on squeamies

squeamie, noun: peep who doesn't want anything to do with implanted technology because of the eeew factor. take the guy who saw me submitting a paper at the CSD offices a couple weeks ago, sorting through the pages with the massive paperclip i was gonna need stuck to the back of my hand on a nodule. gross factor triggered when he realised what the deal was, and eeew guy was out of there, making the squeamie face.

it's not a good thing to be afflicted with, the squeam. i remember my first back-of-the-hand cannula - they leave an impression for about a day after you remove them, and i was fucking horrified. i couldn't look at it, kept the whole thing hidden under a dressing and threw up the first time i touched it. i thought it was a leftover needle that had got stuck in there (i think i mentioned it before here, but i forget...) see, i used to have this problem with subdermal critters - still do - and it fucked me up.

what gets rid of the problem is exposure. after that first cannula, the others didn't seem so bad - that kid i used to be, who screamed bloody murder when there were maggots and blowflies in the yard bin, is now me; i've cut out stitches with a penknife and forced metallic bits of crap inside my own flesh and tolerated all kinds of medical bullshit. you can be an ex-squeamie.

so get out there, ladies. show off your subderms, frighten some normals. you're helping in the long run.

L

Maxwell's equations, or when to shut up

Professor James Clerk Maxwell, 1831-1879: dude united electricity and magnetism in Maxwell's equations, and taught pretty fucking close to where i live, at Marischal College, part of the University of Aberdeen (wasn't at the time, but whatever.) his equations for electromagnetism are based on Gauss, Ampere and Faraday's work; Maxwell synthesised their ideas into a unified theory. smart dude.

so i'm sitting in Physics 2512 a while ago, learnin' about said smart dude and how he's ONE OF US SILVER CITY SCUM and therefore even smarter by comparison, surrounded by physics majors whose intellectual acumen for the subject far exceeds mine (mine's limited to generating overly verbose descriptions of lessons rather than actually absorbing them.) luckily, i've sat next to dumbfuck, who would've made a good gymnast or something but is definitely not a physicist - beautiful, thin and clearly not getting it. even more luckily, i'm none of that there triad.

"I don't get how an electric field and a magnetic field can be the same." dumbfuck shuffles her papers in disgusted bafflement at the very idea.

"It's not," i say (i talk like i type, monotonously and drug-addledly.) "Electric fields generate magnetic fields, vice versa." it's a tutorial class, so to my excitement and everyone else's chagrin, we're allowed to talk, which means i'm allowed to inflict my shit on other people. "If you make a magnetic field change, it makes an electrical field. You make an electric field change, you get a magnetic one." i am of course paraphrasing Wikipedia's Maxwell's equations, but she doesn't know that. she sorta nods. cool, i think, you're teaching, Lepht!

so i carry on. "That's how this RFID chip works," i explain, and i poke the chip under my skin (you can see it move, and it's visible at rest too since the anaemia got bad.) "Reader emits an electrical field, generates a magnetic go-between field, generates another electrical field in the chip. Chip sends an identification value to the reader - no batteries," and i must've sounded pretty proud of that, i guess, even though i didn't have fuck all to do with creating it. "It's passive power. Never runs out."

i coulda stopped there, since dumbfuck was looking pretty freaked out (she turned out to be one of those doesn't-like-subdermal-stuff squeamies), but no, my stupid ass decided to carry on. "That's how all these neodyms work as well," and i continue my in-your-face poking of various non-flesh body parts. "You get near an EM field, it generates a little current in 'em, makes your hands tingle. Like this," and i hit Ctrl-C on my notes, point to the spot under the backtick key where the HDD is, "you can tell if the hard drive is active that way. It's cool, no?"

she did not think it was cool. i gotta learn when to shut the fuck up.

the everyday life - it burns

i keep burning myself on everyday objects because of my crapped-out addict's brain. today i've clocked up shower burn, dishwater burn, steam burn from the fucking kettle and two counts of that-drink-is-too-hot-you-junkie-moron burn.

i really gotta sort this out. i'm hurting myself with coffee.

god damnit

i'm reading Dune again, because i'm meant to be studying for finals, but the fact that Paul is both the name of the main d00d and the never-used real name of a good buddy of mine is messing up my mental images. i keep visualising said /b/tard buddy saying things that would make him do the People's Eyebrow in confusion and making myself laugh.

stupid social circle ruins my nerd fun.

work!

finally, i have some work. work that involves NuGO, the European Nutrigenomics Organisation, a Kerrighed-based Linux Beowulf cluster, and a research institute of bioinformaticists all eminently more qualified than i am (the guy i'll be working directly under has three degrees; i haven't even finished my first.) i'm not all that sure what is and isn't protected data on this, but i'm going to be developing a prototype cluster, one that implements BioLinux and Kerrighed, among other things. that's to stop me b0rking the main Beowulf before the new stuff's properly tested. i'll be writing a report that'll go all the way to NuGO on it.

this is going to be so much fucking fun!

ed. in addition, i got the ego massage of a lifetime when i found out that one of my three rival candidates dropped out of the running because "If Lepht's running for it, it's out of my depth"; the professor i worked for last summer didn't just give a good recommendation but actively told the bioinformaticists that i'd be good for the job and they should interview me; and the interviewers told me they'd already heard of me from the Computing Science department (cause of my grades and my running the CS student society), the helpdesk (cause i volunteer, natch) and through the secular society website (cause i wordpress'd it). i'm famous amongst my vast superiors!

a hint:

when making certain disgusting, acidic homebrew concoctions out of (airquotes) decorative plant matter, for the love of fuck, never add aspartame. jesus fucking christ, and i thought it was bad unsweetened.

oh fuck

child on the bus Tuesday, pointing at me with something like horror: "Ma! Look! An alien!"

nurse in the Human Nutrition lab where i was angling for free experimental chocolate today, whilst butterfly-needling my freeloading ass: "Oh God, you can feel it in there," and poking one of my implants around, "Sheila, have you felt this? Come and see this."

i've become exhibitable.

side-effects may vary

i get a lot of admiration and kudos for my pissabouts with H+ technology, most of it undeserved. frequently, people will say that they wouldn't do it, but it's a cool thing to be doing, or something along those lines; less frequently, people get into it right along with me. two people in the city have since i've been here. both now have a black-market implant installed by yours truly, and one reacted very differently to the other.

that got me thinking. when i first jumped into the field with my little RFID ampoule, i just had one aim: to satisfy my own curiosity. i honestly wasn't thinking of anything else, neither of puerile cool-factor addition or of higher goals; transhumanism wasn't really something i even understood at that point. i just wanted to hack the meat and see what would happen, both socially and technologically.

i got my answer, sort of, but i also got a whole barrel of side-effects, good and bad. viz:

good:
- it stimulates discussion and interest in H+. this is the major pro.
- there are functions of the devices i didn't expect: i use the Nd-60 nodules on my right hand as placeholders for magnetic objects, which helps while soldering and when using styluses, for instance.
- it gets people to build on what i have, like one buddy who's working on improving the RFID setup. this is the biggest benefit, to be truly honest. it gets folk smarter than me interested.

bad:
- it's the biggest blackmail incitement i've ever had. someone i used to work back-to-back with underground now holds the power to send me to jail, someone who doesn't like my sorry ass at all anymore. now i've got a sword of Damocles over my head that i can't forget about, and i've lost the ability to tell you guys about my procedures for fear that it'll fall.
- that infection, and with the Nd-60s, the poisoning / rejection / whatever it is. it's a risk we run, and it's gone badly wrong for me once in the past. it also makes me feel like an asshole every time i have to go get State surgery for things i did to myself.
- socially, it tends to isolate me once people find out who i am. for everyone who thinks RFID is cool and they might try it themselves cause they could do a damn sight better than junkie-ass here, there's another one who thinks monsters check under the bed to make sure Lepht's not there, or that i'm some exotic flavour of self-harmer. it's weird, but i guess it's part of our society; ask TV: cyborgs are emotionless at best and psychotic on average.
- pain. you got a pain problem? homebrewing'll make it that much worse; you didn't have one before and you're sure as shit going to now.
- not that this one bothers me, but people comment on the scars. my hands look pretty fucked up now. personally, i like them.

the worst thing is what's happened with my onetime partner. he was abusive, a total mindfuck to be with even though we had good times too, and i don't miss the guy - on a pretty deep level, i hate that he controlled me for as long as he did - but i've a lot of regrets about what went down. it keeps me awake at night that he could dump my ass back in prison any time he wanted. that's not somewhere i wanna go, ever. the best, i think, has to be the knowledge of exactly how little i've already done, how much there still is to play with and how much room my crapped-out body still has for experimentation. it's exhilarating.

i think even if i'd known this shit would go down, i wouldn't have been able to resist the implants. they're like crack for me. i guess that makes this post the patient information leaflet for cocaine.

L

tramadol, will it fuck you up?

yeah... yeah, it will. tramadol aside, this week you also asked Grandpa Lepht:

could ai have souls
i don't think people could have souls, never mind artificial intelligences. as for whether i think they could be sentient, sure i do. not in our lifetimes, but i reckon swarm intelligence could progress that far.
divers and microdermals
i got plenty of those. you want some? come to Rapport Tattoo, in Aberdeen, or try bodyhazard.
homogeneity bias article
i wrote something, but you couldn't call it an article. use the Lijit widget.
paracetamol does fuck all
no shit. it does fuck all until you OD, at which point it will kill you.

i'll be here the next time y'all wanna know what drugs will fuck you up. here's a Euro, kids, don't spend it all in one place.

implants! aliens! vampires! STAY IN YOUR HOMES

so i was googling to see what other people have come up with in the way of homebrew implanted technology. what i discovered is that a few have neodyms like me, a few have RFID chipped themselves (fewer of us seem to do that than have the neodyms, weirdly) and there's not a lot else out there.

what i also found is that far, far more of them are batshit, underpants-on-head insane.

take one Sherry Shriner, for instance. there's something seriously wrong going on here; something, in fact, that looks a lot like classical schizophrenia to me, although i'm pretty sure i'd get called a "black op" for saying that in these nutjobs' world. Sherry's convinced that aliens put implants in your fucking ears.

not only that, but Sherry is also telling everyone that neodymium - that's right, Nd-60, the same element ensconced in several places under the skin of my hands as i type, right goddamn next to my EM4102 RFID chip - can deactivate microchips.

the hell it can, lady. i could go demonstrate if i wanted to. people, Nd doesn't deactivate microanything, but it will wipe your credit cards if you get a bigass one like these idiots are asking you to Paypal them for.

on a totally unrelated note, i'm getting sick of this sparkly teenage vampire film Twilight that's drifting around - it just made it over to Europa a couple weeks ago, and already i'm getting the shit. three separate people have accused me of looking like one of the sparkly vampire characters - apparently i'm pale enough to be considered actually undead now.

you'd think a ugly motherfucker like me would escape the whole OMG LESTAT IS KEWT treatment, but no - either i have a self-esteem problem, or the actor that plays this Alice Cullen character is uglier than i would've assumed. i'ma just bite the next person that says it and see if any more people think i'm fucking sparkly.

L
(would prefer a blood transfusion, seriously)

cheer up emo kid

woke up this morning after dreaming that i never broke up with w3dyt, never had anything wrong with my head, never got punched, never had a fight, never got my trust broken, never got ratted out and cut off by the suppliers and had to change my hair and tell my guineapig to fuck off and all that shit, dreaming that we were just chilling on the couch with a couple sodas and some junk, playing the 360 and talking bullshit and it was all like it used to be.

then i woke up, and it doesn't happen often, but for a few seconds my slice of the world looked like a steaming heap of freshly-dumped crap.

so this is a list of some of the shit i do when i'm feeling like ass, stuff i picked up in the hospital, at university and just living - shit i know works for me. maybe it'll work for other people too.

0000. cook stuff. last time it went kinda wrong and what i ended up with was snickerdoodles that were better off being put to use as blunt weapons, and the image of your favourite crippled junkie wetware hacker baking cookies is probably fucking hilarious (it sure as hell amused my meatspace peeps), but seriously, cook, make a fucking turkey dinner or whatever. it takes your mind off the bullshit and it gives you a sense of achievement at the end, even if you're as shit at it as i am.

0001. hot bath. enough said.

0010. write novels, paint your room, get a sketchbook, do something creative. program something new, work out some bugs in your favourite open source app. update your monochromatic technology-and-life-related blog that nobody reads. doesn't matter if all you end up producing is a meg-and-a-half of Marty Stu's Adventures in I Am So Great Land, or an IDEful of code that does precisely bupkis, or sixteen pages of scribbled-out monstrosities that not only don't look like the woman you were trying to sketch but would probably make her hit you; it's the effort that does it, you put all the bad that's drifting around your head into what you're doing instead of leaving it there to stew. there's also less conventional creative outlets - my implant jam sessions, for instance, or tattoo design, or planning piercings. make a topiary out of your drunken friend's hair if it makes you feel better.

0011. actually, just do things. chores, laundry, jogging, work, it's all good, cause occupying your brain rather than sitting there is useful.

0100. talk to somebody about what's going on. got a crew, a best friend? if not, you've got a counsellor, or a GP who can get you to one for free.

0101. make sure you've taken all the shit you're supposed to take. i used to get pretty down sometimes when i was really depressed, and believe me, not taking the pills they want you to doesn't help. of course, if you're a normal healthy person, you don't need to worry. get out and do some exercise, you healthy fuck. (kidding, kidding!)

0110. if you've got access to a fuckbuddy, sex will shoot you up with dopamine and endorphines good and proper. if you've got a proper partner with all that hug-me, support-me, hold-me-as-i-fall-asleep jazz, you don't need advice from the likes of my loveless ass.

0111. comfort. i personally don't know what to do for this one, but i'm told by lots of professionals that it's necessary. maybe you've got a soft blanket or a comfy couch you like to lie on; maybe you've got a bull terrier puppy to hug or something, or a giant sweater, whatever comforts you best. (if you'd like to send me a bull terrier puppy to hug...) some of us with broken heads might think that acting on the problem is itself a comfort.

1000. acting on the problem, then: you got bills, start budgeting. you're ill, start planning how to manage it. you got unresolved conflicts in your past that have led to your chronic manic depressive disorder in the present, get to a shrink.

1001. don't do any of the following: hire whores; get wasted (it's a depressant, it's not gonna fucking help); get high if you get stupid, depressed, caught or murderous when you're high; talk to the person who caused all your emotional problems if that's what happened (trust me); go shopping; comfort eat or stop eating at all; paint your room black and decide that Ville Valo is your new idol; start wearing guyliner; put any fiction you've written on the Wired; drop out of university / quit your job. i warned you.

so that's what i do, anyway. anyone got any better suggestions? - L

legality vs. morality

so you're all aware my hobby is a little liminal when it comes to the legal system. the law's unclear as to what it's permissible to do to myself; i can't, as it turns out, do anything to anyone else that involves implants without being in deep, deep shit.

i didn't think i'd find this out by being tattled on. it's not worth my ass to blog about who did it; wouldn't matter much anyway what with this being a dusty little backwater Googlecorner, and i've got a sword over my head now. for the meantime, i don't know whether i'm going back to jail, and the one source of neodymiums there is - Trust, in Mannheim - has stopped exporting to Britain, making the single component i have left the last remaining one on the island. the one consequence that's definitely come outta this snafu is that i will never have a test subject who isn't me again.

before this starts to look too wangsty, let me get into my actual point.

i seem to be such an arrogant cunt that i consider myself above the law, i know, but that isn't actually what's going on in my head; i don't think the law was ever designed for what i'm doing. my attempts at lobbying came to an impasse when i was told to fuck off (because i'm an unqualified peasant and therefore don't get to discuss) by my MSP's office; in my mind, my implants did no lasting or unwanted harm to anyone. they don't violate the Golden Rule, and as such, shouldn't be illegal. i figured i and my buddies had the right to do whatever non-Rule-violating shit we wanted to ourselves.

well, some people don't agree with me, and in the name of doing the right thing, snitched. what i'm interested in is whether i or they are in the right; i'm pretty obviously biased in favour of it being me, and seeing as the one who informed the big guns was someone who previously worked shoulder-to-shoulder with me down in the H+ underground, so to speak, someone who i thought was with me ideologically as well as practically, i'm in no fit state to judge.

on the one hand, i probably did all of my transhumanist stuff up until now in the legal no-man's-land of badly defined prohibitions, and if i get taken to court, i'll have no choice but to plead guilty to whatever they charge me with. i'm fairly sure that the law is not on my side; my whistle-blower assured me that many other people agreed i should be exposed to the authorities and that it was right to go to them.

in addition, other people tell me the laws are intended to stop people from burdening the NHS with their homebrew fuckups. having experienced such fuckups and strived to not do it again, i understand that concern. i can't figure out whether a nanny-state law to prevent us hurting ourselves, NHS or none, is a good idea or not, nor whether there is one as regards implants.

on the other, i thought i had a right to personal bodily sovereignty; none of the components or tools i used are illegal; i never masqueraded as a professional i'm not, i charged no money or trade, and i hurt nobody. if my transhumanist dabblings are a crime, i don't know who the victim is.

the debate in my head has shifted from just Is it right to do these things to yourself? to also include the question, Is it and should it be legal? right now, i'm also wondering Was it wrong to do implants for a consenting, informed friend?

i guess they boil down to Does legality trump my personal ethics, or vice versa?

right now, i don't know. i'll be waiting to see what everyone else decides.

new implants: experimental neodym siting

so i'm trying out a new place to put neodymiums, on the back of the hand. not only that, but i've acquired a test subject - a first year, whose enthusiasm is matched by his total ignorance of exactly how dangerous playing with implantation is. known the guy for a while, and i figured i could trust him, so i decided to do this new siting with both of us, first on me, then my guinea pig buddy. of course, i had to do a fair spiel of explanining first, and i had a lot of dressings and shit to buy. sayonara, food money.

well, those 5mm needles i got a while back are lost'n'gone in the wilds of w3dyt's house, and it being a bad time to show my chronic ass up on the doorstep giving it all "Bitch gimme my needles", i ordered some off bodyhazard, a pretty speedy little Welsh piercer's store i found a while ago, and once they were delivered, i steri'd up and downed a rather over the top cocktail of whiskey, amitryptiline, codeine, diclofenac and paracetamol - my usual pain regime, amped a little and with some Strathisla for good measure. sipping on said excellent drink, it proved to be pretty damn easy painwise.

the problem, and this made me laugh like Hannibal Lecter surrounded by scalpels and needles in my kitchen, is that it's physically really hard for me. it takes all the force i have to puncture the epidermis with a needle, so it's slow, but nothing like the goddamn ordeal we had trying to do fingertip ones. took me about three minutes before i had it in there up to the hilt, and another thirty seconds to get the magnet in. goddamn, it was practically painless. after some bleeding, it slowed down enough for me to get a dressing on, and it's been dandy ever since.

my good guinea pig had a blanket pressed to his face when it came time to do his the next day, which proved to be totally unnecessary; he said it barely registered as pain, but that it was "nasty" feeling the needle go in and getting used to the implant being there. figures, we've got a natural urge to claw them out; not many people like the idea of something beneath their skin, i guess. it ain't natural.

so, here i am, on Valentine's day, with a new implant, and a good few experiments going on. i still feel pretty shitty, what with the amount of things healing on my body and the generic cold that's doing the rounds, and i still disagree that this should be a holiday at all - me and my med buddy were bantering, and came up with the argument that it's kinda like having a special holiday to celebrate having a safe, warm house to live in. it's great for the people who do, but all of us homeless fucks spend the day feeling like crap - wouldn't it be better to just not have the damn day in the first place?

fuck it, i guess i'm just a miserable cunt on Valentine's. miserable, part-mechanical cunt.

dear wankers:

it's fucking snowing. do not linger in the doorway of the fucking coffee shop for ten minutes trying to decide whether you're gonna come in, holding the door open the whole time as you deliberate over entry.

fuckers.

naive

so i got punched over the weekend. no big deal, you're thinking, suck it up, you weakling; thing is, it was w3dyt. the guy who was one of my best buddies, who i trusted pretty much with anything, smashed me one in the back - him being twice my strength and a whole fucking lot taller, me being just in a towel at the time and having refused to sleep with him. i got a fist-sized bruise on my goddamn ribs now.

basically, i'm fucked when it comes to fighting. i have no built-up muscle. i'm five foot three, i weigh 115 - i'm a featherweight at best, an immunocompromised wimp in reality. pretty much anyone i know could kick my sorry ass in a fistfight, and even though he only hit me once, i was so fucking shocked i didn't even hit him back. i'm ashamed to say i started crying, took a shitload of my pain pills to KO myself and slept on the floor, just with a blanket. i haven't talked to him since.

it's pathetic, but i felt so fucking betrayed. he was my best buddy, like a brother to me, and he did that just because i wouldn't fuck him. i trust my crew with everything - with the meat when i'm unconscious, with money, with my house keys, fucking everything - they're part of my family, and the idea that a brother would wanna hurt me never came into my head.

i guess i'm just too fucking naive.

component rejection, immunodeficiency and sepsis: shit happens

well, that episode of mine and w3dyt's adventure with scalpels and magnets was a total physical failure. in my case, putting the magnet into my crappy, narrow fingertip required a pair of tweezers, tweezers that turned out to be far too sharp; the following sepsis meant i had to make yet another visit to the fucking hospital doctors, feeling awful about taking up their time; after three or four days of fever, severe infection and a pretty frightening day in and out of delirium, my system rejected the component and i figured out what i'd fucked up.

i pierced the silicon and scratched the gold coating with the fucking Swiss army knife tweezers (didn't have anything else). this is probably the single most retarded mistake i've made; the neodymium had started to corrupt and leak out of the casing through this tiny puncture, giving my already infected bloodstream the added kick of neodym poisoning, i think.

on the other side, w3dyt, while not bass-ackwards fuckheaded enough to damage his own components, has an immune system that's made of adamantium. during the healing process it decided it didn't like the magnet - and threw out a couple of the skin divers on his sternum for good measure. try, try and try again, i guess.

so we got a shipment of 5mm piercer's needles, big scary motherfuckers that i can well imagine are gonna hurt like a cunt. the upside is, it's probably gonna give us a much deeper cavity, much faster; and this time, i ain't using those motherfucking tweezers.

shit happens, get up and try again. merry fucking christmas.

the outgroup homogeneity bias

i shouldn't peoplewatch. it just makes me despise people.

i'm sitting in the corridors of the huge labs, next to a power socket, happily plugged in and listening to Rabbit Junk while i write a paper about the role of artificially intelligent techniques in machine security. i'm wading through a paper on CycSecure when i'm interrupted by an infuriating stream of banality that streams from the seemingly unthinking head of the bint who's wandered out of the lab to invade my space. "Okay... Tesco... so basically yeah... football? ...no, I'll see you later... no I don't think so sweetie... mum, yeah... I don't wanna go by myself, no..." and on and on, all punctuated with giggles and spoken in an artificially soft, girlified tone that makes me want to crush her throat against the wall until she stops talking like that. it's another sports clone, in the standard uniform of expensive running shoes, joggers, over-feminine pink shirt and bodywarmer, with the same boring plain face, same old brown hair pulled in a ponytail and the same gold necklace they all seem to pass around like a joint. i swear these fucking people are all identical.

so while i'm sitting there, partly fuming that i've cranked my music up to obnoxious volumes and i can still hear this retard blathering about fuck all for an hour, and partly desperately wanting to send them all a long, detailed, ranting letter about how they don't have to look like they're the High Ambassador of Bland or totally eschew any kind of clothing or decoration that might express their personalities or give me looks that might as well spell out in neon over their heads, OH GOD IT'S THAT FUCKING PILLHEAD AGAIN, it occurs to me that my own thinking is spectacularly biased.

see, not everybody looks like me. i've got skin divers on my face and hands, my hair is spiky and dyed weird colours, and my clothes are about as old as i am. on top of that, i just look sick; it's the white skin and the permanent eye-bags at twenty years old, i scare people. the thing is, whilst i'm not neurotypical, in a way everybody thinks like me, everyone despises the masses that drift in oceans of samey-samey facelessness around their ragtag group of misfit friends. that's called the outgroup homogeneity bias.

so maybe i don't have a right to call their hobbies boring. i can't stand small talk or nights on the town, and i hate myself for getting suckered into video games, purely because i have better things to do, like finish the prototype of my thermistor implant or improve the procedure for inserting neodymiums. but they'd probably see it the exact same way, in reverse. what the fuck's Lepht doing sat on its ass drawing circuits all night when i was out with my friends having real fun? the same goes for thinking your friends are all totally crazy and unique and nobody else has buddies like yours. they do. everybody thinks their buddies are the craziest people in the city. the reason i'm on about all this, of course, is that i think it's fucking awesome to notice the biases and prejudices your own perception is subject to. more you see, the more you can reduce your dependency on that kind of thing.

so maybe i should just see the jocks for what they actually are and do some goddamn work.

i'm an idiot

big, fat, raving fucking moron. delivery of neodymium implant components came Friday, me skipping lectures to make sure it got there, and i proceeded Saturday to w3dyt's to sterilise his bathroom as well as we could and get the fuck on with it. got everything all set up, all the instruments sterilised and the first magnet - mine - sitting in its blob of biocide ready to be inserted. i'd taken a few pictures of all the dressings and scalpels and shit we were using, since i'm gonna be writing tutorials as i go, handed the cam to w3dyt, who sat on the toilet seat filming, washed and technicare'd my hands, gloved up and picked up the no.24 blade to make the first incision. i pricked my skin gently to test the sharpness before i started.

that's when i found out what's happened to my pain tolerance. i literally couldn't make myself put enough pressure on the scalpel to make a proper incision - i tried a few light strokes to make a shallow one and i actually made myself cry. i can't remember that kind of pain since my last real surgery, and i thought i'd never feel anything like that again. well, fuck you, dihydrocodeine addiction, and fuck you, opiate-adapted brain. i had about 180mg of codeine, 10g paracetamol and around 60mg of DHC in my system - enough to kill some people - and it might as well have been Smarties for all it did for me.

well, i figured i couldn't fucking stop there, even if it hurt like a cunt. problem was, there was too much pain using the no.3 scalpels we'd intended to carve out the implant cavity with for me to actually hold the blade, and there was no way in hell w3dyt was gonna do it with the chance of me reflexively jerking my hand away from him and severing half my goddamn fingertip.

so we got a paring knife outta the kitchen, sharpened it with a chef's steel, and cold-sterilised it with technicare. i got w3dyt to hold my hand down - it's bruised to fuck now; he weighs about twice as much as i do - and press it sideways into the shallow incision i'd cut, as hard as he could.

it was a fucking good thing i told him to ignore the screaming. we had to insert the knife like that twice, jiggling it around inside the wound to make a cavity, and the second one hit the loop of nerve that runs under the fingertip. after that, i had to use scissors to excise the globbets of flesh that were still in the hole. the whole process took more than an hour and by the end i'd been screaming for so long i'd run out of voice. the insertion was even harder, took longer than the cuts did. amazingly i was conscious through the whole thing, and we did it without any anaesthesia. almost 20hrs later the whole site is still throbbing under the layers of steristrips and Mepore dressings.

after we'd finished mine and bound the edges of the wound, which are still further apart than i'm comfortable with, we took a break, and at about 2am we started on w3dyt. that was easier, seeing as i'm damn good with a scalpel on other people, and took three deep strokes to make the initial incision, plus three punches with the knife to cut out a cavity. inserting the magnet was just as hard as it was with me, although the wound was nicely closed at the end. i didn't have any suture kits or i'd have stitched them both up.

three excruciating hours there, and it takes a pro about thirty seconds tops. why?

it's because of the needles. i was under the impression that a needle was slower, but hell no - it makes the cavity and the incision at the same time, meaning no fucking about inside the wound trying to make it bigger. i'm not doing any more implants until my order of piercers' 5mm needles gets here, and to be honest, i was kind of retarded to even try this procedure without. both of our implants are functioning, but i wouldn't be surprised if shit got infected. doing it alone is not for the weak.

can you snort solpadol?

that search somehow directed some idiot to me, the amateur cyberneticist / white hat with an even more amateur interest in pharmacology. sir, you can snort as much solpadol as you want, and it won't absorb any quicker through your nose than it would through your guts. it's not fucking cocaine.

if you really want it in your system quickly, grind it to a powder and chug it dissolved in a can of Relentless. don't blame me when you OD on rapidly-metabolised codeine and they hospitalise your stupid ass.

'milestone'

two thousand hits. aaaaw yeeeah. *snnrrt*