The joys of midnight cold turkey

I deliberately delayed renewing my painkiller patch this week (it was due Friday evening) as one of the side-effects was making itself felt and I figured a couple of days without would reset things. That does seem to have worked, but as it's an opioid with a half-life you need to give it some time to work its way out of your system, and how long that takes is slightly variable, for me at least. I could probably have renewed the patch on Sunday, but deliberately left it until I was clearly getting withdrawal symptoms. That was a mistake, normally I just feel a little flu-ey, but last night I got major cold turkey symptoms just as I went to bed. Itching, aching, nausea/dizziness, the works. It took me a while to realise what was going on, aching joints aren't exactly unusual and itching crops up from time to time, and I put the nausea/dizziness down to the whisky I'd had just before bed. But finally, about 3AM, I realised what was going on.

But of course even after the new patch is on it takes a while for the opioid to build back up to a functional dosage in the body. So there I was at 4AM throwing everything in the kitchen onto a plate and watching youtube videos to distract myself while waiting for things to settle. I think I finally got to sleep sometime after 5AM. I was mostly okay when I woke up, just tired and a touch headachey, but I think I'm going to excuse myself from adulting for the day.

On a completely different topic, can I just note that "Missing '>' on line 2541" is not a particularly helpful error message when every line in the XML file has a ">" and you don't have an editor that'll take you to specific line numbers* There was no way I was pressing down-arrow 2541 times! (And I'm not sure it was counting blank lines).

Yes, I'm hacking game XML files again, or rather someone else's mod files.

Fortunately I found with a little bit of experimentation that if I opened the file in Firefox it would show the entire line with the error, not just report it. That made the line remarkably easier to find, and  one missing ">" and a couple of extra "_" in a variable name was a lot fewer errors than I was expecting even if it's really simple stuff.

* Actually I think I do, but I'm damned if I can remember what it's called.

Aargh Ableds* *headdesk*

Twice in five minutes twitter has had me not just *facepalm*ing, but full-on head-in-hands over abled attitudes to disability access.

First up were a bunch of pedestrianisation/sustainable transportation advocates arguing public transport meant no one needed cars. Someone had already made a point about public transport not meeting their needs that was probably disability related, so I pointed out mass transport fails as an access solution for disabled people because it doesn't address the mobility barriers between stop and destination. Not the built environment, but the physical environment of how far is it and how steep is the slope that determine accessibility if you have very limited ambulant mobility or are a wheelchair user. Not only did I get a general denial that it's an issue, but I had someone arguing that the solution to disability access was e-scooters (I really, really, really wish I was kidding).

And I just read the twitter profile of the main guy (not e-scooter guy), and he's not some random green, he's a senior transportation specialist at the World Bank. FFS!

Then I noticed a thread about the latest edition of the 'D&D Combat Wheelchair' rules. Yes, it's a thing, there are even figures available, and it's a thing that an ungodly number of ableds seem to find threatening in some way. So threatening that someone has actually spent several hours drawing an annoyingly well illustrated cartoon with character 1, in wooden wheelchair saying "Thank god, an accessible dungeon", and character 2 promptly magicking them them into an abled. So the first post in the thread was "Hey, new version is now out," and the second was the cartoon. After which it degenerated into D&D nerds who don't get the point saying but what about Spell X, and people who don't just get the point but know rather more about disability and why the D&D spells are a very limited solution. But seriously, what kind of a abled arsehole posts that cartoon as an immediate response?

Aargh, Ableds*

* Obviously not all ableds, but far too many of them.