Petco carries a “sofresh” litter that you can refill. Its unscented and does just fine keeping smells down. If i smell anything then i probably forgot to empty it.

Not particularly low dust but also not any worse than purina or others i’ve used. And its cheap due to refilling. I have a few petcos that i pass weekly regardless so its pretty convenient for me, at least.

If you are feeling like social media may be a negative factor in your life at the moment, then take a break. Intentionally stepping away for a week or more helps me from time to time. There is also nothing wrong eith deciding to skip lemmy/kbin/etc for now and only using a server/platform that you find most helpful. Some people hate mastodon but love firefish. Theyre both pretty much fully federated eith each other and offer microblogging, but the experience is different. Kbin and Lemmy have some key differences, too, which can chsnge how you experience the fedi.

I think, especially with lemmy and mastodon, that the time i spend is positive. I avoid the busy generic communities and spaces and focus on ones specific to interests. But sometimes fedi drama or a bad actor that moderation was slow to handle can make for a bad time. Or even just bad news in the wider world can make the fedi less of an escape.

With mastodon, i picked a server with a heavy presence of people in my career space and social similarities, but also with a decent amount of diversity, and that has meant that the moderation and especially the local feed are more likely to be neutral or positive than negative. Honestly, time spent on mastodon, for me, tends to be almost exclusively uplifting and informative because of that server choice. I value several mutual connections highly. That’s not to say there isn’t negativity or that I am in a box… thats why diversity was important to me. I rarely found twitter to be uplifting and it was only sometimes informative, and i never had mutuals on twitter that were this active and made social media worth it to me.

If you are seeing a lot of stuff you’d rather not, changing up your server could help. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple accounts on different servers, or even following the same people from different accounts. There’s nothing wrong with being on a server that is more aggressively moderated if that gives you a better experience for YOU. You could have an account for casual use which is intentionally less dense on content to avoid doom scrolling, for instance. Federation means that you can use these platforms as isolated or loose forums in addition to or instead of being connected to the wider federverse.

I mostly used reddit for a small handful of communities. It would not have mattered to me if those communities were on reddit or on forum software. i did most of my browsing from mobile, and i almost never used the website unless i was using it as a search engine. That definitely led me to use reddit far less than if it was an ever present tab on my computer.

I find that most people are fairly understanding as long as it doesn’t effect them. Coworkers and friends tend to give the benefit of the doubt and are understanding. Sometimes you have to remind them, but usually that clears things up quickly. Sometimes, those of us with chronic migraine also develop some anxiety about missing things or letting people down, even if people are very understanding.

The gaslighting… most of the time it’s people who don’t know enough about migraine (or don’t care) and start to see patterns as laziness, avoidance, or similar. Miss a few wednesdays in a row? Guess what, your manager might think you’re avoiding that wednesday team meeting… Miss a few tests or a presentation in class? Well, clearly that’s because you weren’t ready and wanted to buy yourself more time… Sometimes they’ve bought into some misinformation that all you have to do is eat some magical salt every day and you’ll be cured. Or they disbelieve the existence of chronic conditions entirely. That’s where a manager will find a way to use some performance metric to get rid of you or a professor will treat you like a drain on their time.

All of this is in the context of the United States (I’m sure many other countries handle this a lot better, as usual). It’s really uncommon for migraine to be well-understood at work or school. Especially if you don’t have a current diagnosis, which is also common since doctors tends to brush it off or require some extreme logging to even consider, or insurance companies will refuse to pay for the testing and MRI scans usually required to have an official diagnosis and meet ADA requirements. Like any non-physical disability or illness, schools and employers tend to continually forget and fall way short of ADA recommendations. Especially with chronic conditions that may have phases of being worse or non-existent for months at a time. “Well, you didn’t have this problem last quarter, so what gives?”

Chronic migraine. People think its just a headache, but that’s really just the most obvious symptom and least complex symptom. Family practice/generalized doctors know too little about it to recognize it. Everyone around you thinks you’re just being dramatic. If they can push through a headache then why cant you push through a migraine?

Migraine is a cycle that lasts days. It has phases: prodrome, aura, acute, postdrome. The acute phase (the headache part) is just one phase. Sometimes the headache isn’t even that bad, or long. Sometimes it lasts multiple days. Its a neurological disorder and, in a lot of ways, basically is like your nervous system short circuiting for a few hours or days. Triggers have a lot to do with severity, but there is also a lot of bad info about triggers too. With chronic migraine, you could avoid all triggers and still have 1-2 migraine events a month, and those events dont care about your calendar.

Because information is so badly shared and everyone (mostly unintentionally) gaslights anyone with migraine into thinking they’re not suffering from a chronic condition, many of us go a long time before discovering useful information or getting diagnosed.

There are a ton of signs during the prodrome phase which, once you know what to look for, can help you avoid (sometimes) the acute phase by taking meds soon enough and focusing on avoiding known triggers. Even standard over-the-counter stuff can short circuit a lot of migraines before the most painful part. But also, some of the prodrome stuff alone can make working or completing tasks difficult. I often start having trouble speaking, get very tired, have difficulty focusing vision. General brain fog. This can be hours or days before an attack.

After the headache phase, the postdrome is often more brain fog, speaking issues, low energy, but also sometimes a euphoric state which can make getting back into your normal schedule really difficult.

I miss family events. I miss friend events. I have to cancel stuff all the time. I worry about scheduling things for fear of being in a headache phase. I’ve been lucky with employers being understanding, esp with the work from home setup and mostly DIY hours, but i absolutely couldn’t work a job with shifts.

I also have that UPS rack mounted, just the cage nut bolts. It doesn’t concern me at all. I have it towards the bottom of the rack since its heavy(ish) but its also not too deep so there isn’t a lot of flex on it.

I’m somewhere between a skeptic and a believer. I’m happy to accept that there may be something to the paranormal. Magic is just science we don’t understand, etc. I also know plenty of people who are dead serious about their experiences, and I’ve also had some. Most I can find a way to explain. Especially when I knew there might be a haunting ahead of time. But there are two instances where I did not have knowledge beforehand, yet the experiences matched up very closely.

The university I went to has a number of hauntings and paranormal stories. I did not learn about these or any details until after I graduated and I was setting up a Monster of the Week RPG for my friends who also went to the university and I was making for source material.

I quickly realized that the man who I often saw hanging out on the balcony of the “old main” building when walking around campus late at night/early morning was, in fact, a known haunting. Same description. Everything. I remember thinking it was weird at the time, especially since the building was being renovated, but it also wasn’t entirely closed off to the public. A classic situation of a ghost you notice, but when you look back they are gone.

There was also a more paranormal haunting in another building. Apparently a student was dumped in a ditch in the early 30s and not found, but then when they built the building in the 60s they found bones and figured it had to be that particular cold case based on some other material found. We would often use that building after football games to watch the halftime show (marching band) and do some post-game wrap up. University football game, so we’d be in that space around 11pm to midnight or later depending on the game length. There was one time a bunch of us were taking our time packing up and chatting and we were down a hallway a bit further away from the majority of people. Everyone else had pretty much left and, even the faculty had locked up thinking no one else was left. Just the always-on emergency/safety lighting. Then it just felt… awful. Unwelcome, not a good place to be, the mental image of “get out”. And we all wordlessly just got up and started heading out. The way you might all as a friend group collectively decide “well, time to bounce”, but without any of the semi-ritualisric awkward conversarion cues or learned signals. Once we were away and took a moment to think about what happened, we all felt very uncomfortable and it felt almost like we were compelled to leave. Learned later that it was similar to other reports of the building.

Gnome Tweaks, dconf UI or cli, or extensions can adjust all of those things, CSD included. I wish it was more baked into the settings, fwiw. One of the first things I do is move the CSD buttons to the macOS location.

I definitely agree the baked-in CSD is annoying at times, but now that Wayland has matured a lot and most apps have adjusted to baked-in CSD along with adding Wayland support, it’s pretty rare to run into problems.

Also… if you’ve only tried gnome recently on Ubuntu, def recommend trying it on debian or another distro that doesn’t drastically change everything about it.

(And of course, all that said, desktop choice is wonderful and no one has to settle for anything, big or small 🙂)

In Gnome’s defense, they also make it really easy to replace or customize the vast majority of things to an almost surprising degree and while their extension SDK is a bit weird with some choices, it’s also fairly friendly to anyone with some JS experience.

I used to not be a fan either, but 44 and 45 have felt pretty good to use with minimal changes. Some of the more recent design guidelines they’ve refined have made a huge difference. I use Dash to Dock, but that’s the only real UX change I use nowadays.

I still dislike the macOS-like launcher menu for apps. But I also don’t care for an application menu or windows 7-style menu so I live with it.

This. To implement most infinite scrolls UI’s you are still doing pagination with an API,just automatically requesting the next page in the list rather than needing to press a “next” button to kick it off (usually). Most apps and sites could implement switching between pagination UI and Infinite Scroll UI as a setting.

One of those things that would not be a ton of effort, but since it does create two different things to show does increase maintenance efforts for the dev. So I get why people tend to go for one or the other and rarely both, but it’d be a huge win for user preference.

I have a 3000+ saved songs list which is my standard “just play some music, give me the kitchen sink” choice. The only way to get Spotify off of a “shuffle-loop” is to turn off shuffle, skip a few songs, then turn shuffle back on.

It will still inevitably go back to the same 50 songs after a while though. I haven’t found a way to prevent this with any setting. I’ve not noticed it on any of my playlists with only a few hundred songs, but I don’t listen to those as long or often as my saved songs.

On mobile you can at least pick a (Spotify generated) genre filter which helps.

I just want Spotify to shuffle like old school iTunes. All the songs on this list… but randomized. A setting like iTunes to favor songs you’ve listened to fewer times would also be neat.

But we’re in the era of algorithms for everything, and apparently even Spotify premium isn’t enough to save you from sponsored and/or targeted manipulation Or their algorithm is just bugged and they don’t care.

I’ve actually noticed this with their AI DJ too. Listen to it long enough, it basically favors the same handful of artists and songs over and over again.