Scatter Theory

Hypermetropia known commonly as longsightedness (or farsightedness) is apparently very common and doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t read a book or look at your own fingerprints.

Thanks wiki!

The curvature of the lens means that rays of light are brought into focus behind the retina so glasses (or contacts) are worn to bring the object into focus.  In this modern era everyone knows this, but I honestly didn’t know the age dependence of the condition was so flexible.

Objects at infinite focus are fine, but long-sighted people have a near-focus limit that is further away than normal.  That is how close an object is before our muscle/lens system can’t flex enough to bring it to focus naturally.

I had an eye test on Friday and apparently I was born long-sighted but my vision has always been very good and my lens system has been flexible enough to bring things into focus so I’ve never had a problem reading a book, looking at my fingerprints, reading a micrometer etc.  But in the last couple of years and especially the past 6 months I’ve noticed I have to put extra effort in to focus on these things, and that my depth of field seems to have greatly reduced.

I was told I’m just becoming an old man (thanks optometrist lady, always nice to be told that at 23!) and that my lens/muscle system has stiffened to the point my natural long-sightedness is winning and after the eye-test it seems i’m straining my eyes whenever I look at anything closer than 5.5 m.

Now if we think about the amount of reading and computer work I do for fun and for my PhD all of which occurs < 1.5 m from my eyes it helps me realise my headaches aren’t just because I like to procrastinate but because focusing on my monitor or a book all day and taking breaks to focus to infinity is a lot of strain on my eyes (and the part of my brain holding everything where it doesn’t really want to go).

So I was told to wear glasses when looking at anything closer than 5.5 m (ie. all the time almost) so I have some on order that look like these:

Which I will update when I get them!

So I have always been told I have 20/20 vision or better (or 6/6 in the metric system), and what seems stupid to me is that I still do.  My far vision is and will probably always be very good which is all we use to rank our vision.  I guess it is all the relates to standard tasks of driving, playing cricket and footy which is what our culture is based on

Anyway medicare covers free eye tests for all Australians every two years (I hadn’t had a proper eye test for 6-10 years) and if there is anyone else as stupid as me not to have it done regularly then do it!

Ok so when I saw another log scale comic my brain went “God what is this guy doing” and suggested I stop reading and go do some work because it wasn’t going to be funny.  Alas, there is enough stuff including the Vista exorcism that I giggled at the make me happy enough to say it was funny.  But be warned - take a joke to far and I’ll kick you in the balls.

Honest.

Go ask Tedina (her name used to be Ted - you can guess what happened).

Ok I know I don’t update much but reading PA has made me want to make sure anyone who happens to accidentally pass through my blog (why else would you be here?!) reads it to.

Digital Rights Management (or DRM for those in the know) thoroughly gives me the shits.  I have always loyally purchased games I am interested in because honestly I think thats the right thing to do, and every new method to try and combat piracy usually just ends up pissing me and every other paying customer off.  And to what end?  I know many people that have quite the opposite opinion and basically pirate everything, and I have never seen a game they have missed out on because the DRM outsmarted the pirates.

The DRM implemented in Spore has greatly reduced my interest in purchasing the game, and it even makes me consider pirating it just so I don’t have to put up with that bullshit (though I won’t, but I sure feel like it).  Every time it becomes harder to use, or you feel like you own it less - you want to be less associated with it.

Anyway I thought the recent commentaries posted on Penny Arcade to do with DRM are a good read and if you haven’t had a look you should.  I will leave you with the latest which is my favorite from which comes what to me is a great way of summing it up,

” Stop trying to persuade people to love you more by hitting them [with] a rusty pipe. Put down the pipe, and give up on DRM. ” - Daniel James, Three Rings

Supanova 2008 was in Perth on the weekend and it was really good.  I spent an amount of money I won’t quote here in case my family read this!  But suffice to say I escaped with,

• The Absolute Sandman Vol. I & II
• The Ultimate HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE (plastic/leather bound volume of the five novels and one story)
• A figurine of Illidian Stormrage from the Warcraft Universe
• Two Final Fantasy figurines of a monster I can’t remember the name of and Ifrit
• The first ~480 X-Men comics published on a DVD
• a Fullmetal Alchemist mouse pad
• a poster of the recent Iron Man movie, but its one of those huge cinema ones 1.5 m x 2.5 m!
• Magician: Apprentice Vol. II, the ongoing graphic novel series of Raymond E Feist’s Magician (which was my first favorite book and still holds an important place on my bookshelf!)
• .hack//Legend of the Twilight DVDs - because I own all the other .hack stuff so I might as well!

And I think thats it … Suffice to say it was a lot of money but I am very happy with my stash of stuff.  During the course of the 2 days and Friday evening preview I also attended the panel sessions with Jennifer Fallon, Kandyse McClure (actress who plays Anastasia Dualla in Battlestar Galactica), Howard Chaykin (comic illustrator - Marvel/DC) and Joe Jusko (Marvel/DC painter, graphic novel & fantasy illustrator) and thought they were really interesting and a lot of fun.  Howard Chaykin discussed layout design in comic books before taking questions from the floor, Jennifer Fallon made some good comments about writers block and some of her story constructs and Joe talked a lot about his future direction as an artist.

I also attended and watched the cosplay competitions on the Saturday and Sunday afternoons where there were a lot of really cool costumes.  Link and Batman were reall good on day 1 as well as a lot of cool Final Fantasy costumes, and on Day 2 there was a cool team fortess group, a cool dance skit of Sora from Kingdom Hearts 2 (don’t ask me, I don’t know I was just there), and a lot of Kingdom Hearts costumes.

Each evening there was a special screening for people who had a weekend pass (which I of course did!) so we watched Stargate: Continuum on the Friday night, Dragon Wars on the second night (if you haven’t seen it really don’t bother) and Batman Gotham Knight on Sunday night.  I liked Continuum, I haven’t watched any stargate for ages so I enjoyed it a lot, even though I was quite behind on the story and character changes it still all made sense which was good.  Dragon Wars played out as a bad B-grade movie with good special effects, but then at the end in the dark cave we couldn’t see anything at all - but I’m willing to blame that on the projector and the retard that felt like leaving the bright light on the screen washing out the image.  I enjoyed Gotham Knight, it seems basically like a movie which is a collection of anime sections that are easily episodes (and heck I haven’t read about it - maybe they are!) that introduce a new audience to the generic batman story and setting with tie ins to more recent stuff.

Anyway, I had a really good weekend!  I have been getting into Age of Conan and trying to improve my Team Fortress 2 skills, but uni is really distracting as well as sorting stuff out at home so I don’t think much will happen until I move into a new place and get uni organised a bit more.  Its only Wednesday and already the week is dragging as I try and salvage the stuff for this draft and make some sense of everything.

So I’ve escaped from my livejournal!  Phill is hosting my blog now (thanks phill!) so I am playing with Wordpress to see how it all works.  This is heavily under construction so it will be much better soon.