Various life/status/etc. updates

So, Seattle’s been basically shut down for most of the past, oh, week and change, thanks to the snow. People did overreact to the news of the snow (did they really need to stock up with a month’s worth of bread and milk?) but the various shutdowns do otherwise make sense; Seattle is very hilly and when it snows it gets icy and slippery. And some caution does make sense for having a nonperishable food supply, since power outages are a thing. The really remarkable thing is just how much snow we’ve gotten this year; most years we’ll get none or just a light dusting, or maybe we’ll get one or two snow days when it gets especially bad.

But anyway. Despite the shutdowns, my doctor’s office was still open today (thankfully, although unsurprisingly as they have an urgent care clinic so they make plans to stay open as much as possible). So I was able to do my appointment where I finally got to deal with my various medications for fibromyalgia (as well as finally getting a new prescription of estradiol).

In the interim I had tried daily doses of naproxen, but it didn’t help with the pain and it made for some pretty unpleasant side effects which cleared up as soon as I discontinued it. So my doctor recommended I not do the time-release NSAID course of action.

For now we’re trying low-dose nortriptyline, which apparently works pretty well on nerve pain, and also acts very well as a sedative which also helps with the fatigue and sleep disturbance side of things. I like things that have multiple effects. I took it about 20 minutes ago and I’m already feeling it start to kick in, although that might be psychosomatic.

My big concern is it causing a bunch more drowsiness throughout the day (which is common), but fortunately tomorrow is yet another snow day (because today it snowed yet again) so I don’t have anywhere to be, at least. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly this has an effect and what that effect might be.

Also, having the snow days has made for some nice relaxing days of me just working on my own games and music. Although I haven’t really worked on much. I have been streaming a bunch and having a lot of fun doing mostly synth experiments and piano improv, and I’ve come up with a bunch of cute tunes that I want to develop further. Fortunately I kept local recordings of everything too. It’s been fun getting back in the “sit at a piano and see what comes out” mode, which I used to do a lot but haven’t kept up for Reasons.

A few days ago I did get my Strawberry Jam 3 (NSFW-ish link) code to the point where I can start writing the actual game part but I sort of have lost interest in it for some reason. Maybe because I thought about it so much over the last few weeks that the novelty of it is gone and I don’t really care about the game itself anymore? Oh well, maybe I’ll get something working anyway. I was planning on it only being a few days' worth of effort and I’ve only put in, like, one, so hopefully I get a second wind at some point.

I am completely unsurprised that as of late, my webmentions have been getting spammed. Well, that protocol sure lasted about as long as I was expecting it to. Fortunately my endpoint has some reasonable blocklist functionality and Aaron is working on handling spam better. It’s aggravating that this is still a thing though. But spammers gonna spam, I guess.

I kinda wish there were an approval-based mode for it, which trackback and pingback both eventually got in their various endpoint implementations (so you’d think that would have happened from the beginning on this third attempt at doing literally the same thing), but oh well. That’s down to the endpoint and endpoints will get better. And at least in my particular implementation, spam doesn’t actually do anything bad aside from show some extra little buttons that nobody will ever click on anyway (like it doesn’t contribute to pagerank or whatever).

(Hm, on that note, I should add rel=nofollow to the script anyway, just in case, not that it matters in this case, but the way the web is going I bet search engines are gonna start having to process Javascript to browse anything because of this hideous proliferation of websites that build up the DOM in JS instead of just letting the browser do what browsers do best but that’s a rant I’ve had too many times in other venues lately so I’m just gonna stop it right there.)

Anyway, my pain had been doing a lot better lately not only because of the lack of too much work but also because I’m finally getting some adjustments in my workspace at work and am also generally feeling way less pressure recently, which helps a lot. And I’ve also been feeling a lot more support from my friends and family, and having had the fibromyalgia diagnosis has made it easier for me to be kind to myself when I’m not doing great, so when I’m not doing great I don’t spiral as badly. It also has meant that I don’t feel so bad about skipping various social obligations when I’m not feeling great, and reserving my spoons for when I want to do it, rather than when I feel like I should do it.

As part of the Snowpocalypse I’ve been taking time-lapse video out my dining room window, and this makes me want to add proper video support to Publ. I’m trying not to go off the deep end with how to support it correctly, but part of it absoolutely would require finally rewriting Lightbox too, and ther’s so many things I want that to do better anyway and I really don’t want to go overboard there so I dunno what I’ll end up doing. Mostly I want my videos to appear as part of the thumbnail part and come to think of it I guess I could handle all of that in the lightbox side of things, by having it detect links to video providers and turn it into a video embed or something.

I mean I have ideas about how to make self-hosting the videos work well too but for now I continue to be fine with outsourcing things like that.

Anyway it’s now been 45 minutes since I took the first dose and I’m definitely feeling it for actual reals, and it’s kind of straaaange. Like a vague itchiness all over, including in my brain? Well, I guess that’s a sign I should go to bed soon.

Comments

Before commenting, please read the comment policy.

Avatars provided via Libravatar