The In Case Anyone's Interested Files

In which Rain breaks nearly three years of LiveJournal silence because...

2014-02-02T02:55:17Z

Ron and Hermione was a mistake, and it should have been Harry and Hermione instead.

Really, JKR? Really? Now you say that?

Settle in, kids. Some old wounds are about to be opened, and some interwebs is gonna blow up.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do (the Paxil edition)

2011-03-11T18:36:56Z

After a taper that managed to be both rather quick and excruciatingly slow, I have now been off Paxil since Wednesday of last week.

The first few days weren't so bad, and if anything, they made me realize that I've been in withdrawal ever since I first dropped the dose after Operation Rehydrate back in January. The digestive issues, the swollen eyes and headaches, the aches and pains, and the crappy sleep all made a comeback, as they had every time I tapered. Originally, since I was also tapering up on a new SSRI at the same time, there was no way of being sure what was a side effect of the new stuff and what was a withdrawal effect, but now it seems pretty clear that it's been largely withdrawal all along.

All the precautions I've taken (after obsessively and unhealthily trying to cull the Internet for suggestions), like adding in magnesium supplements and fish oil, seem to have helped to blunt the overt mental withdrawal symptoms -- either that or I was one of the lucky ones to not get any of the dreaded brain zaps or rebound panic attacks. What they did not do, however, was adequately prepare me for the physical form of withdrawal.

The Paxil Flu really sucks.

As noted above, it's pretty clear now that I've had the Paxil Flu since January, and because of the taper, it's been a prolonged, sustained process. (This is, by all accounts, way better than what could have happened had I quit cold turkey, though, so I'll happily let that water go under the bridge.) Some weeks have been better than others. Some days have been better than others. This week? Not one of the better ones.

The worst part has been the hypersensitivity of my beleaguered guts. There has been some nausea, but that's secondary to the simple fact that food just doesn't want to hang around with me for very long, and if I eat something that doesn't agree with me even a little, it's like instant food poisoning. Not to go too TMI here, but I have to wonder how much nutrition I've been actually getting based on my food's rapid exit strategy.

This week has been marked by alternating feelings of feverishness and chill (especially at night), a resultant lack of sleep, ongoing churning of the guts, muscle aches (especially the lower back), and incredible fatigue. And while there is none of the obvious chemical anxiety, well, there's enough of the physical crap to make me feel pretty strung out mentally.

So no, it's no longer all in my head. I don't quite know how to feel about that.

I've added a large daily dose of B vitamins to help against the depletion of neurotransmitters (believed to be the cause of the flu-like symptoms), and we'll see how that pans out. I wish I had been warned not to take it with dinner, however: Wednesday night saw some of the worst fever-dreams I've ever had in my life. Come to find out later that some people intentionally use B vitamins before sleep to induce a lucid dreaming state. Oops.

So that's the latest. Missed three days of work this week, but I've got about eight total days still saved up, and three more weeks of intermittent leave in which these absences will not count against my record. So now I need to hope that the worst will be over soon. A lot of people say the worst lasts about two weeks, and I'm still at just over one, so I guess the thing to do now is wait and hope.

Hope's a little hard to come by right now, but I'll keep at it.

A Work in Progress

2011-01-17T02:27:57Z

Two weeks into Project: Rehydrate Me. Not having to use the loo every ten minutes anymore, which is good.

Five days into reduced dosage #2 (and 12 days since reduction #1). Kick was still pretty high in the days immediately after the change, with accompanying anxiety, until... well, see below.

Three days without significant caffeine. Cut out the Pepsi entirely, so that my only caffeine intake was via small amounts of milk chocolate - a reduction from 150 mg/day to about, oh, ten or less. On the first day, I had the expected headache, but the anxiety kick was so much smaller that I wondered briefly if I'd forgotten to take my med. This was cause for great hope.

However, into the third day, I'm finding myself ridiculously tired. Sleep has been deeper (if still interrupted by moments of heat and cold because of the constant fight between blankets, heaters and inherent chill in our extremely un-insulated house), but energy? That's something that happens to other people.

This still feels like progress, because the exhaustion seems to be due to a greater sense of relaxation. It appears that some of these muscles, now that they're finally unclenching, are giving me hell for what I've been putting them through. I tried to exercise on the Wii today, and homg, it did not go well when I tried to do a yoga pose that involved stretching my legs and back. Ow ow ow.

Tomorrow I go back to work, for a pre-scheduled week of five-hour days. I am hoping for a steady improvement as the combined detox continues and I manage to get more and better sleep.

The troubling part, though, is the feeling of exhaustion, because being this tired leads to clumsiness and general muzzy-headedness that have often been anxiety triggers in the past. So I'm certainly not settled in the head yet, much less the body.

Better times ahead. Must remember that.

More brains!

2011-01-13T20:01:55Z

Straight to the cut this time.

After a week on half the previous dose, it was still kicking my arse with hours upon hours of extra anxiety, so starting yesterday, I'm down to 12.5 mg, the smallest dose I have ever taken, and a quarter of what I was on less than two weeks ago.

I may have done myself a disservice by reading up on withdrawal, which is pretty terrifying stuff, but I need to remember that the horror stories I'm hearing are generally going to be the worst of the worst experiences (people who have easy titrations don't tend to go onto support message boards and post how great they feel, I imagine -- like the sylph said to me last night, they're going to be too busy leading their lives).

Two days in, I'm still feeling a kick from the medicine, but again, it's a smaller one. I have managed to get some time off work in the form of seven afternoons -- leaving at 2 pm rather than 5 pm, so I can continue going to the office (anytime I take actual time off due to stress, it makes coming back to work an anxiety party, so hopefully this modified schedule will help that) and yet still have some more family and recovery time during the latest Adjustment Period.

Meanwhile, I need to stop researching. I need to stop reading. I need to stop trying to figure this out any further than I have. I think I've found all that I'm going to find, and while I've finally figured some things out, I don't think I get to know everything. After hours of searching, I cannot find any stories of people with circumstances similar to this, where a simple lifestyle change made such a difference to their medication tolerance (and perhaps necessity). I don't know if the extra water has flushed me clean to the point that every dose feels like my first. I don't know if the extra water has raised my inherent brain chemistry to the point that the medication feels like an unneeded intrusion.

What I do know is that I need to give it time now. I've already dosed down way faster than recommended. Now I just need to tough it out, deal with the jitters and whatever else may be coming (no brain zaps, thankfully), and let things settle. I need to stop reading support boards and start playing video games and watching anime and enjoying my family, not necessarily in that order.

As I said before, the waiting part? Still sucks. But time has always healed this in the past, and time will be needed to do it again. Along with some better life choices, of course.

So where have I been?

2011-01-11T19:10:58Z

That's a good question. The answer is a long one, though, and deals with lots of stress and brain stuff, so I'll put it under a cut.

Shortly after my last post to this journal last April, I went into another Stress Jag - my second of 2010, and it ended with having my medication dosage upped (25 to 37.5 mg, putting me back to where I started). Another adjustment period later, and I was back to what passes for normal.

In the fall, I was asked to return to the stage again, and I accepted, but one week into the rehearsal progress, bam, stress jag #3 of the year came to visit. Thankfully, this was not a very intensive show, and the rehearsal process was not grueling. I got past the stress before curtain, and took some time off work during tech week so that I would not overexert.

That backfired, as coming back to work set off stress jag #4. This one ended with another increase of medication (50 mg, higher than ever before) with the proviso that I would start looking for healthier ways of dealing with stress and start reducing as soon as possible. It was beginning to occur to me that these jags were set off by periods of a sudden increase in physical exertion, leaving me mentally exhausted and unable to cope with things that would normally not affect me. An exercise program seemed like a good idea.

Then I was sick with one cold or another for a month or so, and when the cold weather hit (relative term for those of us who live here, I know) right around Christmastime, here came stress jag #5.

The day after Christmas, we bought a Nintendo Wii with a Wii Fit, and started this exercise thing.

In the week between Christmas and New Years, though, something else happened that literally changed everything. I woke up drenched in sweat for the second straight morning feeling overheated, exhausted and feverish (in spite of not having a fever), and discovered both a complete inability to spit and dark orange, cloudy urine.

I was freaking dehydrated.

We got a new, heavy, ridiculously warm blanket from my mother for Christmas of 2009, and when the cold weather hit, we piled that onto the bed. Night sweats followed, followed by the stress jag. The same thing happened when we first started using the new blanket at the end of last year, just before stress jag #1 (early January of 2010). We were also using electric space heaters that were cooking any remaining moisture out of the already dry air.

Things began to make a shocking amount of sense. Stress jags 2, 3 and 4 were not only preceded by physical activity -- they were preceded by physical activity during heat waves -- nice, dry Santa Ana heat waves. I looked up symptoms for chronic and acute dehydration, and it was like looking at a list of what happens during every one of these stress jags that I've been having since even before I started taking medication.

I haven't been a good hydrate-er since high school, when I ran long distance. I've been a soda drinker, using drinking fountains from time to time, drinking bottled water on occasion because I know water is supposed to be good for me, but never devoting myself to really keeping hydrated. Small wonder that when the heat and dry hits, and my activity levels go up, I don't have the physical resources to deal with it.

I've been training myself for so long to look at every one of these stress reactions as a mental thing that I've neglected the very real truth that the mind and body are connected, and that no, it doesn't all have to be in my head. It might be in the body as well.

So after that wake-up call, I started increasing my liquid intake. I read up on hyponatremia, and certainly didn't go nuts with it, but I've been ramping it up to a guideline that I've seen from multiple sources -- at least one ounce per day per two pounds of body weight. A few days went by, and I was feeling kind of uneasy, thinking that I'd just set myself up for yet another difficult adjustment period. Yay.

Then, upon returning to work, it got even more interesting. The unease turned into some very familiar foggy-headedness, tension and anxiety -- the sort I felt after every medication increase, only more so. Like clockwork, in the two to three hours following my meds, I would get slammed with it.

Came to read that one of the problems of chronic dehydration is that it affects the body's ability to produce serotonin. It keeps the brain from properly synthesizing tryptophan into serotonin, and the liver ends up taking away a lot of the available tryptophan for detox purposes to make up for the kidneys not doing their job to their fullest.

Suddenly, 50 mg of an SSRI, designed to help the brain retain serotonin due to its relative scarcity, felt like an overdose.

Last Wednesday, on my own, I cut to 25 mg (one pill instead of two, and the dose I was taking a year ago) and made an appointment to see my healthcare provider. Her reaction to the entire thing was along the lines of "Huh, never heard of that -- it makes sense, though!" Hardly a confidence builder, but she agreed to the lower dose.

A week into that lower dose, and it still hits me hard (it's hitting right now, in fact), but it's more like a city bus than a freight train at this point, giving rise to the thought that it's still too much, but cutting down any more suddenly than this is dangerous. Thus, I'm in the peculiar place of feeling overmedicated and in withdrawal at the same time. I'm weakened physically to the point where even a brisk walk around the hospital campus exhausts me utterly. I'm having vivid dreams that occasionally become ripping nightmares. Par for the course, sad to say, and I've been here several times.

So it's another adjustment period, and it's not been pleasant. But the idea that I may have hit on a simple reason for so much of my past stress is heartening in its own way. After two dose increases last year, I was starting to feel pretty darned glum about my situation. Now, it looks like there may be some light at the end of that tunnel after all.

Mostly, it's nice to know that maybe all of this hasn't been in my head, as so many wanted me to believe. The stuff I'm going through now, though, as the brain chemistry resettles yet again -- that IS in my head, and it's frustrating as hell that I can do nothing at this point but wait.

I'm ready to get better now, and waiting is damned hard.

So yeah... that's where I've been.

Shake, Rattle and Roll: Easter Edition

2010-04-04T23:38:31Z

You get used to the earthquakes when you live in California. You kind of have to. But when you're at Easter with your extended family (at your aunt's house, which is on the side of a hill, overlooking a canyon), and the house starts shaking, and it freaking doesn't stop for a good thirty seconds or more? That's exceptional.

No damage here, happy to report. Nothing even off the shelves when we got home. Callisto didn't come out of hiding until we'd been back for a while, but other than that, we were untouched. When we bought this house from my father, we saw a geological survey of the area that shows our house to be at relatively small risk for earthquake damage -- whereas almost every other house on the block was in the red zone. Whoever built on this very spot was perhaps smarter than we know.

One noticeable aftershock so far.

Meanwhile, the kids had a lovely Easter. Maggie is in the process of sorting all her candies. I'm not sure if she's going by content, flavor or size, but she's definitely got a system going.

How To Endear Yourself to Tech Support

2010-03-07T04:44:47Z

In four simple steps!

1) Place a call at 3:53 on a Friday afternoon saying that your computer is Slow and sometimes does Funny Things. Add that you need it fixed and working perfectly Now rather than on Monday because you need to come in on Sunday to work on payroll.

2) To that end, ask the HelpDesk to make it an Urgent ticket, meaning the technician does not get to go home until it's finished.

3) Leave for the day at 4:00 pm, locking your office door behind you.

4) Leave your computer turned off so that tech support cannot remote control it in order to try to figure out what exactly is wrong with it.

Try it! Your technician will love you!

Goodnight, Goliath

2010-02-26T15:18:58Z

Last night we lost Goliath, who left us at the ripe old age of 21.

Goliath has pretty much always been old and decrepit. I remember one Christmastime when she was looking particularly haggard, with fur falling out, an unsteady gait and seeming like little more than skin and bones and fluff. I commented to my brother that I didn't expect her to survive the winter.

That was in 1998.

Goliath was not our cat, to start with. She belonged to a neighbor, and was left behind when said neighbor left town. Luckily, she was quick to notice that there were lots of cats living two houses down across the street, and the people there were not particular about who they left food out for. So before too long, she became a local, and lived here for a long time afterward.

Her health improved when she became a full-time indoor cat, but she always had that look to her, as though she were a thousand years old already. My brother and I used to joke that she was a lich-cat, but was too happy to be all evil and brain-eating like one might expect from the undead.

She was a bonkler. Any visitor who gave her a single pet would have a friend for life (and a friend who would sit next to them mewing for more petting).

For all her advanced age, the end was rather sudden. Three days ago, she was hopping up onto my chair to nap like always, and was sneaking in to get Mirage's leftover wet food. Two days ago, though, I was sitting on Ivy's lower bunk at bedtime, and she tried (and failed) to hop up. It was then I noticed that she was not walking properly, with her back legs skidding out from beneath her. By yesterday morning, she could not walk at all, and we knew that this time it was the real thing.

This morning, she was gone.

I'm sad to have lost a kitty who's been part of the family for so long, but at the same time, she would have been 22 this year. She had a damned good run.

I think she's earned a good nap.

Once again, Jonesy, I'm going to borrow a page.

Simplifying can be hard...

2010-01-12T18:29:32Z

Made the call yesterday afternoon to get my old Nissan pickup truck taken away. It will be donated to the local PBS affiliate. It hasn't run in ten years, and has just been taking up space in either the garage or the back driveway for all that time while I've clung to a faint hope of one day fixing it back up or even converting it into an off-roader. But that's so far down the list of priorities it's not even funny (even if it would be possible after all this time), so the decision was made some time back to donate it. Then I just never got around to it.

This was my first vehicle. It ferried me across the entire state of California several times during that second year at Humboldt State. It was the conveyance with which I got Michelle out of a bad situation in Arizona, only to, at her request, deliver her right back into it a month or two later (those trips were really the ones that broke its back, as it never ran right afterward). It covers a very strange period of my life, from the break-up of the first truly significant committed relationship in my life to the beginning of my years with the Sylph. Many, many memories tied up in this little truck.

So it's a little weird to know that it will be gone this Thursday.

Is it just a guy thing to get so attached to a vehicle that it's this hard to let go of it?

Simplify

2010-01-11T21:20:06Z

Today I called Cox and had the second land-line cancelled, as well as two movie channels we never watch. Lost the bundle savings, and our Internet goes up by ten bucks a month as a result, but the net savings will still be more than $40 monthly. Cha cha cha.

Got a haircut. A pretty severe one, at that. I guess as I get older, my patience for that in-between length (always in my face, not yet long enough for a ponytail) wears thinner and thinner. Almost makes me miss the days when it was more or less acceptable to wear a mullet in polite company. (And Lord knows I wore one of those way longer than was acceptable.) Less effort to take care of, less having to deal with it. Boom. No net savings, though.

Pretty much decided on the not-buying-comics thing. That'll likely be $100 monthly or more at the rate I was going here at the close. I may keep going back for New Mutants for a while (because hey, it's New Mutants), or I may wait for the inevitable trade paperbacks.

Very edgy about going back to work tomorrow. There's nothing like taking two vacation days (the last I'm likely to get for a couple months due to a co-worker going on paternity leave) only to get (what was now almost certainly) food poisoning the night before your four-day weekend.

Still looking for additional ways to simplify, save and de-stress. I'll see what I come up with.

Time to give up comics... again?

2010-01-09T21:37:57Z

So yeah, I'm seriously considering quitting comic books again. I did it once before in the mid 1990s, when things really began to spiral out of control in the business, and now I'm considering it again for a very familiar reason.

I'm just not reading them anymore.

Like then, I've been continuing to buy for the last few years without reading everything I buy: a sort of constant "save it for later" thing. And then later doesn't get here. (I still have loads of stuff from the mid-1990s that I never found the time for, much less the more recent stuff.)

Over the last few months it's become more pronounced, to the point where even the ones I was normally reading on purchase have been stacking up. Part of this was no doubt due to the very intensive writing project I've been involved with since September or so, but now that it's over (at least, unless/until I can think of another story), I look at that stack of books and just don't care to go to the trouble of sorting them out and reading them.

And unlike the mid-1990s, we're now at the point where most individual issues are four bucks. $20 a week or more for a bunch of brightly colored paper that I'm not reading anymore seems wasteful and silly.

I'd feel badly for the guy who runs the shop I go to: his is one of the last non-chain comic stores left in town, and I like to support local business as much as the next person. But at the same time, I can't keep justifying the expense. The X-books are largely a long string of WTF in illustrated form, the Buffy comic has become all but unreadable, and the smaller books (like Keith's Farscape comics) are ordered in such tiny amounts that I only find one on the shelves about half the time, even when I show up on new release day.

So while part of me wants to see if Dove really can save the universe where big hitters like Superman have failed, and while part of me wants to see if Doug Ramsey 2.0 turns out to be the badass we all knew he could have become, and while part of me actually hopes that Joss Whedon will stop jerking his fans around (okay, so maybe there's no amount of hope in the world that'll stop that), I'm really thinking it might be time to cut my losses again. I can always go and pick up compilation volumes after the fact (or on Amazon) for stories I actually care about.

I've been discovering more and more things in my life that I need to let go of. Maybe this gets to be one of them.

Need advice from the massage-minded among us, please

2010-01-09T01:40:29Z

Very stressful week at work today, which hit its peak for me on Wednesday when a co-worker of mine got his Very Last Warning. I consider this guy a friend, and I know enough to know that he can't afford to lose this job. And additionally, it got me worried about the tenuousness of my own situation: while I am in nowhere near the trouble this guy is for absences (or indeed anything), just the thought of losing this job is mind-melting.

Spent the rest of Wednesday day having cramps in the chest and feeling every heartbeat as though it were trying to explode from my chest. Came home after work, and didn't feel much better. I just lay in bed for a while with that feeling of every heartbeat hitting against a wall of tension.

Then, realizing the way I'd been clenching "forward" all day, I basically started poking at my abdominal muscles, then trying to massage them a little, trying to ease any tension that might be there. I felt a series of shooting pains that went as far as my legs, but these passed, and then...

...and then everything changed. The heartbeat felt normal again. The diaphragmatic breathing was suddenly much easier. There was a very real sensation of release. I still felt pretty crappy and exhausted, but more manageably so.

Then yesterday afternoon, at the end of a much better day at work, I felt a pain in the same area that I initially thought was muscle soreness, but given the way my digestion has been behaving today, I don't think that as much anymore. Maybe I ate something bad for lunch yesterday, because you know, why not get a mild case of food poisoning when you're already feeling stressed out and crappy?

My question, however, is this. Given how incredibly tense those muscles were, and how profound the sense of release was with just a few minutes' work, is it possible that I unloadeed enough toxins into my system to knock me for this latest loop?

Is the solution the same? Just rest and lots of water?

Lucky for me I already had the day off work today, I guess...

Post-stress stress is stressful!

2009-12-29T17:15:37Z

So where have I been? Yeah, long story.

Whole family got sick post Xmas (there's nothing like watching your five-year-old daughter sit up in bed suddenly and barf all over herself, poor thing), and as sometimes happens to me nowadays, I responded to getting sick by letting stress have its way with me.

It's annoying more than anything, because really, other than sick family (getting well), I don't really have anything to stress about. Made it through Xmas with money to pay the bills still intact, the mortgage is going to be paid on time, the girls enjoyed the holiday itself (Sylph tells me that Maggie is still talking about how much she loved it, and how she's looking forward to the next one), work is okay, Maggie is doing well in school, Ivy is talking more and more, and I'm nine years happily married.

On the down side, the writing project I've been working on so intently for the last three months is finally drawing to a close, and I'm finding that far more difficult to face than I thought I might. But to be stressed out about it seems odd.

Meh. Time to plow through and get stuff done. Every little thing feels like a Sword of Damocles right now. Time to start taking those bad boys down...

Things I'm Thankful For

2009-11-27T04:38:11Z

In no particular order:

I am thankful for this icon; specifically, I am thankful for my wonderful wife of nine years, and my lovely five- and two-year-old daughters.

I am thankful for my friends, from the local gang to those at a greater distance. I am thankful for the Internet, and the various networks that preceded it, for opening that circle of friends in ways I never could have expected. My world is a better place because you are in it.

I am thankful for my extended family, much of which I got to see today, including my closing-in-on-90 grandmother.

I am thankful once again that my father did us the kindness of selling us his old house on the cheap so that we could afford to remodel it and still get by on a single salary.

I am thankful to still be getting that single salary, and that I have a job that has its aggravations, but is still the best job I've ever held in my life to date in terms of pay, benefits and overall happiness.

I am thankful for the muse making a recent comeback. Even though it's "only" fanfic with an audience of literally dozens, it's still been about 80K words in the last two months, and it's the most fun I've had writing in a long, long time.

I am thankful for cats.

I am thankful that I have no need to go shopping tomorrow.

Best to you all.

And what did you do for your birthday, Mr. [Fletcher]?

2009-11-19T20:10:05Z

I got an H1N1 vaccine up the nose.

So, um, happy birthday to me?

Know what's fun?

2009-11-02T20:47:41Z

Working in a hospital during a pandemic scare.

Hello (from the) Bay Area!

2009-10-08T19:35:43Z

Arrived safe and sound in San Mateo last night, and will be here through the weekend. Maggie and Ivy are in desperate need of a park, or something similar, so that they may run around like crazy things and work off some of the energy they saved up by spending all of yesterday in the car.

Wheeeee!

Quick fury

2009-09-16T20:34:51Z

Our new Senior Analyst left several hours early today without taking PTO, saying as he left "It's my daughter's birthday, so I'm going to spend the rest of the day at (offsite clinic for which I don't have any actual tickets)." Which is basically code for "leaving for the day," because this jackass has also used the phrase Going To Offsite to mean getting his car detailed, getting his windows tinted, and going to a strip joint. (He told us so after the fact in each case, with that jocular "Oh, everyone does it" attitude.)

He's wrong. Everybody damn well doesn't do it.

And you know who particularly wouldn't do it? My former officemate who got passed over for a well-deserved promotion in favor of this guy.

In unrelated fury, but speaking of the word jackass, I wish there were a way I could anti-buy a Kanye West album.

Nine years ago...

2009-09-15T17:58:37Z

...we said we would.

(And we still are, which is pretty darn cool.)

Happy Anniversary, Ra. Wubs.

Your Second Tech Support Minute, with Rain

2009-09-03T16:23:34Z

Second ticket: "Ever since customer put in new toner cartridge, a SUPPLY MEMORY ERROR has been coming up on the printer. Please come fix ASAP, as this is a critical printer."

Came up, asked customer where they keep their spare toner cartridges, put a new one in, returned to my desk and reminded myself that I get paid for this.

And that I'd rather they know how to fix people than fix computers, this being a hospital and all.

Your Tech Support Minute, with Rain

2009-09-03T15:28:52Z

Today's first ticket when I came in: "Customer came in this morning and monitor was black. Doesn't want to touch anything, and wants analyst to come in and fix it. This is the third time this has happened."

I came into the customer's office and turned the computer on.

This would almost be funny, except this is, as mentioned, the third time in two weeks.

If this were phrased differently, along the lines of "Customer would like to know why computer is not on in the morning when it was left on at close of business yesterday," then maybe we could go somewhere with this. But holy crap, people. Your tech support doesn't ask that much of you. Really.

M-I-C, K-E-Y, S-N-I-K-T

2009-08-31T16:09:19Z

Disney to acquire Marvel.

Um.

Wow.

Er.

Hee hee hee hee hee

2009-08-19T18:52:52Z

Everything's better with squirrels.

ZOMG SQUIRL PEW PEW PEW!

This is gonna be fun.

ETA: No, I am in no way going to harm any squirrels. Because squirrels are awesome.

Quick Hitter

2009-08-13T20:10:27Z

Has it not occurred to the panic-mongers that healthcare is already denied to those "deemed unfit for society" by nature of being prohibitively expensive?

Illyana, if you love me, you'll let me eat your brains!

2009-08-10T18:32:38Z

The big Marvel Mutant crossover this fall? "Necrosha." Yeah, Selene is going to resurrect pretty much every dead mutant in the X-books' history and use them in her army.

Apparently this is a blatant ripoff of a recent/current DC story, so it's nice to know some things never change.

You know, in the last twenty years I've started and stopped on at least three separate attempts to write a Late Show 9, but this might be too good to pass up...

Anyway, here's the cover for New Mutants #6. So, yeah.