(no subject)

[the_rck]

I have phone calls I need to make today, and I don't want to deal with them. I also desperately want a nap and know that, even if I lie down, I'm unlikely to sleep.

At least, my mother called me back (I left her a message last night). She and my step-father can't come to Cordelia's concert after all but do plan to come to 8th grade graduation. I had thought that 9 a.m. would be too early given the two hour drive, but Mom says that that's much easier than trying to drive home at night. Also, they have contractors working on urgent house repairs, and the contractors will only work if someone's at home.

One of my phone calls, I need to make around 3 p.m. as I'm calling a high school teacher, the choir director, to talk about choir camp this summer. The other call, I can make any time, but it's also not urgent urgent, so it's hard to make myself do it. That second call is to schedule a tune up for our air conditioner. I really hate to spend the money on it, but getting it done will keep the dratted thing running for longer.

We had a session of Scott's new Firefly game last night. I think I'm going to loathe the system because my preference is for rules that require no decisions on my part and that I don't have to think about or use very much. That's my preference when I'm GM, too. No matter what I'm running, I run rules lite. People who've done a lot of table top gaming tend to boggle when I say that GURPS is my preferred system but that I run rules lite. GURPS is the most flexible system I've seen for character creation/setting creation/genre bending. I'm just not prone to deal with the picky rules in play. I've got a general feel for what different dice rolls mean relative to the numbers on the character sheet, but I'm guided more by interesting story than by the dice. I don't ignore the dice altogether, but I can go a session without asking anybody to roll anything.

I think that what I want is a weird hybrid of GURPS, Amber Diceless, and some form of percentile system.

I have an appointment at the sleep disorders clinic tomorrow. They called me yesterday in response to my patient portal email. I'm not sure what they're going to be able to offer me. The main thing the woman I talked to thought was that I need anti-anxiety medication. Yeah, I do. I've only been trying to find something that works, long term, since 1987. The only things I've found that work are controlled substances, and I'm not willing to take those every night even if some doctor was fool enough to prescribe them that way.

I'm so frustrated by this health crap. I can get plenty of lectures about potential long term problems but no discussion that everything they tell me to do about those is killing me right at the current moment. When I'm drowning, I'm not going to worry about the risk of sepsis from splinters from the bits of wood currently keeping me afloat.

I'm kind of irritated with the lecture series I'm currently watching. The title of the series is 'The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World.' Apparently, the only places that existed in the ancient world were Egypt, Rome, Greece, Britain, and certain other small bits of Europe. Eleven episodes out of forty eight focus on Greece. Six focus on Egypt, and one of those is on Hellenistic Egypt. Thirteen episodes focus on Rome and territories under Roman control. The date on the box is 2012.

Cordelia's friend with the concussion was back at school yesterday. She's still having some headache issues and is taking things very easy. I don't know if she'll be at the concert tonight or not. Her father is becoming a US citizen today (her mother did a few years ago, and both kids were born in the US), and that, naturally, is a higher priority for her limited energy than the concert.

Comments

[cereta]

I'm getting ready to run with a modified, diceless Fate system, one I've been playing with for 6+ years now. I'm really happy with it, I have to say.

[the_rck]

Ooh! Neat! Please let me know how it goes. Scott's big into Fate, so he's always wanting to know how other people make alterations and what works or doesn't.

[lady_of_mists]

Yes, dice are fun, but I always preferred the 10 sided dice and the feel of Mage -- it seemed a little more intuitive than the every time you move you have to roll dice to make sure you don't fall on your face.

I want heroes and plot, shoot far -- not getting characters that I've invested time in getting killed by stepping on a splinter.

[the_rck]

I tend to think that the player characters dying over trivial things is a GM problem rather than necessarily a system problem. It's one thing if one's playing Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu where death is something expected. Most systems, though, can be run either with the risk of sudden death for minor things or without it, at the GM's whim.

I had a GM almost thirty years ago who told us, upfront, that he would never kill our characters over a die roll. He would kill our characters if we requested it, if we did something so stupid that he felt we were asking for death, or if it was big hero moment *and* we agreed to have the character die. Really bad things would happen short of death if we botched die rolls in do or die situations (I remember a character accidentally raising a zombie army due to a botched roll).

I adopted that policy for most games. I still have problems deciding when a player character has done something too stupid for them to survive. I once had a character do something-- in the first session of the game-- that one NPC was urging him to do but that three or four others had warned him not to do while a handful of other NPCs had warned him that the first guy wasn't to be trusted. I really ought to have killed that character because what he did being lethal was a fundamental building block of the world I'd designed.

But it was the very first session...

[evalerie]

I vaguely remember that there are some other options for sleep apnea -- braces, exercises, and other things. I haven't gone looking, but maybe googling something like "sleep apnea alternatives" will find some other options beyond using a CPAP machine.

[the_rck]

The clinician I saw talked about some other options. The problem is that insurance generally won't cover those, and that they don't work so well. Well, insurance would probably cover surgery, but surgery is the last resort because it doesn't necessarily work. The alternatives to a c-PAP are all very, very expensive.

I mean, rapid, catastrophic weight loss might do it, but...

[evalerie]

I think some of the braces are just stiff stickers that go on a person's face while they sleep. I'm not clear on the details, but I have the impression that for some people that's actually all that it takes to hold their airway open.

The exercises are like playing a diggeridoo, so, again, not expensive and pretty approachable.

This is second-hand information from a friend who did a lot of research into apnea options. I haven't read about it myself, but the friend tends to be pretty thorough. So I'd categorize these as not guaranteed to work for you, but potentially worth looking into.

[the_rck]

Well, I got six pages of Google results. Only one link was from a useful source (as opposed to people selling stuff). Most people with sleep apnea have problems because their throats close. The actually useful devices are all dental and all either force the lower jaw into a different position or pull the tongue out between the lips while holding the jaws open. Those may be useful if the problem is at that point but aren't guaranteed to be. They also all are likely to be more physically uncomfortable than the c-PAP.

The government study I found (from 2015 or 2016) pretty much said that if a c-PAP didn't work surgery was next best, that fitted dental appliances (never nasal) work for some people but not for many others.

My big concerns with the idea of a dental appliance, apart from the rather large expense of getting one made, are that I clench my teeth very, very hard at night and that, if I sleep with my mouth open, my mouth gets painfully dry after only a couple of hours (and that was before I was on medication that made my mouth and throat dry).

The cost of the bite splint I got last year was between $800 and $1000. I'm not sure how much insurance covered, but we paid about $470 after insurance, and the dentist got pre-approval from the insurance, so they covered a fair amount.

A c-PAP and all necessary supplies are completely covered by our insurance and is something that we'd own after a year. Dental appliances wouldn't be considered 'medical' expenses and would fall under our dental insurance which... pays for check ups and not much else. As most dental insurances do.