La Usurpadora: best telenovela ever, or so I remembered it

It's out there online, illegally; also on netflix 

When I was little, still living in Dominican Republic, my family waited every night for the hour or two of telenovelas. Assuming there was electricity, which there often wasn't. Among the telenovelas I half-watched in that time, none made as much of an impression as La Usurpadora (The Usurper, I'm pretty sure). 

The plot is cliched, or so I'm told even though I rarely see it. Paola Bracho is an evil rich lady married to a nice guy with two children, a serious older brother, a very religious adopted sister, two children from a previous marriage, and an alcoholic grandmother. Oh, and a struggling business. Paola gets bored of dealing with all the tedious family drama, so she pretends to be sick so she can travel outside of Mexico to see "specialists". In truth, she goes off with a "cousin" (lover) to Cancún, where she meets her double, the sweet maid Paulina. So she can go on travelling and cheating, Paola frames Paulina for jewelry theft, then promises not to press charges as long as Paulina takes her place in the Bracho household.

Most of the drama stems from watching Paulina deal with aftermath of Paola's over-the-top evil actions. She totally ignores her young stepchildren. She is cheating on Carlos Daniel with his sister's loser husband. She's spending way, way too much money while the family business flounders. She is sneaking cognac to Carlos Daniel's elderly grandmother so she can sleep/because she finds the old woman's drunken rants hilarious. She is also cheating with some random, rather dangerous Italian painter (who, by the way, has the crappiest nude painting of Paola ever in progress). As is common in lots of stories, Paola's evil is the most entertaining aspect of the entire thing.

If I was prone to armchair psychology, I'd say that Paola has dashes of histrionic personality disorder. She loves flashy clothes, jewelry, attention (sometimes from men who aren't all that impressive, see: the sister-in-law's douchey husband and that weird "painter"). And probably she's a bit of a psychopath too, since she has very little regard for the pain she causes to everyone around her. Everyone in the Bracho household is either scared of her (the servants), completely fooled by her (the husband, the grandmother, the twit brother-in-law), or extremely angry at her (the siblings). She's like the telenovela Darth Vader.

Methadonia: myths about methadone

Buy on Amazon.

Today a patient told me that he couldn't go on methadone because it "rots bones", which I later learned is a common belief among people addicted to heroin. I suppose that's something I should know considering where I work, but it'd never come up before. (For the record, methadone doesn't do anything to bones directly, though it does have abuse potential and people hooked on any random thing tend not to eat very well. That messes up bones).

After a while in a crowded hospital, addicts lose their their tragic glamour. Addicts, recovering or not, come in all flavors. Some of them are easy enough to treat, even pleasant, and others can make an entire medical team contemplate taking some chemicals themselves. Just like any other old patient cycling through a hospital.

I wish I could say there's no stigma attached to addiction in hospitals, but that would be an absurd lie. It's just that the stigma gets routine, no different than the groaning that goes on whenever a hypochondriac refuses to leave the hospital after their medical condition has more-or-less resolved. We're only human, after all. There's only so many times you can argue with a endocarditis patient who wants to leave the hospital against medical advice to get high before you get jaded towards people who don't deserve it.

Today's drama prompted a mention of Methadonia, a documentary that follows several patients in a support group for recovering opiate addicts.

Fire Emblem's shameless grab for more of my money

Pre-order on Amazon.

I'm counting the days until February 19th because that's when the next Fire Emblem game (Fire Emblem: Fates) comes out. Or, to be more accurate, games. 

See, the next installment has pulled a Pokemon and will have two different "versions". From what I've gathered on TVTropes, there are two royal families involved. One raised you, the other is your biological family, and the storyline branches depending on which family you side with in some kind of medieval conflict (I would choose the family that raised me, unless they're awful, but I digress).

And then! And then. It looks like there might be a third part that will be released as DLC, so I estimate that I'll be shelling out around $70 dollars to play this thing in full. And I'll be paying for it because, videogame gods help me, I love these games. I'm currently trying to harass my brother into playing Awakening so I'll have someone IRL to talk about this with.

I'm trying to be a little less bitter about this since I know that this videogame-making business must be getting rough. Immense numbers of hours go into making a polished game, yet the market is flooded by easily-cranked out "casual" stuff like Candy Crush, which are completely free for the vast majority of players. As it is, I don't know if it's possible for anyone to make the kinds of games I enjoy if the audience will only pay for a copy once, as it used to be in the days before DLC. The only other revenue source I can conceive is advertisements, and I'm pretty sure I'd hurl my DS across the room if my gameplay was interrupted by someone trying to sell me make-up. Or a car.

The more I think about it, the more I accept that DLC is pretty much the future. It might not even be a bad thing since it's probably easier to augment an existing game than it is to start a new game from scratch. I can only hope that videogame companies take care to deliver quality content via DLC. But considering the manure companies have been known to release (I'm looking at you Ubisoft), I'm not holding my breath.

For example, FE creators have been adamant that this new splitting in Fates is not as transparent as the Pokemon nonsense (Pokemon essentially releases two versions of the exact same game with a few different critters in each, then a third game a couple of years later that combines both versions; I have a friend who buys all three copies religiously). It seems that Birthright and Conquest will both have enough unique content to justify having to pay for Fire Emblem: Fates twice. Which begs the question, did they just release two incomplete games rather than focus their attention on making one complete, good game?

That's my biggest concern right now; that instead of getting one awesome game, I'll be getting three unfinished, crappy ones.

ETA 1/3/16: The special edition that comes with the full game is, of course, "unavailable" for pre-order.