This is being dictated to Angel since I’m not able to sit at a keyboard.  If anybody has called me directly in the past day or so, she’s the lady who answered the phone.

I’ve not been online much the past few weeks. I’ve not gone into details in public,  but I’ve had a change of what I do at my job, no longer managing a team but now working on specific technical issues and trouble tickets impacting production for my company.

While initially this was a reduction on overhead workload, that didn’t last long as I discovered critical unaddressed issues.

Fixing those took a lot of manual effort, and this was made more complicated by the fact that the guy who ran the system was very ill with some kind of disease. His backup was killed in a car accident and that made everything kind of fall apart.

This culminated in me having to assist other IT/DBA’s onsite at corporate HQ in North Carolina.  I haven’t done much business travel and every time is a mess. I was fatigued after this and planned to take off. The week prior I was occupied in trying to tie everything up and had issues with the home internet.

Long story short, I was rushing, pissed, and not getting enough sleep or rest. This is probably why I’m stuck in bed now.

Last Friday, I was finishing up work when I had a tearing pain in my left knee. I usually use a cane a friend of mine bought me, but as I was on the production floor and the cane incorporates metal, I didn’t have it. The knee itself was swollen and my lost balance meant I also twisted my ankle badly, to the point I could not walk.

This week was supposed to be my vacation — I’d rest a couple of days, do some cleanup on the fiction, work pieces put together by Jacob, Burnsidhe and other authors, and begin working with the guy who did the EGM mod for ME3 on a storyboard.

Instead, I’ve been in the hospital. There was ‘stress’ and deformation to my ACL with indications it may have a minor tear, and tears in the meniscus, which are pieces of cartilage connecting the leg bones in the knee. Initially I thought it had just given out, but in the course of an x-ray and exam by my doctor on Tuesday he found out more severe damage.

As such I have been in the hospital undergoing meniscus repair, fracture repair, getting the ankle worked on,  and physical therapy. Obviously this does not allow me to get online and even when I could use my phone I can’t get a fucking signal in the hospital thanks to Sprint’s shitty coverage.

I’ve had repairs done to the torn menisci (Liethr can explain what this entails, it sounds scarier than it is). The ACL was evaluated as a Grade 1 injury, but the knee specialist was worried without treating the existing damage and given the poor state of the kneecap and the presence of microfractures this could get worse.

The microfractures were fixed with more microfractures to force healing, along with something they injected. This was explained to me as a technique widely used, but it takes time to heal properly.

The surgery went well, they fixed (sort of) the tear and addressed the microfracture, as well as ‘adjusted’ the ACL — my medical knowledge is on par with a very bad medical school student so there were some details I’m hazy on. I will be going back for follow ups next week and doing physical therapy ongoing for a while.

I came home from the hospital this morning — normally this is done outpatient, but the microfracture and ACL slippage meant they did more than just arthroscopy and I didn’t react well to the anesthesia.

I’m pretty tired. I’ll be on braces and crutches and all this fucked up therapy shit for weeks, which cuts into my free  time. Work will also, I’m sure, be hilarious.

I am probably going to rest the next couple of days. My leg cannot be bent and I can’t really stand or walk much, so getting online would be problematic, although I will make a stab at being on discord via phone later today or tomorrow.

Bottom line, of course, is that this has derailed a lot of projects. Jacob’s piece ostensibly needs me to finish part of it, Burnsidhe’s P. snippet needs to be paired with an STG file I haven’t written the basics on for him to fill out, and I have not had any time to speak with or work with Master Kinkojiro on storyboarding.

Rather than scatter information around I’m posting it all here.

Editing Gang to-do’s : I need the team to do me a little prep work for when I can sit at a chair again and get shit done.

• Prepare a finished state document for ALL of the various pieces of work — P STG file, Aria STG file, Volus File, Krogan File, etc. That is, a list of what is done, what is not done, and for the stuff not done what is needed to be done.
• Jacob, I believe, has volus psychology done, while physiology is not done. I’d appreciate it if several of you took a stab at coming up with a physiology doc, at least rough outlines, and then I can take what research I have done and work those two.
• Ariel made a writeup of mech stuff on the forums — additional ideas and details that could go into a tech guide doc would be extremely useful.
• I need a meme list or ideas for reactions for the post-Ilium chapter in regards to the big televised fights.
• I need a EG guy or gal to step up and make a list of all hard conflict retcons that need to be clarified or re-written — such as asari / volus contact, early instances of hanar not being in line with my later changes, spots where things said in one place clash with another. This doesn’t have to be done soon but I want it cleaned up.
• Someone give me a status on the OSABC rewrites and where we are on those.
• The next chapter of TWCD is at 8,500 words and is no where near done. The next chapter of Lions is at 2,000 words but is clunkery. (I don’t think this is a word but he told me to put it there). There are very ugly drafts of the drell history and psychology chapters that I haven’t posted online.  Anything you’d like to see in these would be useful feedback.

Given that I’ve just had knee surgery and a) can’t fucking walk or sit and b) am tripping on pain meds most of the day, I don’t expect to get anything accomplished today aside from drooling.

Best way to do feedback is to email it to me : viley at att dot net or henryviley at gmail dot com will both drive to my phone. If needed, both Comma and Nimiraj can contact me directly via phone.  (If you are friends with me on Facebook, you can use that as well).

I do not have a good ETA to when the next chapter is done.  I will update as I have more information and can think when the Vicodin wears off.