Hello and welcome to the forums. You seem to have been reading for a while before making this account. Maybe you could let us know a bit about you and boardgames?
1 Like
Well, I know a lot of the people here, but in actual fact, just read @RogerBW Laager and Limehouse yesterday, because I met up with him and @JGD in London. I’m genuinely still going through how this thing works and trying to decide when I feel strong enough for a pre-dinner shower and change.
Mainly, I read, research and play GURPS, but several of my players are board game fanatics, so I play a fair bit. More for the social aspects than any fanatical fervour for ludology. Three of them have multiple rooms full of board games and it occurs to me just now that even while feeling too tired for GMing, I could no doubt enjoy a board game. I need to suggest it more often. I do admit that since my driver only takes me to physiotherapy and treatments, and they’ve decided I don’t need any more transport than that, I feel awkward about always having to ask friends to pick me up and deposit me back home.
13 Likes
If you know @RogerBW, you know there is an RPG section here as well obviously 
But there is a lot of talk about boardgames. If you like to read a lot… there is a lot of text here.
You could check out the Topic of the Week tag if you feel like reading some discussions we’ve had. Or you can just jump straight into the Games we play right now. If you are looking for recommendations or feedback on particular games, we’ve got that covered, too: Has anyone played… or you can check out our various collections. Or whatever stuff we like to complain about existing games in Boxes full of air and other tragedies or these days mostly our complaints about Crowdfunding campaigns.
There is plenty of non-boardgame stuff, too.
So hello and welcome again
7 Likes
Hello Icelander! Sorry to hear your sleep hasn’t been good, but I hope you have been enjoying your stay in London.
5 Likes
I have been enjoying it, very much. And I knew before the surgery it would cause pain and trouble sleeping for the first couple of weeks, at least, but in the long term, the surgery reduces pain there and the injections in my elbows will keep most of the pain there in check, too.
I wished I could walk longer, rest less on the bed, and more on restaurant or bar seats, and generally do more, but in all fairness, 7 km per day would have made the doctors ecststic, and I’ve significantly exceeded that on three out of five days. As long as I manage some kind of travel down to St. James tomorrow, to see everything better in daylight, I’ve done pretty well.
Would I also liked to ramble around all of the East End, going east of Aldgate at night without my revolver? Sure. And check out if anything remains of bohemian boozers in Fitzrovia or if they’re all in Soho? Seen more of Soho in daylight? Absolutely. But there is a lot of London and my feet will just have to carry me as far as they can, leaving the rest for the undefined future.
9 Likes
Welcome, Icelander. Lovely to have ya, and my sympathies for your father’s diagnosis. Cancer is a terrible monster.
4 Likes
I have terrible vision. Lately, I have been having problems with blurring and double vision in the afternoons / evenings. Went to my eye doctor and he said my eye muscles are getting exhausted from changing focus between near and far. I am officially old and need bi/multi focal lenses. Problem is I have terrible vision. I have checked with 5 different online stores and 3 different local in person stores and none of them offer multifocal lenses in my strength. I have a couple more local places I can try, and then it will be going back to the eye doctor to see what he recommends I do. I just want to be able to see!
10 Likes
I’ve had bi focals for years. So I am officially very old 
They suck for reading but I also need computer specific glasses and I’m not getting a fourth pair (sunglasses are #3) On good days I can almost use the computer without glasses on bad days i can’t read in my smartphone with glasses😬
Welcome to the club. Maybe our local optician @Captbnut has a tip or two for you?
7 Likes
DM me your prescription and I’ll have a look
7 Likes
Just curious, how bad is terrible? I was -6 for a long time, recently degraded to -8. But -8 makes it hard to focus on nearby things, so I still have -6 for indoors, and a -6/-8 varifocal for outdoors.
2 Likes
FWIW I wear varifocal lenses with a fairly severe prescription (-9.75 / -11.25 / +astigmatism), and they’re ok. I definitely don’t love that I need them (but I too am officially old). It took me lots of time to adjust to them from my non-vari lenses, but after a few weeks the things which had bothered me initially no longer bothered me.
I could see decently with them from the outset, but it took time for the whole field of vision to feel right. I went to a film a few days after getting them, and after a few minutes I needed to switch to my old lenses; but a week later I tried to do the same thing and the old lenses were significantly worse than the new ones. The following week I had no issues with the new lenses.
I had a real debacle when they were fitting me for them, which resulted in the lenses needing to be remade…
I had another appointment today and they took the measurements again. I believe the problem with the initial measurements was that it hadn’t been clear to me that it was crucial to be positioned in as natural/neutral a posture as possible. I must have been leaning forwards in the chair, and consequently looking slightly upwards through the lenses, and that then became the “forwards” angle.
Being seated in a unfamiliar chair looking at myself in a mirror and consciously trying to ascertain whether my position was equivalent to my normal standing posture was a slightly confusing process today… I definitely didn’t have that on my mind last time, so I’m sure it could have been explained much more carefully.
3 Likes
I was conditioned for the first 20 odd years of my career to tell people that varifocals can take a month to get used to. However when I went to mine 5ish years ago they took about 20 minutes.
Essentially, point your nose at what you want to look at.
It’s easy for me to say that you get what you pay for, because I get my specs for free, but as you go up through the varifocal range your areas of clear vision get wider and the amount of peripheral distortion reduces. I have a 4.5 dioptre cyl (which should be distortion central) but in my (admittedly) top of the range varifocals I get no peripheral distortion, even in my daft Oakley Enigma frame. But I didn’t pay for them!
However, I know pretty much everyone on this forum works in IT and wide screen, multi monitors on risers setups are where varifocals can struggle because the intermediate zone isn’t where you want it. So the best lenses for that for that are “Occupational” lenses (I have a Digitime Room which is incredible).
Kate and I love solving this kind of problem, but not everyone does. Basically, find a nerd!
7 Likes
With mine it took a few days for the edges of the world to stop bulging and swaying when I turned my head…
4 Likes
-14.75 with a -2.5 astigmatism
And
-13.75 with -2.25
I have found places that do up to -20, but only in single vision. The highest I have found for multifocal said they could do up to base -12. I have a couple suggested places to try that supposedly can do almost anything. I haven’t given up yet.
8 Likes
it’s not just that the area is in the wrong place, it’s also not big enough. Moving my head to look at any part of my monitors means they’re no good, because that’s slow, exhausting, and generally annoying. when I’m working, I often have three or four things I’m simultaneously referring to, so my eyes move all over the place.
5 Likes
My orthopedic surgeon was positively giddy with joy about the recovery, so far, from the surgery on my right shoulder. In fact, he liked it so much so that he immediately sent me for X-rays and sonar scans of my left shoulder, in order to determine if it would be possible for him to perform on me a matching set of shoulder surgeries.
I imagine that collecting sets of surgeries yields points of some kind, in a secret bingo game surgeons play among themselves, of course.
9 Likes
I have fairly bad keratoconus, which knocks down my acuity badly. So when I had the cataract operation (at 59) on the eye which works, I had them change my prescription from -14 to -4.
That lets me use a laptop screen comfortably with no additional correction while lying down with the laptop on my chest. I have a set of distance glasses which are about -4, and a set of big screen and cooking glasses which are about -2.
I refuse multiple screens quite firmly, and don’t want varifocals. Fake “out of focus” on a screen is extremely annoying, and I’d expect varifocals to do the same.
4 Likes
I should probably have consulted you when I woke up one day (15.2.2024), and after having brushed my teeth, showered and that sort of thing, I tried to focus my eyes through my glasses on a computer screen. Couldn’t. I didn’t have any control over where my eyes focused. Well, not unless I removed my glasses and put the screen so close it almost touched my nose. Then I could read, which was a mercy.
Over the next weeks, I looked for answers with my GP and optometrist, and I was waiting for an ophthalmologist appointment when I was struck down with the mystery disease which killed all those nerves, stopped the kidneys and damaged the heart. Given the timing, the eye issue looks related, but we could never find any link. My corneas were just all scratched, like a pair of old binoculars which has become useless through hard use. Best explanation the ophthalmologist could find was that malfunctioning nerves caused eyelashes to rub against the eye while I slept, and/or that my eyelids were spasming during the night, drying out the eyes and making them less protected from incidental scratches.
Fortunately, the inability to focus on things further away than my nose finally went away as the corneas recovered, after months of rubbing grease (may have a more exact medical name) and pouring oil (ditto) into my eyes.
Now I just have regular nearsightedness (-6 and the other eye is less, I think) and astigmatism. No varifocals and no multiple screens. Well, I do watch football on a TV while maybe writing on the computer, and there may be a tablet showing another game in the room, but there were no multiple screens involved at the office, back when I did work. I don’t expect that to change when I go back to work. Office manager has multiple screens, as do a lot of the attorneys, but I can only write on one screen at a time, and I don’t understand what the others are for.
3 Likes
Kate’s the contact lens fitter at UHW in Cardiff so is an expert in keratoconus.
We have a topographer in our practice so she can fit all sorts of cool contact lenses
That’s my astigmatism
10 Likes
12 Likes