Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Yeah, I definitely use algebraic notation, though I learned via descriptive way, way back in the day. Algebraic is the common standard. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558664/#p558664 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I don't need a board in front of me when I am playing against a computer, but I do need the views to be flipped, otherwise my brain just refuse to compute the moves.I know it is rather weird, but I can't do anything about it.Other than that, I can pretty much imagine the positions by their algebraic notations, I don't have trouble with that. descriptive notation is a problem though, since I'm not familiar with it much.This is why I actually have tried to search for the chess books which use the algebraic notation for describing moves, but so far, I have run into the books which either use pictures, or the old books which use the descriptive notation.I don't mind the pictures, but let's assume that you're trying to solve a chess problem from a book. It would be best if it contained the description of the positions in algebraic notation, along with the pictures. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558636/#p558636 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Well, you just explained part of your chess issue.I don't even have to have a board in front of me to play, and if I do, I definitely don't have to turn the board around. In fact, that would complicate things needlessly for me.I play chess on my iPhone using Shredder, but used to play KChess Elite, an old, old chess program, years back. I got kicked around pretty handily back then because its playing strength was really weird, but nowadays I usually play Shredder at between 1600 and 2200ELO depending on how brave I feel. I've lost at 1600 when I make a stupid move, and I've won at 2200 when I have a prepared combination and the AI doesn't see it all the way to the end. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558619/#p558619 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @Jayde:it tells me that you probably have been playing longer than me. By the way, What do you think about playing chess electronically?So far I have tried winboard, (Failed to beat it in a most brutal fashion,) but my problem with it is that it doesn't flip the views.Let me clarify. In winboard, when you play as white, you move the pieces forward by selecting the piece, and moving upward to move it forward.if the views were flipped, the same thing would happen to the black, except that it doesn't, and that's like moving the pieces by reaching forward, and moving towards me.Even when I play with myself by using a physical board, I always switch the side when it is the turn of that side.Who knows? maybe this is not the issue with the newer version of the winboard, I'm still using the version which I got from the source forge, last I checked it was updated around 2012. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558591/#p558591 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @142I'm only talking about the fire alarm. I think every incident in college was someone cooking, except the one where someone pulled it on purpose because they were drunk and we all had to stay outside for 2 hours at midnight while they pulled the video.I don't actually have trouble telling the difference between burning and smoke, but then I don't burn stuff often. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558525/#p558525 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I'll tell you one thing, our brain and body is extremely good at adapting to new situations. Not only children, but even adults can do it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558461/#p558461 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? How mine works is that I have the experience of seeing things, but only things that I know are there. So I guess my brain just makes up a visual representation of things I am aware of by other senses. Dark eagle's comparison to a phantom limb seems like a good way of describing it, I've never had a phantom limb but I can imagine it would be the tactile equivalent. All my dreams are also still very visual, and I tend to think by visualising things. Jayde, I'm curious how this works for you, since if I understand you you've never had vision. So what do you get in your head when you work with a map or a chessboard? Is it a set of relations between objects? I guess it might be hard to explain but I'm curious. There are sighted people who also have this actually, it's called aphantasia and it's the inability to visualise anything when they're not looking at it at that moment. I remember there was a study that found aphantasia is underrepresented in creative types like artists (not surprising), but overrepresented in scientists, and the speculation was that maybe it's because people who don't visualise things have to think more logically to connect those things in their minds.I've actually had a car running over my foot. I think at that moment they noticed me because the car stopped on my foot, and took a few seconds to reverse off of it. I don't think they ever realised though. This happened back when I was in school on the school premises. It was a school for the blind, and many of the children there had parents with visual problems, so I suspect it might have been one of those. There are people that end up driving cars that I really think should never be allowed to drive cars. Fortunately I had shoes on (because as part of the school uniform we were forced to wear them), but I still had issues with that foot for a long time after. I'm usually barefoot though when I have a choice about it, and that would have probably been worse. Just as a random side-note, people tend to think anything you do is typical of blind people. When people see me walking barefoot on campus they seem to go for it's a blind people thing to feel the ground to navigate, whereas actually it's just a me thing and don't think I've met any other blind person who walks outside without shoes. That reminds me of a funny story. So rain tends to disorientate me, I've never been sure why but I know it's not just me. Light rain is fine but I'm walking in pouring rain I feel like it's so much effort to keep track of where I am and where I'm going, and I tend to get lost easily. So I was walking with another blind friend in rain and we ended up being helped by someone. I can't remember exactly how the conversation started but we mentioned that we're more disorientated in rain and she said something to the effect of "that makes sense because then you guys can't feel the vibrations." Lol I have no idea where that comes from or if it's at all common that people think we use some kind of vibrations. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558441/#p558441 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? The vending machine one and the cane is blindness specific though, also I would argue that burning could have been avoided easier if I had had vision. I am very careful with my cooking, and vision would have allowed me to see smoke coming, and stop. I can't tell if I just smell burning or smoke. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558439/#p558439 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @140I know where it is. It's not possible to remember the precisely exact position. But I at least know where the ladder goes.Also, your story is a typical college story, you realize that right? We had that once a month or so in my dorm for the entire duration of college, including the one memorable night where someone did it just 4 hours after the fire drill. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558418/#p558418 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Well Camlorn, you should explore how to deactivate the smoke detector, unless you want to accidentally set it off at an inopertune moment, like at night. Well, did your dad also have the fire department arrive. The porters at college usually investigate when alarms go off, but this time they decided to be adventurous and call the fire department, so I was the cause of a fire truck driving up, and firemen coming to my room to find the very very tiny amount of oil I burned when popping popcorn, I doubt that any actually burned though, as the alarm was really close to the kitchen and extremely sensetive. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558415/#p558415 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I know roughly where the smoke detector is, but by nature of it being a small object on what is something like a 16 foot ceiling, I can only get it to within a few feet and have to struggle for the rest.Fire alarm, meh. My dad set off the fire alarm in a mall once because he's kind of dumb sometimes and decided that we absolutely had to take the emergency stairs with the weird beeping lock thing that had a giant sign explaining how you needed to use it while I'm standing there pointing out that if you're supposed to hold the bar for 10 seconds and it's making an ear piercing screech the whole time this means it's not a normal exit, so it's not like being sighted helps. And I also almost set off the fire alarm in college, except that it turned out that that emergency door was actually broken and should have set off the alarms, which I only found out after using it several times (and in hindsight I should probably have told someone). URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558405/#p558405 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? lol Camlorn, I highly recommend you know the place where your smoke detector is, and how to turn it off before it happens. I actually have much worse blind stories, like the time I and the time I set the fire alarm off at 1:30 AM in college or when dipped my hand in full boil water, though I have a piculiarly crazy tolerance to high temps, so nothing happened to my hand after I rinced it out in cold water, had no burns or lasting soar spots.. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558398/#p558398 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Haha stories.There's the two times I got burned pretty badly, the worst one in college when I was trying to pour boiling water to make tea. I actually cook a *lot* and hot water doesn't frighten me in the slightest, so it was bound to happen, but was a valuable lesson in what kinds of pitchers not to buy, namely anything remotely narrow where your other hand needs to be involved. I think he second-worse cooking mishap, fortunately only almost a mishap, was that day my grandmother decided to move a pan of oil I was heating up to fry some french fries to the other side of the stove. If it'd been another 3 or 4 minutes or another inch, I'd have been making cannibal chicken fingers. Obviously there was a lecture after that one.There's the time one of my classes got handed over to another professor for a few lectures and when I walked into the room with my guide dog (I had one back then) the first thing he says is "I thought this would happen one day, either you leave or I do, I'm deathly allergic to dogs and you can't have it even on the other side of the room".Just 6 months ago, I literally ended up running 30 gates at the Detroit airport with two helpful strangers from the plane who happened to have time because I needed to make a connection, the plane on the way in was a little late, and Delta dropped the ball on getting me help. Literal running. On the moving walkways. At midnight. And I wish I could see the faces of any bystanders to that.There was that job interview, where I almost got the job. I didn't fail to get it because of blindness, but because I said I valued stability and it was a small tech startup. But on the way out, the interviewer goes "They probably told you, but watch this narrow door" and a little mini-conversation later it turned out that they were the financial tech startup that managed to get space in a building that used to be an old bank which put conference rooms inside all the old bank vaults and I'd been interviewed inside one.I've got at least one aggressive full-contact prayer story, which is exactly what it sounds like and is also why I won't ever tell someone they can pray for me again.I've never had a bad cane story, but I've almost had a few. Learned the hard way not to use those carbon fiber telescoping ones, and after that day in high school when some idiot literally decided to jump it like a jump rope and failed, I always just decided that I'd carry an extra cane on me if I'm going to be traveling somewhere far from home (I've got 3 on hand at the moment, you can never have too many canes).The smoke detector thing will probably happen to me at one point, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's a common one. Most of the other ones I've got offhand are common enough. Oops sharp knife on the counter, oops hot pan where you didn't mean to put it, etc. If I weren't very meticulous in certain ways some of those would have gotten me at some point or another, especially with how much I do in the kitchen. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558388/#p558388 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? And Camlorn, I am very interested to know if you have any blindness stories that are worse than the smoke detector or almost being run over and having a cane totally bent. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558378/#p558378 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I would still prefer biological cures though than a bunch of electrodes and implants in my head. That is also being worked on, and is becoming more feesable with gene editing tech and stem cell research. But I really struggle alot with even basic spacial concepts. I thought it was a problem with me at a point, though I don't have comprehension issues in other things except math. I really tried hard to understand alot of directional concepts and maps, but they elude me always. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558327/#p558327 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @132The most likely cure for vision, far as I can tell, is neural implants directly into the visual cortex. It's been done, sort of. not ready for widespread use yet, but the people behind the Argus II are doing one called the Orion, Darpa is funding some of it, Elon Musk has a company doing that sort of thing as well. I've watched the field and what's going on right now is that everyone is trying to solve all of the same problems for a bunch of different types of neural implants, most notably rejection and how to manufacture electrode arrays that small and a bunch of other stuff along those lines. But we've done some cool stuff: paralyzed people controlling limbs for example. It only works for 6 months or so and you need an entire laboratory of equipment to run it, but the first miracles are always the most expensive, and there's a lot of stuff beyond curing various illnesses in it: military, entertainment, etc.I'm pretty sure that how this is going to go is that in ~10 years we'll have solved the general problems of the field, in 12-15 years someone is going to report actually good results and try to get into human trials, after that everyone pivots away from trying to cure individual conditions, and in 20-30 we have something through whatever the 2050 equivalent of the FDA is. Then we pop your head open like the hood of a car, plop it in there, and close it up. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558244/#p558244 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? DarkEagle, as far as chess goes, I would be rated somewhere between 1750 and 2000 I believe. I don't know if that means anything to you. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558233/#p558233 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @Jayde:I suppose that my spatial reasoning sucks, or you simply are just a better chess player than me. It is hard to assess that from an internet conversation.unfortunately, one of my eyes were removed when I was two years old, dew to the retinablastoma, and the second one when I was around three years old, give or take few months.The operation also took my retina with it, so I suspect if I am ever to get back my eyes, I'll need a human made retina along with it.@camlorn:What you describe sounds to me similar to phantom limbs, yet different in certain ways. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558232/#p558232 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @130Yeah, well, as I said I don't know for sure that there is a rule. There is surprisingly little research on this stuff at all either way. I've looked and unless I've looked in the wrong places the most we've got is "FMRI shows activity in visual cortex" and "Blind people don't understand perspective". The former says basically nothing useful being as we don't know what if anything it's doing, and anyone could figure out the latter with 5 minutes of thought. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558214/#p558214 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Funnily enough, I can actually use a compass and/or a map pretty well, so long as they're accessible of course. I don't tend to care about absolute north most of the time, but I get how it works and how it can be important. It also takes a really, really difficult maze, in an audio game or in real life, to get me turned around. If I'm paying attention, I can always retrace my steps if I find a dead end or get turned around someplace. And as I said, I also play chess quite well. I suspect I still have spatial reasoning issues next to a sighted person, but I suspect I'm probably at the higher end for blind folks. I don't know if I'm high enough to be an exception that proves any rule, mind you. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558180/#p558180 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @123Nope. I've got at least one other blind friend who does this, and at least one other blind friend who has strong visual memories from time to time. And then there's Charles Bonnet syndrome where you just have strong visual hallucinations all the time just because.I don't see things I'm not "supposed" to be able to see, that is if it's out of my line of sight I can't see it, but I had just enough vision to develop models for such things. And it's helpful because it's accurate. Like, my short-termn spatial memory went and decided to live in my eyes. Sort of anyway, there's also a synesthetic component which makes me sound like I'm on drugs when I try to explain it.As far as I can tell the best way to go blind, if you're going to go blind, is to not have full vision in childhood, but to have enough that you get all the critical periods. There's not really enough research because in all honesty blindness in childhood is really a lot rarer than you'd realize, and so I doubt you could even start splitting up the cohorts. But in my personal experience there's a sweet spot where you get the sighted critical periods but you don't have enough vision to do large print, so you end up developing all the blindness skills, braille, cane, screen readers, etc. while you're young and learning is easy. Go too far one way and you don't get spatial reasoning etc. and also don't really ever become fully aware of things like expressions and body language. People who were born without any vision, for example, seem to have a lot of trouble learning to read a map or work with a compass. Go too far the other way and you have to learn braille and the cane in your 30s. I would love to see someone take this seriously at some point. It feels like the kind of thing where there's a lot of scientific knowledge if someone did the studies. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558176/#p558176 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? in a situation like that, I really think curing vision would offer more in the way of sensory input than hearing ever would. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558145/#p558145 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
2020-08-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : Green Gables Fan via Audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? My friend, who is studying to become an endocrinologist, told me about a podcast done by Eyes on Success. Maybe it was two epidodes, but anyhow, in one of them, they used synaptic exuberance by snorting stem cells to encourage new pathways to be developed.I am patiently awaiting to get a permanent biological cure for hearing, as that is what I would love to cure first. It stinks being caught up in the DeafBlind world and the hearing world. I also have an older sibling who is DeafBlind, but they have never developed verbal communication skills.I would only cure my blindness if only to satisfy my synaesthetic curiosities, then sharing it with other folx for research purposes. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558115/#p558115 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? also, re: blindness and autismSo I really think that focused interests develop due to the poverty of the nature of the stimuli entering the brain. As auditory and other sensory information doesn't use a fraction of the brain regions vision does. I also think that blindisms, and high energy levels can be explained by this as well, as the person generates more stimuli for themselves. Narrow interests could also be caused by a lack of social contact, or decreased social contact compared to the sighted However, alot of sighted people also have very narrow interests they are passionate about. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558082/#p558082 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @120. No one is saying that they are not happy. are they? People are just saying that the sited have advantages over the blind which is true. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558076/#p558076 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Camlorn, I have an infinite list of blindness stories unfortunatly. I can add blindness combination hearing loss stories to them too. Let me share some college blindness stories.The vending machine. So our dorm had this vending machine to buy sandwiches and snacks. Of course, because of my fucked up blindie sleep schedule, and also pulling all nighters, I didn't always have the option of going there with a sighted person. So I memorized the numbers for some of the things I liked. These numbers would constantly change, insuring I got snacks I didn't necesarily want or like. Also, when you typed a number with an empty shelf, the shelf would rotate initially, and you could type another number, or if the item got stuck, you could put more cash in, and try and buy another of the item or alternatively, you could shake or slam your shoulder into the machine to dislodge it. Of course, as students found a way to abuse it, they removed the ability to try again if a shelf was empty, so for example, if you typed 41, and 41 was empty, it would eat your money. I lost dozens of turkish lira that way, even if you average the free sandwiches I got in my first year when retyping the number when items got stuck. Not a single sighted probably ever lost any money, due to seeing what was on what shelf.the caneSo I was crossing this gym parking lot entrance, which was just on the curb. I was with a friend, and this fucking moron ran over my cane, and when I say ran, he ran c The wheel of the car made one complete rotation on my cane. My friend screamed, and then you know what that idiot did? He reversed, and ran over my cane again, while I was holding it The metal was so badly warped, one of the personel in charge of building maintenence was helpful enough to fix it almost completely with a small hammer. That guy could have easily ran over my foot, and if I were sighted in that scinario, I wouldn't have needed a cane, and probably could've gotten out of the way too. and a home blindness story: The smoke detector.So I wake up at 6, and the house is freezing, so I decide to light the electric heater for the first time. However, smoke shoots out of the vents, and the smoke detectors start blaring. I spent around 20-30 minutes trying to find where it was, and then spent another 10 minutes trying to figure out how to turn it off. God knows what my neighbors thought of me. Not to mention the wheeled chair I stood on rolled out from under my feet, and ı nearly crashed to the floor. Again, sight would've allowed me to pinpoint the location of the detector, and at least fan it and make it stop. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558078/#p558078 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @105 I've always wondered if it's just me! This is exactly what happens to me, and I lost my vision long before my 20s. Not sure exactly but by high school I had basically nothing left except a bit of light perception (and even that has mostly gone by now). I first noticed it somewhere in primary school though when I saw my hands until they moved up and I realised they were under a table and I shouldn't be seeing them. I've never actually met anyone else who has a similar experience, but come to think of it all the visually impaired people I know have either been blind from birth or still have some vision left so I guess I don't know anyone else who had ision then lost it completely. Everyone always asks me what I see (sighted people seem to think that blind people only see black) and explaining it is complicated and people don't really seem to get it. Sorry for going off-topic but I've literally never heard this being talked about before. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558056/#p558056 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @kjsiscoNo one is picking apart the ways the sighted have advantages over the blind. There's no picking apart to be done. It's blatantly obvious once you're living independently and holding down a job and doing all those things you're supposed to do as an adult.being able to sweep the advantages of the sighted under the rug isn't about identity. If you can do that you're either young, living in proximity to sighted people who help you out, or somehow you have more privilege than me and my 6 figure programmer salary.I've had multiple job-related blindness stories, I've had multiple airport-related blindness stories, I've had multiple home-related blindness stories, I've had multiple college-related blindness stories. I could probably think up a few more categories. All of them caused problems, all of those problems wouldn't have been problems if I were sighted. If you haven't yet built up a list of stories like this, if you haven't yet come to understand your limitations, then you should think long and hard why so many of us do have stories like this and what it might mean. I promise that those of us who are talking about the advantages of the sighted, we're not being hypothetical. I used to think like you do. Then I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to actually go out into the world, to live alone without a support network, and push myself far enough to find the limitations. That sucks in a way, though I actually prefer living alone without a support network over going back to Florida where I have one, but I also feel kind of sorry for you if you're an adult and have had a boring enough life that you haven't found the edge of what blind people can reasonably do. I will warn you now: if this is the case, you're not prepared for the day that that happens to you.You keep trying to turn this into some sort of blindness philosophy in order to ignore the purely practical points we're making. Obviously we're not going to force you to take a cure if it existed. But you're arguing against purely practical things with fortune cookie-style philosophy. Your "blindness is identity" arguments don't help me or anyone else get to the grocery store. They don't help us reroute around construction. If you're living alone, they don't let you magically know just how bad that burn is. They don't teleport us to work, or find the pill you just dropped before the dog eats it, or make employers consider us equal. It doesn't turn getting stuck in some airport somewhere into anything less than a nightmare, or let you find your new doctor's office without Aira or somehow getting another human being involved. It doesn't let you sense the electromagnetic emissions of your appliances to read their touchscreens, tel if there's mold on the ceiling, notice that the couch is stained and everyone has just been too polite to mention it. It doesn't make the clouds move out of the way of the GPS signal, or the uber driver notice that maybe that blind guy is waiting on him. I could go on.All it does is provides you some justification to put your head in the sand, because obviously monstrously long and impactful lists of just what we can't do and what's harder that aren't things like fighter pilot that we nonetheless have to deal with every day is just picking apart the advantages of the sighted. I've got news. It's not picking apart anything, and it's not about the advantages of the sighted. It's about the disadvantages of the blind. You will have these disadvantages until there's a cure and you choose to take it. The only control you have over that is whether you face them or avoid acknowledging that they exist, you're avoiding, and ironically avoiding actually just makes it worse because only when you face them can you find ways around or through them. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558051/#p558051 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Kjsisco, I agree with you but only up to a point. I think one must be realistic, and that does mean admitting where the sighted have general advantages over us. I don't know how old you are or what life experience you have, but I just about guarantee you that the inequity between the blind and sighted is going to bite you hard at least once in your lifetime if it hasn't already.And no, that doesn't mean we just roll over, bemoan our fate and lie in the gutter. Perish the thought. But it does mean that assuming we're all even and equal at everything, and special each in our own way for everything, is silly. As I pointed out in my longer post, we're all equal as human beings regardless of our ability to see, walk, speak or whatever else, but in specific arenas, people have advantages or disadvantages which are real and which must be acknowledged in context. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558022/#p558022 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I guess we can pick apart the ways sighted may have advantages over the blind but why go down that rabbit hole? As I said, it's about being happy with the way you are. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/558019/#p558019 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? DarkEagle, I think what you're describing with chess comes down to spatial reasoning, not just to blindness. I have been blind since birth, and I'm a pretty strong chess player. I mean, I'm not a grandmaster or anything, but I can play entire games of chess in my head without a board, and a lot of higher-ranked sighted players can do the same thing. Chess is an eight-by-eight grid with a maximum of thirty-two pieces on it, so for me personally, I don't have much trouble at all keeping track of pieces.The only advantage I could see the sighted having over the blind is this. Say I'm in a tournament; in chess, you're really not supposed to touch pieces that you don't intend to move, so groping the board in a tournament probably isn't going to fly. That said, it's okay for a blind player to have a separate board set aside which they can manipulate to their heart's content, without penalty. The advantage to the sighted player is that if a blind person's hands are wandering over this board, the sighted player might get an idea of their intentions this way. But speaking for myself at this point, I don't have this problem. A good friend of mine has improved by leaps and bounds under my teaching, and I asked him if he can ever glean advantage from the way my hands move on the board. He said no. It was something I used to have more problems with, but now I tend to calculate more in my head than with my hands. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557979/#p557979 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @114Someone also worked out how to get some General Electric appliances talking by hooking into the maintenance port with an arduino, but I don't have the reference handy.W.r.t. blindness and autism, I don't think that blindness itself causes autism in the sense that the underlying mechanisms are the same, but somehow half the blind people I've known over the years have also had some of the stuff that's hard to attribute to blindness like highly focused interests. But I'm a programmer, most of my friends are programmers, and whether that's actually causal or not it's also a high correlation for such traits, so perhaps that's not surprising. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557913/#p557913 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Considering Jayde raised the topic of chess, I feel that's another example which I can do better at if I have sight.I have played a lot of chess against the sighted people, since there aren't any blind players in my immediate vicinity, I do end up playing against them.What I have observed is that, when a sighted person is calculating a move, they can have the entire board in front of them, so if they want to consider a move, they can just take a quick look of the board, and make the move accordingly.Meanwhile, what I do is track the position of the pieces with the fingers, (Since it is a blind chess set, I think I should have mentioned it first,) but even then I can't exactly have the prospect of the entire board, meaning that even if the board is blind friendly, I still can't exactly keep the track of every piece on the board.Now, this doesn't mean that I get an automatic loss against a sighted person. I do beat my sister regularly, (And so far she has only one against me once,) and I have a lot of close matches with sighted players where I nearly had the win, but fumbled it up.But if I did had sight, I would have been much more better chess player, and not to mention if something were to happen with my board, I can by a new one from the usual local shop. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557897/#p557897 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? irrationally high expectations can also create stress, and cause depression when you will be unable to meet them. Ignoring blindness or other disabilities put you at a disadvantage and cause problems is like arguing the earth is flat. You can burrie your head in the sand, but that won't change objective facts. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557809/#p557809 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Okay, if we're gonna split hairs, fine. I know the blind can't drive,, fly aircraft, or anything that requires the processing of visual input. No kidding! I am trying to say that we should place ourselves in a situation of high expectations so as to put us on as equal footing as possible with our sighted counterparts. I for one certainly strive for this, and as a result, my lack of sight doesn't come up. If it does come up it's rare. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557797/#p557797 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Jayde, I understand what you mean about neuroplasticity and critical periods. The most important one of these is language, or at least it appears to be, as can be seen by the case of Victor the wild child, and the case of genie. The story of genie is particularly a tragic one. But I have yet to see any evidence that there also exists a critical period for vision. Language is a very unique system, and a complex one but there hasn't been any evidence that vision can't be re-introduced to the brain at some point.Camlorn, I actually did research on socio pragmatic competence and theory of mind in blind people for my masters. I learned alot about blind people getting the autism diagnosis, and my opinion is that blindness causes blind people to share several trates with autism as a result of deprevation from visual cues as you said, however these defesits appear to be fundementally different from autism. Also, the criteria for making an autism diagnosis has visual findings heavily weighted, which contributes to the problem. I really think though that software accessibility is going downhill fast. The number of fully usable applications decreases each day. Now when choosing an antivirus or other software, you choose the one you can use, not the one that offers the best features or protection.Apliences are unfortunatly going all touch, which means you have to rely on smart ones to use them, which usually don't have accessible apps iether. But for washers and dryers,, if you have the option, you might want to get your own for ease of use and less frustration. When I was shopping for my own set, I did alot of research, and there is literally only one brand that offers blind specific accessibility features built in to their aplience. The smart Samsung machines are fully usable in combination with the app, the braille labels next to the main buttons, and the ascending/descending audio tones for all the options in counter options. But funnily enough, sighted people were bitching about the audio tones for all the options, and how they can't turn them off in the reviews, so I won't be surprised if they remove the accessibility features in the future. It is really a shame though that you have to only get specific apliences to be able to use them properly, instead of selecting among all available options for features you want or other qualities. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557790/#p557790 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Jayde, I understand what you mean about neuroplasticity and critical periods. The most important one of these is language, or at least it appears to be, as can be seen by the case of Victor the wild child, and the case of genie. The story of genie is particularly a tragic one. But I have yet to see any evidence that there also exists a critical period for vision. Language is a very unique system, and a complex one but there hasn't been any evidence that vision can't be re-introduced to the brain at some point.Camlorn, I actually did research on socio pragmatic competence and theory of mind in blind people for my masters. I learned alot about blind people getting the autism diagnosis, and my opinion is that blindness causes blind people to share several trates with autism as a result of deprevation from visual cues as you said, however these defesits appear to be fundementally different from autism. I really think though that software accessibility is going downhill fast. The number of fully usable applications decreases each day. Now when choosing an antivirus or other software, you choose the one you can use, not the one that offers the best features or protection.Apliences are unfortunatly going all touch, which means you have to rely on smart ones to use them, which usually don't have accessible apps iether. But for washers and dryers,, if you have the option, you might want to get your own for ease of use and less frustration. When I was shopping for my own set, I did alot of research, and there is literally only one brand that offers blind specific accessibility features built in to their aplience. The smart Samsung machines are fully usable in combination with the app, the braille labels next to the main buttons, and the ascending/descending audio tones for all the options in counter options. But funnily enough, sighted people were bitching about the audio tones for all the options, and how they can't turn them off in the reviews, so I won't be surprised if they remove the accessibility features in the future. It is really a shame though that you have to only get specific apliences to be able to use them properly, instead of selecting among all available options for features you want or other qualities. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557790/#p557790 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? So, w.r.t. hearing, sight and communication, it took me a long time to realize that blindness is in effect high-functioning autism. Obviously the neural stuff is different (though there is at least some evidence that blindness and autism are linked) but the effect isn't. Sighted people use hearing for information transfer via language, but there's an entire second channel for emotion and emphasis that we don't get that's really important for interpersonal relationships. Also, unless someone went out of their way to teach you to do really basic social things like face people when they're talking to you, you're going to hit sighted people's uncanny valley really really hard. And all of this, well. Either someone taught you to simulate sighted social signals, which are honestly much more fundamentally wired than just your particular culture, and you got good at figuring out emotions from way more context than any sighted person ever needs. Or you come across as weird. Not just a little bit weird, either.And with respect to jobs, I don't think that's getting better. It's not getting worse, but we have traded one kind of inaccessibility for another kind of inaccessibility with technology. Accessibility is really good for anyone consuming content with their phone or computer, but it's a continuous battle to get anyone to care about those of us who have to be efficient enough to be employed (Apple, Google, I'm looking at you), it's significant effort to make inaccessible apps accessible, there's no money in it, and the kind of laws that could fix this would be draconian by any measure. Say what you want about the past, but "Can I use this telephone system" is a modern problem.Also, the things you can do independently outside work are in some ways on the decline too. For instance, my apartment has an electronic package locker system that's basically inaccessible. After we fought with them for 2 months they fixed the physical keypad, but that's not actually enough because it's got non-talking menus and the keys don't reliably press. Fortunately my property manager was on my side here, but still. My washer is only usable because it happens to have lights that Seeing AI can pick up, but the knobs and buttons can't be marked because they're the new style that doesn't have an endpoint and just increments a digital counter. Whenever I want to get something nice for cooking--i.e. my food processor--it turns into a research project called "Can I use the buttons" with a side of "Does it even have buttons". Modern thermostats are pretty much universally inaccessible unless they're a smart thermostat and you've linked it up to a voice assistant, and that only works as long as you have internet plus you just had to get an expensive thermostat.Say what you want about the past, and maybe jobs are somewhat better, but 20-30 years ago you didn't have to wonder if you'd be able to use the appliances you just bought. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/55/#p55 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Okay, so two things here.First, I don't believe you could solve neuroplasticity that way. I believe from what I've read that at this point, once you miss certain milestones, they're just gone. You'll never get them back, with what we know at present. You can't just filter out other distractions and ask the brain to retrain and expect good results.Second, unless someone else can speak up and invalidate what I'm about to say scientifically, I want to slam down pretty hard on the whole "deaden hearing into a sense for pure communication like the sighted" argument. Many sighted people use hearing primarily as a sense for communication. Note that word "primarily". But virtually all sighted people use their hearing as a secondary or even tertiary resource. Just as one example, how many people do you think will become alert when they hear footsteps behind them, even with full sight? Or that rustle in the bushes? That dog growling while wagging its tail (yes, it happens). The creaking when you step on a particular floorboard? All sorts of things. I'm not saying that sighted folks use hearing as much or as constantly as we do, but to try and box it this way is just dangerous. It is not ever, ever a good idea to try and train your ears to react to only speech noises. Jesus, I can't even imagine being in that position. That's true whether a person has no vision at all, or perfectly functioning eyes. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557765/#p557765 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Jayde, I still think I would take sight even if I knew I would probably not be able to process all of it. If nothing, it will perminently cure non-24, and I bet a retraining therapy could be given to someone to force the brain into survival mode and make it learn to interpret new stimuli. One option I think would be to use a chemical or other reversable process to deafen the person for a few weeks to months, or certain times to force the brain into that mode to try to learn the input through the eyes. Alternatively, newly sighted blind could wear headpones or other devices that filter all directional noise or background noise, and only allow speech sounds through, so the navigational component of hearing is destroyed, and hearing solely becomes a sense of communication, as it is in the sighted. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557753/#p557753 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Let's see if I can reduce this down to its component parts, as I perceive it at least. This is going to apply to all disabilities, really, but I'm gonna focus on blindness because it's the one I'm an expert on.Being blind does not make you less of a human being. You still have a right to love, compassion, assistance, support, and all of the generalized life opportunities everyone else gets. You might be a good person or a bad person, a kind heart or a complete jerk, empathetic or apathetic. These things, by and large, are not functions of your blindness; they're functions of your character, and the experiences you have while blind may help shape that character, but they are not wholly responsible for it. But you are no more or less valuable, as a person, because you have a disability. A lot of people, both the able and the disabled alike, don't seem to believe or understand this, but it needs to be trumpeted from the rooftops until it becomes innate knowledge. I believe that the NFB, misguided though they are in some ways, is trying to establish this baseline more than anything else. They are trying to convince blind people, as well as those who interact with them, that they are no more or less worthy due to their visual impairment.However, being blind does make you less valuable in certain fields, the same way that being a paraplegic may make you less valuable in others, or having a cognitive disability may make you unsuited to certain environments. This isn't personal to you; it's just a fact. And because living comfortably requires the acquisition of a job, and because there are many jobs which are harder or impossible for people with visual impairments, it puts us at a financial disadvantage, and ties back to my first point. We can often feel devalued by society because of the way we are treated in the job market, or because the assets we offer are found wanting in fields that don't accommodate for our needs very well, or at all. This is largely society's fault, capitalism's fault, but it's not our fault, either due to our own individual aptitudes or our lacking of one sense or another.I think that when a blind person says they want to stay blind because they'd miss audiogames, they're definitely not thinking of the big picture. It's a lot like saying "I don't want my arm reattached because this is a really cool stump I've got here, and I'd miss old Stumpy if I actually had an arm and a hand there instead.". I think there are other immature and unreasoned responses that we've seen in this thread as to why someone wants to stay blind, and a few equally silly reasons why a person wants to be able to see again, too.But I do think there have also been a lot of good reasons here, including mine. If you can't actually make my sight usable, then it's going to be an unnecessary complication. Instead of just being a blind guy who can't do, say, thirty-seven percent of jobs, I'm now a partially sighted guy who can't do thirty-seven percent of jobs, and who also has to deal with really distracting visual input that he can't properly process, much less use effectively. No thank you.The idea that one's blindness somehow defines one's identity is, I confess, a concept I don't fully understand. Sure, it is -part of one's identity, because it circumscribes one's abilities and may in some way contribute to the way one thinks and behaves. So fine, it's a part of one's identity. But blindness, in and of itself, is not an identity; to imply that it is suggests that there is no other relevant dimension to your life, experience or personality, and I find it hard to believe that anyone is so lacking in depth and breadth. I've lived nearly thirty-seven years on this earth without ever having met someone for whom blindness would make up their entire identity. As such, I see the "I won't lose my blindness because it's my identity" argument as pretty shaky. It might make up an aspect of your life that you don't want to be without, and to that I say fine. Do whatever works for you, I suppose. But it's not identity, it's habituation and aversion to change. And god knows most humans embrace the former and sympathize with the latter.As someone who has been blind since birth, I can tell you that there are definitely moments where I wished that I could see well. It's by no means the sound track of my life, and it doesn't colour my every interaction with the world in which I live, but it does pop up, and I think that's okay. It doesn't make me weak for thinking this, and it doesn't make me strong for resisting those thoughts. I try and avoid self-pity, too, where I can, but even that will come up from time to time if something is especially frustrating. But alongside that, I can also tell you that true envy doesn't enter into it. I do not envy sighted people because they can do things that I can't. That's silly. There are individuals who can do things tha
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? When and if you give concrete advice for people who mentioned the obvious limitations and what can be done to eliminate them, I can say hell yes, you were right. Until then, only empty words. I could say keep dreaming and one day all of it will become the reality, but it really doesn't mean much for someone being unable to do a job they were wanting at the time they had sight. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557745/#p557745 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Ah but pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is what must be done. I won't look down on anyone who would want sight. Hell, go for it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557743/#p557743 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? picking yourself by the bootstraps has to be one of the most bullshit arguments I've ever heard. Good luck picking yourself up when your condition automatically zeros out alot of shit you can do, not to mention noone believes what you can do, and will jump at any excuse to disqualify you. Oh, and don't forget multiple disabilities too. This idea that blind people can just go out, get a job whenever they want, or become completely 100% independant, regardless of circumstances is disgusting. Those blind people who look down on anyone who can't achieve any of those. The reality is, gaining any of these is based more on luck, privilidge, or fortunat circomstances than anything else. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557730/#p557730 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I have never had the NFB say that you cannot ask for help. And what is wrong with believing that as we move forward more doors open for the blind? This is not an NFB argument. This is me saying that you have a choice to be negative about the situation or you can grab the bull by the horns, pick yourself up by the bootstraps, step up to the plate, and other overly used sayings. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557715/#p557715 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Yeah, so, w.r.t. filling things in, I will never forget the day I realized I was having accurate hallucinatory vision, and wasn't actually seeing things anymore, only to mention this to another trusted blind friend and have them go "Yeah, me too". Apparently if you have enough vision and lose it in your 20s, you can kind of end up crosswired so that the knowledge of your local environment links up to what you "should" be seeing. Obviously it's not accurate if the environment changes--at least, not until the changes are accounted for and incorporated into the model--but I still operate off it all the time, and it kind of can't be turned off even though I've noticed it.And despite this being a common enough experience that I've known a few people who've done it, no one ever talks about it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557652/#p557652 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? This mentality of being just as valuable as an able-bodied sighted person, and being able to hold down any job mostly seems to stem from the NFB. I can't stand that organization! Independence is a good thing. It expands our freedoms, and can expand our horizons as we endeavor to try new things; however, independence at the cost of never asking another living soul for help is not. We are human beings, an order of social creatures. We need some level of socialization in our lives. Even the most introverted of people come to need it, as we're seeing with the ongoing quarantine situation.So yes, go ahead and teach life skills, but don't ever try to drill it into someone's head that it's wrong to ask for assistance. There's not a one of us that hasn't asked for assistance from someone before. Whether it's express or implied, we all have done it. This goes right to the core of what we are. Even as infants, our instinct is to cry out until we get what we want. Thus, it's against human nature to try to foster a complete sense of independence from any and all other humans.There is much more that could be said, though it would deviate too far from the current topic to continue along these lines. Just know that vision is so powerful, that even as mine deteriorates, I still have my mental imagery in tact. Our brains are so well-equipped to process visual information, that low vision people can fill in the gaps from just a minute amount of detail. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557600/#p557600 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @102:I see where you're coming from. Maybe I should have put it like "Personally for me."What I was trying to say though, that as a child, I was much more angry that other kids would exclude me, and adults would either talk to me as if they pitied me, or they would talk to me in a condescending tone.But around my teenage years, I just stopped caring, and well the fact that I finally was introduced to computers, and gaming probably helped a lot in that, since I could entertain myself without listening to other people. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557588/#p557588 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @102:I see where you're coming from. Maybe I should have put it like "Personally for me."What I was trying to say though, that as a child, I was much more angry that other kids would exclude me, and adults would either talk to me as if they pitied me, or they would talk to me in a condescending tone.But around my teenage years, I just stopped caring, and well the fact that I finally was introduced to computers, and gaming probably helped a lot in that, since I could entertain myself without listening to other people.By the way, your point about dropping things is very accuret. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557588/#p557588 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @98, re: ages 2-12: I feel the polar opposite, even excluding the part where my vision worsened in high school. (If anything, it got better when my vision got worse, but I don't think that has so much to do with vision as it does other things... but "better than 13-14" is a pretty low bar."Let's be honest, " is one of those phrasings I'd really like to see less of Which just brings me back to how Id rather the singularity / second coming / some manner of over-the-top miracle situation happen before I could be offerred vision, by itself. Sure, if I'm using it to lookat a screen the whole time, that's not so bad. But doing anything else, it'd be a constant reminder of everything else that's broken. What I had wasn't good enough for 21st century games, so really I didn't care too much when it worsened until I got a hold of a game it would have worked with that I'd been wanting for a while and couldn't make sense of it. Of course, I was in college at that point, so nothing important to daily life had gotten my attention yet, because we try to keep people as far away from real life as possible for as long as possible, these days. Really, I think there are loads of sighted people who could use a sighted equivalent of LCB and CCB. People get into their mid-late twenties or even early 30s, not knowing how to handle basic stuff. But then we'd have the sighted equivalent to NFB seminars, and I don't want to guess which political fringe that would , be and just lament that it would inevitably politicize generalized functioning. I think I might hate the 21st century.Having said all that ... I've spent ... HOLYCRAP 18 YEARS trying to get around blindness to make games and videos etc, and have failed pretty hard. And I still drop things often enough for that to be a headache. Knowing that I can cope with being lost in the middle of nowhere, or that I can build various things out of wood, etc does help, but does not make it easier to undrop things, or to deal with people, or to play Kingdom Hearts. And how am I ever going to make it back to my home planet if you have to have 20/20 vision to be allowed into space? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557543/#p557543 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @96: Go be a firefighter. See how you do in that field. Astronaut maybe. And there are jobs relating to driving that we cannot hold. You already said we can't drive, but then said we can hold any job, so one of those statements must be incorrect to you. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557502/#p557502 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Things I can't do in programming: anything games related, anything that requires custom hardware, anything graphical. Anything that relies on observing tons and tons of metrics. Machine learning beyond a basic level, due to visual tools. Very advanced performance analysis, which relies on being able to examine visual data in ways that screen readers can't manage and can't be made to manage. The entire subfield of frontend is off the table. The entire subfield of hardware design is off the table. Embedded systems is mostly off the table. Being on call many places is off the table. Game programming is off the table. Working on any project that's on a platform without a screen reader, or which would need screen reader accessibility for testing, likewise off the table, which is why I didn't pursue the couple opportunities I had to help work on custom web browser engines. Going into a new job I always start with "what tools do you use" so I can find out if there's anything inaccessible. When slack breaks accessibility for a few days now and then I'm screwed until they fix it, same for a vast majority of other tools, most of which put way less effort into it than Slack does (at least when Slack breaks, they treat my feedback as holy shit fix this now. GitHub doesn't even listen).Things I can't do efficiently in programming: Lisp (emacspeak technically allows it but would take years), iOS development (Apple dropped the ball), Android anything (Google dropped the ball with Talkback), C# (Microsoft is still picking up the ball they dropped, with respect to VS). Yes these things can be done. Yes I could learn to do them. But a sighted colleague can be as efficient as I'd be in a month in 4 or 5 hours with any of them.These are just the lists off the top of my head. Programming is one of the most accessible fields you can go into and is one of the very few ways that a blind person can make more money than a vast majority of sighted people. But if I thought about this more I could expand those lists. I could also list lots of jobs blind people can't have, like fighter pilot or surgeon or firefighter, but chose the above in the interest of making people realize that this isn't hypothetical. I've done very well for myself, well enough that I'm probably going to be retired before 50, but I'm still limited. There's a lot of things I flat out can't do unless I have vision to do them with, and I don't have to reach for the stereotypical list of driving/video games/etc that I and others always rely on first. This is just stuff in my field, I haven't even talked about the accessibility of higher education.Kjsisco, I feel sorry for you, that you were apparently raised in an environment that's so fucked up that you have managed to turn not thinking of yourself as that blind person into not wanting vision, and somehow seem to think that the rest of us wanting vision means we're unhappy. Happiness is harder if you're blind, just because getting basic things does take more work, but you'll find lots and lots of happy, well-adjusted blind people want vision, and it has nothing to do with identity or seeing themselves as that blind guy or however you want to put it. I think the real problem here is that you don't understand the value of vision, and you don't understand how we could value vision without making our identity into "Hi, I'm visually impaired". Say that you don't identify as that blind person all you want, but whoever taught you not to do that also seems to have taught you that as soon as you acknowledge limitations that you can't get past you'll be unhappy, which isn't true. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557501/#p557501 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? The work thing is off topic so I will just say that sight isn't something I want because I was brought up not to even think of myself as that blind person. It's hard to explain really. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557491/#p557491 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Actually, you can't hold every job you want.Even in the fields like computer programming, the interviewers would be looking at you first when they want to take out the weakest candidates. This is confirmed by a sighted developer, who teaches me.What he said was "You'll have to prepare harder for the interview, because when it comes to taking out the candidates, they'll look at you first."Not to mention, you can't do anything frontend related, which are easier but impossible for us because just by inclusion of a blind developer these become a job for two people, instead of one, while backend programming is not exactly easy.Mind you, the only reason why I am giving so many examples of programming is because I'm most familiar with this field.As for the negativity? I don't observe any negativity within me personally regarding the blindness, and the discussion for which this topic was created is hypothetical anyway. it's not like there's an actual solution to the problem, which I can go to an hospital and get it applied to me, why would I be so negative about something like that?As for the question about children? definitely cure them of this problem if you have the solution. Let's be honest, the childhood years, from two to twelve are the most unhappy ones. Not that the teenage years are any easier, but at least by that point you get used to it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557478/#p557478 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Absolutely. Please go become a pilot then. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557437/#p557437 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Lol I don't wish to convert anyone. I was joking when I worded it as preaching. And no, I don't think the blind will drive but I do believe we can hold any job. I did bring something to light. Negativity abounds. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557432/#p557432 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Lol, preach from the book of the NFB? And people wonder why I despise them. No organization should have such a tight grip on your thoughts and emotions that you feel compelled to apply force to convert others to your way of thinking. You talk about blind people being unhappy, if you were so happy and secure in your beliefs, no matter what they may be, you wouldn't need to proselytize to bring others to your level of understanding. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557431/#p557431 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? We are unhappy with the life, said literally nobody. If you got the opportunity to get 2000 dollars, would you take it? If yes, does that mean you are currently unhappy with the life? But enjoy your NFB there who are trying to tell you that a blind person can work at any job. Looking forward to seeing blind drivers or builders. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557421/#p557421 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? It's about learning to be happy with your life as it is. It seems we have quite a lot of unhappy people here. I am fighting the urge to preach from the book of the N F B but I will do it if so provoked. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557419/#p557419 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I think calling blindness a magnifier for other disabilities is pretty accurate, at least for certain other disabilities. "Where did I put my keys?" becomes a much more troublesome thing when you have to meticulously check every square inch of every place you could have left them. (Have I mentioned that I hate dropping small things, especially the bouncy/rolly/tumbly kind? It's to the point where, if I can't find a dropped nut or raisin within a couple minutes, I just vacuum the whole house.)Yeah. Dropping things was one of the things on the list I forgot about. Driving and reading ... there are ways around those, if cumbersome and less effective. You can always tell people they're wrong. But a tiny item, dropped and tumbling quietly and pseudorandomly, will not yield to computers or education. And they're generally too small to find with the flat cane trick, as it just goes right over them at the tapery parts. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557321/#p557321 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Ok my two cents here. I haven't responded to previous topics on this subject, but. Personally, I would go to any physical, or financial length, take any risk, to restore my vision. Here is why. I have the same condition 81 mentioned, and so far I was spared the hearing loss to a large extent, til about 7 years ago. Hearing loss didn't show up on any of my tests until a year or so ago. However, it has noticably gotten worse. For a long while, I have noticed that I cannot hear the weak forms of certain concenents, with eloquence, regardless of the speech rate, though normal people are ok. I am thankful to be employed and making a living. However, there is absolutely no possibility that I could maintain any level of significant employment if I lost the ability to understand synthesized speech at a fast rate, or had a hearing loss that was severe enough to hinder my communication in low to moderately noisy environments. I don't want to hear how someone wwith such a condition can live a full rewarding life, and so on. The fact of the matter is, I am a very audio oriented person, and lothe, yes lothe! braille. I was never fast at it, and it was always so innferior and like using a dialup connection when using fiber optics was an option. Though alot of person in a similar situation would want hearing restoration, which is also what I would like, when I look at it from a purely rational prospective, vision would offer alot more than hearing, as it is a much more salient sense, and offers alot more input. But I really don't understand the blindness identity thing iether. Literally, every single problem in my life, when I follow the chain of cause and effect, is somehow traceable to my blindness. It has held me back, in my life socially, in my education, by forcing me to work 3x- 4x the amount of time to achieve the same results, as a sighted copy of me could have achieved, causing people to doubt me, and also blindness has limited my mobility much more than a sighted person, in similar environments, due to the inability to drive. Having vision would practically garantee, I could be financially independant for the rest of my life, allow me to achieve more due to access no longer being a consideration, make me more approachable due to the awkwardness of blindness being eliminated, etc etc etc. Alot of people here go from the assumption they will be healthy their entire lives when they say they would go on being blind. I always say blindness is a magnifying glass for other conditions. Basicly, if you have anything else, memory loss, other severe conditions, hearing loss etc, blindness has a synergistic effect on the condition as to make it alot more severe than it otherwise would be.A few points I saw in some points. Someone mentioned how blindness was valuable because it provided a differentiated unique experience. You know what? Fuck that experience. I would much rather have the undifferentiated experience of having perfect vision and hearing. Also, accessibility was mentioned as a superior solution than correcting the disability. Well guys, sorry to be the barer of bad news, but accessibility is basicly a giant hack to do something that was originally designed to be achieved with vision. Correcting vision would solve the root of the problem. Also, you don't have the right to request access just because you are blind. You have the right because you are blind, which is an involuntary state, and there is no way out of that involuntary state. Having a cure would change that whole basis of requesting access if blindness was easily treatable, it would become a voluntary as opposed to an involuntary state. And since it was voluntary, you would no longer have any sort of basis to request access since you could correct your vision and access the application or device. I personally wouldn't help anyone out if they requested access or asked for assistance for blindness specific things if I knew they were refusing safe and effective treatment for blindness.Camlorn, you mentioned people deliberately choosing to have a disabled child. I can tell you unfortunatly that this practice has been ongoing for a while. What is fucked up is that deaf and dwarf couples are using IVGF to specificly preferentially select for a defective gene rather than a healthy one. The UK outlawed this practice after a public case, but I really think it is mental for us in the US to not do anything about this. It is perfectly legal.here are some links from news articles.https://www.theguardian.com/science/200 … alresearchand this onehttps://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/health/05essa.htmland thishttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie … 69256.htmlthis one as wellhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/ … vidteather URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557276/#p557276 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @85:It's not about changing your choice, it's about understanding why that choice.And, Yes, I know that sighted people use sense of touch. Do you think there's any sense that's left unused ever?The point is that noone want's to loose a sense, not even sense of pain.And, in a way, seeing infrared is already possible with gadgets, so I wasn't grasping on straws. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557256/#p557256 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @zakc93 I agree if a disability can be fixed when someone is a child it should be done. Not doing so I agree is child neglect. I also can't see why someone would keep their disability if given a choice but to each their own I suppose. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557235/#p557235 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @Camlorn I saw this thread when it just started including your first post, and was skeptical about what you said thinking that there are probably not enough people wanting to remain blind that there are likely to be any here. Apparently I was very wrong.I'm very curious about this, because I find it hard to imagine. Even if curing my blindness came with some side effects I would probably still go for it if they weren't too extreme. Even if I only got a bit of vision back, anything is better than nothing. Obviously everyone should have a choice what they do with their bodies and it shouldn't be forced on anyone. And I'm not saying anyone who chooses to keep their disability is stupid or anything, I don't know what it's like to be them so can't really say how I would react if I had been in that situation. I'm just saying that personally I find it very hard to understand, it's just something I can't quite wrap my mind around. Deaf people forming their own cultures due to sign languages being actual separate languages is an interesting case. I wonder though how many people, if they had their disability taken away with the option to revert after trying it out would actually still choose to go back. And I definitely agree that it's not a choice parents should be allowed to force on their children. I once heard of a case of two deaf parents who had a child, where the condition was treatable but only very early in life, and if left would result in permanent deafness. The parents didn't want the child to be treated because they wanted to raise them as a deaf person. I feel like this is unfair, you're making a choice about the child that will impact them for the rest of their lives. You can still even teach them your sign language, it's not like being able to hear would render you unable to use it. I don't know, maybe there's something I'm missing here, but I do feel like this should not be legal. I'm sure more people would agree if it comes to for example parents forcing a strict diet on a child which causes malnutrition, or not allowing the child to be vaccinated because of whatever silly ideas they have about it. And this is arguably even worse. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557225/#p557225 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @81 - I'd be interested in reading but i dont see a link. Can you provide a link?@83 Alright you know what, blind people aren't the only disabled people in the world and this attitude pisses me off. You are one person. Sorry if its controversial and ticks a few heads here but it's true. Seriously, how about you google ableism sometime.First off, you're really showing your ignorance of deaf communities. The whole reason why this group even exists is because deafness causes an isolation in communication that results in the creation of their own languages. This has been recorded in real time and is so significant that it has contributed significantly to linguistics and understanding of language synthesis. Curing every deaf person leads to the loss of those languages. I am not going to argue with you why that's a bad thing. Like blind people they are obviously not homogeneous on this issue because of a wide range of experiences - but here's the thing: just assuming that people who are afraid of change are stupid because they can't see the whole world like a sighted person means you are stepping into other people's lives. It's actually you who is homogenizing the deaf by saying this vocal minority has no valid reason to complain - THEY DO.You're allowed to have your own perspective on how to treat your own body but you're literally telling other people how they should live (and don't tell me you're not - you're literally diagnosing them as having a "coping problem" when they express their opinion). That's the problem. It has nothing to do with identity, disability identity is actually really stupid and alienating - it has to do with someone saying, oh this is what you should do with your body.And seriously, talk to people born with glaucoma. I'm not saying that parents who treat their kids are abusers obviously, but I've talked to several and they all had severe PTSD from their surgeries. One of my closest friends went through over 50 invasive surgeries across 30 years. Just looking at people who are just born totally blind in comparison and you can see the psychological impact. Even if this is how you lost your vision I know from personal experience there are other people who have very different feelings. Reducing it into a system of cures is not facing the actual problem that disabled people face.Let's not get into how cures are just a commodity anyways and don't really exist, and how this approach completely neglects people who go blind because of trauma or late-life health (aka, a lot of them). A lot of blind people are even familiar with this problem because their condition is caused by a complex change in their eyes or nerves. Basically the problem is caused by an organ in your body changing its function which impacts your ability to see, possibly removing it altogether. Because of the complexity of this function, how you adapted to the change of it ect. impacts your development, you can't simply just "fix" it in many cases, especially in people born blind. Research visual development in the brain - after a while your body is unable to adapt to vision because the brain has already developed past a critical period. So many blind people wouldn't even gain vision like other blind people who had vision before would.Now this is not to say that treatments and alternatives shouldn't be investigated or looked into, in fact the more options the better (in fact, imagine the possibilities for people who transitioned to sightedness and how they experience the world differently), but when we talk about how "offended we are" and how "wrong" it is for people to feel uncomfortable with the idea of becoming sighted, and reduce their opinion down to a strawman about "identity", you're the one who's introducing what a blind person should be (someone who desires to see again). The "blind identity" doesn't exist; what exists is our experiences and our comfort zones, and its perfectly valid for some people to want to have a different opinion. You say yourself that you were able to see somewhat and this explains your motivation very clearly for wanting to gain vision again, but you write off other blind people as having a "coping mechanism" when you only encompass one kind of possible blind experience. You certainly couldn't have known what it was like to be born totally blind, and I notice many people who are born totally blind tend to have a bit more of a problem with the idea of gaining vision again.Sorry for getting angry about this but I really wish people would actually talk to other disabled people on this subject instead of assuming their own experience represents everyone, and then get offended at other people because they're expressing their own opinions. This is a very complicated subject that can't be just referenced from your own point of view. If this offends you you should seriously
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @81 - I'd be interested in reading but i dont see a link. Can you provide a link?@83 Alright you know what, blind people aren't the only disabled people in the world and this attitude pisses me off. You are one person. Sorry if its controversial and ticks a few heads here but it's true. Seriously, how about you google ableism sometime.First off, you're really showing your ignorance of deaf communities. The whole reason why this group even exists is because deafness causes an isolation in communication that results in the creation of their own languages. This has been recorded in real time and is so significant that it has contributed significantly to linguistics and understanding of language synthesis. Curing every deaf person leads to the loss of those languages. I am not going to argue with you why that's a bad thing. Like blind people they are obviously not homogeneous on this issue because of a wide range of experiences - but here's the thing: just assuming that people who are afraid of change are stupid because they can't see the whole world like a sighted person means you are stepping into other people's lives. It's actually you who is homogenizing the deaf by saying this vocal minority has no valid reason to complain - THEY DO.You're allowed to have your own perspective on how to treat your own body but you're literally telling other people how they should live (and don't tell me you're not - you're literally diagnosing them as having a "coping problem" when they express their opinion). That's the problem. It has nothing to do with identity, disability identity is actually really stupid and alienating - it has to do with someone saying, oh this is what you should do with your body.And seriously, talk to people born with glaucoma. I'm not saying that parents who treat their kids are abusers obviously, but I've talked to several and they all had severe PTSD from their surgeries. One of my closest friends went through over 50 invasive surgeries across 30 years. Just looking at people who are just born totally blind in comparison and you can see the psychological impact. Even if this is how you lost your vision I know from personal experience there are other people who have very different feelings. Reducing it into a system of cures is not facing the actual problem that disabled people face.Let's not get into how cures are just a commodity anyways and don't really exist, and how this approach completely neglects people who go blind because of trauma or late-life health (aka, a lot of them). A lot of blind people are even familiar with this problem because their condition is caused by a complex change in their eyes or nerves. Basically the problem is caused by an organ in your body changing its function which impacts your ability to see, possibly removing it altogether. Because of the complexity of this function, how you adapted to the change of it ect. impacts your development, you can't simply just "fix" it in many cases, especially in people born blind. Research visual development in the brain - after a while your body is unable to adapt to vision because the brain has already developed past a critical period. So many blind people wouldn't even gain vision like other blind people who had vision before would.Now this is not to say that treatments and alternatives shouldn't be investigated or looked into, in fact the more options the better, but when we talk about how "offended we are" and how "wrong" it is for people to feel uncomfortable with the idea of becoming sighted, and reduce their opinion down to a strawman about "identity", you're the one who's introducing what a blind person should be (someone who desires to see again). The "blind identity" doesn't exist; what exists is our experiences and our comfort zones, and its perfectly valid for some people to want to have a different opinion. You say yourself that you were able to see somewhat and this explains your motivation very clearly for wanting to gain vision again, but you write off other blind people as having a "coping mechanism" when you only encompass one kind of possible blind experience. You certainly couldn't have known what it was like to be born totally blind, and I notice many people who are born totally blind tend to have a bit more of a problem with the idea of gaining vision again.Sorry for getting angry about this but I really wish people would actually talk to other disabled people on this subject instead of assuming their own experience represents everyone, and then get offended at other people because they're expressing their own opinions. This is a very complicated subject that can't be just referenced from your own point of view. If this offends you you should seriously talk to more people, especially those with other disabilities, because this "identity" crap isn't coming from them.@
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @81 - I'd be interested in reading but i dont see a link. Can you provide a link?@83 Alright you know what, blind people aren't the only disabled people in the world and this attitude pisses me off. You are one person. Sorry if its controversial and ticks a few heads here but it's true. Seriously, how about you google ableism sometime.First off, you're really showing your ignorance of deaf communities. The whole reason why this group even exists is because deafness causes an isolation in communication that results in the creation of their own languages. This has been recorded in real time and is so significant that it has contributed significantly to linguistics and understanding of language synthesis. Curing every deaf person leads to the loss of those languages. I am not going to argue with you why that's a bad thing. Like blind people they are obviously not homogeneous on this issue because of a wide range of experiences - but here's the thing: just assuming that people who are afraid of change are stupid because they can't see the whole world like a sighted person means you are stepping into other people's lives. It's actually you who is homogenizing the deaf by saying this vocal minority has no valid reason to complain - THEY DO.You're allowed to have your own perspective on how to treat your own body but you're literally telling other people how they should live (and don't tell me you're not - you're literally diagnosing them as having a "coping problem" when they express their opinion). That's the problem. It has nothing to do with identity, disability identity is actually really stupid and alienating - it has to do with someone saying, oh this is what you should do with your body.And seriously, talk to people born with glaucoma. I'm not saying that parents who treat their kids are abusers obviously, but I've talked to several and they all had severe PTSD from their surgeries. One of my closest friends went through over 50 invasive surgeries across 30 years. Just looking at people who are just born totally blind in comparison and you can see the psychological impact. Reducing it into a system of cures is not facing the actual problem that disabled people face.Let's not get into how cures are just a commodity anyways and don't really exist, and how this approach completely neglects people who go blind because of trauma or late-life health (aka, a lot of them). A lot of blind people are even familiar with this problem because their condition is caused by a complex change in their eyes or nerves. Basically the problem is caused by an organ in your body changing its function which impacts your ability to see, possibly removing it altogether. Because of the complexity of this function, how you adapted to the change of it ect. impacts your development, you can't simply just "fix" it in many cases, especially in people born blind. Research visual development in the brain - after a while your body is unable to adapt to vision because the brain has already developed past a critical period. So many blind people wouldn't even gain vision like other blind people who had vision before would.Now this is not to say that treatments and alternatives shouldn't be investigated or looked into, in fact the more options the better, but when we talk about how "offended we are" and how "wrong" it is for people to feel uncomfortable with the idea of becoming sighted, and reduce their opinion down to a strawman about "identity", you're the one who's introducing what a blind person should be (someone who desires to see again). The "blind identity" doesn't exist; what exists is our experiences and our comfort zones, and its perfectly valid for some people to want to have a different opinion. You say yourself that you were able to see somewhat and this explains your motivation very clearly for wanting to gain vision again, but you write off other blind people as having a "coping mechanism" when you only encompass one kind of possible blind experience. You certainly couldn't have known what it was like to be born totally blind, and I notice many people who are born totally blind tend to have a bit more of a problem with the idea of gaining vision again.Sorry for getting angry about this but I really wish people would actually talk to other disabled people on this subject instead of assuming their own experience represents everyone, and then get offended at other people because they're expressing their own opinions. This is a very complicated subject that can't be just referenced from your own point of view. If this offends you you should seriously talk to more people, especially those with other disabilities, because this "identity" crap isn't coming from them.@ 86 - But here's the thing - the whole reason why you're missing out on the world in the first place is because its a sighted world. Ev
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @81 - I'd be interested in reading but i dont see a link. Can you provide a link?@83 Alright you know what, blind people aren't the only disabled people in the world and this attitude pisses me off. You are one person. Sorry if its controversial and ticks a few heads here but it's true. Seriously, how about you google ableism sometime.First off, you're really showing your ignorance of deaf communities. The whole reason why this group even exists is because deafness causes an isolation in communication that results in the creation of their own languages. This has been recorded in real time and is so significant that it has contributed significantly to linguistics and understanding of language synthesis. Curing every deaf person leads to the loss of those languages. I am not going to argue with you why that's a bad thing. Like blind people they are obviously not homogeneous on this issue because of a wide range of experiences - but here's the thing: just assuming that people who are afraid of change are stupid because they can't see the whole world like a sighted person means you are stepping into other people's lives. It's actually you who is homogenizing the deaf by saying this vocal minority has no valid reason to complain - THEY DO.You're allowed to have your own perspective on how to treat your own body but you're literally telling other people how they should live (and don't tell me you're not - you're literally diagnosing them as having a "coping problem" when they express their opinion). That's the problem. It has nothing to do with identity, disability identity is actually really stupid and alienating - it has to do with someone saying, oh this is what you should do with your body.And seriously, talk to people born with glaucoma. I'm not saying that parents who treat their kids are abusers obviously, but I've talked to several and they all had severe PTSD from their surgeries. One of my closest friends went through over 50 invasive surgeries across 30 years. Just looking at people who are just born totally blind in comparison and you can see the psychological impact. Reducing it into a system of cures is not facing the actual problem that disabled people face.Let's not get into how cures are just a commodity anyways and don't really exist, and how this approach completely neglects people who go blind because of trauma or late-life health (aka, a lot of them). A lot of blind people are even familiar with this problem because their condition is caused by a complex change in their eyes or nerves. Basically the problem is caused by an organ in your body changing its function which impacts your ability to see, possibly removing it altogether. Because of the complexity of this function, how you adapted to the change of it ect. impacts your development, you can't simply just "fix" it in many cases, especially in people born blind. Research visual development in the brain - after a while your body is unable to adapt to vision because the brain has already developed past a critical period. So many blind people wouldn't even gain vision like other blind people who had vision before would.Now this is not to say that cures shouldn't be investigated or looked into, in fact the more options the better, but when we talk about how "offended we are" and how "wrong" it is for people to feel uncomfortable with the idea of becoming sighted, and reduce their opinion down to a strawman about "identity", you're the one who's introducing what a blind person should be (someone who desires to see again). The "blind identity" doesn't exist; what exists is our experiences and our comfort zones, and its perfectly valid for some people to want to have a different opinion. You say yourself that you were able to see somewhat and this explains your motivation very clearly for wanting to gain vision again, but you write off other blind people as having a "coping mechanism" when you only encompass one kind of possible blind experience. You certainly couldn't have known what it was like to be born totally blind, and I notice many people who are born totally blind tend to have a bit more of a problem with the idea of gaining vision again.Sorry for getting angry about this but I really wish people would actually talk to other disabled people on this subject instead of assuming their own experience represents everyone, and then get offended at other people because they're expressing their own opinions. This is a very complicated subject that can't be just referenced from your own point of view. If this offends you you should seriously talk to more people, especially those with other disabilities, because this "identity" crap isn't coming from them.@ 86 - But here's the thing - the whole reason why you're missing out on the world in the first place is because its a sighted world. Even if you gained vis
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @81 - I'd be interested in reading but i dont see a link. Can you provide a link?@83 Alright you know what, blind people aren't the only disabled people in the world and this attitude pisses me off. You are one person. Sorry if its controversial and ticks a few heads here but it's true. Seriously, how about you google ableism sometime.First off, you're really showing your ignorance of deaf communities. The whole reason why this group even exists is because deafness causes an isolation in communication that results in the creation of their own languages. This has been recorded in real time and is so significant that it has contributed significantly to linguistics and understanding of language synthesis. Curing every deaf person leads to the loss of those languages. I am not going to argue with you why that's a bad thing. Like blind people they are obviously not homogeneous on this issue because of a wide range of experiences - but here's the thing: just assuming that people who are afraid of change are stupid because they can't see the whole world like a sighted person means you are stepping into other people's lives. It's actually you who is homogenizing the deaf by saying this vocal minority has no valid reason to complain - THEY DO.You're allowed to have your own perspective on how to treat your own body but you're literally telling other people how they should live (and don't tell me you're not - you're literally diagnosing them as having a "coping problem" when they express their opinion). That's the problem. It has nothing to do with identity, disability identity is actually really stupid and alienating - it has to do with someone saying, oh this is what you should do with your body.And seriously, talk to people born with glaucoma. I'm not saying that parents who treat their kids , but I've talked to several and they all had severe PTSD from their surgeries. Just looking at people who are just born totally blind in comparison and you can see the psychological impact. Reducing it into a system of cures is not facing the actual problem that disabled people face.Let's not get into how cures are just a commodity anyways and don't really exist, and how this approach completely neglects people who go blind because of trauma or late-life health (aka, a lot of them). A lot of blind people are even familiar with this problem because their condition is caused by a complex change in their eyes or nerves. Basically the problem is caused by an organ in your body changing its function which impacts your ability to see, possibly removing it altogether. Because of the complexity of this function, how you adapted to the change of it ect. impacts your development, you can't simply just "fix" it in many cases, especially in people born blind. Research visual development in the brain - after a while your body is unable to adapt to vision because the brain has already developed past a critical period. So many blind people wouldn't even gain vision like other blind people who had vision before would.Now this is not to say that cures shouldn't be investigated or looked into, in fact the more options the better, but when we talk about how "offended we are" and how "wrong" it is for people to feel uncomfortable with the idea of becoming sighted, and reduce their opinion down to a strawman about "identity", you're the one who's introducing what a blind person should be (someone who desires to see again). The "blind identity" doesn't exist; what exists is our experiences and our comfort zones, and its perfectly valid for some people to want to have a different opinion. You say yourself that you were able to see somewhat and this explains your motivation very clearly for wanting to gain vision again, but you write off other blind people as having a "coping mechanism" when you only encompass one kind of possible blind experience. You certainly couldn't have known what it was like to be born totally blind, and I notice many people who are born totally blind tend to have a bit more of a problem with the idea of gaining vision again.Sorry for getting angry about this but I really wish people would actually talk to other disabled people on this subject instead of assuming their own experience represents everyone, and then get offended at other people because they're expressing their own opinions. This is a very complicated subject that can't be just referenced from your own point of view. If this offends you you should seriously talk to more people, especially those with other disabilities, because this "identity" crap isn't coming from them.@ 86 - But here's the thing - the whole reason why you're missing out on the world in the first place is because its a sighted world. Even if you gained vision you would have to struggle with the fact that your brain is playing 20 years of catchup. neuro
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @81 - I'd be interested in reading but i dont see a link. Can you provide a link?@83 Alright you know what, blind people aren't the only disabled people in the world and this attitude pisses me off. You are one person. Sorry if its controversial and ticks a few heads here but it's true. Seriously, how about you google ableism sometime.First off, you're really showing your ignorance of deaf communities. The whole reason why this group even exists is because deafness causes an isolation in communication that results in the creation of their own languages. This has been recorded in real time and is so significant that it has contributed significantly to linguistics and understanding of language synthesis. Curing every deaf person leads to the loss of those languages. I am not going to argue with you why that's a bad thing. Like blind people they are obviously not homogeneous on this issue because of a wide range of experiences - but here's the thing: just assuming that people who are afraid of change are stupid because they can't see the whole world like a sighted person means you are stepping into other people's lives. It's actually you who is homogenizing the deaf by saying this vocal minority has no valid reason to complain - THEY DO.You're allowed to have your own perspective on how to treat your own body but you're literally telling other people how they should live. That's the problem. It has nothing to do with identity, disability identity is actually really stupid and alienating - it has to do with someone saying, oh this is what you should do with your body.And seriously, talk to people born with glaucoma. I'm not saying that parents who treat their kids , but I've talked to several and they all had severe PTSD from their surgeries. Just looking at people who are just born totally blind in comparison and you can see the psychological impact. Reducing it into a system of cures is not facing the actual problem that disabled people face.Let's not get into how cures are just a commodity anyways and don't really exist, and how this approach completely neglects people who go blind because of trauma or late-life health (aka, a lot of them). A lot of blind people are even familiar with this problem because their condition is caused by a complex change in their eyes or nerves. Basically the problem is caused by an organ in your body changing its function which impacts your ability to see, possibly removing it altogether. Because of the complexity of this function, how you adapted to the change of it ect. impacts your development, you can't simply just "fix" it in many cases, especially in people born blind. Research visual development in the brain - after a while your body is unable to adapt to vision because the brain has already developed past a critical period. So many blind people wouldn't even gain vision like other blind people who had vision before would.Now this is not to say that cures shouldn't be investigated or looked into, in fact the more options the better, but when we talk about how "offended we are" and how "wrong" it is for people to feel uncomfortable with the idea of becoming sighted, and reduce their opinion down to a strawman about "identity", you're the one who's introducing what a blind person should be (someone who desires to see again). The "blind identity" doesn't exist; what exists is our experiences and our comfort zones, and its perfectly valid for some people to want to have a different opinion. You say yourself that you were able to see somewhat and this explains your motivation very clearly for wanting to gain vision again, but you write off other blind people as having a "coping mechanism" when you only encompass one kind of possible blind experience. You certainly couldn't have known what it was like to be born totally blind, and I notice many people who are born totally blind tend to have a bit more of a problem with the idea of gaining vision again.Sorry for getting angry about this but I really wish people would actually talk to other disabled people on this subject instead of assuming their own experience represents everyone, and then get offended at other people because they're expressing their own opinions. This is a very complicated subject that can't be just referenced from your own point of view. If this offends you you should seriously talk to more people, especially those with other disabilities, because this "identity" crap isn't coming from them.@ 86 - But here's the thing - the whole reason why you're missing out on the world in the first place is because its a sighted world. Even if you gained vision you would have to struggle with the fact that your brain is playing 20 years of catchup. neuroplasticity is not going to make it so that you can fully get around this problem. In fact, its the reason why as you get older, becoming sighted
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I agree with Canlorn almost all the way down to the ground. Being blind from birth means that no, I'll never be fully aware of just how big that gulf is. But because I've done research, talked to sighted folks, and have a logical brain that is still sharp, I know it's there and I have a vague idea that it's huge. That's what makes me say that it would have to be good vision, and I'd have to be supported while my brain worked around the neuroplasticity issue. Provide those things, and I'm all over it. If you can't, though, I want no part of it.I can admit that I have fewer capabilities than sighted me would have. The only argument I will make, however, is that someone who is blind from birth (and has the appropriate nurturing environment and temperament, of course) does tend to have a chance to not judge things as aesthetically as sighted society encourages folks to do. I won't go off and say that my blindness made me who I am, and I definitely don't think it's keeping me who I am. If I regain my sight, I'll still be me, albeit with a hopefully expanding skillset. That said, I was never able to judge things in t way that society was expecting me to, and I believe that may in some way have contributed to me turning out the way I am now. I don't know how it is for other blind-from-birth folks, but it definitely lends the potential for perspective that might not otherwise be as easily reachable. This is not to say, by the way, that sighted folks are shallow; some are, of course, but that's not a defining trait. Instead, it's just a difference in how I process information, which in turn may influence how I think about, remember and then use that information both on a rational and an emotional level. But again, that won't go away if I gain the ability to see; it's well-entrenched now, in fact. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557188/#p557188 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Well, even sighted people would not want sense of touch taken as they use it as well so it's sort of an apples and oranges argument. It's the same with a sense that humans don't normally get so that's just grasping at straws. Anyway, part of this topic's title said "your choice", and users are saying it is there choice to keep there blindness. I don't think you will ever turn us. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557135/#p557135 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Okay,Let me take it to this direction.Somehow, your sense of touch have to be taken away for some unpreventable reason. Now, you live next 30 to 40 years without your sense of touch, and you adapt and enjoy your life. What if something comes out and promises to restore your sense of touch as it was after those 40 happy years.Will you take back that sense of touch?Probably most of you will say that you will take back the sense of touch. This might be because you know how nice and useful sense of touch can be. And yes, even sense of touch is constantly bombarded with various inputs, the touch of your clothes against your body, the sense of hot and cold, sense of wind rushing by your skinn, all of these things happen constantly throughout the day. It's just that we are trained at handling it, or more appropriately, our mind is trained naturally to handle it.In another case, let's say that there's a way to get infrared vision to you somehow, and what will be the responce then. Because we don't have that sense, and we know how useful that can be, I think majority of you will choose to have it.Now, why so much confusion over sight. Just like we adapted to being blind, we will adapt to being sighted. I am sure that that would be far more pleasurable and exciting journey. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557115/#p557115 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @82Yeah, this sentiment is actually super common and I predicted this entire thread in post 2 or 3. As I've said several times, it's one of the few things I think is flat out stupid. You will see people calling it differently gifted in many cases, and either it becomes "but xyz disability is part of my identity" or "Being xyz means that I can do something better than if I weren't". I'm not just talking about blindness. It's universal. You see it in the whole "maybe people should be deaf because deaf culture" stuff most clearly. It's considered controversial by a very large and very vocal minority that disabled you is less capable than not-disabled you, gets twisted into a pretzel of logic that ends at "If I am cured then I will be losing something", and once someone's there you can't argue with them. Google ableism sometime.I don't think that we should force a blindness cure on anyone, but I will call this out wherever I see it, and I do think that if the parents of a minor don't cure their children then we should consider that child abuse, because man, is it taking way more off the table than beating them or putting them down for every waking moment of their childhood.I wouldn't be surprised if, among blind people, it is indeed more common in people who are born blind. I had enough vision to know what vision is like and that has given me a lot of insight over the years as to just how big the gulf is when talking to someone who never had any, but even on this site you can see when people don't--see also all the proposals to make all the sighted games accessible because surely they're not more complicated than audiogames for example. But fundamentally, I think this is a coping mechanism. If you get something else for it then the world is fair, if the cure somehow changes your personality then what does it matter if there is one, obviously the cure will have side effects, obviously we can't solve the neuroplasticity problems and you had to have vision when you were young if it was going to do you any good, etc. These rationalizations are a shield, they stop you from having to face that you're blind and you can't do things because of it.The obvious rational answer to "Would you take a cure for blindness" is "yes". But whenever this is asked, in any context, you instead get a ton of rationalizations as to why you shouldn't, or all these "but the cure will have side effects", or whatever. But the question is never "Would you take a cure for blindness if it was going to kill you faster" or "Would you take a cure for blindness if you wouldn't be able to use your vision because you're 40". Those aren't called cures. And frankly all the stuff that people talk about with respect to problems with it, that's all on the way to being solved. Will it be solved in my lifetime? Maybe. Will it be solved by 2100? Absolutely. This isn't that far in the future even for people who never had usable vision and are entirely missing both eyes, the rest of us will get something sooner.Anyway, end rant. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557111/#p557111 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Interesting, I'm very surprised so many people here would not choose to restore their vision. I didn't know this was a sentiment that existed, especially not in significant numbers. It does seem from what I've read here that it it's mostly among people who never had vision, but I might be wrong. This does make sense since those of us who had some useable vision at some point are probably more acutely aware of what we lost. I guess for someone who has never had any experience of seeing what so ever it would be like asking if you want a new sense that you have no conception of. But I feel like I would still do that actually. Like if someone asked me whether if I could choose to get some random sense humans don't normally have (like magnetoreception or something) I would still say why not, it's more information about the world you wouldn't otherwise have, and I don't really get how that can be a bad thing. And this isn't even like that because it's a sense that is present in most humans, so things are generally structured with the assumption that you have it. So getting it would bring you up to the same level as most people rather than giving you something noone else has. I do take the point though that gaining it at an advance age probably would limit your ability to adapt to it, but still not sure it would be an overall negative experience, you might still be able to get something useful out of it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/557075/#p557075 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
2020-07-30
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : Green Gables Fan via Audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I actually wrote a blog post from the perspective of someone who has both blindness and hearing loss. Feel free to check that out. It is in a two-part series, so it would help if you read both of them. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556937/#p556937 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Exactly. The only reason we are having this discussion in the first place is because of the topic and a possible opportunity, discussing whether we would take it or not. There is no depression, at least not in my case. I don't go out in a random conversation and say man, I really want to be sighted, it is so depressing. There is no reason not to admit the things you could do if you were sighted, and it often happens in discussions. For example, just yesterday we were discussing editing a video and how much faster a sighted person could just skim through the file instead of constantly checking where they are. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556910/#p556910 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @78:I would disagree, at least in my case. sight or no sight, I still be an introvert who quickly gets tired of public interaction. But everything which I mentioned that I would have been able to do in my post in this topic, those are the reasons why I would want sight, wouldn't matter whenever it arrives, or indeed it still wouldn't matter if it didn't arrive during my entire life.While the thinking about what I could do with sight, (Camlorn is right about how you can improve your already learned skills just because you have sight,) it still is not something I constantly think about. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556896/#p556896 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I think the trouble here is self isolation. This is something we see with many, not all, but many blind people. The thought process seems to be, "oh, if I only had sight!" How will bemoaning your situation help you in the end? You have the ability to make friends. Why not socialize with sighted people. Go on, give it a shot! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556843/#p556843 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @75 - Yes yes, you're totally right, the social complexes express themselves in a lot of different vectors which is what combines to create a blind person; it's not just how blind people are treated alone nor is it accessibility alone; although these two elements are actually part of the same thing and we see them differently to help understand how the particular part functions (kind of like zooming in on part of a system). After all the stereotypes of blind people are built on what they are perceived they can do.When you talk about the difficulty of building a society for blind people, I think you need to remember - we're building on top of a sighted society, and thats the reason why it's so hard to achieve so many of the tasks. If it was a blind society for example, things like transportation would be managed in ways that make sense to blind people, that don't require the use of a non-existent sense. In both of these scenarios, the hard part is trying to change. For example in the case of CAPTCHAs, because we live in a sighted society, it doesn't even occur to most people that there should be a blind accessible version. It's not effective to simply say, oh we should care for blind people, they should be morally obligated to make a blind accessible version - because there are many other disabilities like blindness that have the same problem, and while blindness can possibly be generalized, because of this multiple-disability problem, even some blind people may not be able to adapt to the accessibility solutions provided, unnecessarily holding them back. This is particularly apparent when considering deafblind accessibility.In my opinion a lot of this has to do with our relationship with technology in general, its just that disabled people of all types are impacted much more than the main population. What I mean by this is that when you interact with a CAPTCHA, you are forced into a sort of interaction-contract between you and the application. You need to follow their instructions, but the instructions didn't accommodate blind people. Why can't you interact with the information given by the CAPTCHA in a way that makes sense to you? This isn't me trying to have people solve these questions, rather these are the kinds of questions I think we should be asking in regards to technology, accessibility, and disability. Why in most cases are we forced to put up with the developer's decisions in the first place?The more I think and research this problem the more I realize that it's a much bigger issue than accessibility, but accessibility is a point where a lot of the problems coalesce because disability creates a ton of end user experiences that have to be funneled in a very narrow interface.To bring it back on topic, I guess what worries me is that because we live in a sighted society, we contextualize all our social interactions around sight in some way, and blind people are obviously left out of that, which leads to the destruction of their way of living through forced sightedness, when we should have the ability to choose whether or not we want to be sighted or blind, and we should be able to allowed to adapt for both.@76 - I agree. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556819/#p556819 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @75 - Yes yes, you're totally right, the social complexes express themselves in a lot of different vectors which is what combines to create a blind person; it's not just how blind people are treated alone nor is it accessibility alone; although these two elements are actually part of the same thing and we see them differently to help understand how the particular part functions (kind of like zooming in on part of a system). After all the stereotypes of blind people are built on what they are perceived they can do.When you talk about the difficulty of building a society for blind people, I think you need to remember - we're building on top of a sighted society, and thats the reason why it's so hard to achieve so many of the tasks. If it was a blind society for example, things like transportation would be managed in ways that make sense to blind people, that don't require the use of a non-existent sense. In both of these scenarios, the hard part is trying to change. For example in the case of CAPTCHAs, because we live in a sighted society, it doesn't even occur to most people that there should be a blind accessible version. It's not effective to simply say, oh we should care for blind people, they should be morally obligated to make a blind accessible version - because there are many other disabilities like blindness that have the same problem, and while blindness can possibly be generalized, because of this multiple-disability problem, even some blind people may not be able to adapt to the accessibility solutions provided, unnecessarily holding them back. This is particularly apparent when considering deafblind accessibility.In my opinion a lot of this has to do with our relationship with technology in general, its just that disabled people of all types are impacted much more than the main population. What I mean by this is that when you interact with a CAPTCHA, you are forced into a sort of interaction-contract between you and the application. You need to follow their instructions, but the instructions didn't accommodate blind people. Why can't you interact with the information given by the CAPTCHA in a way that makes sense to you? This isn't me trying to have people solve these questions, rather these are the kinds of questions I think we should be asking in regards to technology, accessibility, and disability. Why in most cases are we forced to put up with the developer's decisions in the first place?The more I think and research this problem the more I realize that it's a much bigger issue than accessibility, but accessibility is a point where a lot of the problems coalesce because disability creates a ton of end user experiences that have to be funneled in a very narrow funnel.To bring it back on topic, I guess what worries me is that because we live in a sighted society, we contextualize all our social interactions around sight in some way, and blind people are obviously left out of that, which leads to the destruction of their way of living through forced sightedness, when we should have the ability to choose whether or not we want to be sighted or blind, and we should be able to allowed to adapt for both.@76 - I agree. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556819/#p556819 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @75 - Yes yes, you're totally right, the social complexes express themselves in a lot of different vectors which is what combines to create a blind person; it's not just how blind people are treated alone nor is it accessibility alone; although these two elements are actually part of the same thing and we see them differently to help understand how the particular part functions (kind of like zooming in on part of a system). After all the stereotypes of blind people are built on what they are perceived they can do.When you talk about the difficulty of building a society for blind people, I think you need to remember - we're building on top of a sighted society, and thats the reason why it's so hard to achieve so many of the tasks. If it was a blind society for example, things like transportation would be managed in ways that make sense to blind people, that don't require the use of a non-existent sense. In both of these scenarios, the hard part is trying to change. For example in the case of CAPTCHAs, because we live in a sighted society, it doesn't even occur to most people that there should be a blind accessible version.In my opinion a lot of this has to do with our relationship with technology in general, its just that disabled people of all types are impacted much more than the main population. What I mean by this is that when you interact with a CAPTCHA, you are forced into a sort of interaction-contract between you and the application. You need to follow their instructions, but the instructions didn't accommodate blind people. Why can't you interact with the information given by the CAPTCHA in a way that makes sense to you? This isn't me trying to have people solve these questions, rather these are the kinds of questions I think we should be asking in regards to technology, accessibility, and disability. Why in most cases are we forced to put up with the developer's decisions in the first place?The more I think and research this problem the more I realize that it's a much bigger issue than accessibility, but accessibility is a point where a lot of the problems coalesce because disability creates a ton of end user experiences that have to be funneled in a very narrow funnel.To bring it back on topic, I guess what worries me is that because we live in a sighted society, we contextualize all our social interactions around sight in some way, and blind people are obviously left out of that, which leads to the destruction of their way of living through forced sightedness, when we should have the ability to choose whether or not we want to be sighted or blind, and we should be able to allowed to adapt for both.@76 - I agree. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556819/#p556819 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I can't believe that we are talking about how blind peeps are inferior or superior to sighted peeps. Can't you see, it's not about being superior or better, it's about being happy. And if having a sense which I currently don't, then why not have it. I mean you could still do all of the stuff that you do as a blind even when you become sighted, plus may be, nope, definitely more.Agree or not, being blind is rough, and being sighted won't smoothen out anything, but it will definitely improve your chances. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556762/#p556762 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @@73: I feel like there are two parts to the social model that you describe. One of these is purely social / not well thought out by the sighted majority, and the other is based around the absurd overpowered nature of vision compared to the other senses, making it impractical to design things any other way until we can afford to. (When any particular society could afford to move away from a monosensic structure is a vast a complex subject, and some would argue that progress and opportunity for safe progress overlap almost completely. I'm not sure I'd agree (why is Braille so young? How old are canes, seeing as that whole "blind leading the blind" parable only makes sense without them being common, but I'd think that using a big stick to extend one's awareness to be a concept that predates civilization ...' ). Which is to say, it'd take up a whole thread and a thesis or three.)I think I weighted that poorly. Suffice it to say, there are two separate parts to the social / cultural / worldbuilding situation, and disentangling where one begins and the other ends, and when a failure in the resource-based one is or is not acceptable, is going to lead to lots of differing opinions.But I do feel like the three biggest downsides to blindness (other than being left out of video games) are people, the increased difficulty accessing books and written data, and being in a world built under the assumption that only people who can drive are considered worth building anything but daycares and prisons for.One of those is purely people being ignorant and/or needlessly unpleasant. The other two come from practical resource allocation concerns that I'm not sure could have turned out any differently without making life harder unnecessarily for everyone else. Maybe push building car-based infrastructure back a century, but then would the tech that gets around the problems with cars have developed without drivers being able to go basically anywhere at anytime? And a tactile form of writing is outcompeted by ink and paper quite handily, seeing as tactile forms of writing did exist (where are all the blind Cuneiform experts?). If we can posit a world where cars did not reduce accessibility of travel, it's much harder to come up with a way that books could have been accessible between the invention of affordable writing materials and the production of enough resources to make alternatives practical.Computer accessibility, though ... -_- I feel like I keep trying to be more balanced, and instead keep coming back to the "how could we expect otherwise without reducing scarcity"; stuff. Presumptive design is far more troublesome on a daily basis. I mean, who thought puting an inaccessible CAPCHA on an email service after decades was a good idea? Someone who read "I'm blind" in my support ticket and took it as meaning "I couldn't read that one, and only that one". ... Ugh, how much clearer could I be? "I'm blind" means "I cannot see", not "lol I that looks weird im so blind roflmao". >.<(And that is why I stopped answering forum emails. F***ing CAPCHAs.) URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556755/#p556755 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? And it is my dying wish that cannot be fulfilled. I want my vision back because I want to experience what it's like to see the world. Though people in my surroundings told me that seing the world is a mess, it really doesn't matter. Yes I enjoy being blind. I have accessible apps. I can use gadgets. But no, there is still lacking. I need to fill that hole to complete that missing piece inside of me but it is the most impossible thing to happen. But if 1day, the heavens will grant my wish then... I'd be glad to take that wonderful opportunity. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556745/#p556745 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? camlorn, i don't really think that a "Society of the blind" is really what's necessary. More a social revolution for disability in general (as in, how we approach how we think about disability). After all these are issues that intersect many disabled issues at large, although blindness is a specific presentation with unique circumstances. The problem with implants is that we organize our healthcare based around the idea of a healthy person, so much more resources is invested into it. this is actually a big reason why accessibility gets a lot less funding than expensive surgeries despite being more effective at presenting a social solution to blindness - its because we socially want people to be healthy. So by submitting to transplants we don't actually give the possibility for more lives, but actually less, by eliminating the blind way of life, along with other disabilities, instead of accommodating them.This isn't to say that these surgeries are bad by the way - but rather the way that we socially look at them is based around treating blind people, rather than giving blind people options. And that actually LIMITS options for blind people, by forcing them to live as a sighted person if they can, in this theoretical scenario.Furthermore I think a lot of people would feel uncomfortable with the idea of their bodies being modified without their will. consider the huge ethical issues surrounding intersex surgeries for example. You're talking about a full scale technological invasion of people's own bodies, which will likely be driven by some large corporation or government organization. I do not trust that one bit. Then there are the children who aren't given autonomy over their own bodies, with both disability and gender, that are forced to suffer through treatments their parents think is best for them instead of deciding for themselves. They can't even say no. This is a source of a lot of trauma in many disability and queer communities.The problem with this kind of science fiction future is that it doesn't recognize the inherent structures that drive our decisions, which leads to an eventual path towards elimination of differentiated experiences. The idea that along with a cure for blindness we bring forward a cure for sightedness ignores the social pressures involved. Consider that we could literally blind anyone we wanted permanently right now quite easily by simply removing their eyes but this option is not socially available. Why is that? Simple - because the healthy person excludes blindness.@70 - I understand your pessimism but remember that almost all of those things you listed are hard for blind people to use because of how we socially structure society based around vision. Most of those things are either tools that have crappy accessibility or tools that blind people can't use but people are expected to use. It's just that blind people have to deal with so many crappy design choices because of assumptions based around healthy people. It's worth stressing that these design choices also impact a lot of other disabled people as well, so its a process that extends across a wide group of people, not just the blind; so i feel its necessary to at least try to change, since it impacts so many people. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556711/#p556711 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? camlorn, i don't really think that a "Society of the blind" is really what's necessary. More a social revolution for disability in general (as in, how we approach how we think about disability). After all these are issues that intersect many disabled issues at large, although blindness is a specific presentation with unique circumstances. The problem with implants is that we organize our healthcare based around the idea of a healthy person, so much more resources is invested into it. this is actually a big reason why accessibility gets a lot less funding than expensive surgeries despite being more effective at presenting a social solution to blindness - its because we socially want people to be healthy. So by submitting to transplants we don't actually give the possibility for more lives, but actually less, by eliminating the blind way of life, along with other disabilities, instead of accommodating them.This isn't to say that these surgeries are bad by the way - but rather the way that we socially look at them is based around treating blind people, rather than giving blind people options. And that actually LIMITS options for blind people, by forcing them to live as a sighted person if they can, in this theoretical scenario.Furthermore I think a lot of people would feel uncomfortable with the idea of their bodies being modified without their will. consider the huge ethical issues surrounding intersex surgeries for example. You're talking about a full scale technological invasion of people's own bodies, which will likely be driven by some large corporation or government organization. I do not trust that one bit. Then there are the children who aren't given autonomy over their own bodies, with both disability and gender, that are forced to suffer through treatments their parents think is best for them instead of deciding for themselves. They can't even say no. This is a source of a lot of trauma in many disability and queer communities.The problem with this kind of science fiction future is that it doesn't recognize the inherent structures that drive our decisions, which leads to an eventual path towards elimination of differentiated experiences. The idea that along with a cure for blindness we bring forward a cure for sightedness ignores the social pressures involved. Consider that we could literally blind anyone we wanted permanently right now quite easily by simply removing their eyes but this option is not socially available. Why is that? Simple - because the healthy person excludes blindness. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556711/#p556711 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? camlorn, i don't really think that a "Society of the blind" is really what's necessary. More a social revolution for disability in general (as in, how we approach how we think about disability). After all these are issues that intersect many disabled issues at large, although blindness is a specific presentation with unique circumstances. The problem with implants is that we organize our healthcare based around the idea of a healthy person, so much more resources is invested into it. this is actually a big reason why accessibility gets a lot less funding than expensive surgeries despite being more effective at presenting a social solution to blindness - its because we socially want people to be healthy. So by submitting to transplants we don't actually give the possibility for more lives, but actually less, by eliminating the blind way of life, along with other disabilities, instead of accommodating them.This isn't to say that these surgeries are bad by the way - but rather the way that we socially look at them is based around treating blind people, rather than giving blind people options. And that actually LIMITS options for blind people, by forcing them to live as a sighted person if they can.Furthermore I think a lot of people would feel uncomfortable with the idea of their bodies being modified without their will. consider the huge ethical issues surrounding intersex surgeries for example. You're talking about a full scale technological invasion of people's own bodies, which will likely be driven by some large corporation or government organization. I do not trust that one bit. Then there are the children who aren't given autonomy over their own bodies, with both disability and gender, that are forced to suffer through treatments their parents think is best for them instead of deciding for themselves. They can't even say no. This is a source of a lot of trauma in many disability and queer communities.The problem with this kind of science fiction future is that it doesn't recognize the inherent structures that drive our decisions, which leads to an eventual path towards elimination of differentiated experiences. The idea that along with a cure for blindness we bring forward a cure for sightedness ignores the social pressures involved. Consider that we could literally blind anyone we wanted permanently right now quite easily by simply removing their eyes but this option is not socially available. Why is that? Simple - because the healthy person excludes blindness. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556711/#p556711 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? camlorn, i don't really think that a "Society of the blind" is really what's necessary. The problem with implants is that we organize our healthcare based around the idea of a healthy person, so much more resources is invested into it. this is actually a big reason why accessibility gets a lot less funding than expensive surgeries despite being more effective at presenting a social solution to blindness - its because we socially want people to be healthy. So by submitting to transplants we don't actually give the possibility for more lives, but actually less, by eliminating the blind way of life, along with other disabilities, instead of accommodating them.Furthermore I think a lot of people would feel uncomfortable with the idea of their bodies being modified without their will. consider the huge ethical issues surrounding intersex surgeries for example. You're talking about a full scale technological invasion of people's own bodies, which will likely be driven by some large corporation or government organization. I do not trust that one bit. Then there are the children who aren't given autonomy over their own bodies, with both disability and gender, that are forced to suffer through treatments their parents think is best for them instead of deciding for themselves. They can't even say no. This is a source of a lot of trauma in many disability and queer communities.The problem with this kind of science fiction future is that it doesn't recognize the inherent structures that drive our decisions, which leads to an eventual path towards elimination of differentiated experiences. The idea that along with a cure for blindness we bring forward a cure for sightedness ignores the social pressures involved. Consider that we could literally blind anyone we wanted permanently right now quite easily by simply removing their eyes but this option is not socially available. Why is that? Simple - because the healthy person excludes blindness. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556711/#p556711 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? camlorn, i don't really think that a "Society of the blind" is really what's necessary. The problem with implants is that we organize our healthcare based around the idea of a healthy person, so much more resources is invested into . this is actually a big reason why accessibility gets a lot less funding than expensive surgeries despite being more effective at presenting a social solution to blindness - its because we socially want people to be healthy. So by submitting to transplants we don't actually give the possibility for more lives, but actually less, by eliminating the blind way of life, along with other disabilities, instead of accommodating them.Furthermore I think a lot of people would feel uncomfortable with the idea of their bodies being modified without their will. consider the huge ethical issues surrounding intersex surgeries for example. You're talking about a full scale technological invasion of people's own bodies, which will likely be driven by some large corporation or government organization. I do not trust that one bit. Then there are the children who aren't given autonomy over their own bodies, with both disability and gender, that are forced to suffer through treatments their parents think is best for them instead of deciding for themselves. They can't even say no. This is a source of a lot of trauma in many disability and queer communities.The problem with this kind of science fiction future is that it doesn't recognize the inherent structures that drive our decisions, which leads to an eventual path towards elimination of differentiated experiences. The idea that along with a cure for blindness we bring forward a cure for sightedness ignores the social pressures involved. Consider that we could literally blind anyone we wanted permanently right now quite easily by simply removing their eyes but this option is not socially available. Why is that? Simple - because the healthy person excludes blindness. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556711/#p556711 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? No, I'd be too worried about them making it worse. Not only that but the daunting task of having to relearn how to estimate distance from crappy vision to good vision. Nah, I'm good. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556708/#p556708 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @61: yeah, I basically see refusing as leaving money on the ground. I worry about things that might come with it because I know what living in my head is like. Fixing this one thing by itself, without fixing the other things... I could probably cope, but, like, the kind where I'm not sure?@64: You know, of the three drop-routes they gave me at LCB, I mostly liked the first one and was kinda "meh" about the other two. The first one was an adventure. The second was just a long walk because apparently that weird texture sound on Alabama Ave extends a mile past Tech Drive. And the third was lame because I'd already found Lowe's before so immediately knew where I was (I heard the intercom while passing by while looking for someplace else, and went in to check the address). The first one, though, they just dropped me off in a tiny parking lot in the middle of the woods on some obscure backroad I'd never come within a mile of. The "find this address" assignment that originally led to my finding Lowe's, though, does demonstrate a #blindproblem, though. I found the right block, and the right street, but there was a shared parking lot with the driveway on a completely different road. I have no idea how I was expected to find that out. There wasn't anyone reasonably close to ask. I finally just picked a spot that sounded clearish, and charged up the hill to see if there was a way to reach the parking lot that way. I don't remember if I left the same way, or actually found the driveway on my way out. But yeah, I still have no idea how I was supposed to guess that the driveway was on the perpendicular, and a sighted person would have known immediately, and even if I had only the sight I had in the 1990s, I could have seen the parking lot and just did what I wound up doing an hour earlier.Which is to say: this is like the second or third time I've heard you suggest that independent travel in an unknown place is impossible. I felt that way and whined about it a lot on this very forum, then tested the limits experimentally (and would have done it sooner if I had more conscientiousness than a stump), and, empirically, I can just ask Siri or Google Maps just like everybody else, and not need rescuing ... at least 2/3 of the time. And Indianapolis was my own damn fault (but the panicking civilians didn't make things easier). ... And also empirically, I still ran into "how was I supposed to figure that out blindly?" things on occasion. I can't tell if I'm splitting hairs or not, here. Sorry if I got this completely wrong This feels weird. Like, in 2013-14, I was complaining about how you basically had to be some kind of demigod to overcome such and such problem. Then I overcame said problem. So either you don't have to be a demigod, or I am a demigod. I don't think it's the latter. I think maybe I'm unusually visually-minded or something? It'd explain the travel skills, and the geometry, and the platformers, and the intermittent attempts at doing things with graphics. Eh, I don't buy it.Ugh. Can a GP prescribe Adderall? I feel like I'm making more ADHD-addled narcissistic posts than usual. Oh, hey, if I wasn't blind, I wouldn't have Medicaid, would I? ... What insurance would I have now, and what would I have had 5 years ago? Hmm. Well, whatever it would have been, it wouldn't have had the restriction about not being able to get stimulants when neither employed nor a student. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556705/#p556705 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Sorry @67, perhaps you like to live in an unrealistic world and think we are superior, but I certainly don't. The blind are inferiour in some areas, this is a fact nobody should be ashamed of admitting. Can you drive a car, plane, anything? Or if you like it based on tech, can you get a new PC and immediately go to the Bios to configure the boot devices properly without sighted help for the first time? What happens when you encounter an inaccessible Captcha? No registering for you, because you don't have those different superior abilities. Noone is saying hey, poor blind people can't do anything on their own, people are saying the obvious, which is something that Camlorn already explained very well in his post. I honestly find it hard to believe that in 2020 someone said we should not be realistic about our abilities and what we can and can't do because, I quote, "It's bad enough so many people look at us sideways and even think we should be locked away. " I can't even remember the last time I read something anywhere close to blind people being locked away. But if you can, feel free to poinnt out the post which said blind people can't do anything on their own and are completely inferiour. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556704/#p556704 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? I don't like the science fiction future. It sounds weirdly alienating. I don't know why. Extreme transhumanism and/or brain-linked simulations are clearly the only way to Live the Life I want™. But whenever I hear people talk about those things, it just sounds sad. I am confused.But yeah, if I had to pick one futuristic perk, it would not be sight. I'd need to know what futuristic perks are actually on the hypofuturistical table before picking one, but I'd much rather have perfect teeth / no RSI / other biomancies. Things where I know the quality-of-life improvement is unambiguous and positive and without major tradeoffs or concerns. But were I offerred 5 ... eh, maybe. I'd have to actually try and make the list to be sure. But it feels like an obligation more than like something I'd actually want. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556695/#p556695 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Given the choice though it is better to be sighted in a sighted world. If this were a underground society of badger moles or or if we were all Earth benders like Toph where we could see with our feet it wouldn't matter. No one is saying it's unbareable to be blind. No one is saying it's not doable. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556691/#p556691 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Given the choice though it is better to be sighted in a sighted world. If this were a underground society of badger moles or or if we were all Earth benders like Toph where we could see with our feet it wouldn't matter. No one is saying it's unbareable to blind. No one is saying it's not doable. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556691/#p556691 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Given the choice though it is better to be sighted in a sighted world. If this were a underground society of badger moles or or if we were all Earth benders like Toph where we could see with our feet it wouldn't matter. No one is sayingit's unbareable to blind. No one is saying it's not doable. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556691/#p556691 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? You know it's interesting. Someone could see this on the web via a search and they would see people on this website saying, "hear yee, hear yee, the blind are inferior!" What message does this send? It's bad enough so many people look at us sideways and even think we should be locked away. It is a shame. Ah but by all means, keep taking the stance that it is best not to be blind. Sorry internet. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556689/#p556689 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? @65To add to that though, we're getting closer to being able to clone organs every day. Whether that'd come before or after fully functional eye transplantation I don't know and in part it depends how zealous we are about stem cells and other things as a society. But there are multiple companies who have gotten as far as cloned chicken nuggets being eaten by actual people. That is, there was no chicken involved. I believe one of them did it from feathers actually. Now admittedly it's not growing in the shape of a nugget and it's fiddly and it's too expensive for your local restaurant, but given that the idea was entirely laughable that you'd have actual meat without the animal even 5 years or so ago and now we can put it on your plate...Welcome to the beginnings of our science fiction future. The first miracles are always the most expensive. But we went from the computing equivalent of that in 1960 or so to where we are now in around 50 years. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556685/#p556685 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision? Hi there,@50: eyes transplantation is a quite complicated thing, primarily for two reasons. The firstone is the muscular structure around eyes. Muscles like thigh muscle or arm muscle (I don't know the proper english names) are quite simple, as they are big and work in rather simple way. Muscles around eyes are much smaller, fitted in a small area, and expected to move eyes in various directions, controll your caps etc. This is not easy to reproduce during a transplantation, everything must fit perfectly, otherwise the patient would have quite hot times after waking up.But this problem is not that significant compared to the secondone, consisting of joining patient's optical nerve to the new eye. This is a real trouble, where things get stuck, as nerves can't be simply joined with glue or something like that. They must grow together, what is a quite unpleasant fact considering, that neurons and neural paths do all possible sorts of things just not growing.Neurons are one of the longest living cells in human body, most of them are already created when a baby is born, and last for the whole lifetime. Neuroscientists believe, that some neural paths are built during development of brain, but after the circuits are set, they don't grow or reproduce anymore.Thus, it's not that hard to understand, how challenging is to get these two things to join together.There were some very interesting progresses in this problem in recent years, with successful restoring sight of mouses with cut optical nerves.But the methods are not strong enough yet to work on humans, so further research is necessary.As for moral aspect of transplanting an eye, I wouldn't have problems myself with it. These sorts of transplantations are done already with other organs, so eyes would be just another entry on the list. The person originally wearing them won't need them anymore, and they would decay after some time anyway, so making use of them is the best thing to do. And if the person wants them in his grave so strongly, I can still return them after my death. But seriously, as far as I know, you must give an agreement to use your organs for transplantations after your death, noone will be opening corpses with "you know, we need something from this guy. Don't worry, he will look normally again after we close him."That means, that the person explicitly wanted his eyes to be donored, and thus having them transplanted is okay.Best regardsRastislav URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/556679/#p556679 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
