spinning on office chairs when nobody is around like a special child
lining up chips and PCB push buttons so they look like little creatures making a journey behind my keyboard to hunt for Penguin mints, which i then arranged them "eating"
swearing at electronic components i lack the finesse to pick up with my stubby little gimp fingers
stealing cola from the sports conference going on in our building
i am a mature, 22-year-old researcher in my field.
L
okay, so i read too much H.P. Lovecraft/August Derleth/Clark Ashton Smith as well. i had a week off, and this is the kind of thing i end up doing at five in the fucking morning with my free time... it's a good fucking thing i have a job coming up.
bomb
Lepht Anonym
10.06.10
-----------------------
There's four of them, this time. Last night there were seven, the night before, a horde of the bastards; Jacques wonders numbly if that's an improvement or not, given the fact that they're closer than ever to the foot of his blanket-strewn sofa bed. The air is utterly dead, of course - no CPU hum, no thermostat whirr. The rustle of the duvets registers briefly in the silence, then dies; they make no sign of hearing anything, as ever.
Jacques pushes his foot further, cautiously, down the bed. The four don't move. You're afraid of trips, he tells himself balefully, memories of the Nineties flooding in on all that acid he used to drop and all that Lovecraft he used to read. Bad trips. Tactile trips. But they don't move. He finds himself pushing back into the vaults of his head for the time he saw Tsathoggua, the black toad-god dripping with vile ichor and filthy, sentient intent, perched on his pillow with its tongue lolling out, after nights of reading weird fiction whilst filled up to the gills with LSD - is this like then? Will he look back on this ten, twenty years down the line and see so obviously what set it off?
He flinches as the closest one edges in, soft footfalls padding towards his head as quietly as if they're all barefoot. Good God, should it still be this detailed? This long after taking the stuff? It's been three days now, long enough for most anything to clear out of his system. They shouldn't be real enough to smell, that night-air vapour tainted with mould and sulphur and ancient dust. They're not there, not really - that he can convince himself of at least superficially - but God, that foul air invading his house and perverting his dreams, that wakes him nauseated long before they ever show up! He backs up the bed, experimentation over. The encroacher reaches out one white and withered hand to touch his cheek.
Jacques screams, and this time they don't dissipate as they did when he yelled last night; a brief flash of ordinary worry about Mr. Khera downstairs and what he must think of all this noise crosses his mind before he clamps the pillow to his face, hissing breaths into the stifling fibres, oh God why did he think he could handle that black shit? Why wrap it in a Rizla and throw it down your throat with a shot of sinthe like you're the fucking King of Dares, why not just throw it in the woodstove with the rest of the crap nobody wanted? The vision-figures coalesce now like the halves of blurred, unfocused vision to form one. One gaunt and frail thing that holds more awful bane in its caress of his cheekbone, trailing its damp fingers down his trembling throat, than all the devils and demons he's ever imagined. Please Catholic God, you can torment my soul all you want afterwards but take it away, for the love of sanity take this hellborn abomination back to where it came from, he pleads wordlessly.
No response comes save the soft cooing that issues malignantly from under the lowered hood, soft like bats' fur or moleskin, that hides the eyes of his captor. Carla's silky voice insinuates itself into his head as he sits, rigid, shaking with the effort not to move or scream. "Bomb-it! Bomb-it! Bomb-it!" chanting in the background like war drums and her, all "Nobody's ever taken that much, never mind with alcohol," and "We make wishes on shots around here..." Oh God he just wanted to do whatever they all would have done, just be cool and not an old loser hanging out with a bunch of kids half his age... The thing presses its unseen lips to his hand and he recoils with a thin screech, the sensation of a cluster of holes beneath the pursed mouth rankling on his skin as if contagious. Its breath is on him.
It'll go away. Harmless wish, bad trips, something to tell those kids about for once... doesn't everyone wish for someone to love them? It'll go away...
okay, my exams are over with for this year and i return to the world of the living from my exile in badly-made pptx lecture slides and /b/. i'm alive! i didn't even slice any of my limbs open this time! i haven't been hospitalised once!
so i have some sugru coming in the post in the next couple weeks, anyway. one of you fine gents recommended it to me as a bioproofer, so i figured i'd give it a try - seems like useful shit to have around, anyway. if it doesn't work there's always glue guns.
speaking of which, i have several things on the go this summer, one of which is the continued hackage of the Northpaw; another involves my removing the last experimentally-placed node from the back of my right hand (as stated, it just didn't fucking work out) and re-siting it or attempting to do so in the little finger of the same hand, my left being complete for now. for this i will need some proper surgical sterilisation - TechniCare, ideally - and i'm out. anyone know where to get their grubby biohacker hands on some?
of course, ethanol is fine too. i'd just rather deal with less searing, flesh-burning pain than i need to. might give some lidocaine a shot too, although the doc thinks it won't work in the fingertips (no idea why not). thoughts? you guys want me to video this one?
lastly, my second article for H+ has been taken in and is probably currently getting anal-raped by the copy-editors. expect forthcoming.
L
something i should warn you guys about: when placing nodes in the fingertips, they have to go on opposite sides of each finger than the one next to it. for example, if you were starting with your left hand, you would (for practical reasons) only use the three fingers starting with the little one and ending at the middle; you would put the nodes on the left side of the middle finger, the right side of the next one and on the right side again in the little finger.
to my annoyance, i discovered weeks ago that i'd failed to observe this, and thus the nodes in my left two outermost fingers set each other off every now and then when i'm trying to sleep or type or what have you. another fuckup for general education.
L
i've just recieved a rather large amount of money at an award ceremony, and i know what i'm going to spend it on. food, schmood, because i think i have some better ideas for the control of the haptic compass than using my colleagues' original circuitry, which is rather large.
enter the very tiny MSP430, a little microcontroller i think would do a better job. all i would have to do would be:
- figure out a way to attach the little compass module to the MSP430
- get some fucking neuroelectrodes and attach them to its outputs (jesus christ, but it's hard to get hold of those things)
- bioproof the bundle thereby created (not hard, since all it takes is a hot glue gun)
- stop! scalpel time.
of course, i would also have to program the MSP. i'll need to ask the Noisebridge guys, but i think the logic would go something like this:while (poweron)
get north direction from compass module;
cast to a degree out of 360;
figure out which electrode's "domain" that number falls into;
activate that electrode;
i'm pretty sure the way to go is to have each electrode responsible for a segment of the compass circle, i.e. 0-45 degrees activates electrode no.1, 45-90 activates no.2, etc. if all went to plan following this design, it'd mean zero transdermal components - the whole thing would be subdermal, which is far easier to keep sterile and far more likely to heal, plus naturally waterproof. it would be a big, big cavity to carve out though; i might need some real anaesthesia.
still, sounds like fun, right guys?
L
so i have new ink coming up, my thirteenth, i think. if i wasn't universally fuzz-recognisable before, i sure as shit will be with an abstract arabesque and a ritual kris around my right eye socket... i've been painting abstract crap on there for months, anyhow, so it's not like anyone won't have seen it before. i'm pretty sure the only adverse reactions will come from my roommate, who's not often exposed to this sort of thing, and my mother, who will like as not take a tissue out, gob on it and try to use it to wipe the tattoo off my face as if i was seven and covered in Twix. upon finding out that it consists not of suspiciously skilfully applied face paint but subdermal pigmentation, i expect she'll hit me pretty fucking hard... c'est la vie.
i suppose i can always pretend i fell asleep in the studio and sue the shit out of my tattooist.
regardless, another reason for me never to have a real job. whilst waiting around for my preview of the final design in the studio, however, i overheard a few things - nothing new, but the red lens of my medication makes me want to kill people who say stupid things these days. this includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- So what are you, some sort of Goth?
- (speaking to the poor tattooist) I want a [heart/angel/star/rose/fairy/hideous rendering of my child's likeness which will lead to her disowning me in the future just to stop being associated with it/bad Latin phrase which will make Lepht froth at the mouth with the effort of not correcting my awful uninformed grammar/misspelled English cliche/football logo].
- I want one like [celebrity].
- Have you got a pattern book? [it says 'custom studio' on the door...]
- Aw, is this your first tattoo? [because it's not like i look about thirty-five and haggard as hell, besides being covered in ink, or anything.]
- Ha ha, you look rough, son. [i know.]
- I wanted [x], but my ma will only let me have [y], could you draw that? [why would you have something you don't really want drawn on you, for fuck's sake?!]
yeah i pretty much lose all rationality while i'm adjusting to new meds.
L
me: So I was wondering if you had any green Chartreuse.
gourmet shop d00d, standing directly in front of several bottles of Chartreuse verte: What's that? I don't think so.
L
ed. someone asked about what i sound like. you have two options: read the blog either in my actual husky, slurred monotone, or read it in a Dalek voice.
