FAQ
i get so many emails with the same questions that i thought it was high time i wrote me an FAQ. if you got anything else you want added here, or you wanna ask me something weird, i'm happy to entertain you at lepht art trioptimum dawt com. let the FAQ begin.
Where can I get neodymium nodes for implantation?
hard question. try:
- trust-mannheim.de (translate it w/Google if necessary)
- Calm Bodymod, in Finland
- Lucas Zippra, a piercer in France
- Steve Haworth, the inventor of them, who has a clinic in the States (google him)
- eBay, listed under "Steve Haworth magnets".
i can't sell you them, and they're not imported to the UK anymore, so if you're on this pigs' island with me you're gonna have to travel.
Casey Crook emailed with an ideal place to get uncoated magnets, which you'll need to coat yourself with a suitable bioproof agent (i suggest Sugru, but you will need to test it yourself for allergy etc.) these are at KJ Magnetics.
Can I do surgery on myself? On my brain/eyes/(insert other squishy vitals here)?
yes, but i didn't tell you to do it and therefore can't be sued; no, enjoy your meningitis.
What is the point of the nodes?
they're sensory organs for electro-magnetic radiation. it's awesome.
What else are you gonna do to yourself?
currently working on an implanted compass device.
Are you some kind of faggot?
yeah, i'm bisexual and gender-fluid. my current partner, Muad-Dib, is a d00d.
What the hell is wrong with you?
so much that if they took away the diseased parts, you'd be left with a few lumps.
What is the best kind of anaesthesia to use at home?
lidocaine in powder form, and sterile water vials to mix it up with; if not, don't bother, just put a towel between your teeth.
Why did you do this to yourself?
i'd like to say i did it because i follow a grand tradition of self-experimenters in science, or that it was because practical transhumanism is more than a philosophy to me (it's my life), but at least partly, i did it for kicks. i just wanted more senses; still do.
So I herd you liek mudkipz.
i fucking love mudkipz.
Tramadol-related: Can/does/will Tramadol fuck you up? Can I snort Tramadol/Solpadol? Can I take Tramadol and Solpadol (or other drug combinations) together? How do I take this stuff and not throw up? Can I buy Tramadol or other drugs on this site?
it can, it does and it will; see the posts labelled "tramadol fucks you up", which has become the blog's official fucking catchphrase through people constantly asking me about it. all of this shit stemmed from my once upon a time being prescribed a supply of Tramadol, which is a synthetic opiate for moderate pain. some summary:
1. i don't advise anyone to take it, for legal reasons. if you've got some, it's nothing to do with me whether you take it or not and i won't be sued by your parents when you kill yourself by accident. i warned you.
2. i have no fucking clue how much it would take to "fuck you up". it might be one pill, it might be the whole box - it depends on the dose you have, your existing opiate tolerance or lack thereof, your weight, your definition of "fucked-up" etc.
3. don't snort it, you morons. the pills are mostly talc, which will make you sneeze, and it won't absorb any quicker in your nose than it will in your stomach. just swallow the pills like a fucking normal person and stop trying to be a rock star about it.
4. don't take Solpadol with Tramadol. they're the same thing, except Solpadol is organic/natural codeine and Tramadol is its analogue, produced synthetically. you are going to poison your stupid self. i can't speak for anything else, and none of this blog is medical advice - i am NOT a doctor, i don't have anything to do with the medical profession. i just take some drugs.
5. if you don't want to throw up, i suggest a. not taking a dose so high it makes you throw up, you nubcake, or b. using metaclopramide or another pharmacy anti-nausea product.
6. i don't sell drugs here. i have enough interference from the fuzz as it is, thanks. also, if i had a supply enough to sell to you guys, i'd use it myself.
Is there a Wikipedia page for Lepht/SA/biohacking/etc.?
i don't have a Wikipedia articla of my own, and neither does Sapiens Anonym (rightfully so, since i think you have to be both sane and actually noteworthy to get a Wiki article.) there is one for transhumanism, which is actually pretty informative. plz2 improve it, make other articles, etc.
What the fuck is Sugru, what is it for and where can I get some?
Sugru is mouldable, air-setting hard silicone rubber. it's for fixing shit, and i'm thinking about using it as implant coverings. you can get it at the sugru website - go look at their videos and shit, it might be too hard for what you want to use it for and it is a bit fucking pricey but it seems to be good shit.
OMFG YOU USEDED VODKA?! U CANT USE VODKA 4 STERLIZE!
Jesus fucking Christ, can't any of you wankers read where i said that i did that once, in the absence of any other sterilisation?
29 comments:
What is the best kind of anaesthesia to use at home?
if the surgery will take less than 10 minutes and you have nothing else available, i would soak my finger/hand/insert other bodypart here in an ice-water bath until it feels numb, and then try to do as much as possible in the water bath. again, don't try that unless it doesnt take really long and you have nothing else available.
~Ian
aw, crap. i forgot about ice. my bad.
L
Isn't electromagnetic radiation... Light? Photons? I do believe I have at least 2 senses that can register said radiation already, even without implants*: sight and feel
Correct my high school undergrad ass if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the stuff hard drives and electric current generates be electric fields?
Ah, isn't nitpicking fun?
*that I know of. Who knows what the government has already buried in my
body. For all I know, they might be getting a real-time fMRI feed. Why yes, the aluminum foil hat is comfortable, thanks for asking.
Max -
i dunno, bro. i've taken first-year University physics, but that's about it; i was under the impression that EM radiation is the format of electrical and magnetic fields. photons are just photons, as far as i know. i'm pretty sure EM isn't made out of them, but free electrons. again, could be horribly wrong; spent most of Physics drugged up to fuck.
(you can't feel photons, even if you can see them.)
dw, either species of MRI requires large oscillating magnets in close proximity to the subject; you'd know if that was anywhere near you. peace
L
I've got a question regarding airport security. As I understand it, the metal detectors they use at the body screening uses delays in electromagnetic response to indicate the presence of metal - have you got any idea whether an nd60 node would trigger an airport metal detector? I've been lusting after these implants for ages, but I also travel a fair bit, and I don't want to get shut out of the US for adding an extra sense.
(also, hell of cool blog!)
Leptht: you can feel photons indirectly. You can feel the excitation that results from collisions of photons with molecules of your body (brownian motion --> temperature). In other words: sunlight is warm, and you can feel warmth
Also, if the fields created by spinning hard drives and the like were made out of free electrons that traverse our body, that would basically be radioactivity (the beta minus kind, to be precise), and 'electrosmog' would be a lot more dangerous than it is. So whatever these fields are made of, it can't be free electrons or photons. They're not radiation per se, as there are no particle mediators to magnetism. If I understood it correctly (never take that for granted), electric fields are the fields propagated by (even stationary) electrons, magnetic fields are created by moving electric charges/fluctuating electric fields (and vice versa, see induction and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism), and electromagnetic radiation is just plain old light (/x-ray/microwave/ultraviolet/gamma, etc.)
I just hope not all of this is bullshit, otherwise that would be pretty embarassing...
Then, I still think those airport scanners actually /are/ mind reading machines.
How stupid of me to spell 'Lepht' wrong
...also, as you might have guessed from that last comment, google and wikipedia FTW!
J.A:
I don't think they're large enough to trigger airport metal detectors, and I vaguely remember Lepht saying they didn't trigger them, but don't quote me on all of that.
J.A. - naw, they don't set off metal detectors. never trust your own hypothesis, my friend, just the data.
Max - doesn't matter to me what an EM field is made of; i couldn't feel it before, and i can now. hell, son, you can reproduce the effect pretty easily. i don't honestly need to know how the field is structured as long as it produces a reliable current... (please tell me you don't really believe that scanners read minds.)
L
Don't worry, I'm sane when it comes to that. Everyone knows it's in the water ;)
(seriously now, don't worry)
Max - with a family which involves two Reiki Masters, and with every single one of my blood relatives taking the retarded "I don't believe in a God but I believe there's something out there for no fucking reason other than that it makes me feel better" view, plus homoeopathy users, aura photograph buyers and a white witch, you see why i am suspicious of anyone who claims Government conspiracies.
i mean, even the Reiki makes more sense than the idea that a bunch of bumbling politicos are somehow coordinated enough to organise sundry BIG BAD CONSPIRACIES against the people they generally think they're serving.
L
I apologize if what I am asking is singularly stupid, but I just ran across your website and I'm presently at school, so I can't read as deeply as I should. I was wondering if you could point to the posts that detail exactly how and (more importantly) where you implanted the devices, what implant technologies worked better than others, the devices used and how they were body-prepped, etc.
Incidentally, while EM sensing is neat, the internal compass would be awesome. I could actually have a sense of direction. I'm wondering, though, if the EM sensor concept could be adapted to act as ampullae of Lorenzini. Although it's not going to be too useful in the air, oceanic divers could profit greatly from it.
P.S. - Before you think I'm crazy, if you read my (old) blog most of what you're reading is my thoughts before they are translated into "normal". Incidentally, tip of my had to another transgender.
sup, Josephine. firstly, i noticed you like Boogiepop, and you're as gender-fuckedup as i am, both of which make you awesome. second, your question:
the answer is, actually i forget where exactly my posts end up; you can probably find them under the "h+" and "experiment ideas" tags, and i believe the first post i ever made about this stuff was entitled "meathacked".
the internal compass is very much cooler than my other projects, yes. unfortunately it is also much longer in the making. i have no idea about the ampullae of Lorenzini, though - maybe? of course, you could always try it yourself.
and don't worry about me thinking you're mad. that would be intensely, scaldingly hypocritical given my various mental illnesses and my meatspace appearance... that aside, there's nothing wrong with not translating your shit for the benefit of neurotypicals. it's your blog, you do what you want with it.
L
Hypocracy is nine tenths of the law. And I'm in law school.
I've always been enamored with the idea of expanded sensory experience. One of my favorites (as you may have guessed since I put it forward first) is the shark's electroreception. Infrared receptors would also be nice, but obviously well beyond the ability to throw together. Or at least mine - feel free to figure it out and prove me wrong.
I need to look up the dynamics of the ampullae of Lorenzini. If the arrangement can be replicated by simple means, it'd be interesting to see how effective it could be made in open air (or if one could at least get something approaching a shark's electroreception while in salt water).
i do try to avoid the hypocrisy when i notice it, though. it annoys the shit out of me that i contradict myself sometimes.
regarding actual h+ matters: i say go for it. you'd be surprised what you can overcome with overconfidence, blades and simple electronics.
L
EM is indeed made of photons, but that isn't what is important. When a hard drive, motor, etc. gives off an EM field, what it is doing is giving off electrons, and the electrons are giving off photons, which are what you feel. These photons are generally outside of the visible range.
~ian
Ian - it is, huh? shows what i know. i may have had a bit of a kneejerk response to Max up there; i think it was the whole "My senses already do that" thing, when clearly, they don't. what i was trying to say is that sight != localised electrical field perception.
urgh, communications.
L
Since some of the EM wonderings already diffused into the wired article:
It is more likely that the finger-tip magnets works by wiggling, not by induced currents. You can only feel it in your fingertips, because of the nerve density around there (so, it might work someplaces else, but not the elbows...). If it would be induced currents, pieces of plain metal would work just as well.
To EM waves in general: They come in different wavelenghts (as do sound and waterwaves) and not every part of our body can recept certain wavelength as well as the other. So visible light is perfectly recepted by our eyes, IR and other stuff by our skin sounds below 20000 Hz by our ears and I don't know where the boundaries are, but at a certain point our body starts to feel the pressure waves and our ears stop to do so.
So what the magnets are doing is converting the EM waves of frequencies which are far to low to be recepted by our eyes and skin to wiggling-motions of same or similar frequency which can be felt by the pressure-recepting nerves of our (or more accurately your) fingertips.
M
I notice that there was a little blurb on conspiracy theories, so here's an example of when paranoid conspiracy theories go crazy...
~Ian
so god saw it fit for me to have rather webbed fingers. webbed enough to pierce and keep earrings inbetween my fingers.
so, in the interest of advancing magnetic implantation ima gonna try and add web implants.
i am slightly doubtful that the nerves will pick them up. but i plan on trying.
so my question is if i could sugru on of these and achieve the same effect sans placement.
Nemo - no, and no. unless the webbing has as many nerve endings as your fingertips, and i doubt that. sorry.
also spheres aren't suitable - you want flat-sided circular discs. good luck sib.
L
In your presentation at 27c3 you mention not having enough funds. If you set up a Paypal account (or similar) and linked to it from the blog, I for one would gladly donate to support your work.
-Anders, Sweden
btw, I was just reading through the comments here again (for some odd reason), and came against this thing that needed nitpicking:
Correct my high school undergrad ass if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the stuff hard drives and electric current generates be electric fields?
bzzt, wrong. current flowing through a wire generates a magnetic field (direction indicated by the right hand rule). in fact, any moving electric field will generate a magnetic field (and vice-versa). as for hard drives, they have magnets in them, as well as current-carrying wires, which is what you feel when you turn them on.
~Ian
RE your southpaw plans: GPS chips are getting tiny now, and implanted in all sorts of animals... and it scares the fuck out of me when people say they want to give their kids GPS implants, which there's potential for. That said, I think it'd be neat to combine the electronic compass with one of those smaller-than-match-heads GPS chips and create a 'homing sense', where you define a set of coordinates and the microcontroller does a bit extra work to check how close you are to that point, culminating in a tingly feeling as you get closer to your destination. if you're successful with southpaw, give that a try! maybe someday i'll muster up the balls to try that concept too.
also: I only discovered all this shit last night after someone sent me the links to your presentation in Deutschland. I spent the night poring over your blog. by the sounds of it, you get a lot of shit for doing what you do, with all the implants and whatnot. therefore, I'm glad you're so fucking stubborn :P 'cause what you have done so far is a) brave as fuck (no matter what you say), b) frontier science and c) so goddamn inspiring. keep on truckin', lepht!
Thank you so much for putting this up, I want to do as much research as possible before experimenting with this!
Lepht, first of all, a message of thanks.
For what you're doing in the name of exploration, for pushing the envelope. Selfish motivations or other, I salute you and those that follow.
Have you contemplated neuro-facilitated/interfaced projects? (the main drawback I see here being the enormous risks involved, least of all due to opportunity for elevated levels of headfuck)
CALM Bodymod is located in Stockholm/SWEDEN. Not Finland...
CALM Bodymodification
Hornsgatan 47
11849 STHLM
SWEDEN
info@calmbodymod.com
FWIW, there's now a wikipedia article for biohacking. you're even mentioned on it, L!
~Ian
Hey Lepht, it's been a while since you wrote this FAQ and I was wondering if you would ever update it?
Thanks for sharing an Interesting post. Great job!! You have a nice blog. I will be back a lot Good luck with all you do!
Regards,
neodymium magnet manufacturers sale UK
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[pls no ask about the vodka. debate is always welcome. remember, Tramadol fucks you up]