Linkage: New Commandments

Man, I've been quiet. Things are crazybusy in meatspace, and Twitter relieves my frequent urge to share stupid little crap, so... yeah. Quiet. But that's why we have RSS, right?

I do, however, want to log on here briefly to share this: Irshad Manji's blog and specifically her entry on Dana Gallagher's new version of the Ten Commandments. They are:

I: Love yourself unconditionally.

II: Love others unconditionally.

III: Don’t confuse loving with shoving.

IV: Corruption happens.

V: Keep your laws on your own naughty bits.

VI: Challenge the “bros before hoes” approach to religion.

VII: Be not afraid of scientists.

VIII: Polar bears are God’s creatures, too.

IX: Keep your candle lit.

X: Know when to be humble.

Read the full entry for commentary on each one. Good stuff.

Thanks to Dad for the link!

File under: Political Schtuff, Pure Ego!
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My life is now complete

If you've ever watched The Colbert Report with me, you know that I HAVE to watch the Spartina logo at the end. You know, where the egret chilling by the pond gets eaten by a little fish. I always go "Heeee!" or "FISH!" or something. It's my thing.

I've been saying for AGES that I need an animated .gif of that.

Now I have one. Thank you Gif Soup and Adobe ImageReady.

And in handy icon/avatar size:

File under: Geekiness
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Weekend Update: Rhythm Gaming Hardware Badassery

This is the weekend of rhythm gaming hardware badassery.

FIrst, I rewired my beloved Les Paul controller. Les Pauls are easily the best controllers EVER for Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but they have one major flaw: the way the removable neck connects to the body means that eventually, the fret buttons become unreliable. That means that even if you play a song perfectly, some notes just.... don't happen.

Well, some clever folks have rewired theirs and Twon found me a tutorial, so today I busted out the toolbox and the wires Twon had found at Fry's, and set to work. The process basically consists of opening the controller up, removing the connectors between the neck and base of the guitar, and hardwiring them together, then reassembling the controller. I managed not only to do it, but to do it right the first time! Woo!

The other item today was a bit more complicated.

Continued...

File under: Geekiness
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Umloud! Also, surgery update

Wednesday was Umloud, a Rock Band fundraiser for Child's Play. It was epic win.

The highlight of the evening for me (besides playing Boston's "Rock 'n Roll Band" on the main stage with Twon, Tim, and Witwix) was winning this in the silent auction:

Continued...

File under: Pure Ego!
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Memage!

Because I am too tired to post anything real. :) Filched from the incomparable Dianne Sylvan.

Continued...

File under: Memes
Posted at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

NaNoWriMo 2009: COMPLETE

It's over!

I finished. 50,040 is my final official wordcount. There was a last-minute kerfluffle when the NaNoWriMo official verifying wordcounter totally disagreed with the one in Open Office and I had to scrounge up another 900 words, but whatever.

I FINISHED.

In spite of knee surgery and seasonal affective disorder and work being crazy and and and. WOOOO!

I am considering printing the book out for burning purposes, but whatever. It's not National Good Novel Writing Month.

File under: Pure Ego!
Posted at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Post-Surgery Update!

As previously noted, I had knee surgery this week! Woo! It went really well. The surgery was at Precision SurgiCenter, which was kind of a trip. Very fast, very efficient. But it was surreal to go to a normal-looking office building for my surgery!

Everyone was really nice, and my anesthesiologist was this awesome Navy guy who was very low key. He was also burly and scruffy, and looked pretty hilarious in scrubs. He did a great job. I don't even remember the facemask -- he gave me something he called "a martini to take the edge off" as soon as I was on the surgery table, and it made everything kind of floaty, and then I was waking up afterward.

Dr. J said that when he checked under my kneecaps everything looked good, and that after he made the incisions for the release my kneecaps started tracking better immediately. So yay! They had me bundled up and ready to go pretty quickly, and I came home and slept most of the rest of the day. The only hitch so far is that the Vicodin prescription Dr. J gave me totally did NOT cut it once the morphine shots wore off. But now I have a prescription for something called Norco and am doing much better. Yay! I even managed to eat some real food for dinner. So not too bad overall.

I have little exercises to do already, mostly to do with preventing blood clots and encouraging range of motion. Those kind of suck, but post-surgery physical therapy usually does.

File under: Pure Ego!
Posted at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

NaNoWriMo 2009!

NaNoWriMo is here again, folks! Huzzah!

Antwon and I went to the first-minute write in / Halloween party, which was fun as always. This year it was at a fellow Wrimo's house, rather than the traditional Denny's, and that meant more space and more outlets. Plus, potluck! Annie and Nate carpooled with us. Good times. I also went to the first-day write in on Sunday, which was also fun. I hit 4.5k while I was there, wooo!

Once the web widgets are working again (the servers are currently swamped) I'll add one here.

I'm taking another stab at writing something non-shitty featuring my Jaspa collection of characters, but this time I've dropped them into an urban fantasy setting. Woo! Should be fun.

File under: NaNoWriMo
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Fat Links Post (heh)

My recent entry on the BMI has resulted in some folks sending me links and me surfing around, so here's some of what I've been looking at recently!

Here is a fantastic blog entry about why harshing on your own body is a bad thing.

A video on the same subject (more on that at EndFatTalk.org, check it out!).

Health At Every Size sounds awesome, and I think my new personal trainer (my old one is relocating) is going to be hearing about it from me.

Illustrated BMI Categories (which will have you going "whaaaa?" at least once! I know I did.)

The FAQ at Shapely Prose -- packed with lots of good info, delivered with a snarky smile.

Fat vs. Fiction, an article about fat misconceptions.

File under: Linkage
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Rant: Why scales are a tool of BULLSHIT

I have sworn off weighing myself.

I started dieting young, like a lot of American girls. I was in Weight Watchers in Junior High, where my body clung to every last ounce it could and all I thought about, ever, was eating. Well, eating and grades.

For a while, a couple years ago, I weighed myself every day and entered the data into a spreadsheet which calculated a rolling seven-day average (this allowed me to track my weight loss without being too frustrated by the inevitable knuckleballing one's weight does. Seriously, weigh yourself every day for a week and you'll see what I'm talking about).

I finally decided that my weight is just a number. It doesn't tell me how fit I am. I can't imagine anybody is going to tell a 300-lb professional football player he's unhealthily overweight, or a slim couch potato that he's perfectly healthy. So I swore off the scale. I told the nurses at the doctor's office who insisted on weighing me not to tell me my weight, and turned my back on the scale's numbers. I concentrated on exercising and eating right and didn't let myself worry about what the scale had to say.

Well, I let my personal trainer weigh me as part of his measurement-gathering yesterday. I made the mistake of looking at the weight number. THEN I made the mistake of hitting a BMI calculator today to see where I fall on the BMI charts.

Continued...

File under: Rantings
Posted at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

Loma Prieta

Last Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake. Like most Bay Area folk, I remember exactly where I was when it hit.

I'd been home sick that day, and was still in my jammies at the dining room table. Mom was in the kitchen, leaning over a spread-out newspaper and reading. When the quake hit, I jumped up and stood in the doorway like I'd been taught and said, "Mom, mom, come stand in the doorway!"

She said, "eh, it'll stop in a minute."

But it was still shaking. The bookshelves in the livingroom faceplanted onto the floor with a crash.

"Maybe I will come stand in the doorway," she said, and then it stopped.

It was the longest quake I think I've ever been in -- about seven seconds, maybe eight. Every bookshelf we had that was oriented along the North-South axis of the house fell over. Those oriented East-West didn't (including an enormous cinderblock-and-board bookcase in the library which would have crushed everything in its path, yikes). The upstairs hallway had been lined with stacks of paperback books, all of which fell over and spread everywhere. The whole hallway was easily ankle-deep in books. (I come by my bibliophilia honestly!)

We were lucky. Our house was on decently stable land. Elsewhere, on fill or close to the epicenter, things were not so good. 63 people died. Thousands were injured. Freeway overpasses and part of the Bay Bridge collapsed. Parts of San Francisco burned to the ground. Homes in the Santa Cruz mountains slid into ravines or collapsed, or both. One of my science teachers lost his home -- he and his son barely got out before it went down the side of the mountain. It took over a decade to repair I-880, and the in-progress I-480 was abandoned entirely. And on and on. So much damage.

Since then, most quakes just seem sort of... entertaining. Exciting. They're nowhere near as scary because I remember Loma Prieta, and that is my benchmark for a serious earthquake.

File under: Musings
Posted at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

It's KNIFE-TIME!

So, remember back in June when I saw Dr. J and talked about surgery? I eventually decided to try PT instead.

Well, I did PT. For months.

And as I said to Dr. J last week when I saw him again, that shit did not work, so it is KNIFE-TIME!!!

I'm going under the laparoscope the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Presumably on Turkeyday I will be giving thanks for Vicodin. Those three months of off-the-mat time seemed awful long back in June, but I've been essentially off the mat almost that long while trying PT. My knees actually got worse than they were originally after an initial improvement. Pfffft. You'd think I'd be used to that, as it's an old pattern. Every treatment I've tried for my knees has helped for a bit and then they've gotten bad again. Surgery is the one thing I haven't tried. The big guns, so to speak. Well, my knees are worse now than they've been in about a decade, so it's time to bring out the big guns. I am not having with this nonsense any more.

Curious about what all I'm having done? BEHOLD:

I'm going to have Dr. J from FORM perform laparoscopic Lateral Release on both of my knees, in hopes of fixing my Chondromalacia. I'll be under twilight sleep rather than general anaesthetic, thank goodness (I had to do that for my cyst surgery and was not a fan of the prepwork required).

After the surgery I'll have a 4-week course of physical therapy and then after another couple months of healing, with any luck I'll be back on the mat! WOO HOO! LET'S DO THIS!

File under: Chondromalacia
Posted at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Invisible Illness Meme

Last week was Invisible Illness Week! I had no idea. Better late than never, though, so I'll post this now:

30 Things About My Invisible Illness You May Not Know

1. The illness I live with is: Fibromyalgia
2. I was diagnosed with it in the year: 2005
3. But I had symptoms since: as long as I can remember, really. They got really noticeable around 2003 or so, I think.
4. The biggest adjustment I’ve had to make is: Getting enough sleep every night.
5. Most people assume: That I feel fine, because I maintain so well.
6. The hardest part about mornings are: I am really friggin' groggy. And during a flareup, mornings are my worst time. I'm lounging on the couch to write this and even the super-soft cushions hurt like I'm leaning on boards.
7. My favorite medical TV show is: House! I'm a sucker for asshole geniuses.
8. A gadget I couldn’t live without is: My laptop, so I can sack out on the couch instead of in a computer chair for interwebs-reading/blogging/writing/etc. Or my pill caddies, which help me make sure I don't forget my various meds.
9. The hardest part about nights are: During a flareup, it's hard to get to sleep because I'm in pain. But fibro pain doesn't respond to any painkillers. Oh, and not getting enough sleep makes the pain worse, which makes sleeping harder. Fail.
10. Each day I take 14 pills & vitamins. More if my non-fibro issues act up. (No comments, please)
11. Regarding alternative treatments I: get chiropractic every week and am considering trying acupuncture.
12. If I had to choose between an invisible illness or visible I would choose: Invisible, because then I decide who knows. There's a definite psychological benefit to that. I don't want people I don't even know feeling sorry for me or coddling me or whatever.
13. Regarding working and career: During a flareup it's hard to focus on work, but I feel better if I'm not sitting at home thinking about how much I hurt.
14. People would be surprised to know: That I am in pain every single day. I haven't had a truly painfree day since I was a kid. If I say I'm not really sore on a given day, it means my body is around a 2 on the 0-10 pain scale.
15. The hardest thing to accept about my new reality has been: That I can't just power through everything anymore.
16. Something I never thought I could do with my illness that I did was: I've actually never thought about my illness that way. If I want to do something, I do it -- the only concession I'll make to my illness is to figure out a way to do whatever it is without destroying myself. Sometimes that means going slow or taking lots of breaks or whatever.
17. The commercials about my illness: Don't really exist. I've seen maybe one?
18. Something I really miss doing since I was diagnosed is: Yoga. I can't hold poses without excruciating pain, even on a good day, and I haven't gotten around to finding a yoga class that's motion-oriented. I'm too busy anyway. :)
19. It was really hard to have to give up: The idea that I'm indestructible.
20. A new hobby I have taken up since my diagnosis is: Don't think there is one, really.
21. If I could have one day of feeling normal again I would: Not. It would be too hard to go back to feeling like I do every day.
22. My illness has taught me: That it's not weak to take care of my body when it needs it.
23. Want to know a secret? One thing people say that gets under my skin is: I actually don't have an answer for this. I don't tell people about my fibro unless I'm pretty sure they're not going to be jerks about it.
24. But I love it when people: Ask how I'm feeling and really want to know.
25. My favorite motto, scripture, quote that gets me through tough times is: "There ain't no such thing as normal life... there's just life."
26. When someone is diagnosed I’d like to tell them: Sitting around feeling sorry for yourself really will make the pain worse. No, really. Don't let the pain stop you from doing stuff or it will get a lot worse. Trust me on this.
27. Something that has surprised me about living with an illness is: I am really good at pretending I'm not in pain.
28. The nicest thing someone did for me when I wasn’t feeling well was: Support me in making choices to take care of myself.
29. I’m involved with Invisible Illness Week because: I think it's an awesome idea to raise awareness!
30. The fact that you read this list makes me feel: Good! Thanks for listening.

BTW, anybody who wants to learn more about what it's like to live with a chronic illness needs to read The Spoon Theory (pdf) from But You Don't Look Sick?

File under: Fibromyalgia
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"What Makes People Want to Play Rock Band and Guitar Hero?"

So Gary Marcus wrote an article on Guitar Hero and Rock Band purporting to examine their popularity. He put my hackles up with his first sentence:

In some ways, Guitar Hero and Rock Band seem like the stupidest games on earth.

Then he proved that he knows zilch about playing them at an advanced level:

There's no need to strategize ahead (as in chess); no need for big muscles (as in basketball)...

Clearly he doesn't know anything about competitive GH/RB. Star Power strategy is a key part of racking up points (and if you want to know just how deep that rabbit hole goes, go on the ScoreHero forums and search for "squeezing"). If he thinks the games don't require muscle, he should come over and try playing "Number of the Beast" on expert guitar. Antwon down-strums that monster. Or hell, he should play expert drums! That'll leave most folks sweating buckets.

Then, of course, he makes the classic mistake:

Why mash buttons on a video game controller, when you could put Sgt. Pepper on your CD player, or learn to play a real guitar? ... Whether you buy that theory or not, the plastic "guitars" in Guitar Hero have little to do with real guitars; there are no strings, and no frets, there's no soundhole, and no jack to hook up to an amplifier, either; except for a bit of clattering, the plastic pseudo-instrument makes no sound at all. And there's no room for genuine creativity, as there would be with a real instrument. A real apprentice guitarist must spend hours and hours practicing scales and chords, and learning about the relation between melody and harmony; an aficionado of Guitar Hero skips straight to the songs, and may well never learn the difference between a major scale and a minor.

It's "Play a real guitar, fag!" in long form. To which my standard reply is: do you tell folks who play Grand Theft Auto to run over real hookers and steal real cars? Should afficionadoes of Quake shoot real aliens?

But, he concludes, it's ACTUALLY about how stupid we are.

Games like Guitar Hero set up one of the most potent illusions of temporal contingency I've ever seen: if the player presses the button at the right time, the computer plays back a recording of a particular note (or set of notes) played by a professional musician. The music itself is potent and rewarding -- Keith Richards really knows how to bend a note -- but the real secret to the game is what happens is that fact if you miss the button, you don't hear the note.

The brain whirs away, and notices the contingency. When I push the button, I hear Keith Richards; when I fail to push the button (or press the wrong button, or press it late), I don't hear Keith Richards. Therefore, I am Keith Richards!

Dude, what the shit. Seriously. Wuuuut.

Did he not read the lovely article on Beatles Rock Band in the New York Times a couple weeks back, where one of the Beatles said that Rock Band is a lot like the miming along to music he and the other Beatles did when they were younger? Rock Band (and occasionally Guitar Hero, but don't get me started on my rant of why GH is an inferior franchise at this point) is about creating the sensation of playing music in a group without having to put in the endless hours necessary to learn an instrument. And, most importantly, it's about HAVING FUN.

FUN.

Maybe Mr. Marcus doesn't remember how to do that.

File under: Geekiness
Posted at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Hey, Ealasaid, where ya been?

In short: my chondromalacia finally got bad enough that I started physical therapy (as a last-ditch effort before getting surgery). The PT made my knees hurt worse for several weeks (as expected) -- enough so that I was hardly able to do any cardio exercise. Even walking for too long made me gimpy.

But there's this evil catch-22 we fibromyalgia patients get to deal with: if we don't exercise, it makes our fibro worse. And when our fibro is flaring, it is really, really hard to exercise. So we don't, and the fibro gets worse.

My knees are finally getting better (to the point I may just keep up the PT and not get surgery, yay!), but I'm in the midst of the worst fibro flare I've had in a long time. It hurts to flex my hands (and yes, typing hurts). It hurts to stretch. It hurts to walk. It hurts to sit still. Everything hurts.

And it will continue to hurt until I go back to exercising.

I've started doing a very, very gentle stretching routine. Not quite every day, but more days than not. It's helping. Once I can do the stretching routine without making "ow ow ow" faces, I'm going to start walking laps again. And work back up to going to Aikido and working out and everything.

It's hard to be patient with this stuff. I resent that at age 31 I have trouble making myself do a stretching routine designed for, as far as I can tell, women in their fifties. I resent that the things I need to do to make myself feel better hurt like crazy. I resent that this illness is keeping me from the things I love -- Aikido, swimming, not being in constant pain.

The one good thing that has come out of this is that it has really forced me to understand the women I remember looking down on when I first was diagnosed with fibro. There were women on my email lists who could hardly leave the house because they hurt so bad, gals who some days couldn't get dressed because the weight of their clothes hurt their skin. Women who said they couldn't exercise because it hurt too much and they had no energy. This whole experience has made me really sympathize -- and made those women even more of a cautionary tale. I do not want to end up like that, and now I know I will if I don't make myself stick to my exercise program, as simple as it is.

I have to exercise or I will keep getting worse. It gives the expression "no pain, no gain" a whole new meaning.

I'm going to go do my stretches now.

File under: Fibromyalgia
Posted at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)