It’s a monthly update… on time?! Can I keep it up all year? Let’s see shall we? I wouldn’t take bets just yet 😉 Anyway, here’s how I’ve been Geeking By in January 2022!

A small note before you continue reading dear reader:

In this post I talk about some quite personal thoughts, feelings and a specific emotional response I’ve been having during the pandemic. I’ve done my best to try to make it clear that I mean no offence to anyone, nor do I expect anyone not to voice how they are feeling. These are horrible and stressful times for all of us. This is my safe space where I voice how I’m feeling, and I ask you to understand and respect that.

All over the place, at least mentally. Hormones hit me hard this month and delivered an emotional and physical punch during the second week of January. I think I had been bottling up a lot of things, including stress to do with getting our boiler fixed and a few things that had been triggering me. The biggest one is how long covid is being discussed on social media and portrayed in the media. If you’re following me on Twitter you’ll have seen me mentioning it more and more, and I didn’t realise how much it was getting to me until hormones pushed the floodgate open.

I can’t fault people for talking about their experiences with the condition, after all, that’s what I do with mine all the time. The problem is that every time they do it’s from a position of ignorance, but their ignorance is not out of malice or completely their own fault. It is one that has been cultivated for decades by the medical community and the media, the former treating ME/CFS patients badly (many being told it was just in their head), misdiagnosing and forcing thousands to undergo painful treatment. Only recently, and most likely due to the pressure of long covid, have the clinical guidelines been updated by NICE to better help ME/CFS patients and remove harmful treatments. Some medical professionals actually had a hissy fit and quit the committee because they wanted to be allowed to keep harming patients. More importantly, ME/CFS is now listed as a physical condition rather than a psychological one which means no more being told that it’s just in our heads and being prescribed therapy.

As for the media’s role in this ignorance; like many disabilities we either don’t exist or when we do, we’re faking it or just scrounging benefits. You may have heard more about ME/CFS since the pandemic started, but I bet it was only in reference to long covid. It’s a bit of a catch-22; while it’s good that the condition is finally getting attention, it’s only as a reference point for the big star of the show, long covid. What makes it worse is that studies and testimonials by experts show that most people with long covid most likely have ME/CFS, so we’re in fact talking about the same condition a lot (if not all) of the time. Some doctors are beginning to diagnose long covid patients with ME/CFS, I’ve heard of at least one here in the UK personally and this page on #ME Action suggests that medical practitioners are waiting for the 6-month mark for long covid patients before checking their symptoms against ME/CFS criteria.

Yet, in the media, all I keep seeing is long covid. Everywhere. Considering how people with ME/CFS have always been treated, this just feels like yet another smack in the face. There are people living with a condition that crosses over with our own, and we’re just a footnote in their story. An ME/CFS charity previously coined the phrase “millions missing” for an advertising campaign, and I just keep feeling it more and more.

What triggered me more was seeing someone with an autoimmune disease say that long covid would be a “fate worse than death for them. I understood what they meant, but again, the ignorance surrounding the link between long covid and ME/CFS left me feeling cold. Long covid and ME/CFS have so many symptoms in common, so you can understand why I felt that this was synonymous with saying “ME/CFS is a fate worse than death”. I’m sure they didn’t think of it like that, and if they had thought it through they would have realised how upsetting it was, which is why I said nothing about it at the time. As I said, I understood their perspective; long covid on top of many chronic health conditions, especially an autoimmune condition, is horrible. The thing is… I live that, every day. I have six other health conditions and hearing someone say that, well, it just hit me out of nowhere.

It’s not often that I get that depressed about my situation. My life isn’t easy, I’ve had to adapt a lot and I had to give up my dream career. It’s not the life I expected for myself, but I’m alive, and I’m happy. Considering how many people have lost their lives in the pandemic, just being alive is a positive. I also have moderately severe ME/CFS, which means that while it has a huge impact on my life and limits a lot of things I can do, it can get a lot MORE severe. I could be bedridden rather than just having the occasion terrible bad fatigue day. But yes, my life isn’t the type people dream about, and it’s one that a lot of people, including many in the disabled community, didn’t even realise existed until the pandemic. Now they’re panicking, and I’m just kind of sitting here like “yeah, I’ve been living this for seven years now, it’s not great but worse than death? Not always”. I’d like to reassure them that they will be fine, but there is a chance that they could end up with severe symptoms, there’s simply no way of telling.

As I said, my hormones didn’t just punch me in the emotional gut, so to speak. Physically they managed to make everything else go haywire. It was like they were having a party with every one of my health conditions and leaving chaos in their wake. It took just over a week for everything to calm back down, and I felt exhausted after it all. The rest of the month has been relatively easy in comparison, and I’ve been concentrating on pacing myself so that I’m not over loading myself with too much work and no rest time.

It’s been a quiet month here at Just Geeking By because a lot of my writing has been going on behind the scenes! I’d hoped to get my blog restarted at the beginning of the year, however, with a broken boiler and other things happening there was just too much that needed my attention else where. Rather than rush things and start back on a never-ending catch-up list yet again, I decided to take the month (and considering my pain flare up, it’s a good thing I did!).

I’ve been continuing with Final Fantasy XIV, where we finished the main story quest (MSQ) for Stormblood. Both my bard and my black mage reached level 70, and I’ve started working on levelling other classes. I’m primarily focusing on my dancer as the next one to get to 70, while gradually levelling the lower classes up bit by bit. I finished levelling my crafting professions (Disciples of the Hand) and the quest lines for that expansion for those, and for the gathering professions (Disciples of the Land).

We’ve started working our way through the post-Stormblood content (including the MSQ), such as the Deltascape quest line and any other miscellaneous quests we’ve picked up along the way. We’ll eventually make our way through the MSQ to Shadowbringers. Towards the end of the month we caught up with the Hildebrand quests, finishing the questline in A Realm Reborn and moving onto Heavensward. We’ve done the Inspector Briardien chain in Heavensward so far which was interesting, although I got a slight Hogwarts vibe from it. I think it was Theo’s glasses that did it. I fell in love with Blaisie; her clumsiness is such a mirror for my own! I hope we see those kids again.

I also changed my character to a Viera, as seen in the image above. I wasn’t sure about the race when I first started the game, and then slowly fell completely in love with the way they look and their mannerisms.

As predicted last month, we continued the Shrek rewatch on New Year’s Day with Shrek Forever After and Shrek the Third. Those are the only movies I’ve watched this month, I need to do better next month. It takes me a while to get back into watching things after such a huge pain flare up because they almost always include migraines, and for a bit I automatically shy away from anything that could trigger a migraine due to my sound sensitivity.

 Before I was ill I finished Supergirl season 6, the final season of the show. It had its ups and downs, and I felt that there was some weak writing at times. There was also absolutely phenomenal writing too, and I’m of course talking about episode 6.12, Blind Spots, written by Azie Tesfai aka Kelly Olsen. It got a lot of criticism, mainly from bigots, and I think many people didn’t like seeing Supergirl in a non-perfect light. However, I know the character from the comics, and she’s never been portrayed as perfect, in fact she’s seen as quite the opposite. People forget how young and inexperienced she is compared to Clark (who made the same mistakes, but never gets as much criticism for many reasons), and we saw that a lot in this season. I feel that those moments, especially in the last few episodes could have been written much better, but oh well.

The season finale itself was the perfect send off. The wedding was beautiful, the cameos great and can we all just give a standing ovation to Callista Flockhart as Cat Grant? We all knew, but it didn’t make it any less hilarious to hear it and in typical Cat Grant style no less.

I also watched the Doctor Who new year’s special, and I’ve got to be honest, it was a pretty big let down. Essentially it was the same thing over and over, and while there were some funny bits, and *cough* an interesting reveal (those who’ve seen it will know what I mean), that was all it was. I admit Dan grew on me a bit more, but I could have done without the two people they were trying to save. Especially the creepy guy. What on earth were the writers thinking with that one? A guy who keeps an item from every woman he’s even remotely had a relationship with in a warehouse? Oh, and he’s practically been stalking the owner every new year’s even because he fancies her? Both the owner and Yaz made it clear to him that his actions were creepy AF and that was it, over and done with. So guys, it’s ok to be a total creeper as long as someone tells you, and you know you’re one. That’s basically what the writers just told them!

And…

View Spoiler »

Your persistence will win out and at the end you’ll get the woman you’ve been stalking! I’m sure many people were like “awww that’s so sweet!”. I just felt like I wanted to vomit.

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Over the holidays Chris and I started watching Supernatural again; we’ve slowly been chipping away at it over the years. It’s taken time because we’ve not always had access to it, but now that the show has finished it’s easily available. We finally finished season 14, and we’re now five episodes into season 15.

I slowly started watching TV shows again once I felt better, and first up was Private Eyes. I finished off Season 5, which as usual finished on a cliffhanger, although a slightly different one this time. Then while I was putting this post together I was devastated to find out that the show had ended. According to a studio executive they wanted to end on a high, and to be honest, screw that. As one of the main stars said the show has so much still to give and the way it ended is basically a big screw you to the fans.

I’ll explain in the spoiler cut below:

View Spoiler »

Private Eyes has had an ongoing will- they-won’t-they relationship going on between the main characters Angie Everett and Matt Shade. In the final episode they finally get it together and after kissing the episode ends with the following dialogue:

“What do we do now?”

“I have no idea…”

Both in unison: “Damn…”

I loved the way it ended because it was typical Shade and Everett style rather than how will- they-won’t-they relationships usually go i.e. immediately falling madly in love with one another and usually ending up getting married. Instead of giving fans the chance to see where this was going to go the producers and writers have just whipped the rug out from under everyone – the actors including from the sound of things. It sucks, especially as this was one of my favourite shows. As far as I’m aware it got good ratings and had a strong following, so there was no reason to cancel it. It was literally dropped because the studio didn’t want to see a loss in the future, and if that meant the fans got screwed they didn’t care.

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I started the new year off with a new GoodReads challenge to read 200 items. I say items because I read a mixture of books, comic books and occasionally the odd short-story. I completed last year’s with 211 out of 200, and as I’m already fourteen books ahead of schedule I’m not too worried. I’ll fall behind again and then bounce back up when the volumes for comics are added.

First things first, here’s this month’s reviews for you:

[rcno-book-listing ids=”22586, 22656, 22762, 22865″ wc=250 readmore=”Read my review”]

Unfortunately my reviews from the last week of January are missing as the latest WordPress update has caused problems with the review plugin I use, and until it’s updated I can’t post those reviews.

Most of my reads this month have been comics this month. Watching Superman & Lois in December and Supergirl this month gave me the comic bug again, and I had a lot of catching up to go! I got a whole bunch caught up at the end of last year, and this month I caught up with:

• Wonder Woman
• Wonder Girl (2021)
• Wonder Woman: Black & Gold
• Event Leviathan: Checkmate
• Nightwing
• Shazam
• Teen Titans: Academy
• Green Lantern: Season Two
• Green Lantern
• Batgirls
• Deathstroke Inc.
• Aquaman: The Becoming
• The Swamp Thing
• Batman: Urban Legends
• Robin
• Catwoman

I am absolutely loving some of the new storylines right now. The Bat Family are so strong right now, with Nightwing, Catwoman, Batgirls, Batman: Urban Legends and Robin all being impressively impressive recently. The most recent issue of Catwoman included a note from the editorial team about men always referring to a group collectively as “gentlemen/guys” despite women being in the group, and I was so here for it. Naturally, it didn’t go down well with the fanboys who commented that the art (aka semi-naked women in suggestive cat costumes) was great, but the writing was terrible. Says it all really, doesn’t it?

Along similar lines the team behind Batgirls have been working hard to bring some authenticity to Barbara Gordon’s disability which is something a lot of disabled fans, myself included, have felt is long overdue. I had a brief chat with writer Michael W Conrad on Twitter (see it here) after reading the most recent issue in which Babs openly says she can’t do something because she’s having a hard day. She’s also seen to be using a crutch multiple times in Batgirls, and in Nightwing she has a chat with Dick about not pushing her back too hard after what she went through in The Joker War. It seems that DC is finally giving us an authentic main character, let’s see how it goes.

The other comics I’m enjoying right now are the new Green Lantern storyline, Aquaman: The Becoming, and Teen Titans: Academy. The last Green Lantern run (Green Lantern: Season Two) went way off the tracks and made so little sense to me. I’m used to Green Lantern being different and quirky, but yeah, was not a fan of that one. This one is much more the usual Lantern stuff and I have to admit, I love the kid. Plus I’m a huge fan of Jo Mullein, and loved Far Sector. It’s also great to see John Stewart getting some of the limelight instead of Hal for a change.

As for Aquaman: The Becoming, this series is way overdue in so many ways. Again, I’m a huge fan of Jackson Hyde, and it’s about time he got his own series. The direction it’s going in is also great because as Black Manta’s son his entire life has always been overshadowed by that fact. It’s interesting to finally learn about his mother’s side and I like the way they’ve used it to continue where Aquaman left off with the changes to Atlantean society.

Teen Titans Academy is just pure high school chaos with superpowers and secrets, and it’s brilliant. The teens we know and love are all grown up, and are now the teachers, which is a little hilarious. Their trials and tribulations with their students also feel very familiar because they’ve essentially grown up alongside us, and as we’ve become adults so have they. As they face adult problems we’re right alongside them.

New Year’s Day was an easy-going affair of yummy food and watching movies; essentially the same as Christmas day minus the gifts. Since then, we’ve been getting things sorted around the house, including a huge clear out. Part of that included sorting through a lot of old clothing which was worn or didn’t fit. The hardest part was saying goodbye to some of my nice clothes, especially my summer dresses. But I’ve not worn them for years nor will I likely to be that size again. Most of them are in good condition, so I’m planning to sell them, and I’ll be saving the money to replenish my wardrobe at a later date.

We’ve been doing a lot of sorting out around our house over the last few months and this month saw the fruition of our hard work; everything off to the dump. For those wincing, don’t worry, I can assure you that nothing was salvageable. Anything that was has been recycled or kept to sell on.

Thanks for joining me for my monthly Geeking by in update! I hope you enjoyed hearing how I was Geeking By in January 2022. My blog is set to do a soft relaunch starting on the 1st of February, and I’ll be sending out my first newsletter the same day with highlights of what’s to come! If you’re not already signed up then what are you waiting for?!

How was your January? I’d love to hear all about it so drop me a comment 🙂

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Image Credits: You are more than your disease image is from Pexels, Supergirl screencap is from Supergirlfans.org, Supernatural image is from the Supernatural wiki, Private Eyes image is from the Television wiki, Aquaman: The Becoming image is from the DC Comics Database.