(Update: This post was last edited at 20230103 @ 9pm CST to clarify some responses; edits are at the end of this post.)

There is an individual who claimed today that I kicked him out of a demogroup. They published, publically, a very long, private, internal conversation we had, where we argued about very inflammatory topics including BLM, racism, socialism, and white supremacy. This conversation escalated and became very accusatory, cultivating in me accusing him of being a white surpremacist.

This is a serious accusation as it stands, but what I didn’t know at the time is that it is especially disrespectful and heinous to people who live in Europe, where this individual is from. In the USA, the term carries slightly less impact due to our history of dealing with racism (it is usually used when someone is quite obviously a racist, as in when they’ve stated so themselves publically), but evidently it is a very, very big deal to accuse someone in Europe of this. I wasn’t aware of that until after our argument was over, and for this, I regret using that phrase in our conversation.

That said, I would like to respond to the core assertion made today by this individual, who claims that leaving the demogroup wasn’t his choice, and that it was I who kicked him out of the group. While that is the perogative of any group leader (I have varying levels of code in our productions, but I’ve acted as a manager/wrangler since inception), his claim is false. At no point in our (now public) conversation did I ever say he was no longer welcome in the group. In fact, I asserted the opposite: In the last part of the conversation, I acknowledged that we will never agree on some of the issues discussed, and that I was willing to put it all behind us so that we could continue making demos together, writing: “I’m going to pretend that all of our political discussions never occurred and we can go back to making demos or some other such stuff.” This quote can be seen at the end of the private material he published.

His response, after our conversation ended, was to post the following message to our internal discussion group:

From xxxxx at xxxxx.xx.xxx  Sat Aug 29 18:10:06 2020
From: xxxxx at xxxxx.xx.xxx (xxxxx xxxxxxx)
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2020 01:10:06 +0200
Subject: [PC Demo Dev] I'm a white supremacist
Message-ID: <CAP3xA-E4pgMtVf9EPyWe3+=pBZmH723oO8dC6=-nVTD+0P=A4w@mail.gmail.com>

A white supremacist. That is what Jim has repeatedly called me.
Clearly I am not, and I refuse to be called that by anyone.
I'm out.

He wasn’t kicked out of the group; he left voluntarily. Nobody else in the group was aware of our private argument, and I made it clear to this individual we could continue making demos together as long as we never discuss politics again, but it was his choice to leave. Once he declared his choice, we removed his access from our various shared resources.

The demoscene is a culturally relevant art subculture, so much so that it has been internationally recognized in several countries as such. While it is no longer a part of today’s demoscene, the culture has historical beginnings in male teenage behavior in the 1980s. Most of us who have kept active in the demoscene since those days — 3 decades and counting! — have moved on from that kind of melodrama. I hope someday we all can.

20230103 Update: I’ve been made aware that the individual in question is confused about the exact sequence of events, claiming that I took malicious action before they left the group. They are mistaken; actions were taken only after they declared they were leaving the group. The sequence of events — which are supported by timestamps that the claimant not only has access to, but have mostly made public by them — were:

1. We had a private argument over email
2. I wrote that I was willing to forget the argument and move past it to continue working together
3. They wrote back, refusing, with obscenities
4. They post a message to our internal group saying they’re leaving
5. I remove their access from our design/planning board
6. Another group member removes their access from our code repo
7. I block this individual on twitter
8. 28 months laters later, this private conversation is made public by them without my consent

To reiterate, steps 5 onward were taken after this individual publically declared they were leaving the group, with the response reproduced earlier in this post. No action was taken until after they declared their intention.

This individual also seems to think that there was no reason to block them if they had just chosen to no longer contribute. This individual must never have been part of group projects where a disgruntled participant has maliciously damaged assets. For example: I participate in the curation of a software archival project, and we had an instance where someone decided that, not only did they not want to participate any more, they were angry with certain members of the project. Without warning, they proceeded to deface our discussion board, delete useful organizational information they had contributed, and maliciously overwrote archived material. So, when someone declares they are leaving, it’s standard operating procedure to protect the group’s assets, so that’s what we did. (And I stress we, not just me; it was a group decision.) Despite these actions, we never blocked their email; they could have gotten in contact with any member of the group (even me) via each member’s individual email address if they wanted to discuss the matter further.

I’ve removed any political comments from this post, because this post is not here to invite political arguments or facilitate political discussion. It is here only to explain the facts of what happened, and my regret for using a certain phrase. I still invite any non-political comments.

Perhaps the most regrettable thing about this entire exchange is that I originally reached out over email not to start an argument, but to provide a USA-centric perspective to events that I felt were deeply troubling said individual based in another country, based on his posts on twitter. Meaning, I started the conversation initially trying to help them, as we were friends at the time, and friends help each other. But because of what happened, I’ve completely stopped talking politics to anyone, even family, since September 2020. I’ve also stopped reading and responding to anything on twitter and facebook, using twitter only to make new broadcast announcements about projects I’ve worked on. I’m not sure if one of their goals was to shut down any desire in me to help people understand what Americans think about certain topics, but if it was, they succeeded.

I’m nearing 50.  I’m developing the usual amount of physical issues for someone who doesn’t take care of themselves, but nobody told me about the mental issues that follow.

The human brain is an organ, just like every other organ in your body.  It’s highly specialized, but then again so are most major organs.  As we age, our organs don’t perform as well: We are slower to perform, slower to adapt, slower to heal.  Sometimes organs that performed well in our youth start losing the ability to perform their primary function, such as your kidneys leading to early-onset diabetes.  And, I’m now finding out, the brain suffers from this as well.

It’s no secret that the elderly have easily-identifiable mental issues, mostly speed of processing and the difficulty of forming short-term memory.  What isn’t as well communicated is how less-than-peak-performance brain function affects you long before you become that old.  In the last few years, I find myself:

• Sensitive to emotion and empathy.  I guess this comparison is inevitable, given my nerd pedigree, but it’s very much like Bendii Syndrome, where you feel emotion more strongly.  There have been times when I was expected to be impartial in a situation, only to find myself quite subjective and borderline irrational based on how I personally felt.
• Feeling a pervasive sense of loss.  When I first started out in my career (and hobbies), I had an experience and intellectual advantage in my field.  Someone much older than me described me as “the smartest kid in the room”, and I definitely felt that way up until about 8 years ago.  You can see a definite correlation between how much I felt I was losing that and my demoscene productions from 2013 through 2015 — almost as if I was desperately trying to cling to that feeling of being the smartest kid in the room.
• Being resistant to change.  As emotional response increases, logical reasoning has to fight harder to win.  There are many changes in last few years I’ve resisted because I felt about them a certain way, when logically they made perfect sense to me.
• Tiring after periods of concentration.  What happens when you work a muscle too much?  It gets tired and hurts.  What happens when I have to learn something new, or concentrate on a difficult problem?  I feel fatigued.

There are ways to mitigate the above, but the cruel irony is that your brain is the organ that has to fix itself, and it’s malfunctioning.  I should get more sleep, exercise, eat better — but my brain wants everything to just go away.

I was hospitalized recently for a kidney stone.  Kidney stones are small deposits of minerals that form inside the kidney when there is an unusually high concentration of certain chemicals that crystallize and then stick together.  Smaller stones migrate into the ureters, then into the bladder, then are expelled when you urinate.  Larger stones, however, don’t fit; they get lodged in the ureters, and prevent urine from draining out of a kidney.  This is obviously very bad for the kidney.  It is also very painful.

I’ve been asked by many of my like-aged friends what the procedures were like, what caused it, how I knew I had one, and how to prevent it.  Here are my thoughts on what happened.

The Basic Timeline

(For the purposes of this section, “The Event” is when I decided I needed medical treatment.)

Four days prior to the event, I’d had odd feelings in my pelvic region.  (I recognize this is particularly funny phrasing — go ahead and laugh; I did.)  It is hard to describe what I felt; all I can say is that it felt like I had a stomach located there, and that “stomach” was “rumbling” as if it were empty and I were hungry.  I wasn’t sure to make of these feelings, but they weren’t painful, so I just went on with my day.

Five hours before the event, I developed mild lower left back pain.  I’ve had back pain before, and it was 10pm, so I thought I’d take some ibuprofin and go to bed once it kicked in.  I also had what I thought was bad gas, so I voided both solid and liquid in an effort to fix that problem.

Three hours before the event, it still hurt, but I thought I could lie in bed, relax, and sleep it off.  For the next three hours, I tried unsuccessfully to go to sleep while the pain slowly grew from mild to acute pain, which I still wrote off as having wrenched my back or something.  Still unable to sleep, I decided to try voiding again, and when that didn’t fix anything, I woke Melissa and told her I probably needed to go to the hospital.

After driving to the emergency room, I was immediately given a hospital gown to change into and a bed to lie in.  Anticipating I would need fluids and pain medication, an IV was inserted:

I was also hooked up to various monitors:

(My blood pressure was elevated likely because I was in a hospital for the first time since being born, worried about my condition, and in some pain.)  I was then examined by a doctor, who ordered a CT of my midsection, and the results showed a 7mm stone lodged just inside the beginning of my ureter, close to my kidney.

The size and placement of the stone dictated my treatment.  There are various ways to remove lodged stones:

• Smaller stones can eventually migrate down and out.  These are managed with pain medication until they pass, which can take a day or more.
• Larger stones must be removed, and are typically broken up so that they can be passed or extracted.  There are two ways to break them up:  Sound waves, or a tiny medical laser.
• If the stones can’t be broken up, or are in a completely inaccessible location (which is rare but happens 5% of the time), then the final recourse is to cut open your back, then further surgery to remove them.

Luckily I didn’t fall into the rare category.  But because my stone was so close to the kidney, they couldn’t use sound waves, so I was scheduled for the frickin’ laser.

The actual procedure goes something like this:

1. A stent is inserted into the affected ureter, with one end in the kidney and the other end in the bladder.  It is a thin hose with perforated holes near both ends so that urine can drain into the bladder around the lodged stone, which brings the kidney out of immediate danger.  You want this, because it isn’t always possible to get the stone out during the procedure, and you want to be able to pee semi-normally while waiting for the second attempt, which could be few days.
2. The stone is located with a scope, then a medical laser blasts it into pieces.  Thank the gods of fiber-optics for that bit of medical technology.
3. The pieces are then extracted, and sent off for analysis.  The analysis usually returns a few weeks later, to be discussed with you and your urologist; the mineral makeup of the stone can be used to determine what caused it and possibly how to prevent it.
4. The stent is left in 2-3 days to facilitate healing, then removed either at home or at the doctor’s office.

You are, thankfully, knocked out for this.  Knowing the procedure — the stent is inserted exactly as you think it would be inserted — I would have insisted on it.

After I recovered (which didn’t go well; more on this later), I was sent home, where I rested for an additional day.  Two days after the procedure, my wife helped remove the stent, which, again, is done exactly how you think it is done.  It wasn’t painful, but it sure was unsettling!

Expect the unexpected

The above sounds very routine, which it mostly was.  The surprises for me came after the procedure itself.  Here is a list of things that surprised me:

• I did not come out of anesthesia very well.  Some people wake up slowly and act drunk, crack jokes, act silly, etc.  Others wake up normally as if nothing had happened.  I fell into the relatively uncommon category of people who wake up atypical; in my case, I was panicking.  I felt very anxious, like my brain was racing without a limiter, and my heartrate was elevated.  Melissa described my actions as if my body were trying to process trauma signals, but the actual pain itself was being blocked by medication, so my body wasn’t sure how to process everything else.  I tried to sit up and walk it off, but I was on a lot of pain medication that made me very dizzy and nauseous, so I couldn’t get up.  For at least 8 hours afterwards, I oscillated between this state and sleep.
• Pain medication has enough goofy side effects that I will consider going on much less of it if this ever happens again.  For example, my urine was discolored a bright orange color for days.  The pain meds also gave me constipation; I had my first normal movement four days after being admitted to the hospital.  Then, the constipation turned into diarrhea for a day after that.  What fun!
• I was extremely tired for up to a week afterwards, despite getting plenty of sleep every night, and never actually having been cut open.  It felt similar to recovering from a bout of the flu, where you are tired all the time and slightly short of breath.  I took this as evidence that my body had some healing to do even though I was never cut open, which goes to show you that any invasive procedure usually incurs some trauma that the body has to spend time and energy healing.
• The IV insertion point stays with you for a while.  Over a week later, I still had a bruise and marks from the surgical tape.  Nearly two weeks later, I still have the marks from the tape, and scrubbing doesn’t seem to remove them:

Moving forward

Statistics show that people who get one stone have a 50% chance of developing another in the next 5 years.  (That is why this article is somewhat negatively titled “1.0”.)  Lifestyle changes (mostly dietary) can help reduce this.  While I haven’t yet gone over analysis results with the urologist that performed my procedure, he told me after the procedure that he had quickly examined a piece and was fairly certain it was the most common type of stone (calcium).  To reduce the changes of another occurrence, I was advised to:

• Drink more water to dilute the amount of uric acid produced
• Eat less salt
• Avoid “dark” sodas (coke, pepsi, dr. pepper, etc.) as these contain phosphoric acid as a flavor additive.  (Phosphoric acid has been shown in some studies to assist stone production.)

As I only enjoy dark soda, I’ve essentially given it up completely, and replaced it with water, sports drinks, and tea.  I have to be careful about the tea, as some processed teas also adds phosphoric acid.  Read your food labels, kids.  Also: I’m not fond of tea.

I was sad to give up pop.  It was my only vice; I don’t drink alcohol or coffee, smoke, or do pharmaceuticals.  I drank it every day, and I am really going to miss it.  I may still have once a month or so; perhaps as a treat at a restaurant.

I still think it’s really cool that a medical laser was fired inside my body

2016 holds some interesting anniversaries for me, of events that have defined my hobbies, my persona, or both.  Some fun and notable ones:

• 45th anniversary of me being on this planet.
• 35th anniversary of the IBM PC, MTV, and the Space Shuttle.
• 30th anniversary of my adoption of the online handle “Trixter”, which I initially used for illicit activities but now use For The Greater Good(tm).
• 20th anniversary of the Abandonware movement, something I’m not totally thrilled about how it turned out, but is notable regardless.  My involvement in the birth of Abandonware eventually led to the birth of MobyGames, so there’s a happy ending.  I should probably write about my involvement someday.
• 15th anniversary of the MindCandy series, which was a fun experiment in the days where creating an indie DVD or Blu-ray was uncharted waters.  I’m proud of each of them for different reasons.

Much less notable: 10th anniversary of starting this blog.

I got the idea for Trixter looking at some subway graffiti.  That graffiti is long gone, but thanks to qkumba and a another demoscene friend (whose name escapes me, sorry!), we have some lifelike simulations: