I’ve always thought that my problem was people. Everywhere I go, always with the people! People getting all up in my face. People messing with my shite. I keep thinking that life would be much more bearable without the people.

Then I noticed the flaw in my little theory. Some of my best friends are people. I do a fair approximation of being a people myself from time to time. I realised it wasn’t all people who were the problem. It’s just the stupid people. And I think I know how they manage to be such a problem: the rest of us are too damn nice to them.

Darwinism tells us these stupid motherfuckers should be dead. But we do our best to keep them safe. We protect them and coddle them. I tell you, not actively punishing stupidity is the same thing as rewarding stupidity. It’s time we put a stop to this nonsense.

To that end I say we start by taking the warning labels off everything. That’s right, you heard me, the warning labels. The sooner, the better. No more will we have to worry about Sally Stupid when she decides that swallowing a liter of Drano is a good idea. No more home dentistry with rotary tools! No more “may cause drowsiness”. Let the fuckers pass out at the wheel and drive off a bridge, all the better for the rest of us I say! The list could go on endlessly. Hell do a google search, you’ll turn up hundreds of stupid labels without even trying.
Let Chaos Reign! Or Kill them all, God will know his own. Decide amongst yourselves, I’m not picky. While you’re at it, do your homework in the dark and eat your cereal with a fork!

</rant>

(This dose of rampant cynicism was brought you by the drug of choice for Malcontents everywhere: Alcohol. The source of and answer to all of life’s problems.)

I blame Saint Neil for this one and I’m going to blame Saint Zod as well just because I can.

I stumbled across these recently. I thought I’d share as they gave me a giggle

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I swear! People are idiots.

That is all.

Late last night after I awoke from a tryptophan induced coma (yay turkey!), my brain started firing on all cylinders and I decided that rather than waste the opportunity, I’d do something creative with it. I pulled out my old GURPS books and focused my creativity in a fit of productive insomnia and started to work on my fantasy campaign world for the first time in at least a year.

I decided that rather than stick with the previous incarnations of the world that I’d used in the past (3^rd Ed GURPS and 3^rd Ed. D&D) I was going to completely overhaul things and use the 4^th Edition GURPS books. I wanted to use them partly because I had the books right in front of me but mainly because I love the system and have been itching to use them ever since I bought them.

After looking at all the information I had written down piecemeal here and there and going over the notes in my head with a critical eye I realized that there was a lot of excess fluff and dross in the mythology and some very clumsy plagiarisms that I just couldn’t stomach anymore so I figured that while I was changing the rules I might as well change everything that needed it at the same time.

So for most of yesterday, last night and today I’ve been doing double duty. On one hand I’m scribbling away like a madman, writing down imaginary histories for imaginary countries and populating them with imaginary races and on the other hand I’m critically examining the “whys”, “how comes” and “what else can I try” of each situation as I try to streamline what is in essence at least 15 years worth of notes and half formed ideas. I’ve invalidated almost a two whole chapters worth of character creation notes and religious back story in a single fell swoop just because I felt they were too cumbersome and clichéd. I haven’t had this much fun in ages!

This might take me awhile, but honestly its something I wholeheartedly enjoy. I love the tinkering and world building aspect of it almost as much as I love playing in the world once it’s done. Here’s hoping I can keep up the enthusiasm and actually follow through on some of these ideas that are coming fast and furious before the muse leaves me barren once more.

Of course because I’m without a computer for the foreseeable future, it will probably be a long time before I manage to get any of my notes transcribed and uploaded so none of you will see anything anytime soon. But even if all this is just a tad premature, I figure I might as well throw up this link to the site in the meantime in preparation for the day that I get it all down on paper. Perhaps having the link up there will give me some sort of mental deadline and encouragement to get it all done. Then again perhaps not but that doesn’t really matter now does it… at least not to me. I’m having fun and that’s really all that matters.

Enjoy

So I just checked my page stats for the first time in awhile and I discovered some interesting facts (well they’re interesting to me anyway, I really don’t care about you, remember).

I have an average viewership of 9.4 views per day. This is skewed as half the days are 20+ and the other are 5ish. I can see a definite increase in hits on the days that I post as the page views spike dramatically the following day and then fall back down again after that. My recent hospital stay entry spiked at an all time record of 34 views (Violence, or at least illness in this case, does sell apparently).

On the days that I don’t post I seem to have as few as two people hitting the site each day. And it doesn’t count me so I suppose this means I actually have friends out there in the world… who’d of thunk it.

Logic dictates that if I posted on a more regular basis I’d have a higher regular readership… Nah. Screw logic there is no such correlation!

What gave me the biggest giggle out of while researching this is that apparently the most popular recent search engine term used to find my site in the past 30 days has been Erwin Rommel?!?! I’ve got a bunch of hits using variations of his name over a number of days. What the hell! The only mention of the man that I even recall posting about was from one of the various stupid quizzes that I tend to do from time to time. …… I just checked, the quiz was from September of 05. *boggle*

Teh intarwebs iz a scary place.

I’m sure 90% of you don’t give a rats ass about any of this but it amuses me and as I said earlier, I don’t care about you. I’m really just writing to amuse myself and to get back in the habit of it. I won’t share the rest of these stupid stats with you as I’m sure none of you really care to find out that you spend on average about two and a half minutes perusing things before you go back to surfing porn.

On that note… G’night kidlets!

As promised a few snaps of my ever so dashing cue-ball shaped skull. Enjoy

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Boredom can be a very productive thing.

For the past 3 months or so I’ve been a scruffy shell of person. I haven’t really shaved much and I only vaguely remember what the word haircut means. I pretty much went to seed as my life spiraled into a slump.

Ever since my little adventure in backless gown couture though I’ve started to pick myself up and brush off the things that were weighing me down. Both the mental jewelry that I was sporting as well as the shaggy mop of a thing I call hair.

Yup, that’s right. Last night, in a stroke of bored genius I decided that bald quite possibly is beautiful… and shaved my head again. Of course, logic really never entered into it and I’d forgotten just how cold one’s head can get without a layer of hair to insulate it. I also forgot that… DUH it’s October! Since I managed to remember these wonderfully fun facts after the fact, I’ve been wandering around the house with a rolled up balaclava on my noodle looking to the world like a landlocked longshoreman. Part of me says, hey that looks kinda cool but I’m mainly just trying to keep my body warm.

Okay the real truth is my vanity prevents me from telling you all just how good I really look so you’ll all just need to take a step back. I wouldn’t want you beating down my door in a fit of jealous rage/lust now would I.

I’ll try and post a pic or two one of these days both with the ‘clava and without. In the meantime and in between time I’m going to rub my scalp stubble for good luck (and because it’s auto-erotic and I like the way it feels).

See, now wasn’t this post an absolute waste of time. As I said, boredom can be productive.

My weekend was interesting to say the least. I woke up on Friday morning with abdominal pains that progressively got worse and ended up spending the weekend in hospital to see what was wrong with me.

At first I just thought I’d slept funny or I had really bad gas that just wouldn’t come out so I tried toughing it out at home but then I started to vomit I decided that getting some professional advice may not be that bad of an idea so off to the local medi-center I went and from there to the emergency ward of the Grey Nuns Hospital where I spent what seemed like an excruciating hour in the waiting room before being examined. It probably was closer to 20 minutes but by this point the pain was pretty unbearable and every second stretched on for days.

Finally was examined and they decided to run a battery of tests on me. I was told to change into those ever so sexy backless gowns (which I suspect are a test of one’s self-confidence if nothing else), I had an ultrasound (they wouldn’t tell me if it was a boy or a girl though), some x-rays (to my utmost disapointment no mutant powers have developed yet), and blood was drawn. Those of you who know me well know that this was probably the worst part of the whole ordeal so far as I hate needles. They freak me out something fierce. I survived this time though and was left to recline in a semi-fetal position on a gurney in the hall while the doctors waited on the test results.

An while later (around 4pm or so) the nurse came by and told me they were going to put me on some fluids and give me something for the pain. So I was then subjected to something that has a personal creep factor of several billion: an IV drip. Yup, needles again. Only this time it wasn’t just a quick poke to administer a shot or a short pain while drawing blood, this time I was going to have a needle under my skin and in my vein for an indeterminate length of time. I tried to relax like I was told but subconscious fear took over and I tensed up and the nurse botched the first attempt and so had to switch hands. The second attempt was successful probably because I realized it was either going in the back of my hand or my wrist and the latter just gives me the heeby jeebies *shudder* (even now writing this it is making my flesh creep at the very thought of it).

Thankfully the next bit wasn’t so bad. They gave me a shot of Demerol and everything was groovy for the next couple of hours… I saw another doctor and they were going to wait till 7 to run another x-ray to see if there had been any changes since the first. There wasn’t but they wanted to keep me overnight because my white blood cell count was high and I had a temperature. They’d see how I was in the morning. Yay me, my first overnight hospital stay in 30 years (the last being when I was hospitalized for the Mumps when I was 3).

So around 9ish they finally found me a bed and admitted me. I was made comfortable by some very nice (and nice looking) nurses. At this point the Demerol was wearing off and I was starting to feel uncomfortable again so the nurses gave me a shot of some ol’ fashioned morphine and I drifted in and out of sleep till about 3ish when it wore off and they gave me another.

I slept fine, albeit a tad uncomfortably with the creepy drip in my arm that I kept having to account for and come morning I was awake and pain free. I was poked and prodded by more doctors and more blood was drawn (by this point it was an inevitability that I was accepting of but not comfortable with) and I was left with the encouraging remark from the doctor that He thought things were fine and he’d see if my white count was lower when the results came back and if things were good they’d get some lunch in me and send me home.

Lunchtime came and went with my only food being the saline drip that I was becoming more and more adept at waltzing around with. The day passed in increments with my only company being a sickly old Filipino who coughed up a lung every couple of minutes. By about 3 the doctor got my results and I was expecting to be sent home but instead was left hanging… Finally around 8 o’clock on they came back and said that they wanted to keep me yet one more night and try me on solid food in the morning and see if I had any adverse reaction to it.

I’m not the best patient at the best of times and I was feeling absolutely fine at this point, and was not happy about the results but societal brainwashing has trained me not to lash out irrationally all the time. I sucked it up with as much good grace as I could and went to bed. Besides, they’d promised to take out the IV. They didn’t quite though the tricksy hobbitses! They unhooked me from my erstwhile dancing partner and left the needle in my wrist to save time if I had to go back on fluids again. Not surprisingly this creeped me out almost more than the drip had probably because it had no purpose and the nurse who swapped out the drip apparatus for a detachable tube accessory apparently studied under Torquemada (sadly all the really good looking and competent nurses were working on Friday night and not Saturday)

Eventually I got settled and was lulled into a restless sleep by my bronchial fillipino friend’s wheezing. The night passed quietly enough despite a nurse checking in on me every couple of hours. Normally I’m a fairly heavy sleeper, but even the near-soundless tread of the nurse’s shoes woke me up almost instantly.

Morning came and I still felt fine. I finally had some food and waited for the Doctor to say I was okay to go home. I finally got the green light around 3 and I was thankfully on my way. The bad news was they had no idea what was wrong. I’d obviously had some sort of infection to have elevated my white count and according to the doctor abdominal pains are a fairly common symptom and that 70% of most emergency cases of that nature usually clear up by themselves in a day or so. In the meantime I’m to keep a close eye on things and if there’s a reoccurence then I’m to go in for further tests.

So in summation I had a fairly irregular weekend. I learned that no amount of witty repartee or personal self confidence can change the fact that backless gowns are about as sexy as a week dead horse. I learned that Demerol and Morphine are your friendses. I reaffirmed my belief that nurses are more competent than doctors (even the ones trained by the spanish inquisition). My phobia of needles has not been overcome. I still loathe the little fuckers almost as much as I loathe spiders. Hospital beds are surprisingly comfortable and hospital food is just as horrible as the rumours make it out to be. Last but by no means least, I decided once and for all that I will never have a career in health care.

I’m home now and taking a couple of days to recover and make sure everything is okay and there are no relapses.

You may or may not have noticed, but I haven’t been around in awhile. The simple reason is that my computer decided to give up the ghost sometime last Monday. I’m still not sure exactly why. It has power and all the cards, cables and whatnot seem to be working fine as far as I can tell. It just won’t POST at all. I’ve checked everything except the board and chip and as I have no way to check those, I’m at a loss for the moment. Yes, I’m in withdrawal in case you were wondering. I’ve watched a lot of TV and read a lot of books in the interim but it’s just not the same without being able to connect to the virtual world of teh intarwebs.

I needs me my computer and sadly right now it’s not even near the top of my list of things to do once I get a job again and that irks me more than anything. I can get check my mail now and again using other computers in the house, but they aren’t mine and I don’t have that same comfort zone that I would using my own machine.

So, for the forseeable future, expect me only if and when you see me and here’s hoping I get this fixed soon enough.

Later.