Sapiens Anonym

RIP Tom Dowler

2012-02-08T20:40:00.002Z

i got the news today that my great-grandfather, Tom Dowler, died peacefully this morning at 0920. he was very old and suffering from the advanced stages of dementia, so the family has been expecting this for a while, but i guess you can't ever prepare properly for this kind of shit.

we called him Farver - that was all we could pronounce out of "great-grandfather" as tiny kids. he and my great-grandma Doll-Doll lived very close to where i grew up, just a couple of blocks away, and they were always involved with us, always happy to see us when we came to visit. they'd break out the biscuit jar and let me eat as many ginger nuts as i could cram into my face, and they kept a stock of proper Schweppes lemonade for us. Farver would press a pound coin into our hands as kids, when it was a fuckton of money to us, and grin and tell us to go and spend it all at once. later on as i left for the University he'd give me a tenner when he saw me, even though they don't have very much money to live on. he would always bear hug me and tell me, "Stay lucky, kid. Be good."

i was lucky enough to get a proper goodbye, which was more than i managed when my gran died. lucidity was incredibly rare by last Christmas day, the last time i saw him, and i thought it had been gone completely for quite some time. for the most part, it had. he was still cheerful, and we (me, my ma and my nan) opened his presents with him in the care home and made sure his giant pillowy bed was comfy, just sort of chilling and fetching the occasional drink and talking shit with him. he was the nurses' favourite guy in the whole place. they'd just changed his bedding, given him his meds and made sure he was okay, and we'd come back in to hold his hands and make sure he fell asleep knowing there were people there with him. before he went under he looked straight at me and said, "It's okay, kid, I'm still your Farver." i gave him a hug and he fell asleep.

he was a good person who did some bad things and some really fucking good things. he fought in the Second World War, driving an amphibious tank called a duck, and helped liberate the camp at Flossenbuerg. he was also a good friend of the Kray twins. he never spoke about this - to us, he was just Farver. he loved us.

i can't say he's in a better place, but he's not suffering any longer. recquiescat in pace.

L

first exam

2012-01-16T16:52:00.004Z

well, that was fucking terrible. ran out of time, a quarter or more of the shit i was meant to be answering got left behind. another quarter did get answered but was so messy and rushed that i seriously doubt it will get me any marks. i guess i did alright on the other half, even though it was mostly on Agent UML, which is the one tiny piece of the course i didn't fucking revise or even make notes on - but i'm not good at estimating that kind of thing, so really i have no idea whether i'll even pass or not. there were five or six drawing questions, so i fucked up my time management and wasted almost all the time i had making the fucking drawings, painstakingly, by hand since the University doesn't let computers for exams access anything other than MS Word. i have nowhere near the level of Windows Stockholm Syndrome required to be able to make legible AUML diagrams and finite state automata in Word, never mind the level it would take to want to.

(i know people are trying to be nice when they say this, but no, sib, i will not "pass with flying colours" this time. please don't say that. i'm not low-self-esteeming a perfectly good exam transcript up to shit - this really was a very bad run. they happen. also i am trying not to say stupid shit like OHHHHH WOE WOE IS ME ASHES AND DUST I HAVE RUINED MY LIFE when actually i just got an average mark instead of a very good one.)

unsure of what to do now. that was the first exam, the next one is the day after tomorrow. i didn't sleep last night so i'm wavering a bit; think i'll at least mail Prof. V about what happened before I pass out in my bubble bath. reckon i'll make tomorrow a hardcore revision day. gonna chill out tonight.

i'd type more about some other stuff i was gonna talk about but i'm whacked now and i keep hitting the wrong keys like a little old lady. gnight, all. carpe corporem.

L

crisis averted

2012-01-15T19:35:00.002Z

erm, sorry about that last post there. it did let up after a while and i was able to sleep after trying the whole (Internet videos + hot bath with sleeping aid oils) thing suggested here. i'm pretty sure the cause is just stress since my first exam is tomorrow, the rest all happen in the same week and i am totally unprepared for any of them. i guess at least it gets them all out of the way quickly. after they're done i can start focusing on what to do about housing.

regarding "get to a psychiatrist rite nao!!!", i already have one and his office is shut at 2am no matter how crazy i am. i didn't want to call NHS 24 after the result i got last time, which was the on-duty staff insinuating that i was a crackhead, refusing to believe that i wasn't in treatment for heroin use, and repeatedly telling me they would not give me any morphine or methadone (i had not asked for any kind of drugs). i will let Dr. D know what went down when i see him next on the 24th.

i really appreciate the comments from people trying to help, too. it helps to know people are out there and they're not all judgmental dicks. there's not a whole lot of people i can call or whatnot when this kind of shit happens - my parents are too far away to do anything about it, so all it would do would be scare the crap out of them for no reason, and i didn't wanna wake either them or my one other friend Feoa up at that hour of the morning just to listen to Cracky McGee blabber on about shadows and imaginary singalong time.

gotta go "revise" now, but will be connected for the rest of tonight up through the morning if anyone writes back. carpe corporem

L

worrying

2012-01-15T00:50:00.003Z

i'm a wee bit frightened right now. i'm hearing things that aren't there. sure i see things that aren't real from time to time because of the stupid habits i had when i was a teenager and the permanent, very mild damage i did to myself experimenting like that, but i don't usually hear anything and this is not a flashback, i know what those feel like and they've always been the same with the same cure. these noises are definitely not real: scrapings like granite on granite, whispering voices saying fucked-up shit, B speaking even though she is asleep in her room. she can't be talking because she's been in there for hours and already called J (her long-distance boyfriend) and her parents, these being the three people she speaks to almost every night and the only reasons she'd be on the phone in bed. i don't have auditory disturbance usually (as in it's not some symptom of BPD/EUD or chronic depression) - this is only the second or third time it's happened - but those exceptions are fucking freaking me out. there are also a few unreal things cropping up in my visual field.

they're shadows mostly, humanoid. no discernible features. i keep seeing one (that isn't my reflection) in the black background of this blog. there's also a trail effect, sort of like motion blur on a camera, when i move my head or eyes. unlike flashbacks none of this is alleviated by moving my hand through visual anomalies or plugging my ears until the sounds revert to tinnitus.

there are actual words, too, in the voices. that doesn't ever happen, this is the first time i have ever heard a voice actually speaking to me. usually it's like overhearing talk from far away. the other two times i've heard things, one caused by taking the wrong dose of sleeping pills because i forgot i'd taken the first one, the other by being a fucking moron and drinking more irish cream than i'm allowed by a factor of three or so - those times did involve the occasional song, but not this. for example, last time i thought Muad-Dib had GamerFM radio going on his headset whilst he was playing Heroes of Newerth, because i could hear a song that sounded like it might have been by the Birthday Massacre and B doesn't like that kind of music. there was no song. he didn't even have the actual game music activated. i couldn't make out the verses but the chorus went

everything is black
the queen is black
the dreams are back
and everything is all black

it repeated itself many times, scaring the crap out of me once i realised what it was. i thought it might have been an indicator that my gory, fucked-up nightmares were about to conquer Muad-Dib's superhero-like counteracting effect on them. nothing so far, thank fuck.

i just wish the voice component would give it a fucking rest. they're not schizoid instructions or warnings like someone truly affected by hallucinations might get; they don't give orders or appear consistently as a discrete set of "people" in my head. it's like one conglomerate of misplaced/inappropriately formatted thoughts that uses whatever human "voice" it feels like using in order to communicate its nonsense to me. they're saying things like "Hey" and "Don't think you should" and other vaguely contextual things about what i'm doing at any given point. and laughing every so often. but they're not compelling me to do anything, nor are they saying anything dangerous if i were forced to do what they say.

fuck. i just looked at the monitor on Muad-Dib's old machine that he lets me use, and lying in the background is an image of me lying down on my side, with my eyes open and glazed and my body not breathing or moving. it can't be a reflection because of the angle and because it is wearing makeup and no hat. i have my hat on, it doesn't. do any of you know what to do in this kind of situation? something i can take or do that might help? i realise how insane i am and i sound even worse here but this shit is not right and it's fucking creepy.

L

crap news

2012-01-14T00:33:00.002Z

we got a letter a few days ago that said we're being evicted, again. the new outdoor second-floor beer balcony that the pub's owners (a company called Belhaven) have been wittering on about apparently requires the destruction of my home. B and i have been given two months to get the fuck out before they want to start construction, which means ball-wrecking our flat to make room for a little atrium and stairway where customers will come for about twenty days of the year max, to "enjoy" the "sun" of the City. we haven't even been here for the year we said we'd be.

Muad-Dib and i are gonna try and get a one-bedroom place to live in that we can share, and B is gonna find someplace to live by herself before she moves to Southampton (southwest England) in September. i have no idea where we're gonna live or what it's going to cost, but at least we can pool our resources. i'm still pretty stunned that he's cool with that kind of commitment.

the stupid thing is that this beer balcony is a shitty business decision. there's one right next to where they're gonna put it that gets all the sun in the courtyard, literally two metres away from their one. there's also an existing beer garden for this pub that's well liked, and a pub next door that has a proper roof terrace, twice the size of the balconies and heated with proper shelter for the rain and a 360-degree suntrap all year round. to boot, customers of our pub will have to climb several flights of stairs and go round to the back of the building to reach this balcony, unlike the other balcony. they will not be arsed to do it. it's not gonna make Belhaven any fucking money given the cost it will incur to build the damn thing. B wants to write to them and ask them to postpone construction but i doubt they'll agree.

i can't do fuck all about it yet, although at least we have a plan (exams are first priority right now). just thought i'd let you know that once again my landlords have turned out to be cunts.

L

progress report

2012-01-10T15:01:00.004Z

progress report: see shrink today, ought to have a slightly better dose of meds tomorrow as the starting 35mg is now causing some serious problems 12hrs after last dosage. digestive system reactivates too quickly now, having become adjusted to 35mg, and switches on at about 9am every morning to shout HEY! LISTEN! GET UP YOU LITTLE FUCK! HEY! LISTEN! and retch and stuff. not cool. the sensation is horrible and completely unignorable. it's not even pain, it's like that physical feeling kids get of too much excitement building up in your guts, like when you're four and you realise it's your birthday tomorrow or you're sixteen and somebody hot takes interest in you.

er, or maybe that was just me. i remember that feeling when it had an emotional origin and wasn't quite so fucking obnoxious... goddamn i had such a crush on this one hacker at my school, Majestic, when i was sixteen. i worshipped that dude. i loved everything about that guy for some reason, including his slight sociopathy, and despite the fact that i plainly annoyed him in hindsight. i pretty much thought he was Phate. eventually he took up with a pretty, mute Japanese girl who did not suffer from my charming lack of social skills, inadequate understanding of personal grooming and total inability to dress myself; i learned the meaning of "emo kid phase", sparked a school-wide trend of referring to me as "bitter like a lemon", spent weeks pathetically crying myself to sleep and dyed my hair red for a bit in an effort to be more interesting. good times.

at least i was pretty sure at the times themselves that they were good. good in the sense of doing stupid peer-pressure faux-rebel teenager things, which i was sure i was obligated to do at every opportunity and explore every possible avenue of lest i "miss out" somehow. i was the crappiest teenager ever. secretly, i just wanted to learn to hack stuff, and i was pretty terrible at it, so mostly i just hung around people who were actually good frustrating them with my completely useless educational background in literary analysis and European linguistics. i figured i would fake it till i made it and therefore, for a while, adopted a searingly irritating habit of just mimicking the personal behaviours of anyone who actually did have some skills. i think i thought this would "rub off" and i'd be a real hacker one day. occasionally i'd do something mildly rebellious yet always completely without risk to me like tipsily try oral with a giiiiirl or bob up and down at parties in the woods which i diligently referred to as "raves" or have a tab or a joint, and spend the next day self-congratulating in an actual physical journal about how badass i was. i'm surprised i didn't pass out from sheer narcissism the day i snuck off to London to get my tiny, unobtrusive, incredibly expensive (because the guy realised how naive i was and that i could easily be fleeced in return for secrecy) underage first tattoo.

er. as i was saying, progress report. i'm a little bit drugged up right now. pain levels are fine as long as the medication remains active, which is the problem of course, since as expected the starter dose has become inadequate. that's pretty routine. as for repair work, i've created a studying space in my house after B removed her desk to her room to use as a dressing table. i now have more plug space and a little whiteboard she didn't want which is badass because i always wanted a whiteboard. i need to steal a pen for it though. haven't done hardly any revision for the imminent exams, because i still (to my shame) have the goddamn assignments to do. i am perfectly aware of how ridiculous that is. am communicating with a professor in the Department, Prof. V, who is remarkably sympathetic to all this despite my general tendency to fuck up, about what to do in that regard, what to prioritise etc. maybe doing the assignments will function as revision too. Prof. V says not to panic but he has now gone on holiday, and i'm sort of shitting myself here. my parents will be so disappointed if i have to repeat another year, again.

i'm pretty damn worried about that particular situation, and the variable pain levels don't help at all. Friday night / Saturday morning, when i missed my Friday dose of painkillers and spent the night awake in Stage II withdrawal, was fucking terrible and it's so easy to fall into II or even III with such a small amount of the stuff in my system at any one time. there's no grace period. i am pretty sure that my level of organisation, as it stands, is not sufficient enough for me to be completely safe without the buffer provided by a day's worth of dwindling effect in case of emergency.

speaking of which i've also introduced a couple supplementary organisation methods to my system, attempting to forget less shit, procrastinate less, be late for less things etc. i have a wall calendar (although it is for last year) and i'm drawing up a routine list of tasks that occur every weekday (you know, cleaning the flat on Sunday, taking recycling out on collection days, scrubbing my face on Saturday with the weird green shit that stops you getting spots, that kind of thing.) i'm also logging (but not restricting for now) caloric intake in a little book B brought back for me from Poland, since the meat's metabolism has changed recently and seems to fluctuate like a bitch requiring a lot more control than it did before. i assume that's an aging thing, although it's failed to affect Muad-Dib. he's a year younger than me though, and possesses a much more efficient shell with a ridiculously efficient metabolic rate. also he has things like muscle mass and a Y chromosome. sometimes i wish i could switch meat with him; he gets boobies to look at, i'd get the ability to walk upstairs without hurting my goddamn self.

then again it would be more than i'm capable of to inflict another human being with a substance dependency, two severe psychiatric diseases with management options but no cures and periodic life-fucking-up flareups, chronic pain and the permanent risk of pregnancy every time you fuck. also i'm a selfish ass and i'd be loath to give someone else my implants, tattoos and pretty shiny decorations. plus, i'm kind of used to everyone treating me like a dying orphan and that would not fly were i simply a lazy healthy guy instead of a lazy unhealthy little hacker thing.

god, i type a lot of shit. carpe corporem, all. further report later on (psychiatrist at 6pm) if the psychiatrist has anything of interest to you all to say.

L

the newer system generally is the better

2012-01-09T21:56:00.002Z

as i learned today rather definitively. i'll start by explaining that yeah, out of a stupid antiquated habit i did (up until today) always send my rent in to the landlord by cheque. when i started paying rent aged 18 i didn't have internet banking set up on my account and i thought it was the safest way to give large amounts of money to people who don't accept debit cards, without paying charges or physically going to a bank whose only branch in the City is fucking ten miles from campus. i really ought to have rethought this policy, oh i dunno maybe four fucking years ago when i set the IB up.

so today, the ninth of goddamn January, i get a call from the landlord. "We didn't get your cheque for December; is this one we just received the December rent? What? It's the January rent, like what is due in January and arrives on January the fourth in an envelope marked JANUARY RENT? Three hundred and fifty pounds plix then, you little bastard. Now."

i called up the bank in a fucked-up medication-induced state of sociopathic calm, silently wondering whether i could use the same begging patch as my homeless friend Daz and whether he would teach me the ropes of homelessness for free. the bank, upon being told that i had written and sent a cheque, it had gone out of my account and its recipient said they didn't do that, blinked.

"You really ought not to have used a cheque," said the phone lady. "You should have put the money through over the Internet."

it turns out they don't keep records (at least not that they would give out to ID-verified customers) of where cheques fucking go. they keep records of them going out, and when one is paid in it just says CHEQUE IN :D :D :D without any indication of what cheque or whence. cockheads didn't actually have any idea who had paid in the cheque or to where, and couldn't help other than the nice lady saying it sucked and she'd do something if she could. i couldn't even get pissed off at her because she clearly wasn't able to do fuck all to help, even though she wanted to.

they just kept telling me this was a flaw of the cheque system and i ought to have used something else to pay the landlord. well, fuck, dickheads; why does the system still exist then? if it's really that insecure why don't we just fucking abolish it? and it really is that insecure, apparently. the bank shrugged and wondered idly if the police might be able to help, but i shudder to open a criminal investigation for any reason, never mind before i'd even physically seen the landlord about anything, so i ordered printed statements and a cheque voucher as evidence and excused myself before the Vulcan calm collapsed and i started blubbering like a fucking moron. i call the landlord back up and ask them to search their records for the cheque's number to see if it actually arrived, and tell them that evidence of my having written and guaranteed it is forthcoming. at this point they decide i'll be the one who needs to go to the fuzz and/or Post Office to open any investigations that are necessary, since i won't just do the easiest thing like a reasonable person and pay them twice. they tell me they only have three employees including the two people who own the fucking company and they'll get Angela to have a look in the goddamn filing cabinets. i hang up and start thinking of shit i can maybe sell to raise a secondary rent payment, possibly some viscera, quietly freaking the fuck out.

two hours later i get a call from the landlord again.

Angela found the cheque where it has been since December the fourth when i sent it. it was paid into one of the employees' personal accounts. i don't even know if that was someone stealing it or if they're actually employing someone that dim. they were very sorry for the inconvenience. i sat there for about ten minutes with dried YOU'RE-FUCKED tears on my face looking like a guy who's just been told he has HIV or something because my brain is broken and can't distinguish between a bad yet non-fatal event and the end of the fucking world as it knows it.

and all i could think was, i fucking hate cheques.

L

so i got four emails that were all like HEY YOU OUGHT TO GO SEE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO IT HAS YOU IN IT and i was like YEAH WHATEVER

2012-01-05T23:17:00.002Z

seriously, non-hacker general public, please stop informing me about the existence of that film. i have read the original novels. they were poorly written and not particularly interesting to me. the worst thing is no one person repeats themselves when telling me i ought to go and see it; everyone genuinely means well, and doesn't realise how psychotic my conditioned response to so many repetitions of the same suggestion has become. it's not like the same people tell me over and over again.

why do i hate it that much? because everyone who has never met me or seen this place thinks that i took my personal image from a fictional character in a Swedish pulp crime novel. i was interviewed for a Norwegian newspaper and the guy wanted so badly for this to be true that he asked me three times whether or not i'd wanted to look like Lisbeth Salander before getting into looking fucked up.

to be honest, being compared to the character probably isn't great for me. she's the perfect hacker, assassin, lover and everything else despite her broken bird demeanour. she's played by two very beautiful actresses and from what i can tell the films just emphasise how short and cute and sexy she is. the hero falls in love with her, she saves the day alongside him and proves to the world how badass she is. then she goes off and lives to badass another day. i'm fucked up and insecure and neither an alternative supermodel nor a completely unstoppable genius (not saying i'm stupid, just that i can't hack the Gibson with three keystrokes and an insouciant remark.) it's a recipe for failure.

er, other news after the commercial break.

L

meat free

2011-12-05T05:52:00.002Z

almost. new medication doing incredibly well, should updose this week. glad to see all the support, will jump in on discussions / answer questions later when i've had a bit more sleep. house is now filled with Christmas decorations B had me put up because i'm manlier than she is, twinkly lights etc., and i will be interested to see how fucking spangly it all looks on 60mg of this stuff.

the stuff won't be named, as someone asked, because of the searches it will generate and because of what people will be led here. there are other reasons but i don't need to talk about it. Unq, or anyone else who is privy to my bitchings in the real world, if you want to know the gory details, drop me a text. everyone else, you can email me if you like, because i don't want to deliberately keep things from you all, although it's really not worth the effort for this particular piece of knowledge.

am layering up to slay Mephisto, then tackle a peer-to-peer system assessment with the aid of all my skeleton mages and a tough-ass mercenary i've been dragging around since i hitched my first ride to Lut Gholein on that crappy caravan. wish me luck, fgts.

L

freedom in slavery

2011-11-29T07:21:00.003Z

so it's been about two weeks since the latest medication change. i won't bother you with the details; you all knew how little the Suboxone had been doing recently for my pain control levels, and recently the consultant psychiatrist Dr. D has switched me to another drug, a liquid one that works a lot better. it's been so long since i was actually free of pain that i'd forgotten what it was like. everything's so much freer - movement, thought. i really hope this shit will help me with my repair effort.

hilariously, whilst it is much stronger than tramadol, the new painkiller is of the same family (synthetic opioid analogues, in this case a morphioid). inc: many "can i snort tramadol?" searches just like the good old days.

in terms of that - i will have enough for rent this month, once i also pay back my mum for some of what she loaned me for rent the time before all this shit. i only have this because of you all and your support, and i can't express enough how much i appreciate that support. you are all going to hacker heaven with me.

i'll have some assignments and assessments to do in the next few weeks, so i hope to keep you all updated with them if only so you know what it is i'm trying to do and why... plus they might be interesting. bad news - i will be doing this from various crap boxes belonging to other people (like this one) because my laptop has finally gone tits-up, its mechanical soul flown off to the big scrapyard in the sky (it's where i'm gonna go, when i die, when i die and they lay me to rest i'm gonna go to the place that's the best...) - er, it's fucked, is what i mean. i saved the RAM. my parents are going to see if they can get me a new one (well new to me) for jesusween, which is awesome if a little more than they ought to be spending on their fuckup kid.

i haven't actually been to sleep yet, so idk how coherent this post is actually gonna be. we woke up at 1530 today and decided it was time to try and clock reset once again. if i don't pass out in the pharmacy, in class or at the hospital, i'll let you know how it goes.

lastly, SMS reply-type shout out to Unqualified: i hear and i obey. doing OK, as you can see (you mostly reminded me to update the blog, so consider this entry dedicated to you.) thanks for the checkup; you and anyone else who cares to check in on me are more than welcome to, as it's brilliant for keeping me in touch with what actually matters and not focused on things like stressing over trying to get my washing machine fixed. i love you guys.

L

repair in progress

2011-11-13T02:38:00.002Z

seeing another specialist now, the psychologist i was referred to a while back. we're still in the initial review stage with one more appointment to go before she decides whether or not she'll treat me. with the way it's been so far - "We need to find the emotional source of this depression" - the odds of that look slim. but, if she doesn't see me, i think somebody else will; at any rate even if they don't it will mean more sessions with the actual psychiatrist, who is excellent.

having some trouble with University re. sleeping; missed a few classes, need to drop my extra and catch up with the others. have emailed a professor who ought to be able to help me there.

regarding pain, which has been pretty bad these last few months since the buprenorphine stopped working (Dr. D puts it down to tolerance, which i was told was impossible, but he knows more than i do) - i will be starting a new pain med on Wednesday this week. that's good, because this one will be stronger and not a crappy partial agonist (meaning i can dose up if necessary) and it will also not be filled with poison that makes it impossible to do anything else for pain. i cannot tell you all how glad i will be to get that shit out of my veins. i'll be free for the first time in a very long time. my blood has been converted into a trap for my mind and that trap is about to be dismantled, finally.

downside: five days of withdrawal to make sure it's safe by the time i start the new meds. i am a couple days in but as you all know it starts on the third really. this week is gonna be fun.

will be sure to let you know how everything is going so you can point and laugh etc. other stuff tomorrow depending on how shitty i feel.

L

all hallows eve

2011-10-29T23:55:00.002+01:00

All Hallows' Eve in the Silver City, and everyone under the age of 40 is getting wasted right outside my house. all the males are dressed as zombies; all the females, as "sexy" whatever they felt like. i'm sure this doesn't differ in your cities either. i sat outside to have a joint and watch the drunks, and out of about 60-75 women that went past not one had resisted the pressure to wear torture shoes and a tiny skirt in the freezing cold.

three or four of them noticed me sitting on the wall, looking probably pretty fucked up with my giant clothes and my joint, and i realised they pity me as much as i pity them... weird, huh.

outside of the sexy hordes, things may be getting better, though i'm loath to type a post about happy shiny rainbows before i actually know for sure. i got two conflicting letters yesterday from the Student Loans company, so one of them says i get about half the max loan and the other says max loan. they both have the same date. i need to call up the company yet again but at least it means some money will be coming in sooner or later.

lastly, i need to thank everyone who has sent what they could give towards food and rent. we have enough to pay the rent now, so things are so much more secure for the while than they were before. i can't thank you all enough. i never expected this much support. thank you so, so much.

some people say the PayPal isn't working - let me know if it doesn't. let me know also if you do not want to be listed as a contributor - i'm giving screen or real names as they were given to me, but i'm not listing amounts. i just want to have some page up that shows you were willing to help, as a thankyou.

on that note - even if your only contribution was to keep reading, thankyou too. i'm in no way trying to imply that people who supported me are better than people who didn't or couldn't. once again, the rule is no donating unless you have an income and can spare it.

happy All Hallows', sapes (well, i guess it's All Saints' Day now but whatever, i don't know all the Christian terminology, i just like the time of year). carpe corporem.

L

donor pie

2011-10-19T14:40:00.004+01:00

verified: the PayPal account is working, but it got hit in the face with shrapnel when my overdraft exploded and now it hates my bank account. i can still use it and take money out of it, just can't put any in from my own account. so it's kinda useless for shopping.

today me and Muad-Dib took £10 out of the account and went to the campus bakery. i mention this because it would have been impossible without you all. thankyou so much. we bought some reduced shit to last the next few days and something to eat then and there and i realised how hungry i was; yesterday's tests revealed ketosis in my system, which the doctor yelled at me for until i told her it was poverty rather than anorexia. i wasn't surprised the meat was breaking out the emergency systems after a couple weeks of not really eating anything at all, but i'd been trying to suppress the sensation of hunger itself and i guess it worked until i went in there. everything looked so good, even nasty shit like the mac'n'cheese, and it smelt like greasy, bacony, sugar-topped motherfucking heaven. i had a caramel square, and a plasma physicist mate i see every now and again gave me a steak pie before that because "you look like you need it". he was probably right. i still haven't been sick either, so it will actually give the meat some nutrients this time, albeit not very good ones.

i also found some Ribena in my locker, but it had turned into fermented stuff. not even chooh. all the glucose had been used up and it tasted like arse so i threw it out, feeling like a tool for throwing away technically still edible food. the Sprite was alright, and there were some Haribos in there as well wrapped in tin foil (fuck knows how they got in there, i don't remember). i have used up all my Xanax, though since i was using it to ignore hunger, i might not need it anymore. donor wall and proper FAQ page coming soon.

i called the Student Loans Company yesterday. they said the first employee who spoke to me shouldn't have given a time estimate because that's not allowed, and had been disciplined. they also made me skip lectures tomorrow to try and catch my passport arriving via Special Delivery (probably going to get lost since nobody can find my fucking house.) after patching me through "to my boss" three times they said my account was still being processed at head office, and that it would take about 14 working days to finish processing and then a couple more to actually get the money and letter proving the money exists to me. that is, it won't get here before i have to pay rent for November.

i asked the guy what about the October and November rent, and house bills, and the food it's meant to cover. he made a sorta nuirgh noise. fuck the SLC. thankyou, sapes. i'm not exaggerating when i say i would have bailiffs taking my furniture right now were it not for you. this has only reinforced the lengths i am willing to go to to fetch knowledge for you.

L

having vomited: i'm screwed

2011-10-17T12:24:00.003+01:00

i phoned the bank and the doctor. i can't think straight right now, so forgive typos and nonsense in this one. my balance is pretty much fucked. i can't get hold of the student loans people until after i see the doctor tonight because i've fucking left all my login data for them at home. i fucking hate panhandling but enough of you have offered to give me money that it might be worth my dignity and your spare cash to pull me out of the shit. i hate doing this to people.

i have a semi-broken Paypal at "a (9dot) mason (another dot) 06 (an at sign) aberdeen (0dot) ac (dotO) uk" (EDIT: de-regexed at Max's reminder. i told you i wasn't thinking right. please don't send mail to this address, it's a formal address for bills and things.) - idk if it even works, since i accidentally broke it when my bank overdraft collapsed last March and it said it could no longer be linked to my bank account. if it works without being linked to an account, it should be fine. EDIT 01: making sure it works tonight if i can. will let you know if it doesn't.

i also have a worthless bank account. sort code 40-44-41, account 91356593. holding name Ms A Mason. yeah, look at the meatspace data, it's pointless trying to censor it whilst begging. i can come up with other stuff like IBAN and holding branch address if people need it.

L

slim-fast

2011-10-17T11:31:00.002+01:00

dinner last night was a quarter of this ancient tub of ice cream i found in my drawer of the freezer and i think it's fucked me up. i dunno what the hell else it could be since i haven't eaten anything else in the last 48hrs or so - tried to make a Slim-Fast shake thing i borrowed off my roommate but it smelt so fucking bad i couldn't stomach it even starving - but i can't even keep pills or drink down now and my stomach is killing me. think i'm gonna have to call the doctor.

fuck yeah cause you all come here for bodily fluid news. in other depressing meatspace happenings, today was the last feasible day for the student loans to come through and nothing has. i'm gonna call them again; i fucking hate sitting on hold with their self-interrupting autoresponder system. turns out i also can't apply for the "student hardship fund" until this document comes through, which is why i need to apply in the first place.

...okay, it's getting pretty bad now. i was going to post account data since people offered enough times but i've gotta go get an emergency appt. or something. more later. cc

L

data loss

2011-10-14T17:59:00.003+01:00

hdd totally fucked, power's on the fritz as well now. random outs. fans don't work all the time so i have a desk fan belonging to my roommate sitting behind the machine while i try to answer emails.

i've also lost the HOWTO files i was working on, and the list of people that wanted them, and all the operation documents/photos/videos i had before. fuck.

i'll start the skeletons off again tonight and when i finally do write the docs, i will just post them here and on some filesharing services. sorry if you emailed me and were told you'd be sent a copy - you won't, i had all your addresses in a text file and it's gone.

also i do know how to use PhotoRec etc. but the HDD was too far gone - recovery tools turned up fuck all on initial scan and i didn't have another disk to recover to anyway so i just zerofilled and reinstalled everything (plain reinstall failed and fucked GRUB up). now for the moment it works, but idk how long it will last. i wish i was better at repair work.

in meat news, i missed the last two days of this week but have gotten to more than average classes still. the Xanax isn't really suitable for listening intently to lectures though and one day i ended up just composing replies to people instead of taking notes, like a fucking slacker. well, i am a fucking slacker, but you know.

myself and Muad-Dib are down to £1.40 between us or so, now, apart from the change pot. my roommate uses so much TP that i think said change is gonna have to go on that instead of something a bit more useful (MD thinks she eats it.) Student Loans still haven't paid me or sent any letters, but it could just be slow post - still freaking me out. we're gonna go scouting Marks'n'Spanks for 10p discount food tonight on a tip from Daz, our homeless friend who lives in front of the alleyway to the flat.

here's hoping for 10p belgian truffles and 20p pork roasting joints, motherfuckers. otherwise we're gonna be the ones eating TP.

L

UPDATE: the bastard rich people in their Jimmy Choos and pashminas fucking beat us to it, and by the time we got there they'd already filled literally cartloads of the reduced stuff and were trailing the staff waiting for them to reduce more. we got basically nothing - a sausage roll and some lemonade. assholes. they don't even need all that, they could at least leave some for other people - just a few bits. we saw one lady in gold jewellery and a fur coat cleaning out an entire shelf of reduced meat - so there was literally none left for us - then paying for it with her debit card and saying "See you tomorrow" to the cashier. i hate people with no concept of sharing. we didn't want ALL the food, we just wanted SOME, you fucking dicks. we need to fucking eat.

shit. sorry. i'm just worried.

obstacle

2011-10-10T20:41:00.004+01:00

laptop's hdd is screwed. unmountable from any kind of bootable media nor from the OS itself, which isn't even getting to GRUB before it freezes. looked at it from a miraculously functional Ubuntu 10 live disc that had been loose in Muad-Dib's pocket - fucked. can't mount the encrypted volume that contains the Fedora distrib i've been living off for years, upgrading it again and again, waiting for the memory, or the hdd, or something else i can't fix without money, to break. looks like it has. the touchpad, DVD drive button, volume controls and keyboard all went long ago.

conducting memtest anyway. maybe it's actually a RAM problem somehow plx and i can just scavenge someone else's spare gig for it or see if i have some around here i might have stolen from somewhere... can't really remember what's in the box of gomi. i'm pretty sure it's fucked though. i'm gonna try to reinstall F14 (only disc i have and the DVD writer is on the fucked machine) then download another image and upgrade to... what is it now, 17? 17 beta? i'll lose all my bookmarks (pissed) but the fiction and all that shit is backed up or posted on the blog. if the box is completely boned i'll gut it and see if i can use the hdd as an external, scab the memory for something.

you know what caused this, the loss of my main frankenmachine and my current reliance upon a tiny, dying XP notebook my mum gave me for taking notes in lectures with?

fucking auto kernel updates. all i did was run the auto yum update and click the happy little YOU NEED TO REBOOT ME! icon on the taskbar. fuck.

L

PS. Xanax better than Valium. supply limited, but feeling less dead for the moment. pray to nothing it lasts; sometimes wish i believed in that shit for sheer placebo effect. the Suboxone stopped working completely this week and now i remember why i started taking morphine. working on finding an alternative, outlook piss poor though.

edit: memtest finds no problems. reinstall commencing. cock.

sell your integrity for fun and profit

2011-10-01T02:55:00.002+01:00

several people have contacted me regarding advertising on SA. i have refused them all. i don't care if it would make money, i don't care what i could use that money for. i'd rather work at KFC (which refused my last job application on the grounds of "not adequately qualified for this position").

as i said to the last advertiser, i don't want to associate myself with the kind of untrustworthy information that adverts represent. you could not trust the ads; you'd know they were only there because someone paid SA money. you'd know that i don't believe in the ad copy or use whatever product they're shilling. you'd know i'm not in any way qualified to tell you what you should and shouldn't buy, in this case, subscriptions to a job news site. it would be pointless at best.

at worst, the customers they want to attract would see the company's name and logo on the blog of a self-harming mentally ill drug-addicted fringe-science biohacker, and would form an impression of that company which is not quite the one the executives intended. i explained this, but i don't think anyone listened.

lastly, i fucking hate advertising. i hate the way it tries to manipulate people's use of their resources without their consent or knowledge. i hate the way advertising firms try to get into people's subconscious minds to make them buy, buy, buy. it is degrading and dehumanising. you can evaluate how to use your budget by yourselves.

so, no, there are not going to be and never will be any adverts on SA. not Google ads, not banners, not Lijit ads, not anything. fuck ads.

L

reinitialising

2011-09-27T23:22:00.000+01:00

i got enrolled in University again for fourth year, which started Monday. i was actually pretty proud of myself for getting to the advising appointment and doing the whole registration thing without any fuckups other than being an hour late. it turns out being fucked up is considered a legit excuse for that, somehow. they said they'd make the bureacracy go away since i was "one of their best students", although i think i'm actually just one of their most easily recognised charity case students. i got to the classes then, but that night i took my pills too late and ended up playing RIFT on MD's account until half three. so today i slept through all three classes and so did he. i guess it could be worse.

i also don't have student loans sorted out yet. my mail keeps going MIA after people send it, never arriving at my place because of its unorthodox address - slightly fucking worrying as the loans people have/had my fucking passport. no word on if or how much money will be paid. October rent due date approaching rapidly, kinda shitting bricks here.

head has been a little better. intrusive thoughts have ceased for the time being. plus i actually have people i know in this year, so maybe i can have more than one friend, a housemate and a partner as my meatspace social circle now. doesn't really matter since you guys are better support than any "friend" i ever had irl, to be honest. apart from Feoa, who is beyond good to me, but she needs space and help just like i do - we can't constantly be relying on each other since that would make both of us worse.

i did get some decent Valium from some of my street friends, though, so i should be able to sleep better tonight. only ten of them but they're real this time and this time i'm not gonna pop all of them, get anteretrograde amnesia and spend four hours telling Muad-Dib how x shitty romance book hero i read about when i was thirteen is totally hotter than him.

yeah, i was fucked. i was trying to block out pain from removing an embedded test prototype in my wrist and man, that tissue doesn't like letting go of embedded shit once it gets a hold of it.

gonna go take a bath, go to bed at midnight like an old lady and see if i can sleep through Quiz Night. (0900 lecture tomorrow.) fucking pub. cc.

L

PS. went to wedding of MD's sister Saturday, was recognised by guy i'd never seen before who had found Berlin lecture and shown it to fifty of his repulsed employees. lulz.

pulled from the scrapheap

2011-09-15T00:20:00.005+01:00

i have been trying for a considerably long time and find myself unable to explain what precisely i have been doing since February, when you last saw me. physically, the answer is simple: sleeping; cooperating with medication regimes one after another as they are proposed, adjusted and readjusted; eating convenience food; staring lifelessly at whatever useless shit was in front of me, uselessly trying to pick up my work and my life. i lost myself.

i also spent a considerable portion of the time acquiring the means to build an Exit bag. this device is the quickest, most painless way to terminate one's own life. it induces anoxia in seconds via a maskful of nitrogen. there is no pain, only a deep breath in and a gentle sleep. you can't be revived. i had the components prepared and to be honest, my plan for much of that missing time was to kill myself, as it has been before. this time i was far better informed and equipped. i had all the necessary equipment to give my emptied mind a final, irrevocable state of peace.

i desperately wanted that peace. Suboxone does not give the kind of solace morphine does, and it had long since stopped doing fuck all for either kind of pain in my system. my University work was circling the drain, depression and procrastination hovering over it like vultures ready to finish the job. my financial situation was as dire as always, and this summer i could find no research jobs, not to mention the fact that i was still meant to be working on Thistledown full time. that led to Muad-Dib working 8-6 at a shitty phone unlocking shop, for employers who "borrowed" most of his salary, just to pay my rent and get me food to eat. he is living with me unofficially, but he has another place to go to, and he sacrificed his entire summer and all of its earnings for me. you can imagine this did not help the guilt.

i feel like i should explain that more: i carry a lot of guilt around. you saw what i did to my parents, as carelessly as i do everything else; i might be good at H+ but i am also pretty damn good at fucking people over without thinking. i've done it before, i don't even know i'm doing it half the time. coupled with the worst depressive episode i've ever experienced, i had set a date and my life was tabled to end on the third of July, 2011. from around April i'd been experiencing what they call an "intrusive thought" - it's time it's time it's time, strings and strings of the same little fucking messages everywhere. in dreams and in daydreams, scribbled in doodles on my planner, i'd even notice it spelling itself out in paraeidolic patterns on my ceiling or in the patterns of clouds and leaves. it's time it's time it's time it's time it's time. it would insert itself into the little "subtitles" i see in my mind's eye when people talk to me, into lines of my novel when i tried to reread it. i knew the messages were right, was the worst thing.

i realise i am making myself sound even more insane. my consultant psychiatrist says i am sane, but damaged; potayto, potahto. the third of July came around and my mum called, planning a visit for me to go down to England on my birthday. i realised they would fly her up here tomorrow when someone had to identify my body, or they would make Muad-Dib do it. i put the phone down and cried for hours until he got home. he told me in detail how he thought he would react to my suicide. that made me bawl more. we talked and talked until i promised him i would not do it.

the intrusive thoughts are common in extreme depressive episodes, according to Dr. D. they're almost gone. but i'm trying really hard not to sound like an emo kid while still telling the truth: my mind broke. i had the instrument of a calm quiet death up in my attic, i had my will and cadaver donation there, i had instructions to sell all my things to cover my bank overdraft. my roommate was gone for the summer and would never see my corpse. i convinced myself i was going to a blissful oblivious abyss of nothing where i couldn't hurt or disappoint or betray anyone ever again. i wasn't capable of anything for a fuck of a long time after i realised i couldn't give myself even that.

to boot, mental illnesses bring on physical ones. in one way or another i haven't been well for a very long time. that impacted everything to an irritating degree, but luckily is documented by enough doctors and psychiatrists that the University Registry will be satisfied of what happened.

so, consider me that shell pulled barely living from the cybernetic junkyard, half a torso, no limbs and a lolling bald head. my real name is fitting for that picture, after all. the core of me is alive, but the rest is damaged, and it has taken me so long just to be able to communicate with anyone without lying about how fine i am or just shitting bricks for no reason.

i am on the bench, fixing myself bit by bit with gomi. i'll need help before i am a working person again. but i will get there, and i will keep talking about it for a while as i do; should you not want to read this, as i would expect (recovery stories are not often very exciting save for the author) - check back in a few months. i will heal. it might not be fast. you have likely outstripped me tenfold.

thankyou all for your supportive comments, in the meantime. i saw them but was too fucked up to respond. i hope you understand, but equally, i'll get it if you don't. i will try to answer some emails tomorrow.

carpe corporem.

L

edited for stupid typos.

oh look, it hasn't accomplished anything since we last looked

2011-05-07T15:40:00.002+01:00

yep. the honours project is still coming along incredibly slowly and consuming all my time. plus now i get to want to kill myself again for being such a fuckup. i'm not saying it for attention or advice, either, it's just a half-assed explanation of what the fuck i've been doing with my time.

in the mean time, here's an essay i wrote, the one i promised to upload a while ago. the marks haven't come back to me yet, i doubt they'll be good; the thing's pretty rambly, and it has screwy titling, but it might prove interesting if you or anyone you know wants a quick introduction to grinding as distinct from transhumanism proper.

feedback welcome, but i won't have time to do a second draft. oh, and i censored my RL full name, matriculation number and academic email, on accounta separation of facets.

L

alright for fighting

2011-04-23T17:21:00.004+01:00

okay, so it's Saturday again. what have i been doing this week? answering emails with copypasta, throwing up a lot, coding a new peer matching protocol for my advanced* peer-to-peer system Thistledown because the old one was made of wood, trying and failing to stay up all night to reset my fucked-up sleep cycle (i'm nocturnal. i'm starting to think there isn't anything i can do that will change that, including a fortnight of going to bed at 10pm with hot fucking milk drinks, and the worst thing is my psychiatrist pretty much said the same thing Wednesday.) the all-nighters are also a failed bulwark against the deluges of psychotic images i get when MD isn't here and i'm nearly asleep, and the nightmares i get once i am. worrying about bills. trying to get exempted for council tax. attempting to persuade the student loans people to refinance me next year.

i'll let you know when i do something of value.

mr. searchy man: no. it doesn't matter that you are not the same guy as before. i am just as unavailable as if i were a married Christian hetero with a nice gold ring on my finger, you get me? there is absolutely no difference in the type of commitment we are talking about here. get your arse to plentyoffish.

L

* "It's not broken - it's advaaanced."

your emails

2011-04-16T21:35:00.002+01:00

i can't answer all of those, either. there's way too many from way too long ago. this is what's going down if you've emailed me:

- if you were asking for step-by-step instructions for the experiments i've already done, those are being completed little by little. i have a list of those who have asked for them and will send them out to you when they're done.

- if you were asking common questions and i didn't answer you, it is very likely because those questions were already on the FAQ. i would happily respond to each and every person who asks where to get neodymiums, who i am, whether i'm gay, etc. with the answers or a direction to the FAQ, but i just don't have time any more. there are literally hundreds of you asking the same questions. go to the FAQ by the green link, from my profile, in the left sidebar there.

- if the answer to your question is not there and it pertains to implant hardware or control software, or you have ideas for the Southpaw development effort, go to Biohack.me and ask questions in the relevant thread there, or start a thread with your idea. this is also the place to go if you just wanted an update on the progress of the Southpaw or other experiments.

- if your question is a personal one, ask it here in a relevant post, or email me again with [Non-FAQ] in the subject line.

- if you are attempting to romance me, please don't. i'm sure you're great but i get a lot of this and i love Muad-Dib in permanence. believe me, you all will know if ever this ceases to be the case.

- if you wanted the video or photos of my latest experiments, a link to a reupload will be forthcoming.

the rest i will be dealing with personally. emails which cover any of those things above, i'm just not able to respond to and they will have been deleted. (if i had extra time you will receive a lovely copypasta that tells you pretty much what i've said here.) carpe corporem

L

your comments

2011-04-16T18:32:00.002+01:00

okay, there's so many i can't actually respond to them all. some salient points:

melladh, Thomas, Phryk, Kuro, Crow, everyone else who responded with support: i was kinda expecting you all to be angry. i really appreciate the patience, yeah? i don't want to get rid of any of you. (apart from marriage proposal man, he sounded really fucking serious and i ended up feeling like a total wanker for having to firmly reiterate multiple times that i am not interested.)

i will add a twitter icon to the blog. i've been meaning to do it for fucking ages. thankyou for your two cents. i'll also link to the PayPal, since two or three people have asked, but i fucking hate begging.

Imran: i will email you about this post-haste. if i can afford it i am happy to speak wherever i'm wanted.

"Muad-Dib" is my top search this month. people have emailed again wanting information about him; he doesn't really have any kind of Net presence apart from a disused Facebook and Bebo, so i can't link you anywhere without revealing his real name and all of his friends' to everyone. his family is on those pages, you get the idea. a brief primer then: he is physically very beautiful, with a swimmer's body, thin handsome face, soft golden-brown hair and massive stormy grey-blue eyes; he is smart, though he doesn't get the same grades i do (it's because he hates University courses); he doesn't think either of the previous two statements are true at all; he's one of the best Heroes of Newerth support players and generally an excellent gamer; he has absolutely no self esteem; he is the sole source of humour in my bleak brain most of the time; he is ridiculously strong, physically and otherwise; he is gentle and kind and eternally patient with me and not with most people. Muad-Dib is the one of the two of us who has friends and a social life.

i do not have a Facebook. i never will.

i will make "I get email" posts if you all want them; ordinarily i just throw said mail out, but it could be publicly displayed for entertainment purposes.

Ultra Tempum: "buped" means that my venous system is filled to the brim with buprenorphine, the opiate drug that keeps me sane. i think i made it up. it's not a word you'd be using in your daily life unless you too are a functional addict.

i will upload the essay and re-upload the video of my last Nd insertion to some file stash somewhere tonight. keep you posted once it's all up with download links and the like. peace, all. carpe corporem.

L

prodding the corpse

2011-04-16T03:03:00.004+01:00

hey, i think its eyes have rott - FUCK IT'S STILL ALIVE.

um, hi. you've probably forgotten about my sorry ass by now. have the fans all gone? is that guy who kept asking me to marry him still here?

i owe you all an apology for being away so long. lots of things happened; first there was the move, which was so fucking stressful i kept throwing up, and then trying to catch up with my honours year project, trying to get my application to repeat last semester approved and get repeat tuition fee support for it, trying to catch up with everything else i missed. there was a lot of serious head problems just after the move as well, plus fallout head-wise from the shit i did at Christmas. it still eats at me. then my finances crashed while we were moving, i got a phone call from the bank about how they needed £800 that day, and i had to use up every single penny i and my ma had, anywhere, just to stop them closing down my account. i'm still so broke i can't afford fuck all except rent. Muad-Dib is helping me get food. it's pretty much just potatoes, noodles and those frozen bags of discount meat you get at Farmfoods. i still owe my friend Feoa and Muad-Dib's dad for Berlin, my flatmate B for the massive electricity bill that came in when the boiler broke and my ma for helping me pay the deposit on the new place.

headspace got pretty corrupted this time around, as you can probably guess. i didn't try to end it this time; it makes me feel too guilty, on account of the life partner and family i'd have to leave behind, and the bupe sorta cushions the blow of a lot of those thoughts. i did completely shut down for everything but the Honours project, so i haven't even been answering my phone or checking my email, much less working on the experiments. i thank the gods of sedation that i had this shit in my veins that keeps me from going completely insane when my brain just falters and fails for months on end like that. i think i'd have succeeded at death a while ago if i didn't.

it's time to start again, again.

in my absence two places have been set up to document and plan the experiments: they are Biohack.me and SelfModifier. they were set up by people who read the blog, and i will be establishing myself on them tomorrow. it's going to be the day when i finally check emails, answer messages, make introductory posts, etc. and i promise no matter what kind of progress i do or don't make, every Saturday i will check in here and on those sites.

i tried on various people's advice to set up a Flattr. i'm still trying. my paypal broke when a payment from my bank got refused, and i think that might have broken the flattr as well.

also i had an invitation in January to go speak about H+ in Ireland; i may or may not actually do this, since i don't know if it's too late to accept or about travel funds and whatnot.

in the main, though, sorry. sorry for leaving you all for this long. sorry for not replying to your messages and emails and SMS. sorry for not being better with my finances so i have any money at all to do anything. mostly, sorry for fucking up.

i have an essay i'll post for you tomorrow about underground H+. it's a long-ass bastard (4K) but it's a fairly decent piece, i think, since i wrote it for a University course. it's 0354 now and i ought to go find something to make me sleep. i'm okay, but i'll be better when i get back into talking to people. g'night, sibs. carpe corporem.

L

where the fuck is that ugly little bastard

2011-02-15T20:35:00.002Z

okay, okay. i was moving house. my cunt of a landlord decided that the repair bills required to satisfy regulations for student housing were greater than the profits from the students, and instead of installing functional windows, sold the apartment i live in. he is a money-grubbing coke-snorting underdeveloped shit of a pathetic little man, and i should dearly love to see him floss his ass with razor wire. he has caused us a fuckton of stress, not to mention necessitated my spending over a month disconnected from the Wired, calling agents and companies, viewing a hundred dingy nasty flats occupied by flies and leftover Playboy posters, having to have discussions about who's actually compatible with who before two people who would very much not get on move in together by accident, trying to sort out the ~£400 heating bill caused by the abovementioned cunt making us keep electric heaters on 24-7 when the boiler broke down for two months (he didn't want to pay for repairs to burst pipes), trying not to let my final undergrad project crash and burn, etc.

i'm not dead. i am buped up to the eyeballs, allowing me a modicum of clarity to understand and accept the situation. we have now found a new apartment where i will stay with one housemate until i graduate, upon which i will get my own place. all of this is still being funded by undergraduate loans and grants.

Southpaw news in a little while, sapes. i've got 216 mails to reply to. cc

L

PS i'm not single, handful of Googlers. i spent Valentine's Day with my Muad-Dib, who does not give a shit about gender or orientation, we got fried chicken and had a picnic. i have been with him for close to two years, i love him irrevocably, i'm not interested. you also have got to stop referring to me as a "lady" when i am genderless.

new year's resolutions

2011-01-06T14:04:00.002Z

i. never to read threads about myself on other websites
ii. to talk more with my family
iii. to try and set up some sort of Southpaw development space rather than keeping it here, since a blog isn't ideal anymore for the volume of people coming in

any ideas on the latter are welcome.

L

google before you post

2011-01-03T02:34:00.003Z

i am seeing lots of reactions, mostly on io9 where they reprinted the article about me on Wired, that have misconceptions. i would very much like it if the uneducated masses who like to call me an idiot would disavail themselves of the following precepts:

1. that i cost the NHS money without contributing to it.
no, i pay taxes just like you do, and fund the NHS just like you. some of my experiments have led to hospital, one to an overnight stay; i've never been in ICU, and the service is meant to help all people, not just people with tragic accident-related injuries.

2. that i sacrificed all or some of my sense of touch. i did not. next.

3. that you are just as much a "cyborg" as i am because you use an iPhone and wear glasses. fuck off if you are going to tell me that what i do is pointless, and i do not want to debate the definition of 'cyborg' with any normal.

4. that i don't do this voluntarily, and it's some sort of compulsion; also that because you can buy topical anaesthetic creams for stings and burns, that must mean those would work fine for surgery and would definitely go deep enough, so i must just "like the pain". do your goddamn research.

L

correction

2011-01-03T01:12:00.004Z

i am an idiot and an asshole.

my parents informed me with less than enough harshness that actually they don't mean their comments on TV literally. it turns out that in actuality it is i who doesn't think things through, so not only did i misunderstand what they meant and vent about it without asking for a clarification of whether i was actually correct, i insulted and upset them both in the process. i am lucky my ma still fucking speaks to me.

i removed the post not at my parents' request but at my own embarrassment. should you have said anything important in the comments please do repost here, and accept my apology for publicly venting frustration about people before checking to see if they really were deserving of it: they aren't, and i was totally in the wrong.

other news:

i will be writing up a full account of the 27c3 talk and answering your mails and comments as soon as i can, and will let you know if i find the stream anywhere important. there are several articles about it, or me, which i'll also link to.

someone got into my Blogger account earlier today and i am installing analytics to allow better tracking of who did it if it happens again. i'm not a proper hacker, so i can't stop you, but you fucked me over for a good few hours and made me cry because i thought you had locked me out permanently. good going, asshole, you upset a stressed civilian.

in short: my mother is a good person to whom i owe more than i ought to, including a lot of my finances for Berlin; i know nothing like as much as i like to think i do about normal people and their reactions to simple entertainment; i am not a good person myself; and you shall have your 27c3 article later.

carpe corporem

L

winter feast

2010-12-26T00:04:00.002Z

a rare moment of fightless calm in my ma's house finds me sitting in front of a real log fire, working on my slides for the congress, eating bulk-buy pick'n'mix strawberry sweets. deciding what colour eyes to wear tomorrow out of a beautiful new palette and feeding leftover beef to the never-sad dog while it tries to steal my share of the meat, heat and liqueur. fuck all this Jesus and Eid and Kwanzaa and Pagan Solstice crap. i celebrate in winter what my farthest ancestors, all of them, did: there are people i care about, reachable and not, and most of us are still alive to see the words when i say them.

merry winter feast, sapes and friends. i toast your continued existence.

L

email bomb

2010-12-22T23:05:00.001Z

okay, something has gone seriously wrong with my gmail account. all those mails? they were everything i'd deleted since three years ago. missing from the inbox was everything from this fucking year.

if you've emailed me, please email me again - it's all gone.

L

return of the wanderer

2010-12-22T21:05:00.002Z

greets, all. i apologise again for my absence; i have been juggling various awful arrangements, fun with Christmas in a twisted definition of the word 'fun', a brand-new psychiatric diagnosis (looks like i have borderline personality disorder rather than autism), my decade-divorced parents getting back together and the fact that i have a hell of a lot less money than i thought i did to get to the 27c3 with. ugh. also coldsores, withdrawal, repeat scrip woes with gum-chewing receptionists, trying to buy presents for people with zero budget and repeating the year because i spent six weeks in a state of mind wherein it was an achievement not to try and kill myself every day.

regardless, i am alive. just.

Berlin is hopefully still on, pending the airports actually being open. to be honest i don't know what the fuck i'll do if they're not; if anyone knows a way to get to Berlin from England short-notice (i.e. within a night, no cross-continental bus rides) do tell. i still need to write the slides, to my embarrassment, and they're now crowing for a video of me while i'm scrabbling for the money. i'm pretty fucking stressed.

i shit you not there are 4459 unread emails in my goddamn inbox, none of which are spam, and this is just my personal mail. i don't dare look at my academic address. i will reply to your mails and comments, but it will take me a while. i apologise to anyone who has been waiting a while, although really i don't think i'm important enough to anyone that that's necessary. i have not been ignoring any of you on purpose, i promise.

i'm writing slides tonight, as well as looking at flights. the topic is incredibly general, so is there anything you people particularly want to see?

L

lepht vs. world

2010-11-19T20:25:00.002Z

my fantastic week of attempting to wrestle my life under control was topped off, like a layer of fetid cream atop a trifle of failures and overdraft, by waking up at 4pm today to find the house boiler had eroded into total uselessness. oh, hello, spongebath! i missed you.

looks like i'll be scrubbing my white ass with a washcloth for about a week. sometimes i think i pissed off some god by being born.

L

HOLY SHIT YOU GUIZE

2010-11-13T17:03:00.002Z

i'm going to be giving a lecture at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress! the topic is "cybernetics for the Masses", of course. i originally only applied for a 5min lightning talk slot, but the coordinator who emailed back with the acceptance offered me thirty minutes to speak properly, since it sounds interesting (apparently.)

i am actually fucking shaking. i can't believe i'm gonna get to speak properly about all this, in front of an actual audience of real hackers. i've gotta get slides and stuff together, and find a logo and a photo of myself from somewhere... man, this is going to be fucking awesome.

the only problem is, of course, that after this you will all know what i look like, what my biological gender is, and who i am in meatspace every day. i'm a little afraid this will compromise my credibility as a biohacker. of course, i am also flat shit broke, and i honestly have no idea where the funding for this trip is gonna come from. i think it might be family-begging time.

holy shit, though. i never expected this would happen.

the unreliable narrator

2010-10-29T17:25:00.003+01:00

i will be taking an extended leave of absence from... well, life in general while term is active. i realise a few of you check this site routinely, and i apologise for its lack of life whilst i am pursuing other goals; i don't want to make promises i can't keep, and so i can't promise development of my H+ projects will continue (it usually doesn't) whilst i have continuous assessments, exams, mid-term tests and the like to pass. i don't get an opportunity to resit anything this year, and it's my final year of University, so unfortunately everything else has to take a back seat.

i am genuinely sorry for the lack of effort recently on my part. as some of you will know (and doubtless most will find it glaringly obvious), i suffer from intermittent, badly-controlled depression. a bout of it has hit me pretty hard just now despite the buprenorphine, and mostly i feel incredibly guilty about not continuing something which people have taken an interest in, but i won't get any second chances this year and i have to prioritise the first chances as a result.

i am sorry. i know this will piss people off. i will update when i have anything of value to say.

L

shopping list

2010-10-18T21:24:00.002+01:00

so here's the list of components we're gonna need, so far. there might be more; if (as expected) i've forgotten something, let me know in the comments and i'll add it to this post via the handy unmistake button.

miniature Philips compass module
MSP microcontroller
transmitter and receiver coils
+ any required control circuitry
rechargeable lith cell
various wires
Sugru, lots
neuroelectrodes, 8 or 16 depending on price
solder
surgical supplies as usual (dressings, suture kit, etc.)
anaesthetic (lidocaine + sterile vials), needles & syringes

once this is complete, i can start deciding what i'm gonna build/test first and we can lay out a prototype diagram. whee.

L

we return to your regularly scheduled programming

2010-10-10T22:52:00.002+01:00

with what could be considered success, meatwise: i am stable on the boxone, and not as fucked-up 24/7 as some people's pessimism had projected. it took me longer than i thought to acclimatise to it - i hadn't counted on how hard it would hit me after the withdrawal sucked away my tolerance, so it did fuck me up a bit for the first week, and then i had the fucking luck to get ill again. hence my extended absence from SA and indeed life in general. i'm now back, although i ought to warn you all that since my last undergraduate semester just started, i won't be as active in H+ as i am during the summers when i don't have as much to do.

i guess the first thing to do now is figure out a prototypical diagram and a list of components, which i can then start acquiring piecemeal as money comes in and goes out. i will be working on the diagram/list this week, i think.

the bad news is, of course, that since i'm still stubbornly alive, you don't get any of my stuff yet.

L

fuck this shit

2010-09-27T17:04:00.003+01:00

sibs, i already typed a long post about the painful withdrawal i'm currently in and why, and it will have to fucking wait. Blogger, the shitty engine that it is, is fucking me over and in the state i am in i have bitten my arm bleeding out of frustration.

i will not be in the Wired for the next couple of days, since my access is intermittent and my time entirely consumed in trying not to kill myself. a cure is forthcoming. i will explain more when i'm more capable.

L

edit: post is below. i am seriously about to punch a bitch.

we are experiencing meatspace difficulties

2010-09-27T16:27:00.003+01:00

service will resume shortly, once your host has completed its four-day stint of disgustingly acute withdrawal. i feel like death. the whole meat is shaking, not just my hands this time; i shiver constantly, i can't type right, i sweat like a pig even in a cool shower. it feels like my bones are collapsing in on themselves, muscles twisting in little coils. the next doctor who tells me this is no worse than a bad cooold is gonna get a junkieslap upside the head.

i suppose i oughtn't to be such a cunt about it, given that the withdrawal period is preparatory for my newest poison: a several-month course of Suboxone, better known as buprenorphine (bupe for you Yanks.) i finally got to see an addiction-specialising psychiatrist at the Integrated Drug Service, better known as the junk doc at the heroin clinic. surrounded by heroin-aged people, haggard and weary, i must have looked like the healthiest fucker in the room; the DHC i've been surviving on for weeks, while a child's drug compared to morphine, has its benefits. that has to be the first time in my life i've ever come close to looking like the normal one.

that said, the other junkheads then proceeded to batter me with questions and advice, most of which came in the form of "Fit's tha' on yer fais?!" and "Ah tell yehs, dinnae get inta this." why you would advise me thus, when i'm sitting right the fuck next to you in the clinic is beyond me, save for perhaps misguided parental instinct (i'm 22, most of them were about fourty.)

when i finally saw the dude, he was... remarkably understanding. did i want to give up? no, i said. that was fine by him, but in that case, why was i there? i wanted a stable, more cost-effective regimen to keep me fucking sane, i said.

he agreed. i stammered and stuttered like Professor Dawkins trying to be polite to an Ayatollah before finally saying, "You're gonna... give me... drugs." "Yes," he said. hence my current predicament and blessing - i have been scheduled for a maintenance course of Suboxone, which is medical jargon meaning they're going to give me junk and hope that one day i will get a frontal lobotomy and decide that i'm going to be straight-edge. they hauled me in a couple days later for blood and urine tests to determine a. whether my system is as fucked as probability says it will be and b. what level of trash DHC there was in my kidneys.

herein lieth the rub. Suboxone, as you'll see in the pedia, is one of the world's most powerful opiate agonists. great, you'd think, hail Morpheus. but its strength is its curse, so to speak; it's so good at activating opioid receptors that if there is anything else in your system at the time, the boxone will punt that off all the receptors and hog them all, resulting in instant, excruciating, lengthy withdrawal from the original substance. i can't imagine what withdrawal worse than what i'm putting myself through right now would be like, and i don't want to know. hence four days of turning myself into a shivering, vomiting, toilet-running mess.

i suppose in hindsight it might be quite amusing. the first day of lectures was today and i have run out of two of them to avoid shitting myself (not very gentlemanly), inadvertently made a Coke volcano by putting my rehydration salts into a bottle of it, smoked about six packs, and taken thirty milligrams of Valium, which ought to be enough to chemically restrain a patient in hospital. i also threw up once in a coffee shop and once into a dustbin.

now if you'll excuse me, i need to go smash my head into a door a couple hundred times. fuck this shit.

L

dear searcher

2010-09-27T16:22:00.001+01:00

no you cannot inject yourself with cobra venom to enhance your fucking reflexes!

this, folks, is why Darwin was correct.

L

fightan good

2010-09-14T12:57:00.003+01:00

(title stolen from the SCP Foundation's guidelines of things they don't want any more of, which is appropriately enough also what i don't want any more of.)

this, gentlehumans, is a rant. it is not directed at anyone in particular; rather, this thing that pisses me off is a whole fucked-up paradigm that colours all of our thinking and seems to come from society itself. that thing is fightan good.

it seems like every time you go looking for information or discussion on a particular technology, some fucker is looking to use it to fight good. usually, i expect this as a matter of course: TV and cinema, for one, seem to be saturated with the idea of combat, gaming even more so. everything's about fighting. every protagonist in anything i play has to fight something. i wish this weren't the case, because it bleeds over into science; nice tech, now how will we weaponise that? transhumanism suffers from it every bit as much as biotech and physics do. everyone wants embedded weapons, or enhanced reflexes, or super-speed, all for fucking fightan good. cyborgs as portrayed in common culture are almost all soldiers or mercenaries or bounty hunters. you can't get away from it.

this annoys me to no end. technology is so beautiful, knowledge even more so - and hurting other humans is not its intended use, nor is merely defending oneself from other equally violent motherfuckers who can't think of any other way to enhance the human body. what about your brains, people? what about longevity, or quality of life for the elderly? what about improving our capabilities to learn, to enjoy, to experience?

i'm not saying the species doesn't need defence capabilities: i hope one day it won't, but right now that's not the case. i'm just very sick of seeing people prioritise harming others over anything and everything. that's not what transhumanism is about. i won't help anyone weaponise themselves no matter how many times you ask me.

omnis moria, especially me, and i want to leave this planet a tiny bit better than i found it. you can't do that by making the world into a game of System Shock.

L

i wrote you a story but i ate it

2010-09-06T22:08:00.001+01:00

interesting fact: the protagonist, like my dog, is short, chubby and called Frankie.

frankie
Lepht Anonym 06.09.10
-----------------------

Frankie sits outside, for once, smoking her fifth cigarette. She didn't mind the dolls, she thinks bitterly, not as much. Oh, she knew about them - she knew, and she burned them all, the bastard things, the last time. He had three. What the fuck did he need three of them for? She doesn't want to answer that. They were already bad enough: thinner, smaller, able to be picked up and put down wherever he wanted them, not like her stocky middle-aged ass. More beautiful, with their perfect faces. More obedient, with their AI personalities tuned into geometric stereotypes - the blonde was the slut, the brunette was the librarian and the redhead was the domme vixen, obviously. Was being the past tense. The past tense - Frankie flicks ash onto Markus' rosebush - being appropriate because now they are bubbly twisted scraps of charred plastic and melted steel, buried at the bottom of the garden. Because Frankie is a psychopath. Because she finally got sick of pretending she didn't know about them. Because Markus, who said that he would always love her - she grits her teeth - Markus loved those fucking dolls more. She's not as crazy as he thinks. He never once stroked her hair the way he did theirs.

So she got rid of them. Was that so crazy?

Of course, she knows that this is crazy for real. This really warrants being called a psychopath. It doesn't mean she won't get away with it; she hasn't even thought about that yet, but she knows Markus' heart condition will probably mean no autopsy. Frankie isn't quite as doolally as he likes to think she is. She takes a drag, and admits privately that sure - she's unhinged. A normal wife would have left. A normal wife would never have put up with it for a year and a half after she first found out, would have thrown him out of the house, would have cried to some best friend for hours. Frankie doesn't have any friends. She played nice. She waited. Then she stopped taking the medication, and she built his secret lovers a little funeral pyre. When he came back, she was roasting a skewerful of pink marshmallows amidst the wreckage of their stinking latex skin and their once-tumbling tresses, smiling softly. She had thought the ultimatum she gave him then (and it was simple enough: no more fuckdolls, or no more love and no more house) would be enough.

Silly, isn't it, that a psychopath like Frankie would have been so naive about her lover. Crazy people are supposed to be bitter and untrusting. Aren't they? She stubs out the end of her smoke and lights up automatically again.

Fucking literalism. She didn't mean that this would be fine. Frankie wonders how long it took him to find this woman, this... mistress, from his office. It doesn't matter now, anyway; he's asleep, and he'll stay asleep for long enough. She had considered just butchering the woman, but she let them fuck, let this Marlena go home, content that the aftermath and the possible investigation - silly bitch, leaving your long black hairs in the shower - will fuck her up enough that Frankie won't have to do anything. She runs her hand through her own cropped brown bob. Neither one of them think about anything. He didn't even notice the smell in his coffee when Frankie disappeared silently from the window vantage point, made her way back to her car in the street and drove it into the driveway, playing happy return. Would he like a coffee? She was dead tired from work, she could do with one. Of course he would love a coffee. Sleeping tablets, she muses, are good things to keep around. He's got an overdose that might just finish him off, but he was still breathing when she left him.

Frankie is not quite as incapable as he thinks. Distilling the nicotine wasn't hard; she pulled a sick day, as much to give him a last chance to redeem himself as to prepare, and like a snake he told her he had to work. Does he think she wouldn't go through his planner? He's a fool. He left for his mistress' house, and Frankie had enough time not only to boil out the poison, but to store it safely away in the pantry. She tested it out on a cat or two. It's a good thing she never actually cooks with liquid glycerine.

She has the syringe ready, filled in the kitchen with the care only true hatred produces. All it will take is one little shot right into his pupil. She isn't as dumb as he thinks. Markus, who vowed to love her and her alone, who put the ring on her finger and pretended he'd try to mend her scarred-up, fucked-up heart - he ought to have kept those vows.

She stubs out her cigarette, and stands up resolutely, dusting off her jeans. Frankie is a psychopath. She accepts that.

She smiles softly as she lifts his eyelid.

[EOF]

borg schmorg

2010-09-06T16:32:00.003+01:00

first of all, two or three people have asked me what my IQ is again, and for what i wish would be the last time, it's 145 - least, it was the last time i got tested. in actuality that means it could be anywhere from 135 to 155, not that the latter's likely. IQ is a pretty worthless way of measuring intelligence, in any case, and likely i'd do no better in terms of real intelligence than someone who routinely scores 100.

secondly, Borg, schmorg. i don't believe in forcing modifications on anyone.

i get some really stupid emails.

this post's actual purpose, of course, is to provide a space for us to discuss the current design of the subdermal Northpaw. right now, mine is:

MSP microcontroller with custom software
ring of 8 neuroelectrodes around ankle
Philips compass module
transmitter coil
lotsa wires

i am going to take this mess, and by Carl Sagan i am going to make it work. this is where you all come in.

BEGIN.

L

come on in, the Baudelaire's fine

2010-09-03T17:35:00.002+01:00

De profundis clamavi

J'implore ta pitié, Toi, l'unique que j'aime,
Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon coeur est tombé.
C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé,
Où nagent dans la nuit l'horreur et le blasphème;

Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois,
Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre;
C'est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire
— Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois!

Or il n'est pas d'horreur au monde qui surpasse
La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace
Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos;

Je jalouse le sort des plus vils animaux
Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide,
Tant l'écheveau du temps lentement se dévide!

— Charles Baudelaire

go see the translation if you don't read French, but it's worth reading even if you don't completely understand, just to see the fucking unsurpassable way the man had with words.

real post soon, i swear.

L

literary feeding time, round 3

2010-08-31T18:55:00.003+01:00

freya
Lepht Anonym 31.08.10
-----------------------

I did it. I burned it all. I know, Dr. Hawkins, that when you read this mail you will scream and cry and bemoan the loss of the world's only specimens of that vile perversion of Nature; I know what you will tell everyone left in the lab - everyone who survived the fire, everyone who didn't get the fuck out when I told them to or who tried to get past me to where you, Dr. Hawkins, were growing that stuff - you'll tell them it was a cure for something or other, won't you, you'll say it was penicillin all over again, a biological panacaea, you'll tell them what you told me, you bastard, won't you. You'll try and save your fucking skin.

They won't believe you this time, Doc. Not when those recordings get out. You see, Dr. Hawkins, I am not as stupid as you thought I was when you hired me; rejected from every PhD programme I've applied for? 2:2 mycobiology MSc? Oh, that boy's not too bright. Certainly. It doesn't mean I can't apply myself in times of crisis.

I think, perhaps, I will have a better shot at that doctorate now that Reuters has the videos. Wikileaks got a package, too, so don't think you can go pulling that grant money of yours to get out of this.

Don't mistake this for self-servience either, Doc. I didn't destroy your lab because I'm jealous, or so that I could be a hero and show the whole fucking world what you were doing - even though I did, you sick motherfucker, I already have - I did it because, plain and simple, I hate you. I hate you not just for the way you treated me and Allie. Not just for your daily putdowns, your ridiculous petty tasks just to keep us out of the way, your refusal to grant us credit on the papers or pay us more than a tenth of what was budgeted for our living expenses, none of that irrelevant shit is why I ruined your life and your career. I hate you on behalf of one hundred and thirty two others. That's right; I kept count, even if you never did, I kept the count of every single one of them and I sobbed myself to sleep every night I knew keeping it. Every fucking penny I make off this little sabotage is going to a trust fund for their families. The Alastair Lloyd Morton Fund.

So, you're asking yourself, if the little fucker finally got a shot of conscience, why's he using it now? Why after three and a half runs of testing, countless lies and atrocities later?

Truth is, Doc, I've been waiting. Not right from the beginning; all I knew right at the start, and for a good six months after - while you had me re-pot the fucking plants and help Allie cart bags of compost around and bring in boxes and boxes of shit you wouldn't even tell us about - was that your office smelled of shit, your greenhouse smelled even more fucked up, you hated the two of us, and it was the only job in mycology either of us were ever likely to see. We couldn't complain, and you knew it. Who else was gonna take on a pair of almost-dropouts from third-rate universities who couldn't even study fucking mushrooms properly?

So he and I trudged around your facility for months, doing things the cleaners couldn't be bribed to, slowly starting to wonder why you had all the resources you did. Do you remember making us polish every surface in the "sanitation room"? Didn't you think we'd question why there was a bed in there, Doc? A plastic one, like they put patients on in hospital? You'd have been better off covering it with a blanket and telling us it was for you. But you always did underestimate us, you elitist cunt. You were wise not to let us into the annexe of that room.

You'd have been wiser to keep us away from your testing lab, as well. Of course we saw the records. Of course we got bored, and went through them. Why were you testing anything on muscle fibre, let alone nutritional slurries? What the fuck did that have to do with mycology? I wish to God we'd never found out. I wish so hard, so passionately that you'd never even be capable of understanding it, that we'd just stuck to making out in there.

About a year in, I found your password left on a post-it under your keyboard. You stupid old man; that's the oldest trick in the book. You didn't keep much on your local machine - like any good paranoiac, you moved all the juicy stuff to the encrypted central servers - but I went through your temp files, and I found part of an email. I've sent that to Wikileaks as well. I found you acknowledging receipt of subjects. Three. Thank whatever fucked-up Gods exist that you compose your emails in a word processor; that's the only reason there was anything to find at all. Your technological ineptitude might just be what sees you go down in court.

So I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Your colleagues had nominated you for a fucking Nobel; who was I to assume you were talking about human subjects and not just rare - and really, really fucking expensive - mushrooms from Japan or something? I gave you my trust for far too long, Dr. Hawkins. Long after the greenhouse had become rank and the sanitation room positively foetid with that fucking smell, even though we bleached the floors every day and even though all you were growing in the hydroponic planters was standard garden fare. Long after Allie went on holiday and didn't come back.

You told me he quit, left you a very rude letter, you said, and like a fool I believed it. I couldn't even be happy for him; I was alternately pissed off that he hadn't told me so we could stick it to you together, and heartbroken. You see, I loved that man, Dr. Hawkins, and I believe he meant it when he said he loved me back. You didn't count on that, did you? I loved him so strongly it felt like my heart might stop. I took a week off and I cried in my quarters. I knew I'd never see him again.

You have no idea, Dr. Hawkins, no idea how much I want to kill you for making that not be the case. Some things are not meant to be; some things, the human mind is just not built to handle.

When I came back, you were nicer to me, now that I was the only one. You told me I was part of a team of two now, and that together, we would make great strides in the names of both biology and medical science. You'd discovered a mycoid organism, a new one. You'd found that it inhibited the growth of cancer cells. You'd been granted permission for a Phase Three clinical trial - I was so caught up in my hero's delusions of grandeur that I didn't even ask you where the animal studies were performed, or what the mechanisms were, did I? And all the better. In all my snooping afterward I never found any evidence that you'd thought about it. You told me we would be laureates. You told me that to prevent this information from falling into the wrong hands, neither of us would be allowed to speak of these experiments until the results were published. Like the little boy I was, I agreed.

I'm breaking your little agreement now, though, aren't I? I know that pisses you off just as much as the fallout will. I know, too, that you'll only be angry. You won't feel remorse. You won't feel shame. You'll see a world of pigs who don't understand science.

I understand science, Dr. Hawkins. It is a beautiful thing. You and what you did in that annexe have fouled it, maybe forever. I'm trying at least to rectify what I did to help you.

Can you believe that I even sterilised needles for you? I never questioned what you were doing to those people. I thought they were the standard Phase Three subjects; poor terminal bastards, either desperate for a cure at any cost or aware of their vital role in preventing the same thing happening to others, witting, willing. You fucking bastard.

So when you said there were problems, I didn't think. It was attacking their tendons as well as the cancerous cells, you said; I pitied them instead of helping. You hooked them to IV nutrients. The mycoid gave them headaches that made them scream, for a month or two, and you doped them up with the kind of barbiturates they usually use in anaesthesia. I didn't even know you had a medical degree. I bet the GMC will love to hear from you now. But they could still feel pain, couldn't they, Doc? They still screamed up until the third phase kicked in.

They were docile, after that, and silent, but you wouldn't let me in the annexe anymore. I told you if any of them attacked you again that I would help you. I don't even know what would have happened if they had. Would you have rotted there, on the sparkling floor, barely adding to the stench? Would that shit have breached contamination protocol and escaped into the rest of the facility?

It won't now. Your secretiveness made me suspicious all over again, and this time I decided to go one better than I had before; I keylogged your computer, with this little black gizmo I bought off eBay. You were barely ever in the old labs anymore, except to type up your reports. I daresay you didn't even type up the majority of it; you were too scared I'd find it, and you were right.

What you'd found ought to have been annihilated as soon as you found it. "Freya", as you called it - God knows why you chose a woman's name for it, you perverted motherfucker - seemed as if it'd been designed by some cosmic psychopath. Your first discovery of it had been in other fungi - colonising their cells, altering their growth patterns, their spore cycles, all kinds of strange systemic changes. You thought it was fascinating. I thought it was, too, until I read what you did with Freya next.

You decided to see whether it would grow on muscle fibre. You developed a fucked-up habit of referring to it as "she", too. So you tested it - Petri dishes of HeLa cells, stem cells, vat-grown tendons and muscles. It colonised them all. It did even stranger things with the stem cells. You kept going.

Rabbits, next, and after that, deer. We all know what happened after that. Allie didn't have a family back in Singapore like I do, did he? Nobody to write to. No father to update on his shit, no girlfriend to leave him over how much time he spent abroad trying not to be a fuck-up. You left a contaminated syringe in the sink, and you made him do the washing-up.

I didn't keep reading after that, Doc. No, no, I have a scientist's curiosity, even if I don't have a scientist's IQ; you didn't put your first subjects in the annexe. You kept the deer and rabbits in the spill-secured chemical sheds, so that your precious Freya would have room to be free without escaping your control. I went to see, to give you one last chance to just be a demented old man making stuff up and not a threat to humanity. I stole the key from your safe - 1-2-1-2? You foolish, foolish bastard - and I got a hazmat suit out of the stores, late at night, with the key you ought never to have given me.

He was huddled in a corner on his side, as if in horrible pain, although by this time I thought he must be dead. His skin was carpeted with masses of Freya's hairlike growths. I didn't even cry, not for hours afterward, but I felt the blood drain out of my face as I approached his body in the clouds of spores, and I thanked God I couldn't smell it. He'd put his hands up over his head trying to shut out the pain. Freya had frozen them there when she calcified his tendons. I knew she started out on the CNS - knew it took months before she got to the outside, so I knew for sure when I saw him covered in that vile down of little white strands that he'd never taken that holiday. He really did book one, too. You couldn't even give him that.

It took me longer than I like to remember to notice it, while I crouched there for an eternity too afraid to go any closer and too soul-shatteringly horrified to look away from his putrefying eyes, the strands that had emerged from within holding them open in rictus. I had kissed those eyelids. I had seen those eyes glitter with delight planning our petty pranks on you that we'd pull one day, later, when we had an apartment and somehow a job away from you. I was too busy looking at them to notice the rest.

You didn't tell me about the fourth phase, you bastard. I daresay by that point you were in too deep to think it was anything other than beautiful. I looked down for his name-tag in one last pathetic hope that maybe somehow it wasn't Allie, and I noticed the swelling. He had never been fat even before you started starving him, only an IV line connected to an empty drip bag feeding him and Freya both. I couldn't bring myself to pull back his coat with those fucking white threads all over it, even through the suit, so I looked around and found what you must have used - one of those remote grippers for hot glassware. I pulled back the fabric and lifted his sweater.

Everything. I saw everything. Oh, you were right about this one, weren't you, Doc? Your Freya was really something clever. I've never seen a parasitic organism that repurposes its host to quite that extent before. She was using his own nervous system, just like you'd suspected, as her surrogate soil; she colonised his spine and his eyes for food, she used his skin as shelter for her trunk-threads. She opened his torso into a thousand little cysts that winked at me like a lotus pod's myriad eyes, flowerpots for her spores, swollen with the gas they produced.

His gut was so distended, Dr. Hawkins, that I could see his heartbeat pulsing in the repurposed blood vessels. It was then that I ran. I didn't even have the courage to kill him. I spent longer in the decontamination showers than I have ever spent at once in your entire lab, took eight Valiums in my quarters, and sat down at my terminal to call a taxi, the decom team, and the police. After that, I did what you saw on the tapes; I got the fuel from the tractor, suited up, got as many people out as would believe me, and set your life's work ablaze. I purged Freya from this earth. I wish I'd gotten you too.

I've often wanted to kill myself. Lord knows I do now, after what I've helped you with, after what I've done. But I ran straight into the arms of the coppers instead of those of death, and I talked. To so many. I wanted to make sure. I took every bit of data you've ever typed, Doc, and I made sure it got to everyone I wanted it to. I used that to get your real data - the videos, all those people. Your clinical eyes. I swear to God I will avenge every one of them.

We'll have our day in court, Doc. But I swear on Allie's memory that you won't serve a day of that sentence. These blood-covered hands have one final task to do.

You and I are facing our Nuremberg, Dr. Hawkins. Just as justice demands, neither of us will come out of it alive.

[EOF]

your search queries

2010-08-29T21:03:00.000+01:00

have been excised from this post. postmodern that.

L

motherfucking teamwork

2010-08-19T14:09:00.002+01:00

so, with my electrical incompetence on display for the world to see, Unqualified and others have suggested a far better way to power the Northpaw; inductive power transfer, something about which i know very little and will hopefully know a lot more by the end of tonight. i have a paper to read and a lot of 'pedia to peruse.

i'd just like to get lame for a second here and remind you all that this is precisely the sort of knowledge-sharing or idea teamwork that i have really, really been wanting to see more of in this field. thankyou all for your improvements, questions and suggestions. i would not have gotten so far without you. if any of you are ever in the Silver City, come meet me and we'll share a dram or two.

L

i have what you've been searching for

2010-08-16T12:47:00.004+01:00

things like:

fuck me doctor (she's never gonna fuck you, buddy)
dain bramage (me too!)
i have been known to slice my arms open for shits'n'giggles (me too, too!)
sapiens bar (oh, i fucking wish)

and last but not least,

awful blog

you deck of wankers.

L

bride of the return of the son of das update goes to Hollywood

2010-08-15T21:19:00.003+01:00

the node's fine, wound is scarred over completely although the site is still just perceptibly redder and more heated than the rest of the finger. that's unusual; i blame the cyanoacrylate glue i used to repair the node before i shoved it in there, or perhaps it is rusting. in either case it will be good for science.

there is a Megavideo of the procedure now. if you need it there will be a RuTube as well, although currently i cannot be arsed to put one up.

there is a stashbox of the video at http://stashbox.org/977038/node-insertion.3GP

goals further to this project:
1. source raw neodymium discs for coating.
2. create and test homebrew implants with said discs and Sugru.

goals further to the Northpaw project:
1. find some goddamn motherfucking neuroelectrodes.
2. toss a coin to decide whether i go with some sort of kinetic power assembly or whether i just say fuck it and go with a coated lithium cell. currently, odds are favouring the latter, since a dynamo would require quite a lot of complex electronics - capacitors, resistors, other regulatory circuitry and the like - and would slow my prototyping down by quite the major factor, when i'm used to rapid prototyping as the One True Path of software (and wetware) engineering.

in other news, today i cut a failing microdermal out of my face with a scalpel and realised exactly how much better scalpel use is when you actually have a goddamn handle.

carpe corporem

L

bride of the return of the son of das update

2010-08-06T15:11:00.003+01:00

all doing fine, if incredibly bruised; side of finger opposite the node is purple, we obviously hit a blood vessel this time. real post later when i am not so rushed, pictures forthcoming. several things in the meantime:

0000. i am aware of the fact that the YouTube got pulled - it is because YouTube are pussies and summerfags who can't handle a little guro in the name of science. i will put it up again on MegaVideo and RuTube asap.

0001. i am no longer suicidal, haven't been for a long time. just wanted to clarify. the combination of willing slavery to Morpheus and actually having a contribution to make towards the knowledge and experience of the species helped.

0010. i try to reply to everyone's comments, but if there's something i missed, feel free to email me or ruthlessly spam the blog until i respond. there's nothing worse than being ignored when you're trying to have a discussion.

0011. if anyone wants a tarball or zip of the complete set of photos and video i have so far you're welcome to ping me and i will put it up on stashbox.

as you were.

L

edit: fucking grammar.

return of the son of das update

2010-08-05T12:51:00.002+01:00

i think it's doing alright; it sealed back up overnight. problem is, it's still redder than it ought to be and hot to the touch, which worries me - might be bruising from the procedure itself, which is very likely to have happened, might be a staph resurgence. the wound itself has closed nicely, though, and is sitting there playing good with no discharge or anything.

fingers crossed, gentlehumans.

L

let's play q'n'a

2010-08-04T17:16:00.002+01:00

several people irl and in the Wired have asked me what it's 'like' having a drug addiction. since the last one of those was yesterday, i'll explain. people who are only here for the guro, feel free to disregard this. fellow addicts, also feel free, since what applies to me will likely not apply to you; i'm fairly sure the experience varies from individual to individual.

first off, i'd like to quell the myth that a dependent's life is some fever-crazed, constant, desperate chase after "the next fix". this is definitely not the case for all of us, and in fact, i don't know anyone for whom it is - not even the homeless guys on the street, who are actually pretty cool if you take time to actually talk to them and get to know them. most of them do heroin, which i don't, although it's in the same family of drugs as my poisons of choice. namely, that's the opiates, including morphine, fentanyl, heroin, opium, DHC and codeine. when i can't get decent hospital-grade stuff, which is all the fucking time, i subsist on a mixture of other people's black market prescriptions, poppy straw (proto-opium) tea, and pharmacy-sold rubbish pills catalysed with paracetamol.

i am fully aware of the toxicity of said catalyst. on most days i do not care, for reasons it is better not to go into, about the hepatic failure that will doubtless occur in a decade or two because of this. i'm also aware that i will not be allowed access to a transplant list.

physically, then, one's need for a drug on which one is dependent (as distinct from 'addicted', although i'd be classed as both) is just like any other chemical need the body has, from glucose to oxygen; if the chemical reserves get too low, you don't feel so good. there's no feeling as distinct as hunger or thirst; over time, though, you get to recognise the flu-like withdrawal symptoms, and calculate dosage and timing to avoid them. it takes about two days for whatever shit is in my bloodstream to trickle out, and another day before i'm really fucked. if i wanted to quit (and we'll get into that in a second), it would be about another six before i was done with the physical withdrawal and my brain's need for it was gone.

so, a small part of my life is dedicated to calculating dosages for each day, keeping the levels steady, running it down every other day to slow down tolerance, finding the shit in the first place, budgeting, etc. most of it is automatic for me by now. personally, i consider this and the financial impact (roughly similar to your average smoker's, not to say that i don't smoke a pack or two a week as well) to be fair for what i get, which is relief.

opiates take away pain. not just my back (which is mildly fucked, such that there's a low level of pain all the time and a high level some of the time) or any other physical pain, but mental pain as well. it's why i sound so deadened most of the time; i am, in a positive way. the white halo of an opiate helps counteract the foggy depressive aura that the world has otherwise, along with my regular antidepressants. the balance is an acceptable view of the world; without, it's not particularly pretty. that's why they call it the White Angel, or Morpheus' Kiss: it's a help, for weak motherfuckers like me who need help.

in no way do i suggest that this is a mentally healthy way to cope; i'm not a mentally healthy guy, and just about all my coping mechanisms are fucked up. i like to think that back in the Victorian times when every fucker smoked tar and ladies all used laudanum, i'd have been able to pass as a normal person with some normal health problems, but like as not nowadays i just look like a junkie.

so, there you go. that's what it's like for me, and might be for you if you take up this shit, which i recommend you don't. like i said, it's not a major part of my thinking; i don't have nightmares about what it would be like without any pills, i don't spend my days roaming the streets trying to buy dope or shoot up in alleyways or mug passers-by for junk money. i just take shit to cope, and it's one of my biggest weaknesses, the others being hubris and financial irresponsibility. it's one reason i correct people who call me a "hero".

heroes can cope on their own. so could Tesla, for that matter.

L

son of das update

2010-08-04T14:44:00.003+01:00

hey look, whitey's not dead yet.

node state: i'm still taking antibiotics for it, which seems wise; this morning i changed the dressing again to find the opening white, bloodless and clearly dead or dying. i am half-convinced that this is because it was kept too wet under the Jelonet, which is weird moist jelly-like clinging mesh that keeps wound lips together (my fault, i ought to have removed that shit as soon as i got back from the lab yesterday.) since wounds that get like that tend to reopen, it's not really a good sign, but i re-dressed it dry and here's hoping it will seal again. there's no sign of the node coming out. site was warm this morning, but seems to have cooled down since (probably something to do with the large amounts of antipyretics routinely flowing through my system as a catalyst for the DHC...) pain has abated greatly even when my dose runs down - yesterday was an opiate downday and i could still move all three joints without pain, unlike the day before. today my usual chemical halo is back in place and i feel nothing except when the wound itself presses against something.

status is therefore tentatively good.

sensory-wise, it's still too early for any EM sense to have come through, although magnetic function is obviously active (boring.)

also, i really like Cesium_137, and you might too.

test nodes: result so far

2010-08-02T23:52:00.005+01:00

looks like this:

zoom:

that's all for tonight. will keep the blog updated (okay, will try and will finally do it when endless email slews up about it) with the situation on the node; it's still hot as fuck and painful to touch, but not as much so as before. remember, no matter how much of a doughy Caucasian loser with nasty pallid skin and too many scars you are, the machines will always love you.

...wait.

L

search engine blues

2010-08-02T14:29:00.003+01:00

aside from the usual stuff people ask my Wijit for, like can you get high off one Solpadol pill and does Tramadol fuck you up and where the fuck is Lepht it said it would be here an hour ago, i have seen some weird search shit coming through recently.

fuck u gram

uh, what?

"feyhra"

i have no idea who this is, but someone keeps searching the blog for the name. if anyone knows, do enlighten me.

fuck tramadol

finally, someone not looking to get high on that shit. which you can't.

dr fuck me off

if you mean the doctor will jack you off, you're wrong. otherwise... well, my faith in the uneducated was never very strong to begin with.

pain

oh, you'll find a lot of that here.

fuck a pillhead

Muad-Dib does. you don't get to unless you pay me a lot of money, though.

steve haworth clinic

you want to try Haworth's own site.

will flexiril and tramadol mess you up?

oh, fuck knows. i am not a drug encyclopaedia, guys, and to boot you're asking me about Yankee drugs when i'd slit my wrists before i visited that humanity-forsaken empire of greed again. go to Erowid or NetDoctor or something.

peace

L

das update

2010-08-02T12:50:00.004+01:00

(cf Combichrist's 'Get Your Body Beat'.) i woke up this morning to a small chorus of little dull pangs that mean 'oshit, son, get your fat ass to a doctor'. so i did; i was about to take a picture of the node site, but first the examining doc made me take off the bandage, and then had to send me to the nurse so she could patch me up with shit tons of gauze and Jelonet and stuff that's making it hard to type right. i had several interesting conversations about why it is that i do this shit to myself, which is something i can never explain properly to non-transhumanists - i've gotta learn to do that, otherwise i'm never going to get anything like a research grant or unbiased medical help. the nurses are alright, but the doctors still think of me as some exotic species of self-harmer.

i have been known to slice my arms open for shits'n'giggles, sure, and do a fair amount of damage in the process (none of this emo cat-scratch bullshit, i've split my arm to the tendons like the little psychopath i sort of am), but this is not something i do when properly medicated. i need a better way of communicating that.

fortunately the doc didn't decide to cut the node out of me just yet and gave me a box of flucloxacillin, which will doubtless play havoc with my system. still, it's not like i'm not grateful.

that is all. also you should check out Project Pitchfork, because their track 'A Cell' is kickass.

the things i do for biohacking, part 2

2010-08-01T16:18:00.006+01:00

here is footage of the latest node-siting, completed about an hour ago. in this little flick you can see yours truly, in hood and surgical gloves, trying a new way to do this operation: i have my hand on an ice pack, and it's been in the freezer for about ten or fifteen minutes before the footage starts. this time i asked Muad-Dib, the other guy you see in the video, to do the puncture and shove the node in - doing it myself takes such a long time and is so fucking painful that we thought this way would be better. as it happens, it is; i still scream, but the process itself is far quicker.

i did try to strip the sound, but it wouldn't fucking encode, and i got pissed off with it, so fuck it. y'all can hear me screaming like a little girl. i've been told i sound like Jack from Mass Effect II, if that makes it any the less disturbing. also it came out all weird and high-pitched, fuck knows why. the quality is, as expected, godfuckingawful. apologies.

Muad-Dib does drop the node three or four times before he gets it in there. i had to evacuate the house so i wouldn't scare my roommates with the yelling, not that it bothered any of us. the guy filming is a buddy called Mike, who's a photography genius and remarkably unbothered by this.

goddamn, i do some fucking nasty things in the name of transhumanism.

L

the things i do for biohacking, part 1

2010-08-01T15:24:00.013+01:00

okay, so i finally managed to get the photos of the pre-insertion test blob operation up here. i will try to format this shit correctly, but do bear in mind i went through with the node insertion itself about an hour ago and i'm consequently just a wee bittie fucked up. here is the blob of Sugru i made as a test node:

here it is next to a standard Swann-Morton 24 blade so that you can see the size; it's about 4mm diameter, i think:

this is both of them - the other one is the hot-glue blob. i sterilised both components in standard surgical spirit before i did anything, in a fucking teacup of all things:

then, like the idiot i am, i started cutting holes in myself (the goal of this particular session of batshit insanity, as you recall, being to get the neodymium node out of the back of my hand and then to insert the test blobs of Sugru and hot glue into the hole left behind.) as ever, the initial cuts are bad, but as soon as you do any real damage to yourself, you get an adrenaline rush to the area that inhibits bloodflow and turns you into a bad enough dude to finish the job. it took me a very long time to get the node out from under my skin; it was pretty deep down, and all this fibrous, stretchy shit had grown around it that just didn't wanna let go. i had to use my fingernails to grab the bundle of fibrous crap, pull it out of my hand as far as it would go, and slice its "roots" out from under it with the scalpel blade, then cut the remains from around the node once it was out; i couldn't photograph that both because it was fucking nasty and because i needed both hands. this is the resulting mess:

and this is the freed neodym, kicking about in the teacup of ethanol:

note the rust you can see on its side; that's where a snick in the silicon/gold coating had caused some damage. i fixed it with superglue last night, but fuck knows if it will hold; i figured i'd find out. if anything does happen, at least it won't be toxic to me. after i finally fucking got that out, i shoved the two blobs under the lips of the wound and cleaned it up. here you can see the size of the incision, and the Sugru blob at the south end. the glue blob was at the north end, but as previously and reluctantly stated, i've now lost the fucker.

in this photo you can also see the weird, white area around the wound where no blood is flowing; i am half-sure that this is because of adrenaline from where i shoved in the blobs. see also the little scar next to the opsite, which is from an old and rather pathetic attempt of mine to see how much i could make myself bleed by opening veins; i got nothing from that save a patch of numbness around the area, since in severing the vein i also severed a nerve. gg, Anonym. here is a rather cool-looking picture of the blade i used for this episode:

and here's the hand all bandaged up with some totally unnecessary Overkill 9000-size dressings i had lying around:

then i went and had a bowl of muesli. the end. oh, and here are some Arduino shock shields and press-buttons invading my workspace in the lab to get to a Penguin caffeinated mint:

biohacker out.

L

HE'S OKAY, FOLKS!

2010-07-22T13:26:00.002+01:00

sorry for the loss of updates, guys. my lack of medication is making it pretty hard to function. fortunately i see the doc tomorrow, and i should be alright after that.

the lumps are both fine - it's official, after about 4 weeks of waiting Sugru seems to be compatible in practice with the human body. there's been no itching, bruising or what have you, no irritation or leaking. it sealed up in about two days and has been peachy ever since.

some notes: i made the Sugru lump too big, and so it looks incredibly fucking nasty right now cause you can see this massive fucking thing on the back of my hand. i also made the hot-glue lump too small in my ever-flowing fucking wisdom, and i shit you not i have lost it. i don't know where in my hand that fucker migrated to, but it sure as shit isn't where i put it anymore. it seems to be non-toxic too, as expected.

i also can't find the Crackberry cable anywhere. fucking photos. i will get them to you guys if it kills me.

so, i got my scalpel handle and a shit ton of antiseptic for the real op, which is next on Lepht's Happy Fun List of Pain. i've got like two thousand hospital-standard bacteria-killer wipes as well, plus some proper finger bandages and another big fuckoff needle, and some sterile surgeon's gloves (latex-free, motherfuckers!) for once rather than crappy exam ones. i will see if anyone in the house has a cam i can use, otherwise you'll be getting crappy Crackberry footage, but there will be footage.

and i hereby grant you all permission to fuck with me mercilessly until i remember to update the blog. jesus, i suck at life sometimes.

L

progress bar

2010-07-01T18:29:00.002+01:00

no infection or irritation so far; in fact the site's doing pretty well, although i had to put superglue out of the toolbox in it yesterday. if all is still calm by next week, i will take it that Sugru doesn't cause major immediate damage to the interior of the human body, although it could still be damaging in the long-term. i'm not so bothered about that, since anything that fucked me up over a long period of time has historically been detected by people giving me biopsies and scans and shit and sliced the fuck out before it could do any real damage.

if it works, then, i'll probably use the sugru to coat up both the parts of the modified Northpaw for implantation and two plain pieces of Nd in order to complete my array. i have the node that came out of my hand the other day ready for re-insertion, but i'm waiting on supplies.

and i'm scared shitless of how much it's gonna hurt, of course. i'll have a spotter to video that one. pictures of the blob-siting tonight with any luck.

L

irritating thing of the day:

2010-06-30T15:39:00.002+01:00

retarded Otherkin trying to tell me they have more senses than i do. it's sort of self-defeating to enter into any conversation with that kind of fucking ego-delusional kid in the first place, but i do resent putting myself through a lot of pain just to gain one rudimentary, local-range additional sense and then being outright told that elves and viruskin and dragons have twenty or so senses and if i was a fucking vampire like them i'd never have to go through all of this silly modification stuff, lol, because i'm just an inferior human *giggle*!

without elitism: i can prove my shit. you can hook an electrode up to my hands and watch the nodes being triggered as i sense EM. you can stick paperclips to me. you could take the nodes out of me and put them in another guy and the same things would happen to him, reliably. on the other hand, you are claiming perfect night-vision, a spectrum of hearing beyond the physical capacity of our (yes, our) species, reflexes too fast for sight, etc. etc.

here's a fucking gold-standard experiment for you. let's take all the Otherkin, strip them naked, put them in the woods in the middle of Siberia at three in the morning, and see whether their POWAZ keep their chubby suburban Yankee arses from dying of hypothermia for longer than it takes a bear to scent them.

sometimes i wish i could backhand people over UDP.

L

blobs sited

2010-06-28T21:37:00.003+01:00

i didn't manage to get the crackberry filming (too hard to rig a position where its tiny field of view can see enough shit - needs someone holding it), but i did take pictures. i'll be posting them up as soon as i can get them off that fucking excuse for a phone. (at least it isn't a fucking iPhone, i guess.) also if anyone knows of a good way to zero-fill or strip the EXIF data, i'd appreciate the entire technically-savvy biohacker underground not getting hold of my crackberry PIN.

experimental blobs of bright fucking orange Sugru and freshly melted hot-glue are now present in a gaping wound in the back of my hand, no anaesthesia required. i have filled said wound with ethanol. i dunno exactly how long it'll be until we see whether or not they'll decay, but i'm sure i'll find out.

irritatingly i snicked the node when i was getting it out, and although the gold appears unscratched, there's a big fuckoff hole in the silicon. i intend to hotglue that shut and all, once i'm sure it's sterile (it's sitting in the fridge in a coffee cup full of industrial bleach, HiBiScrub and surgical spirit, where it'll remain until at least tomorrow.) cross your fucking fingers, fellow hackers.

(brb, hospital.)

L

plans

2010-06-22T15:18:00.004+01:00

okay, so i'm gonna be doing this latest experiment sooner or later. it will be on cam, although i'm unsure of whether i will shoop a trollface over mine or just wear a hood or something, since i don't want to ruin my credibility by looking like... well, me. planned proceedings:

1. remove node from failed experimental siting on back of right hand
2. place testing blobs of hot glue and sugru into cavity left by node
3. install node in right hand, middle finger

required:

anaesthesia
- lidocaine powder
- sterile water ampoules
- needle and syringe
- possibly topical lidocaine as well to help with the first few cuts

analgesia and sedatives, which i will probably lean on various acquaintances for and which if anyone asks, i totally don't use - drugs are bad, mmkay?

infection control supplies
- gloves
- TechniCare or surgical ethanol for sterilising the components
- antibiotics if i can procure some
- fucidic acid topical cream
- HiBiScrub
- lots of motherfucking bleach

wound care supplies
- steristrips or a suture kit
- big dressings for the back of the hand
- gauze'n'tape for the finger wound
- spray plaster (useful shit)
- sterile cotton wool pads

tools
- another goddamn scalpel handle because my ex fucking nicked mine
- blades
- a few 4G needles

misc
- absinthe
- camera
- test blobs
- containers for chems, pills, drink, components etc.

can anyone think of anything i've forgotten?

L
(ed. fucking formatting)

exam results

2010-06-22T14:39:00.002+01:00

well, i fucked over my 1:1 average. bastard Languages and Computability class. results for this year, all out of 20 (18 or over is a first-class):

CS3008 OPERATING SYSTEMS 19
CS3015 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE 18
CS3017 ADAPTIVE INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS 19
CS3019 KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS 19
CS3514 ENTERPRISE COMPUTING 18
CS3517 DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS AND SECURITY 20
CS3518 LANGUAGES AND COMPUTABILITY 14

man, i would've had a perfect first if it weren't for the fact that i hate computability theory (by which i mean that i am shit at it). on the plus side i'm informed that most people got about a 5-7 on it... musta been pretty harshly marked, especially seeing as this is the year where we don't get to retake exams. if you get CAS 4 the first time, you can resit, sure. you get a 20 the second time and it still goes down as a 4 on your record, and that's what they use to determine your final degree class. you don't like it? fuck you, you can retake the entire year.

you know what's particularly lulzy about these results? i studied exactly once for each exam, the night before. sometimes i slept, sometimes i didn't; i just couldn't make myself do anything any earlier than that. depressive episodes are a cunt - or apparently, a magical blessing from the gods of depressed lazy assholes.

also lulz at the full marks in Distributed Systems and Security. HURR I AM A HAXOR DURR

L

things i have been doing today:

2010-06-15T15:29:00.003+01:00

spinning on office chairs when nobody is around like a special child
lining up chips and PCB push buttons so they look like little creatures making a journey behind my keyboard to hunt for Penguin mints, which i then arranged them "eating"
swearing at electronic components i lack the finesse to pick up with my stubby little gimp fingers
stealing cola from the sports conference going on in our building

i am a mature, 22-year-old researcher in my field.

L

literary feeding time

2010-06-11T00:04:00.002+01:00

okay, so i read too much H.P. Lovecraft/August Derleth/Clark Ashton Smith as well. i had a week off, and this is the kind of thing i end up doing at five in the fucking morning with my free time... it's a good fucking thing i have a job coming up.

bomb
Lepht Anonym 10.06.10
-----------------------

There's four of them, this time. Last night there were seven, the night before, a horde of the bastards; Jacques wonders numbly if that's an improvement or not, given the fact that they're closer than ever to the foot of his blanket-strewn sofa bed. The air is utterly dead, of course - no CPU hum, no thermostat whirr. The rustle of the duvets registers briefly in the silence, then dies; they make no sign of hearing anything, as ever.

Jacques pushes his foot further, cautiously, down the bed. The four don't move. You're afraid of trips, he tells himself balefully, memories of the Nineties flooding in on all that acid he used to drop and all that Lovecraft he used to read. Bad trips. Tactile trips. But they don't move. He finds himself pushing back into the vaults of his head for the time he saw Tsathoggua, the black toad-god dripping with vile ichor and filthy, sentient intent, perched on his pillow with its tongue lolling out - was that like this? Will he look back on this ten, twenty years down the line and see so obviously what set it off?

He flinches as the closest one edges in, soft footfalls padding towards his head as quietly as if they're all barefoot. Good God, should it be this detailed? This long after? It's been three days now, long enough for most anything to clear out of his system. They shouldn't be real enough to smell, that night-air vapour tainted with mould and sulphur and ancient dust. They're not there, not really - that he can convince himself of at least superficially - but God, that foul air invading his house and perverting his dreams, that wakes him nauseated long before they ever show up! He backs up the bed, experimentation over. The encroacher reaches out one white and withered hand to touch his cheek.

Jacques screams, and this time they don't dissipate as they did when he yelled last night; a brief flash of Mr. Khera downstairs and what he must think of all this noise crosses his mind before he clamps the pillow to his face, hissing breaths into the stifling fibres, oh God why did he think he could handle that black shit? Why wrap it in a Rizla and throw it down your throat with a shot of sinthe like you're the fucking King of Dares, why not just throw it in the woodstove with the rest of the crap nobody wanted? They coalesce now like the halves of blurred, unfocused vision to form one. One gaunt and frail thing that holds more awful bane in its caress of his cheekbone, trailing its damp fingers down his trembling throat, than all the devils and demons he's ever imagined. Please Catholic God, you can torment my soul all you want afterwards but take it away, for the love of sanity take this hellborn abomination back to where it came from! he pleads wordlessly.

No response comes save the soft cooing that issues malignantly from under the lowered hood, like bats' fur or moleskin, that hides the eyes of his captor. Carla's silky voice insinuates itself into his head as he sits, rigid, shaking with the effort not to move or scream. "Bomb-it! Bomb-it! Bomb-it!" chanting in the background like war drums and her, all "Nobody's ever taken that much, never mind with alcohol," and "We make wishes on shots around here..." Oh God he just wanted to do whatever they all would have done, just be cool and not an old loser hanging out with a bunch of kids half his age... The thing presses its unseen lips to his hand and he recoils with a thin screech, the sensation of a cluster of holes beneath the pursed mouth rankling on his skin as if contagious. Its breath is on him.

It'll go away. Harmless wish, bad trips, something to tell those kids about for once... doesn't everyone wish for someone to love them? It'll go away...

shit, i had that blog

2010-06-09T21:22:00.003+01:00

okay, my exams are over with for this year and i return to the world of the living from my exile in badly-made pptx lecture slides and /b/. i'm alive! i didn't even slice any of my limbs open this time! i haven't been hospitalised once!

so i have some sugru coming in the post in the next couple weeks, anyway. one of you fine gents recommended it to me as a bioproofer, so i figured i'd give it a try - seems like useful shit to have around, anyway. if it doesn't work there's always glue guns.

speaking of which, i have several things on the go this summer, one of which is the continued hackage of the Northpaw; another involves my removing the last experimentally-placed node from the back of my right hand (as stated, it just didn't fucking work out) and re-siting it or attempting to do so in the little finger of the same hand, my left being complete for now. for this i will need some proper surgical sterilisation - TechniCare, ideally - and i'm out. anyone know where to get their grubby biohacker hands on some?

of course, ethanol is fine too. i'd just rather deal with less searing, flesh-burning pain than i need to. might give some lidocaine a shot too, although the doc thinks it won't work in the fingertips (no idea why not). thoughts? you guys want me to video this one?

lastly, my second article for H+ has been taken in and is probably currently getting anal-raped by the copy-editors. expect forthcoming.

L

note on positioning

2010-05-27T00:53:00.002+01:00

something i should warn you guys about: when placing nodes in the fingertips, they have to go on opposite sides of each finger than the one next to it. for example, if you were starting with your left hand, you would (for practical reasons) only use the three fingers starting with the little one and ending at the middle; you would put the nodes on the left side of the middle finger, the right side of the next one and on the right side again in the little finger.

to my annoyance, i discovered weeks ago that i'd failed to observe this, and thus the nodes in my left two outermost fingers set each other off every now and then when i'm trying to sleep or type or what have you. another fuckup for general education.

L

haptic compass: hardware

2010-05-20T19:50:00.003+01:00

i've just recieved a rather large amount of money at an award ceremony, and i know what i'm going to spend it on. food, schmood, because i think i have some better ideas for the control of the haptic compass than using my colleagues' original circuitry, which is rather large.

enter the very tiny MSP430, a little microcontroller i think would do a better job. all i would have to do would be:

- figure out a way to attach the little compass module to the MSP430
- get some fucking neuroelectrodes and attach them to its outputs (jesus christ, but it's hard to get hold of those things)
- bioproof the bundle thereby created (not hard, since all it takes is a hot glue gun)
- stop! scalpel time.

of course, i would also have to program the MSP. i'll need to ask the Noisebridge guys, but i think the logic would go something like this:

while (poweron)
  get north direction from compass module;
  cast to a degree out of 360;
  figure out which electrode's "domain" that number falls into;
  activate that electrode;

i'm pretty sure the way to go is to have each electrode responsible for a segment of the compass circle, i.e. 0-45 degrees activates electrode no.1, 45-90 activates no.2, etc. if all went to plan following this design, it'd mean zero transdermal components - the whole thing would be subdermal, which is far easier to keep sterile and far more likely to heal, plus naturally waterproof. it would be a big, big cavity to carve out though; i might need some real anaesthesia.

still, sounds like fun, right guys?

L

annoyances

2010-05-19T17:48:00.003+01:00

so i have new ink coming up, my thirteenth, i think. if i wasn't universally fuzz-recognisable before, i sure as shit will be with an abstract arabesque and a ritual kris around my right eye socket... i've been painting abstract crap on there for months, anyhow, so it's not like anyone won't have seen it before. i'm pretty sure the only adverse reactions will come from my roommate, who's not often exposed to this sort of thing, and my mother, who will like as not take a tissue out, gob on it and try to use it to wipe the tattoo off my face as if i was seven and covered in Twix. upon finding out that it consists not of suspiciously skilfully applied face paint but subdermal pigmentation, i expect she'll hit me pretty fucking hard... c'est la vie.

i suppose i can always pretend i fell asleep in the studio and sue the shit out of my tattooist.

regardless, another reason for me never to have a real job. whilst waiting around for my preview of the final design in the studio, however, i overheard a few things - nothing new, but the red lens of my medication makes me want to kill people who say stupid things these days. this includes, but is not limited to, the following:

- So what are you, some sort of Goth?
- (speaking to the poor tattooist) I want a [heart/angel/star/rose/fairy/hideous rendering of my child's likeness which will lead to her disowning me in the future just to stop being associated with it/bad Latin phrase which will make Lepht froth at the mouth with the effort of not correcting my awful uninformed grammar/misspelled English cliche/football logo].
- I want one like [celebrity].
- Have you got a pattern book? [it says 'custom studio' on the door...]
- Aw, is this your first tattoo? [because it's not like i look about thirty-five and haggard as hell, besides being covered in ink, or anything.]
- Ha ha, you look rough, son. [i know.]
- I wanted [x], but my ma will only let me have [y], could you draw that? [why would you have something you don't really want drawn on you, for fuck's sake?!]

yeah i pretty much lose all rationality while i'm adjusting to new meds.

L

anecdote

2010-05-10T22:56:00.002+01:00

me: So I was wondering if you had any green Chartreuse.
gourmet shop d00d, standing directly in front of several bottles of Chartreuse verte: What's that? I don't think so.

L

ed. someone asked about what i sound like. you have two options: read the blog either in my actual husky, slurred monotone, or read it in a Dalek voice.

no pain, no gain

2010-05-10T20:17:00.003+01:00

i've been getting a lot of questions recently about the placement of neodymium nodes. lots of you are aware of this, but it's better to say outright: they go in your fingertips. they just don't work anywhere else, since they function by generating current that activates or stimulates nerves; this current is so small - it can't shock you - that it needs to be right the fuck inside a really sensitive nerve cluster in order to stimulate them enough that you feel it.

i have verified this experimentally, as it happens - i tried putting nodes in the backs of both hands, on the back of my wrist, and in my forearm, and they don't work. you could probably get sensation if you put them in your clit or your cockend, but i don't fucking recommend it.

unfortunately putting them in your fingertips is intensely, screechingly painful. i cried like a bitch all four or five times i've attempted it; you will too. it's worth it. no pain, no gain.

L

PS. that marks the 200th post here, incidentally. also please don't take "no pain, no gain" to mean that i exercise, because i don't.

pardon my dust

2010-04-28T23:30:00.003+01:00

sorry for the posting delay, peeps. it'll be kinda sporadic for a while; they just took me off one of my psych meds and it's gotta clear my system completely before they put me on the next kind. thus, for three weeks i'm kinda screwed, being without the shit that usually keeps me from doing things like opening my arms to the bone to watch myself bleed for shits and giggles, or delivering swift left hooks to people who annoy me in the supermarket.

i'll still be around, and i'll do my best to answer emails as usual. i'll try very hard not to kill myself (it would probably piss RU Sirius off).

L

ps. also minor surgery yesterday, in which i learned that the only State-approved implant i have was doing jack shit, since it does the same thing as our regular contraception... i gotta say, having things cut out of me with anaesthesia is fucking worse than cutting the fucker out myself.

what do you want, Lepht, a fucking medal?

2010-04-17T00:26:00.003+01:00

i was informed today that i won an honest-to-goddamn medal, the University's "Quincentenary Prize". you know what comes with the medal? a fucking grand, awarded "on a basis of academic merit, personal qualities and needs". they had to pick one person to give this fucker to out of all of the schools of sciences, engineering and medicine, and it was me. that's awesome, if kinda fucked up.

translated: Hey Anonym - you're poor, right? Well, we feel sorry for your crippled, Government-subsidised ass. Have a medal. And get a suit at Primark for the award ceremony, will you, you fucked-up little cueball.

upshot: free rent for a couple months, and whenever anyone asks me "what do you want motherfucker, a medal?" i'm gonna flash that bitch like it was a fuzz badge.

all of this only lends more weight to my hypothesis of being incarcerated, heavily medicated and just making all this up to fool myself into thinking my life is awesome.

L

i'm retired from the human race

2010-03-29T22:41:00.009+01:00

due to the diligence of my newfound readership (hat tip Ian), you can find my queer ass on an obscure YouTube video from last year, hosted under my nasty ex-partner's account. it's about how to insert nodes on the back of your hand, which tbh is a pretty worthless procedure, but someone (i forget) asked me for video.

or you can find it at said abusive's account. bear in mind i haven't spoken to him in a year, so i don't want anyone going all OMG UR EX SENT ITS ARMY HERE CUZ YOUR A CUNT. he is a cunt, but that's beside the point; i was a cunt while we were together as well, albeit less so.

enjoy, marvel, speculate on what the fuck that is on the back of my wrist.

L

FAQ

2010-03-29T01:45:00.006+01:00

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?

VICTORY, amongst other things

2010-03-29T00:36:00.003+01:00

implant is functioning properly, and indeed it appears that the nodes might even be synergistic. seems like i can feel more with three than 3*(effect of one). also the blog has 10,000 hits. didn't think that would ever happen.

other news: i'm not dead, and will endeavour to reply to y'all's emails and comments soon. i've just been dealing with some pretty nasty shit involving the death of a relative and a plan i discovered on the part of my best friend, who attempted toute seule to have me sectioned on the basis of my addiction (i point out possibly fruitlessly that it is a lowly opiate addiction, and not good opiates at that, and that we don't section drug addicts in this country even if they're snorting snow...)

regardless, I LIVE, and will resume posting tout de suite. expect replies if you've contacted me, and bother me if you don't get them.

L

evil plan results:

2010-03-08T01:01:00.002Z

Bond loses. in other news, the implant has healed properly, to my surprise, and is now safely lodged in my left pinky and functioning at what i guess to be about half of its nerve-triggering capacity, based on what the others do.

i'll also be writing another article for H+ as previously hoped, on the ethics, procedures and legality of self-performed surgery (minor). thoughts?

L

good news, everyone:

2010-03-03T16:23:00.004Z

the new node appears to be taking, with the help of a hefty daily dose of flucloxacillin just to be sure (i heart the NHS.) additionally, that nice little motto you see under the blog's title is the lyrics to the chorus of wetware by the excellent Johnny Mo, a hermit-genius culture buddy of mine; it's now on my left arm, in a rather nice circuit-board design. i have therefore been entirely drained of both bodily fluids and cash.

also i have been watching the blog search stats, and i'm curious as to why certain gentlemen from the States keep asking my Lijit wijit if i am gay. i'm not, as it happens; i'm bisexual. it is, of course, entirely irrelevant to transhumanism as a whole whether i sleep with men, women or both.

thankyou and goodnight.

L

i am a stupid stupid motherfucker

2010-02-27T13:41:00.003Z

the idea came to me on the bus, before i'd remembered exactly how much this sort of shit hurts; i spent last night carving one of the stored/experimental Nd-60s out of my wrist and implanting it with a large-gauge needle and Muad-Dib's help into my left little finger. i don't remember much of the night, since i spent the evening with my hand taped into a ball apart from the victimised digit (which was taped to the table), covered in iodine and HiBi-scrub, drinking Laphroaig and taking pills. at some point i woke to discover myself in bed, having apparently untaped my drugged self and retired three hours prior. i hadn't completed the operation, although i had gotten the stored node out of the back of my wrist, incredibly messily - the wound is huge, since i used a silly little disposable Swann-Morton that wasn't exactly effective. i appear to have overcompensated slightly and made a giant gaping opening too far from the implant, then a secondary one crossing it and a massive fucking hole where i recall having to pull the node out, scraping the surrounding tissue back with the end of a spare blade. turns out the meat doesn't like giving up things that have been placed anywhere but the loose skin of the hands. lesson fucking learned.

having awoken covered in blood and with no memory of the self-mutilating events before like some kind of fucked-up Sleeping Beauty, i shuffled back into the Kitchen of Pain to finish the job. it took me an age to work up enough guts to do it, and that's for a reason; i woke up about an hour ago (fuck yeah, steak for breakfast) and it's still motherfucking throbbing - even with the drugs and the whiskey it was agonising last night. i screamed so hard through the kitchen towel i was biting down on that i woke up my flatmate B, who didn't appreciate it. musta taken us about half a fucking hour - it sure as shit felt like it - to get the fucker in, and when it was done, i don't even remember how i got back into bed. i even dreamed about pain, all these weird-ass visualisations of it.

i woke up this morning to find all my face paint on my arm where i rubbed it off bawling, some unidentified substance on my shirt, my lip split from the screaming and my dressings already filling with blood. Muad-Dib is a little traumatised as well. i'll keep y'all posted on whether the implant takes or not.

trufax: i need to find some better hobbies.

L

so i heard you guys like fiction

2010-02-16T22:13:00.002Z

okay, i am not dead yet. soon i'll be writing either an article for h+, if i'm lucky, or a post here, if i'm not, about the ethics, legality and processes of self-surgery. in the meantime here's a piece of fiction called "tea". i wrote it a while back, but maybe some of y'all would like it.

tea
Lepht Anonym
23.04.09

Cherry stares at his earlier text-file notes through a haze of purloined codeine, the pills themselves long gone and the holder of the rest of the stash out of reach for good. "How the fuck you s'posed to grind stuff without a mortar'n'pestle?" he asks the half-deduced recipe, regretting again that he threw the pestle at a yowling cat outside his kitchen window three weeks ago and gave the mortar to the thing that lives upstairs the month before, when said bizarre neighbour inexplicably appeared at seventeen minutes past four outside his bedroom, requesting in his well-spoken way that Cherry lend him a non-metallic bowl.
He's way too nice for his own good sometimes. He's gotta stop being so nice.
Google reveals nothing, except sites where you can buy brand-new shiny mortars and pestles, none of which Cherry can afford. Hell, he can't afford to reconnect his own broadband line; he's stuck hijacking half the pathetic bandwidth of downstairs' ancient WEP setup, much to his annoyance and the bewildered chagrin of the lower floor. He's gonna be so screwed when they finally figure out what's going on. Cherry sighs, and goes back to the kitchen cupboards; retrieving the best alternative to the mortar and pestle a life in the City's patchwork slums can come up with, the mixing-bowl and shot glass, he empties the freezer bag of khaki dust that he's been trying to grind with a rolling pin out over the bowl, and sets to mashing it against the pale china with the side of the glass, muscles complaining as the pliant fragments refuse to comply with his efforts.
"Hello?" he calls as he hears the door creak, expecting some drinking buddy, maybe Tommie with sake, and recoils. "Gah, fuck!"
His upstairs neighbour has drifted quietly into the kitchen, proffering a handful of thick stoneware fragments that once were Cherry's ex-wife's Italian mortar. "I'm afraid I broke your bowl," he apologises in his half-whispered, drug-addled monotone, and deposits them reverently on the introductory electronics textbook that sits open on the counter. "It was less... sturdy than I assumed it to be. Sorry." He sinks, cross-legged, to the grimy tiles and stares up at Cherry with hollow, dulled green eyes, snuffling the dust in the air and adding, "If you're trying to make a Papaverum somniferum infusion, by the way, you're doing it badly. You can't grind it like that, for a start."
Cherry glares at the interloper, annoyed but not surprised after so many years of living here. The block is essentially communal and such intrusions are common, if not this late. "Who are you?"
"They call me the Saint."
"And Saint, what the fuck are you doing sitting on my kitchen floor?"
"I'm instructing you on how to better brew morphine tea... assuming that's what you're trying to do," Saint's eyes focus upwards on the cupboard door behind Cherry's head, "and not making oregano pasta sauce or some such idiocy. In addition," and he leans forward on his elbows with a slightly unstable air, gaze scanning over the detritus that clusters on every surface in here, "I'm refraining from asking you impolite questions about where you got the somniferum straw, or what's causing you enough pain to risk synthesising Class A street opiates when you've left your front door open."
"You're some kind of crazy. I knew it." Cherry narrows his eyes and mentally prepares for another nonsensical fight with another of the block's cadre of meth-addled nutjobs. "Always with the crazies in my block. Go on home, Saint."
"Quite," nods the Saint in agreement with the insult, ignoring the order. "The mental health profession do disagree on exactly what's wrong with me, though. When they can be bothered to see someone with as much negative finance as myself," he smiles, parenthetically. "And they ignore that anything's wrong at all when it comes to getting their fix." His half-focused eyes travel distractedly to the empty bookshelf, the dangling unfixed locks on the window, the dirt-soaked mat in front of the sink, and his expression takes on a tinge of mirth.
He doesn't leave. Cherry goes back to brutalising the poppy straw, and eventually the bedraggled little figure rises and wanders away.

When he wakes up with his cheek smushed against the keys of his laptop and a strange, not unpleasant scent invading his nostrils, the room looks... cleaner. It is cleaner. Beyond the cleared, wiped surface of the table, his recipe books and reference texts are all on their shelf above the couch, ordered by subject. Did he do that? The couch's one blanket is now covering its ripped back padding, joined by two more on the arms and four puffy, comfortable-looking pillows from fuck knows where, all lit by a thin shaft of orange streetlight from the open window, the sink below it devoid of dirty dishes and freshly bleached. It must be nearly dawn, he realises, because a soft drift of birdsong is infiltrating the room on the night air, more of the little chirping voices joining in every few minutes.
"Unh, shut 'em up..." Cherry peels his face off the keyboard. The floor has been swept, the work surfaces wiped. His ashtray has been emptied. There's a fresh bag in the trash can, a fragrant pot of chai tea billowing steam into the air beside him, a battered candle in an old jam jar burning on the counter. Cherry feels like a slumhead Sara Crewe.
"What the fuck?" he mumbles, and more aware now, "Tommie? Did you guys clean up in here? Where's this stuff come from?" Did I already take that crap and it broke my brain? What's the point of a painkiller if it's gonna do that? He coulda just Rohypnol'd himself.
"I had some things spare... An apology, since I broke your bowl." A familiar deadpan whisper from behind, where the Saint, barefoot on the dirtless floor in his ancient fatigues and with his once-white jersey rolled to the elbows, is stirring something in one of Cherry's dented aluminium cooking pots. Oh fuck, he thinks, this guy's some sort of stalker. Now he's going to think you owe him, and he's gonna take your liver as payment or something, oh shit. Why don't you ever lock your fucking front door, you fool.
"Is... that why you're called the Saint? Doing this kinda thing?" ventures Cherry, unsure if he's about to be stabbed with his own wooden spoon or served cream of chicken soup. He means it as a distraction, a ruse while he looks around for his knife, but the Saint's easy posture and the air of relaxed, naive friendliness that surrounds him are disarming. "'Cause thanks."
"Yeah, it's that," wheezes his new chef, and continues, "and it's also because I'm the source of most of the narcotics around this district. If you're addicted to morphine, anyone who delivers it is a saint to you," he says with a twinge of regret, and swirls the contents of the saucepan about. "But it started off when I used to bring people food." He looks up, remembering something. "Sorry about invading your kitchen like this, by the way... but you were really going to mess this batch up, and it's very good straw, very well-prepared. A shame to waste it." He scrapes around the inner edges of the pot with the spoon, tapping the handle on the side to flick the scrapings back into the boiling liquid. "Nowadays, I'm something resembling a unique breed of dealer, but once I was just a young man trying to do his peeps some good. I'd give this another four or five minutes if I were you."
Cherry nods placatingly, still not really awake enough to follow anything the Saint, with his barely-audible voice like an Eton schoolboy permanently hooked to an opium pipe, can say. He's heard enough words like peeps and bring people food and source of narcotics to figure out that the Saint, rather than turning out to be a psychopathic killer, is more likely to be pathologically charitable, and definitely not on the opposite side of the law. "Mhm. What exactly are you cooking? Did your oven break or something, cause you could've just asked -"
"I'm steeping your poppy straw, like I said. Wasn't that what you wanted?" The Saint turns to face him, and the hollows beneath his eyes are arresting despite his smile. He's one of the palest people Cherry's ever seen, Caucasian skin bleached out like an albino's, the little holes in the backs of his hands and those bruised pits looking even worse against the pallor. "I'll dry it back out if you weren't going to use it yet."
"No, no, I was trying." Cherry holds his hands up like a hostage. "Listen, I don't really need any more help, but thanks for cleaning up. I'll bring you a few beers when I'm done tonight. Thanks," and he stands up, expecting the Saint to amble out with his odd junkie grace.
Instead, his new friend points to the pot and beams widely, a genuinely warm grin that looks misplaced between the gaunt cheekbones and the blemished skin, lighting up his eyes so they almost look normal. "Do you actually know what to do with this now that I've cooked it?" he asks, almost playfully. Can crackheads be playful? wonders Cherry.
"Well, I've read the wiki."
"I wrote most of that, but I left a few things out. The users have probably filled in the gaps by now." The Saint holds out the spoon in a conciliatory gesture. "If you can do it, though, I won't intrude any further."
Cherry wrinkles his lower lip. "Yeah, fine."
"I can stay?" Another alien smile.
"Yeah - wait, you can chill here while you cook, you can hang here, but you can't live here." Cherry is struck by a wave of irrational suspicion. "I'm not trading drugs for living space, this is my house, damn it."
"I have a home," the Saint throws carelessly over his shoulder. "I live on the floor above you, have done for years."
He knew that. Damn, he's out of it. He's been under for a while. The Saint picks up the pan with no regard for the heat it must be radiating, carrying it over to a cup on the work surface on Cherry's left, on whose edges an unfamiliar object - a tiny fine sieve with two scratched wooden handles - is perched.
"I'm not going to keep the recipe a secret from you," he reassures Cherry in his conspiratorial whisper. "I'm not Betty Crocker... First of all, you don't really need to be grinding it, especially not with straw like this - it's already been ground fine enough that you can just throw it into a few centimetres of water. Let it steep at about sixty degrees for a couple hours, and always add a few shakes of lemon juice, don't forget, because the pH needs to be low..." He looks at his host to see if Cherry is following, oblivious to the fact that although his eyes are open, the veteran is essentially still asleep. "A lower pH makes for a better morphine yield. Anyway, my tea strainer is yours to borrow anytime you need it," and he pours the sludge from the pan, now turned a greyish mud-brown, into the little mesh strainer, compressing it down with a teaspoon. It takes him a while to push all the fluid out of the wire basket, and the resulting cup of brown liquid looks anything but appealing. Its thick organic scent, tart like dung and not entirely distasteful, hangs around the Saint like a cloak as he brings it over. "Here you are, my friend."
"You sure this stuff is gonna work?" mutters Cherry as the Saint places the teacup, carefully like some underworld maitre-d', in front of the still-steaming teapot. Its own gases rise and mingle with the pot's cloud.
"Of course. Papaverum somniferum," shrugs the Saint, as if that even approximates an explanation. Cherry looks at him vacantly. "The root of all opium," he clarifies. "It made the original Victorian dens and it got the Persians high; it makes the heroin they get from me, and those rubbishy codeine pills that you buy at the chemist's, and the morphine they pump into people in the State hospitals instead of antibiotics. East is east," he grins, "it's all opiates to me."
Cherry chews his lip warily, heaves his head off the table again, stares into the brown stuff. He sniffs it and recoils as a stronger wave of the tangy smell hits his nasal membranes - exactly how much lemon juice has gone into this shit? - and then, with the same instant resolve that made him take this apartment years ago and join the Army a decade before that, he lobs it down his throat.
"Jesus!" He coughs and spits a fragment of stalk away, fishing another out from under his tongue. "God, that is fucking disgusting. Augh."
The Saint puts the half-full, mostly solidified bag of sugar back where he found it, in the back of the cupboard that houses microwave chips, Yum Pax toaster pastries, extra-caffeinated instant espresso and cornflakes, which compose the majority of Cherry's diet. "You can sweeten it... never mind."
"Fuck it. Whoo," Cherry shakes his head as the tea slides into his stomach. "Strong stuff."
"I told you it was a good batch. Thankyou for letting me help."
Cherry raises an eyebrow, but ignores his doubt that anyone would possibly thank people for letting them help with chores. "Sure. Any time." At least he doesn't have to do it.
"Really?" The Saint looks hopeful, and Cherry wonders how many people invite this wasted little dealer into their houses without wanting drugs. What do saints do in their spare time?
"Yeah, come for a beer whenever you want. You saved my ass," he gestures to his creaking back, and to the invisible damage inside his chest from the gas they don't tell recruits about. "Y'welcome here anytime, Saint."
A slow, lopsided smile creeps over the drug synther's face. "Honestly?"
"Sure."
"Then what do I call you, amico mio?"
"Lieutenant-Corporal Martin B. Chandrasekhar, son... but most people stick with just Cherry." He grins back. "Can't be assed with that regiment shit any more, if I'm honest." The opiate tea is starting to kick in, and his slurring becomes progressively more apparent as he speaks. He drags himself out of the chair and around the table, slumping onto the sofa with relish.
"No ranks amongst scum," observes the Saint as he moves. "We're all just sitting down for a cup of tea."
"Cup of tea," agrees Cherry as his eyes start to close. He's asleep before he can say it again.

[EOF]

thus ends another round of public humiliation. whoop.

L

a drugged haiku

2009-12-02T16:58:00.003Z

i don't half write shit when i'm out of it. here's the latest mildly amusing mental spitbubble:

Kernel symbol broke
In the System.map file:
Fucking compiler.

i need to get out more.

peace, love and Tramadol

L

public humiliation time!

2009-11-30T21:44:00.003Z

sometimes i get fucked up and morbid and it leads to me writing whiny-ass pieces in lectures instead of taking notes. i'm sure it looks like i'm taking really fucking good notes, though. anyway here's the piece i wrote in Knowledge-Based Systems today while Dr. Kollingbaum was talking about backward chaining in Jess (awkward); it's called "doll", and it's about biohacking, in the sense of the word that i don't use. assume it's set at some unknown time in the future, like most of my crap. and ignore the wangst; it spills out into the text editor so that it doesn't stay in my head. i'm not actually this emo in real life.

doll
i am a morbid, morbid motherfucker
Lepht Anonym 30.11.09
-------------------------------------

He can't sleep without his doll. That's fucked up, and he knows it. Close to necrophilia, closer to obsession or maniacal grief. It's just a doll now; no more sentience, no more talk, but he still needs it. He talks to it sometimes anyway, even though it won't hear. Those fuckers. He still tells it he loves it, gives it those little showers of kisses it used to laugh at. It says nothing. It sits.

Those fuckers. He's almost traced them, doesn't know any more how much time and money he's invested in making the contacts to do it and bribing the ISP and trading the guy upstairs drugs to teach him how to work the black wares. It's become all he knows, and it won't make the doll into a sentient being again, but it will make him feel better. Sometimes, like the doll itself, he doesn't feel anything at all.

He kisses its cheek, thirteen years' habit, as he climbs out of bed - it sits up in reaction to his absence, his stomach doing its familiar barrel roll before he tells himself for the thousandth time that that's just the basic functionality of the shell activating. Looks into its slack face to make sure. Sees its dead eyes and turns away sick to the screen. Almost there. Almost there. Those fuckers.

Do they even know? Do they ever feel guilty? Do they give a fuck that they killed the only person he depended on?

Of course they know. They do it for fun. And why should they care? It wasn't their love. They didn't technically murder anyone. They just threw some commands to a botnet drone that happened to sit inside his partner's favourite coffee shop. They didn't even manually spread the infection. Just programmers, showing the world their skills. Clever programmers proving the weaknesses in modern technology. Those fuckers.

He turns back to the bed. It's still sitting there; the urge to smash it rises again, throw the lightweight shell out of the window and watch it be crushed by the trains below or fried on the rails, but he can't move his limbs. It still looks like his life partner. It's still wearing a medical bracelet and the T-shirt that smells like cigarettes long gone. Like it could light up any minute, speak again, make one of their stupid injokes or yell "Psych!" and start cackling. Its head lolls. The deep blue eyes stare at the whirls on its blanket.

He doesn't know what he'll do when the trace completes. He knows it won't be legal. He cradles the doll's limp torso tight.

[EOF]

it's out

2009-11-30T20:58:00.001Z

i told everyone at the dissident gathering in Hatton last weekend that i loved my partner. i feel like saying it here as well.

i love you, Muad-Dib. i'm always gonna love you.

L

Tramadol fucks you up, Monday hangover edition

2009-11-30T14:39:00.002Z

the usual questions, you know the answers by now: yeah, Tramadol fucks you up, yeah it will fuck you up, yeah it can fuck you up. one of them will not fuck you up. you need to take a few for them to do it, like ten or so, and you can't blame my junkie ass when you do that and send yourself to hospital cause you're a moron.
can one tramadol fuck you up
no.
solpadol vs tramadol
Solpadol is organic codeine, Tramadol is the same thing but synthetic. they're both opiates of around the same strength.

will tramadol 50mg get you high

nope. an opiate will not get you high. they're depressants, not psychedelics. if you meant will it chill you down, well, not at that dose.

codeine pill do they fuck you up?

sorta. they make you drowsy if you take enough of them, and eventually they will lead to liver damage, but it's the paracetamol in them you gotta watch out for. if you have straight codeine, knock yourself out.

fuck, fuck and fuck again

that's me. HA HA I HAVE A PARTNER.

is tramadol processed through the liver

yes. that is why it kicks you in the liver eventually. watch yourself.

peace, love and tramadol

L

i'm not complaining, but

2009-11-25T14:16:00.003Z

some shit i just don't understand. viz.: your average bus driver; paid cashmoney to be at the public's service, answer questions about public transport and interact reasonably politely with plebs; universally surly, often to the point of assholery.

tech guy Navid: paid to admin the University CSD's bigass new Sun Beowulf, does not have to deal with anyone who doesn't make it to his hermitage of an office. when accosted in the corridor by yours truly, jibbering excitedly about clusters and research institutes, not only does not tell me to fuck off, but gets other tech guy Nikhil to install two machines with the Sun Grid Engine in the public labs expressly for junkieface to play with. i'm just an undergrad. i don't know if it's because i'm president of CS or because i look like a cancer victim, but that was done purely out of Navid being awesome.

i fucking love university.

L

"What pill gets you fucked up then makes you throw up?"

2009-11-16T13:54:00.006Z

what pill gets you fucked up then makes you throw up?
i don't know, little drug quester. does it start with a 't' and end with a 'ramadol'? (in fact, any opiate will get you fucked up, and any of them will also proceed to make you throw up.)can tramadol fuck you up
can tramadol mess you up good
can you get fucked up on ultracet [...]
too tired to be snide: yes.
kap ake
you've got yourself a Kupkake, boy. don't take that sucker during the daytime. actually, scratch that - take it with a shot of Jack, why don'tcha. go ahead.
getting fucked up on tramadol
taking tramadol to get fucked up [...]
two options: take the whole box, or take some of them with your favourite liqueur. you can even open 'em up and pour 'em in there. it's disgusting and you're gonna hurt yourself.
lepht
w3dyt
sapiens anonym
me, my Creepy Ex With A Permanent Bad Hair Day who wears women's clothes, and my dusty, lonely blog. any questions?tramadol make you throw up?
yeah, tramadol make you throw up, you illiterate moron. get some Motilium from a pharmacy.
2 tramadols get you messed up
tramadol 50mg fuckyou up
HA HA HA no.
how many 50mg tramdol to get messed up
lots. or maybe a few. use the scientific method, young knowledge-seeker.
anonym for synergy
i sure as shit am. i love synergy. implant synergy, people synergy, drug synergy...
tea fucks you up
tea fucks you up. tea fucks you up. tea. fucks you up. wow, i thought i'd seen every kind of retard there was. i stand corrected. yeah, stay away from that shit, it's the reason our teeth are like this over here.

your bitchy junkie friend

L

dear creepy ex:

2009-11-16T11:30:00.001Z

i don't hate you because i think you're stalking me. i just hate you.

hugs, Lepht Anonym.

Tramadol fucks you up, Monday pillhead edition

2009-11-09T13:04:00.004Z

that's right, it's that time of the week again.

how much to get high from norflex?
how many milligrams of tramadol would it take to fuck me up
how much tramadol would it take to fuck me up

look, it's different for every person. if you've never taken it before, maybe two or three of them will fuck you up; if you've got a morphine problem, you could neck the box and it wouldn't touch you. you're gonna have to find out for yourself.

tramadol messes you up
fucked up on tramadol
getting fucked up on tramadol

just take it, guys. one at a time until you're adequately fucked up; beware the slower kick-in, cause it might make you think you've gotta take more than you do; have something on hand to throw up into if you've not taken it before. the end.

can tramadol 627 fuck you up
can tramadol get you fucked up
do tramadol get u messed up
do ultracets fuck you up?
does tramadol fuck you up
tramadol fuck you up??
can tramadol mess you up good

yep.

will tramadol hcl 50mg fuck you up
will 2 tramadol fuck you up
how to get fucked up off of 50mg tramadol

no, no and you can't.

kap ake

that's a Kupkake, a 30mg codeine / 500mg paracetamol pill. it's a nice little thing when you're in pain, cept i need about five of them and they will probably make you hurl.

lepht

that's me.

tramadol weekly

that's this.
w3dyt
that's my arrogant ex, a man of calibre who beats his partners and takes it up the arse with a rubber cock.
norflex make you tired
that it will. you can't really counteract it with any legal stimulants, either, and it's not safe to do it with speed.
tramadol throwing up
just get some proper metaclopramide from your doctor, if you can, or some Motilium from a pharmacy, or some ginger tea if you're shit-fuck broke.

peace, love and Tramadol

L

zen and tau

2009-10-28T15:55:00.002Z

i have no idea where i got the idea that the Greek letter tau represents the concept of oneness (Dune?) but those two little one-syllable mantras have been revolving around my head all fucking day. this is, obviously, because i am a fuckup whose zen and tau have gone out the fucking window.

i'm trying incredibly hard not to be self-pitying here. i have free meds, on a state healthcare plan (albeit one that makes me wait to see the fucking doctor until the receptionists have gone home and the cleaners are hoovering around my sorry ass, i shit you not) and i've yet to go completely psychotic. plus, they seem to be keeping the acid flashbacks down. but i'm really not having fun with these fuckers. i missed a lot of important shit today. my sense of calm has fucking vanished.

zen, tau, it'll all come back. i'm just kinda fucked until it does.

L

never plan

2009-10-24T20:46:00.002+01:00

because it only goes wrong, and then you have to write a blog post telling everyone that you're a fuckup. well, i'm a fuckup. i forgot that i used the last of my slicey devices a long time ago, so no test implantation this weekend.

i did solder the control board for the Northpaw together, though, and discovered that my loans have not in fact been paid for this year. hopefully they'll come in a big fucking lump that i can then use to... well, to do more of this stupid shit.

current strands of development of the paw:

- need hot glue gun, test adaptation to the buzzers. transdermal armature is gonna be complex.
- researching dynamos as alternative power source.
- gonna look terrifying, with eight strands of wires going to two boxes (or one box and a dermal incision) mounted on my leg. i think i'll wear shorts for a week to frighten people.

i am a sorry little bald-ass attention whore, aren't i?

L

plans for the weekend:

2009-10-23T12:08:00.002+01:00

i'm informed that normals do things like go out and drink. i intend to drink too, if all goes to plan, since i will be test-implanting a plastic-coated cellphone buzzer from the Northpaw kit into my ankle...

so, i'm gonna go get a hot glue gun, cover the buzzer in waterproof goodness, take a scalpel and shove that sucker in there. also i plan to solder the Northpaw's control board electronics together, design experimentation and sepsis permitting.

also i had something of a psycho bastard episode yesterday; i was almost ready for class, having done my usual faffing about in the morning (take pills, paint C symbols on face, try not to go back to bed because Muad-Dib is still dozing and asking for hugs, spike hair, etc.), and i was running a lil late - about to leave, i discovered i'd lost my phones cable (they're fancy Bose ones i got as a gift last year, so the cable separates from the phones themselves.)

dear reader, i freaked the fuck out, cussin' and kickin' stuff and frantically digging through the debris of dead machines and old clothes that forms drifts in my bedroom, and when Muad-Dib (understandably frightened) got out of bed to come hold me still, i burst into tears like the giant medicated pussy i am. i managed to choke out that the music was what i was using in order to not spazz out in public and smack somebody (not that i'd do much damage, having all the muscle strength of a scotch pie) or end up self-harming or whatever. i refused to go to class, both because of the smeary red-eye face-paint look and the fact that i'd been reduced from a rational human being to a bawling pile of jelly.

i spent the day, in fact, going to find a replacement cable, discovering afterward that the original was in my fucking pocket, scaring normals in a coffee shop, missing three fucking lectures and a BCS seminar i desperately wanted to go to, cleaning house in order to not feel like a useless cunt (didn't work), eating purloined Starbucks cheesecake, and shaving my head.

yes, i cope with mental ill-health just as badly as Britney fucking Spears.

ergo i am now utterly bald, and have painted various things in metallic green on my skull for shits and giggles. jesus, people didn't wanna sit next to me before, they're sure as shit not gonna want to now. happy weekend, everyone.

L

the Two Weeks

2009-10-21T15:17:00.002+01:00

is the adjustment period for psychiatric meds, during which you become an emotion-flipping, mood-swinging, stranger-punching asshole, who will quite happily shout "Motherfucker!" at shop attendants when denied a bus pass, get all teary-eyed listening to zen beep music, hide in a corner because it's sure people are looking at it, and freak the fuck out at the slightest provocation (mysterious compiler error, back pain, overdraft.)

not having a lot of fun here. i got all that and a bag of chips, said chips being comprised of the shakes, the nausea, the irritated friends, the nix on sexyfun time and the EPIC IRRATIONAL RAGE.

still, i can't stop taking the meds. i need the fuckers. i hate adjustment.

L

an announcement:

2009-10-19T20:52:00.004+01:00

i have joined the ranks of bored white Westerners hopped up on happy pills to relieve them of the relentless misery of their grindingly, excruciatingly tedious little lives. this might go horribly wrong. we'll see.

interesting quotes from the patient information:

"Effects when treatment is stopped: Do not stop taking the tablets suddenly."
"Drinking alcohol is not recommended while being treated."
"The following side effects have been reported: ...spontaneous production of breast milk, inability to achieve orgasm, seizures, loss of memory, loss of identity, unusual bleeding..."

wat

in other news, i have recieved my Northpaw and a fresh shipment of solder, and now need to start bioproofing the components. in my own loserish biohacker way, i will probably end up encasing them in hot-gun glue as an initial prototype - that shit is bizarrely resilient to human flesh... need a gun from somewhere though. i'm also gonna have a problem powering the thing. gonna need to dissect a kinetic-powered watch, i think, and steal the little lightweight gyro.

and in other other news, i continue to resist the temptation to ask my pathologically competitive, partner-punching ex W3dyt exactly how his campaign to 'beat' me is going, since i hear enough hilarious third-party criticism of him without any input on my part. in the corridor outside Knowledge Based Systems: "He looks like a girl." "Yeah, but a really ugly girl." much lulz. i look forward to the team project results.

(i also look back with glee on that time i caught my medical bracelet on his chest dermal and ripped the sucker out. in retrospect, that was rather gratifying.)

L

Tramadol fucks you up, Monday edition

2009-10-12T13:05:00.002+01:00

sometimes i think the more i tell you guys that Tramadol fucks you up, the more it makes you wanna take the stupid shit. i'll clarify: when i say it fucks you up, i mean it's gonna make you too tired to do fuck all (unless you have a tolerance, where it will do precisely dick), it's gonna make you hurl, and you're better off getting some DHC or hydrocodone if you wanna be fucked up that badly. anyway:

will tramadol fuck you up
can tramadol get you fucked up
will tramadol fuck me up
can tramadol fuck you up
does tramadol fuck you up
can tramadol mess you up
will tramadol mess you up
can i get fucked up off tramadol

...etc. it's like some sort of junkhead mantra. one day my partner's gonna wake up at 4am and find me typing in bed, intoning monotonously, Tramadol fucks me up, Tramadol fucks you up, Tramadol fucks he/she/it up... in short - yes.

can u get fucked up off of 50 mg tramadol

unless you're a toddler, no. just take the pill and get the fuck on with your life.

what does tramadol do to fuck you up

now that is an interesting question. our green friend is what's known as a mu-opioid antagonist, and is in fact an analog of my personal demon, codeine, the difference being that Tramadol is synthetic. it stimulates these opioid receptors the same as any other opiate, masking pain, inducing sleepiness, and deactivating the guts, thereby making you hurl and/or giving you constipation. it's processed through your liver, which is the main reason it fucks you up - liver's not good at that kinda thing, and it will eventually get seriously damaged. takes a long time, though.

tramadol throw up

absolutely. you need some proper-strength metaclopramide (or another scrip-only antiemetic.) if you're shit ass broke like yours truly, try some ginger tea.

norflex with tramadol

they're the same thing, and therefore will make you throw the fuck up and waste both doses. i don't advise it.

tramadol hurts your brain

i see you've met the analgesic headache. that, or you're talking about the way any opiate wraps your mind in cotton wool so you can't study and you don't care. either way, you gotta lay off for a couple days, then go back and you should be better.

can you get high off norflex

no. it's a chill pill, not a stimulant.

best way to get fucked up on tramadol

take one. see how messed up you don't get. take more. point to my blog when you get taken into hospital and recall that i told you not to fucking take them. if you wanna mess yourself up, take one every half-hour until you're adequately fubarred, but don't blame my wasted ass.

boy i will fuck you up

i lived in Seaton, the Silver City's glessing district, for a year without any bovver. i might not be strong but boy i will smash a pint over your fucking head. kisses, Lepht.

can you take tramadol solpadol together

yeah, but don't bother. they're both opiates, so just take one or the other.

thus ends your lengthy pharmaceutical education for this week. yours dubiously

L

Northpaw, evil scheme mk.1

2009-10-02T12:47:00.008+01:00

so i'm in my third academic year at University now, doing a Bsc Hons in Computing Science. understandably, it gets pretty hard - i'm chewing bitwise C operators right now, and to my shame i still don't exactly understand bitshifts - but it's awesome, in the same way that my work on the NBX Project is awesome.

that is, it's sort of above my capacity, which makes it fun along the lines of a dodgy rollercoaster: "Get off there! You might die!" "FUCK YEAH I KNOW!".

speaking of self-endangering behaviours, i should be getting my Northpaw kit sometime soon, and being the idiot that i am, i'm not content just to wear the sucker. i'm going to do my illevel-headed best to work on an implanted version.

some issues i can think of with this:
- power. it might need a gyro rather than a battery pack, or i could leave it transdermal.
- isolation. i need the buzzer electronics isolated, shock-speaking, from my Weak Against Shock flesh. you can do this with silicon, i'm just not sure where to get access to it.
- waterproofing. cause i like being able to take a shower (not that i wouldn't put up with sponge baths for a while if it meant more mods.)

my God, i really do have problems, don't i?

in other brainhacking news, i've lost track of how long i've been clean for (so more than two weeks, since my sense of time is absolute shite), but it looks like i was wrong about the extent of the dain bramage: slowly i've been getting my ability to detect temperature back. unfortunately, i live in fucking Scotland, and it turns out my room is really, really fucking cold. i had to pull Muad-Dib out of bed by his ankles this morning.

also i have a lot of Mana, since i won my textbook money for this year by writing essays for Epic Prize Money this year. that link takes you to the SugarCopter site at Kustom PCs, which ships from Scotland, so no need to import it from ThinkGeek anymore.

last, it looks like my revenge-driven ex has forgotten about his plans to Beat Lepht's Evil Schemes, which is good, because my evil schemes mostly involve buying candy with my government loans and pestering senior department staff with stupid questions.

peace, love and tramadol. -L

PS. ink win: the giant rook over my back and torso is now finished, and i have a H+ tattoo on my left shoulder above the other one, to boot. nerd win.

our tribe is the best tribe

2009-09-17T22:35:00.003+01:00

today, we were surprised by a present from my pet gimp and James, another awesome member of the tribe (James sings opera, well enough to play Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro). they came back bearing this present in a fancy cellophane display box, carefully decorated, the very definition of cute.

this present was a heart-shaped, three-flavoured, pink-and-purple iced ice cream cake. piped on it were the words OM NOM NOM and a symbolic representation of the stretched anus of Goatse. this was planned for a week beforehand, apparently.

i love my tribe.

tramadol fucks you up, Monday edition

2009-09-14T12:00:00.002+01:00

does tramadol fuck you up
will tramadol get you fucked up?
tramadol hcl will it fuck you up
can tramadol fuck you up
cani get fucked up on tramadol
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all together now, kids: yeah.

will two tramadol fuck you up?
will 50mg tramadol get you fucked up
will a tramadol 50mg get you high

well, aite, not at those fucking doses. fyi, you're not gonna drown if you jump in your paddling pool, either. now isn't Heroes on TV or something?

tramadol fucked me up for 24 hours

oh, sure, come around here flaunting your obvious lack of tolerance for it. you lucky asshole.

tramadol fuck you up
tramadol fucks you up

that's our slogan. don't wear it ou - oh, wait.

fucked up on tramadol

that's you guys.

how many tramadol will mess you up??

i dunno. why don't you start taking some and find out?

why throw up tramadol

i don't know why someone would do that, little drug quester. i just don't know.

peace, love and tramadol

L

choose personal control: surrender it to us.

2009-09-11T14:45:00.005+01:00

so i was chatting with a couple straight edge kiddies, and got pointed to the sXe faq over on MIT's usenet archives. i noticed that the movement keeps describing itself as about standing up to the peer pressure and taking back personal control.

has anyone else noticed how fucking ironic that is?

we, the drug-using tribes of counterculture, don't tell you what to do. if you hang with the alt.crews here, you don't get a spliff shoved in your mouth; i pop pills, i don't make you pop pills or imply that you're not cool if you don't pop pills. they're my pills. chacun a son gout; we're all about bodily autonomy here, which means we can all choose to do or not do whatever the hell we like.

so explain to me again, sXe kids, how joining a movement that emphatically tells you what not to take is about taking back your autonomy?

L

edit: from the FAQ, 1.7 Why do kids get into straight edge?
"It doesn't FEEL good to OD."

look, you screeching pseudomoral moron. it does feel good to OD, something you'd know nothing about because you've never been in any real physical pain and needed real medicine. it feels incredibly good to overdose on an opiate - it is being pulled down into deep cushioned sleep as your pain dissipates and your mind clears into void. that's why people OD on it in the first place. that's also why it's called the white angel.

oh, but what would you know? you're too hardcore for pain meds. you can take it. you stand strong.

let's see y'all stand strong with CP. let's see you have abdominal surgery and still 'resist drugs', you sanctimonious assholes.

OMIGOD U GUISE

2009-09-10T14:36:00.002+01:00

firstly, i must be doing something right, because R. U. Sirius likes my blog. that's almost as good as having St. Gibson's stamp of approval - i'm totally fucking star-struck here. i can't imagine why cybercult kings would possibly want to read the cesspool of Tramadol and bad pop culture references that is Sapiens Anonym, but hey. i'm not complaining.

second, i'm writing an article for the fall edition of H+ magazine - a screed on "junkyard transhumanism", which is what i do, and the allure thereof.

sometimes i could swear i've been sitting in an asylum for years, shot up with happy hypos, and this is just my brain trying to come up with the best "What if my life was totally fucking awesome?" scenario it can. i'm so fucking glad to be alive.