I’m trying to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. I pre-ordered the game back in Sept and even bought a new PC to play it on.
But when I try to enter the code to play, I get the following error:
When I try to post on the forums for support, I get this:
And when I call I sit on hold, for hours:
So: I wanted to play SWTOR once, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
Via Kotaku.
Thank you, Mr. Jeff Fletcher.
This is how Jed washes the dishes. Note that the knife blades *all face the same way*.
Also note that I, his father, noticed that.
Something to remember the next time we do a UI review.
This was originally a Facebook note I wrote and published on my FB on January 28th 2010. I’m putting it here almost entirely un-modified to make it easier to share with folks on http://forums.spondylitis.org/.
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Way back in October 2007, I was admitted to Homerton Hospital in London. My symptoms were severe pain and inflammation in my back, neck, jaw, hips, groin, knees, hands, shoulders, and Achilles tendons. And a few other places.
(Perhaps needless to say, I was unable to walk. I used to say I couldn’t have run out of a burning building. Fortunately i was never presented with the opportunity to test that statement.)
You can see the start of the saga here: http://bit.ly/9CuTfe if you are so inclined, starting with the very first note I ever wrote on FB.
Eventually, I got somewhat better. Not, like, all better. Since then, my symptoms have waxed and waned, but honestly I’ve never gotten better. I should have – Reactive Arthritis does, in fact, get better, so I should have too. But I haven’t. I went from feeling and acting far too young for my actual years on earth to feeling and acting far too old, in the space of a couple of weeks.
Backing up a bit, I kind of feel like I’ve always had some pain in my life. I had pretty severe pain as kid in my legs, which my parents called growing pains and stuck me in the tub to deal with. As I got older I found that if I didn’t exercise, I hurt a lot more, mostly in my larger joints, with my back always being the worst. But I could stay ahead of that by working out. The more I worked out, the less I hurt the next day. But I’m also stoic and have a high pain tolerance and I don’t like to whine.
Since the reactive arthritis, I really haven’t been able to work out at all.
So whether it’s due to the reactive arthritis, or something else, what I’ve been left with since the hospitalization is even more pain. Always in my lower back, but also in places like, well, all over the place. My neck, my jaw, my fingers. Sometimes I will bump my hand against something, you know like you might do and not even know it, and it’s like someone pounded a nail through it. Mostly I can do some stuff, but lots of times it hurts.
If you could get an honest answer out of me, on a normal day I’d rate my normal pain as being at about a 4 (on a scale of 0-10, with 9 being the worst pain I’ve ever felt, which was a tie between post lasik recovery and my ruptured appendix). But you normally wouldn’t get an honest answer out of me.
It hurt to shampoo this morning.
Every time I’ve gone into talk to people about this, I’ve kinda gotten the run around. I’m stoic, that’s not good for talking to doctors. I like to make people laugh. (Even right now, my lower back is, like, ON FIRE, but I’m thinking, hmmmmmm, is this post funny enough?) So the best I can get is “oh, okay, FINE, we’ll do an xray”.
Yay, an xray!
One of my decisions for 2010 is that this will be the year I can do stuff again without it always hurting. I want to, like, go on a hike or a walk, or maybe lie down on the couch, without it hurting the whole time. Or swim without it hurting. Exercise would be SO COOL (I am in such crappy shape!)
So I’ve been seeing this new Dr. and a new PT, and the thing about these people is, they keep asking the same questions over and over again. Like, what am I, some kind of idiot?
How much does it hurt?
Both legs, or just one?
Do they ever go completely numb?
How much does it hurt?
More in the morning or the afternoon?
Where in your back?
How much does it hurt?
Can you move your neck without it hurting at all?
Where does it hurt in your jaw?
Does it hurt when you lie on your back?
Your stomach?
How do you sleep then?
Can you sleep?
Does it wake you up?
How much does it hurt?
Does it ever not hurt?
Does it ever not hurt?
Does it ever not hurt?
Denial, it turns out, is a truly remarkable thing! The longer I simply focus (like a frickin’ LASER BEAM) on ignoring my pain, the seemingly better it gets! Woo hoo! And of course when people ask about it, well, shit. I CAN STILL WALK AND EAT SOLID FOOD!
How bad can it really be?
But the thing about this relentless goddam quizzing, this incessant prying, the thing is that it just kind of overwhelmed me. Okay, fine! Maybe it DOES HURT! Whatever! I don’t want to think about it, But then I stepped back and said “hey silly you are here to get better, how about you actually answer the questions?” that I first realized that I couldn’t answer that last question.
Does it ever not hurt?
Well, okay, so I realized that I could answer it, and the answer is that no, it never doesn’t hurt. It always hurts some. But not so badly that I couldn’t, you know, fight to the death against a few hundred zombies armed only with a crowbar, a can of WD40, and a Bic lighter. It doesn’t hurt so badly that I’d like, just give up and die.
Not that badly.
Last week I got an MRI from my new Rhm (whom I think I now have a small crush on). The goal of the MRI is to see just how FUBARED (that’s a technical term) my back and hips are. Sufficiently fubared and we skip past everything and go straight to the biologics.
Today, sitting in the office waiting for the doctor, I realized that I couldn’t really type on my iPhone very well because my thumbs hurt too much (stupid xBox!) and that I had to hold the phone and type with one finger, which I then realized also hurts (stupid job!)
This is why I should have stuck with denial. I never would have noticed that it hurts to use my iPhone if I hadn’t listened to those stupid doctors.
So, the MRI supports a diagnosis of spinal stenosis, ankylosing spondylitis, and osteoarthritis. Possibly Some Other Big Words. She’s not quite keen on the link to the reactive arthritis. She doesn’t like that because that’s supposed to get better, and I haven’t.
But she has Enough Big Words to skip the Sulfas altogether. Dr. Hsu is going to put me on Enbrel (shout out to our Seattle startup Immuneeeeeeeex! In the house!) which is a weekly self-injected med. You don’t have to wean on or off like prednisone (thank god for that) but I think it’s kind of a “forever” drug, in that it doesn’t reverse nor cure arthritis – it just halts the progression. But it can actually make the pain go away, which would be really nice. Of course, it’s an immuno suppresant, with the side effect of increasing the chances I get sinus infections, which are already bad… but if it works, well, shit.
As I sat there in Dr. Hsu’s office I nearly started crying because, now that I’m thinking about the pain, now that all these people keep asking me to rate my pain and ponder my pain and freaking WALLOW AROUND in my pain, I’ve realized something.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT I HURT LIKE HELL ALL THE TIME! EG right now my neck really hurts and has severely restricted ROM, my back is seriously killing me, my thumbs and fingers hurt, my jaw hurts and has limited ROM… my shoulders hurt.
My feet hurt.
Hey, thanks for that, you stupid doctors and medical peoples! Thanks! Thanks for helping me come to terms with being all in pain and stuff.
Stupid doctors.
The feeling like crying was was a combination of things, starting with feeling helpless. I really don’t like that. It was fear. It was sadness. It was panic.
But it was also a little bit of relief. Like, when you’ve been lying about something, and you come clean? I dunno, I suck at lying. Anyway, I kind of feel somehow like this isn’t just my pain anymore. I feel like maybe it’s ours? And maybe we are going to beat it, with a gold-plated TNF blocker crowbar!
Also I felt some panic when I found out that it usually takes 1-2 weeks to get the pre-auth from the insurance company and I need to get a TB test too, but I want the drug NOW. I want to jab that needle in my thigh and just get going. I don’t want to wait! And what if they say no? Well, if they say no, I will just treat that like it’s someone else’s problem that I can help fix. While I’m frequently crap at my own problems, I’m pretty good at that.
So, lastly, here’s an Important Tip:
If your main coping strategy for dealing with something is total and absolute denial beyond all logic or reason, then don’t tell other people about it. Not your lovers, friends, family, boss (definitely not your boss!). Don’t tell your boyfriend or girlfriend, your exes, your best friends. Don’t tell anyone!
But especially, and this is really important! This is for the health of your impenetrable fortress of total denial!
For god’s sake, don’t tell your mother.
Srsly. BIG mistake. How big? I now have subscription to Arthritis Today.
Like, a printed magazine subscription. Printed on, like, paper. So, like, big.
How did I live this long without watching my drunk kitchen?
Really, I feel like you all must be holding out on me. “Ha ha ha, check this out, it is SO FUCKING FUNNY!!! But SERIOUSLY! DON’T TELL @obs3sd! EVER!”
Is there a secret Facebook API that helps all of you keep this stuff away from me? I had to hear about this from someone I don’t even know via my cousin Scottie (thanks Scottie!).
Fairly certain this is evidence that blood is thicker than water and booze beats food in rock/paper/scissors. Or something.
This video reminds me of the time that Martha Ellen and I were (ostensibly) cooking something at the Big White House and got really stonkingly drunk on checking the evening’s wine for poisons and wound up sitting on the foor by the Aga singing something Very Important. Probably The Monkees.
Jed is 15. Fifteen year old boys are hard to wake up. They want to stay in their caves. Generally, waking Jed up goes something like this:
Me: Jed, it’s time to wake up.
Jed: …
Me: Jed. It’s tiiiiiime to waaaaaaaaake uuuuuuuuuuuup!
Jed: I KNOW!
<10 minutes passes>
Me: Jeeeeee…
Jed: I! KNOW!!!!!!!
<more time passes>
Me: JED! Get up NOW.
Jed: I’M! GETTING! UP!
I wonder if there might not be a better way…
Two girls having an intense conversation near the Museum of London. As one stormed off, she left the other with this expression on her face.
CostCo sells two-packs of one-gallon bottles of un-scented, no-dye bleach. One gallon of bleach will purify an absolute crap-ton (a scientific term) of poop-infused water, so it’s handy to have around the house, flat, apartment, boat, cabin, or Undisclosed Location.
There are a few ratios of bleach-to-water on the interwebz. The WA state USA Department of Health guys seem to be on the “more is better” end of the scale, which I think is good for water that may have poop floating around in it. I’m generally not a fussy drinker, but I do draw the line somewhere.
Their page is here. From this page, we have this excellent chart:
| Treating Water with a 5-6 Percent Liquid Chlorine Bleach Solution | ||
| Volume of Water to be Treated | Treating Clear/Cloudy Water: Bleach Solution to Add |
Treating Cloudy, Very Cold, or Surface Water: Bleach Solution to Add |
| 1 quart/1 liter | 3 drops | 5 drops |
| 1/2 gallon/2 quarts/2 liters | 5 drops | 10 drops |
| 1 gallon | 1/8 teaspoon | 1/4 teaspoon |
| 5 gallons | 1/2 teaspoon | 1 teaspoon |
| 10 gallons | 1 teaspoon | 2 teaspoons |
I already had a bleach bottle cached away for poopy water so I printed
off this table (on label paper no less!), put it on the
bottle, and then put some clear packing tape over that for good measure. Because you never know when zombie blood might get on your bleach bottle and ruin your print-out…
Some people might not like the flavor of bleach in their water. The apocalypse might not cure that. For these folks, a bunch of activated charcoal in a 5-gallon bucket with some holes cut in the bottom should sort that out. JUST NEVER PUT UN-BLEACHED POOPY WATER DIRECTLY INTO THE CHARCOAL, for hopefully obvious reasons.
Speaking of which – if you can actually SEE poop in the water, some filtering before the bleach is likely in order – even just an old tee-shirt will do for that.
Remember those awesome wooden commercial thread spools dad got for free from the mill, to use as fire wood? They were all pretty colored and hollow, and they had metal rings on the bases, and if you put them in the fire just right, you could make a little jet of flame shoot out the hollow tip, just before they completely caught fire…
Funnily enough, they also turned out to be a near-perfect fit into the tail-pipe of your Dad’s brand-new VW Rabbit.
Also funnily enough, he didn’t think to thoroughly check the contents of his new car’s tail-pipe after visiting our house.
So, yeah. Sorry about that.
Happy mother’s day!
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