May 2022 archive

Am I going to do this again? I don’t know.

So, not too long ago I had the first of what is supposed to be two nerve ablations to the back of my head to see if this stymies migraine pain. They numbed the back of the left side of my head after liberally applying chlorhexidine to it, which I liked a lot because numbing it with lidocaine (did they also use dexamethasone? I don’t know) has immediate effects on any pain that I may be having. Once that fully took, they inserted probes into the back of my head that I did not even feel that sent pulses to the left side of my occipital nerves over the course of four minutes. Once I was done I was done. The probes were removed, I was bandaged up, and I was good to go. Getting home was… fun, though, especially once the local anesthetic wore off and everything hurt. I was told that the nerve “healing” would hurt a bit, but then it would stop hurting because it would not be able to communicate feelings of pain (or as effectively, anyway), but we’re still in the part of that where it hurts, I feel a whole lot of pressure, my body is trying to make sense of what happened, and I don’t like the feelings that this is producing in the back of my head. Fioricet has not even helped me here.

I have literally had to take 40mg to 60mg of prednisone to make the back of my head feel tolerable.

I’m not sure if I’m going to have the right side of my head done if this is how the left side continues to feel.

We’ll eventually get our hands on a Steam Deck.

Well, the person that I tried to buy Bub a Steam Deck from tried to scam me, but they didn’t get very far in the process. Within minutes of me making the initial purchase from them and sending them a question about shipping, they closed their entire eBay account in response, refused to answer e-mails from me about the status of the item, and have so far refused to answer PayPal’s inquiries about the status of the item or whether or not they are even going to ship it (they’re not). As soon as they made it clear that they were not going to respond to any of the e-mails that were sent to them, I had PayPal place a hold on the transaction money and begin to investigate it on their end. Through eBay, PayPal can see when they closed their entire account in response and how they have refused to answer any inquiries about the item though. I am in the process of being refunded for the item now. So I’ve been searching for another appropriately priced one…

I’m not going to have to pay more than I have to for one of these (and at that, the 512GB one, because let’s face it, Bub has amassed a tidy collection of games over the years), but at the same time, I just want to find one for a decent price. I can finance it on PayPal Credit and then pay off more than the minimum over the course of several months, so there is that. That’s always kind of been my plan going into this to raise my credit score beyond what it is. Having, and raising, a credit score has always been an American problem.

Just in case all of one person wants a follow up.

In case anyone is following what I wrote about in my last post, Tumblr continues to interact with people online under the guise of selling itself as a “fandom-friendly” blogging site (this could be one of the furthest things in the world given that the security of their site is awful, that doxxing happens on their website, that they are aware that the doxxing happens, and they take absolutely no corrective action against it even when it happens to minors). I continue to be glad that Tumblr is one less thing that I have to check or update in the morning, although I think the majority of people that I followed and were friends with on it had probably caught onto the fact that I wasn’t substantially participating on anything that had to do with the site for like… the longest time bar the very, very occasional one-off. I prefer the sites that I use to have more substantial security, for one thing. And it’s becoming a little bit of a joke amongst my friends at this point.

I’m also a lot more comfortable not actively using a site whose data can effortlessly be leaked.

This is absolutely appalling website behavior.

For several days, I have been attempting to let a large blogging website know that I have become aware of exploitation through their site’s back end — namely, that it is possible, and apparently pretty easy for someone with the right amount of knowledge and fortitude to access information that one would at least think they should not be able to access. I have made reports to the blog site in question (okay, it’s Tumblr) about this, going into enough detail about the process as I’ve heard about it to hope that Tumblr would take the security of their site seriously enough to at least get back to me thanking me for letting them know about this and doing something, anything to fix it. As I’m sure a lot of you can probably already tell by the fact that this post is even being written, this is as far from the case as can possibly be. For multiple reasons, I no longer have an account on Tumblr. I did at one point, and I had for a long time, but I decided that for many reasons it was no longer worth the risk or even the time taken each morning to reblog one or two things pertinent to passing interests that I did not and do not talk about with any of the people that I know offline.

Anyway, Tumblr has “responded” to maybe a third of the reports that I have sent them total about more than one situation, sending me copied and pasted responses claiming that they will look into what I have reported to them… but not actually bothering to look into, or do anything about, any of it. At this point we are on day four of this being a known problem, although I’m beginning to wonder how long it’s been a problem for them on the back end of their website’s security (none of this is or will ever be my specialty, though). I think that if Tumblr cares so little about the integrity, safety, and security of their site to begin with that it should no longer be something that I concern myself over or with, and it’s not going to be something that I use in the future or let my children use. I think we would be better off using LiveJournal even though it is currently owned by Russia, because at least it is secure enough for me to feel safe writing about our daily lives in entries made to varying filters pre-programmed into the account that I’ve had there on it for years.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7