Side Effects Include Being Less Awesome
I don’t even know where to start or what exactly I am going to write about. I know I should write. Well, actually, I know that most days I should write, and most days I don’t. This blog is becoming a bi-monthly thing, which is ok, I guess, but I need to be doing something. I mean, I don’t want to “blog” (god I hate that word as an adjective) about my life on a daily basis. That would bore the piss out of me.
There is an awful lot going on right now though. The world just feels extra intense, if Im allowed to describe it rather amateurishly. I guess the biggest news is that Arnee and I are looking to move back to Connecticut. This, I think, is a very good thing. I’m glad to have lived in NYC. Actually, I wish I did it when I was younger and I would have taken advantage of it more… but even as is, it’s an experience that I think makes me a bit more rounded as a person. But truth of the matter is that living in NYC is very hard. It’s worth it, because it really does feel like the center of the universe, but that also mean it’s extremely fucking tiring. The city is brutal. It’s never not busy. There’s never no traffic. Everything costs a goddamn fortune. There’s crazy people doing crazy shit everywhere. There’s opportunity and failure and opportunity and failure and it’s just so goddamn intense.
Intense is something I’m not. If a survey went out to all of my friends asking to describe me I can say with 99% accuracy that the word intense would not ever be mentioned, unless it was preceded with the words “not” or “isn’t.” That, in itself, is why I had to live in NYC. Well, I had to live in NYC because I fell in love with a woman that lived here… but on an intellectual and emotional level, that’s why I had to live here. One of my greatest struggles in life is breaking out of comfort zones. This explains why after 9 years, and moving 100 miles away, im still working at the same job. This explains why on my drive to work I stop at the same place, at the same time, and get the same food and the same drink. I crave routine. I really want everything to be predictable. I do, as most folks know, have a diagnosed panic disorder, so my brain is anything but predictable. So in response I over compensate by trying to be as comfortable as possible at all times.
This makes succeeding in life a bit difficult, as I’m sure most of you can imagine. I am an exhausting person to be around. It’s a bit ironic that someone could be so lackadaisical and aloof, like I am, yet be so goddamn frustrating. I think things would be easier if I was dumb, or untalented, or generally just mediocre. But even I, who struggles with self-esteem issues (kinda) know that isn’t the case. I’m a pretty smart dude, with an interesting and (usually) funny view of the world. I kan rite gud. I’m impressive in conversation, even if I do tend to stutter and say um a lot. If you know me you know I’m capable of great things. And if you know me you know that in 34 years I haven’t even come close yet.
So what do I do? I don’t know. I hoped that moving to NYC would be the kick in the ass to get me going. It wasn’t. I also hoped that getting married would be the kick in the ass to get me going. It wasn’t either. In fact, right now, I am in a severe funk. I can’t put my finger on exactly why. Well, I can put together a road map that got me here, and it makes sense, but none of the items in and of themselves is good enough to be considered a cause. But let’s review.
I’m stuck in my job. I don’t mean, necessarily, that I’m stuck *at* my job, though I kinda am (see: aforementioned comfort). But at my job, living in NYC, I’m not going to move ahead. They wouldn’t promote me. If they got high on meth and did promote me I wouldn’t be capable of fulfilling the role anyway. So I’m cruising along, doing work im overqualified for, getting paid dick, and not being challenged in the slightest. And then there’s marriage, which for the most part is really neat. In our first year of marriage Arnee and I have fought less than most of my more complicated relationships. But, when you’re married, the disagreements carry more weight. No longer am I arguing about someone not paying attention to me, or paying too much attention to me, or whatever other emo shit I was ever concerned about. These are conversations, sometimes loud, about money, about babies, about jobs, about our whole goddamn lives. It’s a lot to process! I mean, seriously, every other relationship I’ve been a part of we were just trying to make it through the week. Arnee and I are discussing things to make it through the century. There is a comfort in that, but fuck if it isn’t difficult.
And then there’s the uncontrollable shit that happens in life. Arnee’s mother, for instance, is losing her memory and personality and ability to take care of herself. This is an impossible situation. Most thing, in fact all of the things I mentioned up above, there *is* a happy resolution to, it’s just a matter if we can get there or not. This. This fucking nightmare, this is something that doesn’t, can’t, won’t end in rainbows and puppies. It’s painful, it’s exhausting, it’s disgusting – to be frank. Life is a cruel bitch. This situation sucks and there’s nothing we can do to make it not suck. Hopefully moving back to CT and spending more time with her and giving her brother and sister in a law a much needed reprieve will be helpful… but let’s be honest, we aren’t even close to shedding our last tears over this. Not even close.
All of this is combining to put my brain in a pretty bad spot. Well, I guess relatively speaking. I have, over the years, become much better at dealing with life than I once was. Like, for instance, I’m still sober. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been thinking about drinking, ALOT, lately, but I’m sober. I can deal with this shit without it. If and when i do have a drink again, it shouldn’t be because I can’t handle life. But beyond just that, I’m clearly depressed, or at the very least borderline depressed. I spend (some, not all) days completely miserable. I am way, way more sensitive with my friends and acquaintances than I should be (I mean, I am when in a normal mood, so when I’m like this im wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy sensitive and I think a bit unbearable to be around). I am fucking up left and right at work. The post below this is when I thought I was getting fired. Yeah, it’s that bad. Well, actually, it *was* that bad. In recent weeks I’ve gotten my shit together and I’ve been doing better. It’s insane that I could do bad at a job that is completely second nature to me now… but that’s where I am in my head. My memory is a disaster lately. I can’t remember shit.
It may be more than depression and stress. I went to the doctor on Friday. They took a bunch of blood and are testing for other stuff… the most likely being diabetes, something that is prevalent on both sides of my family. Diabetes is something that completely scares the shit out of me. I mean, I know it’s manageable, but what scares me is that it pretty much dominates and changes your life. As I mentioned several paragraphs ago… that’s not really something I’m good at. It scares me. I know I can do it, but I know it won’t come easy to me. I’m just not built to take on that much change all at once.
Through this all, though, my wife has been pretty goddamn amazing. I mean, does she want to strangle me when I lose all grip of financial sanity and spend money I don’t have on shit I don’t need? Yes, of course she does. But does she also sit up and do everything in her power to make me feel better as I’m having a panic attack at 4am? She sure does. She hasn’t completely perfected it yet, but she is becoming pretty darn good at balancing putting a foot in my ass to move me forward… and know when to let up because I’m becoming overwhelmed. This is a level of extra effort it takes to be with me, a level that no one (and I’m not blaming them) ever wanted to give, but she does. And she’s amazing for that. I hope in return I’m equally good to her. I think I am. Arnee is a high energy person and I think I’m good at grounding her a bit, keeping her even keeled and focused on what really matters. This first year, which is up in less than a month, has been a whirlwind, but not because of how we treat each other. In fact I think we both would be fucked right now if we didn’t have each other. So that’s cool.
But… but, I’m just not happy right now. I wish I was. But I’m not. I’ll hear on Tuesday whether or not it’s physical, but it’s probably just in my head. And I need to get that shit straight. I have a call in to my psychologist and I think moving back to CT will really help. I have a plan to get better, and that’s the most important part of getting out of shit like this, but as of right this moment I’m down. And if it’s becoming a drag on you, however you are related to my life, be it wife, friend (internet included), or through work… I apologize. I’ll get better.
I need a job.
So then I fell like that girl from a balance beam.
A gymnasium of eyes were all holding on to me.
I lifted one foot to cross the other
and I felt myself slipping.
It was a small mistake.
Sometimes that is all it takes.
–Connor Oberst From a Balance Beam
Life isn’t fair. News at 11.
I’m going to start this whole thing with a disclaimer, because I start every conversation I have with everyone with disclaimers or explanations or excuses or whatever. It’s what I do and even though i know I do it, and I know it’s unnecessary, I can’t stop myself from doing it anyway. So the disclaimer here is that I am very, very frustrated… but, I know that I really have no one to be frustrated at but myself. I mean, that’s kinda the point of everything im about to write. But the bottom line is that i fucked up at work and now I am reaping the consequences. I also know that bitching about work online is about as bad of a move as one could possibly make. ANNNNNDDDD, I know that with my job in particular talking about it in public is generally a no-no. In fact, it can be illegal.
This isn’t going to be illegal though, at least as far as I can tell. If you don’t know what I do lets just call myself a social worker. Or a caregiver. Actually i guess caregiver is closer to the proper definition. So, obviously, I can’t talk about the folks I give care to. But that’s fine because this isn’t about them. When it comes to my job, in regards to them, everything is great. This is about everything else.
I guess the short version is that once a year you need to jump through a couple hoops to keep your “med certification.” This has changed over time, but usually involves a test, sometimes it involves pouring meds in front of the nurse and getting quizzed on the drugs you’re giving. The whole thing always seemed so silly to me. I think the reason for that is that I started in this field in Vermont, which has much, much, much, much, much less bureaucracy surrounding everything. On my first day on the job, my first day in the field, I was given a bunch of pills and told “give these to her at night.”
You know why that’s all I was told? BECAUSE THAT’S HOW EASY IT IS! But, we live in the land of the sue happy. I live in the state where a few caregivers decided they wanted to go shopping and they left the person they were giving care to in their car with the windows rolled up and that person died. Everyone feels like they have to cover their ass from every possible angle. So, if you want to give meds as a caregiver in CT you need to take a 40 hour course. And then you need to do a huge test (I believe it was 80 questions… it was 8 years ago so my memory is fuzzy) and you have to fake giving meds in front of the instructor… and then you go back to the house you work at and you have to give meds in front of your nurse there. And then, even though you passed and you’ve had your work checked twice, you still have to wait several weeks until your med card comes in because if you try to dispense meds without it certainly the world will explode.
The absolute silliness of med giving is not my gripe however. That’s just one in a long list of gripes about how we have become such an overprotective society that we’ve lost so much common sense. And the thing is, if you suck at your job, if you are truly a terrible person and you are so preoccupied with other shit in your life that you are going to fuck up giving meds… a 40 hour class WILL NOT CHANGE THAT. So in the end it’s a pain in the ass for those of us who have a very basic capacity for critical thought, and it has zero effect on those that don’t.
I don’t even mean to go off on this tangent. My issue is that I was supposed to take this test by this thursday and I didn’t. My excuse is that I didn’t know. I, like an idiot, thought that I had until the end of March. I should have checked. Double checked. Triple checked. But I didn’t. I got a frantic call from my boss at 12:30 asking me if I had taken my med test. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was high out of my mind on codeine and already freaking the fuck out. I was on my way to the oral surgeon to get two teeth extracted and two small chunks of my jaw bone removed. This was a big deal, not just because of the obvious pain, but because my anxiety disorder has kept me away from dentists for over a decade. They scare the fucking shit out of me. It’s not rationale, I actually don’t even mind the pain or the drills or anything. But anxiety disorders aren’t rationale. Anyway, I told my boss I couldn’t even think (because, really, I couldn’t) and got off the phone. But as I sat in the surgeons room as he shot Novocaine into my mouth over and over (I swear it was like 15 shots) the adrenaline from what was about to happen to me kinda washed the haze out of my brain created by the codeine. The surgeon called Arnee in to go over options to replace one of the teeth (I had a molar and a wisdom tooth removed – he wanted to replace the molar, obviously). We have no money so it was like LOLOLOLOL $4000, um no, I’ll live with a space there thank you. But her being in there gave me the chance to ask her to call my boss. This shit at work had officially started wearing heavier on my brain than the surgery that was about to happen.
The extraction was fine, by the way. I mean it took him forever, he even commented on how i had some of the toughest teeth to pull he had seen in a while. And the sound of his pliers cracking the teeth in half was somewhat jarring — but i couldn’t feel a damn thing so I actually didn’t mind the whole thing. I didn’t freak out. Cool.
After getting orders not to talk for the rest of the day I got out and called my boss and tried to plead my case. I didn’t know! If only someone had told me I would have done it! It’s not like I knew and willfully decided not to do it. In fact, a few weeks ago I made a special trip into CT just for the sole reason of getting a bunch of trainings done. I was told at that point I was caught up on everything. I also just a few weeks ago had my quarterly evaluation, where we talked about how I needed to do those trainings, but there was no mention of the med test.
Again, I know it’s my job to know. If my boss were to read this he would be screaming at the screen “BUT ITS NOT OUR JOB TO TELL YOU WHEN YOUR STUFF IS DUEEEEEEE!” And he’s right. But it’s unfortunate.
On the new Bright Eyes album Conor sings the phrase “I wouldn’t waste another thought — on what is fair and what is not.” He’s right, but I am going to waste thoughts on it, in fact I’ll probably waste several thousand words on it.
There are things I am not good at and there are things I do well. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true of 105% of all humans. In my job, I am really good at bringing calm to situations that are otherwise frantic. I am also good at keeping the atmosphere light. I’ve gotten better at things like cooking and cleaning. I am bad, however, at remembering things like trainings. What ends up happening is that what I suck at becomes the obsession. It’s not just me, this isn’t Pete Dodd specific behavior. It’s just the way humans are. I mean, I may actually be in the running for the husband of the year award, and most of the time my wife would agree with that, but if you catch her in the proper mood every single good deed I do won’t matter, what will matter are my weaknesses. Did I sit with her last night talking her through a crying panic attack? Yes. Does that matter right now? No, the fact that I suck at saving money does. Did I suck at money last night when I sat with her? Yes. Did it matter then? No.
Life isn’t fair. Boo fucking hoo. There are million of kids that will work their asses off this quarter at school only to get a C in gym and get reamed out for that C instead of praised for the A+’s in some sort of super math that their parents couldn’t even comprehend. We are obsessed with the negative! And that’s what is happening with me right now. Everyone involved… my boss, the nurse, the people at the main office, everyone… they all know I suck at knowing when I have to do trainings. They know I’m great at my job, they know that the guys I take care of are safe and calm and happy when I’m there. But that doesn’t matter. HE SUCKS AT TRAININGS! HE MUST BE PUNISHED.
If at any point one of those people said “hey, Pete, you’re med thing is due March 3″ I would not be in this position right now. But, again, for the 90th time, it’s not their job to tell me that. So they didn’t. And im sure they want me to learn my lesson. Will I? Time will tell, I guess.
So, the bottom line is that the administration is deciding over the next week whether to pull me off the schedule (without pay) until I take the med course again (which can be a few months from now). It’s like being fired without the ability to collect unemployment.
I just feel so frustrated. I know it’s my fault. I know. I know. I KNOW! But there’s this part of my brain, that’s still bathed in the idealist that teenage Pete Dodd was, that wishes the world was filled with people helping each other out. When i started at my job I worked almost all of my shifts with this one girl. She was a mom and she was great at the stereotypical (in the old fashioned sense) “mom stuff.” She cooked, because the food she made was great, and the food I made was poop. She cleaned because when she did it the house looked and smelled great and when I did it the house looked slightly less like a disaster (but a disaster none the less). But there were things within the job she was not great at. When one of the guys had a really hard time he needed 1 on 1 attention. She hated doing this. There were actually a bunch of situations like that — that she just wasn’t good at. I was. I would spend hours sitting in the guys rooms, helping them calm down, cracking jokes, generally trying to make people happy. It was awesome, between the two of us we worked the perfect shift. The guys were happy, emergencies were handled with as little stress as possible, the house was in great condition, the paperwork was filled out…
But then they took me off the schedule with her because we weren’t “learning new skills.” First off, that wasn’t true. She saw how I handled the guys, I learned quite a few things about cooking that i still use (bouillon cubes in the water that’s cooking brown rice…. mmmm). But I get what they were going for, and over time I got better at that stuff, and she got better at my stuff. But, to be completely honest, in the eight years I’ve been there I have never been part of a shift that did everything so perfectly. We worked together 4 times a week, and everything was great. If you look at the data taken from that time, I would be willing to be that behavior-wise the guys did best during that period. But the obsession with our weaknesses meant that we had to be broken up. And the house was worse off for it, even if it means I can cook a pork chop now.
This silly idealism would be great in everything. Like if republicans were truly just worried about fiscal responsibility and personal freedom and liberals were worried about environmental conservation and social justice and both worked together, as each party’s strength is the other’s weakness. But, no, that’s now how it works. Democrats hate republicans for not giving a shit about the environment… and republicans hate democrats for putting all these rules in the way of them making money.
I’m 33 now… 2 months out from turning 34. I’m married. We will hopefully have children in a few years. It’s time for me to grow up. Life isn’t fair. My wife is miserable a large chunk of the time because her mother’s grasp on reality is slipping. My wife is also having trouble getting work sometimes (and working too much other times). Im also rushing her to the ER with ovary pain. And we’re spending weeks sleeping on her mother’s couch trying to take care of her which is mentally more than should be asked of Arnee. I’m having teeth extracted and stomach pains so fucking bad that had my wife not been there I would have taken an ambulance to a hospital. Fuck, I could go on, but it doesn’t matter. This is life, this is what people do. It sucks, but whining about it isn’t going to do a goddamn thing. Right now, at my job, what matters is that I didn’t do this test. All of my good deeds don’t count, no matter how much I wish someone would go “you know what Pete, you do a lot of good work, we’re gonna let this one slide, and we know you will be in the same position next year so since I’m good at scheduling I’ll make sure to give you a reminder call 2 weeks early next year.” That, literally, is too much to ask. Humans just aren’t willing to do that shit. I need to grow the fuck up.
I will say this though. This year has sucked, but without my wife it would have been a disaster. There’s a reason that people with anxiety disorders are either alcoholics or suicidal. I’m neither, and that’s because of Arnee. I feel like she is the only thing holding me together sometimes. I guess our marriage is what I was the ideal i was talking about in this post. We fill in for each others weaknesses. I comfort her through the really tough shit she is dealing with. She takes charge and calls the dentist when i would just go on living in pain. Even through all of the insanity of this year, even if that includes me getting fired (or “removed from the schedule”) I know i’m going to look back on our first year of marriage as a happy time. Funny how that works.
The Lutheran Medical Center ER is a piece of shit
Whenever I play Super Street Fighter 4 with my internet mates someone eventually gets crushed in a match and blames the matchup and the joke is “I’m going to write a strongly worded letter to Seth Killian about ____ (insert egregious offense that was just unleashed on you here).” Seth Killian is a community rep for Capcom, the company that makes SSFIV, and the joke may have an older meaning that I don’t know, but to me it’s always been about feeling helpless and your only bit of recourse is to be one of those old ladies that writes letters to her favorite cereal about how the last time she bought it that it tasted like shit and how when the company gets said letter they will look at it and laugh but maybe send that old bitty a free box to shut her up.
Well I guess for a long time now this blog has been my collection of letters to Seth Killian, but usually about random bullshit going on in my life. After last night, however, it’s about something that is actually real… and the feeling of helplessness I felt while there has forced me into the role of penning an angry letter (well, angry essay is more like it). I’m not sure if it’s actually going to be sent or not, or to who, or whatever. Maybe it will just exist here, though I’m guessing more than a few people will google the exact phrase of the title of this piece and maybe stumble upon this and we can commiserate over how terrible this hospital is, though i doubt they will send us a free box of cereal.
The back story is fairly simple. Arnee (my wife, pronounced Ar-Nay)was having sharp, sudden pain in what she assumed was her left Ovary. About 12 years ago or so she had cists on them so she knows the area pretty well. After a couple of days of the pain increasing in frequency (once every 8 hours to once every 10 minutes) I finally convinced her to go to the doctor (a complete role-reversal for us). We went to see our new doc a few blocks away… he pushed in and did other doctor stuff but admitted that he wasn’t a OBGYN but that the pain worried him. He thought an ultrasound would be needed but couldn’t get Arnee in till tomorrow. We thought about it and decided to go to the ER because the increasing frequency of the pain had us worried enough that spending another night at home not knowing what it was could have been a nightmare. He suggested we go to Lutheran Medical Center and he called a doctor friend there to try to expedite the whole process.
We got there and the first waiting room was pretty packed but we only sat there for 45 minutes or so before being admitted and put in the triage area. Once in there that number of people was staggering. We sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Several hours later a doctor (I think her scrubs said RPA – I’m not up on hospital lingo, but people refered to her as a doctor so I assume she was) saw Arnee for maybe 3 minutes. She pushed on her stomach a few times and decided she needed an ultrasound.
So then we waited and waited and waited and waited and then we got sent up to the Ultrasound area. When we got there Arnee asked if she could have some water, as she was told earlier not to have any, and the nurse said yes. Arnee went in for the ultrasound and the tech scolded her and the nurse for drinking water. Nice that they are all on the same page.
So then that finished and we went back to triage and waited and waited and waited and waited. At one point all visitors were kicked out for “shift change.” During that i was in the outside waiting room. I overheard one woman say that her mother was admitted 20 hours earlier via ambulance and still didn’t have a room. Other people started relaying their current horror stories.
So i finally got to go back in and Arnee was nearly in tears and having a panic attack. I understand that they need to clear the ER out of visitors from time to time, but it’s certainly not good for the patients, especially someone like Arnee (or me, if it was me) who is likely to freak out and potentially go into shock. But that’s what this hospital does. There was not one time during our 10 and a half hours there that I felt like the hospital gave a shit about the human beings inside of it. We were all just an annoyance to the staff. It was busy, which sucks, but to them it’s like they were accountants and we were math equations in a giant pile that they were pissed off they had to solve. Work would be so much easier if these fucking people would just stop being sick!
And as an aside, for those that don’t know me, I am a caregiver myself. I work in a much more controlled environment (a group home) than an ER, but there are basic rules that I know need to be followed. If you are frustrated you don’t show it. When you are frustrated you must realize that it’s not the people who are taking care of fault. They still deserve your best level of care. In fact, when things are hectic, that’s when you need to up your game, so to speak, because the people you are tasked with caring for are at far greater risk for something going wrong.
I’m not going to pretend i know what it’s like to work in an ER, because to be honest this was my first time ever being in one other than the outside waiting rooms. I have avoided them like the plague. I do have a feeling, backed up from many conversations with family and friends, that this situation at Lutheran Medical Center is pretty much how all ERs in cities work. I’m sure ones in the suburbs and richer, less populated areas probably operate with a bit higher standards. But im guessing that Lutheran Medical Center is not alone in being terrible. And I’m guessing that working in a busy ER is thankless, tiring, frustrating work and that probably does not pay enough for stress level endured. As much as I had anger at each individual person that couldn’t care less about my wife, I had even more anger for the entire system being so utterly fucked up that this level of care is not only tolerated, it’s the goddamn norm.
Anyway, so a few hours after the Ultrasound the doctor (RPA?) came back and told Arnee she didn’t see anything and wanted to get a Catscan. Thirty minutes after that a nurse came over to prep her for it (prepping for in involves drinking a liquid 1.5 hours in advance). At this point the catscan was scheduled for 2am. We got there at 6pm. It’s been eight hours if you don’t want to do the math. And just to recap, so far in this 8 hours Arnee has seen the doctor for 4 minutes total and gotten one Catscan. She also was attended to by a nurse (hooking up an IV, etc) for another 5 minutes. So 9 minutes of care and 1 test in 480 minutes. That means that 99.99% of the time we’ve been here she was not tended to. Literally! I DID THE MATH!
And hell, im not even asking for much more time spent, just more check ins. Going 3 hours without hearing anything is frustrating but even worse, it causes a great amount of anxiety. Arnee had cancer when she was a teenager. She went through chemo and eventually beat it. She also had a child that passed several hours after birth. This is a woman who has experienced great medical trauma in her life. When she has shooting pains in her ovaries it’s going to cause a GREAT amount of concern. Is it cancer? Is in Ectopic Pregnancy? Is this going to make her infertile? Is something rupturing and her life is in danger? Is this one of those “that thing almost killed me but they found it in time?” type of things?
I’ll be fucked if the staff there was going to tell us anything. Simply put, they don’t care. Oh, another anxious couple with lower stomach pain, it’s probably gas, send them home.
So, yeah, the 2am Catscan turned into the 2:30 Catscan without them ever updating us about it. But at 2:30 they sent us over, which the person there promptly sent us back because Arnee was not dressed properly for it which “they should have known” according to the tech. We eventually get back and the Catscan is done. The tech says the doctor will have the results in 30 minutes. It’s 3:10 at this point.
We sit there for about an hour and 30 minutes, asking around the one hour mark if the doctor has gotten the catscan results yet. The answer we get is “NO” and get shot looks like we are giant fucking assholes for even asking the question. At 4:40am the doctor comes over and says “There is a little bit of inflammation in your lower intestine, we are going to give you a script for cipro and something for the pain.” And then she walked away.
Cipro? I know from the 2001 Anthrax scare that Cipro is an antibiotic. Ok, so it’s an infection? How did she get it? Where is it? Is it bad? Is there anything we could have done to prevent it or prevent it in the future? What would have happened if it went untreated?
Yeah, we didn’t get to ask any of those questions. And furthermore, we don’t really trust the diagnosis in the first place. Arnee has had incredible pain for days, including a bout with wicked diarrhea the night before that she thinks was from something bad she ate. Could that be the cause of the inflammation? Probably. Is it the cause of the shooting pain in her ovary? Not likely.
But even if it is the right diagnosis, it’s just a simple infection, a little bit of an explanation as to why it exists would have been helpful. At this point I had zero faith in anything this hospital was doing. We were seated by the nurses station for the last couple hours of the night and all they did was bitch. They bitched about the computer systems, they bitched about how busy it was earlier (it had emptied out quite a bit by this point), they bitched about having nothing to do, they bitched about whatever nurse wasn’t there, one nurse proclaimed she is no longer writing notes on patient’s records. Add that to how little care we got, how they sent us to a catscan with arnee wearing clothes with metal in them, to how the whole goddamn operation was run… and what i came away with was that I didn’t trust a goddamn word out of their mouths. They no longer get the benefit of the doubt from me. And the second you don’t trust your doctors is the second they become fucking worthless.
I think the doctor looked at the catscan, saw a little inflammation which is obviously there — I mean I COULD HAVE TOLD YOU BEFORE WE EVEN GOT THERE THAT THEY WOULD FIND INFLAMMATION! SHE’S IN FUCKING PAIN OF COURSE THERE IS! — and she decided to just wash her hands of the whole thing by writing a script for Cipro and sending us on our way. So 10.5 hours later we still don’t know shit and we got a script that we could have gotten from a walk-in clinic in fucking Ethiopia. And i can pretty much guarantee to you that the bill is north of $1000, probably by quite a bit.
This shit needs to change and it needs to change now. I don’t care if it’s “Obamacare” or what… but it needs to fucking change. Our healthcare is a goddamn joke. The republicans seem to think the whole system will be fixed by putting caps on how much you can sue doctors. I’m all for them putting caps on that, but let’s be fucking serious – that’s not the reason why our healthcare sucks. I don’t know if Obamacare fixes it either, i would guess it probably doesn’t, but atleast it’s a fucking attempt. I’m sure its problem is that it doesn’t go far enough.
The solution for Arnee and I is that we don’t go to shitty hospital ERs ever again unless we are unconscious. We have health insurance, a car, are white, etc etc. We can drive to some nice place in Long Island and get better care, and that’s what we will do from now on. But even though that works for us, that doesn’t fix the system. And it certainly doesn’t fix Lutheran Medical Center, which in ten and a half hours did not do a single thing right.
Liberals fucking piss me off
Before my father reads this and starts doing the airplane around his house that his son has flipped over to the dark side, I want to make it clear that I still consider myself to be fairly liberal. Well, actually, i consider myself to be fairly moderate, but some of my views are thought of as extreme to people – when they really shouldn’t. Like, I think it’s ok for homosexuals to get married. I don’t think this is an extreme view, but evidently in America it is.
But anyway, I’m a registered democrat and for a reason… they are who I vote for. Once you get the social shit out of the way (in which I agree almost 100% with democrats anyway), and get down to how to govern, you have to choose which you think is the lesser of two evils. Democrats believe that government is less evil than unfettered private corporations. Republicans believe that government is worse. Both could probably make valid points as both our (and just about all) government is terrible, but so are (just about all) major corporations. They all suck. I believe that corporations suck slightly more, but it’s certainly up for debate.
But i’m not here to preach about that. That’s the typical shit out of my mouth about politics. Who gives a shit. What has been driving me absolutely nuts lately are my own people. We can’t be the better party if we do the same exact shit as the republicans, especially if we don’t even realize that we are doing it.
Fear mongering is not just the dominion of the right, my progressive friends. You will hear liberals go absolutely fucking nuts with “these republicans just live off of fear, they want everyone afraid, they want to scare you into war, fear fear fear” and then 20 minutes later these same people say shit like “if we don’t do something about global warming WE WILL ALL BE DEAD IN TWENTY YEARS OH MY FUCKING GOD HEAD FOR THE HILLS THE WHOLE PLANET WILL EXPLODE.”
A defensive progressive would probably argue that this is a false equivalency (much like they argue about msnbc not being as bad as fox news). They will say “it’s good to help the environment, it’s bad to go to war.” With that statement I can’t argue, but I don’t think it’s a false equivalency. The thing is, republicans aren’t evil, hate filled people. They aren’t. I know you want to think they are. You want to think they hate brown people, are scared of change and everything they do is irrational and out of fear. But really, it’s just a set of beliefs, just like your own. They actually believe that terrorists are a big threat to this country. They want to do stuff to make sure bad stuff doesn’t happen to us.
Now, I agree, that’s misguided. Terrorists certainly want to hurt us, but we needn’t live in fear of them or spend billions blowing up countries that don’t have much to do with them. But the belief is pure. It’s not just a lust for blood.
Just like democrat’s wanting to help save the environment have a true, honest desire to see the earth not become a shithole. But just because what you believe in is a just cause, that doesn’t mean it’s ok to sell fucking fear. The science about global warming is convincing but is by no means 100% fact. And alarmists blowing it out of proportion don’t help the cause. In fact, environmentalists 20 years ago saying that by 2010 the tides would be up 50 feet and major cities would be underwater only made the whole thing worse… because here we are in 2011, and im in southern Brooklyn and as of this morning 5th avenue isn’t a river.
So stop selling your goddamn fear. Stop making it sound like if republicans are in charge that we will all burn in hell. Stop selling us so much goddamn fear.
The world is actually a pretty fucking awesome place right now. People are living longer than they ever have, despite our daily warnings that every chemical ever is killing us. We have better health care than we have ever had. We have less poor in the world that we ever have. There is better wealth distribution.
None of these things are things we should give up on and say are perfect. Better health care would be great. Less chemicals would be fantastic. Less poor and less super rich would be a nice change for our species. We should strive for these things. But please, liberals, stop acting like these things are the end of the fucking world. If you truly want to be progressive, try to make points that involve zero parts per billion of fear.
Also, stop taking topics in the news and trying to make political points out of them. That terrible, terrible, terrible shooting yesterday is not something for you to use to create more fear of republicans. Yes, I know Sarah “I’m a dumb fucking asshole” Palin had a map of congressional seats that her people would like to see swung back republican — with targets over each district, including a target over the congresswoman who is now in critical condition.
The thing is, the person who shot those people was fucking nuts. Maybe this motherfucker will even admit that he saw that very map and took it literally… but who cares. He’s a crazy motherfucker. And Sarah Palin is a dumb cunt, but she isn’t advocating that we fucking kill people.
I’ll put it this way, what if this person said he shot them because a song by *insert your favorite band here* and that band had a song about overthrowing the government. Would you blame the band? Of course not. You would blame the crazy bag of dicks that did the shooting. Which is what we should do here. That doesn’t mean that people, especially palin and glenn beck, shouldn’t tone down their rhetoric, but it doesn’t make it their fault either. If its their fault, it’s our fault also, because our rhetoric against them is just as strong. It’s a pissing contest.
And I also love how birds dying is a sign that global warming is killing the planet *AND* it’s a sign that jesus hates faggots and is punishing us. Maybe it’s just that birds die for reasons that aren’t related to our political/religious beliefs? Nah, that makes too much sense.
I expect the fear shit out of republicans, not because they are evil, but because in general they are a bit more anxious people. I expect better out of progressives. Lately they are letting me down. A lot.
Doing what I do best
A few people have wondered aloud why I haven’t posted in a while. I’m sure even more just assumed that I had lost interest, as 99.999999% of all people who do anything do. And I guess that’s part of it, but there’s a bit more to the story. I guess the truth is that most of my problems these days aren’t my problems. They are my wife’s. So I don’t really feel comfortable being painfully honest pete (PHP?) when its not about me. I feel fine telling people that I’ve shit myself 3 times as an adult, that I cry at the end of stupid romantic comedies I watch on TV at work, and that im more emotionally needy than any girl ive ever met in my life. That’s fine. I’ll even sharing embarrassing stories about Arnee, like that she farted like 5 times during foreplay last night – because that’s funny, and people deserve to laugh. But I still feel weird talking about her problems.
But sometime last week she and a friend were talking and she was all “yeah pete doesn’t write on his blog anymore” and me, being the not-reactionary person that I am, was all “listen woman, it’s your fault!” and then I told her about how I didn’t want to share her problems with the world. But she assured me that she didn’t mind the slightest. Which makes sense, actually, because that’s what crazy people do. I know this first hand. In fact, this blog is proof of that. Crazy people like talking about how crazy they are. That’s what makes them so annoying to hang out with. About 7 years ago I had a female friend that was going through what could only be called a mental breakdown and her crazy, crazy escapades weren’t the reason that no one wanted to be around her – those were fine. It was that she constantly had to talk about how nuts she was and every conversation had to be spun around to be about her. That’s what we crazy people do. That’s why we have blogs now.
Not that Arnee is super crazy. In fact, she is actually far too sane for someone who has been through what she has. A quick recap of what got her here includes alcoholics, controlling crazy people, losing her baby hours after she was born, getting and beating Cancer, being cheated on while she was pregnant… well, I can go on, but I think you get the picture. God has whipped out his cock and beat her over the head with it. Yet, somehow, she keeps her shit together. Much like me, it’s a balancing act of pills, rationalizing everything to death, relying on people, being escapists (in both of our cases… videogames), therapy, being afraid of everything… and she does most of it with grace. Well, not exactly grace, no one as loud as Arnee would ever been called graceful, but she does it without much complaining or feeling bad for herself. Shit happened, shit happens, shit is going to keep happening; so she deals and moves on.
Over the past year, which has consisted of pre and post wedding, which are two very, very distinct phases of life that are unlike anything I’ve ever been a part of, she has been dealing mostly with the fact that her mother’s brain is failing her. They think it’s Alzheimer’s, or dementia, or whatever. The bottom line is that her mother is starting to forget things, needs help with activities she didn’t used to need help with and she wont be getting better. That’s the kicker and what turns it into something beyond depressing. A few years ago my father had a heart attack. It scared the shit out of me, he could have died. But the thing was, he didn’t, and he recovered. And now he’s doing fine. Arnee’s mother isn’t going to do that. What she was is gone. What she is today will be gone in a few months. She is now changing in ways that aren’t and never will be good.
I know I’m using really harsh language describing it, but that is only because that’s how it fucking feels. It’s incredibly harsh. I have gone through it with two grandmothers, one that died almost a year ago and one that is still kicking. But I was never particularly close with either of my grandparents… i mean not on the level that i am with my parents, or the way that Arnee, who was raised by only her mom, is with her mother. I can’t even imagine what that feels like. But I do know how arnee feels, and it’s terrible. She is filled with sadness that her mom isn’t really her mom anymore and guilt that she can’t do anything about it. For the most part this paralyzes her. She wants to be there with her mom, but at the same time the whole thing terrifies her. I understand this completely, as im sure my reaction would be 100% the same. But for someone like her older brother, who is very much the matriarch of the family, he doesn’t understand it and he resents her for it. He tells Arnee that she doesn’t care about her mom. He’s an asshole for saying that. I understand where its coming from – it’s all just frustration – because he is one of the only people in their family that can actually handle taking care of Joan. But pouring guilt on top of Arnee’s sadness and her own guilt is only going to further paralyze her.
So after our honeymoon, when everything should have been totally awesome and we should have been on cloud nine, Arnee was very upset – a lot. She tried to get back to CT as much as she could to help with her mom, but no matter how much she did her brother was still a cock to her, and seeing her mom only made Arnee more upset. It got to the point eventually that Arnee couldn’t really function anymore. She talked to her shrink about it and decided to do a med change to try to get a little extra kick to help her with her increasing bouts with anxiety.
And this is where the shit really hit the fan. Actually is still hitting the fan. There’s shit everywhere.
Arnee has been winding down one drug and ramping up another, but her body is not happy about it. At all. She has brain zaps, panic attacks, crying attacks, feelings of complete helplessness. She is a mess. Add to that the fact that we decided we couldn’t deal with this apartment any longer and have been going through the incredibly painful process of finding a new place in NYC (well finding places is easy, getting everything to work beyond that point is a nightmare). So this month has been very, very difficult. But as each day passes the meds work themselves out a bit more and eventually all of this turmoil will (hopefully) result in a better baseline for her to operate from.
But it’s not all bad news in Arneeville. She has been working with the Food Network, and potentially will be doing a show or two with them this december fulltime. She is also super cute!
So where does all of this leave pete dodd (dot com dot us)? Well, I’m not going to blow smoke up assholes and say that’s its been totally awesome and fantastical, but in general I’m fine. The thing is, and most of my closest friends know this, I’m actually at my best when I’m helping people. I would guess that if I were to ask most of my long time friends to look back and think of their favorite memories of me, their mind would wander to some point where they were having a hard time and I was there to lend an ear and help them through it. I’m just good at that, to be to be totally honest. There aren’t many things I have an ego about, but that’s one of them.
I have spent many nights sitting on the couch next to arnee, rubbing her back and trying to ask her the right questions to get her to talk about what’s bothering her in a way that it will become clearer what she needs to do to fix it. I’ve spent nights with her in bed while she has cried and cried and merely told her that everything was going to be ok. We have had 100s, if not 1000s of conversations when she is doing well about how to properly handle something like what she is going through with her mother. This is right in my wheelhouse. This is a 85 MPH fastball right over the center of the plate. I was born to do this.
I do worry that once she gets passed all of this that she is going to realize that I’m kinda-really boring. Im stubborn, im not particularly adventurous, im fat and I smell like poop. But for now, I’m husband of the year. I would trade it all in to see her genuinely happy though.
The challenge.
The challenge:
I will not spend cash dollars USA money on videogames until december 25th, 2010… including applications for my iphone or ipad. Except in the following cases:
A. I can trade in games I have for new games.
B. My Xbox 360 pretty much has a timer on it that will expire soon (probably), when that happens it will be replaced for a (hopefully) small fee.
C. Money that is already on my PS3 account (since this cannot be refunded)
D. I can and will accept all gifts.
The reasons:
1. I buy a lot of videogames even when I have many I still love and need to finish (hereby known as the ‘pile of shame’).
2. Arnee and I would like to save more money because I guess married people worry about the future and shit.
Why it should be easy:
1. I have gamefly and can rent most games within a few days of their release.
2. I have a network of friends and other avenues to get my hands on most anything.
3. My pile of shame is at an all time high and I would really like to make a dent into it.
Why it won’t be easy:
1. Videogames are like crack to me.
a. I MUST own them on day one or they are dirty germ infested whores.
b. I MUST always have new stuff, anything more than a week old is OLD FUCKING NEWS.
2. Im used to buying what i want, when I want.
On paper it seems really fucking easy. But, like, really, really hard. Feel free to comment on whether you think i’ll be able to do it or if I will sail the failboat.
Why all the fear, whitey?
Republicans drive me fucking crazy. Crazy. They make me want to strangle kittens. They are a maddening group of people. And it’s not because of their actual politics. I can actually see the appeal of an idealistic republican society that has low taxes, no government intrusion, people doing things for themselves. I think that would be a fantastic world to live in. The problem is that as far as I can tell they only want this world to exist for likeminded Christian white people. And that’s when I ask Arnee to bring the box of kittens in because I have some strangling to do.
All of this chickenshit crying about a mosque being built on ground zero is what currently has me completely pissed off with them as a group of (white) people. You see dickheads like Glenn Beck crying (and I mean literally crying) on Fox News because the big bad government wants to control everything and all our freedoms are being taken away and Obama is Hitler and soon all white people will be in gas chambers. But then there are a group of people, a group of AMERICANS, that want to build a place of worship for their imaginary man in the sky (not to be confused with the white people’s imaginary man in the sky because he is, like, totally different) and this group that literally cries about freedoms being taken away now wants to take away this group of brown people’s basic freedoms.
I’m trying to reconcile this in my head but I can’t. So Obama is taking your freedoms away and the government intruding too much. Ok, I get it. I think you’re fucking paranoid, but i get it. Now there are a group of Muslims that want to build a Mosque near ground zero. You same people want to take their freedom away and have the government (in this case, the courts) intervene and stop them.
WHAT!??! WAHHAHHTHAHHTHET?!?!? Do you not see the goddamn motherfucking hypocrisy here? I mean for fucks fucking sake. Really?!?!?
Also, the government is going too far intruding into our lives. Right? But also we should pass a constitutional amendment intruding into the lives of gay people. They shouldn’t be allowed to marry, because that’s just gross, um – I mean because my imaginary man in the sky says it’s some sort of evil. Evil love. That’s the trickiest evil of them all! It fools people into being happy and nice. Someone grab some whiteout because we have a constitution to amend!
Stop living in fear of everything, republicans. It’s embarrassing. There are some Muslims in the world that are hiding out in caves and african villages plotting to kill us. Yes. This is a fact. We should do something about that. But there are also 100 million+ muslims who aren’t out to kill you. Thinking they are is the same leap in logic that all christians want to blow up federal buildings because Timothy McVeigh was a christian. I guess also by that rationale if someone built a christian church in Oklahoma City at the site of that disaster it would be in bad taste. Right? RIGHT!?!!?
No, of course not. Because you aren’t afraid of christians (well, the black ones sing too loud at church, but they seem nice as long as they stay in their cities).
If we are going to debate actual issues, I am cool with you folks. I think there is an honest dialogue that needs to happen. Like I said earlier, there is much about conservative principles that I think has merit. I would love to live in a world that took the best from each party where we didn’t have government or business’s intruding on our personal lives. I mean, that is the basic philosophical difference between us, right? Democrats want the government to do everything because we don’t trust corporations and republicans want the private sector to do everything because they don’t trust the government. And the truth is that we both are probably right, neither the government or private sector is worthy of our trust. Which is why we should be working together to find what actually works with each and go from there.
But we never actually talk about this shit, do we? The Republicans are the party of “If Obama wants it we don’t.” So I guess that ends the dialogue there. And the democrats are the party of “omg lets have 9000 ideas about one topic and in the end just pass something totally watered down that no one likes.” Both parties are terrible. It’s unfortunate.
What is fortunate, however, is that most of it is mostly ceremonial. I mean I hated Dubya and I like Obama… but really, is my life any different now that dubs is out and Obama is in? Nope. I mean, I did get a $10 a week tax cut. Yeah… I can’t even sell that as my life being any different. It doesn’t matter. These assholes cycle themselves in and out and we have republican rule and democratic rule and they do things that they say is going to affect us but it never really does and it just goes on and on. That’s fine. That’s how political policy is. And that’s especially how political policy in America is, the system is designed to make change monumentally slow. So slow, in fact, that we can go from a dumbfuck like Bush to a “post racial” (gotta love that bullshit term) dude like Obama without it having any affect on our lives other than it giving us a new cast of characters to yell at as we watch fox news/msnbc.
I’m not arguing any of that! I don’t give a shit if you are conservative. You shouldn’t give a shit that i’m liberal. All that I ask is that when it comes to issues that actually affect people… and these are issues that a president or a congress really have no control over… that you stop making your decisions based off of goddamn fear. If you are going to argue for less government interference and more freedom it has to apply to more than Christian white people. If you don’t see that… your head is planted too far up your own ass for you to be any use to modern society anymore. It’s time for you to grab some automatic rifles and join some militia in ‘middle america’ and plot to take down the government. Kinda like a few muslims tried to 9 years ago. And when you do I’m totally going to protest your church being put in my city.
Minecraft is the greatest thing in the history of the world
I tend to use this personal blog to talk about personal stuff and use PSNerds as a place to talk (literally… as in podcast) or write about videogame stuff. But I wanted to put together some thoughts on this little indie game I’ve been playing lately and I kinda think it fits in more here than it does there… even though here there are actually female readers. The PSNerds only has one girl visitor and her name is my wife. And girls don’t like videogames. Or admit that they do. Except my wife. But she also farts a lot.
So this is not for you, girls who hate videogames! Or maybe it is. I dunno.
Anyway, there’s this dude over in Europe somewhere… Sweeden maybe? The story goes (at least what I remember of it, maybe I’m making all of this up) is that he quit his job working at a corporate videogame company to work on an indie project so he could make something on his own that had a bit more soul to it. He also enters competitions to make games in 48 hours and posts mesmerizing time lapse videos of it. He is large and has a beard, so you know he is good people.
Flash forward to today and he has a game up and running, called Minecraft, that isn’t nearly complete but he is selling access to the game (and all future revisions) for cheap now with a plan to up the price once the online play beta starts… and it will probably go even higher when it’s officially “released.” I put that in quotes because I think this is the future of indie gaming, get something together that is fun to play and get people playing it early, which helps further fund your development of the game and also gets you a ton of feedback about what people like and dislike. It’s fucking brilliant, actually. He is getting paid while he makes the game, like he would at a huge development house, but he is making it on his own terms, by himself.
But all of this feel good indie-elitism aside, none of it would mean shit if the game was a piece of crap. It isn’t. In fact it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. Actually at this point it is barely a game. The term sandbox gets thrown around videogames quite a bit, usually in a game like Grand Theft Auto where you have this huge, open world and you can do whatever you want. Games like that can be quite fun, but they are missing the key piece that made playing in a sandbox as a kid fun… building shit. I mean, sure, pushing my little trucks around my sandbox was cool, but it was much cooler when i made a sand mountain and sand jumps to play on.
This is what Minecraft excels at. You start the game as this little blocky dude in this huge world with absolutely no directions given as to what to do (the tutorial on the main menu is grayed out at this point, it’s likely going to show up in an update down the line). As of now there is no goal in the game, except the meta-goal of every game: go have some fun. So you start punching a tree with your blocky little hand and it breaks up into chunks and you collect the wood. You then put the wood together to make a work bench. Then with the work bench you start putting the wood together to make a pick axe. Then you dig a tunnel into a mountain, collecting all the dirt and stone you break up as you burrow deeper. And then you head back to your work bench to make better things with all the new stuff you got. Then you take all your stone you got from your tunnel and you build a house. Next thing you know it’s 4am, you have 3 houses, a tower, a series of tunnels and you have plans on building a huge walkway in the sky.
This just scratches the surface of what you can do in the game. In fact, it’s probably quicker to make a list of things you *CAN’T* do. Every week the developer, a young dude who goes by Notch, adds new stuff to build. Want to make tracks and a mine cart for your tunnels? Done. Want to make a saddle and put it on a pig and ride the pig? Done. Want to make a bow and arrow and shoot cows, take their leather and make a hat? Done and done and done.
The only thing missing right now is that you can only play it by yourself. Communities have sprung up all over the place where people come together to talk about the game and share screenshots of the stuff they are building. In fact, that’s how I found the game. I frequent a message board called Neogaf (even though after like a year I still can’t even post replies on topics there) and saw a thread about the game. After reading about two pages I headed over to minecraft.net, sent the dude $12 (what it comes out to after paypal turns the money into euros) and was playing on my own. At this point I have like 5 bookmarks of different sites and message boards dedicated to people playing and talking about the game.
But all of that is well and good, but what I really want to do is play this game with my friends. I want to build some crazy ass castle thing in one section while my wife (yeah, she’s hooked too) is building some crazy ass house with a giant garden somewhere else, and then one of my friends is building a tower into the clouds while another friend is killing all the monsters he can find while yet another friend is digging a hole to china, just for fun. To me, this will be the essence of cooperative, social gaming. There are monsters to kill (though you can play a mode without them) but killing them isn’t the point of the game. Doing whatever you want is the point. So if you get all your friends together on one server, some may want to work together to build something huge. Others might want to build their own thing but let people connect tunnels or whatever to it. It will be the mix of people all doing different stuff that will make it so neat. Whenever I get sick of building something I’ll have so much fun just exploring the land to see what all of my friends have done. When I wake up in the morning the first thing I might do is run over to see how far friend X got on the giant thing-a-ma-bob he was working on the night before.
The multiplayer beta (aka test… for those not up on videogame lingo) starts soon. Sounds like it is a week or two away. Right now the list of friends I have playing this game is low… though I may end up also playing with people I barely know from any of those random sites I frequent. But want to play with friends! I’m even going to look into hosting my own server (a level of technical sophistication i usually don’t have – haha) so we can control how it plays and who joins us (aka keep out the random assholes who are bound to server-hop just to destroy people’s shit).
I am also really excited to see some more typical gameplay modes thrown into this sandbox world. Like, I envision a game of capture the flag where there is a 1 hour section at the start where you build your own base (and stock up on supplies to mess up the other teams). How fucking cool would that be? Also, like I mentioned before, there are monsters in the world. They typically only come out at night… and they can actually be kinda scary (the sound is amazing). It would be very, very intense to play a multiplayer game where you built stuff as usual but you only got one life. When you died you were done. I certainly wouldn’t always want to play this mode, but how intense would it be after you spent 5 hours building your fortress to see a monster trying to kill you knowing that if you die all of that work is lost. I mean, I can’t think of a videogame that has higher stakes than that, other than online casinos where you bet real money (and one would be hard pressed to even consider that a videogame at all).
So consider this blog post an attempt by me to rope as many of my friends (both real life and internet) into playing this game as possible, hopefully all on one server when the multiplayer starts. I’m guessing only like 3 people will bite, but I have such an extreme love for the game that I had to write it all out to make sense of it. As for system requirements, I doubt they are even slightly high. You can play the game in your browser or as a standalone download. It’s a very simple (but charming) game graphically. Any computer made this decade can probably run it, Mac or PC (but not iphone or ipad, dammit).
I guess I’ll finish with a few pictures showing some of the stuff I’ve been working on. Everything in these shots I built, this area was just some beach and grass.
^^^Here is the inside of the first big building I made. Over to the left I put my storage, work bench and oven. Over to the right I breakdance. Nothing fancy here, this is only like 2 hours into the game.
^^^The building to the left is the building you just saw inside of. The tower to the right now has a giant stick figure man on top, i pretend he is the god we all pray to. Coming out of that you see my high walkway that leads to another settlement that I don’t have pictures of. Also, off the building to the left is where my huge system of tunnels is that i dig into to get all the stone and dirt I need to make this stuff.
^^^This is a giant hole I dug into the ground for no good reason other than that it was fun. I then made a trench to it from the ocean and now it’s 1/4 filled with water. This is all connected to my system of tunnels.
^^^And this is back to my original settlement of buildings. This is after 10+ hours of work. I dug out a hole about 10 layers deep in the entire area. This is right on the water so I held all the water from flowing in with glass. I also made the start of my tunnel system which is directly below me all glass, and you can see a glass bridge in there. You can now see the stick figure we all pray to… and i had a shitton of extra dirt so i decided to make a modern art masterpiece that took FOREVER to build but I am very, very happy with how it came out. I also have 2 other huge, blossoming settlements on this map, all connected via air walkways and tunnels. Eventually, 500 hours from now I want to have this entire map developed in one way or another. And to think, this area was once just a beach and some grass….
So if any of this interest you, let me know. I will also answer any questions to anyone starting out, as the lack of directions is a bit daunting at first (though it took me maybe 15 minutes to get Arnee up to speed with it). Just hit me up via email, facebook or twitter.
Two sarcastic jerks!
In a move that should be surprising to no one at this point, the next post by me after I lashed myself for being a sarcastic jerk… is a video of me and Arnee being sarcastic jerks while we were out to eat last night. We were sitting next to a couple obviously on their first date and we could not handle how poorly it was going. Take a gander!
And also, if you are into videogames at all, or just want to see a 10 minute video of me talking about nerd stuff and making some weird noises for no reason, click click click this.
