Heather Meadows – Page 100 – p i x e l s c r i b b l e s

Bleh

I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing lately, reading my old AMRN posts and enjoying the interactions I had with other characters and the long scenes I’d write for characters and NPCs. I decided to share the posts I was enjoying with other people on the board, so I started a thread on the GenDis.

For the most part it has been a fun thread, with some old-timers chiming in with their thoughts. But at some point I mentioned that maybe I wasn’t that bad of a GM after all, and then he made a comment.

I’m not noting a lot of combat posts in this thread. Bar scenes and briefings and debriefings, yes; combat, no.

Just an observation.

He’s actually wrong; there were no bar scenes ;P But that’s beside the point. What he is really doing is gently reminding me that yes indeed, I did suck as a GM.

This guy and I have never gotten along. He rubbed me the wrong way from the very first time he emailed me to tell me all the things the AMRN was doing wrong. I was always on the defensive with him and completely unwilling to listen to anything he had to say.

I’m not proud of my reactions, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t an asshole.

Up until the time I read his post I had been thinking I wanted to run a small game, with players I liked and with all new characters. I wanted the game to cover a long time period, to involve character development, and to span various different types of campaign. I planned to start with the characters as hostages, then move to things like ground-pounding, intel-gathering, escaping into the underground, and maybe occasionally a mecha battle. But the idea was that the group wouldn’t have a home to return to at the end of each day; they would be on the run, trying to get to somewhere they could call home. Thanks to events at the beginning of the story, no one would know they were alive, so it would be completely up to them.

It was a Macross game in my head, partly because I didn’t want to have to build a whole new universe. New settings are one thing, but laying out ground rules for an entire universe is a bit much for something that’s supposed to be a fun hobby. But I wondered if I really wanted to do Macross, or if I just chose it because I was used to it.

Now, of course, I’m feeling depressed. Regardless of the fact that this guy’s a jerk, he did remind me of the reason I quit the AMRN in the first place. If I go back and try again, will the results be any different?

Bleh, indeed.

No. Surely Pete isn’t that evil.

…okay, so maybe he is.

But please, let it not be what I think this time.

Those Hallows sure are Deathly, I tell you what

So, here’s the US cover for HPatDH.

There are two other covers, the ones used in Britain (e.g., Land o’ Brookie). All three are interesting. I have to admit that Mary GrandPre’s art has grown on me, though.

Something funny: the articles describe Voldemort as reaching towards Harry in the US version, but to me it looks like he’s trying to ward off or magick something in front of Harry that we can’t see.

Perhaps the effect is different when the artwork is wrapped around a book.

Yuck.

It looks so freaking good in pictures and on the commercials.

Too bad it tastes nasty and the runny sauce dribbles all over everything and it keeps falling apart while you’re trying to eat it.

If you’d like a sandwich experience where you have to work to eat mediocre chicken in a sauce that literally stinks, try Hardee’s Spicy Buffalo Chicken Sandwich.

I’ll just get wings, thanks.

Tidying up

I’ve made some changes to my sidebar.

In the Links, I have finally gotten rid of my old “Things We Lost in the Fire” Amazon wish list. It’s been almost two years! I did, however, move the items from that list that I still want to have into other lists.

I’ve broken out “Reference and How-Tos” from “Nonfiction”, and I’ve changed “In My Dreams” to “Electronics and Appliances”. I’ve also added my “Games” list, which I’d created on Amazon awhile back but never gotten around to linking.

The wish lists are now grouped according to type, so my list over at Amazon.co.jp is with “Help Me Learn Japanese“, “CDs” and “DVDs” are together, all the books–“Fiction“, “Manga and Graphic Novels“, “Nonfiction“, “Cookbooks“, and “Reference and How-Tos“–are in a group, and “Games” and “Electronics and Appliances” fall last.

I’ve also made some changes to Fun Stuff. My Twitter, Ficlets, Dandelife, YouTube, and MySpace profiles are all linked now. I’ve grouped these with other communities/sites I’m affiliated with. The next group of links are fun Flash videos, then Japan-related stuff, and finally various cool things, to which I’ve added NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Finally, down in Comics, I’ve removed Bruno, which is over, Venus Envy, which updates so slowly that I don’t even care about the story anymore, and Help Desk, which used to be interesting but is now just “meh”, and I don’t have time to read “meh” comics. (I don’t think the content has really changed…I think I’m just tired of that kind of humor.) I have added Achewood, which I could never get into before but for some reason am finding intriguing now, and Evil, Inc.

I’m more and more wanting to redesign my blog template. I know so much more about web design now than when I first put it together. I’d like to keep the main features–the checkered background, the colors, even the style of the boxes around all the content, if not the boxes themselves. But I think the site could flow a lot better, and I would like to lay out my sidebar in lists. I mentioned before thinking it’d be a good idea to have the search as part of the header, and I’d still like to do that. I’m also interested in creating an archive drop-down up there. Of course, ideally, my design would be achieved through CSS, with none of this table garbage.

We’ll see what happens as my ideas congeal. Hopefully this won’t go the way of my fabled shift to WordPress.

(Speaking of which, I probably won’t make that shift. Blogger has had its issues, but it works for my purposes. I like the fact that I essentially have a backup of my entire blog–the static files here on my server, and the Blogger database of my posts and comments over on their server. Plus, WordPress gets hacked regularly, which means I would have to update my software all the time. Also, one of the main features I found attractive on WordPress is obsolete these days. That feature is dynamic pages, and the reason they’re obsolete is that they use too much bandwidth. So, there you have it.)

Reading

I read The Last Unicorn for the first time. I started it yesterday and finished it today.

It was really good.

I particularly enjoyed getting to know more about Schmendrick, and seeing him come into his magic. I was also glad to see Molly Grue perceived as beautiful. I had always thought she was. It was nice that someone in the book also thought so.

I’m glad some of the proceeds from my DVD went to Beagle.

Next up: Snow Crash. Also for the first time!

Day 10

Yes, ten.

Kill me now.

It let off enough yesterday morning and early afternoon that I thought it was over, and then all of a sudden…whoosh.

Yeah, thanks.

Okay, now I really do want to move

To be fair, I’m sure they edited out all the correct answers…but still.

(That one older gentleman who said Hiroshima and Nagasaki were famous for judo-wrestling…shouldn’t he know better? I mean…wasn’t he alive then? O_o

(I also wanted to die when that guy said Yasser Arafat was the president of Al Qaeda, a suicide group in Israel…and don’t get me started on that fake map, and how no one noticed it was wrong!

(Also disenheartening were the responses to the question “Who should be invaded next?” Not just because they were stupid, but because no one said, “I don’t think we need to invade anyone.”)

Remission

Today, March 25, 2007, is my ninth BMT birthday.

On this day in 1998, I lay in a hospital bed wearing a new pinkish purple Easter dress as my brother’s bone marrow dripped from an IV into the groshong catheter implanted in my chest.

It was actually kind of anticlimactic, after the six months of chemotherapy and surgery and pain and vomiting and frustration at not being allowed to go outside. I laid around in bed for two hours and that was it.

They call it a birthday because you’re replacing your bone marrow–essentially starting your body over, being “reborn”. I had to have all my baby vaccinations again, and it’s possible that other things changed. But the procedure was overwhelmingly successful. My body didn’t reject the bone marrow, and my immune system had built itself up again in 21 days. I went home and never again set foot in Markey Cancer Center’s bone marrow inpatient area.

It’s possible that my leukemia was gone before the bone marrow transplant took place. I suspect that the second round of chemotherapy got it, since my tests after that were clean. But we did another round and then did a BMT just to be sure. My particular cancer was rare and my treatment was experimental.

I’d say my doctors made pretty good choices, overall.

It has been a strange nine years, readjusting to normalcy. Some days I forget I ever had cancer. Some days I’m thrilled to be here to experience the world.

Some days I’m still a little angry that the treatments that saved my life took away the one dream I’ve held constant since childhood.

A large struggle since leaving the hospital has been against the desire to foster my own victim status. Being a victim is very empowering. People have to listen to you. You feel a sense of entitlement. Back in the beginning, I’d manipulate conversations so that I could casually remark about how I’d been in the hospital. I’d downplay it, of course–even then I realized that my experience was far easier than that of many, perhaps most, cancer patients. But usually there was no need to mention it at all. Somehow, I’d always find a reason to.

This was of course a part of my healing process. I’m not saying I should have somehow bounced back immediately. I did need to talk about it. My point is simply that there comes a point when you’re saying the same things over and over and not getting anywhere. I’ve seen that happen plenty of times in my life, but I absolutely refuse to allow it to mire me in victimhood.

No matter how good it feels to be a victim, it ultimately keeps you unhappy. You need the euphoria you feel when someone takes an interest in you, and as time passes and the immediacy of whatever made you think like a victim fades, so does other people’s interest. You sense that, and it makes you feel worthless. And you have a few choices. You can continue to desperately milk the original situation; you can come up with a new situation to victimize yourself; or you can get the hell over it and find a proactive way to get noticed.

It’s possible that without Sean’s influence on me early in my recovery, I would have wallowed in my victim status for years. I will always be thankful that he came into my life when he did.

I now have one thing that still makes me feel like a victim. It was especially bad towards the beginning of my marriage to Sean. That is, of course, infertility–the damage done to my ovaries by chemotherapy. I have for the most part come to terms with the possibility that I may never give birth to my own child. But it does still hurt me when people ask if I’m planning on kids, or when I don’t have a period or when my period is strange and I decide to take a pregnancy test. I’m obviously not completely over it.

But I won’t be a victim of this, either. I am the one who decides how my life is going to be, and I have decided that I am going to do the best I can to learn and grow and experience the world and people around me. If children someday factor into that, adopted or otherwise, then great…but I’ve decided that my life paradigm needs to shift. So I probably won’t be a stay-at-home mom who gardens and cooks healthy dinners every night and takes the kids out on fun trips…so what? I can choose to do any number of things that make me happy. Just because one door closes doesn’t mean there aren’t others to choose from.

I can also make the conscious choice every day to think about all the good that has come into my life.

So it’s my bone marrow birthday. The anniversary of my rebirth. A day I will always remember, and a day on which I typically find myself looking back and evaluating and ultimately looking forward.

I hope I’ve grown.

I don’t want to go so far as to say that someday I will stop observing this day, but I am committed at least to not letting this day, and the history behind it, define me.

For the love of all that is good and pure in the universe, stop saying "Huh"

“Huh” is the absolute worst word in existence.

Please. Stop using it in your dubs.

Try “Hmm?” or “Eh?” or “Gnah?” or “Err…” or maybe just a slight intake of breath. Something.

And while you’re at it, how about not replacing music or changing character names? Yeah, thanks, that’d be great.

(I have to admit that dubs are getting better. They still suck, of course, but they are getting better.)

I have no friends!

Now that Brooke is gone, who am I supposed to drag along when I get free tickets to stuff?

I’m going to Quartetto Gelato tonight at the Imperial, and of course I have two tickets, but I can’t think of anyone to invite!

I did ask Wes, but he had play practice, and I tried Mari, but it was way too short notice.

I’m so exhausted right now I don’t even know if I want to go, but I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.

So blah. I guess my purse will have its own seat.

Either that or I could randomly give it to a stranger. But I doubt I will see many other people attending the concert by themselves.

Edit: I’m still at work at 7:55, and the show starts at 8…so I just called the Imperial to tell them they could sell or give my tickets away to someone else. They seemed to appreciate that, which is good.

I’m feeling a little poopy. Just need to get done here and go home and change into my nightclothes and veg out with my Initial D First Stage DVDs.

She says I’m visiting her in July though

I went to Brooke’s old apartment during my lunchbreak to spend a little time with her. Right about now she should be at Augusta Regional Airport, getting ready for the first leg of her transcontinental trip home.

While I was at the apartment I noticed she had a tiny Magic 8 ball sitting above her stove. I picked it up, and, stupidly, I asked, “Will I ever be able to have children?”

There was a big blue glob in the way, so I couldn’t see the whole message. The last word was “Doubt”.

“Will I see Brooke again this year?” I asked.

The reply appeared to be “Count on it”, but I just checked a list of standard Magic 8 Ball responses, and the only one like that in the list is “Don’t count on it”.

The list does include “Without a doubt”, though.

Want to read something totally stupid?

I am completely flabbergasted by this so-called scientific evidence of Creation.

Bowling Green, KY, March 23, 2007 – In what has turned out to be the most controversial document since Charles Darwin penned the “Origin of the Species”, “Episteme Scientia-The Law of All that Is,” suggests science has been proving God’s existence, all along. The abstract states, “An examination of the sequential mathematical and experimental dual proof of the Genesis record of origins underlying the institution of all that is in the universe-from waves to matter to the mind.” According to the author, the Scientific Method has been subtly proving the Genesis cosmology in every classroom around the world for more than 450 years-in spite of the fervency to promote evolution and big bang theories.

Known online as “the kid,” the author, Samuel J. Hunt, a student at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, boasts of being able to prove all matter was spoken into existence just as Genesis records. The kid says it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. First Order Logic states: if A=B, and B=C, then A=C. This means that if the premises are true and equal, then the conclusion must be true.

1) There is a mathematical and physical relationship between all (a) matter and (b) frequency,

2) There is a mathematical and physical relationship between all (b) frequency and (c) sound.

3) Therefore, there is a mathematical and physical relationship between all (a) matter and (c) sound.

By first order logic (the premises 1 and 2 are confirmed by all physics and chemistry to be true and equal) it can be shown that matter not only has a mathematical relationship to sound but a physical one as well. This proves that God did speak all things into existence; and the body of every living creature from bacteria to human, as all perform this process millions of times per day through their senses, is living proof.

Samuel says that his document is the mathematical and empirical proof that the bible can and is compatible to and verifiable by science on levels that are only just now beginning to be recognized. The proof also answers dozens of other scientific, theological, and philosophical questions. Hunt says, “I’m not here to argue for evidence of this or that. It’s important, but that’s like putting God on trial and allowing people to believe whatever they want. My document proves the Genesis record as the only infallible scientific explanation for our origins.” According to Hunt, his 84-page document holds the missing factor in the quest to find the Grand Unified Theory of Science.

Even now, the Darwinists are taking up arms. After reading only a short quip of Hunt’s wisdom they’re talking about “a good book-burning,” “paradigm shifts,” “eating crow” and the threat of losing more scientists “to the other side.” The paper’s genius lies in its simple, yet profound integration of several mathematical systems, scientific experiments, and observable phenomenon that happen all around us every day. Hunt’s book is available for purchase on-line at www.scienceprovescreation.com.

About Samuel J. Hunt: A Third year student at Western Kentucky University majoring in Pre-Physical Therapy and Nutrition/ Dietetics. Funds created from the sale of the book will support further research and experimentation and the dream of opening a rehabilitation clinic after finishing his education.

Let me just pluck out the phenomenally ridiculous leg upon which his entire argument stands:

By first order logic…it can be shown that matter not only has a mathematical relationship to sound but a physical one as well. This proves that God did speak all things into existence

A proposed physical relationship between matter and sound proves that God spoke everything into existence? O…M…G.

I’m half-tempted to ask for a review copy of his book, just for laughs.

Being pissed off makes me so tired

I’ve spent the majority of the afternoon in a raging fury, no doubt stoked by the flames of PMS. (Is it actually PMS during your period, or just beforehand?) Setting the influence of my hormones aside, I did have genuine reason to be upset.

I was eventually able to solve the problem to a reasonable degree, but not quite to my satisfaction. Still, things are better than they were an hour ago.

Now I’m coming down from the adrenaline rush that fueled (or was fueled by) my anger, and I feel like curling up and taking a nap.

However, there is news to get online! And so I must get to it.

T to the M to the I

You know those T-shirts that say “I don’t trust anything that bleeds for three days and doesn’t die”?

I hate those.

Not because the joke isn’t funny. It’s funny, all right. No, the reason I’m pissed is because my normal periods have always been far longer than three days.

Man. Three days. That would be fabulous.

So apparently this is a real, full-blown period, achieved without the influence of hormone supplements. I’ve had cramps all morning and I still feel bloated. The blood (ewwww, I know, but I told you this was TMI) is bright red, and this is not a trickle.

There was a time when I thought I would love to have a regular period again naturally. I thought that the knowledge that I was “normal” again would supercede the discomfort.

Obviously I was delusional.

I was thinking this morning “At least I’m not all hormonal and emotional like I used to get on my period,” but apparently thinking that was all it took ;> So now little things are starting to irritate me. Here’s hoping the Midol will help.

Ah, the chalky taste of Midol. It’s been years.