Hey, I'm Brian. You'll be seeing more of me.

Sup everyone. My name is Brian “Ryvirath” Michael. This is the first social platform I’ve ever joined and I’m unreasonably excited/terrified about that. What I’m most interested in sharing with you all is the future, its probable forms, moralities, and behaviors; sometimes in short story form, sometimes as an opinion piece. Mostly because above all the future is weird and I love weird. Kind of like the Steem platform, which almost directly monetizes that little electrical impulse in your prefrontal cortex we call attention. That’s weird to me and very clever like most of the decentralized movement. But first let’s power through the introduction so I can start sharing real content.

I won’t bore you with the formative events of my life and how they made me who I am. Mostly because I literally don’t remember them, and only partly because I don’t know who I am. Memories are among the first casualties in rapid onset neurological/neurodegenerative disorders. The way we perceive time and our senses comes second. At the core of me is something I call the black dog. The black dog is a bundle of diagnosed bio/psychological conditions ranging from (notsoterrible) Aspergers to (terrible) treatment resistant depression that resulted from being born at 27 weeks premature back when that was a death sentence.

Untreatable puppy dog eyes.

I will refrain from naming the whole mess because I want you to think of me as sane even though I’m probably not. (Hopefully just in a harmless quirky way) Also, it’s not important in the context of my ability to write. Suffice it to say, most of my life can be defined as the vicious struggle to conquer the black dog, subsequent failure, and then redirection of my energies to a completely novel pursuit wherein I forget how fundamentally disconnected I am. Even with the boldness of youth, a fluency in pharmacology nurtured by necessity, and twenty doctors willing to write scripts for my ideas, I was never able to achieve remission for any measurable length of time. And I tried some pretty desperate things and ended up in some pretty desperate places. Experimenting with the original Silk Road is what got me into crypto in the first place. Still, I could never get the talk, the meds, the electrodes quite right. For every symptom treated, two more popped up in its place. To be fair, I probably put too much emphasis on the importance of monoamines in my treatment attempts. But that’s really the only tool modern science has to combat despair, whatever its terminological header. I learned how difficult it was to hack my subjective experience in a positive way. Fuck the complexity of the human brain. But also don’t, because it’s grand and the quest to understand it even grander.

A blue brain is a healthy brain I always say.

That struggle has left me with a lot of unsatisfying labels and a strangely eclectic wealth of knowledge as I’ve attempted to find the way in which I best contribute to the world. Some of these labels include game designer, manager, delivery driver, soldier/combat medic, crypto-trader, pre-med student, and husband. I’m most proud of the last item on that list and it comes complete with a star-crossed MMO love story that, to this day, seems to reside in a fairy tale.

Love, far more effective than placebo.

I most recently moved across the United States from Philadelphia to Seattle with my wife and two dogs where I intend to get a neuroscience degree from the University of Washington and a PHD in molecular genetics. The notion of helping to create a world in which others don’t have to suffer the way I have brings me some degree of peace. That brings me here to Steem. If neurogenetics, is my path then Steem is where I stop to smell the roses. I intend to learn through writing/sharing/socializing just who the fuck I am and who all of you are. Cheers.

My black dogs, the helpful ones.