{"id":43150,"date":"2018-07-01T06:00:41","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T10:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=43150"},"modified":"2020-02-23T07:58:24","modified_gmt":"2020-02-23T12:58:24","slug":"im-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=43150","title":{"rendered":"I’m Back!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like I said last week, I’ve been having trouble with my eyes<\/a>. If you’re curious about the medical Twilight Zone that caused this, I have the strange details at the end of this post. If you’re a normal person and you just want to know what sort of content we have to look forward to in the coming week, then read the very next paragraph.<\/p>\n

I’m playing Mass Effect Andromeda. It’s been patched pretty well by this point so it’s no longer the distracting and meme-worthy circus of malfunctions. It’s still a bit janky around the edges, but not enough to really bother me. The narrative is paradoxically better than I expected and yet far worse than I’d hoped for, if that makes any sense. <\/p>\n

My impressions have been oscillating wildly like, “Hey. This is a cool idea. Actually no, I guess not as cool as it seemed at first. Ugh. This is atrocious. Okay this conversation isn’t bad. Oh, now it’s making me cringe again. Okay, this character could be interesting. Or they were, until they left. Hey, I like this puzzle. And this jetpack stuff is cool. I like this shotgun. Oh no, this really grating character wants to talk again. Oh, but she’s giving me a cool quest. Nope, wrong. This quest is too dumb to think about.”<\/p>\n

What I’d really like to do is have a stream where I play the game and discuss things with chat. I have this sneaking suspicion that some of you have opinions on the Mass Effect series. I figure we can hang out for an hour or so. I’ll play some early \/ mid-game content, and we can talk about the game.<\/p>\n

Okay, her butt is floating above the seat and her arms are floating above her legs and the pose looks totally unnatural, but I'd gladly overlook failings in production values if the writing could just get in the same ballpark as Mass Effect 1.<\/div>
Okay, her butt is floating above the seat and her arms are floating above her legs and the pose looks totally unnatural, but I'd gladly overlook failings in production values if the writing could just get in the same ballpark as Mass Effect 1.<\/div><\/p>\n

I’m planning on streaming this Thursday. This event link should have all the details<\/a>. I know I usually stream on Wednesday, but Wed is July 4th and I know a lot of my American readers will be busy blowing their fingers off<\/a>. <\/p>\n

So what’s going on with my eyes?
\n<\/p>\n

I Have No Idea<\/h3>\n

I’ve pretty much proven all of my eye problems are the result of diet. And apparently I have a problem that is completely undocumented or discussed on the internet.<\/p>\n

Here’s the thing: For the past few years, I’ve had this thing where my eyes will get red and inflamed. This drags on for a couple of days and they gradually lose the ability to focus and adjust to bright light. The effect is mostly limited to the left eye, although when it gets really intense the problem manifests in the right eye as well.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I’ll go for months without any trouble. Sometimes the problem will hit me twice in one week. Sometimes flare-ups last a day, and sometimes they drag on for a week.<\/p>\n

I went to the eye doctor a couple of years ago and he said I had an eye infection and gave me some antibiotics. So I’ve been thinking of this problem as a recurring infection. <\/p>\n

During the past few episodes I noticed that the problems coincided with Mexican food. A few hours after eating, my eye began burning. I figured I probably got hot pepper juice on my hands and then a few hours later I touched my eye. That didn’t really fit with observations (symptoms were spontaneous and never coincided with touching my face) but it was the only reasonable explanation I could think of.<\/p>\n

So I started scrubbing my hands. I’m already a bit of a germaphobe and tend to wash my hands frequently, but now I was scrubbing like a surgeon after doing any cooking. Also, I started watching my food and noting the onset of eye problems. <\/p>\n

What I discovered was that the symptoms reliably followed the consumption of certain foods: Spicy things, citrus, and vinegar. Consume them, and a few hours later my eye would begin burning. <\/p>\n

As far as I could tell, this stuff was ending up in my tears. Somehow, my body wasn’t properly filtering the water it sent to my eyes, and so I was winding up with trace amounts of spices \/ citrus \/ vinegar in my eyes. That makes no medical sense and I’m not even sure it’s physically possible, but that’s what this repeating pattern was telling me.<\/p>\n

When your eyes burn, your body usually makes them water to clear out contaminants. Except in my case, the contaminants were in the tears so this just exacerbated the problem. <\/p>\n

If this is true, then the infection the doctor observed wasn’t the root of the problem, it was just a symptom brought about by my dabbing and rubbing my eyes for days. <\/p>\n

I’ve searched online and I can’t find anything. Even if I’m totally wrong about the cause of this affliction, you’d think SOMEBODY out there would come to this same wrong conclusion. <\/p>\n

I don’t know what to make of it. It’s strange. For the time being I’m just going to avoid the offending foodsAlthough avoiding vinegar is a little tricky. A LOT of foods have a dash of vinegar in them somewhere.<\/span>. <\/p>\n

This most recent flare-up was really intense. Even four days into my recovery, and it’s still not quite normal. There’s a blurriness that neither my eyeglasses nor vigorous squinting can correct. <\/p>\n

I’m not sure why you read all that, but I hope you found it interesting. We’ll have a Diecast tomorrow, the stream on Thursday, and another Grand Theft Auto post on Friday. Between E3<\/a> and the eye problems I haven’t done any coding in a few weeks, but I hope to get back to the coding posts Real Soon Now. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like I said last week, I’ve been having trouble with my eyes. If you’re curious about the medical Twilight Zone that caused this, I have the strange details at the end of this post. If you’re a normal person and you just want to know what sort of content we have to look forward to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43150"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49342,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43150\/revisions\/49342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}