chip upgrade

hey all. recently i upgraded my RFID chip to a writable version of the same basic protocol type (close-range passive and if i remember right it's still an EM4102 chip.) it's one of the ones from Dangerous Things (Amaal Graafstra's shop), which i'd happily recommend - he was able to arrange fast shipping, the chip arrived very well protected, etc. i also managed to source a newer, sleeker USB tag reader, although its range is awful compared to my old Phidgets one so i might just carry on using the old one. i even got hold of some topical benzocaine cream which is a first. that stuff was extremely useful & i might have to try it the next time i do any fingertip installations, since a lot of the difficulty with those comes from the pain and the toughness of the fascia in that area - having the area numbed might well mean i can go a bit slower, be a bit more precise with the depth of the needle puncture incision.

i did the chip installation at home, with my standard bleach-and-alcohol treatment for the table i was using and hibiscrub to sterilise the hand alongside sealed tools and glove for the other one. i figured out a long time ago that it's better to use a needle than a scalpel, so in the pix i'm gonna share here you'll see me making the incision with a 4mm sterile piercer's needle blade. i did also acquire two of the weird pre-loaded needle syringes a vet would use to install an animal's ID chip, but those turned out to be difficult to unload (you can't use an animal ID chip on a person cause they're specialised things that hold animal-specific information, can't be overwritten with any other info, and require a specialist reader and software what is very expensive.)

so here's some pix:

the needles and the reader. you can see some of the other gear in the background like the dressings etc.

the anaesthetic cream tubes i was using

preparing to do the incision. i don't have a static photo of when i actually put the bastard in unfortunately but there is video which will be released in one form or another later (see below).

this is the dressed wound; you can see the incision site by where the dot of blood is. i used a steristrip wound closure under there as well just to hold the site as closed as i could but it was pretty much overkill, it was a tiny hole that healed up exceptionally well.

the whole thing is very well healed now, had no healing problems whatsoever, changed dressing daily for a week and then it was pretty much done. the whole procedure was filmed too, by both Paul and some professionals, but i don't know what's happening with that footage so i can't release it to you yet or talk about what it's for. in all likelihood nothing will come of it and i can put Paul's video up here or on rutube for you after i get the go ahead, so watch this space or my twitter & i can let you know what goes down. i'm also currently working on something else, but no point posting about it until i know whether it's a viable experiment or not. if it fails spectacularly i'll post pix of that too just for the lulz.

carpe corporem

L

talk results

woefully underattended! it was like a paedophile's funeral, as my cameraman said. about six attendees and one of them was the poor guy organising the event in the first place. it took place in the lower floor of a nice little indie-type cafe place, and having tried in vain to recruit the two sweet old ladies who occupied the lower bit and the small collection of Hallowe'en hating hipsters typing on their laptops in the upper half, i ended up giving a talk to the organiser and five or so people who weren't doing anything for Hallowe'en.

not that the organiser didn't try to publicise it, mind; he was pretty apologetic about the crap turnout, and about the (egregious) mistake of having scheduled the talk for the biggest party night of the month thereby almost guaranteeing that nobody would be interested. you live, you learn. he was a really nice guy & a good host, and the group he's set up seems like it's probably going to be a decent little H+ group once it's matured a bit and attracted some more members, so if nothing else i spose this was an OK talk for those five or so people and a pretty good lesson for me (in that i should have realised much earlier that the date was a bad idea and warned the guy so he could change it).

we did film it, both as something to share if people wanted it and as food for the documentary, but owing to the location lighting and the interference of sound from the floor above us, the film's not of very good quality and will apparently need a fair bit of editing to make it watchable. i'll put it up for sharing as soon as it's finished.

as requested, here are the slides to the talk, entitled "Biohacking 101" on Google Drive. they're free to view for anyone, so feel free to spread the link around. i think the talk contains some decent info for beginner biohackers or people just interested. it also has some stuff on ethics, etc that i didn't go into in the 27C3 "Cybernetics for the Masses" talk, although they're similar to each other.

film will follow when i have it. might post the raw unedited stuff if the edited one takes ages, though it will be godawful.

also as a few people suggested: if any group around wants, i'm happy to give similar talks to whoever wants them & can be arsed to arrange them, like university societies, interest groups etc. if you want a specific topic that's fine too. i don't charge money, just a drink and a toke if you're having em.

cc

L

ETA, 22.12: i did not ever actually get that footage, something happened to it with audio levels such that it wasn't usable. apologies. the slides are still OK though

talk on 31st October, Lee Rosy's Tea Room, Nottingham

i have a speaking engagement coming up on the 31st of October, at Lee Rosy's Tea Room, 17 Broad St., Nottingham NG1 3AJ. it will be a short-ish talk about transhumanism and biohacking (as i see/practice it personally of course). it begins at about 6:30. as far as i know members of the public are welcome to come along & there's no entry fee (i'll update this if i'm wrong.) there will be a LibreOffice presentation and everything. i will be discussing past and present projects, basic steps to basic implant procedures, risks and ethical qualms, etc., as well as taking any and all questions (i plan to leave a fair bit of time for an extended Q&A session, since that's not something i normally get to do.)

it would be awesome to see any readers there. i invite you all if you can be bothered / are in the area / have an unhealthy interest in my intimate personal life!

cc

L

rebooting

it begins! (again.) i think living independently is good for me. i feel like a burden when living off other people, and having my own place is always nice. more or less settled in now, all the account information has been updated, bills set up etc. had a slight hitch on Thursday (08.10.15) when my old Fedora laptop finally gave up the ghost. the HDD made an ominous, bomb-like ticking noise for a few minutes, the system abruptly stopped responding, then the power died and refused to power back on. no luck with diagnostics/repairs that night or the morning after, until one last Chinese reboot convinced the machine to power on and load GRUB. from here i was able to get into Fedora, but only after about seven or eight minutes of loading and fan noise... when i actually got the window manager up, i found it responding slower than if i were sending commands via satellite from the fucking Moon. the terminal was no exception. i'd click or press a key, and literally several entire minutes would go by before the machine reflected what i'd pressed by opening a menu, showing the typed character onscreen, switching windows or whatever. with this excruciatingly slow method, i transferred my WIP novel to an SD card (it was the only irreplaceable file, i'd lost its backup on USB in the moving chaos). the machine itself is unusable and not worth buying a replacement hard drive for, so i haven't lost any data this time, but i have lost that. a new one's coming in a few weeks. it's one of these nice cheap preloaded Ubuntu ones for poor people so it should suit me fine. i don't need an SSD or fifty terabytes of disk space or 16G RAM, i just need some form of Linux laptop so i can function.

and meds. i also need lots of pain meds so i can function.

this Hallowe'en i will be speaking about transhumanism and biohacking in Nottingham, not sure of the exact place and time yet. i'll put up a post and a twatter update when i do, it shouldn't be very expensive if anyone wants to show up.

other news: next planned work is to upgrade my first ever implant, the little RFID ampoule tag i used for the various access hacks i took out of RFID Toys. it's very old and not writable or secured, so i've been wanting a replacement chip for a long time & am now in a position to replace it. (i say "replace", i really mean "install a new one and just stop using the old one because it's a pain in the arse to get things back out from under the skin of the hands and i can't be bothered".) i have a few ideas re where to source a suitable tag. will update you all as i get there.

cc

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.

i missed that penguin

i finally got my arse in gear and installed Linux back onto this machine. amazing how much faster the OS runs than Windows, especially if you've been putting up with the latter for any longish amount of time. i use Fedora, which has always worked out of the box for me, but i found that GNOME 3 is a bit weird and required Fedy and gnome-tweak-tool to be installed before i could turn it into something resembling a usable GUI. maybe it's meant for tablets like everything else on the fucking planet these days. (in other crap news, i lost my Kindle :( )

medication wise i am thinking about coming off the Abilify/aripiprazole. my metabolism is still slow as a snail on Valium and i still weigh more than i should, although i'm down to 10st 10lb from 11st. i can't stand being overweight, so i gave up sweets and that seems to have helped some, but not enough. might have to give up alcohol as well, possibly also red meat.

no biohacking news, sorry. that's all for now sibs. carpe corporem

L

undiagnosis

so i've been waiting for months and months to see an autism specialist here in Bristol, and i finally got to see one for three sessions a few weeks back. i get called back in for a third about a week ago, only to find that they've undiagnosed me - that is to say, these specialists (and they're pretty much the experts) are sure i don't have a developmental disorder. so "what's wrong with me" has now gone from Asperger's Syndrome, to Borderline Personality Disorder, and now to nothing at all according to these ladies (apart from major depression.)

not really sure what to think of that. i trust their professional opinion, and their diagnosis was based on a pretty comprehensive test battery plus a massive arseload of history - interviewing me and my ma, pages on pages of questions about my life and my development (my ma's questionnnaire about me was 18 pages long) - so i don't think it's likely they've got it wrong. but if there's nothing wrong with me, officially, that sort of screws with my access to mental health services outside of severe depressive episodes. so i don't know if this is good or not.

anyone else run into anything like this? ever end up with a diagnosis that stuck?

L

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

in other news here is my dog

i love my dog. her name is Frankie. she is my best friend.

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

pathetic whimpering

i did something pretty stupid today. i couldn't sleep last night, even with all this in my veins, and i just kept thinking of Muad-Dib. so at about 0400 i wrote a letter to him. the handwriting was so shitty he probably won't even recognise it, on account of my hands shake at the best of times and it gets worse when i'm stressed. i'm not even sure what i said.

i guess the heart of it is that i still love him. i cannot forget that. his loss poisons me every day that i am still without him, like something inside my chest is rotting away. i find myself thinking that if i can't be by his side again, it would have been far better if i had never met him at all. i had never loved anyone before him - i told a few boys and a few girls that i did, but it was always the kind of situation where you're forced to say it back because they just did and you don't want to upset them, then you sort of come to believe that liking them is the same thing... then i ran into Muad-Dib and everything was different. i'd do anything to be back with him. it's fucked up but if he asked me to stab my dog in the heart, and then i could come back to him, i'd seriously consider it. my loyal, faithful Staffie dog, the best dog in the world, that tries to comfort me when i wake up yelling at night and licks my face if i cry, that i could take for a walk on the main roads without a lead if i wanted to because she sits down at every curb and waits for me to tell her it's okay to cross, that never disobeys a command, the best friend i have in meatspace - and i would probably murder that poor dog if it would bring back the man i loved. i'd give up decades of my lifespan. i'd let myself get sent to an asylum. anything. even after all the shit.

i don't have a clue if he would forgive me for depending on him for so long. he probably remembers months and months of him working, me doing nothing, him bailing me out each time i bought too much food and pushed my bank account into the infrared again. i was a massive drain on his finances. and because of my depression, i was close to catatonic for a lot of the time, which must have looked a hell of a lot like pure brazen laziness. like just basking in the free time, not having to work, getting while the getting was good. i will always regret that.

of course because i had been writing and thinking of him, the dreams were even worse last night. every so often i have this cruel dream that i'm with him; usually there's some surreal conflict going on, like this time he was choosing a woman to marry from a list. i screamed and begged and pleaded with him, as i've never done in waking life. "Just marry me!" i shouted. and he agreed. i was so fucking happy. just like the other times, he came back to me and took me in his arms, and i actually felt him hugging me and his hands in my hair, and everything was gonna be okay again, and then i fucking woke up and it wasn't true and once again there i was sobbing at six in the morning like a fucking fool. i still sent the letter.

all i can do now is try not to wait for any reply. i can't get my hopes up, because if i do and nothing happens, or worse, he replies and tells me he's found a real woman who's beautiful and sexy and has a nice clear sunshiny fucking mind, it will be like hearing him leave me all over again.

this has come about as a result of all the promotion of Valentine's Day, of course. i suppose all the bitterness sank into my brain until it vomited. i doubt it was a good idea to send anything - tomorrow he will in all likelihood either get drunk with his mates, all of whom i also miss, and go to a club and pull some pretty girl, or if he has already replaced me, he will be writing her a poem and giving her roses. i will be alone in the house (my parents will be having a nice dinner somewhere) with the dog. i will probably raid my dad's stash of cider, get wasted, feed cake to my favourite hen Steve McQueen (she may as well have a nice dinner too), and hopefully fall asleep without any fucking dreams.

fuck. what a pathetic screed. believe me, i would love to be able to "get over it" as common sense suggests. other forms of repair are progressing: i have been assessed by a psychiatric nurse and referred to a consultant psychiatrist who is coming to my house in a few days to see how fucked up i am; i have a stable if expensive source of medication from a prescriber who does not believe i am a lying crackhead; i have seen an orthopaedic specialist who has decided that my spine, while it is too curved, is not bad enough to qualify as "deformed" and therefore does not require surgery. i also need to thank everyone who has sent anything, be it money or food or anything else - it really, really does help, so thank you. on Valentine's Day, all of you who are happily ensconced in loving couples, maybe think about not snogging and giggling in front of your fucked up single acquaintances. throw us a fucking bone here.

L

begging hat

my sincerest apologies if i inadvertently appeared to be a scam by not claiming funds via PayPal - i forgot you had to do that. i cannot thank you all enough for flinging a few quid this way here and there (or a whole lot of quid, as it may be) - i literally have nothing right now and it's fucking amazing to suddenly have even a little bit of funds for food and fags. i am kind of a massive burden on my parents and it sucks to live in someone's spare room and not even be able to feed yourself.

on the benefits front, i duly applied, sent lots of data and got a nice letter in the post. dear hacker, we cannot pay you benefits. it doesn't even say why - under the "why" section it just says "we cannot pay you". i don't even know if i'm eligible for some other shit, or what - the guy on the phone sure as hell didn't think i was. i guess i'm gonna have to find a way into the nearest city to get to a physical job centre or something, i dunno.

emo or not, the colder it gets, the more i just miss Muad-Dib. i'd give up anything for a chance to be back with him.

the kindness of hackers

i feel pretty goddamn shitty. i'm still at my mum's - i'll be here until September 2014 at the earliest - and i'm still completely fucking broke. i have to ask my parents for food right now. some people have volunteered to help, so if you really want to, i have a paypal at a.mason.06@aberdeen.ac.uk. i also have a bank account (it contains minus 2K). if anyone wants to give me 2K so the bank will stop trying to take my blood, you go right ahead, sir or madam. if you wanna throw me a few quid i will happily give you the details by email or you can text me, my phone number is a few posts down i think.

i will also accept offers of free food, random parcels, pills, your unwanted Steam items and/or oldarse games, all that shit your ex-girlfriend left at your place six months ago when she moved out, grocery vouchers pilfered from your parents, and a few people have asked if it is okay to send christmas presents, which it definitely fucking is. anything you wanna send, you can send. i am too poor to be proud, i will eat anything that doesn't contain cheese or tomatoes (they make me throw up). (well, they make me throw up more.) pizza is OK. and second-hand clothes you don't want, i seriously love those. especially men's ones, which are way more comfortable and seem to be the only way to get jeans which are not skintight or hoodies that actually keep you warm or hats that do not look fucking stupid. i am incredibly easy to please.

my mum has given the green light for sending things to this address, it is:

21 Ashgrove
Thornbury
Bristol
BS35 2LH
England

the condition on that is that nobody comes to visit. i'm not exactly up for visits anyway and i think most of you are on the mainland or in the USA to boot. so knock yourselves out.

*jingles its begging hat*

unfortunately i do not currently have the space for that pony.

L

recent events

i guess i ought to explain what actually happened with Muad-Dib now that i can sort of talk about it. even now it still makes my hands shake to do it, though.

so ctrl-shift-h a few months and i was still living with him in a tiny one room flat in the Silver City. i haven't been well for a long time now and i wasn't doing too good then, either. i had a seizure, pain levels were getting pretty disabling, syncope and BP were bad, my head was a mess. my ma came to visit, and while she was there, she came along to one of my appointments with my consultant psychiatrist (Dr. D). Dr. D kindly listed for her all the different ways i was fucked up, and explained how this litany of insanity made me not very capable of looking after myself to a normal person's standard, and between me, my ma and Dr. D it was decided that i would come down to England over the summer for respite care. this would last a month or two, during which Muad-Dib would get a break from me and all my shit and i would go to stay in an environment that would be less isolating during the day. then i'd come back up and finish my last year of university courses starting in September. before i left, he told me to take it easy, get rest, and promised me he would be there when i got back. i packed all my shitty secondhand clothes and gear into my great big fuckoff holdall bag and lugged it to the airport and there i was.

unsurprisingly the plan went arse over tits about a week afterwards. he called me one evening, and after allowing me to flether like a fucking idiot for ten minutes about how much i missed him and how i took the dog for a walk and stupid shit like that, flatly informed me that he had been thinking and didn't want to be in a relationship with me any more. i could still live in the flat with him, he said, if i wanted to, but he was leaving the relationship.

several seconds passed while my mind tried to form an adequate expression of just how stupid it was to expect that someone you have just dumped, who still loves you, could possibly be okay with staying with you in a tiny fucking bedsit which only has one place to sleep - we would either have to carry on sharing the bed or i would have to sleep underneath it. and at some point he would meet someone else and what the fuck would happen then? "Oh," i said. he carried on talking. he was sorry, he didn't want me to take this to mean he didn't care about me, et cetera. i had stopped processing the input at the bottleneck of your life partner doesn't love you any more and simply sat there. eventually i noticed the dangerous amount of water that had fallen off my face onto the keyboard. i remember saying emotionlessly that i had to go speak with my mum now and hanging up on him.

i cried so fucking hard. it felt like my chest had been punched through and just a gaping, howling void was left. i couldn't speak. i couldn't sleep. he was everything to me and he had ripped it all away with one fucking phone call. part of me couldn't even believe that this had really happened - i kept thinking, this isn't him, and then the riposte, no, this isn't what i knew of him. i'm so easy to lie to once i trust someone that he could easily have been thinking about this for months, telling me everything was fine. i don't know any different.

a couple days later my ma called him to figure out what the fuck was going on (i was there). from this call we understood that he definitely wasn't going to change his mind any time soon. he said a lot of things: he still cared, there wasn't someone else, oh you don't want to stay in the flat?, things had "changed", and some other platitudes. i said only that i could not "still be friends", which was the truth: i refuse to put myself through the agony of watching the only man i have ever truly loved get over me, meet pretty girls while he's out drinking, bring some home, get attached, fall in love. replace me with someone he doesn't have to waste his money supporting. watch some perfectly healthy beauty with no scars become his bride. i'd rather die.

"So it's all or nothing?" he asked, sounding surprised. "Yeah," i said. "I can't just be one of your friends." i didn't know it then, but that was in all likelihood the point at which he decided on "nothing".

at the end of the call he said he needed months, maybe more, to make a decision on whether he could ever countenance repairing the bond we had and getting back together. a month in i broke, and emailed him asking for a decision now. he replied, "I'm sorry, it's a no." he added more, things to make him feel better - i "deserved someone who would look after me", he promised to keep in touch, he was sorry again and again. he wasn't sorry enough to try and repair our life together. i could come and pick up my stuff any time, he informed me. as an awful postscript to everything, when we came to pick up my things, we found a "Guide to Lovers' Massage" hidden amongst his socks which had to have been bought after he left me. i don't know if there's another because the only message i ever received from him after that was one sent to my mum, asking for some shit we'd taken to be returned. i refuse to send communications on my part because i can't face talking to him and possibly finding out that i was deceived the entire time.

i ought also to point out here that he did sleep with another woman once, owing to an agreement between us from way back when we were just fooling around together - i said he should find out what he liked, before committing to me. since i never rescinded this, he thought it was cool to bring a girl back to our house while i was visiting my dying granddad in hospice. she slept in his arms in my bed, another image i can't get out from behind my eyes at night. i forgave him. i dunno if it's her, if it's anyone. idk if he just got sick of me. his friends' girlfriends are all beautiful, as is this girl, no giant tattoos or faded man hair or fat guts or self-harm scars or fucked up old-ass gypsy clothes. i used to see them sometimes when they went out and think how fucking lucky i was that he was with me when he could have had any of those lovely women.

so that's how i lost pretty much all progress from the past two years or so. my stuff is shoved into boxes in the back of my dad's office. i'm in my parents' spare room. i still love him and there is nothing i can do with that. i have no money, no house, and i can't go back to the University until late 2014. i wish i could write something happier. sorry, sibs.

L

i'm sorry to give you all bad news again. Muad-Dib left me this evening. i have no more words. L

broken

okay so i've seen all your comments more or less, but there's too many for me to adequately respond to right now including all the mentions and messages on Twitter, comments here on various posts, phone SMS and answerphone messages, emails etc. i haven't reaccessed the email box yet & to be honest i might just delete everything in it beyond the last month or so, so if you did send anything you desperately want me to see or you really need a reply to go ahead and resend it.

the situation is, my meat home is not faring too splendidly. a few months back my thyroid stopped working properly, and since it isn't the standard autoimmune problem (i have the problematic TSH levels but not the autoantibodies, if anyone cares) i'm not being treated for it. the GP i was seeing thought it was better to just leave it, and as you could probably have fucking guessed, that didn't turn out to be a great treatment. i'm carrying two and a half stones or so of extra weight and it's not pretty. i'm tracking calories as best i can, but on 2K/day i was still gaining and it's only stabilised on around 1500 or less now. that's fucking hard to stick to, although it helps that we're poor as fuck.

the poor as fuck is because i'm not currently getting any student allowance, on account of i've been too fucked up to do anything like either study or work. so i'm not possessed of any funds for experimentation, which is frustrating.

the rest is still there: i'm still anaemic as far as i know, my back's still fucked, i'm still taking 100mg of fucking methadone daily for it (which granted is free) and i'm still mad. officially the diagnosis is "BPD with cyclic treatment-resistant major depression and iatrogenic opiate dependence". (apparently that explains the two or three occasions on which i've heard weird songs that aren't playing in meatspace.) contrary to the general commenter opinion i am not in fact schizophrenic. i think someone made a video somewhere on YouTube or something, about how i'm a fucking nutjob and you shouldn't listen to me because i'm just telling you what the voices in my head tell me to, but alas, i've never had the sort of hallucination that tells you things. mine were only ever little odd tunes going round and round, with or without strange poetic lyrics.

as to the suggestion that maybe it's not auditory hallucinations and i'm actually a conduit for an unseen dimension of the world that most of us aren't aware of, well, that might be cooler but if it's true the hidden dimension pretty much just wants to sing songs about shadows and twiddle its thumbs. sorry.

so that's what i've been doing. absolutely bollocks all, more or less. i think if it were either purely physical problems, or just the mental stuff, i might have been able to deal with it better, but it's everything all at once. the mental capacity to deal with and ignore the pain got fouled up because of all the shit that goes on in my head, and anything in meatspace i might have turned to in order to escape or improve the psychological status goes out the window because of the pain and the loss of mobility involved, never mind the fact that going anywhere or doing anything tends to cost money. i've pretty much just been trying to sleep as much as i could, because pathetically enough, that was the only place that didn't hurt to be in. the downside of that is that in that sorry escapist state there's no room for communication, and in fact i had the general idea that it was better not to look at the email or blog and to keep the phone off because all the messages would be overwhelming. that's not strictly true but there are literally thousands of people wanting a heads up, and fifty or so who worry exceedingly within a few days of not getting one, so there is a fuckton to keep up with.

(that isn't to say that anyone trying to reach me worsened the sickness or did anything wrong, it's a flaw in my logic, so to speak, but it's so ingrained that combined with the fact that i don't like voice contact at the best of times, it just led to me totally shutting down in an attempt to escape it all.)

i think it's improving, slightly. after all i can speak now, right? i don't know. i don't wanna make any grandiose statements that it's all better. my blood family in England and my adopted big brother in Canada have been trying really hard to help, and for the first time my blood family now have all the details of my medical diagnoses. my mum came up here to see me and figure out what the fuck i was doing, then realised how fucked up i was, so with their support i'm currently planning to go down to England over the summer to maybe recuperate a little. there's animals there, dogs and little bantam chickens that sit in your hands and a cat, and there wouldn't be the same kinds of money problems, although i'd just be sponging off them which does bother me quite a lot. i also changed GPs to hopefully get a fresh look at my case and some decent treatment for the pain and thyroid problems, and i've had a formal care plan drawn up with the psychiatrist which is in draft right now. i feel like a broken cyborg that's just been discovered in the rubbish heap, dragged home and pulled up onto a bench for someone to take a look at. maybe they can fix me and get me running again, maybe i'm too damaged for that, i don't know. i've pretty much only just "woken up".

so if anyone else out there wants to help restore an obsolete piece of junk that might still have some use, i'm all ears over here on this workbench.

comms channels

i welcome any kind of message from pretty much anyone who isn't trying to sell me gods or penis pills. i sometimes can't reply to everything but i'll try my damndest to read everything people send me.

email: lepht at trioptimum point com
physical address [EDIT: 21 Ashgrove, Thornbury, Bristol BS35 2LH]
mobile: (+44) (0)7527 428831, i'm absolutely shit on the phone and i really hate voice calls because of how awkward they make me so SMS greatly preferred, you can call me if you like but you'll likely get stuttering and monosyllables and i tend to hang up if i can hear my own voice.
IM on request: lephthatesmsn@hotmail.com, tell me if you wanna IM so i can try to remember how to work it
twitter: @lepht_anonym

i have a Steam account as well but i can't remember its username right now. i'll see if i can dig it up so we can have some co op. any other things that you want me to set up or think would be useful, go ahead and suggest, i'm all for anything that helps me be less isolated and more connected with you guys.

gonna go make some spiced milk and play some Alice now. carpe corporem

L

access recovered

urgh. idk what the fuck actually happened but i've not been able to get into any of the Google services i use at all for the last couple of weeks - SA was rejecting my password and even the one i retrieved via mobile backup, Gmail wouldn't sign in apart from a couple of times i managed to get in through a different machine, and even then it would kick me out to relog every few minutes. dunno if someone smarter and more malicious than myself was fucking with me or if the Google account just had a stroke or something, but i'm in now. i do know that just after i posted on Twatter that i'd recovered access i was booted right back out on my pasty little arse. i fucking hate access issues.

real hackers seek knowledge, kids, they don't just fucking break things and torment people. i'll probably get another OH HEY NO HARD FEELINGS HUH I WAS WONDERING IF WE COULD SLEEP TOGETHER NOW I'VE FINISHED ANNOYING YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE READERSHIP email like last time.

makes it seem a little silly to post contact details, but what the fuck, i figure they're pretty much out there already. coming right up, sapes. cc

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