Essentials For Any Plugged Trip.

You've heard about it, you've read about it. Many of you have put on the viewfinders - seen and heard what the twisted minds of the cloud made possible, and have put together for your consuming pleasure. A few of you have actually done it, making the final connection between our naturally computing brains and the progeny of our technological lust.

I'm talking about the notorious neurocannular shunt, the biotechnical wonder that makes the cloud an entirely new universe for you to explore. I consider the following five items to be imperative for a good trip to the cloud, plugged or wireless, and for any amount of time.

The Shunt

- First things first, you need a can, aka shunt, cannular, jack, cloudjack, unnatural abomination, etc. Technically known as the Neurocannular Shunt, as coined originally by Tad Williams in a piece of sci-fi turned reality. It could have been as easily known as a cyberjack, but somewhere William Gibson pissed off the wrong cat in Silicon Valley. Here are their wikis.

You can find locked shunts from any ISP in your area, and most carriers even have on-site facilities or partnerships with local companies that will implant the same day. You can find unlocked and used shunts on the cloud, or in a few small retailers in your area. In this case you must find your own implant services. Pray you take my advice when I say go find yourself the most reputable implant company you can afford. Big-box retailers usually shy away from biotech, because they don't have the room - or the liability insurance - for it.

The Rig

- A rig for your shunt. For most people this will be taken care of in the service agreement when you go to the store to pick out your shunt. It will most likely be a standard broadband cable in the living room, where you can set up a hammock or what have you. The 'rig' in this case is the carrier's listening station nearest you; probably some vintage blades packed away in a shanty underneath your neighborhood cell tower. This is the cheapest way to go, because the gubment still subsidizes the hell out of broadband carriers, in hopes that someday we will have the same saturation as the Eastern Hemisphere. But I digress - that's another post entirely.

Some of you - hell, probably any of you that read this blog seriously - will want to provide yourselves a home-based rig: a computer between you and the cloud, which gives certain advantages such as anonymity, add-on modules, and the use of bots.

Finally, if you are very rich, very extravagant, very geek chic, or just plain crazy, you can use a wireless adapter and be online twenty-four-seven. Wireless rigs are usually limited bandwidth, so you won't get the full experience, but you will definitely look verr verr cool walking down the street with doublesight.

The Place

- A hammock. Trust me when I say your couch is not enough. First of all, you can't rest your head back on a couch without bending the cable that's jacked into the back of your neck and causing excruciating pain. Secondly, bedsores are caused by suffocating the skin. A hammock alleviates both of these major issues, is simpler to set up, and is far more comfortable in the long run.

The Sustenance

- A protein drip. Something that feeds you liquid protein, so you don't dehydrate or starve, or both. Those of you with wireless should not forget to wear a hydration system, like a Camelbak or a Coleman Waterman, filled with your favorite flavor. I'm partial to the pineapple-grape flavor of Profil, myself.

Don't Forget The Rules

If you get hungry or tired, feel overly emotional, sensory deprived or incensed, or at all stressed-out by anything you experience, jack out immediately. The cloud is a disruptive ecosystem, much like the Wild West, and you do not need to risk any trip being a terminal trip. Other than basic common sense, You should have:

- A timer! For most of you, this won't be a problem due to the fact your ISP only allows two hours per session. Many of you however, like me, have applied the simple hack described here to bypass the auto-timer. If you play WOW, you know what I'm talking about. In this case, you need to set-up a scheduled eject command into your shunt's firmware; or you can rig a simple alarm clock timer by following these instructions found on the Instructables channel.

I actually use a variant of both methods, plus a third: I also have an emergency eject command linked to a bot I've set up to troll IM traffic. The bot runs off my rig, so there is no cycle distribution (read, untraceable). It pulls my plug when I send it a coded message. Those of you who are afraid to roll your own bot, or rig, can use Freebot, a distributed model coded by J-6. Freebot has a little-known command buried within, just strike up a conversation and ask it to run '911 eject,' you'll be staring at your own ceiling before you know it.

Follow these most basic tenets, and in no time you will have the best experiences the cloud has to offer.

Braxton Pipp


This work by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Cloud Disorder

Too long. Did it again. Feh. Jacked in too long. Sixteen, maybe seventeen hours this time. Thought my eyes were permanently fuzzy. The cloud was teasing me: "Just one more link." "one more vid." "one more pic." "one more torrent." My bot is filled with "one more's," backlogged, bookmarked. [Boondoggled is more like it. One more "one more" and it will be truly borked.]

Took a white tab, 'bout halfway through the day. Hummed me right into prime-time. Green one at midnight, to wind it down.

Just jacked-out, and it's four AM. The drip ran dry hours ago; my mouth is a forest of toothpicks. Legs are covered halfway with pins and needles; any gesture radiates the whole lower half of my body, and it feels like I'm going to lose my legs to poor circulation. I'm air-peddling in my hammock right now, no matter how much it hurts.

Found some unaccosted code, tucked away behind about twenty layers of a .net. Some old AJAX sitting in a dark room. Nobody wanted it, and wasn't a honeypot. Nomenclature of Gee-male, or some such. Just sitting there all by it's lonesome in a little blue executable cube, not connected to anything. So I copied it. Only a couple hundred gig. I know a guy that knows a guy that has access to old blades. Self-reminder to call him tomorrow.

Hard to focus. Jack aches like a son-of-a-bitch. Getting too hot and searing skin. I have an inch-thick callous, but it's useless. Still hurts. Burns are coming through now, and visibly. I don't want to go out at all, even with a scarf. People still notice.

But it's my job motherfucker. I need this jack like you need that cheap whore to tell you what a monster you are in bed: often and badly.

Anyway, my whole point of posting this was to find other ways to cope staying plugged-in for extended periods of time. I'm sure there are plenty of you. How long and how often? Has anyone ever told you that you jack-in too much? What do you do to cope?

Braxton Pipp

[Crazeebaer626 sez: a protein drip and a good hammock is all you need. The rest is superfluous. My record, by the by, is 22 hours]

[Jannavive sez: Don't forget to eat a big carb meal before you jack-in. Wow CB, you're walking the bleeding edge. Only 10 hours here.]

[2Paul2 sez: You're all nuts. I'm a developer for Samsung, and not even our test subjects stay jacked for more than eight hours. We design our shunt around the notion that people don't voluntarily abuse themselves like that. My personal record is eight hours, because I will not subject my body to that kind of self-desvastation. We get permanently IVed when we're hired, so it's easier to hook up a drip. I do eat a high-carb meal before-hand, and I stretch before and after my trip.]

[Crazeebaer626 sez: Paul, you're the nut if you honestly believe people only plug-in responsibly. How many WOW players are there again?]

[Z&Bob& sez: 208 million, or approx. the population of Canada. Also of note, it is the largest channel in the cloud ... like the whole thing. It takes up more cycles than any other computing model/program, distributed or otherwise.]

[80sWhorinWarren sez: @bob: stfu go paladin somewear ells. @CrZB: u nvr did 22hrs n00b. go pwn urslf.]

[80sWhorinWarren has been permanently banned by TheSparkingDonut. Reason: "pwn this, dumbass."]

This work by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

My Headjack Sucks. This Is Why.

It's all about pus and sparks, savvy?

I have too much electricity running to my headjack. It can be a common problem with unlocked jacks, since they're not tuned to a specific carrier, like most commercial headjacks. I knew this when I picked it out and found one available for little more than a song.

The problem is actually caused by the carrier rig, not the jack, but that's just semantics. The rig sends an unimpeded signal directly from the nearest host switch, as I understand it, because if it was filtered it at all it would be considered wiretapping.

Normally this would be compensated by resistors in a commercial jack, or in the case of an unlocked jack - a bank of tunable resistors. Obviously I did my homework, right?

Enter my lifestyle: I am an unwealthy researcher, and I get most of my kit used. This was something I purchased new, and I wanted to find someone top-notch to install it. I tried everywhere, but no one would finance me. I put my ears to the ground and started networking all my friends, until I found a friend that knew a guy that knew a guy. i told him to set it up.

I may as well have asked Stephen Hawking's wheelchair to perform the operation.

The back-alley doctor that I found to implant a jack in my neck was an alcoholic, or really needed a cigarette, or maybe was just bored to fuck with surgeoning on some old meatjob every day and wanted to get his kicks off; whatever his affliction, the end result is my headjack emits sparks when I'm plugged-in, and the surrounding skin has taken to defend itself by giving me an inch-thick calloused ring-shaped donut under my left ear, with hot pink pustules sprinkled around the topmost ridge.

Really.

It's not an exercise in ergonomics, like the current rage from Samsung. It's functional, even though it is perpetually infected. It's not pretty. It is, however, pretty disgusting. I get asked about it constantly whenever I go out.

The cashier guy at Seven Eleven the other day wouldn't stop staring from the moment I walked in. Finally I asked, "Can I help you?"

"Does that, like, hurt?"

"Every Day. Can I have my cigarettes and change now you insensitive prick?"

I've taken to wearing a scarf from September to March. During the summer, though, it's impossible to hide. And I don't think I'm about to buy a stack of turtlenecks and cut the sleeves out.

So I get by. I work on the cloud, so I only go out for necessities, friends or family - and 99% of the latter two can be found online frollicking with their own avatars, visiting the popular channels like they were tourist attractions, and treating their sim selves as not much more than empty bedsheets.

I've had this jack for about four years now. I've since gathered enough scratch to see a real surgeon, who says it'll never come out unless i enjoy risking permanent spinal cord damage. Says if it works I should count my lucky stars and just keep using it like there's nothing wrong with it.

Except I have to sleeve the end of the input cable with neoprene - kind of like a suction cup catheter - so my rig doesn't explode. And it's hot to boot. Sweltering, in fact, hence the pustules.

So, yeah. It's all about the pus and sparks, savvy? Some kid hovering around the Youtube channel told me to keep saying it like a marketing slogan. Said I'd get more work because I'd have a rep, or some such a thing. I dunno, by the looks of his avatar he couldn't have been more than twelve, so I take that with a pretty hearty grain of salt. I have a reputation, a fairly decent one if Alexa has anything to say about it. I don't need another one that says I'm a freak of human nature.

Braxton Pipp

This work by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.