Eric the .5b

These are the twits I twitted.

• 11:51 I drink coffee and try to work out how to cope with the things that need coping. So far, no luck. I am low on cope. #
• 11:53 Mostly, I want it to be Sunday. On Sunday, she will be here. Everything gets better when she is here. It's like waiting for Christmas x 1000 #
• 12:54 And how bad can any day be when it involves free freshmade chimichangas? I ask you. #

( Book of Note: Amazing Spider-Man #559; First Looks: Captain America, X-Factor, Avengers the Initiative )

   Dave Van Domelen, "We'll handle these with the scary preacher, sir." - Zoe, Serenity Better Days #3

( Cold. )

For latecomers.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Last night was the first session of a 3.5 game (with heavy house rules) set in Sharn. We were a bunch of adventurer types who didn't know each other going to the bank to withdraw money we needed to pay a loan shark. Just then, supervillains, um, I mean evil folks attacked, trapping us in the vault with them. They were going to snuff us and steal something, and it seems that there's more to this than just a bank robbery. It ended on two cliffhangers, with each half of the party (because we split up in our investigations) in dire peril.

I played House Cannith Systems Warforged Model 1-D-20, aka "Tank." I spoke like Ahnold and chewed a lot of scenery.

Let me tell you, Onycholysis is a bitch.

And before everyone gets all freaky and stuff, in this case it’s not because of psoriasis or fungal growth beneath the nail, it’s because — as far as I could tell — I caught the corner of my nail (index, left, joint-locked) on … something … and pulled on it hard enough to dislodge the entirety of the nail itself from the nail bed, where all the blood vessels, nerve endings and other sensitive bits are kept. In some ways, I think it’d been less painful to have it have finished the job by ripping off right across the base, but instead it’s stubbornly attached right there across the top (but not really the sides). It’s also kind of a sickly grey colour without the supporting understructure of the nail bed proper squidged up against it and it’s wiggly enough I can tell it’s detached all the way down.

It also, if I haven’t mentioned, hurts like an absolute blaspheming motherfucking nun being anally rent by two rather burly demons with multi-penetrative cat-barbed dicks. Except in my finger, and strangely, all up along the goddamn thing right to the back of my hand, with the added irony that I can’t exen flex my fingers to cause it … it just does it!

Don’t, for the love of Hell, try to research a medical condition on the Internet. Not if you value your stability and sanity. I figured this was the kind of injury that happens all the time, right? Trying to pry off glued on fake nails, traums from car doors, yeah sure, right? Not until you figure out the right search term. Until then it’s a panopoly of finger-damage images and deeply horrific prophetic announcements. “Splinter hemmorages!? Say it ain’t so!”

Unfortunately to me, I also find contraditory info. One site says that if the nail is splintered, it should be held back in place until it reattaches while the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology suggests that the unattached nail needs to be trimmed off! How in the seventh level of fuck one does that without, say, passing out from the pain if it’s held on only by the edge of the nail plate completely eludes me.

My current solution is to have a band-aid wrapped about the thing to bind it to the bed … at least until I sleep and see what’s what when I wake up. If I’m lucky, it’ll have decided it wants to finish coming out and I could just go grow a new one.I mean, it’s happened before.

Last time a nail came off (pinky, left) it was off altogether and while agonizing, I think the surety of how to proceed — let it grow back in on it’s own and keep the bed dry and clean until then — was a lot better than this half-assedness.

I’m feeling a bit stressed about this. For some good reason, I guess.

Sigh.

I dreamt, last night, of a lot of people I went to high school with. The dreams themselves were really fucked-up and weird, but they did make me realise how much I miss some of those people - even now, fifteen years later, despite not having seen some of these people for a decade or more.

I wish I'd realised at the time how much I'd miss some of those friends - and how much I wouldn't miss others :)

( Here are the things I am willing to confess to having done today )

These are the twits I twitted.

• 15:21 @ sometimes the meetings eat my brain. #
• 15:46 And then I just got sick of it. All of it. In one brief, shining moment I had absolutely no affection left in my soul, save for Weds. #

I'm less than pleased about some trends in my net usage lately, including big chunks of what I've been doing on LJ. I'm gonna take a vacation from it - will still be reading friends' pages and commenting, but I don't expect to have any fresh posts here for a while, where "a while" will be as long as it turns out to be.

I'm doing this, I hope, before feeling completely overwhelmed, for those who wonder about such things, rather than responding to a sense of utter collapse after the fact.

PS: I will keep up with stuff like 100 Books and 100 Movies, and news of stories for those in the fiction filter, and like that.

Upgraded to Windows SP 3 today. None of the problems other people have noticed, but then, I'm on an Intel machine.

This morning I noticed a huge increase in backscatter spam—the spam that pretends it was sent by you so that when it bounces, it lands in your mailbox. I don't know what the deal is, whether some new botnet just kicked in, or what, but I received literally hundreds of backscatter emails today, and spent a good deal of time feeding them all to spamassassin's Bayesian filter—to no avail.

Finally, I asked on the spamassassin mailing list, and they were able to help me out.

( Cut for spamassassin technical thingieness. )

And now any backscatter goes into a bounces folder and doesn't end up in Gmail, and I'm backscatter free! Yay!

Last week, BSU had to undergo a quick reconfiguration for Mothers’ Day when the scheduled band had to bow out unexpectedly. Nothing we can’t handle, of course; release the madness and let fly at the target! From a discussion of how to make a Skull Bong (my ew band name), to Canadian Mounties on a rampage against old people, and definitely where not to hide the loot after a bank robbery. Really, it was there and if you weren’t, you missed it!

Coming up this Sunday is the ever hard rockin’, the high-life livin’, the California wonderkind, the Midnight Reign! Get ready to buckle in with the guys who let off a sound like Guns ‘n Roses have finally got that democracy thing overseas working. Hard to believe, right? We’ll also have the latest crazed thought to enter my mad little head, a new segment called Kick in the Ding! It’s probably exactly what you think it is. Who needs a kick in the ding this week? Listen and find out or call us up and tell everyone who you think needs a solid boot to the jimmies.

Oh yeah, that’s what I call fun!

(For those who listened to last week’s show and are looking for a link to Sword of the New World so you can bust out the crazy on that MMORPG with us, well, there you go. Scheduled times aren’t ready yet, but you will probably want both Xfire and Skype for the full experience with us. Rock on!)

Some of you may remember my my slide show of Quel'danas scenes, including the Dead Scar bombing area.

Well, here's a different angle on it, a more involved perspective, allowing more observation of the combatants.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

So. I'm a noob.

My experienced raider is a healer, which means I've been motivated to learn about +healing and mana regen and the like. Set there. Rotorua is nobody's idea of a meleer, so I've sort of tuned out discussion of the nuances of high-end combat. But now Rosewither, my blood elf rogue, is in the zone where it matters.

Do any of you want to point me at an accessible primer kind of page for this stuff? I know some of it, but emphatically not systematically. By "accessible" I mean one that emphasizes prose and saves the detailed theorycrafting - like, I want to know more about what the categories themselves are before I go stare blankly at complex math.

I have a membership to a new service that lets me clip bits of reporting from various news outlets. As an experiment, I went looking for bits on the recent Chinese earthquake in Sichuan.

And then I found … this:

I’ve seen some crappy journalism in my day, but really? Szechuan Chicken as the emotional linking device to a 7.9 magnitude earthquake? CNN, do you really have such contempt for your audience that you think they need that to help them care?

The more I follow the journalism, the more I’m repulsed by journalists. It doesn’t help that, technically, now I am one.

Meeting General Siglerisimo (aka Scott Sigler) at an Infected signing at Murder By The Book. I always imagined him taller.

Having to see Iron Man 1.5 times, because the boy got freaked out at the start and bored in the middle. I covet Tony Stark's house.

Going completely geekgasmic at Speed Racer. It's a movie where cars behave like they did when I played with Hot Wheels as a kid. The final race is set more or less in the Ultimate Hot Wheels Track.

Re-reading the first Dragonlance trilogy, and having all sorts of thoughts about an "Ultimate Dragonlance" game.

Watching Cloverfield. It reminded me of a Call of Cthulhu con round.

Thinking about 4th Edition far too much.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Gonna take another run at this pbp thing with semi-official champions of the Russian Revolution.