{"id":59818,"date":"2025-12-22T00:01:41","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T05:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=59818"},"modified":"2025-12-21T21:30:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T02:30:01","slug":"happy-life-day-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=59818","title":{"rendered":"Happy Life Day 2025!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sorry I missed last week. Genuinely. Toward the end of the week before last, I got what I thought at the time was a sinus infection. Last weekend I was utterly miserable and in constant pain. Normally the common sinus meds or even pain relievers don’t work on my sinuses, or not well anyway. But; I did finally take some ibuprofen. It surprisingly (only in my case) helped, and the situation has slowly improved since. I’m still trying to manage pain, and while there is possibly an infection going on, I never developed any *other* symptoms of an infection. There is clearly some kind of inflammation and\/or blockage and on-line searches point at sinusitis. Which I already suspected was a problem. I would really like to do outpatient surgery to clear out my sinuses.<\/p>\n

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I was ready to talk about the “Thorn” arc in the last two Halloween<\/em> movies. I really wasn’t sure it would support much thought, but it did eventually occur to me that the Thorn movies reflect Friday the 13th V<\/em> and VI<\/em> in some elements. VI<\/em> essentially overwrites V<\/em>. Halloween<\/em> doesn’t do that *yet*, but they do adopt the retconned plot point of introducing a young, new antagonist then taking it back in the next movie; eventually getting rid of her entirely at the beginning of Halloween VI<\/em>. Kind of weird how these two franchises ran a similar main plot point over parts IV<\/em>, V<\/em>, and VI<\/em> of both series. Especially since the Friday the 13th<\/em> movies were ALL produced and released before Halloween IV<\/em> was written. Now, to be honest, I have no doubt the creators of Halloween IV<\/em> cribbed notes from Friday the 13th<\/em>, but part V<\/em> does go in a different direction, and then of course VI<\/em> then introduces the Thorn story and retroactively inserts it into the previous movies. (Yes, technically the man in black is in the released version of Halloween V<\/em>, but it really does seem like they didn’t know *why* yet. It was just a possible thread. Could have gone several ways.)<\/p>\n

Yes, that is way too many spoilers for something not published yet. But beyond the sickness I’ve been working on Christmas plans for the immediate family and my parents. I’m almost done with gift shopping; I just have a few more to arrange. I haven’t even started Steam in three or four weeks, so I’m just now updating it. There are several full game downloads to do…I know for example the latest update to Star Wars: The Old Republic<\/em> came out and I haven’t even installed it let alone tried anything. I kept putting off the RAM upgrade for my laptop and now RAM is so expensive I can’t do anything about it anyway. The last time I checked getting two new 16GB modules for this computer it was around $150 shipped, I think. May have been a bit less. Now it’s almost $300. The good news is a recent Manjaro update seems to have significantly boosted my performance. I haven’t looked into WHY, honestly. I know something that helped manage my memory is switching to Vivaldi as my main web browser. That and using the YouTube “app” instead of a browser window. I know it’s just a streamlined Chromium-based web page, but it does actually reduce the RAM footprint. I have yet to experience the playlist management slowdown since switching. Sure, I have to click almost every video multiple times to get it to start without an ad, but I can tolerate that.<\/p>\n

We finally got my dad’s surgery scheduled. He has all the pre-surgery stuff coming up in early January, then the surgery itself takes place in mid-January. The best case scenario is that he will be able to walk a bit better thanks to a significant decrease in dizziness. There may be some improvements to cognition as well. He is looking at the surgery as a cure-all, which probably isn’t realistic but is understandable. I would probably hope for unrealistically-good outcomes as well. Family and doctors telling him it is unlikely to help his muscle control and certainly can’t recover anything that may have been damaged by the fluid pressure in his brain. However, his overall capability has been better the past week, after several weeks of discomfort and fatigue. I still drove him around for Christmas shopping.<\/p>\n

It’s Life Day time again in Star Wars: The Old Republic<\/em>. The decorations still don’t seem to be up, but the events have started. I have only collected a few gifts and done one round of “Hug A Wookiee,” so I can’t really show you what the rewards are this year. Nor is there anything to really show off. I hope the developer isn’t so far off their game from losing voice talent for so long the events are all we get. I’ll see how this week goes, and hopefully I can be back with you all soon! Happy Life Day!<\/p>\n

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I’m sorry I missed last week. Genuinely. Toward the end of the week before last, I got what I thought at the time was a sinus infection. Last weekend I was utterly miserable and in constant pain. Normally the common sinus meds or even pain relievers don’t work on my sinuses, or not well anyway. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[638],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paige-writes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59818","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\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59818"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59835,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59818\/revisions\/59835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}