15.8.10

bride of the return of the son of das update goes to Hollywood

the node's fine, wound is scarred over completely although the site is still just perceptibly redder and more heated than the rest of the finger. that's unusual; i blame the cyanoacrylate glue i used to repair the node before i shoved it in there, or perhaps it is rusting. in either case it will be good for science.

there is a Megavideo of the procedure now. if you need it there will be a RuTube as well, although currently i cannot be arsed to put one up.

there is a stashbox of the video at http://stashbox.org/977038/node-insertion.3GP

goals further to this project:
1. source raw neodymium discs for coating.
2. create and test homebrew implants with said discs and Sugru.

goals further to the Northpaw project:
1. find some goddamn motherfucking neuroelectrodes.
2. toss a coin to decide whether i go with some sort of kinetic power assembly or whether i just say fuck it and go with a coated lithium cell. currently, odds are favouring the latter, since a dynamo would require quite a lot of complex electronics - capacitors, resistors, other regulatory circuitry and the like - and would slow my prototyping down by quite the major factor, when i'm used to rapid prototyping as the One True Path of software (and wetware) engineering.

in other news, today i cut a failing microdermal out of my face with a scalpel and realised exactly how much better scalpel use is when you actually have a goddamn handle.

carpe corporem

L

6.8.10

bride of the return of the son of das update

all doing fine, if incredibly bruised; side of finger opposite the node is purple, we obviously hit a blood vessel this time. real post later when i am not so rushed, pictures forthcoming. several things in the meantime:

0000. i am aware of the fact that the YouTube got pulled - it is because YouTube are pussies and summerfags who can't handle a little guro in the name of science. i will put it up again on MegaVideo and RuTube asap.

0001. i am no longer suicidal, haven't been for a long time. just wanted to clarify. the combination of willing slavery to Morpheus and actually having a contribution to make towards the knowledge and experience of the species helped.

0010. i try to reply to everyone's comments, but if there's something i missed, feel free to email me or ruthlessly spam the blog until i respond. there's nothing worse than being ignored when you're trying to have a discussion.

0011. if anyone wants a tarball or zip of the complete set of photos and video i have so far you're welcome to ping me and i will put it up on stashbox.

as you were.

L


edit: fucking grammar.

5.8.10

return of the son of das update

i think it's doing alright; it sealed back up overnight. problem is, it's still redder than it ought to be and hot to the touch, which worries me - might be bruising from the procedure itself, which is very likely to have happened, might be a staph resurgence. the wound itself has closed nicely, though, and is sitting there playing good with no discharge or anything.

fingers crossed, gentlehumans.

L

4.8.10

son of das update

hey look, whitey's not dead yet.

node state: i'm still taking antibiotics for it, which seems wise; this morning i changed the dressing again to find the opening white, bloodless and clearly dead or dying. i am half-convinced that this is because it was kept too wet under the Jelonet, which is weird moist jelly-like clinging mesh that keeps wound lips together (my fault, i ought to have removed that shit as soon as i got back from the lab yesterday.) since wounds that get like that tend to reopen, it's not really a good sign, but i re-dressed it dry and here's hoping it will seal again. there's no sign of the node coming out. site was warm this morning, but seems to have cooled down since (probably something to do with the large amounts of antipyretics routinely flowing through my system as a catalyst for the DHC...) pain has abated greatly even when my dose runs down - yesterday was an opiate downday and i could still move all three joints without pain, unlike the day before. today my usual chemical halo is back in place and i feel nothing except when the wound itself presses against something.

status is therefore tentatively good.

sensory-wise, it's still too early for any EM sense to have come through, although magnetic function is obviously active (boring.)

also, i really like Cesium_137, and you might too.

2.8.10

test nodes: result so far

looks like this:


zoom:



that's all for tonight. will keep the blog updated (okay, will try and will finally do it when endless email slews up about it) with the situation on the node; it's still hot as fuck and painful to touch, but not as much so as before. remember, no matter how much of a doughy Caucasian loser with nasty pallid skin and too many scars you are, the machines will always love you.

...wait.


L

search engine blues

aside from the usual stuff people ask my Wijit for, like can you get high off one Solpadol pill and does Tramadol fuck you up and where the fuck is Lepht it said it would be here an hour ago, i have seen some weird search shit coming through recently.

fuck u gram
uh, what?
"feyhra"
i have no idea who this is, but someone keeps searching the blog for the name. if anyone knows, do enlighten me.
fuck tramadol
finally, someone not looking to get high on that shit. which you can't.
dr fuck me off
if you mean the doctor will jack you off, you're wrong. otherwise... well, my faith in the uneducated was never very strong to begin with.
pain
oh, you'll find a lot of that here.
fuck a pillhead
Muad-Dib does. you don't get to unless you pay me a lot of money, though.
steve haworth clinic
you want to try Haworth's own site.
will flexiril and tramadol mess you up?
oh, fuck knows. i am not a drug encyclopaedia, guys, and to boot you're asking me about Yankee drugs when i'd slit my wrists before i visited that humanity-forsaken empire of greed again. go to Erowid or NetDoctor or something.

peace

L

das update

(cf Combichrist's 'Get Your Body Beat'.) i woke up this morning to a small chorus of little dull pangs that mean 'oshit, son, get your fat ass to a doctor'. so i did; i was about to take a picture of the node site, but first the examining doc made me take off the bandage, and then had to send me to the nurse so she could patch me up with shit tons of gauze and Jelonet and stuff that's making it hard to type right. i had several interesting conversations about why it is that i do this shit to myself, which is something i can never explain properly to non-transhumanists - i've gotta learn to do that, otherwise i'm never going to get anything like a research grant or unbiased medical help. the nurses are alright, but the doctors still think of me as some exotic species of self-harmer.

i have been known to slice my arms open for shits'n'giggles, sure, and do a fair amount of damage in the process (none of this emo cat-scratch bullshit, i've split my arm to the tendons like the little psychopath i sort of am), but this is not something i do when properly medicated. i need a better way of communicating that.

fortunately the doc didn't decide to cut the node out of me just yet and gave me a box of flucloxacillin, which will doubtless play havoc with my system. still, it's not like i'm not grateful.

that is all. also you should check out Project Pitchfork, because their track 'A Cell' is kickass.

1.8.10

the things i do for biohacking, part 2

here is footage of the latest node-siting, completed about an hour ago. in this little flick you can see yours truly, in hood and surgical gloves, trying a new way to do this operation: i have my hand on an ice pack, and it's been in the freezer for about ten or fifteen minutes before the footage starts. this time i asked Muad-Dib, the other guy you see in the video, to do the puncture and shove the node in - doing it myself takes such a long time and is so fucking painful that we thought this way would be better. as it happens, it is; i still scream, but the process itself is far quicker.

i did try to strip the sound, but it wouldn't fucking encode, and i got pissed off with it, so fuck it. y'all can hear me screaming like a little girl. i've been told i sound like Jack from Mass Effect II, if that makes it any the less disturbing. also it came out all weird and high-pitched, fuck knows why. the quality is, as expected, godfuckingawful. apologies.

Muad-Dib does drop the node three or four times before he gets it in there. i had to evacuate the house so i wouldn't scare my roommates with the yelling, not that it bothered any of us. the guy filming is a buddy called Mike, who's a photography genius and remarkably unbothered by this.

goddamn, i do some fucking nasty things in the name of transhumanism.


L

the things i do for biohacking, part 1

okay, so i finally managed to get the photos of the pre-insertion test blob operation up here. i will try to format this shit correctly, but do bear in mind i went through with the node insertion itself about an hour ago and i'm consequently just a wee bittie fucked up. here is the blob of Sugru i made as a test node:

here it is next to a standard Swann-Morton 24 blade so that you can see the size; it's about 4mm diameter, i think:

this is both of them - the other one is the hot-glue blob. i sterilised both components in standard surgical spirit before i did anything, in a fucking teacup of all things:

then, like the idiot i am, i started cutting holes in myself (the goal of this particular session of batshit insanity, as you recall, being to get the neodymium node out of the back of my hand and then to insert the test blobs of Sugru and hot glue into the hole left behind.) as ever, the initial cuts are bad, but as soon as you do any real damage to yourself, you get an adrenaline rush to the area that inhibits bloodflow and turns you into a bad enough dude to finish the job. it took me a very long time to get the node out from under my skin; it was pretty deep down, and all this fibrous, stretchy shit had grown around it that just didn't wanna let go. i had to use my fingernails to grab the bundle of fibrous crap, pull it out of my hand as far as it would go, and slice its "roots" out from under it with the scalpel blade, then cut the remains from around the node once it was out; i couldn't photograph that both because it was fucking nasty and because i needed both hands. this is the resulting mess:

and this is the freed neodym, kicking about in the teacup of ethanol:

note the rust you can see on its side; that's where a snick in the silicon/gold coating had caused some damage. i fixed it with superglue last night, but fuck knows if it will hold; i figured i'd find out. if anything does happen, at least it won't be toxic to me. after i finally fucking got that out, i shoved the two blobs under the lips of the wound and cleaned it up. here you can see the size of the incision, and the Sugru blob at the south end. the glue blob was at the north end, but as previously and reluctantly stated, i've now lost the fucker.

in this photo you can also see the weird, white area around the wound where no blood is flowing; i am half-sure that this is because of adrenaline from where i shoved in the blobs. see also the little scar next to the opsite, which is from an old and rather pathetic attempt of mine to see how much i could make myself bleed by opening veins; i got nothing from that save a patch of numbness around the area, since in severing the vein i also severed a nerve. gg, Anonym. here is a rather cool-looking picture of the blade i used for this episode:

and here's the hand all bandaged up with some totally unnecessary Overkill 9000-size dressings i had lying around:


then i went and had a bowl of muesli. the end. oh, and here are some Arduino shock shields and press-buttons invading my workspace in the lab to get to a Penguin caffeinated mint:


biohacker out.

L

22.7.10

HE'S OKAY, FOLKS!

sorry for the loss of updates, guys. my lack of medication is making it pretty hard to function. fortunately i see the doc tomorrow, and i should be alright after that.

the lumps are both fine - it's official, after about 4 weeks of waiting Sugru seems to be compatible in practice with the human body. there's been no itching, bruising or what have you, no irritation or leaking. it sealed up in about two days and has been peachy ever since.

some notes: i made the Sugru lump too big, and so it looks incredibly fucking nasty right now cause you can see this massive fucking thing on the back of my hand. i also made the hot-glue lump too small in my ever-flowing fucking wisdom, and i shit you not i have lost it. i don't know where in my hand that fucker migrated to, but it sure as shit isn't where i put it anymore. it seems to be non-toxic too, as expected.

i also can't find the Crackberry cable anywhere. fucking photos. i will get them to you guys if it kills me.

so, i got my scalpel handle and a shit ton of antiseptic for the real op, which is next on Lepht's Happy Fun List of Pain. i've got like two thousand hospital-standard bacteria-killer wipes as well, plus some proper finger bandages and another big fuckoff needle, and some sterile surgeon's gloves (latex-free, motherfuckers!) for once rather than crappy exam ones. i will see if anyone in the house has a cam i can use, otherwise you'll be getting crappy Crackberry footage, but there will be footage.

and i hereby grant you all permission to fuck with me mercilessly until i remember to update the blog. jesus, i suck at life sometimes.

L

1.7.10

progress bar

no infection or irritation so far; in fact the site's doing pretty well, although i had to put superglue out of the toolbox in it yesterday. if all is still calm by next week, i will take it that Sugru doesn't cause major immediate damage to the interior of the human body, although it could still be damaging in the long-term. i'm not so bothered about that, since anything that fucked me up over a long period of time has historically been detected by people giving me biopsies and scans and shit and sliced the fuck out before it could do any real damage.

if it works, then, i'll probably use the sugru to coat up both the parts of the modified Northpaw for implantation and two plain pieces of Nd in order to complete my array. i have the node that came out of my hand the other day ready for re-insertion, but i'm waiting on supplies.

and i'm scared shitless of how much it's gonna hurt, of course. i'll have a spotter to video that one. pictures of the blob-siting tonight with any luck.

L

30.6.10

irritating thing of the day:

retarded Otherkin trying to tell me they have more senses than i do. it's sort of self-defeating to enter into any conversation with that kind of fucking ego-delusional kid in the first place, but i do resent putting myself through a lot of pain just to gain one rudimentary, local-range additional sense and then being outright told that elves and viruskin and dragons have twenty or so senses and if i was a fucking vampire like them i'd never have to go through all of this silly modification stuff, lol, because i'm just an inferior human *giggle*!

without elitism: i can prove my shit. you can hook an electrode up to my hands and watch the nodes being triggered as i sense EM. you can stick paperclips to me. you could take the nodes out of me and put them in another guy and the same things would happen to him, reliably. on the other hand, you are claiming perfect night-vision, a spectrum of hearing beyond the physical capacity of our (yes, our) species, reflexes too fast for sight, etc. etc.

here's a fucking gold-standard experiment for you. let's take all the Otherkin, strip them naked, put them in the woods in the middle of Siberia at three in the morning, and see whether their POWAZ keep their chubby suburban Yankee arses from dying of hypothermia for longer than it takes a bear to scent them.

sometimes i wish i could backhand people over UDP.

L

28.6.10

blobs sited

i didn't manage to get the crackberry filming (too hard to rig a position where its tiny field of view can see enough shit - needs someone holding it), but i did take pictures. i'll be posting them up as soon as i can get them off that fucking excuse for a phone. (at least it isn't a fucking iPhone, i guess.) also if anyone knows of a good way to zero-fill or strip the EXIF data, i'd appreciate the entire technically-savvy biohacker underground not getting hold of my crackberry PIN.

experimental blobs of bright fucking orange Sugru and freshly melted hot-glue are now present in a gaping wound in the back of my hand, no anaesthesia required. i have filled said wound with ethanol. i dunno exactly how long it'll be until we see whether or not they'll decay, but i'm sure i'll find out.

irritatingly i snicked the node when i was getting it out, and although the gold appears unscratched, there's a big fuckoff hole in the silicon. i intend to hotglue that shut and all, once i'm sure it's sterile (it's sitting in the fridge in a coffee cup full of industrial bleach, HiBiScrub and surgical spirit, where it'll remain until at least tomorrow.) cross your fucking fingers, fellow hackers.

(brb, hospital.)

L

22.6.10

plans

okay, so i'm gonna be doing this latest experiment sooner or later. it will be on cam, although i'm unsure of whether i will shoop a trollface over mine or just wear a hood or something, since i don't want to ruin my credibility by looking like... well, me. planned proceedings:

1. remove node from failed experimental siting on back of right hand
2. place testing blobs of hot glue and sugru into cavity left by node
3. install node in right hand, middle finger

required:

anaesthesia
- lidocaine powder
- sterile water ampoules
- needle and syringe
- possibly topical lidocaine as well to help with the first few cuts

analgesia and sedatives, which i will probably lean on various acquaintances for and which if anyone asks, i totally don't use - drugs are bad, mmkay?

infection control supplies
- gloves
- TechniCare or surgical ethanol for sterilising the components
- antibiotics if i can procure some
- fucidic acid topical cream
- HiBiScrub
- lots of motherfucking bleach

wound care supplies
- steristrips or a suture kit
- big dressings for the back of the hand
- gauze'n'tape for the finger wound
- spray plaster (useful shit)
- sterile cotton wool pads

tools
- another goddamn scalpel handle because my ex fucking nicked mine
- blades
- a few 4G needles

misc
- absinthe
- camera
- test blobs
- containers for chems, pills, drink, components etc.

can anyone think of anything i've forgotten?

L
(ed. fucking formatting)

exam results

well, i fucked over my 1:1 average. bastard Languages and Computability class. results for this year, all out of 20 (18 or over is a first-class):

CS3008 OPERATING SYSTEMS 19
CS3015 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE 18
CS3017 ADAPTIVE INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS 19
CS3019 KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS 19
CS3514 ENTERPRISE COMPUTING 18
CS3517 DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS AND SECURITY 20
CS3518 LANGUAGES AND COMPUTABILITY 14

man, i would've had a perfect first if it weren't for the fact that i hate computability theory (by which i mean that i am shit at it). on the plus side i'm informed that most people got about a 5-7 on it... musta been pretty harshly marked, especially seeing as this is the year where we don't get to retake exams. if you get CAS 4 the first time, you can resit, sure. you get a 20 the second time and it still goes down as a 4 on your record, and that's what they use to determine your final degree class. you don't like it? fuck you, you can retake the entire year.

you know what's particularly lulzy about these results? i studied exactly once for each exam, the night before. sometimes i slept, sometimes i didn't; i just couldn't make myself do anything any earlier than that. depressive episodes are a cunt - or apparently, a magical blessing from the gods of depressed lazy assholes.

also lulz at the full marks in Distributed Systems and Security. HURR I AM A HAXOR DURR

L

15.6.10

things i have been doing today:

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

11.6.10

literary feeding time

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...

9.6.10

shit, i had that blog

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

27.5.10

note on positioning

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

20.5.10

haptic compass: hardware

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