Greetings Stranger!

At least it's not migraine.

But yeah for me its sort of whackamole/process of elimination, is this POTS, am I hungry/thirsty, am i just tired, does caffeine help? Im on a preventative now and I mostly just get like a white noise pain + dizzy-nausea* and im just kind of guessing. Annoying, but I think better than knowing for sure and/bc of feeling a lot worse.

I've never heard of cervical spine issues triggering migraines - it could be that the people who have that correlation have both migraines and cervicogenic headaches. That's possible.

Migraine is also a general neurological disorder, not just a headache disorder, which is why you can have a silent migraine - a migraine with no pain, but other neurological symptoms including temporary blindness, nausea, increased sound/light sensitivity, etc. Cervicogenic headaches are solely a headache disorder because they're referred pain into the head alone (though sometimes the pain itself can be bad enough to cause sensitivity or nausea, which is sure fun to figure out!).

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here's the thing. A lot of people like to assume that only "idiots" or whatever are susceptible to this. But when you are experiencing sustained hardship, it can be much easier to see meaning where there is none, believe things you wouldn't ordinarily, etc. Many MANY people, possible MOST people, are a simultaneous heartbreak and job loss away from being at risk for this kind of thinking.

It is very survivable and usually pretty temporary IF you are not heavily influenced in the wrong way while you are at your most vulnerable.

Meanwhile, AI LLMs are being marketed as person-like, trained to behave in a person-like way, the interface and design is such that we interact with it very much like it is a person.. when it is NOT anything like a person at all. But it touches our brain in a way that is similar to how we experience interacting with a person, because we are hyper-social creatures, and these programs are designed to feel person-like.

These things are not our friends, they are not our therapists, they are, despite their name, not intelligent or thoughtful in any way, they are data-set probability generators. And they are good at generating words with a statistical probability of being interpreted as believable and trustworthy and smart.

We need to not talk about them like they have anything in common with people, and there should be legislation against marketing them as people, with people names and people voices and descriptions like "friend" or whatever.

my girlfriend is also my man is also "my partner" if i'm in a professional setting. yesterday we went to a ren faire and a man mimed at me - you're together? and at my delighted nod, his baffled, you're gay? made me laugh. a woman with rainbow hair said i love the two of you together. you're both so beautiful it's absurd.

my dad introduced my partner as my "..... friend. or whatever" the other day. he knows we're dating. in the same way, i was never able to get my sister's husband to stop saying that's gay like it's 2008. he still uses the word fa***t, and my sister's defense of him has always been well, he's just kidding.

my lover and i dance to old music in a tiny kitchen. we judge new music together and take food critique very seriously. we watch love is blind before we fall asleep and agree that if they had a queer season, it would be bloody but also make for excellent tv. of fucking course queer people would meet someone for 2 weeks and agree to get married. what are you saying.

at a bar with friends, a man puts his hand on my wrist. got a boyfriend? and yes, i do have a boyfriend, she's amazing. i am texting her while i wander around a gas station named after geese. i am visiting a swing state for a wedding. in the candy aisle i overhear: she's actually like a lesbian it's disgusting. two teenage girls with packaged sandwiches in their hands, giggling. no literally, like. i'm not, like. okay with her being there while we're all, like, naked and changing.

my girlfriend and i tailgate, drink gin and cider out of cups. from the frat group beside us, a man corrects himself with one of his friends: bro, i mean, nonbinary entity, and it makes everyone around him laugh, myself included. he razzes his friend the same way i would have killed for at 19 years old - like nothing happened, he continues: you apply sunscreen like an alien. he does a little sassy (and fairly accurate) dance interpretation of the motion. his friend is laughing so hard they're crying.

i am lucky, i live in a safe neighborhood in a safe state. my masc passenger princess comes up from DC. i drive her for an hour to where all the leaves are a violent arrangement of color. we walk along the trails, letting autumn into our blood. in this part of the state, there's a lot of pickup trucks and trump signs. when we chastely kiss before getting into the car, i accidentally make eye contact with a woman holding her child's wrist. she looks disgusted. she looks fucking pissed.

two hours later my girl and i are eating dinner on a patio, soaking in the last warmth of new england sun before the chill of winter sets in. we are giggling and trying to talk through plastic vampire teeth. at another table, i see a young woman sit up straighter. i watch her watch us. she blushes and takes her partner's hand from across the table. shy, like the taste of evening has just become something deeper.

The most amazing part is how the water droplet magnifies the Hornet's mouth parts, so you get to see them up-close!!!! It was FASCINATING to witness!

Here's some of my favorite still shots from that video:

website

Ea Nasir... is that you? Have you come back to save us all?

🍴 Food for fanfic writers around anxiety and depression (coming from someone who had both 🥳 -- smileys everywhere or I'll lose myself):

Depression can damage the brain for real. Like. It can break neurons connections making you lose words, memories (short-term or long term ones *) and so on 🙂‍↕️ Let's go amnesia troooopes

Even after recovering from depression, you can have long lasting effects. 🫡

Depression is a bit like cancer: it can go away and/or relapse. 🤓

Brains stay maleable until you are 32 years old. Afterwards, making new connections is harder because your frontal lobe is fully developped -- not impossible, but harder. It's pretty new discovery, so we don't know how / how much it affects mental illnesses 🤷‍♀️

Anxiety drains your magnesium. You better get good supplements for it. 🤘

The lack of magnesium provokes tighening muscles, trouble sleeping and so on 🫦

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Like, yeah she does a lot and shows a lot of support for the LGBT+ community but she isn’t just an ally, she’s part of that community.

This triggered a religious uprising in which the old elite were butchered and their computers smashed and all electronic intelligence banned forever.

The result of this was the development of techniques to maximize human power. The Bene Gesserit's body control and observational skills. The massive intellect of Mentats - human computers. The unstoppable combat skills of Swordmasters. Guild Navigators, who get high on magical drugs, see the future and guide space ships safeely at FTL speeds.

Of course, this all takes resources, so this just created new elite nobles with the money to employ/become these kinds of people, who oppressd the masses and treated them as garbage.

Goodbye to the old boss, hello to the new.

It is pretty much the essence of Dune that all revolutions simply lead to a new set of bosses, as bad or worse than the previous ones.