Firestarter
Firestarter is a science fiction-horror thriller novel by Stephen King, first published in September 1980. In July and August 1980, two excerpts from the novel were published in Omni. In 1981, Firestarter was nominated as Best Novel for the British Fantasy Award, Locus Poll Award, and Balrog Award.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
3mentions
3people
2019–2024years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For some reason I read this as "garbage disposals are scary" and then I got a flashback to reading a Stephen King novel as a child (iirc it was Firestarter) where a character commits suicide by sticking their arm into their kitchen garbage disposal, it horrified me at the time and appears to have remained deeply embedded in my personal neural network...
- I read Stephen King's Firestarter at an early age, so that, and other things influenced by MKULTRA, factors in to why I think LSD is scary.
The other issue I have is that when people say that LSD can harm people with a predisposition to schizophrenia or whatever, it's frightening because it seems like a stereotyped thinking pattern that's useful for denying unacceptable causal hypotheses that might in fact be real.
- I got it from a blood transfusion when I was a child.
I got diagnosed back in 2016, and the available treatments back then wasn't great. As an alternative, my doctor signed me up for the clinical trials for the drug now known as Harvoni. I figured that it's a moonshot and didn't pay it any mind. (Having read Stephen King's Firestarter didn't help either.) I also moved to a different city for a job. Months later the drug company called and told me I qualified. The drug trial would have been free and would have cured my hep C, but alas I can't afford to quit my job and fly back to the old city for 3 months. (In hindsight I probably should have.)
Around 2018 when generic Harvoni became available from Indian manufacturers, I got serious about curing my hep C once and for all. I found a doctor that's willing to work with foreign-sourced Harvoni and ordered it online for $1300 (all out of pocket). I started the treatment under my doctor's directions and it went smoothly.
