shopping list

so here's the list of components we're gonna need, so far. there might be more; if (as expected) i've forgotten something, let me know in the comments and i'll add it to this post via the handy unmistake button.

miniature Philips compass module
MSP microcontroller
transmitter and receiver coils
+ any required control circuitry
rechargeable lith cell
various wires
Sugru, lots
neuroelectrodes, 8 or 16 depending on price
solder
surgical supplies as usual (dressings, suture kit, etc.)
anaesthetic (lidocaine + sterile vials), needles & syringes

once this is complete, i can start deciding what i'm gonna build/test first and we can lay out a prototype diagram. whee.

L

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

dear searcher

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

this, folks, is why Darwin was correct.

L

fightan good

(title stolen from the SCP Foundation's guidelines of things they don't want any more of, which is appropriately enough also what i don't want any more of.)

this, gentlehumans, is a rant. it is not directed at anyone in particular; rather, this thing that pisses me off is a whole fucked-up paradigm that colours all of our thinking and seems to come from society itself. that thing is fightan good.

it seems like every time you go looking for information or discussion on a particular technology, some fucker is looking to use it to fight good. usually, i expect this as a matter of course: TV and cinema, for one, seem to be saturated with the idea of combat, gaming even more so. everything's about fighting. every protagonist in anything i play has to fight something. i wish this weren't the case, because it bleeds over into science; nice tech, now how will we weaponise that? transhumanism suffers from it every bit as much as biotech and physics do. everyone wants embedded weapons, or enhanced reflexes, or super-speed, all for fucking fightan good. cyborgs as portrayed in common culture are almost all soldiers or mercenaries or bounty hunters. you can't get away from it.

this annoys me to no end. technology is so beautiful, knowledge even more so - and hurting other humans is not its intended use, nor is merely defending oneself from other equally violent motherfuckers who can't think of any other way to enhance the human body. what about your brains, people? what about longevity, or quality of life for the elderly? what about improving our capabilities to learn, to enjoy, to experience?

i'm not saying the species doesn't need defence capabilities: i hope one day it won't, but right now that's not the case. i'm just very sick of seeing people prioritise harming others over anything and everything. that's not what transhumanism is about. i won't help anyone weaponise themselves no matter how many times you ask me.

omnis moria, especially me, and i want to leave this planet a tiny bit better than i found it. you can't do that by making the world into a game of System Shock.

L

i wrote you a story but i ate it

interesting fact: the protagonist, like my dog, is short, chubby and called Frankie.


frankie
Lepht Anonym 06.09.10
-----------------------

Frankie sits outside, for once, smoking her fifth cigarette. She didn't mind the dolls, she thinks bitterly, not as much. Oh, she knew about them - she knew, and she burned them all, the bastard things, the last time. He had three. What the fuck did he need three of them for? She doesn't want to answer that. They were already bad enough: thinner, smaller, able to be picked up and put down wherever he wanted them, not like her stocky middle-aged ass. More beautiful, with their perfect faces. More obedient, with their AI personalities tuned into geometric stereotypes - the blonde was the slut, the brunette was the librarian and the redhead was the domme vixen, obviously. Was being the past tense. The past tense - Frankie flicks ash onto Markus' rosebush - being appropriate because now they are bubbly twisted scraps of charred plastic and melted steel, buried at the bottom of the garden. Because Frankie is a psychopath. Because she finally got sick of pretending she didn't know about them. Because Markus, who said that he would always love her - she grits her teeth - Markus loved those fucking dolls more. She's not as crazy as he thinks. He never once stroked her hair the way he did theirs.

So she got rid of them. Was that so crazy?

Of course, she knows that this is crazy for real. This really warrants being called a psychopath. It doesn't mean she won't get away with it; she hasn't even thought about that yet, but she knows Markus' heart condition will probably mean no autopsy. Frankie isn't quite as doolally as he likes to think she is. She takes a drag, and admits privately that sure - she's unhinged. A normal wife would have left. A normal wife would never have put up with it for a year and a half after she first found out, would have thrown him out of the house, would have cried to some best friend for hours. Frankie doesn't have any friends. She played nice. She waited. Then she stopped taking the medication, and she built his secret lovers a little funeral pyre. When he came back, she was roasting a skewerful of pink marshmallows amidst the wreckage of their stinking latex skin and their once-tumbling tresses, smiling softly. She had thought the ultimatum she gave him then (and it was simple enough: no more fuckdolls, or no more love and no more house) would be enough.

Silly, isn't it, that a psychopath like Frankie would have been so naive about her lover. Crazy people are supposed to be bitter and untrusting. Aren't they? She stubs out the end of her smoke and lights up automatically again.

Fucking literalism. She didn't mean that this would be fine. Frankie wonders how long it took him to find this woman, this... mistress, from his office. It doesn't matter now, anyway; he's asleep, and he'll stay asleep for long enough. She had considered just butchering the woman, but she let them fuck, let this Marlena go home, content that the aftermath and the possible investigation - silly bitch, leaving your long black hairs in the shower - will fuck her up enough that Frankie won't have to do anything. She runs her hand through her own cropped brown bob. Neither one of them think about anything. He didn't even notice the smell in his coffee when Frankie disappeared silently from the window vantage point, made her way back to her car in the street and drove it into the driveway, playing happy return. Would he like a coffee? She was dead tired from work, she could do with one. Of course he would love a coffee. Sleeping tablets, she muses, are good things to keep around. He's got an overdose that might just finish him off, but he was still breathing when she left him.

Frankie is not quite as incapable as he thinks. Distilling the nicotine wasn't hard; she pulled a sick day, as much to give him a last chance to redeem himself as to prepare, and like a snake he told her he had to work. Does he think she wouldn't go through his planner? He's a fool. He left for his mistress' house, and Frankie had enough time not only to boil out the poison, but to store it safely away in the pantry. She tested it out on a cat or two. It's a good thing she never actually cooks with liquid glycerine.

She has the syringe ready, filled in the kitchen with the care only true hatred produces. All it will take is one little shot right into his pupil. She isn't as dumb as he thinks. Markus, who vowed to love her and her alone, who put the ring on her finger and pretended he'd try to mend her scarred-up, fucked-up heart - he ought to have kept those vows.

She stubs out her cigarette, and stands up resolutely, dusting off her jeans. Frankie is a psychopath. She accepts that.

She smiles softly as she lifts his eyelid.

[EOF]