Dept. of Sometimes You Win

Oct. 28th, 2025 09:50 pm
kaffy_r: Chan, Binnie and Han of SKZ bouncing (3racha bouncing)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Hey Guys, Guess What? C'mon Guess!

Nah, you don't have to guess. 

Remember back when I was having fun with the American medical system, which appeared bound and determined to prevent me from having access to Brexpiprazole*, aka Rexulti for less than $400 per month. I told you about my favorite superhero-who-should-have-a-nobel-prize-for-awesomeness, Nicki who practically turned herself inside out to get me the meds without breaking my bank. 

Back on Sept. 2, I told y'all about that. I haven't updated you about what's happened since then. And up until yesterday, any news I could have told you was simply "nothing has worked, and I'm too exhausted to die on this fucking hill." First because neither link that Nicki gave me resulted in any help. And then the original superhero in my life, Bob, found a better link for one of the organizations that Nicki hoped might help. And sure enough, both he and Nicki were right about that organization; I just might be eligible a program that would provide me Rexulti for zip, zilch, nada until the end of the year, and then could do the same for next year as long as I applied again. 

So I put together the application, and marched it to Nicki; she filled in the shrink's part of the application and faxed it off (faxes! Modernity!) to the organization. 

I had a little frisson of hope when the organization texted me to let me know indirectly that my application had been received. But when I saw the envelope in our post box Friday, I had a bad feeling. Sure enough, they rejected me, saying, "your diagnosis doesn't meet our requirements". I read it and said the whole not-dying-on-this-fucking-hill bit. But the look Bob gave me made me reluctantly (and irritably) decide I'd leave a message to Nicki in her voice mail very early Monday morning, basically to say that this had happened, and why, and should I set up an appointment with my shrink to figure something else to prescribe me. Part of me - a very small part of me, mind - remembered something else, something just enough to ensure I made the call; that Medicare had used the same excuse reason when it initially refused to cover it, so who knew, maybe the same thing could happen in this case.

Didn't hear from Nicki Monday, but was gearing up to call her and actually talk to her rather than leave a message today, when she called. She'd apparently called around 8:30 a.m. but I was fast asleep. She got my voice mail, and redid the application, using a different diagnosis code. She told me she sent it at 4 p.m. Monday, and at 2 a.m. Tuesday the organization left an email telling her that the decision had been reversed, and I had been accepted into the program. 

Reversed. 

Accepted. 

She was so happy for me!

This evening, I got a text letting me know that my 2025 supply had been shipped. That fast. 

I shouldn't have to be celebrating like a mad thing because Nicki the superhero who deserves a Nobel Prize for Awesomeness once again proved that she should wear the damn cape and is probably capable of flying if told that would help one of her boss's patients. 

I shouldn't have to depend on the kindness of strangers to keep my sanity. 

Fucking American "health" system. 

And I'm still celebrating like the mad thing I would surely be without this med. And I'm going to be happy about it. 

* Hey, I can now say and spell the generic name!


Dept. of Memes

Oct. 27th, 2025 01:41 pm
kaffy_r: Second shot of Ateez members (Eight Makes One Team)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Music Meme FTW

I have an unfinished meme exercise sometime in the past, possibly about four years ago. But I'm not going to go back to that one, why do that when I can try another one and only get halfway through it? This one's about music, and that feels like one I actually might get through. It's worth a try at least. Many thanks to 
[personal profile] shipperslist  for the list of music-related questions. Let's see how this turns out. 

1. A song that you discovered this month: Since I already talked about RM's "Tokyo" a few days ago, I'm going give you a solo piece by Yeosang, a member of the eight-man KPop group Ateez. He's one of the members who I've discovered well after becoming fond of some of his group mates. He's a lead dancer, what's known as a sub-vocalist - he has a nice deep voice - and a "visual," which is a thing I understand, but which isn't one of my favorite bits of KPop culture. (Yes I enjoy them being pretty, but I don't like the idea of "pretty face" being an official position especially since the members of any idol group have to be good at everything. Everything.) 

This song is full of near-operatic symphonic swagger. I'd like it even if it was all in Korean because of how it's put together, and how well Yeosang and his dance crew use it in this music video. The English subtitles give me a little more of a hint about what the song means to him, and that's another reason I like it. 











Dept. of The Darkest Timeline

Oct. 25th, 2025 04:19 pm
kaffy_r: Fan art of Bleach characters (Bleach Set the World on Fire)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
This is Chicago. This is America

I'll be back with other things to say, happy things, or at least I hope so.

But right now, I give you this, taken as a screen shot from video a neighbor took as the ICE thugs ambushed him, and who shared it on some local news sites. 

It's my city.

It's my adopted country.

He's my neighbor. 

He's my brother.

They don't care. 

The cruelty, the racism and xenophobia, is the point.
 


Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

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