I have fibromyalgia, a hell that began almost four years ago. During the first two years, more or less, I read a lot of studies. Still, none got me genuinely excited. That is until a team in Sweden decided to see if the syndrome has an autoimmune origin. The first part of their investigation points to that, and there was subsequent Research from another team that also showed solid evidence of this hypothesis being correct. The second part of the Swede's is still pending.
As far as I know, that's it for Research. A team or even two might be doing work around fibromyalgia, but publishing it will probably take a while. Even after that, assuming the identification of the syndrome's origin and the development of an effective treatment, it will take even more time to adjust the current shitty therapies available that fail miserably at keeping the pain at bay or at least at non-hellish levels.
Every day, the hope of getting access to an effective treatment for fibromyalgia during my lifetime fades away, little by little.
I've been having an issue on i3wm that's been bugging me: the screen blanking doesn't get disabled with software like caffeine or stimulator. Both used to work but suddenly stopped, and I have no idea why.
Fortunately, there's xset to manage the screen blanking and screensaver from the terminal.
I wrote a function for my shell (zsh) to make it more interactive and easier to use. On a window manager, I can attribute keybindings to specific options to toggle the screen blanking and the screensaver or query their statuses, then get a notification about the change or the query.
Image from the KDE website. All rights reserved to the project
Plasma 6.0.0 was released recently and two minor releases, 6.0.1 and 6.0.2 are already out, too. If you're on Arch Linux and you want to try this desktop environment but prefer to have a minimal set of packages, I have a metapackage you can use as is or to build your own. You can get it at Codeberg or Github.
I recently found out I have stage two high blood pressure, the level just below a hypertensive crisis. My blood pressure is between 160 and 165 (systolic) and 100 and 108 (diastolic).
I should've known. For a few months, I felt a few chest pains occasionally, but I attributed them to fibromyalgia and the stress it has brought into my life. I was wrong, so very wrong. If you feel your chest hurts, see a doctor ASAP. Don't be a dumbass like me.
I'm a Football Manager player. You probably already read a blog post I published about this game series. Despite playing the game for years, I haven't done a true journeyman save. I've had saves where I start in the lower division available in a country and take the team to win the Champions League, but not one of these. I attempted to do one a while back but stayed at the first team I managed – task failed successfully.
I was watching Shiza's Twitch stream around an hour ago, and at some point, burnout came up in the conversation. This made me think about what I've been experiencing, and it's eerily similar to burnout, although it's not the same thing, and there's more to it.
You may know this as brain fog. Covid brought this issue to the spotlight. The difficulties concentrating and lack of mental energy are severe issues in chronic pain (and we now know that it also occurs with COVID-19), and they're hard to deal with. But, at least to me, the worst part of brain fog is the cognitive impairment.
Image from the KDE website. All rights reserved to the project
