busybee fluffy rambles

Wellp, as usual, saying anything vaguely optimistic about a new medication has angered the side effect gods, as over the course of yesterday I noticed I was having progressively more trouble breathing and swallowing and a feeling of swelling in my throat, which is on the list of Effexor side effects to watch out for and to immediately contact your doctor about. So, I’m pausing the Effexor for now (hopefully having been on it for only three days at the lowest dose will minimize the withdrawal effects, ugh) and have sent a question to my doctor about it.

If dopamine regulation is so great, why doesn’t my brain just do it on its own?

Okay so back in 2021 I had my bathroom redone, and the contractor did an awful job of it, and in particular the plumbing for the shower itself failed a bit over a year ago because the person who did the plumbing was super fucking incompetent.

So, I had to get the wall partially opened up to get the plumbing corrected, and the plumber was only able to do so much without completely demolishing all of the tilework, and was just hopeful that the fix would be long-term but said that the correct fix would have been very different.

The tile work itself wasn’t great either but it was Good Enough™ and I didn’t want to spend even more money to get it redone.

Wellp, today I noticed that I’m getting more leaking behind the shower wall! So that means that the proper fix needs to happen, which means the tile needs to come down, which means I’d might as well get all the tiling redone.

I’ve reached out to my usual good contractor to see if I can get an estimate for the retiling and the plumbing fix, and hopefully it won’t be too outrageous, but, jesus christ I’m so sick of dealing with this.

DuckDuckGo has been slowly rolling out AI “features,” and now they’ve decided to triple down on them.

So now for me they’re DuckDuckGone.

I’m using Startpage for now. The search results are Okay. Not as good as DDG’s were, but, sigh.

No I will not be running it

It does absolutely nothing to slow crawlers down (it’s not like they’re going to wait for a page to finish loading before they move on to the next one, crawlers are super optimized to just constantly grab as much bandwidth as possible in parallel), there’s already so much AI slop on the web that it’s not going to contribute meaningfully to model collapse, and all you’re doing by running it is wasting even more resources. Giving the LLM crawlers more content to slurp up just gives them more reasons to waste even more resources, and only continues the death spiral of making the Internet an even worse place.

This isn’t like interfering with scammer call centers through scambaiting or the like. Computers have no problem with having their time wasted.

And meanwhile it does nothing to actually solve the problem.

So, I was on meclizine for a couple days, and it is definitely not the right med for me.

Basically, it made me super tired and pretty much constantly sleepy or on the edge of falling asleep (like, to the extent that I was experiencing hypnagogia), and it wasn’t helping my vertigo at all.

What’s more, for vertigo it’s meant to be used as a rescue med and not a maintenance med, getting tolerant to it can cause some major problems, and it has a bad interaction with my rescue inhaler. I’m not even sure how it would be useful as a rescue med given that my vertigo attacks usually last 10-15 seconds and are brought on at random, and it takes about an hour to kick in.

Right now my best hope seems to be the vestibular rehabilitation physical therapy I’ve been prescribed. My intake appointment for that is in about two weeks. I also have a neurologist appointment next week, which will hopefully provide some amount of clarity.