transhumanism and pain

i mentioned last time people's objections to cybernetics, specifically one that has to do with humanity. it's a common idea that the more someone works with technology, especially implants and biotechnology, the less 'human' they get; hence the usual stereotype of a cyborg as an uncaring, robotic soldier, the creation of irresponsible scientists in some sterile white laboratory. i often get flak about "losing my humanity", and although i don't exactly agree with it, i think that stereotype is where it comes from, and also from people's equation of 'human' with 'natural'. images of the enhanced tend to include assumptions like cyborgs will all be contemptuous of unmodified humans and cyborgs will want to make everyone into other cyborgs and even cyborgs will be people who have lost their feelings and ability to empathise with unmodified humans, which is more widespread than you'd think. damn you, Hollywood, for filling people's heads with this crap and making them less willing to accept real technological advances. damn you. there's only one tiny grain of truth in that picture, and that's the unfeeling part.

i don't mean that i'm an uncaring jerk because i have an interest in cybernetics. i'm a jerk with an interest in transhumanism, just like i'm a jerk who eats chocolate spread straight outta the jar; they're unconnected. what i do mean is that this shit really raises your pain tolerance, as well as making you seriously reexamine your concept of not damaging your body. i noticed that yesterday, when i was reopening a wound on my hand with a scalpel to stop it healing over before i could get a skin diver into it. the wounds are made with a biopsy punch, and i'd inserted a no.10 blade horizontally and swivelled it round under the skin in a circle, having gotten all the way to pulling out the loosened flesh and clots with a pair of tweezers before it occurred to me that maybe that's kind of fucking weird, and a normal person would have just put a plaster on it and given up on that piercing until they could get it redone. me, i bought another diver and reinserted it myself; after the magnet, and with me planning to do nine more in the comfort of my own home, it just didn't register as painful. or rather, it did, but i just don't care anymore. it needs to be done, damage in the short term that conveys an advantage in the long term.

so, You're gonna hurt yourself isn't really a valid objection either. i know. i don't mind hurting myself in exchange for a little more knowledge. in order to get subdermal components in place, right now a scalpel is necessary. in order to get transdermal ones to stay in place, you're gonna need to make incisions. the pain is bad at the start, but the longer i do this kind of thing and the more experiments i do, the less i seem to care about the pain at all. eventually i don't think i'll even consider it to hurt.

cybernetics: if you're not in pain, you're not doing enough science.

objections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i'm a bastard

i am. i and a few other people made a guy storm out of our Grand Challenges of AI tutorial today just by questioning him.

the tutorials are pretty simple for GCAI, which is an introductory, non-technical artificial intelligence primer that i take for giggles (can't get any credit for it, for various reasons.) you get a source book of articles, you bring it to each tutorial, and each time, you read through one of them and a sort of informal town-hall debate arises around it. today it was Turing's seminal paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, from way back in 1950. it's basically the original introduction to the field of AI, where Turing defines intelligence, presents the concept of machine intelligence, and demos the common arguments against the possibility of deep AI. he then rebukes each one, apart from the last, which is (hilariously) the 'argument from telepathy'; at the time, it hadn't yet been discredited, and Turing was a firm believer. it shows in the paper, with a genius like Turing asserting the existence of evidence for telekinesis and telepathy which he doesn't provide and suggesting the necessity of 'telepathy-proof rooms' for testing AI in.

that wasn't the argument we had problems with, however. Turing's first cited objection to AI is religious, the 'Theological Objection'. people apparently didn't like AI, back in the day, because of their ridiculous conviction that only people could think because only people had souls. of course, a machine could never have a soul, so how could it possibly ever be intelligent?

i pointed out that this shouldn't even have been included in a scientific paper in the first place. it's just pandering to the deluded, pretending that their silly beliefs are legitimate enough to warrant consideration in a serious scientific journal, but it was the norm in Turing's time to pamper these people. i get that, but, i explain, you can't argue from God unless you've previously proved God, and you can't make arguments involving souls unless you've demonstrated their existence already. which nobody has.

crazy two rows down from me pipes up. "Just because it involves God is no reason to automatically say it's bullshit," he tells me sternly.
"It is," i throw back. crazy goes on to explain that we have souls, animals don't have souls, machines don't have souls, and that therefore we're fundamentally different from either one and the only intelligences possible.

why is this guy studying AI? it being pretty harsh to say that, i stick with asking him for evidence of his batshit claims, and with giving an explanation of neural nets and how the ones we have are tiny arrays of perceptrons compared to our trillions of neurons. we're not anywhere close to creating an analogy of the human brain, but if we did get that many perceptrons, there's no reason to write off the possibility that they might approximate a sentient intelligence. "If we can build nets as big as our brains," i ask him, "then how can you be so sure that they won't come close to intelligence?" somewhere in this i used the phrase 'biological machines' to describe us. it turns out this was a big fucking mistake. crazy didn't like that one bit.

"We're pointless then," he says, over and over. "We're just pointless then aren't we."
"We're not pointless. That doesn't follow at all," i cut him off when he starts to annoy me. "Knowing how our brains work doesn't mean we're devoid of all meaning. Or are you trying to tell me we need a soul to have meaningful lives?"

at this, crazy finally has enough. he turns round, points at me and the people who've been agreeing with me like we were witches, and goes, "I don't like this, this is just fucking shit. Fuck this. You're all getting so overemotional. Fuck this. Fuck," and he shoves his way out of the lecture theatre and stomps away down the corridor, leaving me feeling like a total asshole and my comrades giggling their asses off at this guy.

"We're getting emotional?" snorts the guy just in front of me as the crazy's footsteps die away. i still feel like a shit about it, but i can't just sit there in those sessions and let people spew bullshit unchallenged. i guess some people just can't cope with being asked to actually prove what they're claiming is true.

chillin' in 1954

i'm a transhumanist, someone who believes that technology can and should be used to improve the human condition, and specifically, the human body. this is why i have all these implants, and why i design more - i want to learn something about how to use technology to help me, and in doing that, maybe help someone else to improve themselves too, or even create something that helps millions of us.

my view of the future of such implants is completely bottom-up, in that i'm for creating implants that can do a fraction of what i want an entire transhuman body to be able to, and then combining them in my research subject - yours truly - as science and i progress, to eventually add them together and get closer to what i want. hence the tiny, homebrew components i've sited and had sited are simplistic and monofunctional; but an array of tiny, monofunctional devices is what we call a computer, and i hope the whole human who has many modifications like these will be better than the sum of their parts.

a lot of people don't agree with me. go to a discussion on transhumanism like the ones started by my buddies at Atheist Nexus, and you find people wanting downloadable silicon brains, full-conversion robotic bodies, cybernetic jacks into virtual representations of the Net, ad nauseam. now these are wonderful dreams, sure, but we're not living in a manga or a game, we're adults alive in 2008 and we're probably not gonna live to see this shit. i see so many people totally unmodified, hanging around in cyberspace waiting for Masamune Shirow's prosthetic robot bodies and electronic ghosts. it's not gonna happen in your lifetime, awesome as it'd be if it did. it's like we're sitting around in 1954, waiting for our robotic house servants and our flawless machine translation, before any of us has even taken a look at a neuron.

so we don't get ageless, beautiful super-cyborg shells, and we don't get mathematically enhanced solid-state brains to put in them. what we do get is various electronic components that aren't averse to being immersed in a wet environment, soldering guns, electronics knowledge readily available to anyone who can get to a library, and curious, inventive, spectacular human minds. what we do get is the curiosity and the resources to start creating those dreams.

so if you're a transhumanist as well, and you always wanted a cyberdeck, you can't have one yet. sorry. but don't sit on your ass waiting for someone else to invent them. experiment for yourself. design a few circuits, try an RFID security system out, see what today's technology can do for tomorrow's dreams and see what you can do to bring about some tiny part of that transhuman species you wanna see. get the fuck out there and put our philosophy into practice.

L

tramadol wouldn't by any chance fuck you up, would it, old boy?

why yes, it would.

does tramadol fuck you up - y'know what, no. no, it doesn't. somehow it's got no fucking side effects at all, which is why it's a controlled Class B drug, you fucking idiots.
tramadol fucks you up
fucked up on tramadol
anonym search yeah, i do.
does tramadol 50mg fuck u up - if you're five years old, sure.
tramadol fucked up
will tramadol fuck you up?
4 pillars of tramadol fuck you up? - what, there are pillars of tramadol now? is that like the pillars of islam, four things you gotta do every day or the tramadol gods will be displeased with your junkie ass? or did you stack enough pills to make supports for your doorframes? in either case, yeah, yeah they sure as hell will.
can tramadol fuck you up
can tramadol fuck you up?
do tramadol fuck you up - yeah, it do fuck me up. and it fuck you up too.
does tramadol fuck u up yep.
get fucked up off of tramadol
high as fuck on tramadol - quite.
how much tramadol do you have to take to fuck you up?
how much tramadol to fuck you up? - as much as you got, start with 50mg and keep going every hour until you fall over.
surname sapiens - it's 'anonym'.
tramadol fucked up
tramadol and solpadol can i take both - yeah, but it will basically get you stoned without the giggles, and you won't be able to think for a day.
tramadol fuck up
tramadol fuck you up
tramadol get fucked up
tramadol getting fucked up
will tramadol fuck you up

optimum healing and tramadol

not together, yeah? magnet's healing pretty damn well, mostly due to my piercer being OCD about sterility and hygiene and the years of experience i have of keeping wounds clean. it's more difficult than just keeping them relatively bacteria-free, seeing as (especially with implants in the hands) you also gotta keep them dry. you throw a plaster on top of a wound filled with chlorhexidine gluconate or iodine, and you've got a wet injury that isn't ever gonna close - the skin absorbs its max amount of moisture and dies, leaving dead lips around the wound that can't close; capillaries don't grow into dead skin (or at least not as easily in my experience), so you gotta cut the dead skin off and try to stick the living parts close enough together that they heal. there's a better method i eventually worked out.

1. straight after implantation, you put as much pressure on the wound as you can handle, and hold it together with steristrips. if you don't have any steristrips (and i fucking don't), take your run-of-the-mill plaster, cut it into 2mm strips and use those. the point is to hold the two edges of the cut together.

2. every day after that, take the strips off every hour and spray the wound with chlorhexidine gluconate spray or iodine, or TCP if you have it - these last two are gonna hurt like a bitch. leave it with as few strips as it takes to hold it together, and check every day for healing.

3. as soon as the edges hold together by themselves, start airing the wound for a couple hours every day. the sooner you can do this the better, just be really careful not to get it infected.

4. job fucking done.

in other news, tramadol fucks you up:

tramadol fucks you up yeah.
can tramadol fuck u up yeah, physically as well as addictively. it fucks your liver up bigtime.
can you get fucked up on tramadol
does tramadol fuck you up
fucked up tramadol?
tramadol fuck you up?
can tramadol fuck you up
does tramadol mess you up
how many tramadol 50mg should i take to get fucked up five maybe.
how much tramadol to knock you out about ten 50mg. you're fucked if you do it though.
tramadol does it get you fucked
what fucks you up like pain killers? nothing, my friend, absolutely nothing apart from heroin and E.
will tramadol fuck you up?

i love you pillheads.

Lepht Anonym, now with 25% more implants and withdrawal.

so i got this magnetic implant sorted, which is fucking great. i can pick up paperclips, etc, scalpel blades and what you got, but even cooler, i can now feel strong electric currents and all kinds of magnetic fields. the piercer who did the implant has his own done already, and just putting our hands together, you could feel where the magnet was, this sort of weird tingling sensation that isn't what i expected at all. i figured it'd be the feeling of the magnet pulling against the top layer of skin, but it's different. i spent way too much money getting it done, but holy fuck was it worth it.

on the negative side, i also got reminded of why it is i don't have so many friends. a while ago, when the pain got pretty bad, i got a little loose with the alcohol - a few double whiskies in a couple evenings, and i had some cocodamol which i may or may not have been misusing by drinking. at any rate, i knew what i was doing, and i'm not doing it now, both of which sort of escaped a certain buddy of mine, one of about three people i'd been stupid enough to tell about what goes on with my health. said buddy jumped off the conclusion cliff and decided i was some sort of wrist-slashing self-harming alcoholic emo kid, and promptly went to tell my entire professional support network - academic advisor, doc, disability advisor, every fucker - everything the buddy thought was going on, plus a couple things i didn't want anyone knowing about, like the amount of time i've spent in the medical system and the fact that i can't control my own anger without injuring myself.

mostly, i managed to get it under control, but when it comes to the GP, i am boned. the doc doesn't exactly believe my addicted ass that i'm fine. i just got taken off every single painkiller i have, on a reduction regime, just like they give to fucking methheads. starting tomorrow i have codeine and nothing else, and two weeks from today i'm gonna be artificially, totally clean. with nothing to control what's actually fucking wrong with me.

i'm informed helpfully by the doc that 'to be totally honest, it sounds like it's psychological'. thanks, national health service. thanks, buddy who will not be named.

spiders on drugs

naw, i'm not showing that video again. it's storytime with Uncle Lepht.

i'm in the guided labs this morning, listening to Stromkern and keeping myself to myself, when the demonstrator - the grad student who gets lumped in with us and has to answer questions like, Breakpoints? Why would I want it to break? and Why's it doing that? - pounces on me.

"Lepht," he says (i'm translating), "what are you doing here?"

after i've gone "Whut? Huh? Whut?" over the music three or four times like some senile old professor with a malfunctioning hearing aid and finally turned the brick* off, i point out that i'm repeating this year of my undergrad degree. medical certificate, yo. demonstrator wonders why i'm not reusing last year's code, seeing as how the guided lab work's only updated every major Java version, if that. (* i mean, vintage Zen Touch.)

"It's shite code," i tell him. it is and all. last year i was too out of it to bother refactoring everything i write into something small and elegant, so it all just went into the compiler as i thought it up, and i don't think so neat'n'tidy.

"Oh," he goes. "That explains it. You know what it reminded me of?" i don't. "You know that old experiment where they put spiders on drugs, the ecstasy spider?"

yeah.

L

tramadol fucks you up?

tramadol fucked up yeah.
can tramadol fuck you up yep.
does tramadol fuck you up see above.
can i take solpadol with tramadol if you do it carefully, and you don't mind throwing up, sure.
can you get fucked up on tramadol
does tramadol fuck u up
does tramadol fuck you up?
does tramadol fucking you up?
does tramadol get you fucked up
fucked up on tramadol
how much tramadol can you take to get fucked up start with 50mg, titrate up in lots of 25mg until you're as fucked up as you like.
tramadol fuck u up
tramadol getting fucked up
tramadol how fucked up do you get pretty fucked up, but for real up-fuckedness you want some dihydro.

even more metal

two skin divers, one each side of my head. magnet plans have been shifted to the index fingertip of the left hand - which i'm pretty much shitting myself over, since it's gonna be a 5mm needle incision and some painful insertion work - plus circuit design for the thermistors is coming on, and i got (maybe) some help with getting needles and doing the actual surgery for it.

on the minus side, i have the goddamn flu, so it all fucking hurts. worth it though.

more metal in L's body

not a computer component this time, just a set of new subdermal piercings on the back of my left hand, three skin-divers in a triangle. they're a new alternative to microdermals, smaller and much less painful. they're also more permanent. hopefully by tomorrow i'll have one each side of my face, at the corners of my eyes, too - they look like tiny metal discs, sorta like the heads of nails.

i also have an appointment Thursday for an implanted magnet somewhere in my hand, probably under one of the tattoos on my wrists. in addition, i get to meet the guy from the States who piloted all this stuff if i'm lucky; my piercer is his buddy, a guy with blue Celtic knot ink for eyebrows and hair, name's Darryl. absolute legend. more on the magnet and thermistor implants as they come. power to the transhumanists.

an anecdote:

so i was working the labs a couple hours ago when a kid stumbles in, can't be more than about five, with this expression of rapture on its face as it surveys the machines - which must look pretty cool if you're five, what with the masses of dangling cables and the huge shiny black monitors. at this point i'm the only fucker left in the lab, and i've got neon spiked hair and a glowing laptop screen alongside my monitor. to add to this, i'm listening to PTI at full volume and i'm surrounded by a glut of shiny objects, thus making me the most interesting object in the room. kid therefore makes its way towards me, grinning, and install itself on the floor by my chair where it stares up at me as it plays with my RFID equipment, which is under the bench.

i hate children usually, but this one isn't making any noise, instead connecting and disconnecting the USB cable of the RFID reader board with reverence and occasionally trying to press buttons on my Zen, so i let it be. i figure it's lost or something and somebody's gonna come find it eventually.

well, eventually, a guy who turned out to be its dad did. he was pretty pissed at the kid, and pretty damn scared of me even though i was being goddamn polite - i didn't ask why he let his kid wander off around the Engineering Faculty, which features the heavy industrial equipment labs, the chemical labs and storage, big balconies with gaps wide enough for a kid to fall and kill itself, and plenty of machines with loose cables to pull down on top of you if you're stupid and two feet tall, and i told him the kid was fine and wasn't causing any trouble. i thought he was just scared of me cause of the pallor (my anaemia's gotten a lot worse in the last month, so i pretty much look like Bela Lugosi dressed up for a rave) and the bags under my eyes (they're pretty bad) until i heard him say as he dragged the kid out of there, "You don't disturb those people! Here's your Bible."

they left in the direction of the University chapel. religious parent, and i'm pretty notorious around campus as a member of the Atheist Society committee and picker-on of religious delusion, not to mention i've got the society website up on the main monitor. i felt pretty bad for the kid, which obviously liked the machines and my equipment, getting dragged off to church after being abandoned by its dad.

just goes to show the virtues of religious values in childrearing, i guess.

thermistor system in development

i traded two thermistors for a quantum mechanics primer today, from an absolute legend of an engineering buddy of mine. i'm siting them in the back of my left hand or wrist - haven't decided which yet; it's a question of practicality - in order to artificially replace (poorly, but better than nothing) my natural temperature sense, which has been pretty much obliterated by my painkiller use. the idea is that i'll be able to develop a small circuit with a lithium cell and a pair of LEDs, one for each thermistor, whose brightness will increase as the resistance of the thermistors decreases, meaning the hotter it gets, the brighter the LEDs should be.

i have a long way to go, including building the system, siting the implanted components, and testing it all, before i consider this a success, but the idea is pretty much there. i have no idea if my concept of how accurately the thermistors respond to temperature shifts is accurate, and that needs testing too.

the reason there are two sensors is (in my relatively worthless opinion) also pretty cool: one is in the ohm range, for sensing the temperature of things i touch, whereas the other is in the kiloohm range, for ambient temperature. combined, they should give a rudimentary picture of the temperature of my environment.

if i succeed here, the next step will be to replace the LED indications with a proper LCD readout of the temperature, which needs a microcontroller to calibrate the thermistors and perform the calculations necessary to translate their resistance values into grokable Celsius ones. that's a pipedream, for now, but the first setup i'm actively developing. more news as it evolves... this is gonna be one hell of an experiment.

GPs and painkillers

if you're getting painkillers from your GP, presumably cause you actually need them and not just because you're addicted (here, that'd be a little from Column A, a little from Column B, and a little more to use as anaesthesia for surgery i was never supposed to perform) there are a few things you should never mention to them:

"Hey, it's been three years I've been on these things now."
"Yeah, they're making me sick and none of these antiemetics are working." (shouldn't have told her that before i tried the metoclopramide.)
"I'm on about 300mg a day, yeah."
"It's making my guts bleed coffee grounds. What'd you mean, haemorrhage?"
or especially, last time: "Ha ha, yeah I'm pretty much fucked without dihydrocodeine now."

i now have a grand total of 90mg per day to stop it all hurting. suffice to say this is like trying to stop up the city reservoirs with Blu-tak, and even this was a compromise between me, the addict / chronic pain patient, and the doc, in whose medical opinion i shouldn't be on anything at all and should, to use the medical terminology, suck it the fuck up. it kind of annoys me that i can't.

so, if you're sick and you need your meds, deal with your side-effects and damage yourself before you tell the jeep. they'll only take the meds away.

L

more pillhead searches

- will tramadol fuck you up
- fucked up on tramadol
- can tramadol fuck you up yep.
- "download whole albums for free" you can do it at Jamendo.
- can you take solpadol and tramadol together you shouldn't, but yeah. knock yourself out.
- tramadol fucks you up yes it does.
- does tramadol fuck you up
- will tramadol fuck me up
- how to get fucked up on tramadol take lots, add whiskey.
- tramadol fuck you up
- tramadol fucked up
- effects of coke and paracetamol i don't know, i can't get any Coke. or any coke.

suppository-sniffers.

to the general public:

yes, that is me biting a hole in my arm on the street. yes, those are all bitemarks up my limbs. yes, that is what people like me do when we get that fucking frustrated; i can't do anything else, unless you want me to take it out on one of you instead of on myself, or you wanna see me smash my head into a wall instead. i used to do that before i realised it was fucking my career up. so please, don't give me that 'Please don't bite me, Lepht, you fucking psychopath' stare on the street; i can't help it, alright?

... okay, i'm done. just getting my angries out, like they say. i gotta start again, again, and i'm a little down about it - i've been upchucking my pills, my food, all the acid in my stomach every day for about the last month and a half, and pretty much feeling shit for it. as a consequence, my partner hasn't let me outta his sight for about that long as well, so i've been living out of a carrier bag like a transient in a place with no connection and i've had no way to carry on with studying hacking. so like i said, i gotta start again; i feel like such a useless douche when i'm not learning, especially since i don't have the natural talent most hackers do.

so, i'm gonna start again, again. gotta go reintroduce myself on my old hangouts, gotta review what my head's half-forgotten and the drugs have half-erased. i've got so many buddies to get back in touch with, and a hell of a lot to apologise for, but Lepht Anonym ain't dead yet.

L

ps. to the other guy called Lepht, two things. 1. i'm sorry, but i can't give up my name, it's my name too. 2. if there's anything else i can do, let me know. i don't want hard feelings over this.

lepht can has job?

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

tramadol still fucks you up

i remain the #1 Google hit for that, mostly due to my drug-seeking little clientele of Lijit users. so today, Lepht Anonym will answer your junkhead questions for fun and unprofit...

q. does tramadol fuck you up | a. at high enough doses.
q. tramadol fucks you up | a. yeah, it does.
q. fucked up on tramadol | a. you need about a gram if you've had opiates before, or a half a gram for newbies. start with a quarter and titrate up.
q. will tramadol fuck you up | a. yeah.
q. can tramadol fuck you up | a. yeah.
q. will tramadol fuck me up | a. YEAH.
q. tramadol getting fucked up | a. see above. and do it with a mate, cause you can OD pretty easily and the side effects are nasty.
q. how much tramadol will fuck you up | a. depends. if you've never taken it before, take it a capsule at a time in 20minute intervals and find out. otherwise a gram.
q. will tramadol fuck u up | a. IT FUCKS YOU UP, alright?
q. solpadol or tramadol | a. Solpadol will fuck you up less, but has a different analgesic action. one or the other might not work alone; for maximum fucked-upness, i'd recommend taking them together... junkhead.
q. tramadol fucked up | a. it's not as fucked up as dihydro.

you fucking pillheads.

L

new hardware

i finally have replacement hardware, a Lenovo laptop replete with Windows Vista. Fedora Core 9 comes out on Tuesday, so i'll be jacked up and Linified by Tuesday night and waiting to dump more newbie-hacker crap on y'all. i also have new custom ink lined up for then, and a couple new piercings doing their best to heal up within the confines of my slightly shit immune system, plus new (hot) Scottish nookie, so all in all i'm a pretty happy little bastard right now. i might even have a job.

anyway. few challenges are gonna be working with the Broadcomm chipset for wireless under Core 8 (i seem to remember that needing madwifi), making the weird combo memory card reader and the fingerprint auth device work at all - especially the fingerprinter, i'll be fucking chuffed if i can get that shit working. it's a swiper rather than a presser, too, which makes it harder to hack; i'd want to dust the keyboard, monitor and case for prints, relief one into a mould and make a gelatine finger to test that before i could say i was sure though. biosecurity is pretty cool, but we've all seen it's far from infallible.

does give me a little more trust in Windows, though, although disturbingly i don't think the regular auth protocol has been disabled in favour of fingerprints. i'd have passwords required as well as prints, or as a backup only if the prints failed, but not as an either-or option...

so kids, fingerprints are fun but won't keep the robbers away, Scots are all hardcore motherfuckers, and remember - Tramadol fucks you up.

L

unplugged

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

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

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

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

Kalle, man, you're not convincing me.

L