ASCII by Jason Scott

Waxy pointed his faithful readership to an interview with a fansubber. A fansubber in this context is someone who takes a film in a foreign language (“film” being “anime episode” and “foreign language” being “Japanese”). The interview asks all sorts of questions of the process, the ideas behind it, and of course the morality, since this is some commercial product being repackaged and distributed elsewhere (at no cost) which theoretically means it affects the market for it.

Anyway, it’s a good interviewee, who gives lots of context and writes clearly without sounding like a dope, but somewhere in the thick of it comes this exchange:

So why do you continue to do what you do knowing that it’s having a negative impact on the people who create the anime you like?

That’s a tough question. It’s one of those things where the technology has allowed it to happen. I can’t think of any entertainment medium that hasn’t had to deal with this – let’s take it back to the late 90’s and early 2000’s with Napster and MP3s..

Well, hang on there, I’m going to cut you off for a second, I apologize. There is no comparison here to the music industry because musicians can still make money with live performances if their product is being passed around gratis. Anime companies can’t. It’s not really the same problem.

Well, you’re right, but there is a value to be added as far as the subtitles are concerned, and the companies are adding value to the product. But I understand your point where the fansub scene is hurting that, and it’s basically that old habits die hard and one fansub group bowing out isn’t going to make a bit of difference and everyone knows that.

Woah now! Hold on there, Tex!

Two major problems are here.

First of all, don’t interrupt your fucking interviewee. Let them answer the question, and even if you think they’re fundamentally flawed in their assumptions, do a follow-up question that either shows up the person’s line of reasoning as being in need of recalibration, augment. Don’t cut off.

Second of all, you’re fucking wrong. Anime companies in fact do have alternate streams of revenue related to the specific video episodes. The actors/singers for an anime’s sountrack will do live performances and concerts, posters and figurines and merchandising of breathtaking levels. In other words, the base premise the interviewer brings up is flawed.

Dude, shut the fuck up!

When I first started doing interviews semi-professionally, the single most difficult skill I had to learn was shutting up. I had spent so much time elaborately engaging in conversations, often dominating them, but never shutting up, that even I recognized it was going to be a big problem for taped interviews. I started trying to talk to people and being quiet after asking questions. I’d go to parties, talk to someone, and as soon as they started to tell me things, I’d be encouraging but never redirect their responses into an opportunity from another sermon from me. This was very hard, but I did the best I could.

In some of the interviews, you can hear me telling stories, but a lot of that is because I’m trying to work with people in getting the memories flowing again. I bring up something I heard and they go ‘Oh, yeah! When that happened, I thought this was going on….” If you listen to the tapes, you can hear me immediately shut my piehole and let them speak.

The rules of interviewing are simple. Ask good questions. Listen to the answers. Ask better questions based on the answers you just got. Don’t read from a script. And don’t interrupt.

The interview remains excellent because the interviewee kept moving forward with his thoughts, but it’s in spite of the interviewer, not because of him.

Don’t interrupt, jerk.

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As a side note, I’ll be attending Penguincon as a panelist and presenter on the weekend of April 18th-20th, in Detroit (actually Troy) in Michigan. I’m talking about my film and holding forth on an interesting variety of other subjects as well. I’ll be making an effort to interact with a new range of folks outside my comfort zone; let’s see how that works.

This is just a week and change after Blockparty and Notacon, so for the moment, this is all I can say about this announcement, because my attention must naturally be focused elsewhere. But if you were going to it, feel free to say hi.

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So, there’s a book out there called The Game. This entry is not really about the content of the book as regards the direct subject. The direct subject, by the way, is about the world of Pickup Artists, guys who have crafted methods that border on sure-fire for charming and seducing women. Credit where credit is due; it was this weblog entry by Aaron Swartz and his linked full review that got me to go pick this thing up in the first place.

No, while the subject matter may or may not be fascinating or relevant (I can imagine a range of people who would read it and twitch with anger through most of the chapters), it’s the structure of the book that I want to focus on.

The structure of this book is brilliant. It takes a hold of you very quickly, and then for over 400 pages (!) it leads you through all the permutations of a subculture. When you finish this book, you feel like you’ve been there, seen the ups and the downs, and you feel like you know more about stuff than when you picked the book up. The book is about this subculture of pickup artists, with the author being a star player in that subculture, but that’s not what I’m saying in terms of fascination; what’s fascinating is that you follow the growth of this subculture, ebbs and flows, and you round out at the end like a car has slowed down a little and kicked you to the curb, onward to more adventures, wishing you could tag along.

Not very many books do this, or accomplish it.

Finishing this book, putting it down and contemplating what I’d experienced going through the stories, it occurred to me that this was the kind of book a hacker, phreaker, cracking subculture could use. It doesn’t punch people in the face; it doesn’t have to. The criticisms, when they come, are in the nature of the subculture itself. When someone uses someone else, they use techniques learned by others to do pickups; they’re just taking it to the next level. It really is the case of “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. It’s reflexive like that; you enter a mindset and you end up on the other end realizing you’ve been thinking in this mindset throughout the story arc.

It’s a narrative; the author is the main character, telling you how things happened through his eyes. He brings in people, helps you keep track of them, but he tells you about himself as much as anyone else. But the thing is, he doesn’t start out ruling the world. He doesn’t end up ruling the world. He’s another player in the story, and yet also asides to you his discoveries, growth, disillusionment, and delight.

I wish a book like this was written for hacking. I wish there was someone who would construct a beautiful narrative, with them as the center of it, going through the era of the 1970s up through to the 1990s. Even if they had to start things at 1985 or even 1995 and reference the “old school” as we progressively continue to label anything ten years old, it would still have a lot more potential to rule.

Reading “hacker books”, I grew sick a long time ago of the journalist types going “boy, these are some fucked-up little gumballs, aren’t they”, snickering the whole time and making everyone out to be a vicious backstabbing automaton. People aren’t necessarily evil to the core; they have reasons, fears, hopes that drive them to make bad decisions. Trust me, I can attest to this fact. Evil’s an easy thing to write about; just make someone a psychotic robot. Bringing nuance to explain how things got that way is so much harder.

The book is good stuff. You may enjoy it. You may not. But the structure… there we have something truly great. Let’s see more of that. Maybe I’ll have to write that book myself.

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You can watch a documentary about a possibly fascinating subject that’s about 20 minutes long for free, right now. I simply cannot make it easier for you!

The film is called “Possessed”. The webpage to see it is here and includes lots of contextual information, links, and references. It is about hoarding, the mental condition where a person is unable to discard or stop owning items. This condition could be somewhat benign or utterly debilitating. In this documentary, you meet four people, who range from merely curiously intent on their collections to full-out residents of whatthefuckia.

I am, by these standards and of the organizations mentioned in the film, a compulsive hoarder. Is this a big shock to hear? I keep a lot of stuff I shouldn’t and I keep a lot of stuff that I want to keep but which a lot of people wouldn’t keep. I like to think I’m on the edge of acceptability but by some standards I may not be. I do not feel the need, currently, to go to meetings or consider myself in trouble. Like a lot of conditions, it does have roots in my past (I had a lot of my stuff thrown away when I was younger) but also out of necessity (people send me stuff to join my collections of stuff on my sites and I keep the originals).

I like to think that given the right opportunities I would donate some of my items to proper archives, but I have very high standards for what such a place would be, so it might be a big mental trick I’m playing on myself.

This documentary gets me thinking this way, and that’s a sign of a great documentary. It’s very simple. It does not have music. It does not ridicule its subjects. It presents you with documentary overview of these lives and the voices you hear are of the people, not some bubbleheaded idiot narrator or the ever-present check-my-haircut-out “news” asshole types. The director took these paths on purpose and I laud him for it.

Enjoy the film, on me. Resist the urge to save it somewhere.

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I was impressed by a cute little brainfuck that happened recently.

There’s a device that’s been made that allows you to take over the power for a computer that’s plugged into the wall, such that you can unplug the machine and it’s still being powered. You can then move the machine around to anywhere, and then plug it into a new plug and the machine never turns off. It doesn’t have to be a computer of course; it could be a radio or an EKG machine or TV, but since it’s computers that flip out and do crazy shit when they get unplugged, computers seem what it’s really for.

The version of the product that got all sorts of attention is called HotPlug. Where it got a lot of attention, really, is security weblogs and tech weblogs. They focused on it for how it was being marketed: as an easier way for police and agents to seize your computer and take it away.

That’s well and good, but it’s just a mobile UPS, if you think about it. It’s a way to keep power going to a plug and move the plug. That’s all it is. The company selling it decided to market it to cops, but it’s truly a general-purpose item. I can think, going back years in the hosting business, where being able to tell a customer we’d be moving their box but wouldn’t have to have it shut down at all would be pretty damn sweet. I actually did this for one customer’s box that had two power supplies; I was able to unplug one, snake it to an extension cord, and then pull the thing along to its new location, stringing the network cable as I went. It was awesome.

But once people have the bug in their mind that this is a fascist tool, the comments fill with hopelessly elaborate ways to foil it. Checks for location, for voltage variance, for activity. You know; delightful spy stuff, the stuff people tell themselves they would do to thwart the man and then they don’t even shred their credit card statements before throwing them in the trash.

Compare this with, say, peer-to-peer programs, where it is so ingrained as a piracy assistance tool that efforts to brand them otherwise seem like errant peeps in the middle of a roaring ocean of opinion. People definitely do use these programs for legitimate, nobody’s-problem transfer of data; but the mark goes back a decade now and it will be a long time, if ever, before the first thing one thinks of with a peer-to-peer program is “oh boy, faster downloads of my legitimate data”.

It fascinates me how a few choice presentations to a neutral technology gives that technology an indelible mark, one that only enormous effort could shift public opinion away from. I have no solution to this; I just see it and try to remind myself not to punish a technology for its potential uses, but to laud/decry the actual uses that occur.

Now pardon me while I cook a roast on this record player.

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Here’s the thing about Kevin Kelly.

Kevin Kelly gets about 80 percent of whatever he’s talking about right. He makes too wide a jump, uses the wrong term, calls things important that aren’t, or vice versa. But 80 percent is pretty darn good and Kevin Kelly is therefore more useful than, say, a Pop-O-Matic. So credit where credit is due.

In fact, let me make it more clear. Kevin Kelly, he of Wired and many other projects in his long life, is like that Really Cool Uncle you have, the one who has a lot of answers, some of them wrong, but who is willing to give you some ideas without acting like he’s discovered flight or you owe him anything. He just lets you bounce around a bit and often, you find yourself with ideas or worked-out concepts that otherwise you’d never really plunk together. A catalyst, if you will. You come away with a chat with him feeling like you moved ahead and not behind like I do with, say, Cory Doctorow.

So recently, Kelly made this idea/pronouncement that resonated with people. And by resonated you could define an entire set of thinking by “before reading about 1000 Truefans” and “after reading about 1000 Truefans and running off to your weblog to pontificate”.

The short form, which there’s no lack of those on weblogs either, is to suggest a survivable business model for a performer or creator, wherein they have some set of people who pay a lot more than anyone else would pay for your crap, but in return you give them better crap than the other people. This way everyone’s happy; you get to eat and your biggest fans get a more exquisite piece of you or your output. If the number of these fans hits some arbitrary number, in fact, you can probably even support yourself. A thousand fans giving you $100, for example, is $100,000! Make Money Fast!

Kudos to Uncle Kevin for glomming together a bunch of already extant ideas and giving it a new branding. To his credit, he even mentions some of the sources of his ideas, so again, no punching the guy.

As an extra bonus, he even includes Chris Anderson’s quasi-nutty “Long Tail” graph, although he does it by corellating the entire purchasing public to True Fans, which is, as is his nature, a tad off. Not everyone who buys stuff in the major sales period of your work (the first few weeks, months, years) is necessarily a true fan, they might just be some people who bought your crap because you successfully got mention in Teen Beat or Maximum Rock ‘n Roll or some such. No, there’s a little more filtering to it than that…

I’ve had people buy the BBS documentary a couple weeks ago, who are excited I’m making a new movie and want to be informed the minute it’s out. I’ve got people who were there with my pre-orders last time who probably don’t need to do that crazy pre-ordering again. I’ve got people who are major fans who didn’t give me a dime and probably never will, but fuck yeah, that Jason guy’s the shit!!

Still, he’s right, there’s definitely something to making products available in various tiers, and leveraging people’s love for your stuff, however many people those are, and treating them with respect and giving them opportunity. It’s called a fan club, and they’ve been around for decades.

You’d apply to be in the fan club and you’d get special versions of the records, or a nice plastic badge or even special passes to concerts/appearances/events the salient subject of the fan club was appearing at. Surely among my reading audience are several Close Personal Friends of Al or Dementites of the Demento Society.

But OK, fine, people now use “Angel Investors” to mean “non-professional money lenders” because it sounds nicer, until the fights begin. So now people who are more than casually interested parties in your crap are “True Fans”. Bear in mind that Kelly has a website called true films which he uses to mean “Documentaries” and by documentaries he means “any film with a vague connection to being related to reality”. So “True Films” begets “True Fans”.

Like I said, 80%. Nice 80%, though.

Obviously, I’ve got some pleasant enumeration of people who dig the crap I do. Some people don’t like me as a human being, some adore my writing but are ambivalent on my other endeavors, and a number of people have actually flown places or paid good money to get the chance to spend time at an event I’ll be at. It’s an interesting mix. A lot of people don’t know I’m the guy behind some of the stuff I do, so that adds even more fun.

The BBS Documentary had pre-orders. This was a delightful success. GET LAMP will have pre-orders, no doubt about it. GET LAMP had the Adventurers’ Club, which was that rarest of things, a terrifying success. I don’t think of the people who go into these jaunts as being more “true” fans than others. They just have a different level of liquidity/opportunity/approach to my stuff. I pre-order a lot of things, because I like long bets, and I’ve dropped some cash in various directions as needed. I don’t think this means the people who don’t are some sort of sub-class of the audience. They’re just the audience.

Seriously, enjoy Uncle Kevin’s Funhouse. Just don’t assume he’s 100% on the money.

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Way back in college, I stayed in the relatively quiet dorm. No particular reason; it’s just the one I ended up in. I did not get to live in the party dorm.

The party dorm wasn’t officially the “party dorm” like some colleges might have; it just happened to be built in a way that encouraged craziness. It was a converted hotel, or more likely a hotel and multiple buildings, and so all the hallways were wide and crooked and extraordinarily weird. I visited people in this dorm and these rooms, and I have strong memories of the crazed dissimilarity between various places in it. One pair’s room might look like it should have hospital beds (white, non-squarish, tons of windows), while another might look like the college didn’t like your kind (smallish, low ceilings, dark, facing an alley). Some rooms had two people, some had three, a couple nightmarish scenarios had four or five and one had, as I recall, six.

As an extra bonus, there were people living in this dorm. What I mean is that these were people who had 99 year leases on their apartments, and the building had converted to a dorm around them but they were still living there.

I made a bunch of buddies in the weeks before school started, and one set of friends had a room together in this dorm. There was the big guy, the rakish Mark Hamill-looking music whiz, and the suave curly-haired fellow with the silent but friendly air. They got a relatively large room, which also had a weird-ass little alcove in one corner, which was probably a closet four thousand years ago but which now one of the beds got shoved in.

One of them had worked in a record store, and so he brought 2,000 CDs. I am being very specific here, he brought two thousand CDs in cases and filled one of the bureaus with them. Also, before classes started, he hooked up with a girl going to a nearby college and moved into her apartment, leaving his stuff behind. So now they had thousands of CDs and music. And beer. I remember all sorts of beer.

Parties happened in that room, including one at the beginning of the year, co-hosted by one of the room resident’s father, which grew so loud and out of control that it took five RAs (resident advisors, little quasi-employees of the schools recruited from the student body) to knock on the door. The parent came out and explained in no uncertain terms that if he was spending thousands of dollars to house his kid in this dump that the party would go on. The party went on.

One of the parties I was at had a rule of checking ID. Big ol’ sign on a sheet explained this, behind a prodigious amount of liquor. Two young ladies came in, and whoever was behind the bar asked how old they were. They said they were 15. “Got any ID?” he asked, and they did. So they got a drink.

Within months, this room was a war zone, a collage of ripped paper, lost socks, broken plastic and all sorts of forgotten dreams. I remember being over on a Saturday morning chatting with one resident when the other came in and drank from a random assortment of bottles, looking for a buzz. What I remember most specifically about this period was that the beds, which could be converted to bunk beds as needed, had been converted to a triple bunk bed, with the middle bed being used as a shelf for books and garbage and the top bunk had someone sleeping in it, in a manner that would guarantee memorable injury were he to fall out of it. This freed up space in the room, for sure; even with the really high ceiling, this bunk was coming close to scraping against it.

Ultimately, the freshman year drew to a close, the residents of the dorm filtered out, and I ended up having one of the three residents of this room invite me down to his parent’s place in New Jersey for a party. At this point, we hatched a plan to get an apartment together instead of paying the ruinous fees for a dorm, and our next set of adventures began.

Now, why mention all this?

I mention this on two fronts.

First of all, it all really happened; I am not making anything up here, throwing things up a ratchet for the sake of entertainment or devising statistics that are intended to impress or dismay when in reality they were not this way. This is how it happened and it’s real. This sort of stuff happened all the time and I observed it, and 20 years later I can remember it, primarily because I was stone cold sober the whole time.

Second of all, these are stories. They’re all just tons of stories, stories that I remember, that I gathered, that I sat around in when they happened and thought to myself “Well, look at this.” In our lives, these things happen by the truckload. I recall from one of my interviews I conducted with Eric Greene, who turned out to be one of the top ten interviews I did, and he said, basically, that we all convince ourselves that we have normal boring lives and need to spice them up, but we in fact all lead interesting lives. I agree with that. It’s all in the telling.

Stories, these building blocks of recounted happenings, are created by the truckload, every day, and as we all become more and more connected, these stories are being told with greater and greater frequency. I am trying to visualize how it must be for the group fo kids who occasionally mail me, who are now in their young teens and have always known a world with a world wide web, always known that everything out there is just one “http://” magic spell away, could find anything they wanted in moments and the way they’ve always known this. I wonder if they think that these stories are all false, or if they must be true, or what all this storytelling must mean. What meaning does this din of smirking recitations have for them?

I know that for many of them, the textfiles on my sites reflect a simplicity, a sort of ease with the world that they cannot have; if someone takes your picture with a cell phone, it ends up in the world’s hands within moments. If you say something hurtful about someone in a fit of adolescent anger, your words are trapped forever, and nothing you say will change where they’ve gone. To these kids, they often speak how wide open the world was back then, that you walked away from phones, not with them. You waited in line to be on-line. Your computer did a thing and that’s all it did. These are rapidly becoming a romantic memory of this lost time, with the downsides sort of smoothing out into quaint irregularity. Like living in a castle, sans a window. Nice in a photo, not so nice overnight.

I wonder, sometimes, what our new world of storytellers with voices so loud they circle the world and last for years will yield.

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I’ve recently been able to figure out the phenomenon of a webtrap.

There’s a site called dannychoo.com, the adventures and experiences of a guy in Japan called Danny Choo. Danny’s a technical guy, a photographer, an otaku, a fan who wears costumes… and he’s also a great tour guide, giving you context to life in Japan. He’s really good. Really, really good. Like, too good.

He’s so good that one of his entries can take me 30 minutes to read and I can finish reading and still not feel done. I feel like he just put out the nice pamphlet that I could browse for hours while on a train or walking around, giving me insight and more details to research. Each one of his entries is this little microcosm.

In my web browsing, I have to keep moving. I have so many things I’m looking up, so much stuff out there. Like a shark, if I stop moving, I die. (Also, my eyes look scarily dead and people think I’m super dangerous and I am mostly not.) When I find a page like Danny’s entries, I have to say “OK, this has to wait” and I set it aside.

In no time, I have DOZENS of his entries set aside. Entries of sparkling detail, of context and regard and insight, waiting for me. Piled up, and waiting.

Danny consistently does this, but others do this too. It’s a mark of quality, no doubt, and I am complaining of the weight of the riches, not the pain of poverty. These are meals that pop out of the little slot when I bang the vending machine a few times looking for junk food. They are wonderful.

While browsing these weblogs, I will stumble on these, and go “Oh no, webtrap.” I find a page where someone has meticulously linked to so many cool things, that I could lose a day going through them, and at the present I do not have days to lose. I have less than days to lose. I am going to start cutting some major stuff out of my life so that my film gets done on time. I can’t afford to spend two hours on an amazing overview of a subject I always wanted to know. Or a subject I didn’t know I wanted to know about until right then and there.

Haaaalp, trapped.

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Sometimes I have strange feelings, very difficult to articulate.

In the cases that I’m talking about, it’s how I get about narrative approaches to code. I am completely entranced by narrative approaches to code. If I find one of these examples while browsing, every single other thing in my life gets backburnered until I finish digesting the narrative. It’s like finding a unicorn. You drop your pack of gold and hold onto that sucker because you’re going to get a wish. This sometimes leads to major decision trees that have probably led to a lot of “Hello? Where are you?”-type missives directed on me. I apologize to everyone, in retrospect and advance.

Here’s some examples:

• Why the fact that you can make some points jumping near Donkey Kong on the arcade game version is a bug and not a feature.
• A collection of heavily commented Atari 2600 cartridge disassembies.
• The process of improving Crazy Climber in Free Play mode.

Coding is magic to me. Over time, obviously, it has lost some of the zest and spring because there’s such a large industry associated with it and people can let the hardware do the thinking. That is, they no longer find themselves with a bucket, a length of rope and an orange and have to get to the top of a castle. They say SEND_TO_CASTLE and they’re done, they don’t even care what’s happening under the hood. But when you take 20+ years of experience with coding and the advances we made, hie yourself down to these long-ago games, and just rip them apart in the operating theater, I’m going to be one of the interns up in the bleachers watching everything.

Does this stuff sound familiar from me? It might. I’ve certainly done my share of raving for Krakowicz’ Kraking text files, and this care paid off in an interview I scored with him a couple years back.

It’s the tour guide aspect I love. It’s the guy at the front of the boat, telling you where to look, giving you the context. Sure, it’s a bunch of code, but what was going on when it was made? Why were these choices made? Why was there such intense work to make this one piece act like it did? The tour guide, a good tour guide, will wrap it all up for you. Even if they’re not 100% complete, they send you on the way you would want to go to find out even more.

I think, personally, the future is in being a tour guide. I think that’s what we’re all becoming. I’ll write about that shortly, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, I never get tired finding out how large the collision detection block is in Donkey Kong, or how well they tried to hide the chips in Crazy Climber… and that ultimately, no secret got left behind.

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Sleep Apnea is where your body forgets to breathe while you sleep. Or, to be less dramatic, an “event” where your oxygen intake is below average. For some people, this almost never happens while they sleep. For others, it happens constantly. I have sleep apnea. I’ve likely had it for a long time, but I am not sure; I was asleep at the time, after all.

The problems with sleep apnea are pretty memorable: you might die. Also, you have reduced energy since your body is basically going “HEY! HEY!” all night and clanging on the pipes to send down more oxygen, motherfucker. This fills your body with a general sense of unease, like when you’re on a date that looks like they’re the marrying kind after one dinner. I knew I had a problem with the sleep, but I kind of toughed it out since I figured it was just the way things are.

Recently, though, I decided I had a lot of living left to do, so I’ve been going through trying to find all the fun stuff wrong with me. I’ll be seeing an allergist, and a kidney specialist, but I also insisted I go through a sleep lab study, to see if anything is actually out of whack. After all, one can convince oneself of anything. Maybe my snoring was A-OK and just a misery to unfortunately proximate companions/associates.

(In the late 1990s, I was convinced that I had destroyed my hearing; I decided to go get a test. I went to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear infirmary and after a battery of tone listening and reporting, I was told I had better than perfect hearing. So sometimes the dice fall in my favor.)

In a sleep lab test, you go to a hospital and meet up with technicians, who have at their disposal a set of rooms. My room was a bit huge, and I feel like they must be used for something else. My technician, Will, was friendly and genial for about 2 minutes but quickly fell into a depressed state; this must be the worst job in the world… or he has sleep apnea!

They measure your heart/brain activity, breathing, and muscle movement. All well and good. What this means is they attach electrodes to your face (4 places), head (4 places), legs (4 places), chest (2 places) and attach two bands across your stomach and chest. They also strap this mask onto your nose that goes up your nose. And then you get to go to sleep, like Alex did in Clockwork Orange.

While you sleep, a camera watches you via infrared. This is all rather scary or perhaps exciting, depending on your own Maslow’s pyramid of needs. For me it was just great that I was finally getting this looked at.

Another neat feature was they record your sleep. Snoring, talking, and so on. Since they do this, they also say that if you need anything, just ask. When I woke up during the night, I simply said “Will, I’d like some water” and a voice went “Okay”. That was the best part.

What was not the best part was a gout attack at 2am. Turned out that strapping a belt across my stomach triggered some unpleasant movement with my kidney stones and off I went to the world of pain. My left foot started hurting very badly and there was no way I could continue sleeping.

This is OK, by the way; the documentation that came with my sleep lab appointment explained to me that they only needed a couple hours of data to really understand you, so even though I only slept about 3 and a half hours before having to go home and drop tons of pain meds, they got the data they needed.

It turns out I have over 15 “sleep events” an hour. So once every 3 minutes while I sleep, I stop breathing or otherwise have my body freak out from lack of something it needs, that is, air. This means I’m due to have a fitting for a CPAP machine, which will force air down my throat while I sleep. I’ve been told that after a few weeks of this, you don’t even recognize yourself. Here’s hoping!

Pleasant dreams.

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