Guanfacine and naltrexone updates

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I’ve been on low-dose naltrexone for a whole month now, and I don’t think it’s really helping with my pain.

And I’ve been on guanfacine for two weeks, and while I’ve noticed a slight improvement in my focus (and a general lowering of my blood pressure, which is of course to be expected), holy cow am I drowsy all the time. Like, to the point of nodding off while sitting still or whatever. I hear that this effect goes away after a couple weeks, and I really hope it does soon, because even though I’m generally getting a full night’s sleep every night I still wake up exhausted and end up taking little mini-naps throughout the day. Heck, even while going grocery shopping I occasionally feel like I’m going to fall over.

On the plus side, caffeine doesn’t give me as big of a panic attack now (although I still feel a bit of one) so that’s at least filling in the gaps while I try to stay awake at work.

Bonus thing: yesterday I tried coating my glasses with soapy water (based on seeing an article in Glamour) and it actually works pretty well! The article suggests thoroughly cleaning them, but I just mixed a little bit of liquid hand soap with a glass of water and dunked my glasses in them and let them drain. It’d probably also work pretty well to dilute some dish soap and swap it on with a cotton swab or something.

Nearly 20 years on

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Some recent conversations around Internet toxicity have been reminding me about some deeply traumatic, formative experiences I had nearly 20 years ago, with being doxed, harassed, stalked, and threatened online.

What makes things even worse was that this was directly facilitated by someone who is now a self-proclaimed expert in Internet toxicity, and who was recently given “special thanks” in a podcast I listen to, on an episode about these problems that he very directly contributed to.

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Isso comment privacy update

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So the reason for my recent mini-rantle was that I found a hidden API in isso that would have made it pretty easy for folks to trivially scrape every comment on my website, including ones on private entries.

Fortunately the fix was really simple and it’s what I have deployed on my site right now.

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SpinDizzy MUCK wants YOU!

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Are you interested in whimsical, fun, weird, sometimes downright brain-ending roleplay? Tired of all RP spaces turning into public sex-a-thons?

SpinDizzy MUCK might be a place to check out!

Folks there are friendly and fun and creative and imaginative, and you can be whatever you want as long as you can find the words and/or ASCII art for it.

All you need is a web browser and the wherewithal to take a detour from your ontological nightmare that is real life.

Come check it out. We won’t bite. Well, some of us will. But it’ll be cute. And only has a 35% chance of turning you into a were-whatever-bit-you.

Distributed toxicity and the IndieWeb

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This tweet has been making the rounds in IndieWeb spaces, and reflects a thing I’ve been thinking about on and off lately for obvious reasons:

I’ve seen several other related sentiments lately; with a certain prominent politician being deplatformed from all of the mainstream social media platforms, and all of the platforms that accept him being in turn shut down or otherwise made ineffective, people have been (quite reasonably!) wondering what happens if he ends up starting up his own IndieWeb site, and causes a resurgence in self-hosted or otherwise privately-run, single-author blogs.

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Miscellaneous goings-on

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I’ve been on guanfacine for a few days and so far I’m not noticing that my focus has changed any, but on the plus side my blood pressure is great now. So, that’s good.

I don’t know if it’s from the naltrexone or the guanfacine but my dreams have been pretty vivid and weird, but usually in a good way. Unlike when I was on the Wellbutrin and my dreams were vivid and stressful.

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Mac mini updates

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First off, I am a dummy and completely failed to notice that there are in fact two USB-A ports on the Mini itself. The dock was completely unncessary for my initial setup. Oops!

Also, I just played some test content in HDR and holy heck it looks pretty amazing. Conveniently enough, Safari supports HDR in YouTube while Firefox doesn’t, so I was able to play some videos side-by-side to see the difference, and it was pretty immense, especially in the extremes. Which is, of course, the whole point to HDR.

I’ll probably keep using Firefox for usual video stuff, though, because I’m not a fan of not having a decent ad blocker. Hopefully Firefox adds HDR support soon!

EDIT: Oh yeah, I ended up force-quitting the NI installer so that I could finish installing some system updates and the Wacom driver and so on. What’s really cool is that even though the Wacom driver is still x86, Rosetta still emulates it. Holy cow. Also the Silicon Macs use a new driver signing thing that’s a little onerous but also exposes a nicer way of going into the startup disk selector (now you just hold down the power button while booting, no need to remember an awkward keyboard combination that doesn’t always map right to whatever weird keyboard you’re using at the time).

Also, I had meant to do some disk speed tests as well. See below!

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New Mac mini

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Today I wasn’t expecting to get a lot of work done due to my brain still feeling like it’s been through a juicer, and also because my new Mac mini arrived today. So I got to go through the drudgery of reinstalling everything while also seeing the news of the world exploding around me! Hooray!

Anyway, just some random setup notes.

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