Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

The Mighty Wheels of Cartography have finally turned and I have a couple hundred tasks in my work queue again. Crisis averted!

Now I just have to figure out how to get a referral for a retinologist, and I have done most of my major adulting for the month. And I might still get to take Christmas off after all! (I'm going home to Ohio Dec 17-28 regardless, it's just whether I have to work over it.)

If I can just have a nice, normal week, I might have to officially declare myself Okay!

We accidentally made an in-joke in Parallax whose source is not Google-able. At all. No results. Even though it's a reference to a comic strip that ran for 30 years and used to be a household name.

I'm feeling perversely proud of this. 😺​

An old classic from Adult Swim's "infomercial" experiments. I particularly like this one because of the writers' benign indifference to the trans character's transness. (MILD SPOILER: Note the subtle validation of Carla's womanhood at around 5:20...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgNo5Smino

I beat Slay the Spire's fourth and final act (with the Defect). So I got that goin' for me.

I was basically the Ice Bot. Frozen Core (for extra ice per turn), Gold Cables (for more uses per ice), and Diskette (for more ice per use). Frankly, the rest of the deck was garbage, but who cares, when you're generating 80 Block a turn? Pulled an Echo Form from the very last shop and dealt the Heart a humiliating defeat.

(Counterpoint: If I were in Aruba, the weed would be illegal and the coffee would be of marginal quality. What the fuck do Dutch people know about coffee?! And now that I think of it, I probably wouldn't get much writing done if Peg had 12" inflatable tits pressed against me. So who am I, a humble Daoist comic writer, to say what is good and what is bad?)

You'd think it would be *easier* to write a scene about impending doom when you're feeling a sense of impending doom.

But I have this weird inkling that this scene would be far easier to write if I were, for instance, staying at a Caribbean 5-star resort, rolling in $100 bills strewn across a four-poster bed, with Peg at my feet in a rubber catsuit, no dwindling job queue to worry about, a healthy rapprochement with my estranged sisters, and both my retinas free of sinister fatty deposits.

But hey, were would the romance be in that?

Oh, right. In the catsuit, the tropical resort, the restored sense of self-respect, and the large quantity of money. Huh.

Hey, GEICO?

One, marketing to me with Christmas themes is not an optimal method.

Two... um... it would probably also be helpful if you waited until I have a car?!

The new "infinite character length with a cut tag" thing here on awoo is nice. Gives it a bit of that Livejournal feel that I've been missing. Surprised more people haven't mentioned it!

Nasty anxiety dreams last night. The usual: I was at a con, nobody had any time for me, people kept blaming me for every little thing, and I finally blew up in a public and embarrassing fashion.

Meanwhile, in our own semblance of reality... Been obsessively watching the task queue at work over the weekend. It keeps bouncing between 0 and 20. That's a good sign we're not Finished, and a bad sign about us having any work this week. It's fine, I might just take all my remaining PTO, make a little vacation of it, and work over Christmas.

Eyes are holding steady. That's not surprising. These retinal... things sound more like a five-year danger than a one-week danger. Still not sure how to wrangle an optometry appointment from a different network into a referral, and not looking forward to the co-pays starting to stack up if I have to go see my PCP over this. Whatever, it's "just money."

So yeah, generally intact, but something in my brain won't quite let me rest. At least it's been a good distraction from the social stuff I was beating myself up over *last* month.

Parallax still good. No real script progress, but Peg and I had a great creative jam yesterday and figured out a really endearing angle for one of the supporting characters. It'll make the Mixolyne ("fungus hippies") side feel a little bit more like a queer family, and that's exactly what I wanted to double down on.

Also, Peg's latest spread of an alien city is stark and weird and gorgeous. I can't wait for everybody to see it in context.

Exactly what it says on the tin: "Glitter drop."

https://i.imgur.com/2DUnrdo.gifv

Further proof I'm either not in the right universe or our causality's broken down:

I couldn't find any good lightbulb jokes about Texans. I did a good 10 minutes of web research. I actually read Yahoo Answers. I went through the Canonical Collection of Lightbulb Jokes, and... I mean... it's *canonical*!

I have never come so close to believing in the Mandela Effect. Peggy had a suggestion involving undocumented labor, but I think it needs a little workshopping. :p

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.