Andrew Hindle's Blog

All dates approximate and open to debate.

The Greatest Generation (1905-1925): You have two cows. You go to a dance with your next-door neighbour who you’ve known since you were three years old and whose family owns two bulls, and two weeks later you are married and own a modest but successful ranch.

The Silent Generation (1925-1945): You have two cows. Times are tough but you and the cows look after each other and don’t take any big risks. Cows produce milk and cream, and at the end of the day you can get a bunch of steaks from one. That’s cows for you. Pretty simple really.

Boomers (1945-1965): Your parents worked themselves to death at the age of fifty and left you a modest inheritance of three hundred and fifty thousand cows. A bag of cow feed costs whatever lint you happen to find in your pocket (or credit is also fine). You kill all the cows and blame your lazy good-for-nothing kids.

Gen X (1965-1980): You have two cows. Cows are kind of lame, you were looking forward to doing the “why the long face” routine with them at first but then when you found out that was actually horses you kind of lost interest in the whole thing to be honest. Still, you do alright selling milkshakes.

Millennials (1980-1995): You have two cows. Well, the bank owns two cows and lets you rent them for a thousand dollars a week plus interest. Milking them costs a thousand dollars a time. Feeding them costs a thousand dollars a time. A milk distributor’s license is free, I’m kidding it costs a thousand dollars a month. The Zoomers are accusing your cows of ruining the environment and the Boomers are accusing you of ruining cows. You’re so very, very tired.

Zoomers (1995-2010): Cows? In this economy? Lol. Lmao even.

Gen Alpha (2010-2030): GerRold

Alright, where are we? For anyone who’s still paying attention, I’ve been going pretty well on the writing even though we’re perpetually busy and endlessly exhausted and broke. Not a lot happening, just work and kids’ school stuff and work and work. Occasionally sleep.

But I have been getting some good writing sessions in (it’s part of my new regimen and my health depends on it, so I’m really getting pushy about getting time, and Mrs. Hatboy is angelically understanding and our kids have relentless creative weirdness of their own to deal with so I think they’re fine). Another solid large-novella’s- / small-novel’s-worth of text has hit the work-in-progress manuscript since I last checked in.

Chapter 7 (of 9, the one we’ve all been waiting for!) came out at 31 pages, 14,854 words. As I had suspected it would be, it came out significantly shorter than anything since Chapter 2 (of 9). But damn if I didn’t love this one. It was so much fun to write.

Chapter 8 (of 9) clocked in at 86 pages, 39,682 words. Oops. Now to be fair, a lot happened and I also loved writing this one, particularly the first couple of sub-chapters. I once again opted to move a bunch of stuff from this to the final chapter, but it is mostly notes from my old exercise book version of the story and a lot of it is just travelogue from place to place. I am not completely certain how the final chapter is going to handle it, since I have once again switched point of view characters, but I’m looking forward to cracking into it (not tonight, hahahahahahano, of course I don’t get to tonight).

Chapter 9 (of 9) will be shorter!

My current stats stand as follows:

Chapter 1: 75 pages, 38,455 words.

Chapter 2: 19 pages, 9,319 words.

Chapter 3: 63 pages, 29,483 words.

Chapter 4: 140 pages, 68,001 words.

Chapter 5: 65 pages, 34,281 words

Chapter 6: 49 pages, 21,843 words

Chapter 7, 31 pages, 14,854 words

Chapter 8, 86 pages, 39,682 words

Whole book: 754 pages, 260,058 words.

So, we are almost at the end of the second book in the trilogy! All three covers are done, incidentally, and I have concept art for several of the species involved. But there is still a lot to do!

But not tonight. Hahahahahahano.

30th Birthday Report: Festival of the Horn 2008

Just switched to Jetpack for making blog posts on the go on my phone, I loathe it but oh well.

Another addendum to today’s little post about Spider-Man. This evening we finally got around to watching David Attenborough’s 2020 documentary A Life On Our Planet.

It was really good, as obviously all of Attenborough’s work is. The man is a global treasure and we should all be fucking listening to him. Should have been for decades. His message is profoundly frightening and even more depressing, especially when you are as immersed in absolute ignorance and denial and casual embrace of disastrous environmental choices as I seem to be on an almost daily basis. Wump watched it in school, which is excellent.

Human-caused climate collapse and loss of biodiversity is happening. It’s already happened so much, and it is going to destroy us.

So yeah. Watch this (it’s on Netflix, which I’d prefer it wasn’t but okay), and make a few people in your circle of head-in-sand denial monkeys watch it. Stick through it even though it’s uncomfortable, because he ends on an optimistic note.

There is a way we get out of this and into the 22nd Century alive. We’re already doing a lot of it. Levelling off our birthrates. Educating our people (particularly our women), worldwide. Embracing renewable energy. Switching to a more (not entirely) plant-based diet, which will decrease the amount of farmland we need, especially if we also switch to more efficient farming methods. Stopping and reversing fishing and deforestation in specific ways that will give us more resources and more robust biodiversity, not less.

You may already have recognised all of these as things the USian / western political right are dead-set against and ideologically opposed to. They’re also things national and international treaties will make immensely difficult, as those nations are beholden to their corporate billionaire overlords. Funny how that works.

So yeah. We’re probably still fucked. But we can all do something. It’s not over until it’s over.

Start by watching the show, if you haven’t already. I came real late to this one and it doesn’t seem like the world’s got the message these past six years. But it’s not too late.

A while ago, a woman over in the United States made over a million dollars by yelling a racist slur at a kid and then getting a bunch of shitty racists to donate money to her. She was fined a thousand for the hate speech, leaving her – let’s round up and say a million fucking dollars richer. Her bigotry was grossly rewarded by the bigots that seem to fill the US-fed online ecosystem that I am sadly familiar with.

This seems to happen quite a lot, especially in the US. Yes, they make the most noise. They’re USians. Bless their big ol’ hearts. If it’s not crowdfunding for medical bills or legal expenses, it’s just making rent or buying food. Donating to them feels like fostering a kid in a developing country. That’s basically what the US is, on bad days.

So, Minneapolis is still having a real one. See previous exhibits in comments here, here, here and here.

Now, it is Spider-Man punching what looks by all evidence to be an absolute and complete piece of white supremacist shit. I’m thoroughly glad it happened. I’m proud to be a small part of the cosplaying progressive – and yes, woke – fellowship to which this hero belongs. I wish ill upon fascists and hatemongers. I always have and I always will.

Spidey was tackled by the fascists’ protective sheepdogs, and injured in the process. He was arrested by said sheepdogs, while the Nazi pile of human sewage was allowed to walk free (but hopefully a little more afraid, a little less certain, and fucking sore). I apologise to all sheepdogs and those who employ and love sheepdogs for the comparison. It was unfair of me.

Spidey’s MJ is collecting money to pay for his medical bills and other expenses related to a livelihood-endangering injury in the line of duty. And yes, that’s what this is. Because I will reiterate yet again, it is the duty of good people to stand up against evil. And I will agree, yet again, with what the Humanist Mike says in the video above. White supremacy is an inherently violent, murderous, genocidal ideology. It will not respond to healing hugs. It will not be defeated in the marketplace of ideas. It wants good people dead. The only way to deal with that level of belligerence and hatred is to beat the ever-loving fuck out of these scourges on our society, so a generation from now their progeny (ideological and literal) cower in their basements in cosplay of their own, ashamed and terrified to show their faces in civilisation again.

I donated. I’m running on fumes until payday but I donated. I can’t make you donate, but I’d really like it if you did, because I like to know I have friends who would donate to a cause like this.

P.S. It’s still not white vs. black, or even progressive vs. racist. This is just happening because I was annoyed the bigoted asshole got so much money from other bigoted assholes. The fact that GoFundMe battles are even happening over this should clue you in on what the real war is here. It is, and always has been, all of us vs. the billionaire paedophile class. But they’re apparently really hard to punch, and this loser is really fucking punchable, so.

So, I’ve been on vacation the past four weeks (I’ve been back at work this week, but the four weeks before that I was on vacation), and unlike most of my vacations this one was pretty selfish. Mrs. Hatboy let me go out and play author most days, and I didn’t have holidaying family members to deal with. Aside from Ropecon (and I just realised I am two years behind on Ropecon posts now), and a wedding one weekend, I was free to indulge myself.

As a result, while I didn’t quite write two novels, I did write two chapters of The Faere Named Dredna pretty much in their entirety, and they were large novella length, if not short novel.

Chapter 5 (of 9) came out at 65 pages, 34,281 words. This was above the projected amount for the chapter, again, but not by too much. Although I did cut it significantly short, flipped the point of view, and pushed the next section of story into chapter 6 (of 9).

Chapter 6 (of 9), however, was a tiddly 49 pages, 21,843 words. Actually below the projected amount (which was 25,272 words according to my pie chart excel tab), but I once again bumped a lot of this chapter – not into chapter 7 (of 9), but into chapter 8 (of 9). I want to get this done even though there’s still no huge rush. Just good impetus from the holidays.

Also, chapter 4 got a little longer. Couple of hundred words. Actually a couple of thousand. No biggie.

My current stats, therefore:

Chapter 1: 75 pages, 38,455 words.

Chapter 2: 19 pages, 9,319 words.

Chapter 3: 63 pages, 29,483 words.

Chapter 4: 140 pages, 68,001 words.

Chapter 5: 65 pages, 34,281 words

Chapter 6: 49 pages, 21,843 words

Whole book: 411 pages, 201,382 words.

I’ve also been a positive patron of the arts this summer, with not only my third and final War of Mortal Aggression cover nearing completion by Emily Anderson, but a series of concept art sketches by Dakota Curry also in the works, ready to put in the front of each book so we all know what the different species look like! I hope we all go the distance, because there’s a lot.

I also need to do a proper map for the books, but I might take care of that myself. Paying artists is expensive! Anyway, let’s see.

That’s it, that’s the post. I had a good time! Mr. Fahrenheit was still hard at work on the Viking Karaoke when I left, regrettably early. Other colleagues were also giving it their all, and I salute them!

Boy howdy.

Well, I suspected this was going to be a big one (at least by the time I got into it I did), but it’s finished at last. It came in at 138 pages, 66,812 words, which to those still paying attention means it’s a respectable novel all on its own and pretty close to Eejit in length.

My current stats:

Chapter 1: 75 pages, 38,455 words.

Chapter 2: 19 pages, 9,319 words.

Chapter 3: 63 pages, 29,483 words.

Chapter 4: 138 pages, 66,812 words.

Whole book: 295 pages, 144,069 words.

And chapter 4 (of 9) really is basically a book in its own right. As I joke in the metrics-caption here and mentioned in my earlier post a bit, I’m alternating A-plot and B-plot in odd and even chapters for the first half of this book, and in chapter 5 (of 9) I should be reuniting the split party (but maybe not). What that means is that chapter 2 (of 9) and chapter 4 (of 9) are all one plot thread, so I might technically be able to take some stuff out of 4 and add it to 2 to make them all more even…

But I’m not sure if I want to. There are plot points and pacing issues that this layout helps with. I just didn’t intend chapter 4 (of 9) to be so large. I think I was actually concerned I wouldn’t find enough content to fit in there. I think I said the B-plot was thin in comparison to the A-plot.

Well, it fattened up nicely. When I realised my B-plot was essentially a whole-arse DnD party and quest, complete with weird new characters and some pretty outrageous adventure and action sequences, it just took on a life of its own.

I feel I’m past the halfway point now even if I do have five chapters left to write – I doubt they’re going to be this long, and may not even be as long as their current projected lengths (which if I recall correctly was a guess based on an average of chapters 1 – 3? Yeah, I’ve kind of blown that up…). But I have long since accepted the fact that whenever I say “the next bit’s going to be shorter and more difficult to write” I turn around a month later and look at the giant pile of bullplop I just made and go “well dang.”

I can’t wait for you “all” to read it!

That was all a bit heavy, how about a little mood-lightener? Let’s talk about Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

I had previously played a lot of Animal Crossing (New Horizons), and in fact it has been six years since that blog post. Feels like longer. That was Toon’s big non-tomato-sauce-related entrance to the Hatstand, that was.

Anyway, it was a fun game and Wump put me up to it. Tomodachi Life is another one that Wump had heard about and seen streamers playing, and so bought it one day and is now mildly hyperfixated on it. It’s a lot like Animal Crossing, only instead of having a single avatar and a bunch of cute little animals running around on an island owned by raccoons, you are a sort of disembodied controlling intelligence and all the characters are ones you make. They’re called ‘Mii’s, for reasons that escape me. You create them, give them a look and personality, then let them loose to interact with each other and do basic life-stuff. Essentially, it’s Animal Crossing meets Sims in a kind of social simulator game.

Wump promptly created themselves, their boyfriend, our immediate family and then started to make a whole range of fictional and TV characters (Winx girls, My Little Ponies, and so on … they’re all roughly humanoid, the customisation is not too wild, but you can have up to 70 dudes on your little island). Hatboy and Mrs. Hatboy promptly started talking about The Wheel of Time (you can give your characters catchphrases, interests, pet sayings, sentence-closers and other quirks as they level up, and all of the actions and phrases in the lexicon start to cross-pollinate in very amusing ways), and then fell in love.

What I decided to do with my island (after naming myself Mer), was recreate all my favourite characters from my literary urverse.

I started with Çrom Skelliglyph, opting to leave him with no birthday or aging mechanic but lock him at somewhere in his early 40s. The age slot can go up to 150 years which makes a lot of my non-human characters difficult as well, but I figured what the heck. Skell can be the age he usually appears to be. My initial plan was to leave him on the island all alone and see what happened to his mental state, but it turned out there wasn’t much you could do until you added more people and got things moving. Obviously, next I added Drago Barducci.

I’m pleased at how much he came out looking like Mister Garibaldi from Babylon 5, that was always kind of how I pictured him (although a ludicrously CGI-size-enhanced The Rock would also be funny in a TC / movie adaptation).

Drago and Skell got along pretty well. Next came Z-Lin Clue, and her sentence-opening pet phrase “FFS”. And I gave everyone the closest I could find (so far) to AstroCorps greys.

As you can see, I gave her a Mister Goggles.

There are some very cool mechanics in the game (and I’m not talking about Zeegon, although he’s pretty cool too). While the phrases you can give your characters are generally quite short, you can mess with them in the pronunciation setting (oh boy, did both ‘Çrom’ and ‘Rakmanmorion’ give me trouble … not that I made a Rakmanmorion). For example I gave General Moral Decay (Alcohol) the saying “BHDGI”, which is pronounced “but humans don’t get it” which makes a lot of what he says funny by default.

Also, as shown above, you can customise or straight-up draw a variety of objects, including pets and clothing, for your characters. Mister Goggles has never failed to bring a smile to my digital Trampsters’ faces. It’s still somewhat limited, but very fun. With it, I was able to face-paint some scars on Janya’s Mii.

Your characters more or less make up their own minds who they want to talk to, be friends with, and start relationships with. You can customise their genders, pronouns (separately!), and dating preferences (including “not interested”), which is all a far cry from Animal Crossing and its annoying “long hair means feminine coded avatar” restriction.

It was also very funny to find that Cratch’s personality coding made him into a happy optimist (hence the bright yellow starter-house). He’s still creepy though (no pun intended). And I did the best I could with making a Molranoid head for Decay, it still ended up looking a bit nosferatu-ey. I may go in and face-paint up his ears into a better pair, once I’m a bit more familiar. And as you can see, his name would not fit in the field but the characters say it just right, I assure you.

Next was one of my bigger challenges: Thord.

I also made Waffa, Contro, Janus and (as previously mentioned) Sally, but getting pictures from the Switch to the blog is still a bit of a pain in this the Year of our Lord 2026, so I didn’t take too many. Anyway here’s Zeegon ‘Pretty Balls’ Pendraegg.

And of course I created Zeegon a space weasel.

As you can see from some of these shots, the island started out pretty generic but I was able to make it dead square, cover it entirely in steel plate, and convert most of the buildings to soulless modules (with nice custom interiors, except for the floors for regulation reasons), to give “Cursèd Playground Island” the right vibe.

Coming up next, I made another brig unit next to Cratch’s place, and created The Artist.

It is pure confirmation bias, of course, but it is funny how the characters all seem to just say the most perfect things (that you’ve written for them, but still!). Here’s Janus Whye.

Once I got to the end of my main run of Final Fall of Man characters, I branched out into Always Night characters too. I was getting more confident with the face painting and character creation process.

Padûls and Janus hit it off almost immediately, possibly while Janus was trying desperately to give Padûls some much-needed therapy.

I gave Thord a very expensive freezer suit (until such time as I can customise something better, it is just plate mail) and Decay a funny T-shirt that reads “some of my best friends are humans”, and they became friends very quickly. She also connected with Skell over Drednanth stuff.

I added a third brig cell, and created Horatio Bunzo.

Anyway, I could go on and on about this, but I guess I’ve already jabbered enough. It’s a fun game, if you have the characters to populate it. And lord knows I have that.

The game has a group photo feature as well and you can insert characters of your choice into a given setting. So much fun (also one of the only pics I took of Contro but I absolutely fucking nailed him, even if I do say so myself).

Highly recommended.

I’ve been a bit out of contact for a while because things have been messy (literally). I was considering writing another book – a sequel to Arsebook, maybe, entitled Arsebook II: The Chronic-ills of Hernia … but in the end I decided there wasn’t enough material and I didn’t want there to be enough material, and besides, I don’t have enough social media presence anymore to really carry a book in the comments and messages of support – which I still received, and gratefully, but only from a few very select sources. They know who they are.

So, in the meantime, here’s a quick summary.

A few years ago, I started to notice what the doctors call a parastomal hernia developing. That is, a hernia around my front-butt. See, while a regular hernia (to my understanding) is a bit of intestine pushing out through the abdominal muscles or elsewhere in the torso (they can also be groinal) this one was pushing out around the hole that had been intentionally made in my gut so the front-butt could exist. So, in short, there was intestine that wasn’t meant to be there, as well as the bit that was meant to be there.

This is pretty common among ostomates, with as many as 75% of us getting one as time goes by. It’s coming up on 15 years since my big rearrangement, so it’s not that strange. It’s also quite survivable, although the grapefruit-sized bulge did make the poo-bags hard to apply and was obviously uncomfortable, particularly from time to time when I had constipation or gas, or had exerted myself a bit and made it push out and hurt more. Once or twice I had to lie down on the floor and push it back in and wait for the weird feeling (you know, the feeling of your guts falling out, if you know it you very much know it), and that was about the point where I started asking doctors if there was anything they could do about it.

Hernia belts were not really helping either, since to wear one was to constrict the poo-bag still more and that led to shitting all over myself even more than usual. A hole could be cut in the belt to allow the bag, but that reduced the effectiveness of the belt and still did not guarantee the poo would stay and go where it belonged. Anyway, the hernia itself was not going anywhere and was only going to get worse, not better.

I finally got a meeting with a surgeon who explained the process to me. He (with assistance from a robot, because we live in the future) would go into my abdomen, put all my intestines back behind my abs where they belonged (except for the last little tube that still goes out to become my front-butt), then install some mesh around the whole area to keep them from coming back out. There was a long waiting list for this procedure, so I was put on the list and told to get my weight down a bit and my blood pressure under control. I was at about 125 kg and 155/90 at the time, which is not good.

Weeks and months went by, and I got down to 115 kg (actually I believe I had told the doctor I was 125 kg and he’d told me to lose 5 – 10 kg, and I’d then weighed myself and found I was “only” 115 kg, so called it a day and rolled my eyes a little at the arbitrary way doctors just assumed everything bad that happened to anyone was because they’re fat, but whatever … also I was a little annoyed that I’d been given an app kind of thing to get my weight under control, when I knew that wouldn’t work and would only make me miserable and stressed, and I was a 47-year-old man and would lose weight without help if that was what I decided to do). My operation was set for sometime in April 2026. I started making arrangements at work, as far as I could without any actual fixed dates or information.

As the day approached, I had a check-in with the nurse who said we’re all good, operation on the 22nd. Great, I thought, and told work. They began to make arrangements for a big up-coming project kick-off. Then, that same afternoon, the health centre called me and said nope, it’s all off, your blood pressure and other tests are a huge mess and there’s no way. Put the operation out of your mind, it’s not happening until you get squared away.

So I sighed and told work about this, and thus they decided we would kick off in April anyway, since I was not going to be away recuperating from an operation but would just be getting myself “squared away” in that time. No problem, although definitely annoying because I still had the fucking hernia. That was the only thing actually bothering me – otherwise I felt in perfect health and only had the doctors’ word that anything was wrong.

I could philosophise a little at this point, about how this is the way a whole bunch of anti-vaxxers and other “natural medicine” and “science sceptics” go down the garden path. They feel one way, the doctors tell them a bunch of stuff they don’t want to hear and otherwise flip-flop on things a lot, and they get frustrated and opt for the “common sense” solution. I’m smart and arrogant enough to think I know my own body better than a bunch of blood tests and measurements and doctors who’ve never met me before can say … and yet, I don’t fall off the far end of that plank and decide to ignore them and do whatever YouTube says I should. I listened to the doctors, because they have fucking learned this shit.

For a while, then, I upped my blood pressure medicine and lost more weight. I did this by a revolutionary process I have developed and intend to patent. I call it “eating less”.

Glib but true. And of course it only works as long as I am motivated. And (in accordance with my triangle of keeping my shit together) my motivation is utterly and inextricably linked to writing. When I don’t write, I get snacky. I get hungry. And I eat, big mounds of lunch and dinner and bowls of snacks and assorted fast food, and it might cheer me up briefly but it doesn’t actually stop me from being hungry.

So, with the endless support of Mrs. Hatboy and Wump and Toop, I made writing way more of a necessity in my daily life than I have up to this point. I know it seems like I complain about this a ton (especially to those of you who already heard most of this story), but what I mostly do is complain and then even when I get ample time to write, I have frazzled myself out with being unhappy about not writing right now, so then I fail to write when the time comes, and then I have a burger and fries. Now, I put on my headphones (a kind gift from Mr. Itkobloom of Region Free), open the google doc on my phone, and just write whenever. And it seems to be working. I don’t think I’m neglecting my family any more than I was before – I’m actually spending less time at my computer, since I only need to be there for a) work and b) checking my files for story details I can’t remember off the top of my head. But whatever. My blood pressure is down to about 125/70 and I’m down another 10 kg to about 105 kg, and intend to keep going until the doctors shut the fuck up about it. I’m not holding my breath, because they apparently say it to everyone no matter how skinny they are. But nevertheless, that’s the plan.

Right, so with that put aside, what happened next? Well, I had more tests and then I got a call from my doctor again. This was after the whole project thingy had been set in motion at work (I have Views on the work-life balance issue, but it’s somewhat relevant to this story which is why I seem way more invested than usual). The doctor said everything is looking great, no reason I can’t have my operation on the 22nd after all, who said I couldn’t? I sighed, and told work the good news – I was going to be away, probably for at least a week, right when everything was happening.

But oh well. I went in for my operation, and it was all good. I was back up on my feet that evening, and discharged from hospital the next day. Which was good, because hospitals are where people go to fucking die. You know, unless they walk out. Which most of the time they do. But it’s still draining.

This was where the fun started.

On the 24th, I had a low grade fever and so we hiked out to the emergency room and sat there for about four hours while various walking wounded and homeless derelicts rambled and raved around us. It was delightful. All I can say is doctors and nurses are built different and they should be better-funded. Anyway, they said I had no other real symptoms and do go home. So Mrs. Hatboy and I went home.

The next day, my front-butt was black and grey with full-blown necrosis. Back to the hospital, and they gave me a CT scan and immediately booked me in and prepped me for surgery again. I think it happened on the 26th, but I have so many different entries and tests in my calendar now it’s impossible to say (it may have been operation on the 22nd, home then emergency room and home on the 23rd, intestines dying and operation on the 24th…). The hernia mesh had come into contact with my intestine and was preventing full blood flow, which had killed my front-butt.

They sent the robot back in (fun fact: the robot’s nickname was Da Vinci), took out the mesh, then cut off the necrotic intestine and gave me a new front-butt. This time they kept me for a whole day and night longer (I was back in the same recovery ward I’d been in the first time, with a lot of the same people, some of whom were there with complications of their own after being sent home too soon), and then sent me home again. So far, I am still operational.

I had yet one more visit to the emergency room another day later (this was Vappu, May 1st, or at least Vappu Eve April 30th) when I presented a very mild fever (Mrs. Hatboy was being abundantly cautious, and I appreciate it), but I was once again sent home. This time since it was 3am and Mrs. Hatboy was looking after the kids, I took a taxi home with a mad fucking former-Yugoslavian driver, who regaled me with stories of his battling alongside the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and eating dogs in – I want to say Albania. Anyway that was weird. It made a change from Mr. Itkobloom picking me up from the hospital, which he did on two occasions and helped me buy meds as well, since the geniuses at the emergency room had told me to leave my wallet with Mrs. Hatboy for absolutely no fucking reason … anyway I greatly appreciate his tireless help, as fun as my taxi driver buddy was.

Now I am home, I am more or less fully-recovered, and my only problem is the defective-arse new front-butt they’ve given me is so deep-sunk in my gut I cannot actually sit in a normal chair and do normal things without the bag peeling off and shitting all over me. Which is fucking awesome because they never gave me more sick leave after my first surgery was a failure, so I go back to work on Monday.

How are you guys all going?