11. No end in sight
Chapter 11 of Camera Obscura, written by Matt Boothman after Samantha Leigh
Day 311
Is there any mileage in a petition to scrap Human Subject Research Training? How many of you would sign? What a waste of time.
Yes, I am grumpy because the deadline to renew it snuck up on me (side effect of jumping two months forward in time).
And have they made it harder to pass for some reason? I clicked the link in the aggressive FINAL URGENT REMINDER email, went to the usual soft white room, the usual big voice sang the usual question, but it took me far more tries to get it to pass me than it ever has before.
THINK OF A HUMAN.
I think about myself.
THINK OF A HUMAN.
I think about the PI.
THINK OF A HUMAN.
I think about each of you.
THINK OF A HUMAN.
I don’t want to, but I think about the remaining alts still hanging around the lab (I still need three of those pens back, please.)
THINK OF A HUMAN.
I think about $IVYREEF.
THINK OF A HUMAN.
And on and on like that, going through every human I can think of until it finally let me out and the lab was dark and I had 15 unread emails from the PI.
How much must this be costing the university? And for what benefit?
Day 315
Has anyone else’s lab conducted interdimensional subtraction as part of a participant observation? Is there anything that surprised you? Anything I should know about that isn’t in the basic documentation?
My PI is very excited about the possible results of interdimensional subtraction since getting a whiff of a positive correlation in the dimension of origin data. And the results could be really valuable. But that means we run into another positive correlation, that between the value of a research activity and the number and strictness of protocols necessary to implement it.
I really want to get the required new protocols through IRB first time if possible. I just need someone with experience of interdimensional subtraction to peer-review my participant risk assessment and catch anything I haven’t anticipated. Here’s what I’ve got so far – list of risks participants may experience during an interdimensional subtraction task:
Taking offence
Aura inversion
Negative polarity
Nega-self manifestion
Dual nega-duel
Paper cut (above threshold)
Perforation and other minor injuries related to infinite pencil lead extrusion
Parasympathetic wavering
An unjustified sense of having been put in the pear wiggler
Eldritch embarrassment
Become imaginary or vice versa
Ana-chthonic shock
Thousand eyed strain
Sudden onset horn decay
Temporal subatomisation
Witch’s curse
Greggs belly
Chair gains sentience (and has beef) (and takes it out on participant)
Day 321
Comrades, I’m sorry to share that we may have missed one.
Writing this up as a warning for anyone adding an interdimensional subtraction task to a similar study in the future.
This morning was our first participant observation with the new task added in. I read the subject the instructions from the updated script, revealing it by the light of a lucifer and skewering each wriggling word with my tongue. From about word five, I knew the incantation felt naggingly familiar, but I couldn’t place it until the Endling Horn shrieked and there opened the staring void of the Thousand Eyed Abyss, and then presumably something happened and then it was later.
Maybe this is just me being stressed and oversensitive, but I’m starting to really resent every suspension of subjectivity, every loss of time, every experience that happens to me but that I’m not permitted to remember, or even to know. My life is being lived and I’m not getting to live it. It’s getting away from me and I’m fed up enough that I don’t mind saying, I don’t care for it.
Any coping strategies gratefully received.
Day 333
Pizza party in Curzon Lab tomorrow night for anyone with the spare time!
We’re celebrating because the records have come back from vetting and it’s confirmed that enough participants met the criteria that we have definitely hit the enrollment goal for the study. Even if I still don’t remember about half of them, and when I try to generate demographic reports on the sample I always get the same error: “Unable to find or open /Brain/TemporalLobe/Hippocampus/MISTAKE.png”.
Hitting the enrollment goal means those correlations we’d started seeing are statistically significant, which in turns means the grant proposal the PI is working on is all but guaranteed to be accepted.
So that’s the real cause for celebration. We stood our ground through all that hassle from the IRB last year, endured, stuck to protocol, and now the study is sustainable. My position is sustainable. You won’t be rid of my posts on here for a while yet. Come breathe a sigh of relief with me! It’s BYOB but the pizza’s on Curzon.
Day 334
To anyone and everyone whose good mood I deflated at the pizza party: I apologise.
(Except to those remaining alts of mine using my login to read these posts. It’s my right to keep saying what I like to all of you.)
Not to make excuses, but to offer some evidence to inform anyone hypothesising about my behaviour:
It’s just complicated.
The seemingly straightforward positives: we secured our grant. The study can continue. We have the opportunity to widen the candlelit pool that science has carved in the cave of existence. I don’t have to look for a new job.
The complicating factors: the data underpinning our successful application to extend the study (and my role on it) seems to have arisen at least partly as a result of a deal I semi-unwittingly struck with a study participant to try to put this study behind me.
Everyone here who helped me last year when I was struggling with repeated visitations from $IVYREEF knows how relieved I was to prove that our timelines had diverged, and that I was no longer on track to become that specific future version of me, who would maliciously interfere with the integrity of our own science. But here I am now, interfering with my own timeline, in a way that, yes, appears to have ensured the robustness of the study rather than undermine it, but still undeniably strains safe scientific protocol.
That’s all it was. I didn’t mean any of the things I said personally.
Day 338
Looking for strategies to throw Finance off the scent of Pizza Palace receipts. Can anyone help?
>END
Camera Obscura is an actual play of Outliers, a single-player journalling game by Samantha Leigh, based on The Wretched by Chris Bissette, and published by the Far Horizons Co-Op.
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