Stuck in the game

Feeling cranky because I am once more at an impasse in the game I have been playing so much of lately, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous.

This time, the culprit is a big nasty demon with the highly unlikely name
Khorramzadeh. He is completely unfair. He can, at will, unleash a series of lightning based spells of devastating power that completely kills at least 2/3 of my party with there being absolutely nothing I can do to prevent it.

And he casts these spells one after each other, all in the same turn, which totally breaks the rules of the game and so it super extra tasty and crispy unfair.

From what I have read, he is sort of the final boss of the game. Not in a literal sense, because there’s plenty of adventure left after him.

But he’s the biggest and baddest boss in the game, according to my fellow players.

Which I suppose is a relief. I’d hate to face a monster that could kick HIS ass.

But it’s all got me kind of bummed. And it has be contemplating things I would normally be far too proud to do, like lowering the difficulty level, or using cheats.

I’d hate to do either of those, but I might have no choice because it’s rapidly becoming clear that my only alternative would be to just give up on the game.

And I have invested too much playtime in this thing for THAT to be an option.

And I am not entirely out of ideas yet. There are techniques I have yet to try to maybe gain an advantage over this motherfucker.

But it’s all put me in a crappy kind of mood.

Live by the game, die by the game, I guess.


Was late for Wound Care this morning because, despite having been reminded of it by Joe and Julian last night, I once more forgot that they switched me back to coming in twice a week to have my bandages changed.

I am not happy about this.

I liked once a week. At that frequency, I had a whole week to recover between visits and thus they never seemed like a big deal.

Twice a week now feels like a serious imposition.

And the only reason I got switched is that one of the nurses who worked on me recently “thought” that “maybe” one of my bandages, the one for the wound on my left foot, was wet with a lot of discharge that one time.

That’s not nearly enough of an excuse to fuck with my time, in my opinion.

But what can I do? I am merely a lowly patient. The Nurses have spoken and their word is law in my little kingdom.

I do plan on making my feelings on the subject known. I was going to do so today but then I arrived late and kind of lost the moral high ground right away.

Next Tuesday, though. I shall be a little crabby about it.

Watch out. I may get mildly cross!

Oh, and I finally made an appointment to see Doctor Caswell today. It’s something I have been needing to do for more than two weeks, but I kept putting it off and putting it off till it became this whole bete noire.

Feels good to have finally gotten it done.

Take that, Bette!

More after the break.


From the depths of the FruBrain :

“For you see dear, it was never that I wanted to hurt you. I just didn’t care whether or not I did. And I think I deserve some credit for that. ”

I could probably write three times as much in this thing if I just wrote down all the stuff that my brain just naturally produces.

Like the above bit of dialogue. That just came to me. I wasn’t even thinking about writing or anything. It just coalesced out of the rich and flavourful gumbo of my mind.

It’s like the primordial soup. Only caliente!



Still haven’t killed that goddamned demon. Tried a few things that the internet suggested, none of which worked.

I’m getting to the point where I might be willing to “respec” all my characters.

No, I didn’t forget the “t” in “respect”. Aretha Franklin taught me better than that.

No, to “respec” a character is to reset the character so you can choose all their skills, abilities, spells, and so on over again based on what you know now.

It tends to be a lot of work, especially in a system like Pathfinder which runs very deep, but the reward is that you get to choose only the skills etc that you now know are useful and skip the ones that turned out to be duds.

It’s basically the fantasy of starting your life over with what you know now. Only it only works in video games.

Which is too bad because I would respec the hell out of myself.

Because as you know, you got to respec yourself before others will respec you!


Today’s been a flabby kind of day.

Well, not the morning. The morning had Wound Care and all that entailed. That trip from the car to the Community Care Clinic just gets longer and longer for me.

Before too long, I will need Julian to push me there in a wheelchair.

Not looking forward to THAT. Although I do look forward to developing those awesomely ripped wheelchair guy arm muscles.

Assuming any of my muscles still work.

Okay, let’s stay out of the medical funk for now. No good can come of dwelling on it. If I want to prevent my dire fate, I know what I need to do.

I need to stop fucking around and get my diabetes under control.

I need to make that my primary task and just keep going at it till I get what I want instead of giving up and running away the minute things get tough.

It’s not going to be easy. In fact, it’s going to hurt like hell. I have babied myself for so long that even the slightest of strains feels like it will tear me apart.

But I dont wanna die.

I don’t want to end up in a wheelchair, unable to walk at all.

I don’t want to die tied down to a bed because if they don’t tie me down I will try to pull my tubes out.

I don’t want to become completely and utterly helpless.

My self-esteem is already pretty shaky. I already feel like I am an overbrained infant who should have invested more of his character points in actually being good at life.

But it’s not like I can respec myself now.

All I can do is try to be better and do better and maybe actually save my life.

Even though it’s probably going to be a lot of work. Sigh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve got sunshine

This song is smooth soul perfection.

We’ve finally got some real honest to goodness sunshine happening here on the Wet Coast, and I think it’s doing me some good.

I feel somewhat more enegetic and “up” today than I have lately, and boy, do I need that. It occurred to me during Therapy Thursday just how down I have been lately.

Nothing like explaining something to my therapist for me to realize how true it is myself. I figure out a lot of things about myself that way.

Honesty, doc, I had no idea how much I hate her till I told you I did.

Told good ol’ Doc Costin about my dissatisfaction with my interactions with Doc Chao yesterday. There’s just something about being there with a doctor that turns me into a passive and eager to please child.

I think it’s the fact that a doctor takes a sort of parental role in your life. You bring them your problems and they solve them for you. You (mostly) do what they tell you and accept that they have the authority to do this to and for you.

And they do it from a place of superior knowledge and experience, just like adults do when you’re a child.

So I react to them like I reacted to my parents, by telling them whatever it was I thought they wanted to hear so they would go away and leave me alone.

And yes, I know there is so very much wrong with that response, It means I was an active participant in my being ignored because when people did pay attention to me, I told them what they wanted to hear, which was that everything was fine and therefore they can go away and stop thinking about me again.

All I can say is that I didn’t arrive at this response by accident. It came about because if I told them the truth about how hard things were for me at school, they wouldn’t stop everything they were doing to deal with it, like some sitcom family.

Family meeting, everyone!

They would just stand there looking awkward aqd shocked, their eyes silently pleading for me to do what I was supposed to do and give them permission to leave.

If I had been someone with less empathy and a stronger sense of self and self-worth, I would have refused to rescue them and let them deal with the truth of my pain.

But I knew they didn’t really care. So to hell with them. I’m not going to let them kick me in the head over and over again on the off chance that THIS time, they mean it.

It’s amazing how so many seemingly complex parenting issues basically boil down to “stop punishing them for doing the thing you want them to do!”.

If when your kids call you, you rant and rave and attack them verbally, don’t be surprised when they stop calling you.

My father never learned that lesson. So he died completely alone.

God as my witness, I have no idea where I was going with all this.

Oh well. Whatcha gonna do?

More after the break.


That salad I love

Did my weekly-ish online grocery shopping today. Ergo I got potato salad.

As I have mentioned before, I really love potato salad. So I get it when there is room in the weekly buidget for it and I am in the mood.

I shouldn’t.. It’s basically carbs and fat and protein from the eggs.

Oh, right. It’s actually potato and EGG salad, which is way better than just plain potato salad in my books.

Those of you becoming overwhelmed by the sheer thrill of this hot news are advised to find a dim, cool place to lie down, fan your forehead, and drink cold fluids.

A shot in the arm

..can be surprisingly painful.

So picture this. Yesterday I notice that the flesh part of my left shoulder hurt. Felt like I’d gotten hit there with a rubber bullet. It was very uncomfortable and sore.

So immediately I think, oh god, another random malfunction of my body. Another part of me developing a weird fault out of nowhere. Another part of me that is going to end up taking out a chunk of my flesh.

And on and on like that.

It was hours before I suddenly remembered that I had gotten two shots, one for the flu and the other for pneumonia,. when I was in Doctor Chao’s office that morning.

And they had been, of course, intramuscular shots in that exact spot.

D’oh. I felt pretty silly about my outrageously negative earlier assumption. But that’s where my mind goes when suddenly stressed.

I instantly leap to the most negative of conclusions based on vastly insufficient evidence. It’s like I am always expecting the worst to happen and soI will immediately conclude it has at the slightest provocation.

I’m really not a sensible person, am I? Sigh.

Thank god I’m at least cute.

Anyhow, I don’t get where this negative assumption comes from. It’s not like I have hads a lot of really terrible things happen in my life.

In fact, my life tends to lack events of any kind at all. Which is its own problem.

So maybe I leap to negative conclusions in part because I am so eager for ANYTHING to happen in my life that even a bad thing happening has a certain appeal.

Could be worse. I could leap to absurdly POSITIVE conclusions and then be absolutely crushed when I have to come back down to earth.

At least when I get a grip on myself and counter the negative conclusions, it’s a relief.

Phew,. things are not nearly as bad as I just thought they were. Thank God.

Can’t help but be a little disappointed too, though.

For a minute, it seemed like something was going to actually happen.

I need to think about what I can do to make GOOD things happen in my life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.