faye

MOST recurrent headaches are migraine headaches.

"migraine" does not mean "extremely painful headache." it is a type and source of pain, not a degree of pain. migraines can also include some or all of the following: fatigue, sensitivity to light and sound, visual auras, nausea or vomiting, dizziness, cognitive impairment, etc. these symptoms can be mild or severe and it may actually be difficult to determine if you have them. (who wants a bright light in their eyes during a headache?? i thought that's just how headaches were lmao.)

this is important because while aspirin, NSAIDs like ibuprofren, and other over-the-counter pain meds can effectively alleviate migraine pain, getting diagnosed with migraines allows for a wider range of treatments and preventatives.

it's also important because, in my opinion, your average general practice doctor is not equipped to diagnose you with chronic migraine. don't go to one expecting them to. a neurologist with migraine specialty is a better option, although a regular doctor can still be useful if they listen to you lol.

my life would be miserable and unmanageable without sumatriptan. and i never would have gotten a prescription for sumatriptan if i hadn't gone to my GP and said, "i have migraines and want to try migraine medicine," even though at the time i wasn't 100% sure that was true.

starting around age 12/13, i started getting headaches near-daily. sometimes they hurt really bad and were debilitating, but mostly they were kind of just....the background noise of my life. when you have a constant headache, you kinda adapt.

ibuprofen and tylenol never helped. caffeine and excedrin migraine helped maybe 10-15% of the time. so i took it every single day because that 15% relief was worth it. (until i was hospitalized with a stomach ulcer when i was 19. please don't take aspirin, NSAIDs or tylenol every single day!)

the pain feels like it's all over my head, with slight pressure, like a tight swim cap of pain. some migraines start or are concentrated in one spot, but that's not my experience.

SOME of my migraines make me nauseous, but only if they get really bad and last a long time. i think only one or two migraines in my life have made me vomit. with my current rescue medication, I've gotten a nausea-inducing migraine maybe three or four times in the past 10 years. before that, it was slightly more common, but certainly not every day. again, migraines were mostly background noise: slightly to moderately painful, but i had to keep going to school and working and living my life, you know?

other than that, sometimes i get brain foggy before/during/after a migraine, and sometimes i'm sensitive to light and sound. i don't get every symptom every time with every migraine. mostly, a migraine for me these days is a low-grade amount of pain for about 30-60 minutes until sumatriptan kicks in. there are always neurological things going on with migraines but sometimes they're subtle. and if you experience migraines a lot they can be difficult to notice tbh.

the main trigger of migraines for me and many others is inconsistency. a change of routine. i tend to need to sleep the same amount, eat at the same times, regularly hydrate, consume the same amount of caffeine daily, and not radically change these habits to avoid migraines. other triggers i have: certain kinds of alcohol/too much alcohol, certain scents, and stress. dehydration and hunger are my main triggers.

it's hard to come to terms with the fact that you can't do things that you used to be able to do. I'll be honest, it feels like you're losing control of your life. it can feel very isolating and hopeless. its scary and overwhelming, and it's so hard to deal with.

If I'm in a pain flare and miss my train, I'm not screwed, but now I have to wait until the next one comes - could be ten minutes, could be an hour and a missed appointment. I'm going to be exhausted by the time I get to my destination either way. If I spasm too hard while gripping a box of pasta and it explodes everywhere in the checkout line, I have to hike all the way back to the pasta, come back, wait in line again, and pay for my stuff. It's a Disabled Tax in energy and time we don't have.

like there are theories of ableism, but they're created by disabled people and in every other discipline we just aren't paid attention to. medicine is focused on eradicating us. anthropology focuses on every intersection of modern oppression EXCEPT us, even though ableism/pathologization is a tool of all of them that works near-invisibly.

and as soon as you bring up fat disabled people, or intellectually disabled people, or disabled people of color, people begin to actively promote eugenics with a kind of glee i find deeply disturbing.

one million dead in a two year long pandemic, the majority of them disabled, and even liberals are telling everyone to return to normal and questioning mask mandates.

Homie this the same dude

To convert CD audio into mp3s, you just follow the steps here

To play mp3 files, you download an mp3 player like Winamp here and away you go

On mobile? There are plenty of free mp3 players for your phone available, too, so check them out

If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with their metadata attached, but there could be risks associated (I would worry more about viruses than lawsuits these days, though). Deciding a method for acquiring music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.

1. Find the song on Youtube. YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming service.

This is great if you already listen to music on Youtube, but there might be a better method for going direct from Spotify, though this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to the whole thing to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.

2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free. It’s probably against the YT terms of service, but you’re not going to get sued.

I like y2mate for downloading YT videos (or their audio in mp3s) because it’s a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes it’s laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. For easy file management, download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the “song name”.mp3.

3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album, track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.

iTunes is free and and logical if you have an iPhone, but limited in its capabilities. I do all my management/listening in MusicBee (free for Windows) because of its playlist and management features, as well as having a very customizable interface. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library, or do so manually. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire album’s metadata at once easily with Auto-Tagging. Auto-Tag can fetch the details from the internet and fill in artist, tracks, album artwork, etc and save that information to the mp3 file. You can edit this manually if needed too. Drag and drop the edited songs to any other player you may want to add them to so it can find the files.

4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.

MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and dynamic features. You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on other computers with MusicBee installed. I think the playlist features on MusicBee are better than what is on streaming services. You can create an auto-playlist of your recently-added music so you can easily find the ones that are new and might need need editing, adding to other playlists, etc. I have custom tags for music by LGBT artists, sapphic love songs, and more. I also drag-and-drop these playlists directly into iTunes so I have them on my phone too (you can do this to make a new playlist or just edit/add songs to a current one).

There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming, though they usually have fees for that feature. Because you aren’t streaming the music and rather storing it, you’ll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but memory is cheap these days.

You can buy a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so having to store the songs isn’t much of a downside. Plus, the song will never “leave the service”, you can listen to it offline, etc.