Yesterday was mostly doctor’s appointments and sleep deprivation. Good news: no second round of surgery and I should have all my vision back in my right eye! Bad news: …in about two weeks. Well, beats the hell out of going blind. Yay, the healing power of lasers!

Also, I don’t have to sleep exclusively on my right side anymore. Still can’t sleep on my back, which is fine, I never do that, except of course I woke up last night on my back for some reason. awesome. And I still have a lot of restrictions (driving, heavy lifting, jarring workout – tho’ I can do smooth-motion exercise again.).

I had some other thing to say but damned if I remember what. Oh well, happy Halloween. I may not understand your weird candy-hostage holiday (tho’ the Venture Brothers Halloween Special made it make a lot more sense), but I do like candy.

ARHM NOM NOM NOM NOM

…particularly the attitudinal kind.

Right about now last Tuesday is when they rolled me in for emergency eye surgery.

I can see over half my field of view in my right eye at this point. That’s actually pretty good, since it means we’re on an accelerating curve again – the maximum horizontal diameter of the bubble is shrinking now, rather than static. From top of eye down to focus centre, it’s pretty normal for me – nearsighted as all hell, but that’s normal. Then I have a band which moves around all the time because it’s the edge of the bubble, and then the bubble area.

If I look down I can see all the edges of the bubble in peripheral vision.

My eye still looks pretty damn scary tho’! It’s been one week…

…since I looked at you

…but if you compare it to two days after surgery, you can see it’s quite a bit less bloody overall.

Sadly, I have lost most of the macrovision. But I did use it a lot while I had it!

Follow-up appointment tomorrow; I don’t think that’ll change much. I am hoping they’ll let me stop sleeping only on my right side, tho’. I’m not sleeping well being immobile like that, and it’s catching up with me – I look kinda terrible. On the other hand, Anna and I got into a Scary Eye Fight on Tumblr last night. Everybody wins! Or loses. Depending. XD

So, you missed the show at GeekGirlCon? Here’s a copy of the script for the mini-opera you missed. It’ll change each time we do it, of course. This time, Captain America won. Next time? Who can say…?

—– GeekGirlCon 2013 script (2013/10/16.1) —–
SONG LIST:
Something’s Coming (The Warning Cry)
Starship on Fire (The Turning Point)
World Trapped in Amber (The Contemplation)
Sick of America (The Supervillain’s Rant)
Anarchy Now! (The Fight Song)

STAGE: Solarbird’s Flag (held by HENCH NICOLE) and Cascadia Flag (held by HENCH ANNA), flanking and behind SOLARBIRD.

SOLARBIRD performs Something’s Coming.

SOLARBIRD: “We used to be superheroes, you know…” [usual mythos explanation here]

[SOLARBIRD performs Starship on Fire and World Trapped in Amber.]

CAPTAIN AMERICA stands in the shadows, opposite stage area.

SOLARBIRD [derisively]: “Captain? Captain Hammer? In the shadows? Is that you?”

[Solarbird whips up the BROKEN HAMMER PROP and smirks.]

SOLARBIRD [mocking]: “Ready for a rematch already? Last time didn’t go so well.”

[CAPTAIN AMERICA steps heroically into full view, possibly catapulting a railing to do so. SOLARBIRD was not expecting somebody from the big leagues, and is visibly taken aback.]

SOLABRIRD: “Uh. You.”

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “Step away from the flags, Solarbird. We don’t need to do this.”

SOLARBIRD: “Oh, I think we do, Captain. I think we really do. Because, well… you know why…”

[SOLARBIRD performs SICK OF AMERICA. This is the Supervillain Rant. Lots of physical action and mobility.]

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “You have valid grievances, Solarbird. But you are tearing America apart to express them, and I cannot let you do that. We can stand here until tomorrow morning–and I will still disagree with you.”

SOLARBIRD [Laughs angrily]: “I?! I… have done nothing. Nothing except recognise what has already true. I tried it your way, Captain – I tried it your way for a long time. All I got was a torture regime, a surveillance state… a registration act… and a Traitor declaration. And I, for one, will gladly have four or five separate Republics before one united empire.”

[HENCHES lean FLAGS against WALL.]

SOLARBIRD: “There’s a difference between an optimist and a fool, Captain. I wonder, which are you?”

[HENCHES step forward, in front of SOLARBIRD. SOLARBIRD smiles at her henches.]

SOLARBIRD: “I think it’s time for a lesson in applied politics. Get ‘er, gang.”

[HENCHES gang-rush CAPTAIN AMERICA, who shoves them all back at once with her shield, and HENCHES fly all akimber.]

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “Mother and country!”

[SOLARBIRD performs ANARCHY NOW. Fight scene proceeds as rehearsed. HENCHES… don’t do so well.]

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “Honestly, those are your best henchies? Who’d you get them from, The Monarch?”

SOLARBIRD: “…maaaaaybe. It was short notice.”

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “Well, show’s over. Come peacefully for shawarma, or it’s your turn!”

SOLARBIRD: “Shawarma, or shawarma and… jail?”

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “No promises.”

SOLARBIRD: “Toni’s outside, isn’t she?”

[CAPTAIN AMERICA half-smiles.]

SOLARBIRD: “Aaaaaand Coulson. Damn.”

SOLARBIRD puts down her zouk, sighing: “I’ll be good.”

[SOLARBIRD puts forward her wrists, as if for handcuffs. CAPTAIN AMERICA marchers her by the arm towards offstage. While being turned away, SOLARBIRD looks back to any audience, holds up her other arm, fingers obviously crossed, and winks. CAPTAIN AMERICA pretends not to notice. Then SOLARBIRD breaks away from CAPTAIN AMERICA.]

SOLARBIRD: “Baiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “Avengers Assemble!”

SOLARBIRD: “Henches! TO ME!”

[CAPTAIN AMERICA and SOLARBIRD run back to stage and bow. SOLARBIRD introduces HENCHIE AMBER, HENCHIE ANNA, and HENCHIE NICOLE, WHO HAS A SHOW. NICOLE plugs her show. SOLARBIRD then introduces CAPTAIN AMERICA, who takes a bow. CAPTAIN AMERICA introduces SOLARBIRD, and out.]

— 30 —

Agents of SHIELD has made its way into the category of “current good” in my band’s mythos, and I am, as they say, disappoint. That sounds contradictory, but it’s not; let me explain.

Core Crime and the Forces of Evil mythos is that we were superheroes who lost a war to our world’s supervillains. In a universe with superheroes, that means villainy triumphant gets to decide what’s right and good; the victorious villains become the new super-heroes.

This isn’t some cosmic event, it’s not even magic; as a rule, humans basically go along with whoever is in charge. Once the supervillains have the power, well, there y’go. And if you don’t go along – well, somebody has to be the new super-villains, don’t they? Good, evil, whatever – we’re just the supervillain enemies of the new order.

SHIELD, now – SHIELD has long been a clandestine secrecy, surveillance, and enforcement organisation that is above the common law. There are laws they follow, apparently, but these, too, are secret. SHIELD threatens and intimidates and disappears people and things that We Aren’t Meant to Know, and are sole and unaccountable deciders of these matters.

At least, if you lack the money and power to prevent it, like, say, Mr. Stark.

And all that’s fine; you have evil and intrinsically corrupt organisations all the time. But the show appears to expect us to be on their side. They are the paradigm. Oh, they get their hands a bit dirty, but who doesn’t?

Why don’t we take a look at that?

With “The Girl in the Flower Dress,” what do we have? (Spoilers, ahoy…)

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I’m under medical orders to take it easy, so I am, and that’s cool and all, but boring. So today I made a couple of cloth iPad slipcases. They’re easy and I’ve never made one before. Both of these are multi-layered fabric; the red one is denim on the outside, artificial suede on the inside; the Cutter one has three layers, suede, denim, and on one side…

Okay, 10 years ago, the start of Medical Adventures was Anna’s bike accident wherein she broke her arm. They had to cut away her T-shirt and sweatshirt, and the T-shirt was particularly painful since it was one of her old Elfquest shirts, and a favourite. She said just to throw the cut-up remnants away, but I didn’t.

Blood of Ten Chiefs guards Anna’s iPad

Proof!

The snap is small but metal and pretty easy to open and close; the band is sewn-edge like you’d do with a serger, but I don’t have a serger, so I faked it and applied some anti-fray glue. The art, of course, is rather old! But now it’s adhered against two layers of relatively stiff fabric, so should last a lot longer than it would’ve had it just stayed a T-shirt.

I have a totally superstitious hope that this can be a coda on the other end of this, and what’s scheduled for next month can be the end of it for a long time. I have no rational reason to think this, of course; I’m just resorting to animism here. But at least it has some art in it.

Also I made a minimalist one for Minion Paul; actually, I made it first. His first-gen iPad had a nice case, but Fred peed on it, and, well, finding first-generation iPad cases? Good luck. So I made him a slipcover case instead.

I’d’ve put a patch on it, but he didn’t have one he really wanted attached.

Slab of Red

Pointy there! POINTY THERE!

The only kind of trick to this one was wiring the rim. I was going to do kind of a drawstring thing but that’s kind of weird and lame, and this is kind of cool, and, let’s be honest, no more ineffective than those damned drawstrings.

Spring wire! Stays straight, which is more than you can say for me.

Oh, and if you do anything like this and want to layer fabrics together so make thicker multi-layer fabrics to, say, strengthen old T-shirt fabric so it no longer feels like a T-shirt at all? This is the best steam-on/iron-on fabric adhesive I’ve ever found. I will be using this again.

Honestly, nothing else I’ve used works nearly so easily or so well, and I’ve tried a bunch of different kinds. I wouldn’t go on about it this much except this is one of those solutions I looked for with real effort when I was more seriously into cosplay, and I’m really glad to have finally found one.

So, yeah, J-List sent this thing:

C’mon, J-list, if you’re gonna anticipate my surprise medical emergencies, at least put the patch on the right eye!

Surgery went well; for a couple of days I felt like I was filming an extraordinarily monotonous documentary on my own feet (Live from Shoetopia?) because I had to keep my head parallel to the floor and eyes down, but now I can look forward even if I still have a bunch of restrictions. (No looking up, no lying on my back or on my left side, no lifting even somewhat heavy objects, no sleeping without the eye guard (above) no strenuous activity, no driving, no altitude changes of substance – I could go to Portland, say, but not to the dry side – weird eye drops 8x daily, it goes on a bit…)

A lot of these get lifted in a week; a bunch, not for a few weeks.

On the plus side, my right eye is now a microscope! No, seriously, it actually is. There’s an air bubble in it – put there by the surgeon to force the torn part of the retina back into place – and the refraction factor between it and eye fluid is like sixty, which is to say, it acts as a lens! Yes, for the moment, I actually did get a super-power out of this. Sadly, it’s one not worth it, but still: moral victory! Or possibly amoral victory, what with the supervillain thing.

I asked the surgeon whether I had X-Ray vision now and he said, “Not yet.” Interesting.

Y’know, when you have an eye that’s a microscope, you can really tell the difference between retina and non-retina pixels. Seriously it’s like lego and duplo.

Also, my eye looks really scary and gross! Check it:

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“Emergency eye surgery.” Those are not happy words.

About a week and a half ago, I got a big floater in my right eye. I get floaters more often than most, but it’s never been a big thing, and it seemed to be breaking up on its own, like they do, so I ignored it through the GeekGirlCon show with the intent of going in to make sure it’s not the 3% of time that posterior vitreous detachment (harmless) leads to retina detachment (problematic) or tears (extremely problematic and can lead to blindness).

Monday morning it seemed to have got worse, and that was new, but I was making the appointment anyway, so I went in. Dr. Khan agreed from the symptoms that it was probably just ordinary stuff, but of course, the whole point of going down there is to get a look.

And yeah, it’s not. Dr. Khan transferred me immediately to a retinal specialist, who said it is PVD, but with an outright retinal rip, and I have two other spots in the same eye that are damaged, and very likely to lead to retinal rips. The damage in all cases is very old, and the sort caused by multiple head trauma events.

So I have emergency surgery tomorrow morning. They’d’ve done it today, but it wasn’t an option unless we moved to overnight at Swedish, and that’s actually pretty bad because they don’t have the specialised eye crews overnight, and we’re better off waiting ’till the morning. If all goes well, I’ll be fine – tho’ down a lot of money, despite coverage.

And that gets me to something I don’t talk about much. I don’t remember most of my childhood, mostly because of my broad-spectrum abuse history. Psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, multiple abusers. It’s all kinds of fun.

In the extremely unlikely event that you know anything about my past, which almost none of you do, I want to make a point here of exempting my last guardian, whose initials were E.E.. E.E. was the closest to a decent parental figure I ever had, and none of this, none of it, is on him. This was all before his time.

The others, tho’… yeah. I’m not going to name names, because hi, lawyers. There’s one in particular here – I’ll call him Mr. B.

Mr. B was fond of academic rigour, in particularly through pain, in more particular through punches to the head. I have a bunch of healed but fortunately minor skull fractures from his particular breed of rigour.

I hadn’t heard from Mr. B in decades, until – now that he’s old and sick – he started cyberstalking me a couple of years ago. I blocked his accounts but he made new ones, until went so far as to reply to one of his over-the-transom missives from a donated, throwaway account, saying that okay, I know what he wants; I want to know who my birth parents were and how Mr. B and his associate Ms. A got ahold of me. His price was being “welcomed back into my life,” which is happening never, thanks.

So I can keep that out of my life just fine, thanks. And with the help of a therapist, I’ve managed to keep Mr. B and Ms. A out of my head, a lot of the time. (Ms. A has had the decency to disown me outright. Not fond of the queer, you see. Simplifies things, sometimes, doesn’t it?)

But apparently old blows can still cause physical harm, even today. I thought Mr. B had had his last shot at me, but apparently not. One more blast from the past, eh, Mr. B?

We’re going to fix that, tomorrow. With lasers.

It’ll leave me with limited vision for a couple of weeks, but hopefully will only really knock me down for a couple of days. So maybe I won’t be around for a bit.

Or maybe I’ll liveblog from the operating room. Who can tell?

First, thanks to Captain America, Minion Amber, Minion Anna, and Minion Nicole for working the show on Saturday at GeekGirlCon; I think, on the whole, it worked as a dramatic piece, but it’s hard to tell from stage. If you were there, I hope you’ll give some feedback, as it was the first time we’d tried that!

Thanks to GeekGirlCon for letting us do our little production, as well. ^_^ I spent most of Saturday on the show, and then wandering about a bit; Sunday I spent almost entirely in the gaming pit. GGC’s gaming pit needs a Looking For Group signup, but is really nice. I also bought a game.

Kyoshi and Water Tribe

Secondly, I’m probably going to be radio-quiet for a while, as I have to go in for emergency eye surgery tomorrow. This is unrelated to anything at the convention; I’ll write up a longer post about that, next.

And to think they told me a micro-anti-gravitron emitter simply couldn’t be made. Have to do something about the power chain colour, tho’. Should be nice and green.

Who has the hammer now, Captain?

GeekGirlCon! 2pm! Tomorrow! Time is a bit approximate because it’s a ninja gig, but we will be there an there will be adventures.

We had a good full-cast rehearsal last night. The Henches performed well. We tweaked the script a bit more, in details, adding some fun. Five-person cast! Props! Captain America’s shield is super-shiny. The sashes I made for the Hench crew look good.

If you missed them before:

This is going to be fun. Saturday, 2pm. Watch the twitter feed for location. 😀