Could you give your best explanation for what exactly wetware is?

In science fiction, "wetware" is often the name for a brain-computer interface. In reality, wetware is a Don't-Create-The-Torment-Nexus sort of deal where despite many stories of the horrors possible from making such an invention without proper care, oversight and ethical concerns, certain ultra-rich people have rushed the development of wetware by abusing animal and human subjects with few actual benefits just so they can tell shareholders that they invented wetware.

Now, I know what you're thinking, isn't this a fake fact blog? Or is he gonna promote his own novels with their many cyberpunk elements? Or did he sneak in a clever reference to Neuromancer or Ghost in the Shell above that I missed? Or did he load that question into my mind through the wetware he deleted my memory of getting?

No, I'm just tired and my sides and back hurt and I'm typing almost randomly while watching Elden Ring lore videos and I just want this fucking kidney shit to be OVER because I can't think straight.

Sorry everyone I'm not braining well these days but hopefully soon I'll be back and not just typing to try to ignore the ugh.

POV you're loved by a whole ecosystem, a thousand moving parts all cradling you, the flowers turn to get a glimpse at you and the bug won't bite your skin out of respect

The wonderful Dr. Hive was made by @handsome-john ! I am. So fucking normal about them and their relationship with Gears. SO yuri. If you want to know more about them John is writing an amazing fic about their lore: Lose Yourself - Chapter 1 - Phoenix_Write - SCP Foundation [Archive of Our Own]

So yeah I only just heard about the concept of "wetware" and knowing that people are actually working on this kind of technology while I'm nerding and fixating on ULTRAKILL all day hits me with a very peculiar mix of feelings that I can't quite put my finger on at the moment.

Read my gay bullshit

fig through a 40x microscope

I like to refer to myself as wetware because it makes me feel euphoric without ignoring my physical reality.

Basically this word makes me cope with being otherkin.

All because you received the upgrade doesn't mean you get to keep it. This is actually kind of scary and sad at the same time.

ah shit; “water” damage not so bad but with these particular pens it makes them phase thru the paper somewhat. bottom right is a bunch of things i saw in passing tumblr posts and now i dont know what to do

Second-Hand Eyes by Arlen Feldman

*Frankie1915 - Mon, May 22 at 8:37 Has anyone else got a certificate warning on the “Yeux DR17 Blue Eyes”?

Published in our August 7, 2022 newsletter. Full story is under the cut.

Link to sign up for the newsletter is in the blog description!

*Frankie1915 - Mon, May 22 at 8:37 Has anyone else got a certificate warning on the “Yeux DR17 Blue Eyes”? *Frankie1915 - Mon, May 22 at 13:15 Yes, I know they’re out of warranty, but it’s not like I can return them anyway. I’m just looking for someone who knows how to get past the certificate error. *Frankie1915 - Mon, May 22 at 16:43 E-bay. *Frankie1915 - Mon, May 22 at 21:03 Yes, thank you DrMondo69 for the pointless advice. If I could have bought new, don’t you think I would have? *Frankie1915 - Tue, May 23 at 9:07 It just says that the certificate has expired and that I have 30 days to download a newer version of the software. *Frankie1915 - Tue, May 23 at 11:16 No, I never had an account. They were “new in box” but didn’t include the paperwork. Honestly, I’m not sure they were exactly “new.” The guy who installed them thought they had been used. *Frankie1915 - Wed, May 24 at 10:00 Okay, for all of you asking the same questions, let me provide some backstory:

I was wearing coke-bottle glasses about six-feet thick and could barely see with those.

No, I couldn’t just get surgery. If I could afford surgery, do you think I would be buying second-hand sh*t off of E-bay?

The installer sterilized them before install and checked that they were working first.

If you got a liver transplant, would you be bitching that it was already used?

No, I didn’t read the EULA. Have any of you *ever* read any EULA ever?

No, I didn’t keep the originals because a) they sucked (see point 1) and b) they were wetware. What was I going to do with them? Put them in a fishbowl?

Yes, obviously I’m an idiot/moron/gnarl-brain (whatever that is) and all of the other various things you have all kindly suggested.

They worked great for a month. I could actually see things without squinting. It seemed worth it.

Now, I don’t suppose anyone has any suggestions on how to actually deal with the freaking certificate error? *Frankie1915 - Wed, May 24 at 17:54 Thanks, Ggirllll – I tried downloading the patch from the warez site you suggested, but my anti-virus software went insane. I might try installing it as a last resort, but it seems pretty janky. *Frankie1915 - Wed, May 24 at 18:32 No, I have not tried uninstalling and reinstalling them. They are f**king eyes—like in my head. Not an effing spreadsheet app. *Frankie1915 - Thu, May 25 at 9:17 The countdown now says 18 days. I tried a few things before posting here, so lost some time. *Frankie1915 - Thu, May 25 at 14:26 No, the company went belly-up about a year ago. *Frankie1915 - Thu, May 25 at 17:45 Nice to know that I’m not the only one with this problem BillyBoy13! And since you bought yours new, that at least tells me that it is not just an issue with buying them the way I did. Wish I could afford to just replace mine. *Frankie1915 - Thu, May 25 at 17:49 Yeah, me too. *Frankie1915 - Fri, May 26 at 9:27 A class-action suit would make more sense if there was someone to sue. The company’s gone!! In the meantime, the 12 of us here, and however many others, would be sitting in the dark waiting for the lawyers to collect. Besides, I just read the EULA (yes, I know). Turns out I wouldn’t have been covered anyway—resale is “expressly forbidden.” As is “any form of modification” or “installation of unofficial patches, devices or software of any sort.” And, just for giggles, they also threaten anyone who attempts to modify their software with prosecution under the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions. *Frankie1915 - Mon, May 29 at 9:03 Okay, I’m going to install the warez patch. Wish me luck. If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know why.

Arlen Feldman is a writer, software engineer, entrepreneur, maker and computer-book author who lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Website | Twitter

Am I growing my hair out so I can look less...me? Yes.

Am I also growing it out so it's easier for someone to come up behind me, hold my head and fit me with lovely implants to slave me to their will? Also yes

Derivative Works

This is a five-part piece of conceptual art titled Derivative Works. Each image here is generated algorithmically using one (or more) pieces of other art as input, but bears no resemblance to its 'progenitors'. The intent is to question what it means for an image to be a 'derivative' of another, both in the legal sense of copyright law and in the moral sense.

For Perceptual, Sorted, Transpose, and Sample, the input image is Wikipedia's high-resolution image of the Mona Lisa. The inputs for Composite are the first 10,000 images in this subset of the Stable Diffusion image set.

All images in Derivative Works are public domain (specifically, CC0). I do request that you give credit if you make use of them. The source code and original-resolution PNGs are available on Codeberg.

Perceptual (Derivative Works 0x0)

Perceptual uses a perceptual hash of its input image and then applies a fairly simple generative algorithm to render the output (which is intended to vaguely recall a night ocean, but that's not the point). The use of a perceptual hash means that the output depends on what the image 'looks like'; changing a pixel here or there will still result in the same output. At the same time, a substantially different input would provide a noticeably different output.

Sorted (Derivative Works 0x1)

Sorted simply sorts the pixels. The output image has all the same pixels as the original, but going back to the input would be impossible since you have no way of knowing which pixels go where. The color scheme is faintly reminiscent of the input, but all detail and structure is destroyed.

Transpose (Derivative Works 0x2)

Transpose interprets the image as a series of RGB values, then repeatedly applies a variation of the horseshoe map to them: take the first byte, then the last byte, then the second, then the second-to-last, and so on. Repeating this process four times produces something that is absolutely unrecognizable, yet still contains the same information as the input image. Furthermore, unlike Sort, the transformation is reversible; it's not hard to write a corresponding "unfold" transform that, when applied four times, would give the input image. So is this a copy (because it can be transformed into the original) or a new work entirely (because it bears no visual resemblance)?

Sample (Derivative Works 0x3)

Sample is a single reddish pixel; it may be difficult to see. The Stable Diffusion model contains roughly 2.3 billion images. The model itself is about 5 gigabytes of storage. This implies that the model contains very little information about any particular image, from an information-theory point of view. A single pixel in an image contains three bytes of information: one each for red, green, blue. Sample, which was generated by computing a 3-byte perceptual hash of its input image, is therefore a visual representation of roughly how much information Stable Diffusion has about any individual work in its input set.

Composite (Derivative Works 0x4)

Finally, Composite takes the principle of Sample to its extreme. I downloaded roughly 10,000 images from the Stable Diffusion data set, computed a 4-byte hash of them, then concatenated the hashes together to produce the output. In the interest of saving time and effort, I interpret each bit as a pixel, either on or off. There are therefore 512 * 512 / 8 / 4 = 8192 images represented. (I downloaded more than 8192 to account for images that would fail to download or that no longer pointed to a valid image.)

Not Sick (Not Well)

Summary:

Not for the first time tonight Zim wonders if the disgusting fondness that floods his system when he looks at his idiot nemesis stems from some manner of cootie infection or a previously undetected flaw in his body shell. (It must be the former, Zim is perfect.) Or; Zim is down bad and hatches a plan, Dib gets his first kiss stolen, and the real enemy all along is letting oneself be touched and to touch in return.

(Read on A03)

Bonus Sketch from the fic under the cut!

ANSALE’WIT - The Angels Return Home

Regez’s original species, Ansale’wit, were expunged from the planet once trolls of old arrived onto the planet. 

Derived from a once simple fungus species, simple as this mere species may seem the fungus colonies along regez soon evolved the ability to look back upon itself and the nature of itself and the environment, soon it evolved itself into a keystone species for regez, each of regez’s vastly diverse biomes would find itself an array of Ansale’wit adapted to their environments. This species, perhaps by the very nature of life itself, created society, art, clothing, language, and culture. They worked with advanced celestial mathematics, and developed tools to further atomize the surgical precision in which they could interact with their environment. A species entirely in lockstep with the beauty of its own planet. How beautiful! 

The Grand Council consisted of 4 directions, seraphim who embodied and studied the grandness and beauty of the world around them. For it was the northern direction who sensed them first. Coming from the stars. Death. North, pure in their essences, had already known and accepted their fate. To be shattered like glass, her body swept into the dusting spores they once could barely perceive. Shards of her scattered across regez over millennia have come to have folded and fused back into regez, now channeling her great knowledge through the spirit of regez. And only being able to connect to the spirit of regez through interacting with the planet 

The passing of the north direction, signaled the beginning of the end. The east direction went missing in the midst of battle, and with that, the west and south saw only one way to survive. To flee. The west and south led their people into the maws of colossal beasts who swim through the stars.

I NEED to draw weirder shit but alas....... the fear of Judgement..........

Wetware, #1 through #4

"Isn't that a person in there?"

"What, the wetware computer? No. It's just a bunch of cells. Human cells, granted, but just cells nonetheless."

"Aren't we all just a bunch of cells?"

"Speak for yourself! I'm 97.3% robotic by mass."

"Right, but you get what I mean."

"I guess? It's still not a person though."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Well, a person is a special kind of data. It's comprised of thoughts, emotions, feelings, bonds with other people. It can think freely, act freely, according to it's whim."

"Yeah?"

"Whereas the brain in the jar here, by contrast, is just running Linux."