pardon my dust

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.

an announcement:

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

Northpaw, evil scheme mk.1

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

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.

revenge on Lepht

right now, ladies and gents, i am one sick-ass motherfucker. my stomach's roiling like the North Atlantic, i'm only sitting on the floor because to get up is guaranteed to make me hurl and i personally just want to jack in to my beautiful cluster and not ever look at meatspace again.

why, you ask? well, competition.

i don't like competition. and it's nothing to do with not liking to lose - in fact, i'd prefer to have the competition be in a subject where i know i'll lose, like sports or chemistry. (you're listening to the virtual voice of Dr. Rubber-Legs Can't-Catch What's-A-Reagent itself, here.) what's sparked off all this sickness is, once again, my last ex.

w3dyt, in his wisdom, has decided that he is going to take revenge on my dain bramaged ass. i'd thought that a relationship during which: i got jealous and got between him and his new flame; he punched me, a guy literally half his size, in the damaged kidney; i seemed like a total binary-flipping psycho because i don't even know my own mind when it comes to proper relationships; he posed my unconscious body in 'funny' positions and took pictures without my consent; i told him i loved him when i couldn't possibly know that; he ratted me out to the legal authorities for doing implants as soon as he wasn't the only one i was doing them for and coldly told me in Starbucks that he did it for moral reasons; etc., etc. - i woulda thought that a relationship like that, which i should never even have started with him, would be revenge enough for both of us.

apparently not. whilst i take a lot of the responsibility on myself - for not ending the relationship as soon as i realised i was in over my head, for allowing myself to play at having emotions i'm just not really capable of, for getting jealous, a million things like that - not all of it belongs to me. we both did awful things. in w3dyt's mind, though, it seems that it was just me.

so he's decided that he's going to try and - i quote, from a twenty-year-old man - "work my ass off to beat [Lepht, academically]". he says competitiveness will give him "the edge". i break no sweat over this happening - i've been selected for a dozen things over him, including the research job i'm working right now (he didn't even get shortlisted) and founder President of the CompSci society at the University, plus i'm pretty well known at the Department and my grades are generally a lot higher than his - but it's this i'm-gonna-getchoo attitude that makes my blood freeze.

you wanna know why? because it fosters a hostile attitude towards me in general that's not gonna go away. i am indeed a med-popping, drug-addicted, virtually friendless self-implanting machinehead nutjob, and having w3dyt in all my classes, trying to find out what my grades are so he can crow if they're lower than his and hate me if they're not, telling people he's going to beat me because i'm an asshole who "prides [itself] on being top of the class" (i'm not top of the class, ever, i hover around the middle) - this is not going to make it any easier for me or indeed him to get over what happened.

in addition, i can see it engendering a common practice of grade competitiveness, and from that stems that culture that makes undergrads value themselves on their grades alone. getting a 12 when i get a 9, or vice versa, does not make the higher graded guy the better person. whether he "beats" me or not, we're still both going to be fucked up humans with serious problems to get over.

so far the best practice i can think of is what i usually do, which is to avoid revealing my scores to anyone who isn't in my immediate tribe. i'm still sick as a dog, though. to be honest the fact that he's reduced the whole situation, in his mind, to one where he is the good guy, i am the bad guy, and he will work hard and beat me like some Hollywood high school movie, just hurts. even though i vehemently dislike w3dyt, i'd hoped to see him do something more mature than that.

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.

god damnit

i'm reading Dune again, because i'm meant to be studying for finals, but the fact that Paul is both the name of the main d00d and the never-used real name of a good buddy of mine is messing up my mental images. i keep visualising said /b/tard buddy saying things that would make him do the People's Eyebrow in confusion and making myself laugh.

stupid social circle ruins my nerd fun.

oh fuck

child on the bus Tuesday, pointing at me with something like horror: "Ma! Look! An alien!"

nurse in the Human Nutrition lab where i was angling for free experimental chocolate today, whilst butterfly-needling my freeloading ass: "Oh God, you can feel it in there," and poking one of my implants around, "Sheila, have you felt this? Come and see this."

i've become exhibitable.

cheer up emo kid

woke up this morning after dreaming that i never broke up with w3dyt, never had anything wrong with my head, never got punched, never had a fight, never got my trust broken, never got ratted out and cut off by the suppliers and had to change my hair and tell my guineapig to fuck off and all that shit, dreaming that we were just chilling on the couch with a couple sodas and some junk, playing the 360 and talking bullshit and it was all like it used to be.

then i woke up, and it doesn't happen often, but for a few seconds my slice of the world looked like a steaming heap of freshly-dumped crap.

so this is a list of some of the shit i do when i'm feeling like ass, stuff i picked up in the hospital, at university and just living - shit i know works for me. maybe it'll work for other people too.

0000. cook stuff. last time it went kinda wrong and what i ended up with was snickerdoodles that were better off being put to use as blunt weapons, and the image of your favourite crippled junkie wetware hacker baking cookies is probably fucking hilarious (it sure as hell amused my meatspace peeps), but seriously, cook, make a fucking turkey dinner or whatever. it takes your mind off the bullshit and it gives you a sense of achievement at the end, even if you're as shit at it as i am.

0001. hot bath. enough said.

0010. write novels, paint your room, get a sketchbook, do something creative. program something new, work out some bugs in your favourite open source app. update your monochromatic technology-and-life-related blog that nobody reads. doesn't matter if all you end up producing is a meg-and-a-half of Marty Stu's Adventures in I Am So Great Land, or an IDEful of code that does precisely bupkis, or sixteen pages of scribbled-out monstrosities that not only don't look like the woman you were trying to sketch but would probably make her hit you; it's the effort that does it, you put all the bad that's drifting around your head into what you're doing instead of leaving it there to stew. there's also less conventional creative outlets - my implant jam sessions, for instance, or tattoo design, or planning piercings. make a topiary out of your drunken friend's hair if it makes you feel better.

0011. actually, just do things. chores, laundry, jogging, work, it's all good, cause occupying your brain rather than sitting there is useful.

0100. talk to somebody about what's going on. got a crew, a best friend? if not, you've got a counsellor, or a GP who can get you to one for free.

0101. make sure you've taken all the shit you're supposed to take. i used to get pretty down sometimes when i was really depressed, and believe me, not taking the pills they want you to doesn't help. of course, if you're a normal healthy person, you don't need to worry. get out and do some exercise, you healthy fuck. (kidding, kidding!)

0110. if you've got access to a fuckbuddy, sex will shoot you up with dopamine and endorphines good and proper. if you've got a proper partner with all that hug-me, support-me, hold-me-as-i-fall-asleep jazz, you don't need advice from the likes of my loveless ass.

0111. comfort. i personally don't know what to do for this one, but i'm told by lots of professionals that it's necessary. maybe you've got a soft blanket or a comfy couch you like to lie on; maybe you've got a bull terrier puppy to hug or something, or a giant sweater, whatever comforts you best. (if you'd like to send me a bull terrier puppy to hug...) some of us with broken heads might think that acting on the problem is itself a comfort.

1000. acting on the problem, then: you got bills, start budgeting. you're ill, start planning how to manage it. you got unresolved conflicts in your past that have led to your chronic manic depressive disorder in the present, get to a shrink.

1001. don't do any of the following: hire whores; get wasted (it's a depressant, it's not gonna fucking help); get high if you get stupid, depressed, caught or murderous when you're high; talk to the person who caused all your emotional problems if that's what happened (trust me); go shopping; comfort eat or stop eating at all; paint your room black and decide that Ville Valo is your new idol; start wearing guyliner; put any fiction you've written on the Wired; drop out of university / quit your job. i warned you.

so that's what i do, anyway. anyone got any better suggestions? - L

naive

so i got punched over the weekend. no big deal, you're thinking, suck it up, you weakling; thing is, it was w3dyt. the guy who was one of my best buddies, who i trusted pretty much with anything, smashed me one in the back - him being twice my strength and a whole fucking lot taller, me being just in a towel at the time and having refused to sleep with him. i got a fist-sized bruise on my goddamn ribs now.

basically, i'm fucked when it comes to fighting. i have no built-up muscle. i'm five foot three, i weigh 115 - i'm a featherweight at best, an immunocompromised wimp in reality. pretty much anyone i know could kick my sorry ass in a fistfight, and even though he only hit me once, i was so fucking shocked i didn't even hit him back. i'm ashamed to say i started crying, took a shitload of my pain pills to KO myself and slept on the floor, just with a blanket. i haven't talked to him since.

it's pathetic, but i felt so fucking betrayed. he was my best buddy, like a brother to me, and he did that just because i wouldn't fuck him. i trust my crew with everything - with the meat when i'm unconscious, with money, with my house keys, fucking everything - they're part of my family, and the idea that a brother would wanna hurt me never came into my head.

i guess i'm just too fucking naive.

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.

objections

so i'm sitting in the lecture theatre yesterday, playing with the magnetic stylus for my touch phone, pushing and pulling it along the desk without touching it like i'm Uri fucking Geller and generally not paying attention to anything else. this important work for the cause of the betterment of humanity is interrupted halfway through the lecture by a terrified whisper of, "Lepht, what are you doing?" from one of my housemates, say D, who's sitting next to me. she's a great caring type, but cybernetics isn't her bag at all and turns out she didn't know i had the neodymium.

"Psychic powers," i tell her as seriously as i can, and give myself away with my usual i'm-not-lying-guv shiteating grin. when i showed her the scar on my fingertip, she twigged that it was another backstreet modification, and freaked. holy shit, do people around here hate the idea of implants. in D's case, it's 'unnatural'; but i get a lot of people who have a lot of weird reasons for telling me i should stop experimenting with these things. viz.

1. That's just disgusting/scary/weird.
i get this one most of all, and it's the one i understand the least. i can get that self-surgery would be disgusting to watch, or maybe even to think of, if you were a squeamy bastard. but why is it disgusting for me to have implants if you don't have to watch the surgery? are people with pacemakers and blood glucose meters disgusting? same with 'scary'. are you afraid of people with artificial legs? if not, why are you so scared of me, and if so, what the fuck is wrong with you?
as for 'weird', well, brand me with a W. of course it's considered weird before everyone's adopted it.

2. There's no point until you have (insert ridiculously advanced technology here).
i've talked about this one before. saying we shouldn't experiment with cybernetics until robot shells and cyberjacks have been invented is like saying that we shouldn't have experimented with canoes until nuclear-powered destroyers were around. we've got components, soldering guns and minds, what's the holdup?

3. You don't know what you're doing. You'll hurt yourself.
well, yeah, i probably would hurt myself if i just jumped in at the deep end of each project and went for self-surgery before i'd designed the systems. i'd also get a lot more work done a lot quicker if doctors could do all the surgery for me, but that ain't gonna happen, so i don't have an alternative. it's not a reason to stop, it's a reason to be really fucking careful and study the anatomy of an area properly before i site things.
and if i knew what i was doing, i wouldn't call it research, as they say.

4. You're going to lose your humanity and become a soulless robot.
demonstrate to me that i have a soul to lose and i'll accept your evidence that cybernetics will make me lose mine. you do have evidence of those things, right?

5. It's not natural.
neither is chemotherapy. next objection.

6. You're just an undergraduate.
yeah, i am. in fact, i'm an undergraduate repeating an entire year, and my grades aren't at the very top of the class. but a degree doesn't magically confer the ability to do science, and if i can experiment now, why should i wait? if this means i can get some interesting system working two or three years earlier, what difference does it make whether i'm Lepht Anonym or Lepht Anonym, BSc?

i'll probably hear more than this before my career is over. i hope i do; it'd mean i got somewhere and did something worth criticising.

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.

lepht can has job?

i actually have a paid form of employment now, which is why nobody's seen me for about a month now. i've got so much shit to catch up on... but man, it's awesome to be employed again. i'm now a researcher with the University until September, when i have to go back to my undergrad degree - basically, a hardware junkie. i'm helping out with a project using RFID to help severely disabled kids tell stories about what happened during their day at school, as the project's resident clankie - seriously, this is one of the best jobs i've ever done. i can has job!

unplugged

so i'm sat in the lab, trying to follow Baal's Bum through Genesis. this isn't an easy task, especially when you've already slogged through the fucker once and you're opiated up to the nipples, and especially when you're unplugged.

that's right, it's Mental Detox Week, the seven days in every year when people like me, who fucking hate adverts, get yelled at by Kalle Lasn to turn the damn electricals off before we rot our modern brains out around our crappy, overpriced iPod headphones. i'm following it, as it happens, but not by choice.

you've all (both of you) seen me bitching and ranting about passing out in random places. it happens on the street too, and turns out that's not so good for all the shit in my pockets. i have no fucking clue how i didn't figure out this was gonna happen before it did, cause it's pretty damn obvious when you think about it, but in the space of three days i've smashed the shit out of the little iPod someone really close to me gave me a few years ago, and my one and only piece of computer hardware, my Fedora Core 8 laptop. they're both totalled, and it's 100% my own stupid junkie fault.

so i'm on my fourth day now with no Linux and no music, and holy crap am i feeling it. i'm so sick of the Windows XP boxes in the labs that i honestly have no idea how i managed to use this operating system, let alone try and hack anything with it, for so long. i'm also on the verge of stabbing someone with my penknife (yeah, all four centimetres of blunt blade we're allowed to carry here in Europe's favourite police state) - i never realised how obnoxious people are when you can hear them.

Kalle, man, you're not convincing me.

L

paracetamol

part of my pain control regime is Remedeine Forte, the 30mg kind, otherwise known as dihydrocodeine tartrate. it's got a little booklet taped shut to the front of the bottle, so when you finally get the fucker open, you find out each 30mg dose of useful opiate also comes with its synergistic ingredient, paracetamol (or acetaminophen for you Yanks).

drug synergy is pretty cool. it's a phenomenon whereby the effects of two synergistic drugs are more, when they're combined, than the effects of taking them both separately. that is to say, paracetamol-dihydrocodeine is stronger than paracetamol and then dihydrocodeine.

there's just one thing. i take anywhere from two to five of these fuckers in a day, with the aid of a lot of Coke and Jaffa Cakes. so, 500*4, let's say...

that's an average in a day of two grams of paracetamol. my liver must be crying.

me, i'm laughing; this stuff's starting to affect me less negatively than it did, i have no exams to pass this year at all (being a cripple), and i'm full of caffeine. it's freezing in here, too, and thanks to the side-effects of said synergy, i can't even feel that. more temperature implant musings at some point.

L

withdrawal

i'm trying to deal with the above motherfucker right now (it being 2:52 in the morning) and it's not working. if you know kiddies who think it's cool to be addicted to opiates, and i do, do me a favour and slap them out of it; this is what you get. pain that's worse than the one you're taking the fucking things for. insomnia cranked up to utter sleeplessness. physical and psychological total dependence on a drug to which your body becomes more resistant day by day, just as day by day you need it more and more, and the doctors become less and less willing to give it to you. you eat too much, you drink too much, you can't work or think or do anything worth doing, and you know it isn't going to get better. i fucking hate this.

anyway, my point is that there are ways of dealing with it, they just don't always work (like tonight). in an attempt to distract myself, i'm sharing my, uh 'wisdom' when it comes to coping with either withdrawal or severe pain - same strategy, different applications. in no particular order:

- distractions. you can't erase pain, but you can make your brain think about something else at the same time. whatever you do don't just lie there hoping it will get better; that way you have no distractions and you just make it worse. internet shopping is good, so is doing your core comps or chilling with your buddies. hit ICQ and talk to someone.

- the old English cure. where i'm from, if you told someone you had terminal leukaemia, their response would be Poor cunt. Sit down and have a cup of tea. laced with Russian Standard, it actually works pretty fucking well, i gotta say.

- get your ass in the hot shower. sounds stupid, but it helps, especially if you got a shower radio (i find some Subway to Sally helps. get it on the Pirate Bay!)

- of course, if you could get your hands on some wimbawe, everyone knows it has a medicinal effect. unfortunately everyone also knows the government hates wimbawe and all who sail on it.

- don't get wasted (a little overeasy is fine). it doesn't help and the combination of alcomahol and drug withdrawal will just make you throw up. likewise try and fight the compulsion to overeat, as you won't throw up, you'll just bloat and sit there for nine hours feeling like you need to throw up.

- play some Xbox if you have it, or Amiga or whatever. personally i don't have any of that shit, but if i did, it'd sure fucking help.

so yeah, gonna try and sleep some now. i'll probably be back before long with more inane, self-pitying tripe.

L

things i didn't know before yesterday:

01. red meat is bad for you. seriously. the studies say so, the dieticians say so - why aren't we told? red meat is constantly pushed at me as healthy, and i'm trying to lose eight fucking kilos here.

02. scottish tablet is also really, really fucking bad for you, and tastes like a goddamn hug in a bar.

i'm gonna stab my dietician some day.

L

boku wa user ga hanasemasen

man, i now know what the word overload truly means. i'm trying to make a C program display tag output correctly, prototype a game-selling system interface, build (and understand) analogue sensors for my team's stupid-ass Lego robot, figure out how many photons per second are given off by a fucking 200W lightbulb (undergraduate quantum physics course), do laundry, read Anderson's seminal security engineering text, fix my damn Atheros card and calculate a dosage of dihydrocodeine that results in neither me bitchslapping my robotics team because the pain is pissing me off nor passing out in the corridors and getting groped and/or looted by the unscrupulous. it's a riot, sure, i'm as wired as i've ever been without the use of schmethamphetamines (fuck you, Google spider), but without stimulants, i just fucking collapse.

so instead of actually working, i'd like to point y'all to LSO's challenge server, challenge.learnsecurityonline.com. that's why i'm still up at 3:30: it feels so good to get root, you'll forgo sleep.

which leads me to my actual point: techheads are always percieved as being isolated from "real life" (i'm not gonna go into the semantic idiocy of that phrase right now), but up until now i've seen that as a kind of stupid myth. this last month or so has really changed my mind.

starting up, people's reactions to the kind of shit that doesn't even get a shrug from a hacker. the chip in my hand inspires about 1 "hey that's cool" or "you could use that for X random application" for every 99 "oh my god that's so fucking gross get that the fuck out of your body you fucking headcase". i've been seeing weird discrepancies in how tech people react to the world compared to the machine-illiterate, too: walking into a classroom with two unlabelled doors, i say to the guy next to me, "you know, that's really bad interface design", and then realise that's a fucking stupid thing to think. likewise, i keep trying to hit Ctrl-C Ctrl-V when faced with having to copy out bits of meatspace paper, and forgetting not to use the word meatspace when that's where i am, and i know there are guys out there way worse than me.

the problem is, that doesn't only isolate you from students, it gives tech itself a bad image. it also makes it virtually impossible to interact with endusers and clients meaningfully - you write in your docs, "bitsetq -a -f -x -q" and your users look at you and go, "hay lepht wtf is terminal anyways?" equally, students who listen to you won't ask questions if they hear one huge pile of jargon and unfamiliar concepts, they just give up. i'm gonna have to learn to act like a normal human being if i wanna deal with these people, and that's a huge part of what my job involves.

i think i've been in denial about that, trying to convince myself i think the same way as a social scientist or a historian, and it's seeming more and more like i was bullshitting myself. i guess we all gotta learn to speak user; seems to me like otherwise, users won't speak to us.

L