Hello phil vlasak!
I will certainly come to USA!
hahaha
Thanks
Ishan

At dark sir!
you don't reply to my mail which I have sent.
well today is a very interesting one because My speed of internet become good and finally I manage to get a blind legend in my phone.
How crazy fight with a dog and a hang of the Iphone.
now the damn thing is going in my phone I just leave when the battery sucks.
and the phone is not responding after reading notification.
Thanks
Ishan

Hi audio gamers! and moderaters.
we haven't posted anything in this topic so let's get started.
We have covered a conference and a lots of interviews. and the conference about women welfare.
various issues has been discussed.
Thanks
Radio udaan team.

Hi dark!
the conference went successful and we have discussed various issues like marriage and employment. also we looked at the work of NGOs in india such as AICB and NFB specially in the field of women.
various students shared their views and from our side Mr naresh kashyap covered that.
we want to know is their any audio game develop conference held ever in the world?
Thanks
Radio udaan team!

Hi dark sir!
whats up
I am going to start a band
I hope it will take few days but it will work
Thanks
Ishan

@Dino, a panel is an interesting idea, though it'd still have to happen at some sort of event with an interest in audiogames, and we've not seen any of those thus far. Usually the most that happens with audiogames is that someone produces and publicises the "inivative new project of games with sound and how this will change things in the future", which  results usually in one or two very glitsy games with lots of prestige and coverage and usually extremely good sound effects, but not a long life. Such projects usually run out of steam until the next time.
It happened with sound voyager back on the gameboy advanced a few years ago, and with various other projects, most recently somethinelse and then a blind legend, and it'll probably happen again, but until audiogames  become a little better known I don't know how long it'll take for things to get off the ground outside the indi community, albeit said indi community has massively increased over the past few years and what has been made both in volume and inn concept has generally been a build on what's been there before.

In other matters, Consider Phlebas is good, though i disliked how incomplete and generally unsatisfying the ending was. That was sort of Bank's point of course, but it did make for an unsatisfying conclusion, plus I found the final third or so of the book a little draggy and lacking in direction, then again it was banks first sf novel and the first with The Culture.

Look to Windward, which is sort of a sequel (or at least it mentions some events), was a generally better book I thought, though also pretty grim, however my two favourite culture novels thus far have been player of games and Invertions, though Invertions is  a very different story being set entirely on a pre contact planet, it actually reads almost like a GEorge R R Martin style fantasy novel though we know that the "magic" is actually advanced technology in this case.

I need to read the rest of the culture books.

City of Mirrors is absolutely awesome! I can't believe the climax. It's odd, it breaks a lot of rules from deus ex machina too last minute escapes, and yet it works amazingly well, and I can't explain it,. My reading has been slightly interupted both by playing manamon, and with a really nice evening yesterday going to a theatre that also serves food where we watched Mary poppins.

The musical was actually fairly awesome, because it was a decidedly darker and distinctly more plot driven story than the disney film, albeit it did use the majority of the songs from the film though added some new ones. it even featured an evil nanny who Mary poppins had a duel with who had an amazingly nasty song about how she bought up children by force feeding them bad tasting medicine .

Well several things to report. First and formost, my lady's spousal visa has indeed been granted, yay! this means she can indeed move to the Uk, which is good since the alternative was me emmigrating to the states which would've been problematic and rather complex, and goodness knows what I'd have done out here.

So I've been having a few days off recently which is good, mostly alternating playing manamon, reading and writing book reviews. City of mirrors was indeed good though I found the epilogue rather disappointing, not that it had a bad ending, just a bit too draggy and introducing imho an unnecessary new character only a couple of hours before the end.

Manamon is good but I'm finding the grinding to level different creatures, well rather dull considering I'd rather get on with the story itself, still I gather that is part of the game at least as far as it goes. Not a lot else to report other than yesterday we had the most amazing storm which my lady and I both enjoyed. i love seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder and the rain, we even went out and stood in it wearing, ----- mmm, not very much which was quite an experience.

Whoever tells you the magic fades after marriage is a moron .

@Dino, I love musicals and sing myself, indeed that is how my lady and I met, her being a classical soprano and myself a classical tenor and both of us fans of musicals, we've regularly done duettes from phantom and did one hand one heart from westside story at our wedding. We both go to the Aims international music school which happens each spring for a weekend and for a week in summer, which is awesome, the only difficulty is finding directors that don't automatically think "bugger off we can't have blind people on stage" which is sadly far more common than it should be.

With games yes, unfortunately the spectacular sounding but short projects will always happen, however it's the solidly produced titles that work. Manamon impressed me for it's sounds and gameplay and the fact that someone has finally done something like this in audio, indeed I will say that over the 10 years I've been involved with audiogames things have expanded quite a deal, perhaps not as much as we would like but there is far more now and more by way of frequent releases than there used to be, at risk of sounding like an old fart "I can remember the days when we were lucky to get one game a month, and you young whippersnappers should get off my lawn!" .

ACtually considering that games I could play visually pretty much stopped after the 16 bit era (and stopped entirely after the 32 bit era), it's good that more is being produced, albeit I still do love my Snes.

Well I'm feeling slightly dead this morning which isn't good, though possibly being up until close to midnight playing manamon last night might have something to do with it .

I will see about a city of mirrors review this morning I also need to at least vaguely think about getting some work done on my thesis at least before I pick up manamon again. I'm also reading a collection of nebular award winning sf, and there were some pretty good ones, bloodmusic by greg bear which he later expanded into a novel.

I haven't read the algibreist, though the title rings a bell, is it also Banks?
Look to windward is at least sort of partly the direct sequel to consider phlebas(the title comes from the same quote),  or at least it mentions the Idiran war and deals with some consequences of it, though it doesn't involve horza or any of the other characters, I don't think Banks did that often, if at all.

I really didn't like the way that the book just sort of petered out and even Horza's reuniting with his ex wife or partner just didn't hapen, while Yalson and pretty much everyone else just got randomly killed off. While I get that Banks was trying to show that the hole "lone hero changing the course of the war" thing is a total falasy, at the same time he could've been at least a little less messy and left us with a better taste.

I'll say roughly half of his books have dark endings from what I've gathered, albeit not quite as entirely pointless as phlebas, against a dark background did at least resolve the main plot of the story.

I'm actually getting in a vaguely fantasy mood now. I am not sure if I want to reread some davideddings, who's an author I've not touched for about 15 years, (though i loved the belgariad as a teenager), or begin on feist who I understand is similarly fun but I've not really read before. I do rather want to redo eddings since I'm now myself married to an incredibly tiny lady who somewhat resembles a dryad, and I did used to have quite the crush on Ce'Nedra, ---- albeit in personality my lady is quite a long way from Ce'nedra, and for the reccord she really dislikes ce'nedra finding her quite a brat.

I also do need to read and review some stuff, so I'll have a think and see, that if I don't get too destracted by raising my manamon again .

@Dino The belgariad, for all the nostalgia value isn't imho as good as Edding's other series, the ellenium trilogy. While the fantasy is somewhat standard, the wit and character interactions are fun, or at least that is how many people describe eddings, albeit I haven't read anything by him for quite some time.
I actually started on Magician in case I found the belgariad not as I remembered.

I have read magician before, but it was over a very short and crowded weekend, and I really don't remember that much about the book at all, hence why I'm reading it, possibly going on to more feist afterwards.
I will say I'm glad I read magician before and recall the story picking up and getting a bit more involved, since currently while not completely a waste of time I'm finding things a trifle on the generic D&D side at the moment with characters who are a bit too shallow and a world that feels very familiar. Fortunately i do recall things changing when the war happened, so we'll see. 
I didn't actually play anymore manamon yesterday since I was feeling rather dead, and will hopefully get to today albeit today we're busy meeting one of my lady's friends and also going to see The Music Man at a local theatre, which should be good. It is a musical I've seen before and I remember it being rather fun.

(But daddy, I don't want to wait until Monday!)

Apparently it isn't exactly normal for one to return from training to find a new roommate having appeared in one's apartment without warning. They came down nearly a week early, so that probably has something to do with it.
I just finished both 1984 (Orwell) and The Eyes of the Dragon (Stephen King). I'm not sure what to say about either? I'm trying to start the Aeneid, and I picked up Roverandum off a shelf, saw it was by Tolkien, and then spent nearly two hours reading through the essay that comprises the first third of the book, since apparently they only expected Tolkien scholars to want to read a fairy tale about a lost dog who goes to the moon.
(Even though half the books are either religious or nationalist, it's still awesome to just have the ability to pick up random books off shelves and investigate, rather than fiddle with apps and whatever else, and honestly I discovered that I was very mistaken about how to spell a number of words just because I'd never seen them in braille before.)
(I do not feel like the training is going anywhere near that "confidence building" thing it's supposed to aim at. I guess I finally finished that blasted essay. Have I mentioned how poorly I get along with essays? Because I don't get along well with essays.)

(I also heard the sentence, spoken in what I believe to be complete sincerity, "I don't see how someone can complete the training here and not join the NFB." Perhaps I should go find a thorough introduction to the subject of mind projection and the typical mind fallacy and accidentally leave it on the couch.)

I've actualy seen a braille library before at the local society for the blind, but I tended to find that after feeling my way through x number of books mostly and manifestly aimed at the over sixties with no attempt at subject classification (all I saw were either cook books, romance, knitting patterns or crime)k, I sort of lost interest .

It sounds like the Nfb indoctrination is a little scary, particularly the way that those in the organization believe themselves to the point that they can't see why their own methodology won't work. I'll say this is one reason I tend to avoid special schools and most societies for the blind in general. My lady has freely never had anything to do with the Nfb, nor does she want to, indeed she regards them as somewhat elitist, and some of the tales of her nfb trained braille teacher who insisted on her using a slate at university are rather horrific, ---- particularly since she wasn't even allowed to use a standard perkins brailler, the teacher was a little slate obsessed.

Myself, essays never bother me in general, but then again I write book reviews for fun, poetry to relieve my feelings, audiogames.net entries just for gits and shiggles and my thesis supposedly to get some sort o qualification so writing is just something I'm comfortable with doing in general, indeed to say I've churned out two or three reviews in the past few days just because, I can legitimately say I enjoy the exercise.

Btw, my review of King's under the dome is now live, you can read it here The Uplift war and City of mirrors reviews should be on the way.

I didn't know tolkien did a translation of the inead, I always thought he was more a schollar of nordic than griek myth, indeed I've had friends who studdied medeival literature who say his essay on beerwolf is still the seminal work on the subject. Eyes of the dragon is fun, particularly as King's only stab at sort of semi traditional fantasy and a book his kids could read (though he still goes into oddly dirty bits occasionally), though i found it severely slow, and i recal waiting around for a long time for stuff to happen. I was also very disappointed that two of the characters in the ending who at one point it is implied Rowland meets in The Dark Tower never showed up again, King did intimate around Wizard and glass that he was considering them join Rowland and co, but he never did which is severely annoying since they were quite nice characters and also on a hunt for flag.
1984 is awesome, albeit my lady absolutely hates it for it's utter uggliness, not just in the government and the torture, but in the way that Winston Smith himself admits to being willing to do anything upto and including throwing acid in a child's face to bring down the government, and is in his own way as bad as the people he opposes. My lady actually really! hates the book, though in general while she does have a macabre sence of humour she is not into darkness for darkness sake, and she finds some literature contin a little too much pure suffering for her liking (one reason she and I disagree on game  Ice and fire, the series pisses her off with the naked suffering and in her view gratuatus deaths of good people, I however actually like it for the fact that nobody is safe and it contains so much shades of grey.

Sadly i still haven't got further with manamon. In general much as I like the game, when I consider sitting down to it I'm mildly put off by the grindery, particularly if I'm tired and have a headache or (as was the case the other day), was very busy, what with meeting some of my lady's friends and seeing the music man and finishing city of mirrors.

I might be able to play at some time today and get hooked again since undoubtedly the story is awesome and the combat is interesting when not just killing random things again and again to level your creatures to the point you can actually continue in the story, still I'll save that conversation for the manamon thread.

Music man was actually pretty good last night even though it wwas an ameter company. The last production of it I saw the cast were all old and lacking in energy, this one was rather different, although sadly the main girl, marian who sings two songs my lady and I love, then there was you and goodnight my someone, was pretty dire. not only failing to hit several notes cleanly, but absolutely zero magic or on stage presence at all. Not a bad actress, but someone who I got the distinct impression thought she was far better than she actually was, the little boy character Winthrop also needed shooting! (being a child is no excuse for inflicting flat singing on an audience). ACtually i always think this when I see a production of A christmas Carol, since Tiny Tim is inevitably a cute child with absolutely zero! ability to sing which is supposed to be adorable but only serves to make me agree with the pre ghost scrooge's "If he's going to die he better do it!", just to save us from his abysmal singing! .

Fortunately in the music man several other cast members were pretty good. The school board who form a barber's shop quartet had an absolutely awesome base, The arsy and rather dim town mayor doesn't actually sing but was a hilarious actor, and his wife, (a friend of my lady's sister), was hilariously mad. The guy who played Harry Hill, the titula music man, a con man who goes from town to town convincing people there is a problem and setting up boy's marching bands before pocketing the cash was actually pretty dam awesome, I particularly liked his patter songs.

of course when my lady and I see something like this it really! makes us both have a massive desire to start performing, assuming we can find a director who won't be a scuzbag about the hole disability thing, which is sadly a rather large if.

@Dark: Congrats on your marriage! If we're talking about the same place, I used to live in Hershey in Pennsylvania. Lots of fond memories of those days too.

As far as what I've been up to lately...Well, I took a one-day trip with some colleagues out to California in May. It was too short for me, but fun nonetheless. I've actually been debating quitting the part of my job where I go out into the field, so to speak. Long story short, I'm not a very good independent traveler and everybody wants me to see about maximizing that. Well almost everybody. Although, I *think* I just might have reached a compromise with my mother regarding this whole issue of going more places independently. This has to do in part with ADA paratransit, and I posted about that elsewhere on here so I won't repeat what I said. Speaking of my parents, I spent the night at their place. Today marks one year since they moved in, and the place is looking nice. They've had some work done to it, and are currently having some landscaping done. The workers are very behind, but my mother says they're scheduled to come tomorrow, so hopefully that'll actually happen.

Speaking of construction, the building where I live is doing great. The ground-floor renovation is all complete, and the workmen did an outstanding job. Now their task is to do stuff out in our backyard, which they've already started. One of my downstairs neighbors is moving out tomorrow. Not because of anything bad, but she just wants a bigger apartment and we're otherwise booked. But it was great having her with us, and this evening we're throwing her a send-off. She's not going far though so fortunately we'll still see her around.