prodding the corpse

hey, i think its eyes have rott - FUCK IT'S STILL ALIVE.

um, hi. you've probably forgotten about my sorry ass by now. have the fans all gone? is that guy who kept asking me to marry him still here?

i owe you all an apology for being away so long. lots of things happened; first there was the move, which was so fucking stressful i kept throwing up, and then trying to catch up with my honours year project, trying to get my application to repeat last semester approved and get repeat tuition fee support for it, trying to catch up with everything else i missed. there was a lot of serious head problems just after the move as well, plus fallout head-wise from the shit i did at Christmas. it still eats at me. then my finances crashed while we were moving, i got a phone call from the bank about how they needed £800 that day, and i had to use up every single penny i and my ma had, anywhere, just to stop them closing down my account. i'm still so broke i can't afford fuck all except rent. Muad-Dib is helping me get food. it's pretty much just potatoes, noodles and those frozen bags of discount meat you get at Farmfoods. i still owe my friend Feoa and Muad-Dib's dad for Berlin, my flatmate B for the massive electricity bill that came in when the boiler broke and my ma for helping me pay the deposit on the new place.

headspace got pretty corrupted this time around, as you can probably guess. i didn't try to end it this time; it makes me feel too guilty, on account of the life partner and family i'd have to leave behind, and the bupe sorta cushions the blow of a lot of those thoughts. i did completely shut down for everything but the Honours project, so i haven't even been answering my phone or checking my email, much less working on the experiments. i thank the gods of sedation that i had this shit in my veins that keeps me from going completely insane when my brain just falters and fails for months on end like that. i think i'd have succeeded at death a while ago if i didn't.

it's time to start again, again.

in my absence two places have been set up to document and plan the experiments: they are Biohack.me and SelfModifier. they were set up by people who read the blog, and i will be establishing myself on them tomorrow. it's going to be the day when i finally check emails, answer messages, make introductory posts, etc. and i promise no matter what kind of progress i do or don't make, every Saturday i will check in here and on those sites.

i tried on various people's advice to set up a Flattr. i'm still trying. my paypal broke when a payment from my bank got refused, and i think that might have broken the flattr as well.

also i had an invitation in January to go speak about H+ in Ireland; i may or may not actually do this, since i don't know if it's too late to accept or about travel funds and whatnot.

in the main, though, sorry. sorry for leaving you all for this long. sorry for not replying to your messages and emails and SMS. sorry for not being better with my finances so i have any money at all to do anything. mostly, sorry for fucking up.

i have an essay i'll post for you tomorrow about underground H+. it's a long-ass bastard (4K) but it's a fairly decent piece, i think, since i wrote it for a University course. it's 0354 now and i ought to go find something to make me sleep. i'm okay, but i'll be better when i get back into talking to people. g'night, sibs. carpe corporem.

L

where the fuck is that ugly little bastard

okay, okay. i was moving house. my cunt of a landlord decided that the repair bills required to satisfy regulations for student housing were greater than the profits from the students, and instead of installing functional windows, sold the apartment i live in. he is a money-grubbing coke-snorting underdeveloped shit of a pathetic little man, and i should dearly love to see him floss his ass with razor wire. he has caused us a fuckton of stress, not to mention necessitated my spending over a month disconnected from the Wired, calling agents and companies, viewing a hundred dingy nasty flats occupied by flies and leftover Playboy posters, having to have discussions about who's actually compatible with who before two people who would very much not get on move in together by accident, trying to sort out the ~£400 heating bill caused by the abovementioned cunt making us keep electric heaters on 24-7 when the boiler broke down for two months (he didn't want to pay for repairs to burst pipes), trying not to let my final undergrad project crash and burn, etc.

i'm not dead. i am buped up to the eyeballs, allowing me a modicum of clarity to understand and accept the situation. we have now found a new apartment where i will stay with one housemate until i graduate, upon which i will get my own place. all of this is still being funded by undergraduate loans and grants.

Southpaw news in a little while, sapes. i've got 216 mails to reply to. cc

L


PS i'm not single, handful of Googlers. i spent Valentine's Day with my Muad-Dib, who does not give a shit about gender or orientation, we got fried chicken and had a picnic. i have been with him for close to two years, i love him irrevocably, i'm not interested. you also have got to stop referring to me as a "lady" when i am genderless.

new year's resolutions

i. never to read threads about myself on other websites
ii. to talk more with my family
iii. to try and set up some sort of Southpaw development space rather than keeping it here, since a blog isn't ideal anymore for the volume of people coming in

any ideas on the latter are welcome.

L

google before you post

i am seeing lots of reactions, mostly on io9 where they reprinted the article about me on Wired, that have misconceptions. i would very much like it if the uneducated masses who like to call me an idiot would disavail themselves of the following precepts:

1. that i cost the NHS money without contributing to it.
no, i pay taxes just like you do, and fund the NHS just like you. some of my experiments have led to hospital, one to an overnight stay; i've never been in ICU, and the service is meant to help all people, not just people with tragic accident-related injuries.

2. that i sacrificed all or some of my sense of touch. i did not. next.

3. that you are just as much a "cyborg" as i am because you use an iPhone and wear glasses. fuck off if you are going to tell me that what i do is pointless, and i do not want to debate the definition of 'cyborg' with any normal.

4. that i don't do this voluntarily, and it's some sort of compulsion; also that because you can buy topical anaesthetic creams for stings and burns, that must mean those would work fine for surgery and would definitely go deep enough, so i must just "like the pain". do your goddamn research.

L

correction

i am an idiot and an asshole.

my parents informed me with less than enough harshness that actually they don't mean their comments on TV literally. it turns out that in actuality it is i who doesn't think things through, so not only did i misunderstand what they meant and vent about it without asking for a clarification of whether i was actually correct, i insulted and upset them both in the process. i am lucky my ma still fucking speaks to me.

i removed the post not at my parents' request but at my own embarrassment. should you have said anything important in the comments please do repost here, and accept my apology for publicly venting frustration about people before checking to see if they really were deserving of it: they aren't, and i was totally in the wrong.

other news:

i will be writing up a full account of the 27c3 talk and answering your mails and comments as soon as i can, and will let you know if i find the stream anywhere important. there are several articles about it, or me, which i'll also link to.

someone got into my Blogger account earlier today and i am installing analytics to allow better tracking of who did it if it happens again. i'm not a proper hacker, so i can't stop you, but you fucked me over for a good few hours and made me cry because i thought you had locked me out permanently. good going, asshole, you upset a stressed civilian.

in short: my mother is a good person to whom i owe more than i ought to, including a lot of my finances for Berlin; i know nothing like as much as i like to think i do about normal people and their reactions to simple entertainment; i am not a good person myself; and you shall have your 27c3 article later.

carpe corporem

L

winter feast

a rare moment of fightless calm in my ma's house finds me sitting in front of a real log fire, working on my slides for the congress, eating bulk-buy pick'n'mix strawberry sweets. deciding what colour eyes to wear tomorrow out of a beautiful new palette and feeding leftover beef to the never-sad dog while it tries to steal my share of the meat, heat and liqueur. fuck all this Jesus and Eid and Kwanzaa and Pagan Solstice crap. i celebrate in winter what my farthest ancestors, all of them, did: there are people i care about, reachable and not, and most of us are still alive to see the words when i say them.

merry winter feast, sapes and friends. i toast your continued existence.

L

email bomb

okay, something has gone seriously wrong with my gmail account. all those mails? they were everything i'd deleted since three years ago. missing from the inbox was everything from this fucking year.

if you've emailed me, please email me again - it's all gone.

L

return of the wanderer

greets, all. i apologise again for my absence; i have been juggling various awful arrangements, fun with Christmas in a twisted definition of the word 'fun', a brand-new psychiatric diagnosis (looks like i have borderline personality disorder rather than autism), my decade-divorced parents getting back together and the fact that i have a hell of a lot less money than i thought i did to get to the 27c3 with. ugh. also coldsores, withdrawal, repeat scrip woes with gum-chewing receptionists, trying to buy presents for people with zero budget and repeating the year because i spent six weeks in a state of mind wherein it was an achievement not to try and kill myself every day.

regardless, i am alive. just.

Berlin is hopefully still on, pending the airports actually being open. to be honest i don't know what the fuck i'll do if they're not; if anyone knows a way to get to Berlin from England short-notice (i.e. within a night, no cross-continental bus rides) do tell. i still need to write the slides, to my embarrassment, and they're now crowing for a video of me while i'm scrabbling for the money. i'm pretty fucking stressed.

i shit you not there are 4459 unread emails in my goddamn inbox, none of which are spam, and this is just my personal mail. i don't dare look at my academic address. i will reply to your mails and comments, but it will take me a while. i apologise to anyone who has been waiting a while, although really i don't think i'm important enough to anyone that that's necessary. i have not been ignoring any of you on purpose, i promise.

i'm writing slides tonight, as well as looking at flights. the topic is incredibly general, so is there anything you people particularly want to see?

L

lepht vs. world

my fantastic week of attempting to wrestle my life under control was topped off, like a layer of fetid cream atop a trifle of failures and overdraft, by waking up at 4pm today to find the house boiler had eroded into total uselessness. oh, hello, spongebath! i missed you.

looks like i'll be scrubbing my white ass with a washcloth for about a week. sometimes i think i pissed off some god by being born.

L

HOLY SHIT YOU GUIZE

i'm going to be giving a lecture at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress! the topic is "cybernetics for the Masses", of course. i originally only applied for a 5min lightning talk slot, but the coordinator who emailed back with the acceptance offered me thirty minutes to speak properly, since it sounds interesting (apparently.)

i am actually fucking shaking. i can't believe i'm gonna get to speak properly about all this, in front of an actual audience of real hackers. i've gotta get slides and stuff together, and find a logo and a photo of myself from somewhere... man, this is going to be fucking awesome.

the only problem is, of course, that after this you will all know what i look like, what my biological gender is, and who i am in meatspace every day. i'm a little afraid this will compromise my credibility as a biohacker. of course, i am also flat shit broke, and i honestly have no idea where the funding for this trip is gonna come from. i think it might be family-begging time.

holy shit, though. i never expected this would happen.

the unreliable narrator

i will be taking an extended leave of absence from... well, life in general while term is active. i realise a few of you check this site routinely, and i apologise for its lack of life whilst i am pursuing other goals; i don't want to make promises i can't keep, and so i can't promise development of my H+ projects will continue (it usually doesn't) whilst i have continuous assessments, exams, mid-term tests and the like to pass. i don't get an opportunity to resit anything this year, and it's my final year of University, so unfortunately everything else has to take a back seat.

i am genuinely sorry for the lack of effort recently on my part. as some of you will know (and doubtless most will find it glaringly obvious), i suffer from intermittent, badly-controlled depression. a bout of it has hit me pretty hard just now despite the buprenorphine, and mostly i feel incredibly guilty about not continuing something which people have taken an interest in, but i won't get any second chances this year and i have to prioritise the first chances as a result.

i am sorry. i know this will piss people off. i will update when i have anything of value to say.

L

shopping list

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

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

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

L

we return to your regularly scheduled programming

with what could be considered success, meatwise: i am stable on the boxone, and not as fucked-up 24/7 as some people's pessimism had projected. it took me longer than i thought to acclimatise to it - i hadn't counted on how hard it would hit me after the withdrawal sucked away my tolerance, so it did fuck me up a bit for the first week, and then i had the fucking luck to get ill again. hence my extended absence from SA and indeed life in general. i'm now back, although i ought to warn you all that since my last undergraduate semester just started, i won't be as active in H+ as i am during the summers when i don't have as much to do.

i guess the first thing to do now is figure out a prototypical diagram and a list of components, which i can then start acquiring piecemeal as money comes in and goes out. i will be working on the diagram/list this week, i think.

the bad news is, of course, that since i'm still stubbornly alive, you don't get any of my stuff yet.

L

fuck this shit

sibs, i already typed a long post about the painful withdrawal i'm currently in and why, and it will have to fucking wait. Blogger, the shitty engine that it is, is fucking me over and in the state i am in i have bitten my arm bleeding out of frustration.

i will not be in the Wired for the next couple of days, since my access is intermittent and my time entirely consumed in trying not to kill myself. a cure is forthcoming. i will explain more when i'm more capable.

L

edit: post is below. i am seriously about to punch a bitch.

we are experiencing meatspace difficulties

service will resume shortly, once your host has completed its four-day stint of disgustingly acute withdrawal. i feel like death. the whole meat is shaking, not just my hands this time; i shiver constantly, i can't type right, i sweat like a pig even in a cool shower. it feels like my bones are collapsing in on themselves, muscles twisting in little coils. the next doctor who tells me this is no worse than a bad cooold is gonna get a junkieslap upside the head.

i suppose i oughtn't to be such a cunt about it, given that the withdrawal period is preparatory for my newest poison: a several-month course of Suboxone, better known as buprenorphine (bupe for you Yanks.) i finally got to see an addiction-specialising psychiatrist at the Integrated Drug Service, better known as the junk doc at the heroin clinic. surrounded by heroin-aged people, haggard and weary, i must have looked like the healthiest fucker in the room; the DHC i've been surviving on for weeks, while a child's drug compared to morphine, has its benefits. that has to be the first time in my life i've ever come close to looking like the normal one.

that said, the other junkheads then proceeded to batter me with questions and advice, most of which came in the form of "Fit's tha' on yer fais?!" and "Ah tell yehs, dinnae get inta this." why you would advise me thus, when i'm sitting right the fuck next to you in the clinic is beyond me, save for perhaps misguided parental instinct (i'm 22, most of them were about fourty.)

when i finally saw the dude, he was... remarkably understanding. did i want to give up? no, i said. that was fine by him, but in that case, why was i there? i wanted a stable, more cost-effective regimen to keep me fucking sane, i said.

he agreed. i stammered and stuttered like Professor Dawkins trying to be polite to an Ayatollah before finally saying, "You're gonna... give me... drugs." "Yes," he said. hence my current predicament and blessing - i have been scheduled for a maintenance course of Suboxone, which is medical jargon meaning they're going to give me junk and hope that one day i will get a frontal lobotomy and decide that i'm going to be straight-edge. they hauled me in a couple days later for blood and urine tests to determine a. whether my system is as fucked as probability says it will be and b. what level of trash DHC there was in my kidneys.

herein lieth the rub. Suboxone, as you'll see in the pedia, is one of the world's most powerful opiate agonists. great, you'd think, hail Morpheus. but its strength is its curse, so to speak; it's so good at activating opioid receptors that if there is anything else in your system at the time, the boxone will punt that off all the receptors and hog them all, resulting in instant, excruciating, lengthy withdrawal from the original substance. i can't imagine what withdrawal worse than what i'm putting myself through right now would be like, and i don't want to know. hence four days of turning myself into a shivering, vomiting, toilet-running mess.

i suppose in hindsight it might be quite amusing. the first day of lectures was today and i have run out of two of them to avoid shitting myself (not very gentlemanly), inadvertently made a Coke volcano by putting my rehydration salts into a bottle of it, smoked about six packs, and taken thirty milligrams of Valium, which ought to be enough to chemically restrain a patient in hospital. i also threw up once in a coffee shop and once into a dustbin.

now if you'll excuse me, i need to go smash my head into a door a couple hundred times. fuck this shit.

L

dear searcher

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

this, folks, is why Darwin was correct.

L

fightan good

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

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

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

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

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

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

L

i wrote you a story but i ate it

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She smiles softly as she lifts his eyelid.

[EOF]

borg schmorg

first of all, two or three people have asked me what my IQ is again, and for what i wish would be the last time, it's 145 - least, it was the last time i got tested. in actuality that means it could be anywhere from 135 to 155, not that the latter's likely. IQ is a pretty worthless way of measuring intelligence, in any case, and likely i'd do no better in terms of real intelligence than someone who routinely scores 100.

secondly, Borg, schmorg. i don't believe in forcing modifications on anyone.

i get some really stupid emails.

this post's actual purpose, of course, is to provide a space for us to discuss the current design of the subdermal Northpaw. right now, mine is:

MSP microcontroller with custom software
ring of 8 neuroelectrodes around ankle
Philips compass module
transmitter coil
lotsa wires

i am going to take this mess, and by Carl Sagan i am going to make it work. this is where you all come in.

BEGIN.

L

come on in, the Baudelaire's fine

De profundis clamavi

J'implore ta pitié, Toi, l'unique que j'aime,
Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon coeur est tombé.
C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé,
Où nagent dans la nuit l'horreur et le blasphème;

Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois,
Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre;
C'est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire
— Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois!

Or il n'est pas d'horreur au monde qui surpasse
La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace
Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos;

Je jalouse le sort des plus vils animaux
Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide,
Tant l'écheveau du temps lentement se dévide!

— Charles Baudelaire

go see the translation if you don't read French, but it's worth reading even if you don't completely understand, just to see the fucking unsurpassable way the man had with words.

real post soon, i swear.

L