Thanks to the awesome people over at Loot Crate, weâre giving away a 6 month subscription to their service!
If youâve missed the memo and have no idea what Loot Crate is, itâs a box filled to the brim with geeky goodies delivered right to your doorstep! Each month, subscribers to the service receive a mystery box filled with things like t-shirts, action figures, books, comics and other awesome bits of memorabilia all carefully curated around a certain theme.
If you want to sign up (it would make a great Christmas present for yourself or a friend) weâve got our own discount code for you guys to use! Enter geekymerch into the coupon code box to get 10% off your crate!Â
One lucky winner will receive:
A 6 Month Subscription to Loot Crate.
Rules:
Follow our blog, Geeky Merch.
Each reblog of this post counts as an entry. Reblog as many times as you like, but try not to spam your followers too much.
No giveaway-only blogs. People who use these tend to spam-reblog, and thatâs unfair to everyone else. We will be checking!
Must live in: The UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Ireland, The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany or Norway.
One winner will be randomly chosen and notified on 24th December 2014!
Good luck with the giveaway! If you would like to contribute to our next giveaway, click here!
(Ps. all of our giveaways are completely legit. Click here if you donât believe us.)
This is big in the Grinder community. Most people start off by implanting magnets in their fingertips, which gives you the ability to feel magnetic fields. Your fingertips have lots of nerve endings jammed into one area and they are really sensitive to stimuli. Magnets twitch or move in the presence of magnetic fields, and when you implant one in your finger you can really start to feel different magnetic fields around you. So it is like a sixth sense. At first you will be waving your hand around appliances, probing fields like someone looking for a light switch in the dark. After a few days or weeks you will almost forget you have the implant because your brain has fully incorporated the sense into your normal world experience. When you sleep you will notice that even your dreams have changed to include the sense. You can now perceive an otherwise invisible world.
This makes many curious about all of the other things happening around them that they canât see and they want more. So letâs expand on the magnet thing. We can buy all kinds of different sensors to detect heat, radiation, radio signals, wifi, whatever you want. If we wrap a wire around our implanted finger and attach that wire to our new sensor, we find that the wire creates a small magnetic field to the beat of the sensor. This of course makes our magnet twitch, and now we can feel heat from a distance, feel wifi, or whatever.
Why limit ourselves to feeling these sensations? We have other senses we can induce synesthesia in. I got some media attention in June of 2013 after I implanted headphones in my tragus to do just that. I had some practical reasons for doing this in addition to my thirst for exploration. A few years earlier I suddenly became legally blind in one eye. Lenses cannot correct it and my original eye doctor informed me that the other eye was likely to follow, at which point I would be legally blind, lose my job, etc. With this inevitability in mind I decided to be proactive. Ultrasonic rangefinders are devices used to determine how far away an object is. I knew that most blind people find acoustic variations help them identify the proximity of objects, so I figured I might be able to amplify this by converting rangefinder data into audio I could send wirelessly to my headphone implants. It turned out to be much more complicated than I thought, but that is a part of Grinding that I have come to appreciate. My setbacks lead me deeper into the rabbit hole of audiology where I discovered knowledge that has unlocked a thousand more possibilities.
Iâd say that 25% of the people I talk to about sensory enhancement think itâs really cool and some go get implants themselves. The other 75% will nod their head and hope the conversation ends or they laugh and ask âwhy would anyone want to feel magnetic fields?â I get asked that question so much, and I still find it hard to articulate. They usually point out that âyou donât need it,â to which I counter âwhat if you lost the ability to taste? You donât really need it to survive.â Ask anyone with an implant how they would feel if they lost the implant, and almost all of them will tell you they would miss it. A small bit of richness would be missing from their life experience.
Visible light is but a tiny portion of the greater magnetic spectrum that we cannot see. If we modeled the entire spectrum as a road stretching from LA to New York, the amount of visible light that humans can see would equal a few nanometers. Humans, from our allegorical caves, have nonetheless managed to form and test theories about things at the edges of perception but these discoveries took thousands of years. Where would humans be now technologically if we never developed sight? How long would it take us to theorize the existence of the aurora borealis or to hypothesize about the existence of stars? This reduction of input obviously cripples the rate of input.
So is the opposite true? Would expanding our senses accelerate our advancement? My answer is yes. Some Grinder friends of mine formed a team called Science for the Masses to discover if they could biologically push human perception of visible light into the near-infrared spectrum. This is a small increase, around 6% above our current abilities. The impact is dramatic. The new light allows you to see through fog and haze, tinted windows, and some clothing. Stars can be seen during day hours. Subtle changes in blood flow can be seen under the skin, allowing anyone to detect circulation problems and find clots. Seeing blood flow takes some of the guesswork out of determining what mood your date is in and lying becomes nearly impossible. Imagine how this awareness would have altered human history, politics, art, courtship, and relationships. Does human psychology benefit in a world where sincerity and emotional context can be seen with the naked eye rather than hypothesized or conjured? The new layers of info Iâve detailed above are actually just the tip of the iceberg. The real magic of sensory expansion comes from finding deviations and surprises that donât fit within our scientific understanding because it makes us reconcile our mental models of the world with reality.
My friends George Buckenham and Alice OâConnor kindly agreed to be written about as an introduction to my âembeddingâ with strangers. George has been making games for years, both traditional and non-traditional; the central focus is on his outlook on games as a whole. Alice is Senior...
Apropos the Telegraph and Dave Berryâs click-baiting earlier-
1. The first album you bought; Itâs mostly important to have this because if you become a famous musician, people will ask you about it. I canât remember what mine was, which is why my pop career has stalled.
I was seventeen and sticky. It was the summer of 1989, and I was off to college in a few months. The Massachusetts town where I grew up was decidedly blue collar, filled with teachers and nurses and the occasional sales manager. My friends and I fell asleep to the sound of our parents arguing about car payments and tuition. It was our soundtrack, this din of worry. If you were young, you were expected to have a part-time job.
I got one, scooping ice cream at Chadwickâs, a local parlor that specialized in sundaes and giant steak fries. Summer jobs are often romantic; the time frame creates a perfect parenthesis. Chadwickâs was not. Hard and physical, the job consisted of stacking and wiping and scooping and lifting. At the end of my shift, every removable piece of the restaurant would be carted off and washed. Vinyl booths were searched and scrubbed. This routine seemed Sisyphean at first, but I soon learned the satisfaction of working at a place that truly closed. I took great joy in watching people stroll in after hours, thinking they could grab a late-night sundae. I would point to the dimmed lights and stacked chairs as proof that we were shut. It was deliciously obvious and final.
Chadwickâs was one of those fake old-timey restaurants. The menus were written in swoopy cursive. The staff wore Styrofoam boaters and ruffled white shirts with bow ties. Jangly music blared from a player piano as children climbed on counters. If the style of the restaurant was old-fashioned, the parenting that went on there was distinctly modern. Moms and dads would patiently recite every item on the menu to their squirming five-year-olds, as if the many flavors of ice cream represented all the unique ways they were loved.
There was a performance element to the job that I found appealing, to begin with. Every time a customer was celebrating a birthday, an employee had to bang a drum that hung from the ceiling, and play the kazoo, and encourage the entire restaurant to join him or her in a sing-along. Other employees would ring cowbells and blow noisemakers. I would stand on a chair and loudly announce, âLadies and gentlemen, we are so happy to have you at Chadwickâs today, but we are especially happy to have Kevin! Because itâs Kevinâs birthday today! So, at the sound of the drum, please join me in singing Kevin a very happy birthday!â
I wasnât sure yet that I wanted to be an actor. I was planning to go to Boston College as an English major and maybe become a teacher, like both of my parents. But when I stood in the dining room and demanded attention I was reminded of things I already secretly knew about myself. I wasnât shy, I liked to be looked at, and making people laugh released a certain kind of hot lava into my body that made me feel like a queen.
This feeling didnât last long. Iâm not sure when the worm turned. Maybe it was during one of the many times we announced the BellyBuster. The BellyBuster consisted of mounds of ice cream in a giant silver bowl carried in on a stretcher. The busboys would have to pretend to struggle under the weight of this giant sundae as they lifted it onto the table and handed a giant spoon to the maniac who had ordered it. I would ease my pain by exchanging looks with one busboy who was always slightly drunk, and the ex-junkie cook who was always slightly grouchy. The cook spoke in bumper stickers when describing his disposition: âOf course Iâm mean. Itâs hard to be happy when you are standing this close to the fire.â
But the teen-agers were the worst. Teen-age boys, especially. They would file in, Adamâs apples bouncing, and announce it was their birthdays. Since Chadwickâs operated on an honor system, I would have to look into their sweaty, lying faces and smile like a flight attendant. Some of them would order their sundaes while asking me to âhold their nuts.â Was this the life of an actor?
I quit when the summer ended. I had started forgetting to charge for whipped cream. I was failing to use the ice scoop. A customer told me I was banging the drum âtoo hard.â She was right. I was angry; I wanted to be gone. Itâs important to know when itâs time to turn in your kazoo. The nights would end with the wait staff in the parking lot, sitting on a car and drinking beer as we counted our tips. The boys would undo their bow ties and suddenly look weary and handsome. I would change into soft jeans and throw pennies at the dumpster. I was aching for what came next. I felt my whole life stretched out before me like an invisible buffet. I turned toward my future, mouth watering.Â
Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody elseâs⊠I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other peopleâs lives to get them to love me. Iâm busy casting spells for myself.
- Laurie Penny in her excellent article I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (via femfreq)
"It is important to maintain your equanimity. You cannot let yourself get too âupâ or too âdownâ based on your circumstances."
âToo âdownâ I understand. But why not too âup?ââ
âBecause the higher your mountains are, the deeper your valleys will seem. You should not react to the world. You should respond, but not react. A response is an action based on logic. A reaction is an emotional state. Your reaction will not change the world. Your reaction only changes you. Your response will change the world.â
