Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Yay, got my insurance member ID, from an egregriously friendly CSR with a cute Southern accent! Now I should presumably be able to just go online, pay my freakin' premiums, and start getting the ball rolling on my optical care.

So to speak.

@mawr "Dear gods, Mawr, you're not saying it's... Moriarty?"

#tigersdontunderstandwebtechnology 🐯​

This is my favorite phone prank of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs-Csqy7AkM

I have a weird relationship with phone pranks. Most are mean-spirited and put me off. But I really like some of the smarter prank artists who don't just set out to annoy their targets, but to create a surreal alternate world for them and play on their willingness to believe totally absurd, implausible things under a little social pressure. Like Bette Midler. As. The Ringmaster.

@JulieSqveakaroo Either/or, really, but I was leaning towards the former one...

@Oneironott Ooh, where at?

@Oneironott I envied the hell out of you for about 30 seconds and then I remembered I live a 5 minute walk from Xi'an Noodles. :D

You know what would really improve my mood this evening? Either a mind-control helmet and/or a Princess Crown.

Amy is my short-duration personal savior. The kids are alright.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FickQdRT54

@Leucrotta @chimerror Poor Ed. All he wanted to do was boot people in the head. :(

@starkatt (Plus, Hobbes has always been a personal hero of mine... Getting bait-trapped by a tuna fish sandwich sounds a lot like something that could happen to me in RL. I'm kind of stupid that way.)

@starkatt "Being a Martian tigress means never having to say 'I'm sorry. Was that YOUR head?'"

More seriously, the Tigress started out as a way to feel big & unassailable in scary crowds of noisy, conventionally masculine types.

Then it kinda evolved into a way to channel my twitchy, temperamental personality into cartoonish things nobody could take seriously. Why bother arguing when you can just go "rawr", make laughably unscary claws at the target of your ire, and both go about your day?

And this time I won't spend a whole month letting an inept PCP fuck my referral over before I go in to see somebody. Even after that, they undid a lot of the damage in my right eye, and now I can at least see 20/50 out of it-- and don't have double vision anymore...

Okay, I've spent some time looking good and hard at the worst-case scenarios, and there's a way past all of them. I'll be okay. Just wish my brain's alert panel understood this fact. :p

You know, really... my eyes are in LESS danger than they were two days ago. I'm in the exact same situation I was in before: there's a genetic Sword of Damocles dangling over me, and on any given day I could develop a little pinprick of light that won't go away, and it'll start growing bigger and bigger.

That was always true. Now I just know for sure that the sword is still there. In retrospect... I had no real reason to believe it had ever gone.

@chimerror Surreal pynchonesque letters of complaint to the people who make Oreos? :D

Or, more seriously, find some good old web games on kongregate.com or somewhere similar and see if you can get 'em working? ^___^ I've been doing that recently and having a surprising amount of fun!

@LeDiva Me too!

@chimerror Write surreal, rambling, Pynchonesque letters of complaint to random members of the T***p administration? :D

I REALLY like the fact that Janet starts the series as basically a service droid and is being set up as their Badass Warrior Transcenda instead...

You know, my catdroid-implantee Hladolet had already kind of taken Janet on as a role model. This gets me thinking about how I could reboot her, so to speak, as someone a bit less problematic...

@acetone_kitten It's cool, but thanks hun! <3 The more I read about it, the more it sounds like I basically caught this at Stage 0. It's actually *better* than what happened to me in Boston... as this shit goes.

And this time around, we know what to look for-- instead of dicking around for a whole month while it got worse, like last time, I can pop straight into the nearest retinologist and say HIT ME.

So yeah, in general, I'm feeling stressed out but kinda punchy. My current attitude is that this all sounds dealable in the long run, and if it *does* hit sooner rather than later, we can still get it dealt with. It'll just be a little grueling. I'm up for it. I've had worse. Motherfucking bring it. There are days when the doubts seep in, but the life I've got is very much worth fighting for. And, you know, I like being able to read and stuff. :p

Less freaked out this morning. Found a medical study that gave solid percentages, and it looks like this is less "tornado at the door" scary than "turns out your house is built on mud" scary. I have something like a 15-20% chance of getting wet AMD (read: effective blindness but somewhat treatable if caught fast) in the next 5 years.

And it turns out the main drug that treats it is still cheap. And still goes directly in the eyeballs. Yay! I'll deal.