Inside Castle Ra-Ra
Sneak preview of part 3 and last of Halfway Across… I’m about 1/3 through writing this chapter.
Little Lavinia
This is Lana’s friend Lavinia when she was a likkle kid. Ain’t she cute!
More on natural eyesight improvement
A few more ramblings on the Bates method for better eyesight…
Think of it this way: if you’ve had your legs in a cast for 4 months, you will not expect, after one or two days’ physio, to be able to walk perfectly. Your eyes are also controlled by muscles. You can’t expect, after torturing your eyes for months, or even decades, to be able to see perfectly after a day of Bates treatment. Be patient. This does entail a bit of hard slog, but I think you’ll find it’s worth it in the end.
I shall mention here the words of another eye-specialist, Joseph J. Kennebeck O.D., who later came to reject the orthodox teaching that the lens is the determining factor in accommodation:
No one is blind without glasses. Anyone who can see with glasses can also see, in a way, without them, at least well enough to get along until his eyes improve. Only the blind ARE blind, and they cannot see even with glasses. Too many of them are blind from wearing glasses. Let it be understood that near-sighted eyes can do close work easily without glasses.
The severe cases of today were the mild cases of yesterday, just as the mild cases of today will be the severe cases of tomorrow, from wearing glasses. There are eye troubles — that is true — but no one is so bad in the beginning that he has to resort to glasses and wear them as he does, to supposedly see with or to supposedly save his eyes. One might be able to see with glasses until they need changing, but the glasses will not save his eyes. Of course if one does not live very long, it makes little or no difference if he wears glasses, but no one knows how long one will live. If one lives to a ripe old age, he will have the poorest eyes, at middle age and past, if he wore glasses before. Therefore, one must fight off glasses at a younger age to have the best eyes at an older age. One cannot wait until it is too late to do it. No one would be hurt by fighting off glasses, as much as all are hurt who resort to glasses.
Loyalty to the old tradition of glasses is widespread, and practically universal. As said before, all must save face and not be proven wrong in what all have believed in throughout the years. If all were as loyal and true to their eyes as they are to glasses, all would be better off in the long run. But all have more confidence in glasses, and less confidence in their eyes; too bad. Those who wear glasses think that they are wiser than those who do not, and will not, wear them. Why be so loyal to glasses, when glasses are not loyal to eyes?
More on eyesight improvement at I-See.org
Writing - argh!
Uhhhh… I’m thinking that Jasmine’s story is now going to run to SIX chapters. And to think this was originally meant to be a 2-parter story. Yeah right! Chapter 3 has already been split into 2 chapters, now it looks likes it’s going to leak over into chapter 5 as well, meaning a sixth chapter will now be needed… oh I wonder if it will ever end!
Better Eyesight Without Glasses
I’m just going to copy this from Tom’s old blog, because I can’t be bothered writing a new review. So here we go.
It’s like this: Your science teacher always told you that it’s your lens that determines how good your eyesight is. If your myopic, it means your eyeball is too long and your lens cannot accomodate, and as a result, you get blurred vision. This is in fact very very wrong. A very clever doctor called W.H Bates discovered plenty of examples that do not fit in line with the orthodox teaching of bad eyesight. This concludes that the rule must be wrong, because if it was true, there can’t be exceptions, but there were, and orthodox ophthalmologists chose to just ignore those exceptions.
However, this was not satisfactory for him, and he investigated this, and discovered that the reason for poor eyesight is because of mental strain. The external muscles of your eyes then cannot change the elongation of the eyeball to accomodate, as they should in normal-sighted people. It is through the external muscles’ actions on the shape of the eye, NOT the actions of the lens, that determine your ability to focus.
Your eyes shouldn’t be trying to see, they just should. As he says, your senses can not act themselves, they are to be acted upon. As soon as your eyes make an effort to see, your eyesight begins to deteriorate. Any eyestrain, therefore, is a result of mental strain.
He cites the example of a young girl who had a keen interest in astronomy. She could see the moons of Jupiter with her unaided eye, yet ask her to look at some maths sums on a blackboard just a few metres away, and she became myopic. This is because maths was disagreeble to her. This caused mental strain for her, which in turn caused eye strain and hence reduced vision.
His book, Better Eyesight without Glasses, is rather heavy-going at first; it’s a lot to get your head around. But once you can familiarise yourself with the principles of treatment, it is actually very effective. Now, first and foremost, ditch the specs. They only make your eyes weeker, and create even more strain for your eyes (please read his book for an explanation of why).
Palming
This is the easiest ‘exercise’, once you stop trying! Close your eyes, place the palms of your hands over your eyes, without actually putting any pressure onto your eyes, and think nice things. Just like thinking of disagreeable things reduces your vision, thinking of nice things improves it. Now just lie or sit there, make sure you’re comfortable and relaxed, eyes covered, thinking of nice things, for as long as you wish. Now when you open your eyes, hey presto! you can see the numbers on the clock for the first time without glasses! Great, eh? Like I said, this takes a bit of practice, don’t give up, just make sure you aren’t making any sort of an effort, even unconsciously. The point of this is to relax your mind and body, therefore reducing the strain on your eyes. The longer and more often you do this, the longer the effects will last, till eventually you can get permanent relief. Those whose eye-sight is perfect will be able to see a field so black, that you cannot imagine anything blacker.
[End of plagiarised review]
I have to say, the exercises are a bit tedious at first, but I’m glad I stuck with them. I’ve been glasses-free for over 3 years now, and though my sight will not become normal without the aid of a Bates teacher (as I wore glasses for so long, the bad habits of my eyes will be so much harder to break), it has certainly improved my vision, so much so that after palming, my bad eye’s vision is equivalent to the vision in my good eye - and of course, my good eye gets even better too. My verdict: it’s certainly worth trying. If you’ve worn specs for a long time, then you will not be able to cure your eyes without the help of a teacher, but if you have never worn glasses, give it a go, you will find it surprisingly successful.
Why you should not submit to TSR
It’s only now that I’ve left TSR that I realise just how many disadvantages there are to submitting your work to that site. Now obviously with the custom content, you have no control of it once it get published: you can’t edit or delete your creations at all without first clearing it with a moderator (every other community site I know of allows submitters to modify and update their creations at any time). This means that if you find a problem with something you uploaded, rather than just reuploading the file/screenshot, you have to sort it all out with a mod first, and even then you have no guarantee that you’ll be allowed. And of course, they never ever allow you to remove your uploads. In other words, they are quite happy to keep your files on their servers without your permission, but if you share their pay files without their permission, you’re evil and deserve a ban. Hypocrites.
As well, the free artists upload their work because they want to share, TSR wants the free artists to upload so they can lure more visitors, and therefore have more potential subscribers. In other words, TSR are exploiting you for profit, nothing more.
Hosting my files elsewhere means I now get total control of my custom content, but I think the biggest advantage of having an independent site is that I also get complete control over my stories. One thing that peed me off a lot about TSR’s story-hosting was just how hard it is for an author to continue to perfect their work after it was published. When I edited and reuploaded part 1 of Jasmine’s story, after waiting over a week for the story to be approved (they never took more than 2 days ordinarily) I thought something must have gone wrong, so I reuploaded again, only for all my feedback to get deleted and to have to then re-upload once more for it to work. Idiotic load of rubbish! So you have to go through all that hassle just to make a few minor changes to a story. It makes me wonder how I ever stood for it! Now that I’m in complete control of my stories, I am free to modify screenshots when I want, I can add and delete scenes any time and make those all-important typo corrections and minor tweaks…whenever I like. Something you will never get with TSR.
(Fanseelamb put it much better than I did.)
Torrenttttttttttttttt!
Lots of seeds now, so it should be pretty fast. Here’s a list of the content. Some (very few) of these require the Nightlife EP.
Please read! - If it’s not in the torrent, I don’t have it. Please no requests. If I’m in a good mood I might download and torrent an artist’s entire pay-database, but for now if there’s something you want and it’s not here, please search through the booty.
All the torrents I’ve uploaded are now listed here
They’re all mad around here
I found this quite funny when I first got Nightlife XD
Typical man!
Just shows, all men are the same. They only have one thing on their mind! *rolls eyes*
Miss Matchmaker
Talk about Miss Matchmaker… or should that be Mismatch Maker?
Forget it love, it ain’t gonna happen
Reunion?
Ah! What’s going on here? Could it be an emotional reunion..? This is a shot from part three of Raindrops
Fort Ra-Ra
This is Ra-Ra Loft’s fort from Halfway Across the Galaxy… I’ll see about uploading it soon.
They don’t make ‘em like they used to
They really don’t know how to make good cartoons nowadays. So here are my top 3 kids’ shows from bygone times…
1. The Mysterious Cities of Gold
This is undoubtedly the best cartoon ever made, and if you disagree with me, it means you never watched it 
MCoG is set in 1532 and follows Esteban, a twelve year old orphan boy from the Americas.
Alpha Canis Majoris
AKA Sirius, the brightest star in the sky
Canis Major has always been a kind of special constellation for me, along with other favourites like Lyra, Cygnus, Orion and Boötes. It was amongst the first constellations I identified. Sirius (alpha [α] canis majoris) is the brightest star in the sky at magnitude -1.4, which makes is quite easy to identify, even in bright city skies. Canis Major is located east of Orion, and if you follow Orion’s three belt stars down you will find Sirius.
Historically, many cultures have attached special significance to Sirius. Sirius was worshipped as Sothis in the valley of the Nile long before Rome was founded. The Middle Kingdom of Egyptians based their calendar on the heliacal rising of Sirius, which occurred just before the annual flooding of the Nile and the summer solstice. In Greek mythology, Orion’s dog became Sirius. The Greeks also associated Sirius with the heat of summer: they called it Σείριος Seirios, often translated “the scorcher.” The dog days of summer were also connected to Sirius.
Photo © by Akira Fujii
And you’ll understand the significance of this just as soon as I’ve finished part 2 of Lana’s story. I don’t know when that will be.
