This morning was a strange morning, made up of two negatives and a positive.
I set off early to get ahead of the rush at the local Medical Centre, intent on getting a script for a nasal spray version of my migraine abortive. After waiting forty minutes to see the doctor, she kindly wrote me a script. She then asked me what other measures I was taking, and I mentioned mindfulness, Tai Chi, meditation and the like. She was very encouraging and agreed that lifestyle changes are an important component to healing.
So, what’s so weird? I suppose it’s the combination of all that happened in the space of a single hour.
On the upside: The doctor’s eyes lit up when I mentioned meditation and she gave me the name of a Buddhist monk – ajahn brahm – who specializes in mindfulness (especially for young people). He was an Englishman, born in London in 1951, and holds a degree in theoretical physics from Cambridge University. In later life he ended up in Western Australia teaching others how to meditate. The website of the Buddhist society that he belongs to is full of a variety of practices, sprinkled in various locations. The best way to find them is to have a wander through their pages (fair warning though, the videos and audios seem to be lengthy, lasting anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes each – I’ve only listened to half of one so far):
Buddhist Society of Western Australia • Perth WA (bswa.org)
On the downside: After seeing the doctor, I went out to the pharmacist, only to be told that the nasal spray the doctor prescribed was discontinued in Australia – last week. I can’t find anything on the web that tells me why, only that I have to swap my script out for a fast-melt-wafer instead. Ugh. This medication treadmill is so frustrating! In Australia we have a national shortage of hormone treatments, and now a whole range of drug options has vanished. (Curious if any other countries have the same dilemma, or if it’s just that we’re ‘too small a market to service’ which is often the case.)
Downside two: While I was waiting to see the doctor, I was scrolling through other blogs on WordPress, which I often do. Several posts were lamenting the fact that WordPress has agreed to sell access to the material on the blogs that it hosts to AI ‘trainers’ (i.e. ‘crawlers’ or ‘scrapers’). That means all the material that you and I spent our energy on could be gobbled up and regurgitated willy-nilly by AI bots. Now, I’ve been very open about the fact that I experiment with AI art in an effort to explain how migraines feel, and to create images for my blog posts. I’m conflicted, but up until now I haven’t felt like the imagery is the result of regurgitation, or theft. But I suppose it is. When I imagine my words becoming someone else’s ‘fodder’, then I can see how distressing it is for all the artists whose work potentially ‘feeds’ the machine. The news about WordPress selling everyone’s blog information is probably old news to many of you, (it was made public a week ago from what I can see), but to me it was a decided shock to read about it this morning.
Turns out you have to “opt-out” of sharing your data with the AI ‘crawlers’. Here’s a screen shot of where I found the option:
When you click on the ‘Learn more’ button it says “Activating the “Prevent third-party sharing” feature excludes your site’s public content from our network of third-party content and research partners. It also adds known AI bots to the “disallow” list in your site’s robots.txt file in order to stop them from crawling your site, though it is up to AI platforms to honor this request.” Which all sounds a little bit like, ‘no promises, good luck, God bless’ to me.
Anyway, life’s a roller-coaster… enjoy the ride I guess, Linda.
PS. If you want to read more about the AI training deals struck up, here’s two links that explain it:
Tumblr and WordPress posts will reportedly be used for OpenAI and Midjourney training (engadget.com)
Tumblr and WordPress Are Selling Your Data to AI Companies | Lifehacker
The Mindful Migraine 
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