...this is a joke, right? You're kidding, right?

Seriously. What... the fuck is this shit?

Tags: politics
Current Mood: grumpy

( Personal first for me, details within... )

Tags: gaming, warcraft
Current Mood: satisfied

I get heartburn now and again, but it usually only occurs maybe once every couple weeks and goes away after a few hours.

When it starts happening almost every day for 2 weeks, along with bouts of abdominal pain and cramping and such, and doesn't completely go away even on an empty stomach? Time to visit the doc, 'cuz something's wrong in there. :P

( More test results in here... )

Tags: medical
Current Mood: stressed

( Medical hoo-ha and other stuff in here... )

Tags: medical
Current Mood: pleased

Somebody brought in a couple buckets of TJ's eggnog almonds today.

Whimper.

Current Mood: hungry

Union finally voted -- overwhelmingly so -- to ratify the new contract.

About goddamn time. Now maybe I can get my job description updated to something more relevant instead of being held back and becoming less relevant.

(yeah, i know i should be grateful for anything resembling a pay increase in this environment, but i'm just not feeling the love right now)

Tags: day job
Current Mood: annoyed

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/208604/i-will-never-go-back-to-normal-raiding-again

Zarhym takes down some twit who doesn't seem to understand the purpose of the LFR tool. He also pulls out the snark cannon on some other guy who calls the dev team lazy. It was beautiful. :)

The hardcore serious-business raiders can have their tough raids and get the big shiny epics that mean something to them, while the rest of us non-raiders now have a chance to actually experience the big endgame content ourselves, meaning a big chunk of the game is no longer exclusive to the upper 2% of the playerbase or whatever it is.

I agree with pretty much everything the OP on that thread said. Dumbed-down or not, it makes a lot of content which the devs worked hard on accessible to a much larger segment of the playerbase. Same as with Starcraft 2 thus far. The story is what interests me the most, and if this means I might be able to experience more of the story in-game instead of having to resort to YouTube videos, then I'm all in favor of it. And it looks like future content in v5.0 is going to get this same treatment.

I admit my faith in Blizzard has been tested over the past year given some of the things that have happened since Cata launched, but I also see plenty of developments that could renew said faith. This is one of those things. We shall see how it pans out.


(Off-topic but semi-related: it looks like they're working the crafting system in Diablo 3 so that in order to get the better raw materials and level up your artisans appropriately, leading to better goodies, etc., you need to play through the game at increasingly higher difficulty levels. Again, gives you the option of going through the whole story without worrying too much about getting bogged down, and then you can go back and really play the game in order to get the real shinies. I love it.)

Tags: gaming, warcraft
Current Mood: impressed

Two vials of blood drawn yesterday afternoon, for an electrolyte panel and a creatinine check. The results?

( Lab results and other things in here... )

Tags: medical
Current Mood: sleepy

Today was "go see the nurses for BP followup" day.

( Bit longer than I thought, so behind a cut it goes... )

Tags: medical
Current Mood: awake

...or there's some kind of placebo effect going on. BP dropped noticeably just after a couple days on the meds and it's been staying low since. Diastolic's been averaging 85 the past few days, sometimes going all the way down to 78. Since I was getting diastolic numbers as high as 110 before, this is a huge improvement. Systolic's gone down proportionally, even got down to 109 last night.

Haven't noticed any serious side effects thus far. Mostly I tend to run out of steam faster than usual. Sitting at a desk isn't so bad but if I have to get up and move around for a while it's not long before I start feeling run down and a little dizzy. Makes walking across campus to get to meetings a bit more challenging than it needs to be, but really that's more of a nuisance than a problem. Little bit of coughing from time to time, but nothing I'd consider unusual.

Granted it hasn't even been a week yet so the side effects could still show up, but all in all it's looking good so far.

Tags: medical
Current Mood: hopeful