alright for fighting

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."

google before you post

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

dear searcher

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

this, folks, is why Darwin was correct.

L

borg schmorg

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

search engine blues

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

irritating thing of the day:

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

VICTORY, amongst other things

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

choose personal control: surrender it to us.

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.

straight edge

my crappy, can't-handle-finals-week immune system can't fight off glandular fever, so i've been pretty damn sick this week. illness kinda sucks ass: a week on your ass, losing ridiculous amounts of weight because your throat hurts too much to even swallow liquids, not being able to breathe properly (it was that that made me call the NHS, contra to my advice to other people about not being an over-macho i-can-take-it asshole and letting yourself get horribly ill), dehydration because you can't drink and if you do you vomit and you've got diarrhoea, yada yada.

the plus side was i got an entire stash of Kupkakes* - 30mg cocodamol, an excellent little drug that works excellently for pain.

that got me thinking. i don't use the Kupkakes recreationally, though i sure as hell could - aside from their analgesic/antipyretic effects, they'll calm you down and make you walk around floating on a cushion of chill, but they're far too valuable to me as a chronic pain patient to waste on chilling. i was looking at one the day before yesterday in an attempt to psyche myself up for swallowing it (yesterday was the first day i could eat solid food, and since then i've been fucking golden), and i remembered the stash of Rx Kupkakes one of my exes has.

i have a few ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, but most have been from my side of life - alternatives, sort of. i think i'm just attracted to that willingness to try anything; well, this ex - call him Will, names changed to protect the fucking guilty - was sort of an anomaly. had ink and piercings, sure, less than me but a few, and weird hair like yours truly - but Will's a straight edger.

this was sort of a shock to me when i found out, after we first started dating, but i figured hey, if the man doesn't tell me what i can and can't do with my own meat, i'm not gonna tell him what he should do with his. it was only after we had a conversation in which it transpired that if i got seriously ill and resorted to cannabis for pain relief, he'd leave me no matter how ill i was, that i realised there's something kinda fucked up about this straight edge philosophy.

for a start, i reject the argument that the philosophy bans things because they fuck you up. the SxE list of 'banned' substances is... well, sorta arbitrary. tobacco, recreational drugs, alcohol. some of them are also vegetarian, some don't approve of any drugs at all - no fucking paracetamol with one kiddie i heard about on the grapevine - some just stay away from those Big Three. but why just those three? just because they're common? why doesn't SxE doctrine ban fried food, standing right in front the speakers, skinny dipping, high heels or not taking your insulin on time? personally i believe people have a right to fuck themselves up, and to make their own judgements in what's acceptable levels of fucked-up. it's called bodily autonomy.

there's another thing. i see no reason to make an entire militant philosophy out of not doing something nobody is making you do. you don't smoke? well, i quit too. now i'm more stressed, less broke and no lung cancer. grats. you don't drink? welcome to the United Arab Emirates. i just don't get it why it needs a symbol and vigilantes and a movement.

third, i reject the idea that drug use is always bad and the only reasons people have for taking are peer pressure and thinking it's cool. i don't know a single fucker who's ever used anything because they wanted to be one of the cool kids; the cool kids don't even need to do that shit in my experience. the people i used to hang out with had the same problems as i and the rest of the city did: some were in pain, some had survived awful shit in their lives, some were addicts, some wanted the rush. using whatever was just one solution. all of us did some stupid things, but we sure as hell weren't doing it for acceptance in the goddamn playground. to reject drugs on that precept is over-simplifying to a ridiculous degree.

the lifetime commitment thing bothers me, too. i respect people trying to make a commitment to something, but i worry when i see them trying to make a promise for life. like a marriage, i think you can't enter into a contract like that knowing for sure that you're never going to feel any other way, even if you really don't think you will; so when you've got an X tattooed on the back of your hand and you find that, shit son, you can't pay the NHS for your pain pills and you've got nothing to keep that tide of hurt away, i don't think you can honour a lifetime promise never to do drugs without putting yourself through pain for no real reason.

last up, the militancy - i don't have a problem with SxE kiddies who just don't drink, smoke or do drugs themselves; they wanna protect their meatshells, and we disagree only on the best way to do that and the acceptable tradeoff between protection and other benefits. i have a problem with those like Will, people who look down on friends having a drink together, people who decide to make you pick between them and relief from the screaming abyss of agony where your guts used to be. my personal choices are mine alone; if you think they're wrong, we'll have a debate, but sneering straight-edgers with a squeaky superiority complex aren't good at that sort of debate. if you think my choices should be restricted because people around me are emotionally hurt by them, you can think again. everyone has the right to do legal things without fear that they'll hurt or offend others and be thrown in jail; what i don't have the right to do is physically, actually hurt someone.

if my pain control makes me go off the rails and kill someone, it's my fault and i deserve to go down for it, because i should've been more responsible in choosing better drugs and locking my arse away while i was on them. if i take acid because i wanna know more about myself so i take a bungload of PCP and i freak out and gouge out one of my eyes, i don't get to the top of the waiting list for a new one any time soon, and that's fair. but if i'm not hurting anyone, i don't need a lecture from some sanctimonious, cleaner-than-thou punk.

L


* Kupkakes are called that because they say KAP|AKE on the pill, as well as because when you're feverish, your muscles are screaming and you can't sleep, four of them are the sweetest thing in the Universe save the white angel.

on squeamies

squeamie, noun: peep who doesn't want anything to do with implanted technology because of the eeew factor. take the guy who saw me submitting a paper at the CSD offices a couple weeks ago, sorting through the pages with the massive paperclip i was gonna need stuck to the back of my hand on a nodule. gross factor triggered when he realised what the deal was, and eeew guy was out of there, making the squeamie face.

it's not a good thing to be afflicted with, the squeam. i remember my first back-of-the-hand cannula - they leave an impression for about a day after you remove them, and i was fucking horrified. i couldn't look at it, kept the whole thing hidden under a dressing and threw up the first time i touched it. i thought it was a leftover needle that had got stuck in there (i think i mentioned it before here, but i forget...) see, i used to have this problem with subdermal critters - still do - and it fucked me up.

what gets rid of the problem is exposure. after that first cannula, the others didn't seem so bad - that kid i used to be, who screamed bloody murder when there were maggots and blowflies in the yard bin, is now me; i've cut out stitches with a penknife and forced metallic bits of crap inside my own flesh and tolerated all kinds of medical bullshit. you can be an ex-squeamie.

so get out there, ladies. show off your subderms, frighten some normals. you're helping in the long run.

L

Maxwell's equations, or when to shut up

Professor James Clerk Maxwell, 1831-1879: dude united electricity and magnetism in Maxwell's equations, and taught pretty fucking close to where i live, at Marischal College, part of the University of Aberdeen (wasn't at the time, but whatever.) his equations for electromagnetism are based on Gauss, Ampere and Faraday's work; Maxwell synthesised their ideas into a unified theory. smart dude.

so i'm sitting in Physics 2512 a while ago, learnin' about said smart dude and how he's ONE OF US SILVER CITY SCUM and therefore even smarter by comparison, surrounded by physics majors whose intellectual acumen for the subject far exceeds mine (mine's limited to generating overly verbose descriptions of lessons rather than actually absorbing them.) luckily, i've sat next to dumbfuck, who would've made a good gymnast or something but is definitely not a physicist - beautiful, thin and clearly not getting it. even more luckily, i'm none of that there triad.

"I don't get how an electric field and a magnetic field can be the same." dumbfuck shuffles her papers in disgusted bafflement at the very idea.

"It's not," i say (i talk like i type, monotonously and drug-addledly.) "Electric fields generate magnetic fields, vice versa." it's a tutorial class, so to my excitement and everyone else's chagrin, we're allowed to talk, which means i'm allowed to inflict my shit on other people. "If you make a magnetic field change, it makes an electrical field. You make an electric field change, you get a magnetic one." i am of course paraphrasing Wikipedia's Maxwell's equations, but she doesn't know that. she sorta nods. cool, i think, you're teaching, Lepht!

so i carry on. "That's how this RFID chip works," i explain, and i poke the chip under my skin (you can see it move, and it's visible at rest too since the anaemia got bad.) "Reader emits an electrical field, generates a magnetic go-between field, generates another electrical field in the chip. Chip sends an identification value to the reader - no batteries," and i must've sounded pretty proud of that, i guess, even though i didn't have fuck all to do with creating it. "It's passive power. Never runs out."

i coulda stopped there, since dumbfuck was looking pretty freaked out (she turned out to be one of those doesn't-like-subdermal-stuff squeamies), but no, my stupid ass decided to carry on. "That's how all these neodyms work as well," and i continue my in-your-face poking of various non-flesh body parts. "You get near an EM field, it generates a little current in 'em, makes your hands tingle. Like this," and i hit Ctrl-C on my notes, point to the spot under the backtick key where the HDD is, "you can tell if the hard drive is active that way. It's cool, no?"

she did not think it was cool. i gotta learn when to shut the fuck up.

the everyday life - it burns

i keep burning myself on everyday objects because of my crapped-out addict's brain. today i've clocked up shower burn, dishwater burn, steam burn from the fucking kettle and two counts of that-drink-is-too-hot-you-junkie-moron burn.

i really gotta sort this out. i'm hurting myself with coffee.

a hint:

when making certain disgusting, acidic homebrew concoctions out of (airquotes) decorative plant matter, for the love of fuck, never add aspartame. jesus fucking christ, and i thought it was bad unsweetened.

implants! aliens! vampires! STAY IN YOUR HOMES

so i was googling to see what other people have come up with in the way of homebrew implanted technology. what i discovered is that a few have neodyms like me, a few have RFID chipped themselves (fewer of us seem to do that than have the neodyms, weirdly) and there's not a lot else out there.

what i also found is that far, far more of them are batshit, underpants-on-head insane.

take one Sherry Shriner, for instance. there's something seriously wrong going on here; something, in fact, that looks a lot like classical schizophrenia to me, although i'm pretty sure i'd get called a "black op" for saying that in these nutjobs' world. Sherry's convinced that aliens put implants in your fucking ears.

not only that, but Sherry is also telling everyone that neodymium - that's right, Nd-60, the same element ensconced in several places under the skin of my hands as i type, right goddamn next to my EM4102 RFID chip - can deactivate microchips.

the hell it can, lady. i could go demonstrate if i wanted to. people, Nd doesn't deactivate microanything, but it will wipe your credit cards if you get a bigass one like these idiots are asking you to Paypal them for.

on a totally unrelated note, i'm getting sick of this sparkly teenage vampire film Twilight that's drifting around - it just made it over to Europa a couple weeks ago, and already i'm getting the shit. three separate people have accused me of looking like one of the sparkly vampire characters - apparently i'm pale enough to be considered actually undead now.

you'd think a ugly motherfucker like me would escape the whole OMG LESTAT IS KEWT treatment, but no - either i have a self-esteem problem, or the actor that plays this Alice Cullen character is uglier than i would've assumed. i'ma just bite the next person that says it and see if any more people think i'm fucking sparkly.

L
(would prefer a blood transfusion, seriously)

dear wankers:

it's fucking snowing. do not linger in the doorway of the fucking coffee shop for ten minutes trying to decide whether you're gonna come in, holding the door open the whole time as you deliberate over entry.

fuckers.

can you snort solpadol?

that search somehow directed some idiot to me, the amateur cyberneticist / white hat with an even more amateur interest in pharmacology. sir, you can snort as much solpadol as you want, and it won't absorb any quicker through your nose than it would through your guts. it's not fucking cocaine.

if you really want it in your system quickly, grind it to a powder and chug it dissolved in a can of Relentless. don't blame me when you OD on rapidly-metabolised codeine and they hospitalise your stupid ass.

transhumanism and pain

i mentioned last time people's objections to cybernetics, specifically one that has to do with humanity. it's a common idea that the more someone works with technology, especially implants and biotechnology, the less 'human' they get; hence the usual stereotype of a cyborg as an uncaring, robotic soldier, the creation of irresponsible scientists in some sterile white laboratory. i often get flak about "losing my humanity", and although i don't exactly agree with it, i think that stereotype is where it comes from, and also from people's equation of 'human' with 'natural'. images of the enhanced tend to include assumptions like cyborgs will all be contemptuous of unmodified humans and cyborgs will want to make everyone into other cyborgs and even cyborgs will be people who have lost their feelings and ability to empathise with unmodified humans, which is more widespread than you'd think. damn you, Hollywood, for filling people's heads with this crap and making them less willing to accept real technological advances. damn you. there's only one tiny grain of truth in that picture, and that's the unfeeling part.

i don't mean that i'm an uncaring jerk because i have an interest in cybernetics. i'm a jerk with an interest in transhumanism, just like i'm a jerk who eats chocolate spread straight outta the jar; they're unconnected. what i do mean is that this shit really raises your pain tolerance, as well as making you seriously reexamine your concept of not damaging your body. i noticed that yesterday, when i was reopening a wound on my hand with a scalpel to stop it healing over before i could get a skin diver into it. the wounds are made with a biopsy punch, and i'd inserted a no.10 blade horizontally and swivelled it round under the skin in a circle, having gotten all the way to pulling out the loosened flesh and clots with a pair of tweezers before it occurred to me that maybe that's kind of fucking weird, and a normal person would have just put a plaster on it and given up on that piercing until they could get it redone. me, i bought another diver and reinserted it myself; after the magnet, and with me planning to do nine more in the comfort of my own home, it just didn't register as painful. or rather, it did, but i just don't care anymore. it needs to be done, damage in the short term that conveys an advantage in the long term.

so, You're gonna hurt yourself isn't really a valid objection either. i know. i don't mind hurting myself in exchange for a little more knowledge. in order to get subdermal components in place, right now a scalpel is necessary. in order to get transdermal ones to stay in place, you're gonna need to make incisions. the pain is bad at the start, but the longer i do this kind of thing and the more experiments i do, the less i seem to care about the pain at all. eventually i don't think i'll even consider it to hurt.

cybernetics: if you're not in pain, you're not doing enough science.

to the general public:

yes, that is me biting a hole in my arm on the street. yes, those are all bitemarks up my limbs. yes, that is what people like me do when we get that fucking frustrated; i can't do anything else, unless you want me to take it out on one of you instead of on myself, or you wanna see me smash my head into a wall instead. i used to do that before i realised it was fucking my career up. so please, don't give me that 'Please don't bite me, Lepht, you fucking psychopath' stare on the street; i can't help it, alright?

... okay, i'm done. just getting my angries out, like they say. i gotta start again, again, and i'm a little down about it - i've been upchucking my pills, my food, all the acid in my stomach every day for about the last month and a half, and pretty much feeling shit for it. as a consequence, my partner hasn't let me outta his sight for about that long as well, so i've been living out of a carrier bag like a transient in a place with no connection and i've had no way to carry on with studying hacking. so like i said, i gotta start again; i feel like such a useless douche when i'm not learning, especially since i don't have the natural talent most hackers do.

so, i'm gonna start again, again. gotta go reintroduce myself on my old hangouts, gotta review what my head's half-forgotten and the drugs have half-erased. i've got so many buddies to get back in touch with, and a hell of a lot to apologise for, but Lepht Anonym ain't dead yet.

L

ps. to the other guy called Lepht, two things. 1. i'm sorry, but i can't give up my name, it's my name too. 2. if there's anything else i can do, let me know. i don't want hard feelings over this.

found bigotry

usually, Truthdig is a really nice Yankee politics resource. i use it to get a non-Fox viewpoint on American current events, and usually it serves me well.

until today. i'm reading The Left has Lost its Way, a report by Chris Hedges - yeah, the same author of I Don't Believe in Atheists, which is too fucking stupid for me to give you links to. Hedges is a bigot in his own right, in that he doesn't believe atheists can even be taken seriously in our core statement ("I don't believe in gods,") but he quotes someone who rivals Vox Day for pure idiocy, one Susan Thistlethwaite:

“The other side has religion, and we need some,” said the Rev. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary. “We need a more robust understanding of the role of religious values, values that prevent us from compromising the sanctity and dignity of human life. The left, because it is largely secular, did not do enough as the working class was finished off. And now the same thing is happening with the middle class. It is the loss of the left’s spiritual resources that has crippled the movement. The left forgot that nations, like individuals, have souls. Once you sell your soul, it is hard to get it back. History is not linear. History is about constant struggle. It is the struggle, if you come out of faith, which matters.”

ignorance doesn't begin to define the attitude of someone who can blame secularism for the US' political ills, not to mention tout blind faith in primitive literature as the cure.

once again. secularism is what the Founding Fathers wanted. it is what makes Europe a good place to live. it is what makes countries great. it is not a religion, or a strategy by the left-wing conspiracy, or a product of Satan. fucking deal with it.

L

Microsoft's statistical technique

from a ZDNet Vista article:

"It's a myth that users click 'yes,' 'yes,' 'yes,' 'yes,'" said Cross. "Seven percent of all prompts are canceled. Users are not just saying 'yes.'"

yep. 93% of them don't cancel their prompts, but they don't all cancel them! UAC ROCKS!

L