Andrew

Been awhile, eh?

I'm happily married now and everything is great on that front. We're still living in Fort Wayne and looking for a new apartment complex to call home because our current location is just a little scary and our neighbors are just a lot too loud and annoying.

For the Outpost people out there on my friends list, they've made me their chief. Iain and I are in the process of moving everything to a new server and getting rid (hopefully) of a lot of red tape and middle management bloat in the process. Of course if you care then you're probably already up to speed.

I decided back when we moved up to Fort Wayne that I wanted to learn how to draw in Photoshop. I'd gotten the hang of the program using a mouse, but my longtime interest in comics and webcomics coupled with the almost-success of a website that was hampered by the fact that people aren't inclined to read through a wall of text to get a joke prompted me to head to Best Buy and purchase a Wacom tablet.

Then I promptly forgot about it after about a month, only to pick it up again in December. I've upgraded to a new tablet and spent time in the learn to draw books, and this is the first I've come up with just by going off a reference:



That'll probably wind up as a more conservatively attired character model for the comic I've been scripting. I definitely need to keep up the practice, but this one turned out pretty good imo.

I'll try to keep this up more often. I just tend to get distracted from LJ for years at a time.

And in the news yesterday, everyone in the city of Boston is officially an idiot. Seriously, calling in the cavalry because of a cartoon advertisement? This country's level of institutional paranoia has officially crossed the line into "going too far."

I really despise screaming children in public places, and I recently found an article about an airline that took a stand and kicked a screaming child and her parents off of their airline.

If you're interested, you can read my ruminations over at the other blog.

Just a warning, this post will probably contain frequent reference to testicles, all in a medical context, so you've been warned.

Saturday night I was over at Emilie's house and had to go to the bathroom. I did my business and proceeded to put the equipment away when my hand brushed against something that shouldn't be there. I performed a simple exam on righty and discovered that there was a hard BB sized lump that I'd never noticed there on previous checks. (Incidentally, if you're a male age 15-40 then you're at risk for testicular cancer. I'd recommend checking it out at least once a month, you never know when you'll find yourself in a situation like this.)

The next day I went to the doctor and he had a look. The doctor informed me that it was probably just a cyst or something else that I needn't worry about, but he also wanted to be absolutely certain. I was scheduled for an ultrasound on Tuesday at The Imaging Center here in Muncie.

Now I have to say that I didn't think I'd be going in for an ultrasound for at least a few more years. And I definitely didn't expect that ultrasound to be on my nuts, or on any part of me for that matter. Still, better safe than sorry, so I went in for the exam. It took about a half hour and then I was out of there with the assurance that they would know for sure what was going on in about 24 hours.

Fast forward to the next morning when I get a call from my doctor's office saying that the Imaging Center called and wanted me to go in for additional testing. "Uh-oh," I thought to myself. "That can't be good."

So I call the Imaging Center and make an appointment to come in between classes later that day at 12:45. I arrive on time and promptly have to wait 15 minutes for the doctor to get in from lunch. He was a South African gentleman as far as I could tell from his accent, businesslike and not particularly friendly or reassuring in his bedside manner. The technician had already informed me that it's rare they call someone in for additional testing, and the doctor didn't help matters.

"Sorry, I just saw something that concerned me on the pictures and wanted to get a look at them live."

"Well who wouldn't?" I quipped. I thought it was funny.

So he went through the examination with the ultrasound machine with a bit of help from the technician. It seemed the doctor didn't really know how to use the machine all that well. That instilled me with a great deal of confidence. When he was done he got up and was about to leave the room without saying a word.

"Um, so what do you think?" I ask.

The doctor then assures me that he feels much better now. He was concerned over something, but definitely thinks it isn't cancerous. Evidently he was worried there might have been something else going wrong in my wedding tackle. He still managed to equivocate in that special way that only doctors who are trying to avoid a potential lawsuit can, telling me that he would have to go back and look at all of the pictures and make a final report before he could tell me anything for sure. The technician again assured me that I would have an answer in 24 hours.

I called my doctor's office the next afternoon to ask if they'd gotten anything from the Imaging Center. Nothing.

I called them again today and they said they had finally gotten the info back. It was just a cyst, nothing to be concerned about. They said they could refer me to a urologist if I wanted to have it removed. Seeing as how cysts are rather benign, they tend to just sit there minding their own business, I declined to have someone come near that area of my body with sharp pointy implements.

So I ended up coming out of this one okay, no thanks to equivocating doctors who kept me on edge for the better part of a week wondering if I would have to have my right nut chopped off sometime in the near future (the typical treatment for testicular cancer). If you've made it this far then I'd like to encourage you to examine your pertinent parts, breasts on the ladies and testicles on the men, on at least a monthly basis. Thankfully it was a false alarm for me, but you never know when something might show up. Catching this stuff early gives you the best chance for survival, so make sure you give yourself that chance.

If you watch Comedy Central for any length of time then chances are you've seen the advertisements for Primeval a horror film that's due out this Friday. There's one interesting thing I've noticed about the previews though. They make it out to be your typical slasher film about a horrible serial killer, but the serial killer in this case is a giant crocodile. And none of the previews that I'd seen mentioned this fact.

Anyways, I wrote more about it over at the new domain. check it out here.

I suppose livejournal could be considered a blog. I never really thought of it as such though. I've been using my livejournal to keep in touch with friends since before the term "blog" became ubiquitous. The friends features make it easy to keep in touch with people who I may have otherwise lost contact with years before.

Having said that, I've decided to try my hand at running a real blog, as it were. I registered the domain for my favored nome de plume at http://www.daecrist.com and have gotten to work adding content. The first post deals with the impending release of what is sure to be the talk of the town tomorrow: the 8PM premiere of the CBS reality series "Armed and Famous."

I'll probably avoid cross-posting between the two. This has always been a more personal thing, and the new domain is more of an outlet for writing since I haven't been doing much of that lately.

So anyways, enjoy.

http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa07018_wz_wiiporn.2073d3ef.html

Chalk another one up to scaremongering and parents who aren't willing to do any parenting.

The lady they mention by name in the article seems like she has it together. It's these people who really bother me:

Other parents, however, complain that Nintendo's scheme is unsatisfactory, and that the Wii browser lacks a "cyber-nanny" or filtering function.

Like it's Nintendo's job to make sure your little darling doesn't use his new toy to "accidentally" get to porn. These new gaming systems connect to the Internet. The Internet has porn. If you don't want your kids to get into that sort of thing then perhaps it's a good idea not to download the web browser at all? The Nintendo Virtual Console is a standalone network that's completely independent of the bad porn mongerers out there on the scary Internets. If little Johnny suddenly wants to be able to browse the web with a cumbersome controller and no keyboard I'd be damned suspicious anyways. Be a parent and don't blame the manufacturer when they don't do your job for you.

Today when I popped onto the livejournal front page I noticed a featured community that was all about encouraging people to read fifty books in one year, much in the same way that events such as Nanowrimo encourage people to write a 150k page book.

It took me aback for a moment that there were people out there who needed to make a conscious effort to read fifty books in a year as opposed to just doing it over the course of a few months.

First off I'd like to apologize for slacking off on the journal. I was going well for a few weeks there and then dropped entirely off the face of the earth as I'm wont to do on Livejournal. I'm back now, huzzah and all that.

I finally went over to the Dark Side and actually purchased and Apple product. It's been a long time coming, but I was hoping that someone would come up with a viable mp3 player that would replace the iPod. That never happened so I spent my Christmas money that had been intended for a Wii on a new 30GB video iPod. Other than a downloadable version of the ever popular but extremely rare Sega Genesis game Toejam & Earl there isn't anything I'll be playing on the Wii until well into the next year. The console has an insane amount of promise, but it seemed silly to plop down the cash when there was nothing I'd play on it.

The iPod, on the other hand, has been quite nice. It's a vast departure from my clunky Dell mp3 player. Its chief advantage is that it plays songs that come in the proprietary iTunes format, so I can finally make full use of that wonder of modern technology. The Dell mp3 player was just that, an mp3 player. Other formats sent it into conniptions. Of course the down side to this is that I now have access to an unlimited number of albums and songs that I've always wanted to own and it's only a click and a credit card charge away. I will have to exercise a great deal of restraint with this awesome new power.

The syncronizing is also terribly convenient. I make playlists in iTunes and the songs are automatically added to the iPod if they're in the iTunes library as opposed to having to drag and drop everything into the Dell player and set up separate playlists by hunting through every song on the machine for the one track that I'd just copied over. It was much like searching for a needle in a haystack and became quite annoying. I've also discovered that all of my favorite NPR shows are available via podcast so I don't have to tune in at the exact time they're on to keep up on the latest news.

Here's hoping everyone else had a great Christmas as well, and a bah humbug to all of you out there who are glad to see the holidays gone for another 11 months.