The back is not pleased

One of the latest things with me has been a newfound hate I have for my old injured back.  Back when I was 21 I lifted something far heavier than I should have and far too quickly because my boss was being an absolute cunt.  I felt a little twinge in my lower back which later turned into stupid pain.  Typical nerve damage.  I was actually surprised to find out quite a few people I know have the same problem.

Any way the pain is brutal and it screwed me for years.  Only 5 years ago I found a simple back exercise that would counter all pain so I wouldnt feel it again.  Problem is I need to do it once every couple weeks to keep it good.  Sadly people get lazy.  No pain, no problem.  I'd go for months without doing it and suddenly be all OMG the pain is there again, like this should be a surprise.

Normally the pain has always focused on the lower back, which made simple things like leaning slightly over the sink while brushing teeth, picking something off the floor, or even getting out of bed an absolute nightmare for a few weeks till my exercises did their thing.  This time it did something completely new.  The back pain was there again.  But I could feel the nerve that got screwed deciding to do something new.

You know when you pinch that nerve that in the back of your shoulder blade or neck, and you just cant turn your head without crying?  I got that in my lower back.  But it decided to move more to my hip which was totally new.  This caused a knock on effect.  My legs from my thighs to my calfs, were SCREAMING in pain.  Like I'd walked for 2 days straight and then had them set on fire.  I'd never experienced anything like this before.  Standing was very painful.  Sitting was more horrible.  But lying down?  Impossible.  I couldnt even sleep because of the pain.  And my pain threshold is stupidly high which says something.

After about 3 days of this and 2-3 hours of sleep at best, I decided to take some painkillers.  This is something I never do.  Not even if my head is exploding with the mother of all headaches.  I've probably taken some once in the last 5 years.  I wasnt expecting anything since they're just standard.  But much to my surprise after about 20min the pain went away.  It would only last half the day so twice a day I was taking them.  I guess since I never take them their strength is full power for me.  Unlike my mum who eats them every day at the smallest pain she gets. 

I did this for about 3-4 days which really helped.  For the past 2 days I've taken none.  The pain is still there, but its much less now, so my exercises seem to be shifting into gear finally.  I can still feel the issue which makes me worry that the nerve is still fucked off and could be triggered into being stupid again if I do the slightest wrong thing.  One of the strangest things though was losing my flexibility.  The day before my body died, I could easily do the splits.  Martial arts history blahblahblah.  Now I cant even lean over slightly with my legs straight.  Its like all my muscles have clenched up and refuse to do anything.  I'll wait another week and give myself more time to heal before I try and test out my flexibility again and see if its come back.  It pisses me off because it takes months of daily stretches and I'll rage if all that effort has been wasted.  At least I'm not feeling completely suicidal anymore.  That pain was something you could only read in legends.

A generous long pause

Well that was almost 2 months since my last update.  Guess I have a few things to put down this time.  Mind you there hasnt been that much good to bother posting about.  A month back my pc decided to just implode on itself.  Bluescreen crash and then refused to boot up into windows again.  Just reset loop of hell every 5 seconds,  I figured my faulty SSD had finally decided to pass on.  The things been screwy for the past 3 years.  Pretty impressive considering its 5 years old and only has a 1 year life expectancy.  So I pulled it out and replaced it with one I bought a year and a half back, during a time I thought it was about to die since my pc kept freezing twice a day.  Weirdly it started to behave when the replacement came in so I never bothered to install it because of laziness mixed with paranoia.

But moving on, I put the new drive in and thought this might be a good time to install windows 10 since almost everyone has been positive about it and it was a free update.  One thing I hate doing is reinstalling windows.  Something always goes wrong when I do.  So I'm going along, installing the programs I need to get me going.  And slowly but surely I'm starting to notice small things that arent right.  And some big things.  One of them was whenever I recorded or streamed, peoples voices would sound a little hollow and with a bit of an echo.  It was very annoying.  Didnt matter if I was using teamspeak, discord, whatever.   The other persons voice was always dodgy.  So I spent a couple weeks troubleshooting with my own knowledge and then scouring the internet for people with the same issues.  Nothing seemed to fix it.  Another issue I had was some of my motherboard utilities wouldnt work with win10, which was an extremely annoying thing.  Especially since I'd gotten another bluescreen while playing a game to test.  Also my mic, if I were to mute myself for a little and then unmute, it would keep me muted until I unplugged it and plugged it back in again.  Streaming to twitch wasnt working properly either.  The quality went to hell and the stream kept break all the time.  It was infuriating.

There were a few other things that slowed me down as I tried to fix this or that.  In the end I decided to reinstall win7 thinking this would sot out my issues.  I did like a few things about 10 but since I couldnt fix anything I was pretty much forced to go back.  Unfortunately some of my problems were still there.  Primarily the voice echo.  After another week or so of trying to sort it out, I finally fixed it.  How?  Logitech had changed their drivers last year when their contract with ScreamingBee ended.  Which meant a few voice altering modules were removed.  When I reverted back to a driver that had these still, the echo was gone.  So I'm super happy.  Streamiing works again and all my drivers are back on.  Though I am getting an annoying bug when I launch the OBS software to stream.  It auto lowers my volume down to 10%, which makes no sense.  I can live with it if I cant figure out how to fix it.

I did get another bluescreen so this got me paranoid.  I stress tested my memory which came up fine.  So I thought maybe its a windows thing since it hadnt updated fully because microsoft purposely broke the update feature to force people to move onto 10.  So I had to manually download a crapload of them.  A few days later I got the crash and reset loop issue again.  I got my system working again by unplugging the SSD and plugging it back in again.  So this cancelled out any theory about damaged ram.  My guess is my motherboard must be faulty.  My system is going on 6 years old now so its no surprise.  But I cant afford to upgrade anything so I'll just have to grin and bare it for a while and just hope it doesnt die.

I havent installed everything yet since I'm moving slowly, and I really hope my editing software doesnt give me any freak issues.  But what I've learned from this is if you have an older system, dont update to windows 10.  All the people I know who have it and love it have upgraded their motherboard in the last couple years.  People with fairly older ones have issues because the drivers and such dont seem to get updated.  After a month of stress it seems to be ok now.  This is the reason I havent updated the youtube channel.  Super sorry.  Should be back to normal now.  Theres a bunch of other stuff I wanted to post but I'll wait a couple days before putting that up.  This page is already long enough.  Thanks for reading!

A Breeding ground of sickness

Thats pretty much the best description I can give of my workplace.  Someone is always sick.  And not just 1 or 2.  Generally its a few.  And they are ALWAYS sick.  They stay sick for like 2-3 weeks.  When they get better, someone else has the sickness.   A couple weeks later?   You guessed it.  They're sick again.  In the almost 5 months I've been working there, everyone has been sick at least twice.  Me?  I've been managing to hold my own and not catch anything because I'm psychotic when it comes to cleanliness.  I have antibacterial wipes, hand wash, everything.  They touch something near me, wipe it down.

This week, my second last week there, everything changed.  I finally caught their diseases.  I rarely get sick.  My problem is my lack of sleep has helped me catch this.  I only get like 3-4 hours normally.  Its just how I am.  Now that I'm sick I'm waking up every hour or 2, so I'm getting even less.  All week I've felt it burn up in the evening, but the next day feel like its gone.  Today though was a whole different story.  Nose, throat, cough, all of it.  Absolutely pissed.  One of the girls at work asked me if I caught a cold off such and such.  I said no.  I've caught it off EVERYONE.  Obviously I'm not happy.

Tomorrow is friday, and I'm calling in sick because fuck it.  It'll be my first day off in 5 months compared to everyone there who have had 2-3 weeks off for sickness each.  Next weeks my last week.  And lets be honest.  Who the fuck am I even going to impress.  They're all on permanent contracts, spent large parts of the day just chatting away.  Meanwhile I'm doing my work and chatting little.  But thats just how it is.  This is how it always is for me.

I cant fucking do this

You know you go through things that arent good, and you get to a point where you're just numb to them and expect them to happen and just say oh well fuck the world and keep going.  Thats me on a daily basis.  With the added in bit of hoping a truck takes me out sooner or later.

But then this sort of BULLSHIT happens and I just cant handle it.  My favourite manga creator Izumi Matsumoto, is dying.  He created Kimagure Orange Road, my absolute favourite manga of all time.  I've seen the tv series probably 4 times through.  The only other celebrity who died that upset me this much was Christopher Lee.  Admittedly, Lee was probably 10 times worse for me, but someone would have to be second place after him.  There are very VERY few people who will upset me when they pass on. I can probably count them on 1 hand.

So yeah.  Fucking saddened by this.  And just to rub salt in the wounds, I found this fucking kickstarter that had gone up last april and didnt even know about it!!!!!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitalmanga/publish-kimagure-orange-road-classic-manga


So many things I would have wanted from there.  I probably would of gotten the $900 tier for sure.  Would have loved to do the $1450 to get the sketch done by him but thats a big jump that at the time I dont think I could have afforded.  To be fair the $900 would of been out of my budget but I would of closed my eyes and gone for it.  Its like the world is constantly wanting to fuck me over.  The past couple months have been absolutely bullshit for me.  But what can you do.  Roll over and let the rest come again.

I will absolutely miss this guy.  He created something magical for me that even to this day I still love to death.  I look forward to getting my hands on those omnibus volumes, which I'm blindly believing will go retail with luck, and if the gods are kind they will finally bring out the KOR series on bluray because of his passing.  He'll always be a legend to me.

October 17th

So this is the date that my current contract at work expires.  Usually I would of signed a new contract by now but since the new government was elected in there have been lots of changes in regards to funding.  So my section still have no idea how much they can get which leaves me out in the cold.  If they dont sort their shit out by next week I'm pretty much unemployed again.  Cant say I'm too shocked that this might be happening, but in the way its happening is a bit surprising.  So yeah I guess we'll see how it goes.

In other news my friend Royce has been heckling me into writing out my story ideas and getting an artist to commission them into a comic book and putting them up on indiegogo/kickstarter since there seem to be heaps of comics getting funded that look rubbish.  I'll admit I'm seriously thinking about it and sorting out my current ideas into a more fleshed out order.  I originally had them as stories for books, so it'll take a little tweaking to get them as a comic.  But if I do go ahead with it I'll put up details here about some of the ideas.  If I dont get extended then I'm 100% doing it since I'll have nothing to do and will need to keep my mind away from suicide lololol

Blast from the past

This has been an interesting week for me.  But the highlight was getting in touch with a friend I havent spoken to in 25 years.  See, next month my high school reunion is happening.  Obviously I'm not going because fuck people.  I'm not one for gatherings.  But going through the facebook page thats been set up for it I decided to see how everyone I knew has been faring.  Then I noticed the name of one person who I have always wanted to track down but never could.  This is the brief story of a girl who was not only my first love, but also my best friend in highschool.

We used to spend heaps of time together.  Most times I'd walk her home after school, we'd meet up on weekends to go to the library for study, go to places to eat, visit the cinema etc.  We never dated, though I could have easily if I wanted to.  But I was more happy having her as a friend.   Now the problem with this is some others were annoyed by me.  She was one of the popular girls, and there were guys who were interested in her and saw me as a constant blockade.  I remember one time 3 of them cornered me and told me to either ask her out or stop hanging out with her so much because noone could approach her.  Told them shes a friend, they can go ahead and ask her out, nothing to do with me.  Clearly this didnt make me too popular with some people.  But fuck them.

Anyway, the last 2 times we spoke were pretty memorable.  I'll start with the final.  Walking her home from school, suddenly she turns on me and just loses it.  I was like wtf.  She started yelling at me saying how she couldnt believe I hadnt asked her out to the graduation, similar to a prom for my american friends.  Another friend of mine had asked her to it and she had accepted.  Berated me how she was expecting me to ask her, how her parents were even expecting it too.  In all honesty I didnt want a date for it.  I was happy to go with friends and just do my own thing, not be dragged around for dances and have to focus on one person only.  So for me it was a bit of a relief someone had asked her as I was expecting on the final day to just be automatically nominated by her whether I wanted to or not.  A weird thing to feel towards the girl you were in love with.  But thats me.

So the second final time we spoke was the catalyst for everything.  I was at home doing something or other when the phone rang.  I picked it up and on the other end I could hear her crying.  She was over a friend of ours house and apparently he had told her I'd called her a bunch of bad things, like slut etc.  So shes sobbing and asking how could I say such things, she thought we were friends etcetc.  Through the entire tirade my brain was working furiously.  Had I said these things?  Did I say them and just forget?  Surely I must have if shes crying like this.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that not even offhandedly had I said any of this.  Then I realized what was really happening.  One of my best friends had decided to stab me in the back because he was interested in her.  This was betrayal of the highest order.  And thats when everything changed for me.

I finally answered her by admitting I'd said those things.  I was done.  As heart wrenching as what was happening, I was over it and didnt need any more drama that highschool brought.  When she got off my friend hopped on and his tone, which I still remember to this day with absolute fury, was almost accusing.  Shes crying, he said.  Those things you called her were really uncalled for, he said.  At the time I couldnt believe it.  I questioned myself again.  Had I said them after all since he sounded so sure of himself.  Was he maybe misunderstanding or mishearing something I'd said casually.  No.  By now I was 100% certain.  Fuck you I thought.  I told him to make sure he kept her happy.  And then I hung up and went andlocked myself up in my room with whatever was left of my shattered mind.  Funnily enough they broke up a couple months or so later.  At least thats what I recall.  I'm not completely sure since we didnt hang out after that again.  He tried to keep in contact with me, but after a little realized I wanted nothing to do with him.

It was pretty much on that day when I realized, despite my positive outlook on everything, that people sucked and majority of them were fake.  It took a couple years more before I'd fully cursed the world and everything in it.  My profiling of people became inhumanly accurate.  I would always have friends asking me for advice on things or relationships, because my brain had somehow evolved to see past all the layers of bullshit.  Even to this day a friend of mine showed me pictures of 3 guys she was sort of interested in.  I told her what I expected each one of them to be like, down to 1 of them most likely having the ability to cheat.  She was floored since that guy, who looked fairly normal in his photo, had cheated on a previous girlfriend.  Which made me ask the question, why the fuck are you even interested in him to begin with.  But then I realized people just love drama.

Any way, after graduation which was year 10, we all went to a new school that covered years 11-12, and then followed onto university.  We ended p never speaking again.  She found a new circle of friends and I lost all contact.  I've always wanted to tell her that I never said any of those things.  Its been smashing around in my head frequently since then.  One of those moments where you wonder how things would of been had you said or not said something, and wanting to rewind the clock.  I'm still content with what I did.  What I'm not happy about is not having the chance to tell her later that it never happened.  So when I saw her name on the facebook post I decided to message her a couple months later.  I had to gather my courage.  After all what sort of reaction would I expect?  Anger?  Indifference? Could be anything.  But I'd decided it didnt matter.  I needed to do this for myself, to finally get it out of my system so I could move on.  Amazingly enough she was outright shocked.

I wont paste up the entire conversation, but these are a few lines from it just for gossip sake -  'Omg....I don't know what to say....you were my closest friend in high school the one person I thought would be there always......You made high school bearable, it was us against the school......I remember the break before we started Year 11 and you turned to me and said that things would change and I was like no it won't it will be fine....Lets get together sooner rather than later. Free most weekends, would love to catch up on the last 25 years.''

So yeah, I was pretty made up with that.  Easily the best reaction I could of hoped for.  In case you're wondering, yes shes married and has a couple kids.  So no, I will not be doing some bullshit romcom movie style of finding my highschool sweet heart and marrying her.  Because that stuff never happens.  But I hear you ask, what if she were single?  Would I have followed through with anything?  No, I would not.  Many years ago I chose friendship.  I'm still happy with that choice and dont regret anything.  Logic states I'd still be happy to continue that trend.

So thats my big thing.  Your eyes are probably broken from reading so much.  If they are, I encourage you to abuse Jed.  Abuse him thoroughly.  And tell him I sent you.  I think next weekend is when we'll probably meet up so that should be fun. At least conversation wont be boring.  We have 25 years to catch up on.

I really should update more

So I took a little break.  22rd of last month was 3 years to the day my cat passed.  So I was in my own little world for the past few weeks.  The only reason I didnt go completely catatonic like I usually do is because I've been working so slightly distracted.  Sadly its affected my concentration at work and my level of stuffs have been a little mediocre.  Will be snapping out of it after this week and going for gold.  The one irritating thing about work is that I'm having to be around people.  And you all know how I just loathe that.  For the first time in many years I've found myself thinking maybe a girlfriend might be a good idea.  Bullshit right?  This isnt me.  Need to do something about this new broken thinking.

One thing I must share is one of my trainers at work Sonia, in the middle of being trained she said she thought I was familiar when she first saw me and then said its because she saw my blog years back.  Obviously this floored me.  She mentioned about the update long ago where myself and a couple friends cosplayed as GI Joe characters, and then said she was into cosplaying and creating her own outfits.  I mean I know quite a few cosplayers, but I didnt know anyone who actually made outfits so this was very cool.  I checked out her blog and found this.

She made that.  Ridiculous talent right?  Looks completely professional.  The most I ever managed to create out of a needle and thread was a pillow case.  And I dont think it could be described as a pillow case.  Thats far too flattering for it.  She also does things like this for childrens parties...

Tell me that doesnt just blow your mind.  Balloon characters.  First thing that came to mind was the character Skuld.  But thats me.  Right now she isnt doing much of these types of things cause shes about to have a baby, which is pretty amazing.  So she'll be taking a break for a bit.  If you want to see her blog heres the link-

https://www.blogger.com/profile/04649481301908838417



So whats new with me...  Oh, I got a new addition to my Ariel family.

I've also finally done it.  After 5+ years of looking for a camera, I have finally chosen one.  Had my eye on it before it came out, and the reviews and features sold it for me.  And this is after watching many videos, looking and reading many website reviews and photo displays etc, no rushing into this.   Its the Panasonic GX85.  The deal came with 3 lenses which was super good and saved me like probably $400.  Pretty good considering it only came out in April.  Sadly they havent sent it yet and its been over a week.  Most likely stock issues.  Very frustrating because I need this damn thing.  I need to learn it inside out so I can start taking some cool pictures and be prepared for Disney Land/World  next year.  Again, only happening if I dont lose my job by then.  So you never know really.

Anyway almost 1am and I have to be up in 5 hours.  I'll add more possibly tomorrow.  As well as upload a new video.  By tomorrow I pretty much mean tonight.  No promises cause I'm shit at keeping time.