Adventure Rocket Ship

 It's not all been grim, thankfully.

- such hackercamps that I have been to, now I've been paying attention to pride flags which are now 'ours', are gleefully Queer As Fuck. The current winner being CCCamp 23, which had catgirls as far as the eye could see. And. Dear god the lack of the grinding transphobia that's the constant background radiation to one's existence on Terf Island was like breathing clean air for the first time in weeks. 

You really do have to go and live somewhere sensible, even for a few days, to realise just how fucked this tiresome little island has become.

- That written, in order to get to .de, I had to refresh my passport because it was old. Now it has an 'F' in the box, even if it is brexiteer coloured.
The GP did their best to fuck the process. Everyone else involved, very much including the passport office themselves, did their best to make it all happen in about a week.

'I'm sorry I can't accept this passport form,' went the woman in the post office. 'You look nothing like your previous photo...' Which, yay but argh.

- Those hackercamps have inspired most of my ink. I still catch sight of one or other of the pieces at least daily and have a quiet grin. Who knew I could be that sort of rock&roll?

- I love, absolutely love, DJing techno and prog house. Like, you know pottery bloke that bursts into tears at the sight of a fine pot? That's me with a good blend. 

- I can no longer really read SF and I don't care. Instead I am reading really rather a lot of sapphic romance. Like, a lot. Who knew that representation, women protagonists having fulfilling emotional lives and (mostly) managing to communicate like adults, all of those protagonists making it to the end of the story, and having DNA-altering sex, would be a more interesting read than, oh, I don't know, tedious manliness, gunplay, and a fucking hyperdrive?

- It's kind of weird that my own sexuality actually makes sense for the first time, now it has a different label.

In receipt of a(n) SMS earlier in the week, allegedly from m'GP (who have quietly turned into a hopeless shower, which is sad) which went along the lines of 'We are updating our records and wish to know if you smoke. Please reply 'YES, EX or NEVER''

At first I was tempted to reply along the lines of 'Please send me your data-protection documentation and copies of any risk-assessments you may (or may not, most likely) have done, paying particular attention to the notion of wrong numbers, re-used numbers, shared mobile phones, nosy partners, stolen mobiles phones and the actions of News International. Bear in mind I used to hack on surgery-management kit and I don't imagine it's become any less terrible in the intervening years Honestly, what were you useless bastards thinking? Further consider that specific question doesn't usefully break down into the categories you think it does. For instance, I smoked moderately heavily between summer 1993 and ditto 1994. Now to a tiresome rules-lawyer, that makes me an ex-smoker. However, since I don't know what crap probability-of-expense patient-mortality forecasting game you're playing, I'm going to take it that cycling daily and being able to blow your lung-capacity test off its end-stop means I fit in the 'never' box. Christ, it's not like it was even hard to give up like all the adverts allege.'

But that would have been a right faff to prod in on the squitty Android finger-painting pad.

Then I thought to reply 'NEVER'); DROP TABLE Patients;--' but that would probably guarantee that I would be subject to regular and vigorous prostate examinations for the rest of my life.

In the end, I went with boring, nearly true and 'remember this for a piece to livejournal'. So there you go. I would be interested to discover if this is A Thing now.

http://www.clubmate-uk.com/

Hackathon! Humppa! RMS is a twat!

When we were driving back from Vierhouten, jarkman spotted a sign that pointed to Lelystad. Had I been a lot less focused on getting to the ferry (and could actually remember where the place was) I would have detoured here, which is where this happened.

I still have the t-shirts. They're a bit knackered and only really fit to be worn by the rail-thin version of the JHR, and...

... It wasn't so much mind blowing as mind augmenting. I suppose vaguely like discovering that most of the things you knew or suspected had extra or hidden levels which could be used as a handy leg up out of your reality tunnel.

A couple of years previously, I'd been along to some proto-extropian event where Terence McKenna was going to speak over a live video-link. Or maybe it was going to be Tim Leary and McKenna was organising it. Basically a set of activist post-hippies playing with smart drugs and hunting for the cyberculture that Gibson had conjured up in some ur-Rule34 manner. They had the concept right, but the toolset still revolved around finding the right mind-altering chemical.

HEU provided the toolset for people to start hacking reality.

(I note the GSM Men are firmly denying that A5 can be cracked by the CCC. Good luck with that belief in fairies...)

I missed the next two. (HIP & HAL) One through being too deep into my own reality tunnel, one through sudden poverty.

WTH was... I thought I knew the score. It was good, but I was just a tourist having a bit of a scoff at the MFTL lectures. Instead I met lovely people entirely by accident and I guess worked out that it wasn't all about buffer exploits. There was also John Gilmore talking about the restart in psychedelic research, so maybe those proto-extropians were right. And Humppa, obviously.

For HAR, I had this vague idea that to be properly involved meant being physically connected to the campsite LAN. Even in the last couple of hours of bunging things in a bag, I was dithering about bringing along my aged Bay/Netgear hub.

I'm sure in one conversation or other, it's come up that the Heinleinian Competent Person is unrealistic and just a bad thing to think about because people are basically useless and proud of it. While I'm not a subscriber to the complete list of ship-minding and cutting up of pigs, I do begin to think that a useful sort of chap should be able to manage a wedge of it, plus the set of things that one can learn from hanging round a good hacker-camp.

[ This was buried in the comments section of a recent post and summarises what I've been jabbering about. ]

I look at the reports from Defcon, and the thing looks like a cross between 'Ibiza uncovered' and some form of 'Nerds gone wild' DVD. Las Vegas also gives me the Fear. I'd like to visit the place when the Rat-pack and the Mob were running the show(s), but absent time-travel I'm stuffed.

Hxx/CCC events are, I dunno, more or less the exact opposite of that. It's all the self-organising, co-operative, anarchist, mind(set)-altering good stuff that makes me quietly despair about my alleged real life, but also be intensely glad that it happened and that I was part of it.

[ I've tried several times to write about the experience properly and they've all come out rubbish. This is a fragment from a previous attempt. ]

The separated nature of HAR meant that somehow, each field had a different flavour. One contained the Blinkenlicht tent and several people noodling away on guitars. The field where we'd set up camp turned out to contain the people with the techno and the big speakers. Big disco-balls hung from oak trees, laser-shows over the fake-smoke shrouded lake to the sound of a storming Carl Cox mix, and the guys working on the OpenBSM cell-site code. Everywhere you looked there were teams of people hacking on... something, faces lit by laptop glow and nodding along to the nearest mix.

Or in this case on Last.fm. Let's see how long that edit lasts...

Anyone else going to Hacking At Random?

It's on: http://events.ccc.de/2007/01/24/chaos-communication-camp-2007/

Handy for this: http://www.luftfahrtmuseum-finowfurt.de/museum.htm

I think a small round of 'Oh fuck yes' is in order.

As Ed Price would have it: 'Having a bit of a fester'. For one reason or another, the last pair of migraines kicked the crap out of me. I'm not sure if I'm paying more attention to the inside of my head, or if these were just different. Anyway, I think the blood-sugar crashes and ugly mood swings have stopped, so I'm far less likely to call you all a tiresome shower of bastards and employ a brutal and entirely personal Stark Fist of Removal. Praise 'Bob' for &style=mine.

Migraine malarkey on the web seems to fall into two camps. Accept the healing power of Ergotamine (Mentioned in both Big Black sleevenotes and a (presumably, since I bought one) short-lived comic-thing called A1. Albini also mentions heroin, and I'm not trying that either.) or the healing power of Jesus. Well, a plague on both their houses. I'm into prevention, not mitigation. Here's an undergrad sufferer's paper which covers it all well.

Via the fine fellows over at CCC we find this (entertaining) and this (bloody depressing).

I'm not sure about this. A part of this. The 'Deaf Bach' section in particular.