Depression, Ibuprofen and Online Captions

It's been a slow week at chez steph, due to a three day stint with some serious depression that I'm pretty sure was caused by ibuprofen. Really.

I've been dabbling in depression since the migraines took over, but have thus far been able to avoid being depressed depressed. I can get out of bed in the morning and go for walks and try to make myself better on sad days with endorphins and whatnot and that usually works well enough. But for those three days last week, I just couldn't. Do. Anything. All I could do was cry and cry and zone out on the internet and happy puppy pictures. I was getting really scared that this might be the way I am now, when it suddenly lifted. I'm back to dabbling, and the only thing I can think of that might have triggered it is that I took ibuprofen, two days in a row. So weird.


Wordpress is doing this adorable holiday thing where all of their blogs have snow falling over the text. It's so festive and charming and MAKES ME FEEL LIKE PUKING ON MY SHOES. Please, wordpress, knock it off.

While I'm griping about the internet, I've got a bone to pick with online tv. Reliable captions are few and far between. Hulu is the best of them, but my estimate is that they caption 25%, or less, of their content. They blame it on their providers, and the networks blame... somebody else... I don't know. All I know, is that I've stopped watching a lot of shows that I like because I can not find them with captions. For example, any Syfy show. I've written emails to all the networks requesting that they make their content accessible to everyone. But they don't even respond most of the time. It's rather depressing. Youtube started this intuitive captioning thing for some of their videos, but it's pretty consistently terrible. This Safety Haiku is very similar to my own experience. It comes out nonsensical, totally unhelpful, and rather nauseating.

However, the recently passed Communications and Accessibility Act of 2010 aims to make the internet friendlier to those for whom audio is a problem. Within a year or two, all content previously aired on regular television will be mandated to have captioning available online as well. This still doesn't apply to user generated content, or even web series, since they wouldn't have "aired", but I do have high hopes for the auto-captioning services. Technology changes too fast for them to remain unusable for long.

And one more internet gripe: I am unofficially boycotting any websites with music or audio that starts automatically, whether it's in blogs or ads. I try to keep my volume muted, but I forget, and lately I've been smacked by unwanted noise enough times that I've just started deleting them all from my bookmarks and reader. I don't have the spoons for these assaults.


Link of the Day: Care at home is a civil right - As a disabled person who is reliant on others for daily needs, this article really resonated with me.