Rumors of the thermonuclear detonation of my skull have been greatly exaggerated

My head did not, in fact, explode and strew flaming radioactive death over southern New Hampshire yesterday....   it just felt that way.

It started out sometime around, I think, 1000 or 1100, with visual aberrations that were making it hard to read my monitor.  I thought at first it was a visual afterimage from looking out the window at the sunlit snow, except it wouldn't go away.  Then about twenty minutes or so after that, the headache started, and 20 minutes after that it felt like my head was coming apart.  I already had a 1515 doctor's appointment scheduled for a physical, but I was clearly in no shape to drive; cymrullewes left work early to take me to the appointment, which we got to around 20 minutes late.  I was able to walk from the car into the waiting room, but about three minutes later when the time came to go back to the examination room, I could no longer stand, and after I fell down trying, they took me back in a wheelchair.  The nurse did the usual vitals, my doctor checked me out briefly, then they sent me over to the ER for a CAT scan to rule out aneurysm.

It turned out I spent the next seven hours in the ER on IV fluids, morphine (three doses), and anti-nausea drugs (two doses of one, one of another) while they did a CAT scan, studied the results, did a spinal tap, and studied the results from that.  For the first couple of hours, I kept getting muscle spasms in my legs, and my left hand kept tingling and going numb.  Finally at about 2330 they told me I could go home; they wheeled me out to the car, and the moment we started moving, I had to tell cymrullewes to pull over so I could open the door and throw up, wondering what in hell my body was still finding to throw up with.  It managed to find enough to throw up three more times before we got home, then again after I got inside and sat down.  After that, though, I felt up to eating a tub of peach yoghurt, and that stayed down.

This morning, I have a residual headache and my eyes still sort of ache, so I'm taking it pretty easy.  I just made a pot of tea (cream and plenty of sugar) and a soft-boiled-egg sandwich to start replenishing fluids and blood sugars and all that good stuff.  cymrullewes is staying home from work today because we don't know how functional I'm going to be or whether it'll come back.

The RPG meme

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Spider Robinson Gets It

Not that it should come as a surprise.  But go read his latest diary entry.  And so does Tom Rush, if you're into his music (I'll freely admit I've never heard of the man):

Dig this:

If you go to http://www.tomrush.com, you will be offered a chance to download several entire superb Tom Rush albums, for US$9.98 apiece.

Did that get through? Slip him a credit card number, flip him a sawbuck, he zips you a great plate. That's it. Downloads in seconds, unzips in a few more seconds-you're done. Import it into iTunes, transfer it to your iPod, good to go. Or, if you like, burn it onto a blank CD for another quarter, and now you have a Tom Rush album for only ten bucks and change. And Tom Rush gets to KEEP the whole $9.98.

Is that beautiful? You just did everything that a big record company does to justify keeping 90% of the money from a twenty-buck CD…and it cost you a quarter for a disc and however many pennies you spent being on the internet for five minutes. And, you didn't wait one minute for the package to arrive in the mail from amazon, or pay a penny in handling or taxes. An extra copy for the car stereo will cost you about a quarter.

It gets cooler: these particular albums are NOT AVAILABLE in any store or from amazon. The only ways in the world to get 'em are either to buy 'em at a Tom Rush concert…or to download 'em from his site and burn your own…at half the usual cost…all of which goes to the musician.

In the parody of a "legal agreement" window offered, Tom admits you can certainly rip him off if you want to, by burning fifty free copies for fifty friends, and he can't stop you. But he sure wishes you wouldn't, considering how cheap he's selling it, and he kindly asks you to just send your friends to his site instead, if you wouldn't mind.

I don't mind a damn bit.

Tom understands what I've been saying for decades: the only real answer to copyright theft is: don't rip people off in the first place. The real answer to piracy is: don't gouge. People would rather not rob you, unless you make it irresistibly attractive. Sell it at a fair price, and it's just easier for everybody to be honest.