#I might release a demo sort of version with the current mechanics

[sporco-filth]

Om a different note, has your tumblr banner been changing? Every now and then I look at the picture of the amazingly filthy room, and I swear it got messier/dirtier the last time I looked at it

No, the image has not been changed since this blog was made (I mean the file on my computer, and so the image in the banner can't be different either).

BUT... this actually alludes to something and I will reward your question with a sneak peak. Because, you see, this picture is from my still-in-development slob game (it's fallen to the wayside over the holidays but I'm planning to start work again soon). And in that game, the room actually does in fact start out neat and becomes messier. The version shown is the end result.

The image though is based off this shot from this episode of Portlandia:

In the game, everything starts out clean:

And then if you lower the cleanliness points to 0 it looks like this:

I'm still working on the in-between stages though.

There are other rooms (lounge, bedroom, bathroom) but those I started from a clean room and am building up to a messy room, so they're relatively cleaner currently:

(this is the messiest one so far, but it's still got a long way to go. It's not even halfway yet)

I know I said I wouldn't spoil things by showing my work in progress but eh... you lot have been waiting too long for me to draw these things so at least you can see I've made some progress.

[zephyrstargame]

Yippe, Horay, and other such words of excitement! i've released Zephyr Star Gameplay Test Demo version 1.0.6! this version mostly has bug fixes and makes some preparations for future game mechanics.

here are the changes:

Bug fixes:

You are no longer able to swap characters while performing a special action (gooping or using the rope)

Fixed a bug that caused the moving bridges in the dungeon to get very noisy

Fixed a timing bug that made it very difficult to block consecutive eighth-note attacks at higher tempos

Made it so that, when a battle is completed with a dead party member, that party member is revived with 1 HP when returning to the overworld. (rather than being a sort of zombie walking around with 0 HP and being dead when entering the next battle)

The second impact from Bat's "Home Run" skill (when the enemy lands and takes extra damage) can now damage Fungask

Other changes:

Adjusted the blur effect to be less intense on higher graphics settings

Added the Flashing Effects toggle in accessibility settings

Flashing effects are now enabled by default

Smoothed out the battle camera a bit

Changed the sound for pressing the block button, to be easier to line up with the music

When an enemy attacks you, there is now a ! bubble that indicates when you are supposed to block.

Removed the option to select "Talisman Points" when ranking up… (was an idea i had but i changed some things)

Added Rot-Weiler as a bonus battle

Also involves the Rotten attribute, which causes enemy attacks to build up Rot in your HP bar rather than damaging you directly

Adjusted the layout of Zee's crystal room slightly

Added the "Team" button to the pause menu.

Currently only used to check team members, but will be expanded in the future.

Added a ripple effect to the pause menu background. why? why not, it looks cool!

Added some extra flair to Galaxy Guardian's battle

Prepared the map for future expansion.

Restructured internal item data to make way for future mechanics. (because of this, items from legacy saves might not load properly…)

added Wish Fragments, which are hidden throughout the world.

now why don't you scurry on over to the game page and play it for yourself?

[wannabeanartist]

Update about my game

So, I just wanted to make a small update about the game that I am currently making.

Important: to avoid confusion with the comic I am making, I may have to create a new blog specially dedicated to the game. I will also try to make slightly different designs for the comic and the game versions of the characters.

Game concept: So, as a reminder, I plan to make an RPG, but a story-driven one. There will be fights that will play out as classical tile fights where you move characters on a grid make them do actions etc... where it becomes interesting is that you the player will be the leader of the group fighting the anomalous, and your "agent" will all have relations to one another as well as towards you. And you will have to make sure that everyone gets along, or else your team will just fall apart. Also, this isn't a linear friendship bar that goes from 0 to 100, characters can have different types of relations. Let's take Elliot for example. Elliot views Vicent as a mentor, he is more likely to give it his all to impress him and will be terrified if he sees him go down. But, Elliot sees Sasha as more of a friend, clearly, he wants to help Sasha rather than to try and impress her and will become angry if she goes down. This is just an example, but characters will act differently depending on how they view each other, there will probably be a meter from 0 to 100 to show how close the characters are, but it isn't the only thing to look for, the type of relation (friendship, mentor, rival, etc...) is also to be taken into account. I have a few names in mind for the game, but I still need to verify the copyright. I was thinking about something along the lines of: beyond the rift (in reference to the in-game rift spewing paranormal events into the world) or The Anomaly Squade.

The progress and planned content of the game: I have started to write some of the dialogue and important game mechanics. For now, I still intend to work on my art skills since the way I envision the game, it shouldn't be too hard programming-wise. Ideally, I would like to have a first demo ready by somewhere between the start of next school year and next year's Christmas. This demo should contain at least three characters, multiple fights, a short story, and two maps (one in France and the other in Russia). For the full game, I envision at least 6 characters, but I may add more if I have the time to do so. And of course, more story as well as an end boss are the bare minimum for a game. Still, I can't guarantee that the game will be commercial-grade quality, it is supposed to be an end-of-high-school project after all, I am just documenting my progress and releasing the game for fun.

Possible features: I am not sure if I'll be able to do those things but, if the game is successful enough I might. I would like to have the game dubbed or at least the playable characters. On one side, there are only 6 to 9 characters, which isn't too bad, if I am lucky I might find enough friends and classmates to do the job. The problem is, all my classmates are French, and even if I can hide my accent relatively well whilst speaking English, they cannot so yeah, IDK if there will be an English dub. Maybe if I garner enough community, I might find some internet people willing to do that for me? But that is unlikely. I also may start a Patreon or some sort of donation once I am 18 to get some more professional equipment, mostly I'd like a graphics tablet to draw.

[theonyxpath]

Chicago is!

If you remember the original Chicago By Night cover art, this is the same scene – this time illustrated by Adrian Majkrzak – but the point of view is reversed. A nice call-back!

Of course, all this Chicago referencing is because we are currently running a Kickstarter campaign for our new Chicago By Night book for Vampire 5th Edition. So far, we crushed the funding goal in half a day and have blasted through several Stretch Goals.

Sincere thanks to all of you who have backed and made this possible!

We’re very excited about the additional projects being built by the Stretch Goals: first, the Chicago Folio, an in-character artifact book compiling diary entries, transcripts, emails, and other treasures to use in the course of a V5 chronicle, especially useful when utilizing the characters and plots from Chicago by Night. We’ve already added the Camarilla Record section and the Anarchs Accounts section to the Folio via Stretch Goals, so let’s see what else we can add!

Second, we have Let the Streets Run Red, a PDF supplement set in and around the Chicago and Midwest area, incorporating characters absent from V5 Chicago by Night and exploring the activities of Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and the rural Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana areas. The first section, starting in Chicago, is our current Stretch Goal and almost achieved at the time I’m writing this!

If you are interested, you can check it out here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/chicago-by-night-for-vampire-the-masquerade-5th-ed/description

Like all of our recent KSs, backers are getting sections of the text that will add up to 95% of the full text for the book before this KS is over. So if you are concerned over the writing direction, or that it might get changed before it’s published, here’s your chance to see all the words before they go to editing.

    Trinity Continuum: Aeon illustration by Michele Giorgi

    As part of our ongoing outreach to let our community know all about the V5 Chicago By Night Kickstarter, the developer, our own Gentleman Gamer Matthew Dawkins, will be hosting a Q&A to answer your many many questions! In fact, here he is now:

“Matthew here! I’ll be hosting a live Q&A on my YouTube channel focused on Chicago by Night, but in which you can ask me anything (within reason) and I’ll answer (probably)! I’d love for you to join me, and we can all discuss the Chicago project and how it’s doing so far.”

  It’s on Friday 9th November at 22:00 GMT right here: www.youtube.com/user/clackclickbang

    Trinity Continuum Core illustration by Felipe Gaona

    Mirthful Mike Chaney wants all of you prospective Exalted artists out there that he’d love to see your stuff! Just follow the submission guidelines on this site, and if you can create illustrations along the lines of the artwork you’ve seen in Exalted 3rd, the monthly EX3 releases, and the previews of Dragon-Blooded – then he wants to see your stuff! (As a note, Chibi style isn’t really what we’re looking for, as much as we love it).

  Eddy Webb notes that he has a special deal going on with Pugmire‘s Canis Minor Community Content site, like so:

  I need to cut this one a bit short this week folks. I lifted weights with the intention of getting back some tone in my shoulders and now that one muscle sort of along the shoulder blade is REALLY hurting.

  Makes it very hard to type, actually. Fortunately most of my work this week is talking and coordinating and not art and writing!

    Trinity Continuum: Aeon illustration by Jon Reed

    So, one final note that this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast features an interview with “Diamond” Dave Brookshaw, who is not only developer of the Mage: The Awakening line and lead dev on Deviant, but I think still holds the record for the writer who has worked on the most of our game lines. Certainly, his knowledge of our lines (and other things) is vast, so expect some excellent talkin’.

  Plus, Dave having worked on so many of our game lines means I can segue right into him knowing all about:

  Many Worlds, One Path!

  BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Lo the darkness that lies like a pall over Chicago.

The V5 Chicago By Night Kickstarter went live as planned last Tuesday and blew through its funding goal in half a day, and is currently at over a thousand backers in just one week ! Congrats to the whole team and all our backers, and we’ve already started to pass through several Stretch Goals and activate additional projects!

We’d be thrilled if you’d give it a look here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/chicago-by-night-for-vampire-the-masquerade-5th-ed/description

Next up, we’re working on the Kickstarter for They Came From Beneath the Sea! (TCFBtS!), which has some very different additions to the Storypath mechanics we’ll be explaining during the KS.  They take an excellent 50’s action and investigation genre game and turn it to 11!

  ELECTRONIC GAMING:

      As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here are the links for the Apple and Android versions:

http://theappstore.site/app/1296692067/onyx-dice

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onyxpathpublishing.onyxdice&hl=en

Three different screenshots, above.

And our latest, the dice for Werewolf: The Forsaken 2e:

  ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Endless Ages Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rites of Renown: When Will You Rage II (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Ascension: Truth Beyond Paradox (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Curse of the Blue Nile (Kindle, Nook)

Beast: The Primordial: The Primordial Feast Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Predators and Prey: The Hunters Hunted II Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Poison Tree (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Songs of the Sun and Moon: Tales of the Changing Breeds (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: The Strix Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Forsaken: The Idigam Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Awakening: The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Beast Within Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: W20 Cookbook (Kindle, Nook)

Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Tales of the Dark Eras (Kindle, Nook)

Promethean: The Created: The Firestorm Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Demon: The Descent: Demon: Interface (Kindle, Nook)

Scarred Lands: Death in the Walled Warren (Kindle, Nook)

V20 Dark Ages: Cainite Conspiracies (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Strangeness in the Proportion (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: Silent Knife (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Dawn of Heresies (Kindle, Nook)

  OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

And we’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

  Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

    DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

This week, we are releasing the Advance PDF for the Promethean book Night Horrors: The Tormented! This Wednesday on DTRPG!

“The Pilgrimage ain’t got no shortcuts, no quick fixes. Heck, even death’s not a reprieve for us. So you pick yourself up now, and you keep goin’. I promise there’s light at the end of this tunnel, even if the walk takes forever and a half. Just mind those that’d get in yer way.”

— Sister Meshé, Tammuz Sage

Night Horrors: The Tormented includes:

• More than 50 Storyteller characters, including Centimani, Pandorans, alchemists and genitors, qashmallim, clones, and Zeky

• A new way the Pilgrimage can go awry: petrificatio

• Two new Flux Alembics

• Plot hooks and story seeds for your Promethean: The Created chronicles

• An in-depth look at the Zeky, complete with rules to play one, and clones

• A close examination of the enigmatic Jovian

        CONVENTIONS!

THIS WEEK! Matt, Monica, Bill, Crystal, and other Onyx Path writers and developers will be at GameHoleCon in Madison, WI November 8th – 11th running demos of Pugmire, Scarred Lands, and more! https://www.gameholecon.com/

Rich, Lisa, Matt, Eddy, Dixie, Danielle, and other Onyx Path writers and developers will be at PAX Unplugged in Philly, November 30th – December 2nd running demos of Scion, Monarchies of Mau, Exalted, and more! http://unplugged.paxsite.com/

Start getting ready for our appearance at MidWinter this January in Milwaukee! So many demos, playtests, secret playtests, and Onyx Path Q&As you could plotz!

  And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

C20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion Jumpstart (Scion 2nd Edition)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

  Redlines

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

  Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

  Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon (Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Wr20 Book of Oblivion (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

  Manuscript Approval:

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

  Editing:

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Aeon Aexpansion (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

C20 Players’ Guide (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Adventures for Curious Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

In Media Res (Trinity Continuum: Core)

  Post-Editing Development:

Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

  Indexing:

    ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

  In Art Direction

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – Pretty much all contracted.

Geist 2e

The Realm – Yihoung on the fulls. I will probably get Gunship going soon.

Trinity Continuum (Aeon and Core) – Aeon sketches coming in.

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Chicago By Night – KS moving along.

C20 Player’s Guide – Contracted.

Aeon Aexpansion

They Came From Beneath the Sea! – Getting more KS art since we have a little time.

Lost 2e Jumpstart – Art contracted.

EX3 Lunars – Getting KS art.

Signs of Sorcery – Contracted.

  Marketing Stuff

  In Layout

Trinity Core – Working.

Trinity Aeon – Inputting 2nd proof notes.

M20: Gods and Monsters – With Josh.

Pugmire Roll of Good Dogs and Cats

  Proofing

Scion Hero – Backer PDF is out, errata coming in.

Scion Origin – Corrections are in.

Ex3 Dragon Blooded

CtL2 Jumpstart – Adding in corrections.

  At Press

Monarchies of Mau and Screen – At Studio2. Dice and buttons at Studio2. Shipping to backers soon.

Wraith 20th – Printing the Deluxe interior, proofing cover this week(???).

Wraith 20 Screen – Printing.

Scion Dice – At Studio2.

Lost 2e Screen – Off to printer.

Scion Screen – Off to printer.

Changeling: The Lost 2e – Printer getting started.

Fetch Quest – Files sent to printer.

Exalted 3rd Novel – Going out to backers this week.

PTC: Night Horrors: The Tormented – Advance PDF on sale this Wednesday on DTRPG!

  TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: 

Remember, remember, the fifth of November Gunpowder treason and plot We see no reason Why Gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot…. I just love V for Vendetta!

[click2watch]

I Got the Mark of the Beast – And It Will Hold My Bitcoin

“What happens when you need an MRI?”

Someone answers for me: “You die an excruciating death… Actually, they remove them painfully quickly or the machine does.”

I’m sure these paranoid, exaggerated remarks didn’t help as I sat down at the folding table in front of a large man with a 14-gauge needle. I was sweating through my shirt.

“Are you gonna pass out?” he asks.

“I don’t think so.”

It’s literally right on my face – in the form of a septum piercing – that I’m pretty familiar with needles.

“Three, two and one,” the man with the needle said as he pushed it into the squishy part of my left hand, between my thumb and index finger.

It was all of one second of pain, and then it was over. I hardly even bled.

And just like that, I was now officially a cyborg.

So, what the hell am I doing here? Well several years ago, in 2014, I stumbled on this guy, Martijn Wismeijer, aka Mr. Bitcoin, who had gotten a microchip implant that he then programmed to hold his cryptocurrency.

I doubt I really knew much about the transhumanism movement back then, but I have always been fascinated with robots and the idea of melding robots into humans or vice versa. This seemed right up my alley, as even back then, I was basically covering crypto full-time, so I started reaching out but communication eventually dropped off and it was all but forgotten.

Until this January, when Bryan Bishop, the Bitcoin Core developer that’s known for his tremendously fast typing and in turn his transcriptions of conferences, mentioned BDYHAX to me. “There’s a lot of transhumanists in the bitcoin community,” he said.

But the conference’s agenda had already piqued my interest – “Implantable Tech Area.”

I’m there.

Freedom of…

Bishop’s right – at least anecdotally, that there’s an overlap between the body hackers and the bitcoiners. Transhumanism does, in fact, link them. Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney seems to have been one, since he cryogenically froze his body, hoping that sometime in the future he might be able to be resuscitated.

It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that folks that believe technology can create a better future as it relates to money, payments, shit just about everything, would think that technology can also make humans themselves better.

Take Bishop’s recently revealed designer baby venture.

Funded with his bitcoin savings, Bishop’s project, recently written about in MIT Technology Review, looks to allow parents to genetically engineer their babies to have features like muscles without ever picking up a dumbbell or enhanced memory.

If that sentence sounds weird – almost like adding apps to your smartphone – it’s because it kinda is. There’s mounting criticism and concern over the practice, especially after a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui claimed he’d made the first genetically edited babies.

If you give your imagination even a tiny bit of wiggle room, you can see why.

Do parents have the right to choose how their children look and act? This can’t be a cheap procedure; will everyone be able to edit their children to be smarter or will it only be the rich that benefit? Will we lose some humanity if everyone edit’s themselves for the flavor of the week?

Yet for all those dystopian futures (that I very much see and worry about), ultimately some of this could no doubt be beneficial and save hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of lives.

For instance, one of Bishop’s first examples – something we talked about in the Fall last year – was making humans resistant to HIV.

Future humans will think we’re barbaric if we resist this kind of medical achievement.

While I’m not so interested, and even slightly disturbed, by genetic beauty enhancements such as muscles or blue eyes, I worry these concerns could push this type of biohacking into the shadows.

And that’s a shame.

Bodies and money

We’ve seen a similar thing happen in the cryptocurrency space.

There are hacks, scams, fucking idiots and all sorts of bad things lurking in the blockchain scene, and typically that’s made many turn up their noses to the whole industry. They lump it all together and mark it “useless,” “nefarious,” “shit.”

And I get it. I look around the crypto industry, after being here for six years, and see rot. I see individuals who only want to make quick money at the expense of others; I see companies touting their disrupting finance but actually enstating the same, arbitrary, discriminatory rules as legacy banks.

Where the fuck did the ethos go?

I’ll tell you. It might be hard to see through all the “sky is falling” – or during a hype cycle all the glitz of free money – but it’s in Venezuela, helping people literally starving because of their corrupt government, hold onto some value. It’s in the lightning torch, hopping all around the world, showing people the power of a stateless digital currency.

And because those instances exist, I’ll take some of the bullshit.

Because that’s what I’m here for – an alternative to the systems that were created without my input and sometimes do not work for – to be more clear, work against – me and other individuals.

“We’re all already attuned to this, we want freedom, we don’t want to be told what we can and can’t do with our bodies, what we can or can’t put into our bodies, and people don’t want to be told what they can and can’t do with their money,” Chad Creighton, a vice president at blockchain development consultancy BlockSaw, who was at BDYHAX, said.

While our bodies and our money could seem like apples and oranges, they’re really not. Because what we can do with our bodies is directly determined by what we can do with our money.

Case in point, for some in the biohacking space, healthcare is too costly and big pharma, insurance providers, even doctors are working against the people, the individuals who need care. For cryptocurrency aficionados, the great monolithic entity to disrupt is the Federal Reserve, state monetary policy, the banks.

There’s an overlapping “distrust of formal institutions,” Bishop told me. “They have gotten so large and bureaucratic, it’s sometimes more practical to go your own way and see what you can get done. Even more specifically, some people see certain regulations directly interfering with people’s right to live.”

He gives the example of a DIY biohacker figuring out a way to make insulin cheaper and then offering that to diabetics, which would be technically illegal.

As with all these anarchist attempts, Don Andres Ochoa, a biotechnologist and data scientist speaking at the event, gave the best rallying cry:

“Fuck it, let’s fix the problem ourselves.”

Scared of needles?

These two fields of research “are not directly useful to each other, but there’s a common source of inspiration,” Bishop said.

And they do mix together at a certain point. For instance, because of the controversy surrounding designer babies today, Bishop is cognizant that cryptography-backed privacy tech will likely play some role – if nothing else, at least as it relates to anonymous payments for the service.

Still, all this stuff seems outrageous to the majority of people.

“Right now, the idea or concept of body hacking is literally bleeding edge (ha),” said Amal Graafstra, the founder and CEO of VivoKey, the maker of the implant I got.

With implants, as with cryptocurrency, “the overlap is directly related to people’s sense of adventure,” he continued.

Case in point, Jerrah Cameron, a Denver-based programmer, who stumbled upon the body hacking scene only about a month ago and already has three implants – two small chips and this larger NFC chip, for which he had a gnarly one-inch slice on the side of his right hand.

For the novelty these devices provide so far – I currently have my chip programmed to take an NFC-enabled phone to my “receive bitcoin” QR code, making it fast and easy for someone to send me a tip – most people won’t want to get poked, he said.

That’s why he’s working on an application that would allow the chips to be used as payment mechanisms, housing first the tokens needed for apps like Apple Pay, Google Pay or Venmo, and then in the future even cryptocurrencies.

And VivoKey is also working on something similar.

In a week or so, Graafstra and his team plan on releasing an API that can allow developers to program one of their chips (yes, the one I have! squee) to act as an authenticator key. With this, users should be able to request that their chip be tapped to verify any send or transfer of crypto within a wallet.

“The idea was to develop a completely autonomous secure element under the skin,” Graafstra told CoinDesk.

And the company also offers a chip (not the one I have) that can actually complete key generation and the signing of a transaction all within the chip. That’s currently in private beta and requires quite a lot of programming to make it all work, so it’s not ready for mainstream use yet.

So for now, my hand isn’t worth any more than it was when I was just a boring old human (although it has facilitated $2 worth of bitcoin).

Implant procedure images via Bailey Reutzel for CoinDesk

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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The post I Got the Mark of the Beast – And It Will Hold My Bitcoin appeared first on Click 2 Watch.

More Details Here → https://click2.watch/i-got-the-mark-of-the-beast-and-it-will-hold-my-bitcoin-3

[douchebagbrainwaves]

COPY WHAT MICROSOFT IS THIS SUMMER

9 is what makes Lisp macros possible, is so far still unique to Lisp, perhaps because a it requires those parens, or something just as bad, and b if you add that final increment of power, you can no longer claim to have invented a new language, but only to have designed a new dialect of Lisp;-Though useful to present-day spam acceptably well using nothing more than a pretentious version of u r a fag! If you get a call from a VC firm, go to their web site and send them an email. There are people who would have become checkout clerks to become engineers. He really doesn't know. Roughly, work that has zero chance of being a spam, whereas sexy indicates. And you want to work on it. You can demonstrate your respect for one another in more subtle ways. So if the company gets sold at a low price, the founders happily set to work turning their prototype into something they can launch.

If his lack of authority caused him to make mistakes, point those out. One easy way to build such a whitelist is to keep a list of the fifteen individual probabilities, you calculate the combined probability thus: let prod apply #' probs/prod prod apply #' probs/prod prod apply #' probs/prod prod apply #' mapcar #' lambda x-1 x probs One question that arises in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. When a company is a function of the situation and the people would be dispersed. Plus since TVs were expensive whole families watched the same shows together, so they rewrote their software not to. For example, in my opinion, are math, the hard sciences, engineering, history especially economic and social history, and the only reason you need them, and that would have been on the list 100 years ago, but what we mean by it is changing. Signalling risk smells like one of those things founders worry about that's not a real problem. There's no other name as good.

9999 free! What happened? Someone you already know might send you an email with a new baby. The best I can think to myself If someone with a PhD in computer science can't understand this thermostat, it must be badly designed. Garbage-collection. The use of credentials was an attempt to axiomatize computation. The defining quality seems to be that the refragmentation was driven by computers in the way. Along with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other good hackers.

Wufoo took this to heart and released their form-builder before the underlying database. When I think about the great hackers I know seem to have been influenced by the people around you care about the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. What I found was that recognizing that last few percent of you. 027040077 quite 0. And of course you have a real point to make. One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. So it's good if you can. P 500 in 1958 had been there an average of 61 years.

And yet he invested anyway, because he expected it to be very disciplined if you take the latter route that the lawyer is representing you rather than merely advising you, or an acquirer says they want to invest in startups founded by eminent professors. VCs reading this are probably rolling on the floor laughing at how my hypothetical VCs let the angel keep his 10. If a mail triggers this second level of testing designed specifically to avoid false positives, and by trial and error I chose. If you can't, your plans may not be a difference in degree, but a DH2 or lower response is always unconvincing. There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. How do you know when you meet them. And those who do raise VC rounds will be able to say what the overall false positive rate is, because we're up in the noise, statistically. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds. This really is kind of a bug. What we're seeing now, everyone's probably going to be seeing in the next. A lot of the brain of the filter is in the individual databases, then merely tuning spams to get through the seed filters won't guarantee anything about how well they'll get through individual users' varying and much more trained filters. You can demonstrate your respect for one another in more subtle ways.

This sort of trolling was in the early 1920s approached 80%. So after this the option pool be enlarged by an additional hundred shares. Now startups have another alternative. But anyone willing to falsify headers or use open relays, presumably including most porn spammers, should be able to leave, if you restrict the sales pitches spammers can make, you will be net more productive. Cluttered sites don't do well in demos, especially when they're projected onto a screen. Startups and yuppies entered the American conceptual vocabulary roughly simultaneously in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 027040077 quite 0. False positives seem to me a different kind of error. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts. It was more prestigious to be one of those meetings when you check out a company you've pretty much decided to buy, after all.

With individual angels you don't have to live in a great city: you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city your whole life. It was from someone in Egypt and written in all uppercase. I suspect signalling risk is in this category too. It's obvious why: the lower-tier firms' biggest fear, when chance throws them a bone, is that VCs will allow founders to cash out partially in a funding round, by selling some of their stock directly to the investors. They got to have expense account lunches at the best restaurants and fly around on the company's Gulfstreams. Say what you're doing. There's also a variant where one has no place to work. They certainly delivered. I feel a bit dishonest recommending that route. For example, lower-tier VC firms are a bargain for founders.

If you're worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is. The 1980s; till then one had to major in applied math. At the time IBM completely dominated the computer industry. But it means if you have this most common type of ambition, you'll probably feel like running tomorrow. They know they'll have to cede some power, because the schools adjust to suit whatever the tests measure. The greatest advantage of a PhD besides being the union card of academia, of course. So, I think we're better off attacking one step downstream, where wealth turns into power. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. And once started this process spreads through the whole economy, because at the beginnings of people's careers they can easily switch not merely employers but industries. In some business relationships, you do implicitly solicit certain kinds of mail.

[lorrainecparker]

VR, AR and More at SIGGRAPH 2017

The beginning of August saw the 44 year old ​SIGGRAPH ​conference​ (​S​pecial ​I​nterest ​G​roup on Computer ​GRAPH​ics and Interactive Techniques) return to Los Angeles for the 11th time, and this year the topic was almost exclusively VR. As this is ProVideo Coalition and not VirtualReality Coalition, I’ll be taking a more filmmaker-centric approach to this recap. That being said, the word of the week was “immersion”, and at this point I’m confident we’re on our way to ​The Matrix ​within the next 5 years.

The Exhibition Hall

The TL;DR of SIGGRAPH this year was that Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are here, and there are plenty of companies developing tools for it, mostly surrounding the ​interactivity of the technology​. That includes tracking in various forms, eye strain and fidelity solutions, and feedback simulation. The feedback tools can utilize simple things from ​inflatable bags worn about your person​, all the way up to more complex things such as a large drum you would, I suppose, hang in your garage to ​simulates heat, wind, and frosty wind​. Or an HMD that reads your mind.

VR is in an interesting spot, as there is plenty of potential but not a lot for the consumer to do with it right now. There’s a handful of games and even less in the way of passive entertainment, but that brings up an interesting dilemma. People keep hand-waving VR gaming as the obvious but not the end-game (pun not intended), and that there’s a ton more on the horizon. What makes one’s head tilt is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much else to do with it (HP, in their press event, said 76% of VR content is gaming) but the companies recently diving in seem to believe there’s a whole heap of new experiences on the horizon that aren’t “silly games”, mostly in the commercial sector. Consumers care about experiences, commercial folks care about transforming workflows: lower cost, optimized investments in training and simulations, and shorter dev cycles. To that end, it’s up to individual companies to decide what (likely proprietary) programs best fit their needs.

The problem with the aforementioned poo-pooing of VR “games” comes down to the definition: what is an interactive experience if not a game? Games are becoming more and more cinematic, with franchises like ​Metal Gear Solid ​really pushing the boundaries of acceptable cut-scene length at an hour a pop in G​uns of the Patriots,​ and turning ​MGS:V​ into a sort-of hybrid television show/open world game. More recently, ​Fallout 4​ eschewed much its personal choice-driven roots in favor of a more linear, film-like experience. A perhaps-woefully small push towards interactive cinema, as seen by the ​Summer Camp ​demo​ in the VR Village, exemplified this strange blurry line.

User Playing Summer Camp

In ​Summer Camp, ​you’re a kid in a barn with another kid, getting into some mischief, and your buddy discovers a mystical ball with magic powers and some semblance of intelligence. I won’t ruin the demo since it’s pretty short, but some fun things happen and you’re instructed to complete various simple tasks to advance the story. It’s things like “hide behind those hay bales” or “turn on the faucet”, for example. In gaming, we call this being “on rails”, as opposed to an “open world” experience. Just like in most current games that utilize this mechanic, the main portion of ​Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality , if you ignore the requests made of you, the characters will implore you using different voice lines and tactics. The difference here is that the entire experience is on rails. It’s billed as a VR film that ​you​ experience, but does that make it an “interactive movie” or a game? What’s the difference?

The big thing the conference showed us is that the future of this new medium is limited only by the human imagination, and perhaps a few more years of display tech advancements. That said, it feels as if everyone’s waiting for the next shoe to drop in terms of someone coming out with “the next big thing” in VR. We see this in more filmmaker-centric conferences in the form of “our camera enables creatives to be creative by giving them the power of 20K sensors and smaller form-factors”. Filmmaking is at a point now where the only thing stopping anyone from putting together a compelling movie is a compelling script. In my estimation, we’re already there in the VR space as so many of the computer-based technologies that empower traditional filmmakers are shared by VR creators. So let’s dive in to the nuts and bolts of what got us there.

First off, the PC. It’s got to be powerful and usually that means building your own, often in a big case, or spending a lot of money on a pre-build. Then there’s the giant cable-tail you’ve got following you around, jumping under your feet when you least expect it which at best ruins immersion, and at worst rips the HMD straight off your head and snaps your neck in the process.

HP has developed a backpack-mounted high performance PC specifically designed for VR use and development, called the ​HP Z VR Backpack​. At $3295, the 10lb computer is kitted with a nVidia P5200​ graphics card with 16GB of memory, an ​Intel i7 vPro​ processor, and is HMD-agnostic. In other words, it’s “just” a fast PC you wear on your back. It’s also got two slots for 75mAh battery packs that are mounted by your hips to complement the internal 50mAh battery that are hot-swappable and together will last about an hour. With consistent swapping and charging, 4 batteries will last you about 8 hours. You can also detach the computer and dock it, allowing you to use it as a standard PC. Wearing it is a pleasure, feeling more like a full Camelback than a PC riding around on you. In regards to the “portability” of VR, this is definitely the next step. Beyond that? Full body tracking.

HP Z VR Backpack Harness

HP Z VR Backpack Dock and 2 charging batteries

Companies like ​Motion Reality​, ​Realis​, O​ptitrack​ and ​Vicon​ had full body tracking demos on display, and all but two, Vicon and Realis, were rifle-based. Vicon, coupled with ​Manus VR​’s hand tracking technology, was able to demo an incredibly immersive neon-samurai game in which you can move every joint in your body and see a 1-to-1 translation of those moves in-game. Looking down and seeing your legs, holding out your hands and articulating your fingers, is honestly incredible. It’s the difference between playing a game and being transported into another world. It’s almost impossible to describe the feeling when the tracking is perfect beyond “putting on a costume”. You genuinely feel like you were wearing the samurai armor, aided by the elastic bands holding the tracking points on your arms and legs putting pressure on your limbs, mimicking the armor in a physical sense. An unintentional but welcome side-effect.

Vicon wireframe display, user getting suited up.

Motion Reality, powered by HP’s aforementioned Z VR Backpack, were running a great demo featuring the ​Dauntless combat simulator​ in which you and a partner could either shoot at each other as big avatars in a city (think Godzilla) or together walking through a “kill house” type simulation shooting at wooden targets that pop up. Once hand tracking, which needs its own system, reaches a consumer-level price point and power draw we’ll be in a whole new world. It’s incredible how little things like finger articulation without a controller can drive that immersion home. Once you can move every inch of your body and see those motions translated in the digital world in your HMD you really do feel differently about the experience. That’s going to be the ​next ​next big thing.

HP Reps talking, Dauntless players behind standing by.

Then there’s ​Neurable​, the company that decided attaching a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to an HTC Vive wasn’t terrifying. It uses EEG technology combined with “proprietary algorithms” to detect what the user is thinking, such as making specific choices when prompted, and uses that information to make selections in the program/game/etc. This demo had a line out the proverbial door, so I was unable to try it myself, but people seemed to think it was impressive. It ultimately might have more applications in the healthcare sector than entertainment, but it’s still pretty new.

Neurable headset

On the software side, there were companies like Boris FX and Blackmagic touting the 360 Video or VR-centric updates to ​Mocha​ and F​usion 9​, respectively. It seems that at this point, most brands have a VR editing mode bundled in their packages. Boris also has a new plug-in version for Premiere, AE, Avid, Nuke, and OFX which is a welcome change from having to throw things into the standalone program for planar tracking (think using large texture selections as tracking points instead of high-contrast dots) and the like. The object removal module is really, really impressive. About as simple as “circle the thing you don’t want, that’s gone now”. As a filmmaker, that alone made me pause and consider dropping the $700 Boris wants for their current iteration of the Mocha plugin.

Fusion 9 station

From MAXON we saw a rather substantial update to ​Cinema4D​ in the form of the ​R19 release​, both “under the hood” and in regards to simple usability. The new viewport is leaps ahead of the old one, they’ve got a new media core, native MP4 support, a new sound effector, new easy-to-use fracturing features and more. There is also, of course, a spherical camera feature and near-realtime rendering of lights and PBR materials so you can see what your final look will be as you go as well as a new motion tracking features for filmmakers to quickly and easily place 3D assets in pre-recorded plates. As Paul Babb, CEO, said “it’s the age of rendering” now, so your product has to be fast. It seems as though C4D is holding a full house in that regard.

C4D Booth

Overall the week gave the impression that we’ve hit the critical point between “it’s just not there yet” and “what do we do with this?” You might also say it was the year of optimization. Tracking is better, interfaces are better, forecasting is possible, and the consumer is much more aware of what’s available. At the same time, it seems like we’re still in the deep end paddling for some edge we can’t see.

Sure, there’s plenty of interesting tools and applications, but creativity is novelty plus utility. Pixel perfect tracking? Useful, but obviously needed. High performance computing power in small, wearable form factors? Same. A wakeboard or stair simulator? ​Definitely novel…

Even for the medical applications, it’s not the VR tech that makes it useful but peripheral technologies in scanning and design that makes something like high resolution scalable models of real patients possible. The VR space just allows for easy interaction and manipulation of that scan. This is where I think AR will leapfrog VR in terms of usefulness, and VR will remain more an entertainment outlet. But who knows?

At the beginning of the conference, animation legend ​Floyd Norman​ was interviewed and hammered home the importance of story over flash. Mr. Norman was the first African-American animator to work for Disney, working directly under Walt for the first time on ​The Jungle Book​. Throughout his talk he reinforced the concepts given to him by Walt, which he summarized as, “don’t watch the movie, watch the audience”. Walt meant that if the audience doesn’t buy it, your film doesn’t work. You can have all the tech in the world, but if they don’t serve the story they have no real purpose. Immersion comes from getting entrapped in the story, not necessarily in the realism of your environment.

What we have here, today, is a new tool. Like digital cameras, smaller lights, faster film stocks, and VFX before it. This conference showed us that we’ve recently surpassed the novelty portion of VR which means it’s going to falls on us, the creators, to bring the necessary utility and emotional experience to draw people in, create empathy in the viewer and yes, immerse them in new worlds.

[As a total side-note, ​Unreal 4​ was the secret winner of the whole conference. ​Everything seemed to be powered by Unreal. If you’re looking to get into the 3D industry, in any form, you might want to download U4 and start learning it now.]

  The post VR, AR and More at SIGGRAPH 2017 appeared first on ProVideo Coalition.

First Found At: VR, AR and More at SIGGRAPH 2017

[click2watch]

I Got the Mark of the Beast – And It Will Hold My Bitcoin

“What happens when you need an MRI?”

Someone answers for me: “You die an excruciating death… Actually, they remove them painfully quickly or the machine does.”

I’m sure these paranoid, exaggerated remarks didn’t help as I sat down at the folding table in front of a large man with a 14-gauge needle. I was sweating through my shirt.

“Are you gonna pass out?” he asks.

“I don’t think so.”

It’s literally right on my face – in the form of a septum piercing – that I’m pretty familiar with needles.

“Three, two and one,” the man with the needle said as he pushed it into the squishy part of my left hand, between my thumb and index finger.

It was all of one second of pain, and then it was over. I hardly even bled.

And just like that, I was now officially a cyborg.

So, what the hell am I doing here? Well several years ago, in 2014, I stumbled on this guy, Martijn Wismeijer, aka Mr. Bitcoin, who had gotten a microchip implant that he then programmed to hold his cryptocurrency.

I doubt I really knew much about the transhumanism movement back then, but I have always been fascinated with robots and the idea of melding robots into humans or vice versa. This seemed right up my alley, as even back then, I was basically covering crypto full-time, so I started reaching out but communication eventually dropped off and it was all but forgotten.

Until this January, when Bryan Bishop, the Bitcoin Core developer that’s known for his tremendously fast typing and in turn his transcriptions of conferences, mentioned BDYHAX to me. “There’s a lot of transhumanists in the bitcoin community,” he said.

But the conference’s agenda had already piqued my interest – “Implantable Tech Area.”

I’m there.

Freedom of…

Bishop’s right – at least anecdotally, that there’s an overlap between the body hackers and the bitcoiners. Transhumanism does, in fact, link them. Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney seems to have been one, since he cryogenically froze his body, hoping that sometime in the future he might be able to be resuscitated.

It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that folks that believe technology can create a better future as it relates to money, payments, shit just about everything, would think that technology can also make humans themselves better.

Take Bishop’s recently revealed designer baby venture.

Funded with his bitcoin savings, Bishop’s project, recently written about in MIT Technology Review, looks to allow parents to genetically engineer their babies to have features like muscles without ever picking up a dumbbell or enhanced memory.

If that sentence sounds weird – almost like adding apps to your smartphone – it’s because it kinda is. There’s mounting criticism and concern over the practice, especially after a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui claimed he’d made the first genetically edited babies.

If you give your imagination even a tiny bit of wiggle room, you can see why.

Do parents have the right to choose how their children look and act? This can’t be a cheap procedure; will everyone be able to edit their children to be smarter or will it only be the rich that benefit? Will we lose some humanity if everyone edit’s themselves for the flavor of the week?

Yet for all those dystopian futures (that I very much see and worry about), ultimately some of this could no doubt be beneficial and save hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of lives.

For instance, one of Bishop’s first examples – something we talked about in the Fall last year – was making humans resistant to HIV.

Future humans will think we’re barbaric if we resist this kind of medical achievement.

While I’m not so interested, and even slightly disturbed, by genetic beauty enhancements such as muscles or blue eyes, I worry these concerns could push this type of biohacking into the shadows.

And that’s a shame.

Bodies and money

We’ve seen a similar thing happen in the cryptocurrency space.

There are hacks, scams, fucking idiots and all sorts of bad things lurking in the blockchain scene, and typically that’s made many turn up their noses to the whole industry. They lump it all together and mark it “useless,” “nefarious,” “shit.”

And I get it. I look around the crypto industry, after being here for six years, and see rot. I see individuals who only want to make quick money at the expense of others; I see companies touting their disrupting finance but actually enstating the same, arbitrary, discriminatory rules as legacy banks.

Where the fuck did the ethos go?

I’ll tell you. It might be hard to see through all the “sky is falling” – or during a hype cycle all the glitz of free money – but it’s in Venezuela, helping people literally starving because of their corrupt government, hold onto some value. It’s in the lightning torch, hopping all around the world, showing people the power of a stateless digital currency.

And because those instances exist, I’ll take some of the bullshit.

Because that’s what I’m here for – an alternative to the systems that were created without my input and sometimes do not work for – to be more clear, work against – me and other individuals.

“We’re all already attuned to this, we want freedom, we don’t want to be told what we can and can’t do with our bodies, what we can or can’t put into our bodies, and people don’t want to be told what they can and can’t do with their money,” Chad Creighton, a vice president at blockchain development consultancy BlockSaw, who was at BDYHAX, said.

While our bodies and our money could seem like apples and oranges, they’re really not. Because what we can do with our bodies is directly determined by what we can do with our money.

Case in point, for some in the biohacking space, healthcare is too costly and big pharma, insurance providers, even doctors are working against the people, the individuals who need care. For cryptocurrency aficionados, the great monolithic entity to disrupt is the Federal Reserve, state monetary policy, the banks.

There’s an overlapping “distrust of formal institutions,” Bishop told me. “They have gotten so large and bureaucratic, it’s sometimes more practical to go your own way and see what you can get done. Even more specifically, some people see certain regulations directly interfering with people’s right to live.”

He gives the example of a DIY biohacker figuring out a way to make insulin cheaper and then offering that to diabetics, which would be technically illegal.

As with all these anarchist attempts, Don Andres Ochoa, a biotechnologist and data scientist speaking at the event, gave the best rallying cry:

“Fuck it, let’s fix the problem ourselves.”

Scared of needles?

These two fields of research “are not directly useful to each other, but there’s a common source of inspiration,” Bishop said.

And they do mix together at a certain point. For instance, because of the controversy surrounding designer babies today, Bishop is cognizant that cryptography-backed privacy tech will likely play some role – if nothing else, at least as it relates to anonymous payments for the service.

Still, all this stuff seems outrageous to the majority of people.

“Right now, the idea or concept of body hacking is literally bleeding edge (ha),” said Amal Graafstra, the founder and CEO of VivoKey, the maker of the implant I got.

With implants, as with cryptocurrency, “the overlap is directly related to people’s sense of adventure,” he continued.

Case in point, Jerrah Cameron, a Denver-based programmer, who stumbled upon the body hacking scene only about a month ago and already has three implants – two small chips and this larger NFC chip, for which he had a gnarly one-inch slice on the side of his right hand.

For the novelty these devices provide so far – I currently have my chip programmed to take an NFC-enabled phone to my “receive bitcoin” QR code, making it fast and easy for someone to send me a tip – most people won’t want to get poked, he said.

That’s why he’s working on an application that would allow the chips to be used as payment mechanisms, housing first the tokens needed for apps like Apple Pay, Google Pay or Venmo, and then in the future even cryptocurrencies.

And VivoKey is also working on something similar.

In a week or so, Graafstra and his team plan on releasing an API that can allow developers to program one of their chips (yes, the one I have! squee) to act as an authenticator key. With this, users should be able to request that their chip be tapped to verify any send or transfer of crypto within a wallet.

“The idea was to develop a completely autonomous secure element under the skin,” Graafstra told CoinDesk.

And the company also offers a chip (not the one I have) that can actually complete key generation and the signing of a transaction all within the chip. That’s currently in private beta and requires quite a lot of programming to make it all work, so it’s not ready for mainstream use yet.

So for now, my hand isn’t worth any more than it was when I was just a boring old human (although it has facilitated $2 worth of bitcoin).

Implant procedure images via Bailey Reutzel for CoinDesk

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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The post I Got the Mark of the Beast – And It Will Hold My Bitcoin appeared first on Click 2 Watch.

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[click2watch]

I Got the Mark of the Beast – And It Will Hold My Bitcoin

“What happens when you need an MRI?”

Someone answers for me: “You die an excruciating death… Actually, they remove them painfully quickly or the machine does.”

I’m sure these paranoid, exaggerated remarks didn’t help as I sat down at the folding table in front of a large man with a 14-gauge needle. I was sweating through my shirt.

“Are you gonna pass out?” he asks.

“I don’t think so.”

It’s literally right on my face – in the form of a septum piercing – that I’m pretty familiar with needles.

“Three, two and one,” the man with the needle said as he pushed it into the squishy part of my left hand, between my thumb and index finger.

It was all of one second of pain, and then it was over. I hardly even bled.

And just like that, I was now officially a cyborg.

So, what the hell am I doing here? Well several years ago, in 2014, I stumbled on this guy, Martijn Wismeijer, aka Mr. Bitcoin, who had gotten a microchip implant that he then programmed to hold his cryptocurrency.

I doubt I really knew much about the transhumanism movement back then, but I have always been fascinated with robots and the idea of melding robots into humans or vice versa. This seemed right up my alley, as even back then, I was basically covering crypto full-time, so I started reaching out but communication eventually dropped off and it was all but forgotten.

Until this January, when Bryan Bishop, the Bitcoin Core developer that’s known for his tremendously fast typing and in turn his transcriptions of conferences, mentioned BDYHAX to me. “There’s a lot of transhumanists in the bitcoin community,” he said.

But the conference’s agenda had already piqued my interest – “Implantable Tech Area.”

I’m there.

Freedom of…

Bishop’s right – at least anecdotally, that there’s an overlap between the body hackers and the bitcoiners. Transhumanism does, in fact, link them. Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney seems to have been one, since he cryogenically froze his body, hoping that sometime in the future he might be able to be resuscitated.

It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that folks that believe technology can create a better future as it relates to money, payments, shit just about everything, would think that technology can also make humans themselves better.

Take Bishop’s recently revealed designer baby venture.

Funded with his bitcoin savings, Bishop’s project, recently written about in MIT Technology Review, looks to allow parents to genetically engineer their babies to have features like muscles without ever picking up a dumbbell or enhanced memory.

If that sentence sounds weird – almost like adding apps to your smartphone – it’s because it kinda is. There’s mounting criticism and concern over the practice, especially after a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui claimed he’d made the first genetically edited babies.

If you give your imagination even a tiny bit of wiggle room, you can see why.

Do parents have the right to choose how their children look and act? This can’t be a cheap procedure; will everyone be able to edit their children to be smarter or will it only be the rich that benefit? Will we lose some humanity if everyone edit’s themselves for the flavor of the week?

Yet for all those dystopian futures (that I very much see and worry about), ultimately some of this could no doubt be beneficial and save hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of lives.

For instance, one of Bishop’s first examples – something we talked about in the Fall last year – was making humans resistant to HIV.

Future humans will think we’re barbaric if we resist this kind of medical achievement.

While I’m not so interested, and even slightly disturbed, by genetic beauty enhancements such as muscles or blue eyes, I worry these concerns could push this type of biohacking into the shadows.

And that’s a shame.

Bodies and money

We’ve seen a similar thing happen in the cryptocurrency space.

There are hacks, scams, fucking idiots and all sorts of bad things lurking in the blockchain scene, and typically that’s made many turn up their noses to the whole industry. They lump it all together and mark it “useless,” “nefarious,” “shit.”

And I get it. I look around the crypto industry, after being here for six years, and see rot. I see individuals who only want to make quick money at the expense of others; I see companies touting their disrupting finance but actually enstating the same, arbitrary, discriminatory rules as legacy banks.

Where the fuck did the ethos go?

I’ll tell you. It might be hard to see through all the “sky is falling” – or during a hype cycle all the glitz of free money – but it’s in Venezuela, helping people literally starving because of their corrupt government, hold onto some value. It’s in the lightning torch, hopping all around the world, showing people the power of a stateless digital currency.

And because those instances exist, I’ll take some of the bullshit.

Because that’s what I’m here for – an alternative to the systems that were created without my input and sometimes do not work for – to be more clear, work against – me and other individuals.

“We’re all already attuned to this, we want freedom, we don’t want to be told what we can and can’t do with our bodies, what we can or can’t put into our bodies, and people don’t want to be told what they can and can’t do with their money,” Chad Creighton, a vice president at blockchain development consultancy BlockSaw, who was at BDYHAX, said.

While our bodies and our money could seem like apples and oranges, they’re really not. Because what we can do with our bodies is directly determined by what we can do with our money.

Case in point, for some in the biohacking space, healthcare is too costly and big pharma, insurance providers, even doctors are working against the people, the individuals who need care. For cryptocurrency aficionados, the great monolithic entity to disrupt is the Federal Reserve, state monetary policy, the banks.

There’s an overlapping “distrust of formal institutions,” Bishop told me. “They have gotten so large and bureaucratic, it’s sometimes more practical to go your own way and see what you can get done. Even more specifically, some people see certain regulations directly interfering with people’s right to live.”

He gives the example of a DIY biohacker figuring out a way to make insulin cheaper and then offering that to diabetics, which would be technically illegal.

As with all these anarchist attempts, Don Andres Ochoa, a biotechnologist and data scientist speaking at the event, gave the best rallying cry:

“Fuck it, let’s fix the problem ourselves.”

Scared of needles?

These two fields of research “are not directly useful to each other, but there’s a common source of inspiration,” Bishop said.

And they do mix together at a certain point. For instance, because of the controversy surrounding designer babies today, Bishop is cognizant that cryptography-backed privacy tech will likely play some role – if nothing else, at least as it relates to anonymous payments for the service.

Still, all this stuff seems outrageous to the majority of people.

“Right now, the idea or concept of body hacking is literally bleeding edge (ha),” said Amal Graafstra, the founder and CEO of VivoKey, the maker of the implant I got.

With implants, as with cryptocurrency, “the overlap is directly related to people’s sense of adventure,” he continued.

Case in point, Jerrah Cameron, a Denver-based programmer, who stumbled upon the body hacking scene only about a month ago and already has three implants – two small chips and this larger NFC chip, for which he had a gnarly one-inch slice on the side of his right hand.

For the novelty these devices provide so far – I currently have my chip programmed to take an NFC-enabled phone to my “receive bitcoin” QR code, making it fast and easy for someone to send me a tip – most people won’t want to get poked, he said.

That’s why he’s working on an application that would allow the chips to be used as payment mechanisms, housing first the tokens needed for apps like Apple Pay, Google Pay or Venmo, and then in the future even cryptocurrencies.

And VivoKey is also working on something similar.

In a week or so, Graafstra and his team plan on releasing an API that can allow developers to program one of their chips (yes, the one I have! squee) to act as an authenticator key. With this, users should be able to request that their chip be tapped to verify any send or transfer of crypto within a wallet.

“The idea was to develop a completely autonomous secure element under the skin,” Graafstra told CoinDesk.

And the company also offers a chip (not the one I have) that can actually complete key generation and the signing of a transaction all within the chip. That’s currently in private beta and requires quite a lot of programming to make it all work, so it’s not ready for mainstream use yet.

So for now, my hand isn’t worth any more than it was when I was just a boring old human (although it has facilitated $2 worth of bitcoin).

Implant procedure images via Bailey Reutzel for CoinDesk

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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