A Predator of InformationOur songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.2017-01-09T23:19:34Ztekuti-azurehttps://fox.blue/feed/atomAzurehttps://fox.blue/My Heart Is a Vector Spacehttps://fox.blue/2017/01/09/my-heart-is-a-vector-space2017-01-09T23:19:34Z2017-01-09T23:19:34Z

Most people don't understand how I feel. This isn't their fault; my emotions do not work in the normal way. I have Bipolar Affective Disorder I. ‘Bipolar’ is a bad name for the condition, as it suggests a straight line connecting depression and mania upon which any mood can be plotted with euthymia (the somewhat dystopian sounding psychiatric term for a normal mood state) somewhere in the middle. This is false.

Decades back, they called my condition ‘manic-depressive insanity’ and described it as a pattern of abnormal mood states comprising some mixture of the extremes of mania and depression. This is different from the general understanding of today where the two are viewed as opposites. I think of them as basis vectors that can be combined to find a mood. (One could subdivide mania and depression still further into independent components.) What we think of as ‘mania’ is simply a combination where depression's contribution is fairly small and vice versa.

When psychiatrists refer to a ‘mixed state’ they mean the most extreme combination, where depression and mania are both maxed out. This is considered a medical emergency and is, as far as I can tell, the worst thing in the world. One feels an incredible sense of wrongness and an intensity of emotional pain that dwarfs any physical suffering I've ever felt. The last time it happened to me was more than eight years ago and I still can't think of it in detail for too long without ending up in tears. By comparison, feeling like I was going to die of asphyxiation was much less traumatic. This kind of mixed state leaves me physically shaking, speaking too fast to be understood yet unable to make complete sentences (since I kept interrupting myself), and generally not functioning well. This is what finally got me to seek psychiatric treatment. That this is called ‘a mixed state’ is unfortunate, because there are mixtures that, while probably not the most wonderful thing in the world, are much less malignant.

I experience a near constant low-level (at least when it's not higher level) hypomania. (This worries my treatment providers who have commented on it, but since it's stable they haven't tried to do anything about it.) This is likely from the effects of light on mood state (intensely bright light is known to precipitate mania in people predisposed to it) and the fact that, for me, there is no such thing as a non-bright light. (I can stand outside on an overcast winter solstice at the fourth hour past noon and the sun is still painfully bright.) This has some obvious upsides (ha-ha-ha); it gives me a certain baseline intellectual energy and excitement and probably contributes to my general skill at liking things. I feel as if I have a constant inner fire burning. It has one obvious downside that I've written about before: my impulse control is impaired, causing me to take up meditation.

People think that this means that I'm euphoric all the time and immune to unhappiness or depression. This is false. (I do seem to be immune to most forms of long-lived anxiety, though.) My experience of depression is brighter and sharper than what most people experience. Due to my ‘internal fire’, I seldom if ever feel the complete loss of energy, lack of interest, or lack of pleasure that so often characterizes depression.

I'm still interested in things, but I have difficulty getting started on them. If I manage to and make some progress, it often makes me feel better, at least temporarily. I feel an intense sadness combined with an intense longing for something I can't name. I might be quite lonely, while also withdrawing from places I normally find companionship. This isn't because I don't enjoy people, but because I find my normal euphoria turning to irritability, and minor annoyances are much more likely to make me feel sour, like there's too much fuss to deal with, and make me want to withdraw. (Also I have enough sense to know that being around me when I'm feeling particularly irritable is not a fun time.)

Having the ‘inner fire’ is still pretty useful during depression, since it gives me the motivation to keep moving forward. I think that makes it harder for this kind of state to become self-reinforcing compared to the normal depression in most people. There still seems to be a longer term effect; I can get excited and interested in something and really enjoy myself even be properly euphoric but slide back down into unhappiness again fairly quickly, so there is definitely some sort of longer-term potential that holds on, and even in the smaller ‘up’ cycles within a longer term depression, there's a larger potential for irritability. I have also noticed a repeating depressive pattern that sometimes holds of more depressed mood in the mornings that move toward more euphoric or agitated moods at night. This doesn't mean I'm always depressive or that this is my life all the time, it's just one kind of affective state I experience.

So, why am I telling you this? Because it's nice to be understood, even by total strangers. The world is a large place with a huge range of differing experience and recording more of them is worthwhile. More usefully, consider it my own little contribution to destroying the stigma of mental illness.

Azurehttps://fox.blue/Caustic Lunacyhttps://fox.blue/2017/01/03/caustic-lunacy2017-01-03T16:09:31Z2017-01-03T16:09:31Z

I went to the surgical technician today so he could see how well my surgical wound was healing up. Everything was filled in nicely, but the wound had not closed properly. In technical terms. the edges were rolled and there was hypergranulation: the tissue that had filled in the wound was peeking up above the surface, preventing the edges of the epithelium (the 'top layer' if you will) from touching and fusing together.

The technician decided to use silver nitrate to corrode away the hypergranulation.

Silver nitrate has many uses in medicine, though has been replaced by antibiotics and other treatments for many purposes, though the Spectre of Resistance is making some practitioners rethink that. It was briefly used to kill pathogens in drinking water, but fears of argyria caused it to be displaced by chlorine.

Silver nitrate (called lunar caustic in old medical texts) is still used today as a chemical cautery. The powder is fused together into a solid lump on the ends of a stick, giving something that looks like a kitchen match. This is then rubbed on small bleeding blood vessels to stop the bleeding or on tissue to gently corrode small portions away.

Ever since I discovered that this was a thing that is done, I have wanted rather strongly to try it. I'm weird. I know. I think it's the name. How can you not want someone to shove something called lunar caustic into an open wound? I had been thinking I'd request it if I ever needed a wart removed, so I was kind of pleased when the technician decided to use it.

I was also a bit apprehensive, as I was expecting it to hurt quite a lot. It didn't; the worst it got was a mild burning, hardly notable when you're expecting to have to grit your teeth and get a white knuckled grip on something to suffer through it.

My tissues have been put on notice that they are expected to behave themselves and re-epithelialize.

Azurehttps://fox.blue/From the Ashes of Disasterhttps://fox.blue/2017/01/03/from-the-ashes-of-disaster2017-01-03T07:46:25Z2017-01-03T07:46:25Z

Once upon a time, I went to Minnesota to be cured of the dreaded butt pneumonia. I organized my trip quite thoroughly, much more so than I organize most things. I planned in advance, arranged all my travel, and didn't put off packing until just before I had to leave.

This was a mistake. When I arranged my trip to the airport, I somehow scheduled my ride at the same time I needed to get there. I didn't realize this until a few minutes before the car arrived. I felt woe and sadness and a bit of fear that I might miss my flight.

I had made my margin for error so wide that I arrived at the airport fifty minutes before my departure. I thought I was home free. I'd check in, go through security, and be on my way.

The TSA had other ideas. Only one scanner was running, the line seemed almost completely unwilling to move, and by the time I finally got through, I heard them calling me to get on my flight because they were about to shut the door.

I put my shoes on, grabbed my bag, and ran as fast as I could toward my gate. I almost missed it, but a gate agent shouted at me, “Hey! You look like you're running to catch a flight! …is it this one?” I looked and saw that I had almost gone right past my gate. I hopped into the airplane (I am rather taller in person than most people expect, and this was a short-haul commuter jet. Standing in the jetway ready to board, I was taller than the plane. Getting on board I had to crouch over and shimmy down the aisle. I felt like Gandalf entering Bag End.) We took off, landed shortly thereafter, and I got out for my layover in Chicago.

I reached into my bag to pull out my laptop and found a distinct lack of laptop. It hit me. I had taken my laptop out of my bag at the TSA checkpoint, and not put it back in before grabbing my bag and running.

I was sorely vexed. And…well, I didn't curse, unless you count “Arrrgrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” I looked up the lost and found and discovered that Detroit International Airport is blessed with four lost and found departments.

  1. If you lose something in the airport generally, you call the Airport Police.
  2. If you lose something in a security checkpoint, you call the TSA.
  3. If you lose something on a plane or at a gate, you call the airline.
  4. If you lose something on the ground transportation level or in a car, you call ground transportation.
I filed a report with both the Airport Police and the TSA, then figured I'd file one with the airline just on the off chance I had grabbed my laptop but left it on the plane. They said to expect a three day turnaround, so I lay back and took my flight to Minnesota.

It was about then I was glad that I had, as part of my sudden bout of preparedness, printed out copies of all the documents related to my trip and my appointment. I went to the clinic and the day progressed almost without incident. Almost. They decided to add one extra test, meaning that I would not actually have my last visit of the day when I thought I would. I was a bit distraught since I had scheduled my flight out that evening and there wasn't much room for error.

They stuck me in a waiting room, and the doctor walked into the room by accident. I wasn't scheduled for another forty-five minutes and he meant to see a different patient. He decided to examine me since he was there anyway, and I got out in time to catch my ride and take the flight home.

The Airport Police, the Airline, and the TSA all called to tell me they didn't have my laptop, and so I set about buying a new one. A few days later my phone woke me up at six in the morning with a call from the airport police. Someone had just turned in a laptop that printed the exact password prompt I had described when it was turned on.

I went straight out to pick it up, but the whole event got me thinking of evil maid attacks. I thought that I should really defend more against them. I didn't suspect foul play, but it got my mind on the subject and I figured it couldn't hurt to set up SecureBoot properly and maybe involve the TPM in my full disk encryption.

That evening, I plugged a USB thumb drive into my desktop to write a rescue image, then rebooted. The rescue OS came up. I wondered if my boot order was screwy, so I pulled the USB thumb drive out booted again.

The rescue image came up.

Whimper.

I realized that I had made a typo when writing the rescue image and overwritten my hard drive. A quick check realized that the rescue image was long enough to slam straight through the both the EFI System and /boot partitions and blast the key block into oblivion.

Whimper indeed.

I reinstalled my system and discovered that my backups were three years old. Fortunately, several of my friends sent me back things I'd sent them (I'm pretty promiscuous with information) or that they had archived on their own, and I had swnc my password store and keys onto my laptop before traveling. (Losing my password store would have been particularly unfortunate.)

I got my mail up and running first, then my XMPP server. It took me awhile to get this website up and running partly because I thought I should rewrite part of the server software before doing so, but since I kept having actual work and other things to do, I just put it up and ran with it.

Here I am.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled posting.

Azurehttps://fox.blue/On the Bushttps://fox.blue/2016/04/13/on-the-bus2016-04-13T00:31:16Z2016-04-13T00:31:16Z

I have discovered that I can focus strongly on my environment if I imagine someone there with me who isn't from the universe. Occasionally this leads to very strange internal disagreements, often involving math. Mostly, it leads me to focus on the environment, to really appreciate what I'm looking at, notice the exact color of the sky and the pattern clouds running through it, the state of the leaves, the kind of thing I'd normally just overlook while daydreaming or listening to something. It also tends to give me a tremendous sense of well-being. I usually do it on the bus, going to or from work.

I was riding on the bus when a man came in with a big, big beard. He smelled like he had barely escaped with his life from a fire in a tobacco warehouse. He sat down next to a woman (I couldn't really see the details because I'm not good at looking at things) and said, “Is that a sunflower? On your neck?” And she said it was. It was a tattoo. And the two of them immediately started pulling their shirts up and hiking their pant legs up to show off their body art to each other.

The man admired how skillfully done the woman's tattoos were, and lamented that his were all black and white because he couldn't find anyone he thought would do color well. The woman pointed out all the political symbols he had tattooed on himself like "Nomad Nation" and a sign for "Traveller's Rights" (I'd never known either thing existed before) and then they got into a long conversation about squatting, hitch-hiking, various meetings and groups that are happy to give someone who shows up a ride in whatever direction they're going.

Then my stop came. But it was wonderful.