Disability hearing
I finally have a disability hearing tomorrow morning. Feel free to send positive vibes, if you’re into such.
Current statuses
Things seem to be moving forward, except for where they aren’t.
Current TODO list
Just some stuff to get done
Meds and such
I had a long-overdue physical with my doctor last week, and after explaining my various struggles with fibromyalgia, long COVID, and suspected ME/CFS she put me on two new medications, Singulair, for the persistent shortness of breath, and Lyrica (pregabalin), for the chronic pain. I’ve only been on them for a few days but here’s some observations so far:
My breathing problems have cleared up quite a bit, in that I’m not randomly feeling short of breath when I’m just sitting on the couch. So far I haven’t noticed any of its many potential side effects, but I also theoretically shouldn’t be noticing any positive effects this soon either. I haven’t done any significant physical activity so I can’t yet tell whether it’s effective as a prophylactic against exercise-induced asthma (which is the main reason I’ve been told I should be on it for years).
I haven’t noticed any significant reduction in pain, but I did have a day of extreme drowsiness when I started the Lyrica. The drowsiness has already cleared up but I’m still having a bit of “finger no worky” problems at times, and I’m already having the major constipation that happened with gabapentin. Increasing my water intake is always a good idea as would be going back on docusate, although I don’t recall that helping with gabapentin.
I’m definitely feeling a bit dizzier than usual and won’t be driving at all until things settle down a bit. Fortunately there’s Lyft (sigh) and the bus for most of the places I need to go which aren’t in walking distance. I’ve been thinking about getting a cheap electric bike/cargo trike/scooter for grocery and short-distance travel purposes, and that might even be an overall better setup than owning a car anyway.
Also as of late my hypermobility has gotten a lot worse and I am pretty sure I do have some form of EDS (and not just some unspecified “hypermobility spectrum disorder”) after all. So, that’s fun.
My disability hearing is in two weeks and hopefully it goes better than the previous parts of the process. I’m not optimistic.
I FOUND IT
I finally found the song I was looking for: it was “Lolita” by Moneyshot off the album Bliss.
Which I CANNOT FIND ANYWHERE ONLINE. Spotify doesn’t have it, iTunes Music doesn’t have it, Musicbrainz doesn’t have it, even Discogs doesn’t have it. CDDB probably has it (given that I’m sure someone submitted it when they ripped the CD back in the day) but they don’t make it easy to search. And FreeDB doesn’t.
But anyway, mystery solved.
Building a lyric search engine
Y'all probably know that my views on AI are somewhat nuanced. I’m not 100% “AI BAD!!!” but I’m also hesitant to rely on AI for a lot of things, and generally do not care for generative AI or any situation where you need AI to “reason” on things.
But, recently I’ve wanted to remember the name of a song that I listened to a lot, and where the lyrics I can remember don’t come up in any of the major lyrics databases. I listen to a lot of obscure indie music that tends to get lost by the major platforms, and I’ve been packratting music for decades now.
Further, it’s only fairly recently that music started to get lyrics embedded into the id3 tags (thanks to bandcamp really pushing for that) and even the streaming platforms have taken forever to pick it up. So a lot of the music I listen to has never had its lyrics entered in any sort of machine-searchable way.
But, hey, there are plenty of AI models for vocal extraction and text transcription… so why not actually use them?
My Zelda tier list
I (not so) recently1 finished Echoes of Wisdom and after a ramble about the Zelda games I’ve played and enjoyed, Star implied that I should do a tier list.
So, here we go, way too much effort put into telling the Internet my opinions on things: how I feel about every main series Zelda game so far2.
I persevere
I’m 47 now.
Or rather, I’ve been 47 for the past two days. I didn’t really want to post about it on my actual birthday, partially because I was super busy that day with two VRChat gigs (following immediately after the previous day’s choir show), but partially because I spent the first half of the day super depressed, particularly over the state of the world, but also over a bunch of interpersonal conflicts I’ve been having which seem to rhyme with one another, and also learning that a good friend of mine is in a really bad situation right now.
And how so many people I feel close to are hurting.
And how of course I share a birthday with a fucking tyrant who was using his birthday as an excuse for a jingoistic military parade, and how completely reasonable it would be that most of my friends would be out protesting that, rather than coming to see me perform silly songs about mental health in VRChat.
Superpositional mood
I’m simultaneously doing great and not-great.
May is/was ME/CFS awareness month
I only just learned from eladnarra’s blog that May is ME/CFS awareness month, which I guess is fitting given that throughout all of May I’ve been getting painfully aware that I may have been developing it on top of everything else.
Basically, ever since I got COVID last June I’ve been especially prone to fatigue, vertigo, brain fog, shortness of breath, a persistent cough, and a whole bunch of other long COVID signs. The worst of it comes and goes, but this month has been particularly bad, especially on the fatigue front. And ME/CFS is a very common part of long COVID.