I'm going to do Dive Into Accessibility over the next few days. I had a lot of problems using my computer when I was disabled and I'm going to do my part to make my part of the web better. Most of the problems I had related to browsers not having the greatest accessibility features (I particularly needed a black background and white type to see) but a big part of the responsibility lies with web designers.

I recently started taking blurry photos.

When you show photo people a photo that is ‘defocused’ they will tell you, “please, blurry is so overdone.” and I have to agree, you can’t really make a photography career out of it. It’s not a style. However, I’m not trying to do that. I actually was seeing the world like this when I took these pictures and I honestly couldn’t see if they were focused or not so I just racked the focus back to macro distances on every shot. I also began to actually appreciate blurriness for its own sake and my photographic intent shifted away from narrative to the quality of the ‘bokeh’.

World Transhumanist Association

I probably shouldn't be getting all crazy about how special I am now with my eye implant, but it has started me down the road toward total subsumption with the global machine mass. I kid. I kid.

In my college days I was into this magazine called Mondo2000. It really changed my life. I read a couple issues and was completely hooked on the future. There were a number of things in my environment (punk, acid) that turned me away from the backwards-looking classic-rock-listening cold-war-thinking generally-anything-as-it-is-done or-was-done retro-prison stuff that regular people believed in. But it was Mondo2000 that gave tendrils to all these new awakenings. It was a clearing house for all manner of nuts and I latched on to their ideas rather forcefully.

I came to the website of the World Transhumanist Association because a guy there was discussing the work of Paul W. Ewald on that site. (There are precious few places where it is discussed, sadly.) Those lovable fruit cakes, the Transhumanists, who use words like ‘superhuman’ that scientists have to stay away from, are kind of like having a smart inventor uncle that I admire but is a little too wacky to hang out with full time.

From STELARC's website:

Bodies are both Zombies and Cyborgs. We have never had a mind of our own and we often perform involuntarily conditioned and externally prompted. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators and we constructed artifacts, instruments and machines. In other words we have always been coupled with technology. We have always been prosthetic bodies. We fear the involuntary and we are becoming increasingly automated and extended. But we fear what we have always been and what we have already become—Zombies and Cyborgs.

Cool. But it turns out now I’m more into medically-related scientific speculation. Evolutionary biology is so hot.

And Paul W. Ewald got me going on it with his article, “Mastering Disease” In The Next Fifty Years (listening on my iPod at the hospital because I could no longer see text on paper) and now I’m going to read Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancer, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments. It’s what all disease sufferers do I guess. Read about the perfect future to help deal with the not-so-perfect present.

They were afraid there was something behind my left eyeball that was making it buluge out and they didn’t want to operate on me it if there was so they ordered up a CT scan of the area around my eyeballs: Orbits with Contrast.

Orbits with Contrast

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or download 625kb

The video scans through slices of my head from the bottom of my nose to just above my eyes. You can drag the movie controller back and forth to scrub it.

I was so excited when DeeDee gave me my official registration as a cyborg. I think she forgot she had it so I just got it tonight. I guess they gave it to her after the sugery.

As an official cyborg, I’m supposed to carry this around at all times. In case they need to re-build me from scratch like Steve Austin, they’ll need this info. So it’s a good thing I have it. My favorite part has to be that it lists the serial number of the lens. I might need that if I have to call for product support or something.

There is no way to explain eye surgery. In some ways, especially if you're a sensitive bugger like me, it's easier than putting a contact lens in. You're drugged and locked down and numbed. in other ways, it's kind of horrifying. You have to watch it all and you are in charge of holding your eyeball still by looking at a light. I had my first taste of what it's like when I got a steroid injection in my eyeball. But that was really nothing. Yesterday I got a cataract extraction and lens replacement in my right eye as a result of my (in case you didn't know) cronic uveitis.

I'm now officially a cyborg. Part man, part plastic.

My vision in my right eye is 20/25 today. It may fluctuate a little bit as I get used to the lens but things are looking good.