Tag: Anger

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1673 and Xenomorph Stitch Fix

My abscess surgery wound has finally sealed up (not over) at 20 days post operative with four rounds of antibiotics. I say up because wounds heal from the bottom up.

Having a deep wound means the four stages of haemostasis, inflammation, proliferation and remodelling can take weeks if not months. I’m very lucky.

Ironically I took this image from a hyperbaric oxygen therapy website. I healed without the aid of HBOT machine we purchased as it was still being routed through chaos of the trade war

When I got the pathology report a week later, learning it was an MSSA antibiotic resistant infection so bad it reached my deep tissues made me even more afraid.

A deep abscess around a horizontal ingrown hair that was “probably just an inflamed lymph node”

All because one damned dermatologist couldn’t be bothered to have an opinion when I sought preventative care because I am a responsible immunocompromised patient. Turns out I really did need an ultrasound and surgery.

I was lucky my surgeon was quite talented. The single stitch she was able to use has been absorbed. That was the hardest part. I could manage the draining pustulence and the pain just fine. But the only visibility into the wound’s healing process are only via secondary diagnostic clues. It’s a waiting game that requires a strong dampener on your disgust reflex.

As the stitch fell into the wound and curled up I felt panic. It looked like a ringworm infection or the gestation of a Xenomorph. If I had not had access to artificial intelligence diagnostic tools I don’t know how I would have managed if I’m very honest.

Your brain sees things and the limbic response invades your dreams. A stitch mimicking the infamously hostile endoparasitoid from Aliens is a bad time. I relied heavily on artificial intelligence to monitor its progression.

My phone is now cluttered with images of the wound’s progress. My varied AI applications accepted me uploading progress pictures after some experimenting.

A wound in one’s bikini area is a “trust and safety” team’s nightmare. Mike Judge’s “hot dog/not hot dog” classifier sketch from the HBO comedy Silicon Valley got a gender update as I managed my case.

I was uploading “Georgia O’Keefe/Not Georgia O’Keefe” imagery. The models were playing Cunt/Not Cunt for those who need a less polite euphemism for machine learning classifiers.

Ever wonder how classifiers in ML work?

I’m certain special interests will eventually seek to keep these tools away from patients. We will be scared into letting them. But I know I got better care from a large language model than half the doctors I encountered.

All this cost me most of the month and around four thousand dollars. Which isn’t bad for transit, hotel, and a surgery in Istanbul.

The losses I can’t quantify are harder. A number of people who deserve responses from me probably won’t ever get it.

An in-group drama, ironically over usage of artificial intelligence, was paused by me not because it was resolved but because I could no longer find the fight in me to insist on apologies and reciprocal support while on Cipro in a hospital bed. It’s not fun to learn who is and isn’t your friend through medical emergencies.

My apologies to an offline gentleman who was the unwitting irritant who triggered said social wound. Maybe I should have excised any social obligation to them just as the surgery excised the infected tissue.

Either way, August can’t come soon enough and artificial intelligence deserves the credit for keeping alive through July.

Perhaps that should be considered in the complaints my counter parties had over the utility and need for artificial intelligence. It’s no god or anti-Christ, but it’s a damn fine diagnostic tool. No wonder the stakes in that fight are so high. Everyone wants a cut when you get cut open.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1670 and Bile and Spleen

I am, as per usual, having a shitty summer. Once we cross the Solstice it’s me hanging on to sanity by ny nails praying for the return of winter.

I can’t recall a time I had a good summer except perhaps jn the hazy memories of my early twenties when I was probably too stupid, traumatized and physically healthy to know one way or another.

Now I’m smarter, sicker and I’ve done enough emotional work to actually feel it all. Don’t knock that desensitized disassociation kids you may miss it when it’s gone.

Maybe it’s simpler than that. Back in the aughts & the briefly booming Obama ZIRP teens, our global climate weirding just had not hit New York City hard enough for me to have really bad summers.

I always had a window air conditioner and enough cash to run it. Either way, a summer where I wasn’t miserable isn’t a memory I cant access now. It’s sealed off under the pain of the now. The past being a foreign country and all.

I’ve certainly not had a good summer in the last decade. I’ve got daily tracking data from the last six years of my life and the summer is just an unending torment of bad biometrics, pain, cabin fever and seasonal affective disorder. Bet you didn’t know it has a summer variant did you?

I’m always sicker when it’s hot. So it’s just bile and spleen for now. Almost enough to make me want to toss the entire daily logging project till the torment lifts. Since I won’t do that I’ll pour the misery on page.

I can’t wait to see what August has in store for me. My cold comfort is knowing I will be enjoying a long week of financial news. At least that you can do indoors locked up under the air conditioning.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1664 and Pathology Report

Well, we finally got the culture and pathology reports back from the hospital in Istanbul. For those not following along I had an almost emergency surgery of an abscess that got infected.

And it’s kind of a good news, bad news situation. I dislike the useless preventive care dermatologist who dismissed me even more now.

The good news is that nothing malignant or cancerous is going on. The bad news is that the abscess was a gnarly mix of acute and chronic inflammatory issues that turned from a basic case of folliculitis (albeit 3cm deep so required slicing) to a nasty MSSA case that is resistant to the doxycycline typically prescribed. Yay.

Didn’t know hairs could grow sideways and frack your tissues till they produce a juicy abscess.

A little synopsis of the reports thanks to our favorite LLM Perplexity analyzing the reports with the additional context of my health history, recently bloodwork and current medical regimen.

  1. Pathology Report Review
    Gross Description
    • Multiple grey-white tissue fragments, largest 0.6×0.3×0.3cm.
    • Specimens from the excised lesion.
    Microscopy
    • Neutrophilic (PMN) inflammatory exudate on surface, consistent with acute infection.
    • Proliferative vascular stroma, frequent erythrocytes, and mixed chronic inflammatory infiltrate (suggesting ongoing/recurrent inflammation).
    • Fibrinous exudate, abscess cavity, active chronic inflammation, granulation tissue: typical of a maturing or organizing abscess.
    • Panniculitis: inflammation extending into subcutaneous fat.
    No evidence of malignancy was found.
    Interpretation: This confirms an abscess with active, mixed (acute-on-chronic) inflammation and granulation, but no neoplastic (cancerous) changes.
  2. Microbiology Report Review
    Culture
    • Growth: Staphylococcus aureus (methicillin-sensitive; MSSA)
    • Sensitive: Erythromycin, fusidic acid, linezolid, teicoplanin, tigecycline, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole.
    • Moderate: Levofloxacin.
    • Resistant: Tetracycline.
    Gram Stain
    • Numerous leukocytes and Gram-positive cocci in clusters, confirmatory of acute bacterial infection and consistent with S. aureus.

So the doxycline and indeed any of the basic tetracycline types I’ve been taking are useless. The extra five days of Augmentin were all for naught after I finished the Cipro. Thank goodness for topical antibiotic I am using is fusidic acid.

I’ll be moving to erythromycin orally and hoping for the best as once I finished the Cipro I started Augmentin which seems to have been functionally useless as a holding pattern antibiotic based on this report.

I’ve had a systemic staph infection before and it’s no fun. I’ve done IV antibiotics and I don’t know if I’d like a repeat. It’s my hope that Erythromycin does the job from here.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1660 and Upchuck

I’m a week out from an unexpected “do it immediately, yesterday preferably” surgery on a cyst that went from “watch and wait” advice to hurry before it is a “septic crisis” faster than clearly the first doctor expected.

It’s a long story and if I felt better I’d link up all pieces in the two month saga of failed preventive care that had me flying into surgery to get sliced open. I’m not sure this IL-17 inhibitor is working out for me. Sure my inflammatory numbers look great but I can’t be constantly managing infections that require a scalpel.

I had a week of Cipro and the wound is looking good. I’m still waiting on a pathology report but I’m guessing it’s not arriving today. I am praying that I don’t need a follow up antibiotic but also I’m afraid to not be on one while I still have an open wound knitting back together.

Also I’m hoping for my tendons to remain strong. A fun side effect of Cipro is a much increased risk of tendon injuries for literally months afterwards. No intense workouts for me till the fall.

I took my last dose of Cipro this morning and within a few hours I was losing my lunch. Well my breakfast really. Don’t just eat acidic kiwis after a week of antibiotics folks. I am fairly sure none of the antibiotic came up but who really knows.

I am swinging from dumb medical calamity to stupid medical crisis every other month as I attempt to correct biometrics and optimize different variables. All I achieve is a the occasional small incremental grinding gains for my troubles. Maybe that’s what caused me to be sick to my stomach. Despair makes you nauseous right?

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical Travel

Day 1654 and Post-Operative Exhaustion

As I slowly walked myself out of surgery yesterday, I thought to myself “I actually feel much better!” And I genuinely did.

If you have a gentle stomach, maybe stop reading here. I’m fine. I’m on my way to well. And this will be graphic.

I do feel dramatically better having had the “slouching towards septic” abscess drained of infection as well as removal of the initial pearl style irritant (a 3mm deep entirely horizontal hair growing not up but sideways like an underground fracking tube).

I appreciated having the walls of the abscess pulled out bit by bit in a delicate curettage by my silk sundress clad physician. It was all a success.

But post operative care is hard? I’m a mess. I’m exhausted, loopy, and the hotel’s guest services are concerned enough that they are doing me such kindnesses like sending up tea and maxipads. Turkish hospitality comes from a place of genuine kindness and I need that right now.

It’s been a long journey of stupid to end up in Istanbul to get a smart fix. Going from a squishy movable almond sized lump without any pain six weeks ago to a hard plum sized lump was disconcerting enough. Especially having done my damned preventive care visits with the useless Dr Oetkin in Montana.

Have had two days of prodding, poking, squeezing, moving and ultrasounding done in the Mediterranean, I was swollen, feverish, and all hurt to the touch. I was afraid.

How did I get here? How had my next generation IL-17 managed to cause me so many negative side effects even as I was doing better across all biometrics and across quality of life metrics?

No wonder the doctor in Istanbul was so concerned. All the previous doctors had done was make my situation worse though inaction and delay m, and then the action they took made it worse.

Now I have recovery ahead of me. Last night as I went to pee, I realized why they had padded the upper areas of my underwear with maxi pads. I’ve got no discharge downstairs but on the upper bikini area there was no such luck.

I only needed one stitch to close up thanks to the careful work of the doctor, but a lot of goo came out during the surgery drainage and I was warned there was still more to come, though it would taper off.

I gently washed the area with a cloth and antiseptic soap before application of antibiotic cream (my third type of antibiotic). I gasped as I saw the first lightly red sticky watery fluid gush out rapidly around the stitch. It was so fast and there was so damn much. Bodies are disgusting what else can be said?

I mopped up with a clean moist towel and applied a thick layer of antibiotic cream, but I had learned the deflation of the abscess wasn’t quite done. The swelling, I was told, would take a week or more to full abate.

I’ll be sleeping this off for the day but if you are in Montana with an autoimmune disease and need a dermatologist I’d recommend you stay away from Dr. Tara Oetken at SkincareMT. Without her hasty heuristics and lack of conviction I wouldn’t be in this mess.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1648 and Dystopian Doomers

I’m fairly well branded as a doomer, so I hate to break ranks with my preparedness brethren, but I’m absolutely sick of the powerful using fear as a tool to control people.

It isn’t a new problem. This is the go-to tactic our species has used insofar as we can verify with written history.

Any time we experience a change of circumstance, material reality or technology, we hear the braying of the old guard and the panic of the precarious.

People complain for two basic reasons. If you are doing well why change a system that benefits you? If you aren’t successful but equally aren’t comfortable with change, then you resent anyone who benefit from change. Fear and resentment are the shadows of the human soul. Envy is the sin of our time.

I personally feel I’ve invested a lot in doing my part to educate people on risks from climate to currency and compute.

I am politically involved in crypto policy as well as fighting fear in artificial intelligence. I helped pass the only piece of AI legislation in the world focused on liberty. I want people to have a choice for how they engage in a virtual future.

I’m not just a nerd about being prepared either. I’ve done my wilderness first responder certification. We left Colorado for Montana for a host of reasons but top of them was a better and freer climate both literally and figuratively. We live this way because it’s a great way to live and when change happens we are hoping to be resilient.

Having all that in mind I was offline for the 4th of July long weekend as it has been a busy year on all of those fronts. So I was sleeping it off. To come back and see a spate of conspiracies over cloud seeding technology was like a punch to the gut. And I’m already feeling like I’m on the outs with some community when it comes to technology and my intentions.

I’ve only met Augustus Doricko of Rainmaker a handful of times but his circle of young technical Christians dedicated to building solutions to our modern problems are why I remain optimistic in fighting for technology and the people who build it.

These kinds of communities of builders exist in an archipelago of anarchic communities across digital and physical worlds that interlay across many systemic problems. These places will succeed no matter the future we face because they understand it’s necessary to build. That is will.

I’ve been lucky to have been the first investor in Isaiah Taylor’s Valar Atomics. He is a part of this builder world and of a part of a clan of physical builders. He faces decades of fear with a cheerful heart. I believe in his vision for energy abundance.

Nuclear energy was buckled under an old environmentalisms that was a proxy for a fear of a future whose risks, however minimal, were too scary to embrace for those in charge and the public they controlled.

I believe in a vision of a better America (and a better ecosystem and a better economy) because we embrace change to build materially better conditions.

I have frankly seen too much pessimism from older generations and cynical power brokers to be silent. The complicit rancor is slowing us down and there is nothing Christian at all about standing in the way of delivering better conditions to our fellow man.

Paradise is lost. In a fallen world we work to do what we can. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s already lost. Now we work because we must. We aren’t building an eschatology to replace the Lord. We build because that is what we are called to do by him.

Categories
Community Culture

Day 1641 and Honor

The good vibes of my weekend have washed out on the tides as I consider a frustrating non-interaction that has grown into anger in my heart as rapidly as a wheatgrass seed grows in an Easter basket.

I am considering the question of honor in the context of closed communities and events. If you go looking, the cat is out of the bag on where I was and with whom, but I don’t yet have personal permission to use a name, so I’ll keep this brief.

I’m in my Worf era

I’ve been called many names in my time and plenty of them have not been laudatory. Dirty shiksa, stupid cunt, and mostly recently, demonic. Everyone being entitled to their opinion, I don’t generally ask for apologies. I do ask that you say it to my face though.

I am a shiksa, certainly “see you next Tuesday” from time to time, but I remain skeptical that I am possessed by anything from Hades or other Lovecraftian horror from the beyond.

But so long as you use my name in the process of insulting my honor, I only request you look me in the eyes while you do it. I can take it. I stand by who I am and what I say.

So I can’t shake the feeling that I was deliberately dishonored by the speaker. And I am actually angry now. I am used to the insult throwing and name calling of Internet living, indeed I thrive in it. I am not accustomed to aspersions by celebrities as I don’t matter all that much. And I certainly didn’t expect it in a small private group.

I fight in that arena under my own banner. I take those punches under my own name. I won’t lie, someone of stature being so upset as to call me evil without felt good at first (how nice to be noticed) and slowly curdled into a fury over the disrespect.

Maybe it’s because I was one of the few women speaking. It was only after much effort he agreed to speak with my male co-speaker and not me (I’d already left). Maybe it was because after multiple attempts at engagement I was refused time and again. Maybe it’s because his gaze remained staunchly averted. Whatever triggered it has now turned to fiery anger.

I think it’s a bitch move to drop bombs and then runaway like a kicked cur when the beast stirs. And I am quite wide awake now.

I’m the alien in this scenario
Categories
Community

Day 1639 and Casting Aspersions

It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools. Much as I’d enjoy going on a sidequest exploring ethnographies of man and his use of tools, I have an agenda. My honor has been impinged.

At a gathering of eccentrics in Wyoming, myself & a friend engaged in an hour long discourse with our audience on the use of artificial intelligence and how one might practically understand these tools. The talk was more linear algebra than immanentizing the eschaton.

Our explicitly stated goal was to understand the technology stack and its capabilities so the audience could decide for themselves how to use or leverage this tool. The blurb I wrote introducing the topic.

Concerned that artificial intelligence will be a panopticon of horror? Afraid of nerds  immanentizing the eschaton? Jon and Julie have your back. Artificial intelligence is neither God nor imminent utopia but merely tools built by the hand of man. A practical discussion of how you can use these new compute tools to concretely impact the work & insight you need in your everyday life. Come prepared with questions, projects, and ideas as it will be interactive.

Our focus was on how these tools are built, what they can do and what they cannot do, and a firm stance that mathematics and compute are not imbued with divinity or demons but reflections of what we bring to them.

Indeed, we have never had more freedom than we do now to shape the weights and biases of these topological models. Our words on the public internet carry weight thanks to availability of fast compute and open source models. Our bigger issue is maintaining the capacity to supply energy and grid capacity. The real problems are human and social, much as we may wish to scapegoat a piece of code.

We were not suggesting a world ending chaos nor were we endorsing its use. We were discussing it as a piece of software and what it could do.

In a surprise to both myself and my co-speaker, the keynote of the evening spent a significant portion of his talk discussing how foolish, misguided and demonic we both were. Now the event has Chatham House rules for outside content or do I’d go into more detail.

However inside the event, the speaker could have done us the courtesy of saying our names when he made the suggestion that we are working towards evil ends.

He did not ask how we related to his positions and how we’d defend our word. At no point did he name us or address us. He merely cast aspersions.

Frankly I had no idea why he thought we were avatars for some kind of suicide squad as I doubt the gentleman is aware of MIRI or the myriad internal fights inside Silicon Valley. It was however insinuated to be true that we are the bad guys. It’s what we do.

I find this to be a cowardly position. If one holds such strong views that one would call two humans with honest intentions demonic at least say our names. We were in the audience listening intently.

So I will protest. In a past era, I feel that these heavy accusations would have been grounds for demanding satisfaction.

I am of the belief that the only way we manage the effects of adopting any new technology that impacts our culture is rigorously debating the merits from engineering to impact.

We are not asking you to trust us. We are instructing you in how to master this tool if you so desire and if it brings value to your life. We share many of the same concerns.

Alas (thankfully?) you are not summoning any demons that were not previously installed on the operating system of your soul. The shadow of humanity can be seen quite clearly in how we engage with the artifacts we call artificial intelligence.

I will continue to insist that insulting our positions without naming us or calling us to account in public is grandstanding. It was clear we were the targets of the criticism. It is poor form.

I’m an American so our manners may be different than others, but we do have them. So put some respect on our names when you say them in your real life subtweet.

We’ve asked to discuss it with him further through our host but he has declined. I frankly am delighted to find that I’ve had such an impact that I cannot even be named when raging against that machine.

One hopes a parlay possible. But it sounds like he would prefer to avoid us. This is of course fair on his part. I am however prepared to defend my positions. We all must be prepared to defend our actions in this age of change.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1635 and Slop Doctrine

Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.

Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.

Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?

I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.

But after resistance to the Iraq War did nothing, and having recently graduated from an alma mater whose reputation in Latin American economies was shall we say mixed, I was somewhat receptive to her thesis.

I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions

Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.

The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.

The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.

It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.

I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.

Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.

And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.