Monthly Archives: October 2017

Mass Effect (again again)

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A friend of mine has been discovering Dragon Age and then Mass Effect for the first time.  It’s been pleasing to see how much he’s enjoyed all the games, even though some of them are pretty long in the tooth these days.

It also inspired me to go and play Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 again (I’m about 10% through ME3).

It’s a bit depressing how badly Andromeda stands up to Mass Effect (certainly 3) in terms of story and emotional engagement.  The side stories in Mass Effect 3, the overheard conversations, are heart achingly tragic and poignant.  And they’re not even part of the overall story, you can’t even always influence them.  There’s a elderly lady in one location trying to contact her son, who’s in the military.  You don’t know if her son is okay or not, but you know she’s got memory issues, because she’s confused and doesn’t realising she’s been having the same conversation for several days.  You get the conversation in snippets, and the response from the woman she’s speaking to is so real.  There are loads of conversations like that, moments, ‘real’ lives, telling a story of people affected by war.

Andromeda tried, but it missed, and I guess while it’s mechanically a good game, it just doesn’t have the heart present in ME3 (BioWare have form here, DA2 didn’t have the same heart as DA1).

Anyway, just a short post in passing – Mass Effect, the whole trilogy, is still worth buying and playing if you’ve never done so.

Diabetes

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I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2005.  In the 12 years since we found the right level of medication, the metformin dose I’m on has never changed.  Until today.  Up from 1500mg a day to 2000mg a day, with a promise from me to the GP to also lose some weight with my intent being to reduce that dose again.

Ever since the accident last year, and to be fair, for a short while before it, my sugar has been creeping up and my HbA1c’s getting worse.  I’ve had a couple of ‘soft’ attempts at getting it back under control, but not enough to offset the changes, and so it’s time for a bit of focus.  I don’t want the change to be permanent, I want to be able to reverse it, and I’m going to try hard and delay the ‘inevitable’ slide towards insulin for as long as possible.

It remains to be seen whether my will power will be strong enough to actually lose weight, but I’m going to give it a shot.

I’m pleased the GP was once again willing to work with me, rather than simply sticking me on a new medication or insisting the change was larger and permanent.

Interesting, the only reason I know it was 2005 when I was diagnosed, is because I read back and found the blog posts where I started talking about it, which is a sign I guess that I should blog more often, not because anyone reads them, but just because writing this stuff down is useful for my own memory.