ware Everyday Bowls from Amazon that should arrive on Friday.
I got the bowls but they are not what I expected.
I ordered 4 cup bowls and got 3 cup bowls,
so I guess I mis-read the description or Amazon screwed up the delivery.
The missing items could even be slowly spinning around in a circle above our heads and we wouldn't know it.
Wasn't that what happened in the movie Poltergeist from 1982?
Maybe the house is infected with sadistic Gremlins!
A tooth pick just flew out of my hand and entered the void!

Oh, I found it. It was secretly lodged between the cabinet and a two pound can of Folger's coffee.
Even before I was to write about my missing Braille ruler I just found it under my chair.
How Will These improbable disaperances End?
If I manage to enter the void,the land of the lost objects, what will I find there?
Will I find all the objects that have been banished from this plain of existence, and is now languishing in the Valley of the Lost? 
Well, I checked Google and it said we've probably got mild cases of Amnesia or Old Timer's disease.
The solution they suggest is to buy two or more of each missing item from the Google store.
That is what I did with the bottle opener, nail clipper and bowls, except I used Amazon.
We got two bottle openers, but again they are the wrong type.
We wanted the kind that looks like a bone, or lollypop with a steel ring that fits around an old fashioned bottle cap, which a local root bear company still sells.
I think they were designed to open the bottle so that the cap was not bent or damaged, so they could be put back on the bottle.
What we got was two "Church Keys" that are 4 inches long and about an inch wide. They are made of steel, with a can opener point at one end and the bottle opener part at the other.
This does remove the bottle caps but also bends them so much that they are not re-usable.
Great! We finally got the vintage bottle cap opener!
Oh no! Sorry Dark. Now my missing things Gremlins seemed to have even infected the Audio Games Forum!
The Gremlins took two weeks of posts. Are  they hiding them in that other dimention?

2018-09-11 15:31:39

Nice to no the site is back, I had a small panic attack when I saw that site was down. I usually doesn't have a reaction like that, I am not sure why did that happened.

@Orko:

sorry to hear about your mother Orko, I do hold parents in importance since they have supported me quite a lot in my life. so I can't I can't imagine how would I deal with your situation.

on other things, colege continues, programming continues its progress, the twellth chapter of my fanfic is around 5000 word, yet still doesn't show any signs of completion, and I am still waiting for professors of my colege to give me studdy notes, since they agreed to provide me those, yet haven't done that yet.

@dark:

I don't know what kinds of experiences you have with blind organizations, but here in India, I have studdied in two blind schools, and naturally they were run by different organizations formed to help blind.

well, other than giving me quite anger issues at the time I studied there, it didn't help me any.

2018-09-11 18:04:49

There have been several topics on these forums about schools for the blind and it seems that most people didn't like them. I've never been to one since I had vision until about 5 or 6 years ago, but I think the problem with these schools for the blind is that they are run by organizations that were formed decades ago and nevered bother to update their rules or methods to keep pace with the changing world, so what used to work doesn't anymore and they just don't bother to fix it.

2018-09-15 16:37:52

@Dark eagle,  hope the programming is okay. Schools for the blind are another topic and would I could discourse about,  particularly after some research I did for my phd on historical ideas of blindness.
Either way, Guide dogs for the blind over here are a different matter, they don't run any schools for one thing, their chief purpose is, well obviously guide dogs, but they do occasionally do other things.

Unlike the RNIB that is the royal national institute for the blind who are sort of the main organisation over here and are generally a dead loss unless your over 70 and likely to leave them money in your will, guide dogs are one of the few blindness organisations I've had time for, one reason why this so called engagement officer being a right idiot was rather irritating.

Well in  other enws we have a random concert this evening.  its just one at a local church which we're doing for one of mum's friends. actually I'll admit the audience last time around wasn't exactly friendly, but hay its a chance to do some singing anyway, there's even a pianist though i hope she's up to what we need playing.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-09-16 15:57:22

@Dark:

well, programming is going good. I hope that I would manage to learn enough that by the next year, I could work on some project, since my teacher does provide his students with such opportunities.

on the genral topic of blind organizations, it is not only they are useless here in India, they are corrupt. as in, you have to throw the system out of the window corrupt.

most of the schools and organizations get a minimum amount of money from the government, and otherwise, they receive donations. as in massive amounts of donations.

but what do people in charge do with that money?

split it among themselves of course. instead of I don't know, using it for the purpose it was given?

these people are cheap enough that once I saw that warden and few teachers splitting the food material given for the kids and teenagers living in the boarding school among themselves.

also, nothing like guide dogs here, only thing which is given importance is here is the stick. and I hate it.

I remember someone insulting back when I was about 8 year or so, when I was traveling in a train regarding the stick, since that point onward, I hate it.

not to mention, the myths people believe about the stick here, like there is some sort of device and such in it, which could help you to find your way. well I have seen both broken and disassembled sticks, and other than mettal pipes, elastic, and plastic tips, I didn't saw any such device.

and even worst part about it? they convince the parents as if they are the only one who can actually do anything for their child. and you might think that this would be enough bad thing, but no it doesn't end there.

when I tell other people about these things, they tends to not believe me, despite being told by a complete blind person who had experienced all these things. they would say, "you are lying." thankfully, I do not have to go any kind of school like that since my seventh grade. they are quite behind in the education anyway.

on some positive news, I got a new phone. it is a oppo model, and so far it is working fine. I hope that windows could have something like talkback, a screen reader which could work out of the box. but google fead infuriated me, because it changed the language of google search results from English to Hindi. thankfully, I fixed the problem. in the process, I learned that sighted people are mostly useless for technology help.

2018-09-16 23:14:02

@Dark eagle,  I don't imagine dodgy organisations for the blind exist just in India. The RNIB over here is effectively run like a business or a big company, yet they will basically sell you stuff at ridiculous prices, they have share holders, a board of directors (all of whom are on huge salaries), and yet will insist to the government they are a charity so do not need to pay tax. As one example of the sort of things the RNIB  do I once saw them conduct a review of a support center which they closed due to it not being prophetable enough. The directorial team who carried out the review stayed at the five star luxury hotel across the road, even though the support centre had accommodation, accommodation which was apparently good enough for blind people, but not for the almighty directors.

They also used to be famous for employing blind people, and yet after the recession in 2008 they basically layed off all their blind employees, and of course nobody beyond middle management level is blind either.

They're also just as bad for telling you that they're the only people who know about blind people, and for making ridiculously silly claims, for example when once asking them about accessing bank machines they told me "get your carer to do it" big_smile.

I wonder if the lack of guide dogs in India is due to dogs being less acceptable in some Indian cultures? I don't know how it is where you are Dark eagle, but I do know a lot of Arabic cultures like Pakistan have a thing against dogs.
Interestingly enough, I've sometimes run into issues with taxi drivers or Muslim shop owners who refuse to allow  dogs because they  claim they're "unclean",
I actually decided to investigate this (since I know a couple of Muslim guide dog owners), and phoned the British Shariah council, who were actually extremely nice.

They told me that apparently dogs are considered a working animal in Islamic culture, so are perfectly okay, but the problem is a lot of people don't know that. Actually, they were really! pissed off that some muslims had apparently used supposedly religious dogma to disobey the law in Britain regarding guide dogs being allowed everywhere. The chap I spoke to used the term "ignorant"). It finished up with them sending me a really nice paper listing in Arabic the bits of the Koran that say "guide dogs are fine!" and telling me if I ever ran into problems again, ask anyone who claimed Islam was anti guide dogs to call them big_smile.

So, all of that is to say, I wonder if India, or at least some parts of India are a bit too anti dogs to allow guide dogs. That's a shame, since yee gods things are easier with a guide dog, something Mrs. Dark is finding out at the moment having her new dog.

Well the concert was okay, though my lady thought she messed things up. My voice actually worked which was good, though the poor pianist got a bit tangled up with one of my pieces so the sound guy had to Youtube an accompanyment to something I knew instead, though that went down okay.

Today, we went with my mum to an event for the miatonic distrophy society (which she's involved with), involving a guy who did a work shop on African drumming, which included how to play the Jembai (which I'm probably horribly misspelling). Even though I'm definitely a singer not a drummer, it was nice for a bit of fun. I was particularly interested when the chap mentioned that people in Ghana used an almost Solfe`ge like system to describe the different drumb beats, with a flat base beat with the right hand being, gun, with the left dun, a lighter beat with left and right hands being described as go doh, and a left and right slap on the rim of the drumb being pah and tah.

So certainly an interesting time and lots of fun.
Actually it was odd, my mum just sort of dumped this on us and said "this is happening" and we were "well okay", but a bit uncertain, but it turned out to be a good experience all in all, and something very different.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-09-20 02:40:44

Misconceptions about the cane and what they can do are most likely not specific to one culture. I've encountered my share of stupidity about that as well. Once, a guy stopped me on the street and asked me if my "stick" had magnets in it. I came to a dead halt, completely dumbfounded, and asked him why he would think that. He said, "well, because when you approach the street, the magnets will grab onto the magnets that are in the street, and you'll know when to stop." That experience was certainly different.

In other news, I haven't been up to a whole lot lately, but I did go out for dinner a couple of nights ago. It was a fairly nice pizza place, complete with the standard fare you'd normally find there, but the main draw was supposedly their selection of beer. I, unfortunately, was not all that impressed with it. Whenever I go out, which is a rarity, I like to treat myself to a nice IPA or two. I sampled a couple of the ones they had on tap, and they just fell flat with me, but my parents, who were also there, said the same thing about the selections they made as well, which were definitely on the lighter side. The pizza was excellent, though, so I can't complain too much. The place was recommended by a lady that my mom works with, and, seeing as how they wanted to take me out for my birthday, which is on Friday, but they're both working then, I do appreciate it.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2018-09-20 14:27:56

@Dark:

It is not that the dog guides are not here in India because of riligious beliefs. I think it has to do more with people simply don't think that they can be used by us. besides, there are dogs used by police and milatary, but they are different case. but still, if religious issues were many regarding them, then I don't think they would be used.

@tourtlepower:

the example with the magnets was hillarious.

2018-09-20 14:51:00

I just got back from a little vacation my sister and I took. We went to New York City to see the 9/11 memorial and museum, and Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. We never got to the 9/11 memorial and museum because the streets in Manhatten were so confusing that we simply couldn't find the ones we needed to get there, and GPS wasn't any better, it kept getting caught in loops of one way streets it apparently couldn't calculate its way out of. After four hours of trying we gave up and went back to our hotel. The lesson? Never drive in Manhatten, just let a local do it. After that we had no problems and had a blast. The second half of our trip was to spend three days in Chicago. We went to Navy Pier, the Sky Deck in the Willis Tower, and River City, where I used to live eight years ago, and got information I'd need to move back there.

On our last day there, we needed a few hours to kill before heading for the airport, so we went to MOSI, otherwise known as the Museum of Science and Industry. We had been told that they had lots of blind friendly interactive exhibits, but they had none. Sure there were levers and button and knobs to control, but what you were controlling was behind glass so you needed vision to enjoy the exhibit. It was disapointing and annoying, so we left after spending only an hour there, and decided to kill the last hour at a bar in the airport.

All in all it was a fun trip, we both had a blast and look forward to repeating the trip. We'll do New York City again because we both still want to see the 9/11 memorial and museum, but now we need to come up with someplace else to go to pair with it, just like we did Chicago this time.

2018-09-20 18:12:41

hi
sorry for very bad thing orko
well, hi, monthly chat

2018-09-21 04:12:30

Orko,
To find the 9/11 memorial and museum, just look up!
The new one trade center tower was built on the same plot.
It is the tallest building on the island.
True the streets in lower Manhattan are confusing and it only gets organized in a grid above 14th street.

2018-09-21 05:37:20

e
@Dark eagle, a shame guide dogs haven't made it to India, since yee gods they make life a hell of a lot easier, though not perhaps as perfect as some people think, someone once asked me if my guide dog could tell me what sort of shops we were passing and what number bus to catch, ---- she's good but not that! good big_smile.

@Turtlepower, that bit about the magnets is hilarious! Glad you had a good meal out. I'll confess I'm a very unusual Englishman in that beer has never interested me, the after taste has always been unpleasant. Indeed I probably drink far less alcohol than most people.

@Orko, amusing about the museum though I've seen that sort of thing before sadly. Interestingly enough in the Uk there was an initiative in the 1980's to make musium exhibits accessible to blind people, though the results were mostly sporadic, actually some of my favourite musiums have ironically been the kids ones, since they tend to focus far less on some interactive stuff on a screen that honestly you could get on the internet, and far more on random stuff going on.
For example, Snibston Coliary which is a science musium in the midlands that was an ex pit has an awesome mock up of a river with lock gates and toy boats that is frankly just fun to play with big_smile.

Well today I had my birthday present, which was basically to go and spend an hour with a lovely lady who happens to be a very professional harpist. She played me a couple of things, but more of it involved me just having a look at the harp and a tinker with it, I did manage to get green sleeves out of the thing which was rather good big_smile.

I don't know if I have much by way of aptitude for the instrument, but its a wonderful sensory experience, I've always adored the sound of the harp and getting to actually experience the thing from a player's perspective was awesome.

thank my parents for such randomly weird and rather fun presents big_smile.

Less happily today I have an appointment at the eye hospital which probably means sitting around for a very long time, followed by a five minute consultation, being poked if I'm unlucky, and discussing my medication. Unfortunately its necessary for me to go occasionally just to maintain the link and monitor my eye pressure, but since things are okay at the moment its more a formality than anything else.

I'm also reading a truly abysmal book, one of the single worst I've read in a very long time Mort(e) by Robert Ripino which I am really only finishing so that I can write a fair, if very scathing review.

The irony is it actually encourages me with my own writing since if drek like this is published well I can't do that much worse big_smile.

More happily, I am playing through Metroid ii on the gameboy, or rather on the gb player for my gamecube. Wow I've missed metroid!

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-09-21 12:33:57

Dark,
You wrote, manage to get green sleeves out of the harp...
People should have told you never touch a brass harp with a white shirt.
The green tarnish will get on your shirt sleeves.
Oh, do you mean the song "Green Sleeves?"
Amazon just announced a talking echo microwave, so you can say heat this potato, and it will cook it.
However it doesn't have the full echo, and has to connect to an echo plus via blue tooth.
And it is a cheep microwave for $60 usd and has 750 watts of power.
Our current microwave is 1250 watts and has buttons for most features and we added braille dots on the numbers so we can punch in 1 minute and 30 seconds.
Why is it when they decide to make something more accessible they convert the cheapest device?
Okay blind people, we are releasing the first self-driving car, and it is a Model T Ford!
i

2018-09-21 14:48:04

While looking up might have helped my sister, it wouldn't have done anything for me because for all intents and purposes, I'm totally blind.

Phil, they probably do that because they don't think we're astute enough to appreciate the finer things in life, idiots!

2018-09-21 23:09:57

@Dark:

since I haven't used the guide dogs, I can't really say whether they could improve things or not. but it would be nice if they were available here. also, I am sure that your guide dog would be able to tell you everything, after some crazy sciantest manages to create a breed which could speek the human language.

on other note, just like every rain season of India, there are floods all over the place, (I hope my beta reader is alright, since she live in one of those areas,) people proved that they are douch at my father's government job no less, (mainly the higher ups.), and I have kind of reached the stage in my programming where I couldn't find anything on the internet to try, because either my level is too high or two low. so, I have to wait for my teacher to give me spesific task. on which, my success rate has improved a lot.

also, since I learn by taking his entire time soly for me, his attention is always on me. and sometimes I think, are all the programming teachers so sedistic? but the moment never lasts long. because I realize immedietly that if I don't learn now, I wouldn't be able to in the future.

also, do you guys have any books to recommend for someone who is a complete beginner at the algorithm? as in, I have never even read any single thing about it yet?

2018-09-22 07:30:42

@Phil, not sure what you mean about the brass harp there, unless your talking about the brand of lager.

As regards talking microwaves, I don't think any of the echo devices have ever been billed as accessible, you can see this by the fact that you can't actually completely  control them from voice, and need to do all the setup, as well as several control settings from a screen on the devices themselves. We actually looked at getting an echo connected washing machine and this is what we  found. I suspect its because at the moment speech interfaces are more about a gimmick for sighted people than for access reasons, though whether this will change in the future we'll see.
Amusingly enough though, the Kobold talking microwaves are actually 900 watt, though they used to be 1600 which is wonderfully nuts big_smile,

David Brin who writes the uplift books (which I'm a huge fan of), does vaguely mention that neo dogs are the next species humans of that universe are working on uplifting, to sentience after neo chimps and neo dolphins, though I don't think he's written any stories about Neo dogs yet, which disappoints Mrs. Dark as  her previous guide dog was called Neo big_smile.

Well its cold and rainy and grim here, methinks summer has definitely ended, actually given we've had weather warnings across the hole of Britain and 70 mile an our winds bringing down powerlines and trees, it seems the weathers definitely out to get us big_smile.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-09-24 17:15:15

Mr. Dark, somebody on skype is impersonating you, he recently joined a skype group by the name: Dark (audio games.net forum). Can we do anything about this? No, let me rephrase: can you do anything about the person who is claiming to be dark from audiogames.net forum?

2018-09-25 08:35:20

Lol Gaurav, that is actually quite funny.
I cannot do anything about it for the simple reason that I do not have a Skype account. I had one about nine years ago, but firstly that has probably expired long since, and secondly that was under my rl name not as Dark.

So i can absolutely assure you that until I get around to sorting the mike situation, anyone on Skype claiming to be me definitely isn't me big_smile.

I'm actually sort of flattered, they do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all big_smile.

For the record I probably wouldn't be on Skype or anywhere else as dark (audiogames.net forum), anyway. This site and forum is obviously very important to me, but its  definitely not the only thing I do in my life. As proof just go and check my list of names in the character names topic, none of them relate specifically to the forum or to here.

Well things are a bit crazy. two very interesting game projects have come up at once so I've been betering furiously over the past few days. I won't say which projects, but suffice it to say I think both will be ones the community will  much like and hopefully I can help the respective developers make them even better.

I also have just finished writing the most negative book review I've ever done. It was for Robert Repino's book Mort (e), which, to say it was a book about intelligent animals and evil giant ants was truly, truly dreadful!

Still my review will hopefully be up before long and people can have a look for themselves. More hapily my lady and I are reading magic's pawn by Mercedes lackey and! infinity's shore, the second of David Brin's uplift storm trilogy.
We  were just reading the David Brin, but then I started on the Lackey on my own, and Mrs. Dark heard a bit and decided to read it with me, so now we've got two on the go at once. happily they are  already considerably better than that pile of drek I just finished, and should be getting more positive reviews, although  Infinity's shore isn't quite as good as the first book, Brightness reef was.

In other news, my lady and I have booked to go and see wicked the musical in October. We're doing a singing weekend which will be fun (I'm going to take Gethsemane from Jesus christ superstar), and since we're  in London for that we'll see the musical as well.

Arangements are a bit stressful and its going to cost, but it should be worth it, its one of my lady's favourite musicals and I've been categorically forbidden from reading the book, or even looking at the plot synopses until I've seen it live on stage big_smile.

Today is looking to be equally busy since I need to go and get Riva a rabies vaccine so that she can have her pet passport updated, as we're hopefully going to spend Christmas in the states with Mrs. Dark's sister, and somewhere in all that I need to continue betering, learn an aria by Donezetti and find time to play through more of Paladin of the skies, not to mention get back to work trying to replace all the stuff that got lost from the db during the two weeks snapback, so things are a bit nuts right now (though probably seem nuttier than usual to me since I've been up all night writing scathing reviews of a truly horrible book).

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-09-25 13:23:43 (edited by sunshine 2018-09-25 13:26:15)

Lol Dark, I verified that it's not you  when that  bot by your name was added to the conversation wasn't able to tell about the series of books I told you to try out  last month. He typed it something like "startrech", second thing which tipped me off was that he typed my name "gorav" which you as far as I've seen never do it that way. So it was definitely not you, it was a bot which is gone now big_smile

2018-09-28 11:30:32

Well... Dropping in here... I'm working on getting a guide dog when I'm moving out.

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