Cav's Place

Anyone? Please?

I guess I could add some more things to this post, though all that matters is what’s written above. Writing this in Notepad though, not directly here, because I just feel like it. All right, not only because of that… It’s also because of WordPress being annoying and creating a separate post for the autosaves when you’re editing something that you already published instead of, say, having a separate system to store those and not take up regular post numbers. Either way, you’ll also notice the lack of links. I really don’t feel like adding any of those…
There’s a smell of raspberries coming from outside. It struck me just as I meant to start writing this… Which caused me to pull that old deodorant sample out of my desk. You know, the one that smells like watermellon that came with an issue of FHM back in 2005. So now it’s really old and not much left to it, but there is actually still a bit left in it because I only used it a few times and only for this purpose, when I needed a more direct reminder. Kept it because it smelled just like a shower gel Andra really liked the smell of, to the point of no longer using it when there was just a little left and keeping the bottle in our room after that point, so she’d be able to take a whiff when she felt like it. Not that she actually did that more than a few times, but she wanted to keep it there. Can’t exactly remember why didn’t she just buy another bottle. Perhaps it was some “special edition” and she couldn’t easily find more, but I’m really not sure.
Otherwise, the same old worries and the same old reasons. Only getting worse and worse every day, whether they’re health concerns, worries about what Andra’s doing or the feeling that everyone I know or used to know is conspiring against me. I actually worked out a little plan to check out one of the more recent health concerns, as much as I could myself, and what I found was terrifying. Now I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on how it develops. What that requires is somewhat unpleasant, but at least I’m just doing things myself. Of course, I may be all wrong, as usual… So I have to move on to the other things and say that of course it’s very unlikely that everyone I’d actually want to keep in touch with is conspiring against me, but that in fact they’re just moving on with their own lives, which didn’t, don’t and never will include me, so they leave me behind, as always, because at best nobody cares about me and most likely they really want to get rid of anything that could drag them down, and I’m obviously right at the top of that list.
There is one change, however… I went from only sleeping some three hours per day to some ten hours per day… And I’m still exhausted all the time and would never wake up. But now all those things I was saying are keeping me just crawling on and on keep me from spending all day in bed. They kept me from doing that for years… I’d need that, just spending days and days in bed, holding the teddy bear and convincing myself that all this is just a nightmare that I’ll wake up from someday, as I often did for the first several months after being thrown back here. But it doesn’t seem possible anymore. Nothing seems possible anymore. Or at least nothing except things getting worse and worse, perhaps in ways I couldn’t even think of, though that may be hard to believe at times…

Yes, I’ll just be complaining some more. It’s not like I can do or think of much else… The loneliness and feeling of doom are only getting stronger every day and I feel as if I’m already dead and just don’t know it yet. Not exactly any new reasons for that, only perhaps some additional reasons to focus on a couple of them even more. So I’m just throwing a post on here and wondering what I’ll do about the second one this week, seeing as I already said I can’t think of or do much else…
Well, Ami posted some brief reviews for some of the webcomics people recommended to her after she asked for such recommendations and, as I wasn’t doing much else anyway, I went through Flipside from start to end. And now I’m trying to work my way through Drowtales, though this isn’t working too well so far. But I did actually get a couple of ideas from Flipside and Drowtales could perhaps provide even more, assuming I’ll manage to wrap my mind around it properly. But the few times I tried to follow such things before I usually got bored and gave up, so I guess it depends on exactly how much I’m trying to find something to do that’s not any of the other things I try to keep myself together with… Not that I have any idea how or why I’m even keeping myself together as much as I currently am.
As a matter of fact, I did manage to write a little more today, after much struggle, but that won’t be getting anywhere. Not that anything I do ever will… In fact, it’s really frustrating how I’m creating these schedules for myself, serving only to force me to do things I know I can’t do right, so only adding to the frustration and hopelessness and despair. Or, perhaps more often, serving to just keep me going from one point to another of the routine instead of just crashing and curling up in a ball in a corner, with my arms wrapped around myself and rocking back and forth, going completely insane as I feel I ought to, because this isn’t manageable in any way anymore…
But I can’t even seem to get myself to do that. And one of the really frustrating reasons for it appears to be the simple fact that there’s no carpet on the floor in my room. Even though a carpet would be harder to clean and therefore likely to actually be dirtier, there’s just something that prevents me from just slumping on the floor and losing it completely like that because I think it’d be dirty. Which I guess means I didn’t lose it quite so completely yet, seeing as I’m thinking of such things. Or perhaps it means I lost it even more than I thought, if such things are on my mind…
Who the fuck knows anymore? It’s not like anyone cares… It’s not like anyone could care, apparently, as the issue obviousy is that there’s not a single person in the world that I could get along with and who would be interested in me. So all that’s left to do is sit here and complain in a mad daze… Because there’s no carpet either…

It has a “magical” feel to it, due to the entire atmosphere, the way the characters talk and to some extent even due to the events that take place, but it seems quite shallow and more a children’s book than Tolkien‘s darkest story, as it is described. If you ignore the ending, at least…

Rating: 3/5

Isaac Bonewits passed away this morning at the age of 60, after losing the battle with a rare form of colon cancer that he was diagnosed with last autumn. For those who do not know, I’m talking about likely one of the greatest and certainly one of the most influential Neopagan scholars, though perhaps a more appropriate term would be modern Pagan scholars, as he was involved with what he called Mesopaganism as well. And that term is just one of his many contributions, as we are talking about the man who, among many other things, coined a large part of the terminology used by modern Pagans. His own description of himself was: “I am an author, teacher, speaker, singer, songwriter, curmudgeon, and all-around trouble-maker. I am not, however, a “spiritual leader,” thank you very much, as I have feet of clay going up to just under my shoulders.”
There’s little point in looking up details and posting them here, so those interested in learning a little more should check out the obituary posted on the blog he and his wife Phaedra maintained and the tribute that the obituary posted on The Witches’ Voice linked to. Those interested in learning a lot more should go through his works directly.

His was one of the first names I came into contact with when my interest, first in Wicca and then in Neopaganism as a whole, was rekindled towards the end of 2004. I appreciated the articles written by him that I read during that time, and most of those read afterwards as well, but appreciated his attitude even more. There may and certainly will be some disagreements, perhaps even some slightly suspicious activities, but his contribution, and the way in which he chose to make it, cannot be forgotten.
My only actual contact with him that I remember was when he was wondering why wasn’t an image aligning properly in a blog post and I checked the code and answered, which resulted in a little confused exchange because the faulty code wasn’t put in by him, but automatically added by WordPress, so at first he didn’t understand what I was talking about and I didn’t understand what he wasn’t understanding. But otherwise I did read his blog for a while, until last summer, and poked around some of his other projects as well, including the short-lived Real Magic School, from which I saved the first part of as many courses as I could access without paying anything and then just left them there in a folder ever since…

Having stopped reading his blog last summer, when he started writing far less often and mentioned thinking about abandoning it entirely due to the lack of comments, I was completely unaware of his problems and therefore was quite shocked yesterday, when I saw an article basically saying that he was taken out of the hospital to die at home, in accordance with his wishes. So I rushed to look through the available information, both on the blog and on their Facebook page, and then just waited for the inevitable…
It was really depressing to go through the blog posts and Facebook updates, to see how he tried to keep a brave face and stick to his usual attitude early on, but then notice that the blog was completely abandoned in February. In his last major update, he said: “That’s how modern cancer therapy works. The idea/hope is that all the cancer will die before the rest of me does.” Unfortunately, while the cancer seemed to be losing the battle against the treatment, the rest of him was losing it even faster, as you can make out from Phaedra’s Facebook posts that he started having more and more problems making it through the treatment after that point, ultimately a very honest discussion with the doctors being mentioned in May, during which they were told that medicine can’t do anything if he can’t tolerate the treatment required to cure him and that a miracle would be required past that point. It was sad to see her last moment of determination, calling to everyone to help prove that such miracles do happen and that reaching the limits of modern medicine doesn’t mean reaching the limits of what can be done, and then see the posts express more and more desperation and eventually depression hidden under a veil of resignation.

Such things do make you seriously question the existence of anything besides the physical world we see around us, because if this happened to a man with his knowledge and benefiting from the kind of support he had from so many others in similar positions… Admittedly, his condition was discovered late and at the time he was suffering from at least three other problems as well, one of which had to be solved before the doctors could even start working on the cancer and the other two causing complications for the duration of the treatment, plus that the affected area was one where surgery is usually only a last resort, so it didn’t look good from a medical point of view, but if someone like him couldn’t make the miracle the doctors said he needed happen, or in fact simply that someone like him ended up needing such a miracle, it seems quite unlikely that such things can actually happen at all.
Then again, I quite readily admit that at least a part of the reason I believe in something higher than the physical world is because I need to. More exactly, a part of it is due to searching for explanations that science is yet to provide, but another is due to searching for explanations that are less frightening and disheartening than those already provided. A part is searching for a purpose that seems to make sense, but another is the need to find some sort of purpose somewhere else when, under the current circumstances, there is none to be found here, or at least no good, worthy or in any way acceptable one. So I’m searching for something that seems to make sense to believe in, but do it because I choose to believe there is something more out there, because thinking otherwise would put me in an even worse position than I currently am in. Perhaps there would be more understanding among those of different faiths if more would admit to that… But there would probably be more sadness and far less hope as well, as becoming more aware of these motivations and also of the fact that reality contradicts the existence of the good things I try to believe in more and more is why my spirit rating plummeted from 5.8 to 2.9 in three years, as this part of my life is turning from a source of comfort and hope to quite the opposite the more I think about it…

Apparently that virus scan wasn’t so pointless after all, because it discovered something. Five things to be exact. And no, the two likely false positives it kept finding in recent months in a kit I’ve been keeping around for years are not included, because it finally decided to stop saying those are viruses. Two were just tracking cookies, which aren’t that uncommon, so that left three finds which apparently really were a trojan. Two separate versions of it too. But I’d rather not give its name here, to avoid the risk of pointing to myself as a potential target, in case some code would still be in effect. Those who are really interested could probably identify it from the description anyway.
Did some searches and it turns out that this is a new version, likely having first appeared in spring, of a virus that’s been around since 2003. When I looked it up on the BitDefender site, the threat level was listed as medium, but that was a generic page for any version of the virus. The sites that mentioned the new variants listed the treat level as critical, as it can supposedly download any file and execute any code by exploiting a Java vulnerability. And, while the original vulnerability has been patched many years ago, newer versions have found other methods, as some information I found on the Microsoft site listed it as affecting Java Runtime Environment 6.0 Update 10 and earlier.
Still, even that’s a pretty old version, as I had Update 20 since April and originally installed Update 16 back in October, after the failed HDD was replaced, as that was the current version at the time. Now I checked again and saw there has been one more update since then, so took the opportunity to install that as well. But, of course, I don’t know exactly which version was the Microsoft site referring to, as I found other information that said even Update 3 would protect you from it, so it obviously advances along with the environment it exploits, meaning that I’m very uncertain that I was in any way protected from its effects…

While over the years there have been a few things downloaded through file-sharing and several other trojans that I stumbled upon on various sites, all have been immediately flagged and blocked by BitDefender, so there hasn’t been a potentially active virus on my computer since I got CIH from a pirated copy of StarCraft: Brood War, way back then. All right, so that wasn’t just potentially active, but actually very active and I luckily noticed that something strange was going on and managed to get rid of it just before the date on which it was supposed to do the most damage. Either way, getting another after all this time makes me feel very inadequate, as if it actually managed to do anything it’d mean over ten years of “invincibility” coming to an end.
But I’m wondering where did I get it from and how come BitDefender didn’t block it from being downloaded in the first place, as I keep it with some pretty strict settings, including having it scan HTTP traffic, which is supposed to make it block infected sites and prevent malicious code from even being accessed by the browser in the first place, which is exactly what it’s been doing for the other potential trojans I happened to stumble upon in recent years. Some of the sites I checked listed it as being spread through casual games available on a certain popular social networking site, though the site wasn’t named, and I did play something with Susana on Facebook three weeks ago, just one day after the previous virus scan, plus that I looked through a few other games that night, which included at least one that took me to another site and at least two that used Java, one of them triggering my “potential threat sense” at the time. But by far the most likely source seems to be XTube, which you’ll have to excuse me for not linking to under these circumstances, as I’ve been poking around there again recently and I know for a fact that the site was infected with something at least at some point these days, because I got a message asking me to run or save an obvious trojan when I tried to enter one day. That made me raise an eyebrow towards BitDefender, as it didn’t block it, but eventually just hit cancel, closed the browser and didn’t try again for the next couple of days.
Now I’m pretty pissed that I had BitDefender delete the files in question before thinking to check them out and see where they had been downloaded from, or at least when. That would have answered the above question very easily and would have helped in the future, though it wouldn’t have done anything about my fears regarding any potential damage already done… But if anyone received any suspicious links apparently from me recently, do let me know, because I read that the virus tends to spread itself like that.

So now, especially after linking this to the unusual behavior noticed Saturday night, I’m extremely concerned about my computer and feeling extremely inadequate in pretty much every aspect. Which obviously brought about another crash, which isn’t helped at all by my other current and constant worries, the feeling that nearly everyone I know is in on a conspiracy against me because most have stopped talking to me recently, knowing that something’s still obviously wrong with me physically and not sleeping well at all even before all of this. For that matter, I woke up and started writing this after roughly two and a half hours of sleep…
And the heat’s no help either. I don’t usually notice that it’s hot until it gets to a reported temperature of 32°C, don’t have to particularly do anything to manage reported temperatures of up to 35°C and, with some care, usually managed up to 40°C quite well, but two weeks of reported temperatures of at least 33°C are starting to take their toll, especially considering the health concerns as well. I likely wouldn’t even notice a couple of days like this, but being just a little bit uncomfortable for yet another reason day after day tends to add up and eventually take its toll. And it doesn’t seem to be getting any better, as the forecast lists an average of 35°C for the next five days and usually still 32°C or over for all of next week as well.

Oh, and for some reason I thought to check again and found that apparently Elena G. took me off ignore on Facebook, because I could see the profile pictures at least… And one of those pictures, posted at the end of 2009, may explain why she’s been ignoring me, as it’s of her holding a baby. Now it may not be hers, and Ami was of the opinion that parents who hold their newborns don’t look like that, though she admitted to being far from the best judge when it comes to that, but it does point out a major difference of opinion when it comes to that crucial issue. So I may need to add another person to the list of those lost because of that, after Sarah and potentially also Liz. And, who knows, this may have something to do with why Jen’s been ignoring me as well, especially since I sent the angry messages I wrote after finding out that two Nightwish members were having even more children to her as well, plus a bitter comment regarding her mention of a loud three year old during her trip to Turkey, and in fact those are the only things I can think of that could have pissed her off after she came back from said trip, as I really don’t think I pressed her much about the reasons for her trip to London, no matter how much it worried me, and otherwise I only sent a few links…
Of course, all of this only serves to worsen my fears regarding Andra potentially having or adopting children, as that’s my constant main concern, being the only thing I’ll never tolerate from anyone, including her, under any circumstances, meaning it’s the only thing that would make even fake hope impossible and truly leave me with nothing at all to potentially look forward to. That’d sure be a case of already being hurt even worse but not being aware of it yet…