LP Update/Comment Thread

[IskatuMesk]

Gameproc now supports https. While we aren't currently using a forum or any other form of communication, it has been brought up a few times in the past and I took advantage of Lavarinth's recent changes to CC to push it to GP.

/e

I've added some new terminology to the related page, though some of it hasn't come up a lot in most of my current videos.

[IskatuMesk]

Recordings completed in Halloween 2019 and processing completed in June 2020, the Dark Souls 3 Randomizer series finally sees completion and release as a Psychological Adventure.

[IskatuMesk]

Anyone contacting me should be aware that due to enormously mounting IRL problems you should expect extremely delayed responses to any messages, DM's or otherwise as I am simply unable to access the machine most of the day.

Wouldn't be birthday week without something extremely damaging happening.

[IskatuMesk]

I've tried to make a coffee hour but between limited time and energy, coupled with the unshakable fate of something new happening before I can get to processing it, I'm going to bulletpoint current events in this post.

- Cat is in a near-death final stand situation.
- Heat is insane. I'm less and less able to deal with it as I get older. We invested a tremendous amount of money into finally getting some portable AC. Amazon hid the box handles so pulling it up the stairs probably permanently fucked some of my fingers.
- Nonstop yard work and house work. Imbeciles who bought our treadmill fucking trashed the house with it and destroyed the treadmill in the process. In other news, people still don't ever listen to me when I try to make their work easier.
- The East Asian community is basically ram ranch but with less ramming and more scraping and wasps.


The ride never ends.

[IskatuMesk]

My brain is pudding. My face is crusty with dried tears. A migraine pounds in my skull and the right side of my jaw is in severe pain. I am in agony. Yet I sit down here now for the purpose of seeking closure, and it is closure I will seek. I cannot sleep. I cannot bear to even sit in that room any longer. Everything surrounding it is a sea of emotion, faces, words and numbers. It's all too much.

I shouldn't be here, but I am. I am here because I feel there is no other place for me. Not because I have something I need to do - yes, there are many things; they'll stay in eternal deadlock as they have for the months preceding this one - but because I have nothing to do.

If I had known, then, back in 2014, that I would be here, again, posting now, at this point, at this time of the day, at this month, at this year, what would I have done differently? So many things. I have countless regrets, countless pangs of sadness and a lot of guilt. But that is because I am critical. The truth is, of course, that life is a series of dicks and all of them are toothy and no matter which one you pull out of the box it's going to bite you. Predicting just how many teeth are going to penetrate your flesh and in what arrangement is just a little difficult, especially when faced with a truly unstoppable onslaught of insanity.

Where do I begin? Is there really a point to even going in detail? I suppose every good tragedy needs a heroine.



The closest thing I had to a family member. Historians might recall the Years of Hell began back in 2013, when this little girl would embark upon a terrible battle against chronic ulcers. We have followed her journey throughout time because she was the only reason I am still alive.

I still remember those days as clear as crystal. It's amongst the only memories my addled brain has chosen to preserve. I remember scraping crusty bits from her eyelids in 2014 when they somehow got infected; a process that took up to 20 minutes, bent over a small master bedroom cupboard (I'm sure this is where my future - now-current - back problems began). I'd scrape the crusties off with a fingernail I carefully manicured and sanitized, sanitized the eye, then placed a layer of antibiotics on in their place. In 30 minutes to an hour I'd repeat the process, lest the eyelid fuse together.

The Melting Ulcer is a battle I will never forget.

It's 1am, the 30th of August. In 2:15 hours I put in two antibiotics with a 15 minute drift between them and then finally pass out for the few hours of peace I will get until the next rotation.

It wasn't the first time I had endured such a grueling month to months-long trial; the kind of thing you hire nurses and hospitals for. Unfortunately, today, the battle of the Melting Ulcer almost seems like a small skirmish. One I had a real stake in as a person to change the tides in. My actions mattered. My extreme attention to detail, including the analysis of the eye under different lighting conditions taking advantage of my otherwise terribly useless near-sightedness. Discipline, of course. Always discipline.

The reward for victory is the love and affection of one of the few things in all my waking life I trust. A cat who, for all reasonable observations could deduce, was not terribly bothered with my incessant doting and constant medical care. A cat whom once was forced to walk the street because of careless breeders, a cat whom would surely have died had most anyone but me ended up as her guardian.

After the melting ulcer was finally conquered only a few scares would surface throughout the years to follow. I didn't dare leave her cone off anymore, especially unattended. This is one of my regrets. Had I not been a useless piece of shit, had I been born into more fortunate circumstances or had cards simply played out better and I had a large amount of money at my disposal I could have probably made a more suitable arrangement for permanent eye protection. But the reality of her situation was that it was all too easy for her to simply rub her corneas off or poke them.

I vowed I would never live to see her in pain again. In the early days of the melting ulcer, when she was lethargic and unattentive, I never wanted to see that ever again.

From 2016 the story gets only worse for the rest of my environment. While the cat would enjoy a relatively carefree life of sleeping on chests, pillows and faces, upheaval and turmoil befell the world around her nonstop. I call them the years of hell because I literally have never had a single month without something insane happening. Everything from the CRA claiming my grandmother was dead and shutting down our money right out from under us, to pensions being yanked out for no inexplicable reason, to finally the house being sold and our rent being illegally raised by $300 (and raised again every year after the fact, of course - including during the State of Emergency which was also illegal) but having to keep compliant and sign our financial decimation because of how little power renters have in Canada. What were we going to do? Find somewhere else to live? Hahahaha!

Between being treated like disposal shit by both blood relatives, alleged "friends" on the internet and randoms alike, I hope it isn't too far a stretch to ask the reader to picture that, to me, the cats whom I cared for, particularly this little white nugget of fluff, were the only persons in my physical world I could love. Between my grandmother outright laughing me out of town when I tried to explain how losing the dogs in 2006 devastated me to current day, to my very own mother trying to kill me and using her influence over others to shut me out of outside assistance and family, my father never having once shown his face in my life -- well, I just don't particularly have a fondness for people.

I expect unconditional honesty. Honesty can be uncomfortable, and it can create strong reactions - but the alternatives are always worse. It is why I have tried to be honest with myself that a day like today would eventually come.

Nearly a year ago - yes, summer is stupid fuck it - the cat spontaneously began exhibiting extremely alarming behavior. Complete confusion, blindness, and fear. Her attempts to grab onto to a tree that was behind her, crawling around meowing helplessly at nothing - I remember the panic attack I had that moment. Most panic attacks I get hour by hour are very similar, but this one was unique.

When a panic attack begins, I feel a surge of momentum pass out from my upper chest and into my fingers and feet. As it moves, every muscle begins to burn. My chest compresses and sharp spikes of pain will surface. Breathing becomes difficult. Tingling sensations begin to surmount as adrenaline is pumped into my system. Then my brain effectively will shut off. In this particular anxiety attack, it's like my perception of time came to a standstill. I was paralyzed in a wordless horror.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.

The internet is filled with blue checkmarks whom will assign to themselves PTSD because someone called them a mean name on Fecebook. I haven't been able to talk to a doctor in order a decade since the one I momentarily had moved his practice the instant anti-psychotics failed to helped me, so I'm a little reluctant to describe my relationship with animals, especially cats, as PTSD. If I was to armchair diagnose myself, it would be PDSD.

However, individuals experiencing an ongoing occurrence of negative stress (such as being a constant witness to trauma as an officer in the emergency services or an individual constantly finding themselves the subject of workplace harassment) will exhibit similar symptoms to PTSD, but this is known as Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder (PDSD). The trauma is cumulative rather than sudden.

While it's true my animal-related anxiety is extremely profound, I definitely wouldn't classify it as the same as a Vietnam vet freezing up because a street racer's car blew a gasket. I do have an extremely strong emotional response any time I see a cat, be it on the internet or in person. I had to actively try to fight my fears of the future every time I dealt with my own cats. I would say that seeing the cat freak out was probably one of the most distressful and painful things I've ever seen, far moreso than any human-related violence (of which I have seen quite a bit). In any event, panic attacks are like a fiery iron maiden and the pain they cause for my heart, arms and fingers is not trivial. This one was much worse.

I did all I could do at the time - I scooped up the cat, went and laid down with her, and cried endlessly. She simply laid there and purred. So long as I was there she wasn't afraid anymore. But if I let her go or went away she'd start to freak out again.

I thought she had a stroke and that, just like that, it had given her brain damage or otherwise destroyed what little bit of vision she escaped the atrocities of yesteryear with. Little by little, as hours turned into a day, she began to liven and move around on her own.

We took her to the vet, where I wholly expected her to die. Thankfully, this wasn't the case.

The instigator of her episode was blood pressure so high it was threatening to rip the retinas loose from her eyes. The likely cause of the blood pressure was a prolonged death sentence regardless. Kidney failure. A regret I have to this moment is that I was unable to pick up on this before it nearly killed her. The signs were there, but they were so subtle that without regular blood tests it wasn't possible for me to pick up on them. I think the specific instigation of the blood pressure spike that almost took her sight was eggs. She loved eggs, so we'd give her a little bit when my grandmother made some for a sandwhich or whatnot. Since finances had always been knife-edge with weeks to months without food, especially when the Canadian government randomly declared people dead or yanked support for no reason, the blood tests I had always wanted to get - which were extremely expensive - got eternally delayed. This is my greatest regret of all and I will never forgive myself for allowing this to happen.

The following week and a half was met with fevered panic as the first blood pressure medication had no effect. We set aside everything - months of food, paying off decades-old debt nearly finished - to make way for the tests she needed years ago.

The tests came back with devastating news. Stage 2 Kidney failure. She needed a diet change and drugs.

Then the urinalysis came back. It confirmed Stage 3 Kidney failure. Bad news always gets worse, it's a Year of Hell thing. She was close to being terminal. How close, I'll never know. My uneducated guess is under my care she could have easily survived another two years had further complications not taken place after the fact. Her kidneys apparently did not change much after I stabilized her diet, but something definitely did continue to change.

I did my best to transfer her to the new diet - a 5x more expensive diet - and separated her and the other cat's eating arrangements. This was made easy by the fact she never left the bedrooms except to find me when I was downstairs. I feel like she associated the other parts of the house with that incident and only wanted to be where I or my grandmother was.

I am sad. I will be sad every time noon or midnight comes up. These are the times I gave her drugs and made sure to feed her. She didn't like the new food, as she was already a very picky eater, so her weight dropped from 2.4 to 1.3 in the span of a month or two. Scared shitless, I undertook the responsibility of feeding her by hand and force feeding her during her drug intervals. She liked the dry food, and drank a lot of water, so feeding her by hand every hour to hour hours followed by giving her a little bit more food than she wanted to eat at lunch and dinner allowed me to reclaim her weight in a few months.

Without my holding a spoon to her, or giving her kibble piece by piece in my fingers, she didn't want to eat much after the first few months. She always enjoyed a broad diet and leftovers like scrambled egg. She would go after the other cat's food in a heartbeat when she saw it.

But, she endured her new lifestyle quite merrily. She liked to be covered under blankets and sleep on pillows. Her cone was no barrier to her travel and I took it off more and more as time progressed and spent more and more time with her. Since I couldn't take her downstairs for long, I willfully gave up all other activities I had been taking part in - mostly making content for my D&D game or video casting - to ensure she was comfortable and safe. It was an exhausting, endless watch.

The eternal watch put solidity in my schedule. I think I actually had improved productivity as a result of it. I treated every hour as a precious bite of time I could be spending with the cat. So I spent almost all of it with the cat when she was awake.

I would gladly give my life to do it just one last time.

The last two months have been extremely packed with insanity. From a wasp nest and subsequent scraping of wasp nest to imbeciles trashing the house trying to move a treadmill, nonstop yard work and house work keeping up with the demands of landlords and my grandmother, and finally the cat deciding it just didn't want to do anything more - and the apparent solution to this was to remove her cone for good, therefore watching her 24/7 without rest.

Again, I would give everything to return to the way things were. I would go through it all again to have the little fuzzy sleeping next to me on her pillow.

Yet a final trial awaited, and this would be the last.

Presumably, due to her kidney failure, her red blood cell count allegedly dropped from around 27 or so to barely 10 between the two scheduled blood tests - one in January and one a week ago.

Blood transfusions are supposedly considered at the 17 range. This option was not realistic for us. Financially, impossible. But to put her through a blood transfusion every month in her state... we couldn't do that.

We instead opted to try a hormone injection to try to encourage her body to replenish her red blood cells, but in the week to follow the injection her health and behavior took a dramatic turn downhill. She stopped crawling around, she largely stopped being attentive, and finally she stopped willfully drinking for most of the day and getting her to eat her dry food became increasingly difficult. She'd try to find places to hide and would stay there until I retrieved her, usually long after periods I felt her to be safe without drinking and certainly long after her usual routines. She was increasingly wobbly, and spasms from her legs were getting worse. She still paid attention to me, still purred when tickled and held, and when I had her in my room she almost seemed alive again... but in her I could see that the toll of the red cell loss was finally settling in. She had a few attempts to jump up to stools from a foot or two too far away in the past, but one in plain view and broad daylight of my grandmother forced us to face the reality that she was effectively becoming blind and, furthermore, becoming scared as a result.

I spent the last two days hand watering her and feeding her individual kibble. I did not sleep. I could not sleep. My little girl was dying. Most importantly, her quality of life had sharply become intolerable. It would be weeks before the injections began to really take effect - if they had any effect, if we even knew what the source cause was of such a dramatic cell drop to begin with - and to see her hiding under a dresser for hours made me sick to the core. She was no longer happy, and at the rate she was going, an uncomfortable death to organ failure surely awaited.

Today she was scheduled for a second injection. Instead of being injected with the hormone like she would have been, she instead was finally set to rest. Standing there as I held her, it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life. I did it for her. I stood with her in her darkest moments as I stood with her in her brightest. I will never forget this moment. It's utterly ingrained into my head and plays over and over and over just like when I carried my dog to her death. I absolutely cannot escape the pain of loss. Loss of home, loss of family. I'm still homesick over the place from prior to 2006. I still dream about it almost every night. I'm haunted. The only thing I can try to do is avoid it.

No. I don't suspect I will sleep tonight, either. Nor the day after. I don't believe I will ever really sleep again. I'm truly tired of seeing old faces and old places in my dreams. I used to find solace in waking up next to the little white cat sitting next to me, bumping her head into me waiting for food. Now I am well and truly alone. I'm in shock currently, but I suspect the first time I wake up it will hit like a freight train. If not, then the trial has well and truly destroyed what was left of my humanity.

Seven years. Seven long years. I have always said that so long as she enjoyed life, so long as she was happy, I would do anything and everything to preserve that joy. Now, as her final moments play back in my head time and time again, I relive all the pain and agony of fearing this day all at once. The immeasurable loneliness, the burning anxiety, and the raw, unfiltered pain.

I am reliving 2006. I am reliving the worst day of my life. This is the end of an era. The end of an era in which I had hoped I could have helped her see days in which there was no fear. In which we had stability and a future, with a home to call our own. Of course, I've always known in my heart that I will never have stability and I have no future, and I'll never have a home. I am a drifter whom has no place as a person or as a concept. 2006 taught me that dreams die young, 2014 taught me that no day would be earned without extensive trials, 2017 taught me that I am a despicable person, 2019 taught me to be fearful of every day and 2020 taught me that there are still ways to feel blinding sadness.

The years of hell are over, and the months to years of despair now begin. However long I can force myself to exist in the jagged emptiness to follow this day I cannot say. But I know that a part of me vanished with her.

I am broken. Utterly, thoroughly.

Please live life to its utmost, and please hold close those whom you cherish. Make no small sacrifice to preserve trust and render ironclad your resolve in the face of fear. To be human is to suffer, and to suffer is to live. All that remains is the small things that tell us we are still alive at all. When even those embers crumble in your hands then you know you have lived too long.

[Drunk Swede]

I suppose the default words for this type of event would be I'm sorry for your loss, but I suspect such words carry little meaning from where you're sitting right now. This same event happened to me back in the beginning of 2019 with my own little derpy cheerful fluffball being taken by cancer. It's quite easy to get stuck in a cycle of blaming oneself for what one could've done differently, but that's a trap that'll keep you stuck in despair.

I can say that in my own case, it did get better, as far as these things can get better at all. Not in an "I feel good and content with life" way, but more in the way that I mostly just remember the fond memories today. Instead of thinking first to the events where I sit with a syringe trying to feed her luxury food and failing because she refuses to eat anything, I remember her cheerful little rolled "durr" greetings whenever she met my eyes, how she'd raise her paw to me like a roman salute when she wanted to be picked up, or miscellaneous funny behaviours that felt kinda annoying at the time, but now has this cute charm to them.

If remembering mostly good memories could be considered "it gets better with time", then I suppose one could say it got better for me, but remembering the good times also comes with the realization that those times are gone now. It may sound silly to many people, becoming attached to a cat in this manner, but then, way too many people spend their entire lives failing to find the same kind of undying love and loyalty in humans that we can find in animals. It's quite obvious that people are looking for the same thing we've already found, yet they look down on it because they consider animal companionships lesser in worth.

The problem is that animals generally do not live very long compared to humans. If your family consists of animals, your family will be very short lived. Even if a human lives a very short life and dies of natural causes at 60, most animals would be lucky to live even a 3rd of that time in good health. In my case, due to my stubbornly increasing health as I approach 30, I realize that my cat probably only got to live an 8th of my natural lifespan. At that point one starts to ask a lot of questions about the natural workings of this world.

It's quite obvious that there is no such thing as fairness in this world, and that's probably why all these communists and social justice warriors start their crusades, because even they realize the unfairness of life, and in their own twisted ways, they want to fix it. The sad fact is that there is no fixing this world. All you can do is carve out your own little corner of it and hope it doesn't break, or when it does break, figure out if you can rebuild something that'll keep you going.

As much as people make a mockery of the idea of "internet fwends", I do still consider you a friend. I mean, you wouldn't drop inane rants in someone's steam inbox at random times of day (like a cat dropping a dead rat in front of your feet, scolding you for your inept hunting abilities) if you didn't consider them your friend, right?

[IskatuMesk]

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