red carpet premiere

Paul finally finished his Master's degree and got the mark for it last Friday - a Distinction overall, since all the individual marks he got were also Distinction grades - so i can pass around the documentary he made now (embedded above).

huge thanks to everyone who helped make the film: Kevin Warwick, Jenova Rain and Vicarious for their interviews, Meredith Thomas for the vintage portrait sketch that was used for the title card, Klayton (of Celldweller) for allowing the use of his music for the soundtrack, and the biohacking community at large for ideas, feedback and suggestions. i apologise if anyone sent content to Paul or me and it didn't end up in the film - there was a very strict limit on how long the film was allowed to be, meaning that a lot of things we wanted to feature couldn't be kept in without it being too long. i actually do have a dusty youtube channel somewhere, however, so i plan to upload the interviews as separate films; that way you can see the full unedited versions as well if you want.

[aside: i read the feedback sheet that Paul got handed and was extremely surprised to note that his tutor, Richard, actually uses "they/them" to talk about me even when there's like zero chance i will see what he's writing which is generally not how it goes down and is also very sweet. you're a diamond Richard - even though i would probably get into academic slap fights with you over postmodernism ("is it a crock of shit? discuss.") you can learn my pronouns any time, shitlord. sorry about pretending i was not schtupping your star pupil.]

in other Paul-related news he is still kind of fucked. a CT scan showed there is a problem with his intestines, but some more... invasive... tests are required before they know exactly what that problem is or what's causing it. the next test is coming up in a week or so but until then he still can't eat solid food and is in quite a bit of pain and discomfort. i've passed on all the messages you sent to me about him, so he knows there's well wishers out there. hopefully Ganesh sends some good luck Paul's way and gets him back to health soon. (Ganesh is the god of biohackers, obviously.)

amusingly enough, Paul has needed to take some Tramadol, which you all know will fuck you up.

in any case, the homebrewed documentary i first heard about from a cute and enthusiastic Goth boy five years ago is finally actually filmed and released - he titled it "Lepht Anonym: Biohacker", so if my embed up there isn't working or you for some incomprehensible reason don't like my eye-watering tiny white text on a black background, you can find it on youpoop at his channel, Voxis Productions. you can also watch some offensive puppet humour if you're bored (i recommend it!)

more to come. i am still working on a quick guide to the various chips/tags you can buy to put inside yourself - types, what em do, installation, etc etc. i have also gone back to my online security course after having to take a break for mental health reasons, which worries me a lot, but i can't take breaks forever. i might put digests of what i've been studying up here, since it's hacking-related stuff. watch this space if you like that sort of thing.


carpe corporem

L

it doesn't even have a title!

once again i find myself apologising for the lack of blog-related content. the last two months or so have been utterly hectic: as you know, i was still staying with my folks after my attempt to do a second try at a University degree failed for lack of £27,000 in tuition fees, and when i last updated i was still there. since then my parents embarked on a massive house move: they decided to move to a different house in the same little town, someone else snapped it up, then their house was still on the market, they started looking further and further afield and ended up buying this tiny smallholding near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. (it turns out you can buy a lot more in Wales for the money.) there was a lot of drama whilst all this was up in the air: house viewings all the time where we'd have to scrub the whole place and hoover everything and hide all the personal stuff and take all three of my mum's dogs out of the house, the stupid old bat who eventually bought the place requiring four of said viewings, showing up unannounced, constantly threatening to pull out of the deal, etc. the move also necessitated my mum selling her wool shop business, my dad moving the whole premises of the little business he ran to an office on their new property, my brother (who works for my dad) and his partner and their two very very young kids also moving to Wales to live in the annexe attached to the new house, my great-grandma moving in with my Nan for health reasons, and my parents (and their large collection of animals) living in her empty house for a month or so with all their stuff in storage before they could even get to Wales. during all this, i wasn't sure where i could go or what would happen. eventually, after a massively stressful search for housing that would take itinerant losers as tenants, i found a flat.

so i am now in Kings Norton, Birmingham. truly a cyberpunk metropolis. please to not send anything to the previous address in Thornbury as the old bat will end up with it and frankly i would like to kick her in the ovaries rather than inadvertently give her gifts. if anyone would like the new address for sending letters, news, free anthrax etc., i'm happy to send it to you via email. my PayPal is still at a.mason.06@aberdeen.ac.uk, and i'm still at the same email address and Twitter page.

my parents helped move all the crap in & i have now sorted out rent, bills, council tax etc. & am fully set up in here. now that i have my own place rather than just staying in the spare room of someone else's house, i'm a lot more free to continue/restart projects, collaborate, talk etc. on biohacking stuff. you can't really do experimental surgery in a tiny house that has lots and lots of pets.

other things what is interesting: a while back, the people who make the graphic novel series Metal Made Flesh named a biohacker character after me (sort of, they called the hacker Leift Antonym). as you can see below, she doesn't look anything like yours fugly. it was seriously flattering though, even if she does get murdered horribly and forgotten over the course of the plot. it's a very well written book, i loved the art and the world they show is a sort of transhuman purgatory; i'd definitely recommend it to fellow weirdos.

the documentary is (still) an ongoing work, which had to go on hiatus while we were all running around worrying about somewhere to live. Paul's supervisor on his degree programme is on board, and his degree will be completed next year, so by that time the doc in its final form will be finished and ready to... go on YouTube i spose. he is working on it as his degree thesis project, which gives him access to pro equipment and editing machines plus other bonuses & will make it a better film in the end. he wants to make it clear that there's nothing to prevent anyone else filming whatever they want - i've not signed any bullshit non-disclosure agreements or confidentiality stuff, he's not paying me, and there's no agreed-on exclusivity, so anyone else who wants to interview and/or film stuff about my work is welcome to. if anyone still even remembers i had a blog.

health crap: it turns out that methadone in liquid form is not actually licenced for use with pain patients! so i had to switch to capsules instead. they're easier to deal with. this is a temporary thing: because methadone is a. massively stigmatised, such that pharmacists/nurses/etc tend to assume i am a heroin addict in treatment, and b. a pain in the arse to get hold of owing to the weird distribution requirements for pharmacies, i will soon be seeing a pain management consultant here to talk about switching back to a small dose of morphine or whatever. i found out there's a cool adjunct called nefopam which should potentiate the morphine allowing me to take less meds and have more pain relief, so i wanna ask them about that too. i haven't yet accessed any mental health services in Birmingham but i have a new antidepressant (lofepramine) which is more effective than the last one, and i have been a lot better recently than when i was on my own before.

so thanks for being patient, if anyone reads this, and i will be trying to post a blog on Fridays now i have a lot less stress to deal with.

cc

Lepht


EDIT 15.10.15: had to remove some personal details. feel free to email if you are confused. i apologise for editing but it was unavoidable. also clarified some stuff regarding exclusivity & the forthcoming documentary.

status affected

okay some new things have happened and it is time to stop neglecting the blog and actually tell people something! hooray.

first some bad news. unfortunately i wasn't able to pay the tuition fees for my place at UWE, and i can't get a loan because you can only have so many years' worth of loans. there's no exemption to the rule for health reasons, apparently. i signed the withdrawal form on Wednesday to break the contract and officially cancel my student status, so i am now without an occupation other than "itinerant loser". i'm trying to trade in the credits i earned so far for a designated degree, as crap as that is. much better than no degree. after that, i'm gonna try and get some kind of research assistant job. if anyone knows of any institutes or universities hiring, i'm all ears, could always do with some extra leads.

second, some good news. i found a partner - although you probably already know that because i said it on Twitter.

also the documentary is still on - we have a lot of raw footage, plus my old videos, and i'm told it now needs lots of storyboarding to work out the narrative. then editing, graphic art work, more editing etc. i don't know fuck all about filmmaking really.

health wise i'm alright. i started a new treatment last week - a six-week course focused on mindfulness, which is a new treatment for depression that looks promising from the evidence. it seems pretty helpful at first glance. i also had a new drug added to my regimen - aripiprazole (Abilify), which apart from making me sleepy as fuck is actually helping my mood levels i think. between all of that, Paul, and the support i've been getting from you all i'm dealing with things pretty well overall. it's nice to have someone to look out for me.

can't think of anything else that's happened right now, but i probably will sooner or later. hope you're all enjoying the run up to Christmas, sibs.

cc

L

nyuus

ugh. i'm so crap at composing blog entries these days. here is some shit that has been happening:

while the current shitty depressive episode is still ongoing, i'm getting closer to some proper treatment. a few months ago my referral to LIFT Psychology, a local mental health service, went through and i was sent on a three-day "stress and mood management" course based on introductory cognitive-behavioural therapy. it did help explain some shit about how exactly the thought patterns created by depression work, how they become cyclical or "neverending", how triggers exacerbate them, etc. the downside was that although this knowledge might be useful if i do get any one-on-one sessions with a CB therapist, it didn't do any good for actually halting or removing any of those destructive patterns. that was the first day, and the other two were about anxiety disorders and anger management, so although i was there they weren't really relevant. they're gonna call tomorrow evening for a "review" and i'm hoping they'll send me on something specific to long-term depression now. i'll take what i can get. i also discovered that this whole time i'm meant to have had weekly or fortnightly appointments with my GP specifically to discuss my mood, thoughts, antidepressants and the like, which the GP has utterly failed to even mention, so i'm gonna try and set that up even if it's just a medication review. i haven't had the dose on my escitalopram (my main antidepressant) checked or adjusted for about five years now so i'm pretty sure it needs doing.

it was my birthday on the 14th - i got all the messages people sent me & all that, so thanks for the kind words. i also checked the facebook page duneo set up so thankyou for your messages there as well. my family went to the pub carvery (yeah that's how classy we are) and i abused the fact that i've survived twenty-six years without killing myself or dying of self-induced septicaemia to persuade the chef to give me an extra Yorkshire pudding and the tasty bit off the top of the roast beef that everyone else doesn't want. HAUTE CUISINE. my brother and his partner baked a cake that was blue on the inside, with yellow and purple buttercream, covered with iced flowers and rainbows, and was filled with jelly beans in the centre. it was a badass cake. i didn't want any presents on account of the cost, but my parents bought me a weird-looking toy frog to replace the one that i'd had since i was born that got stolen from me when i was moving out of University halls one summer (i had two big market bags that contained all my possessions/clothes/books and the one with all my textbooks, my toy frog, my recent birthday presents from friends, a little book that my dad gave me when i was two or three and my completely worthless sentimental-value jewellery was the one some scumbag lifted while i was loading up the other one into a taxi.) i named it Slymer II after the first one. i'm still gutted about that fucking frog.

regarding university, i have been trying to get into Bristol University, but we got the news a week or so ago that they don't take students without maths A2 levels, which i don't have, or they would have accepted me. their advice was either to go back to sixth form (yeah, back to fucking SCHOOL) for two years to get one, or to apply to the other local university UWE (University of the West of England). having looked at both courses, i'm pretty sure the Bristol one is too theoretical for the type of research i wanna go into - plus i don't wanna go hang out with a load of sixteen-year-olds who are still in compulsory education, i don't wanna wear a school fucking uniform, and i especially don't wanna go anywhere near the town secondary school which was the place where i got so badly bullied that i don't even have proper memories of most of it. the UWE course seems much closer to what i was studying in Aberdeen. i am actually very, very bad at maths - one educational psychologist in Aberdeen thought i had dyscalculia because i can't do basic arithmetic in my head, although i'm alright with stuff like algebra - so even if i did manage to get an A at the A2 level, i don't think i would be able to handle the contents of the second and third year university courses, which you have to take at the Maths Department with the maths students. even if i did i wouldn't be able to get the sort of grades i was getting in Aberdeen. seems like there's a distinction between mathematical, theoretical computing science in some universities and applied, less academic CS in others - the only thing i'm kind of worried about is that this might make it a "lesser" degree and maybe that would affect my chances of a career. when i was applying for places on linguistics & language degrees at eighteen i was repeatedly told not to apply to UWE because of its bad academic reputation, so i was also worried about that, but it seems that was referring to the Languages department, and UWE has apparently vastly improved its rankings over the last five years or so. so, i'm now trying to find someone at UCAS to find out how to apply for this place given my rather twisted situation.

in other news, my parents have decided to use what they've saved up over the past few years and take us on a holiday. a massive ten day holiday. the kind i've never been on before. they're going to some all-inclusive place in fucking Jamaica and for some reason they actually agreed to take me with them - i've seen the brochure and it looks incredible. the pool has a bar that you swim up to and sunken seats where you drink your drink and there's a snack hut on the side that gives you hot jerk chicken. it even has a Chinese restaurant. they're going in September (so my ma will have her 50th birthday out there which is pretty bizarre to think about because there is no way my ma looks fifty years old), so hopefully if i do get into UWE it won't interfere with classes, but i suppose i can always take some class work with me. i wouldn't mind working the whole time if i could go to the pool bar for breaks. i've never done anything like it - we don't have that kind of money and they've saved for a long time i think, it's never gonna happen again, so i'm still amazed they actually let me come. (hence why i didn't want them to spend any money on my birthday.) i am gonna have to take about ten cans of factor 75, and figure out a way to get a litre of heavy opiate painkillers into the country without being arrested, but i fucking love travelling when i can & i think it's gonna be fucking great.

i have also lost half a stone since being taken off one of my antidepressants, quetiapine. if any of you have depression, or an anxiety problem or a psychosis-related condition, i'd advise thinking really carefully about your calorie intake and checking the side-effects of your medications before you start if you're offered a new one. especially that particular medicine - it does help you with mood but it's so, so bad for side effects and i've had similar experiences (though not as bad) with others. i didn't look at the info properly and so because i didn't change my diet as they increased the dose i went from a size 8, weighing eight and a half stone, to a size 12 weighing eleven. being disgusted with yourself and not being able to figure out why reducing your calorie intake isn't working like it should pretty much offsets any benefits the drug might have moodwise, and it doesn't help if you're finding it hard to do things like put on makeup, shower properly, etc because now every time you look in the mirror or down at your body you're reminded that you're repulsively overweight. i'm hoping to lose the rest of the weight over the next year.

i'm loath to say "EVERYTHING IS FINE NOW" because it's still not and every time i say that something fucking awful happens, but shit is at least going a better way than it was a few months ago. i've been able to tidy the house and make the beds more often the last couple of weeks, and also to take my dog out for a couple of walks, and today i did the house, had a shower, did my hair and paint, and took my laptop to Hawkes House (the local omni-hangout that does restaurant food and tapas and drinks and coffee, that sort of shit) with the express purpose of putting a blog entry up and starting to deal with emails. a month ago doing any one of these things would have been the max i was capable of in one day, and there were a lot of days when i couldn't do fuck all.

i'm gonna try and do this again tomorrow. i haven't replied to any emails today (i was writing this) but i did clear out all the spam and automail, so tomorrow i'm gonna try and get to the emails.

carpe corporem

L

repairs in progress

i have seen an assessment dude from the psychiatry services here recently and said dude has recommended a pretty major medication shift. the main sleep medication i have is quietiapine, or Seroquel as its brand name. it's actually an antipsychotic (i am not psychotic) so it has some pretty gnarly side effects, but it works well as a sedative and is also one of the only well-studied treatments for BPD. i was fairly certain that because of this i'd be stuck with the shit for life. it's a pain in that it fucks up your metabolism and appetite - apparently almost everyone on these drugs gains weight, which is one of the things that's been really getting to me. i track and restrict calories but the amount that i lose weight on instead of plateau has gone way down, from 1500 losing me a good amount of weight per month to still weighing the same on 1350, so it's hard to actually get the weight off.

so assessment psychiatrist dude tells me apparently there's a new drug called aripiprazole or Abilify that i'd never heard of. says you add it on to pre-existing antidepressant regimes instead of replacing them, but he reckons it can replace the quetiapine. and it doesn't cause weight gain - in fact it's apparently associated with weight loss in depressives. fucking a. i agreed, and dude wrote to my GP (who is currently in charge of my psych meds until i can see a real psychiatrist, in the predicted waiting time of six to eight months, natch) recommending a regime change. he also pointed out that tramadol is a pretty crap breakthrough pain med for someone accustomed to 100mls of bloody methadone as their everyday pain control, but didn't suggest a replacement, so i have to go inquire therein about everything. hopefully i can see the GP either tomorrow or Tuesday and start that shit ASAP, although i did find that quetiapine can fuck you up if you stop taking it suddenly. mine ran out when i forgot to request the repeat scrip once and i was throwing up everything i ate for like five or six days. i think i'll probably need to taper off of it this time.

dunno how i'll do with sleep on just melatonin, but insomniac is better than fatarse.

L

lazarus tl;dr's

i'm not dead. anymore. i feel like i have been. didn't move, didn't eat, didn't talk or communicate with anyone but Muad-Dib, barely even that. i couldn't remember what month or year it was or when anything was. i didn't go to the doctor or the psychiatrist except to mindlessly collect drugs. i didn't open my planner or my logs. i couldn't touch my phone. i don't even have any real memories from beyond about a fortnight ago, not since finding this place last-minute in early March and the rigmarole of getting it paid for and putting enough shit inside to make a house.

i had to stop there and go puke my guts up again. that's been happening for a while now but once again, the NHS thinks i am a skaghead and besides i already have a fuckton of antiemetics. the bowl under my bed is full of blood and all this green bitter shit i think is bile but might be stomach weeds or something since i haven't eaten the last few days. it's fucking gross, but it's better than being dead.

i also have some tramadol (legit!), which, predictably, has fucked me up. not in the good way either since i can't keep it down. i wish i had some goddamn intravenous doses. can't get the cyclizine to stay in my system long enough to take action.

veering off track again - apologies. my mind still isn't what it was yet. i'm losing the struggle to even fucking name what happened. i'd like to say depressive episode, but never in my life has it been that bad, never has my whole consciousness been reduced to catatonic coma like that. it's been so much longer than a normal episode, too; i can't really tell but i know i've been like that for months after i should have surfaced. i know i planned to die after i realised it was eating away at my mind, because i wrote it in an OO.org file i found amongst my documents about a week ago; i had the tools close at hand, but i didn't even try this time. in hindsight that's probably good, since what i built was more or less foolproof and does not allow for second chances. one breath would have deoxygenated this carcass in milliseconds and wiped me from its shell like rain off goretex. i shudder to think how close i came to this, and how close to its effect i was in life regardless.

no, i dismantled the assembly, and i must have discarded the components, because none are here and Muad-Dib would have done something memorable even to me, i think, even then, had he found them. for the first time i had the capacity to do it quickly and cleanly, and as the cliche goes, i couldn't. or must not have been able to, i've no real record of what happened. i found myself shackled to life by the simple existence of the man i love, and by weaker chains to everyone else who gives a fuck, Unqualified and my blood kin and Max and Usul and everyone else there is, all of you.

Muad-Dib said at some point that he didn't want to be what kept me there on life support. i remember saying that there wasn't a choice in it, and remembering what he had told me when he first knew: that my loss would rip his life to shreds, and he wouldn't be able to end that pain by following me. a lot of the time when your mind is crumbling like that all you can think of is the easiest of the hard ways out, deleting yourself. you forget that it would leave a wake of destruction in the lives of those you know and care about such as you can't even imagine, such as would fuck them up permanently just like you, reduce them to the same state you want to escape so badly - only without that escape, because they saw what it did and they won't spread the damage out any further. i know what it would do to Muad-Dib, the strongest person i know. i don't even want to think about the crushing blows my suicide would have dealt to my mum, my nan, my dad.

so i lived, half-dead, and after a very long time i woke up. i don't know what did it. the week before, i was prescribed an additional drug, Seroquel, although i don't seem to have taken more than three or four doses. maybe it was that. maybe it was Muad-Dib's hard work finally paying off, since he's been doing literally everything for me since i fell into catatonia. he quit his degree, took a full time job with one of the giant zaibatsu corporations that run this city, left at seven every morning to come home at five and cook something with meat and bread and try to coax me to eat it. he'd download episodes of a couple of TV programmes during the day and put me in front of them in the evening and watch them with me, he installed simple games over Steam that he couldn't really afford and set them running to try and get me to play. he did the dishes and cleaned the house and took the rubbish out, talked to my mum when she couldn't get hold of me, filled out the council tax forms and doctor's letters and sent countless emails to Prof. V trying to explain what the fuck happened. i owe him everything, again.

shit, i type too much. tl;dr then - it seems i cannot be trusted not to disappear when this channel of communication is simply me talking at you. i'm pretty sure that one of the contributing factors to what happened is that this is the first time ever that i have had absolutely no friends at all while an episode is ongoing; even the presence of B, who didn't really understand the whole depression thing and thinks suicide is an act of "ha! now they'll be fucking sorry," helped a lot more than i thought. so, i'm asking anyone who still reads this for a favour. i would like you to remind me of... well, anything. life. since my anonymity is far more cosmetic than concrete, i am going to give you every possible means to do so. i need contact from people or, it seems, i really do go insane. the details i will place in a second post for visibility.

i understand that maybe nobody except spammers will take me up on this, but the data haemorrhage is worth the risk to me. i'm fucking sorry i didn't do this before. i'm sorry i left you all. i'm sorry i didn't answer your messages. i'm sorry this has happened so many times, and that i wasn't good enough to stop it. i'm sorry i wasn't awake before. i promised you knowledge and i have not yet delivered.

it is my goddamn duty to hold up that promise as well as my life.

L

progress report

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

meat free

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

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

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

data loss

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.

reinitialising

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.

we return to your regularly scheduled programming

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

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

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

i have what you've been searching for

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

son of das update

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.

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

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.

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