I'm an 18-year-old Canadian in the first year of a software engineering degree. I thought I was going to be a mathematician, then a physicist, but then I took a Python course in my last year of high school and got hooked. My first exposure to science fiction on a serious (well, arguably serious) level was my brother's Warhammer 40K collection. One thing led to another and I was playing free-form 40K PbP on another forum, which was my first RP experience. It wasn't long before I started adding transhuman elements into my RP and writing, mostly focused on heavy unobtrusive cybernetics. I've been involved in playing D&D for a long while now, and a friend introduced me to Eclipse Phase about a year ago, but I haven't had much of a chance to act on it apart from a (currently stalled) PbP. I write code, I play video games, and I swordfight (Fiore, if that rings any bells). My reading list is currently Steakley, Gibson, Butcher, Stephenson, Moon, Drake and Niven/Pournelle. I like acting and applying it to RPs. I was raised Jewish but am pretty solidly atheist; if God does exist he should be fired. I like getting into arguments with evangelicals who don't know what they're talking about. Who am I? I'm a person, I think. Solipsism isn't my thing but I realize there's not much you can do to prove it in any direction. I have a pretty strong sociopathic streak that I'm working to suppress. When I create characters I create entirely new offshoot personalities like I would make beta forks, complete with mnemonic devices to get into the mindset. I have a hard time eating anything that's healthy for me. I'm trying to reconcile empiricism with quantum wave superimposition. I've never quite gotten the why of relativistic time dilation. I am the only person I know who consumes chocolate with a 99% cocoa content. I know a fair bit more about lethal weaponry (firearms, swords, knives, humans) than it's generally accepted that people should around here, and I have an unhealthy fascination with the word "thermobaric". My favourite comics are Not A Villain and Schlock Mercenary. I have minor OCD about distributions that seem non-random or non-uniform. My favourite numbers are 16777216 and any multiple of eleven.

Generally I spend more time lurking than posting, and like Lilith I find some of the science a bit over my head, but trying to keep up is part of the fun. I'm 44 years old (very soon to be 45). I live in California with my wife and two boys. Most of my work is a mix of software project management, user experience design, and writing. When I'm not working or doing things with my family, I like to ride my mountain bike, read, and (on Friday nights at least) game. I first encountered D&D in middle school and have been gaming since. D&D was never my thing, and since I was the resident GM, we mostly played Aftermath! and RuneQuest through high school. In college I added Twilight:2000 and Shadowrun (a *lot* of Shadowrun) to the mix. I did some gaming after college, but not much. I was busy as an infantry officer in the Army, then once I left the Army I spent most of my time building a new career. Later I obtained a Juris Doctorate, though I decided not to even bother taking the bar exam, as I was not interested in becoming a lawyer. Three years ago I became part of a small group that meets every Friday evening. I played in a Call of Cthulhu campaign for a while, then ran a RuneQuest campaign. From time to time we'll play something else, like Apocalypse World or an ORE-derived game. Last year I started an Eclipse Phase campaign, and I'm utterly hooked. While I don't consider myself a transhumanist, I really enjoy thinking and talking with my group about the ramifications of so many elements of the game. I also crave game worlds that feel vibrant and real. EP definitely has that covered. It's also important to me that the small crew at Posthuman Studios be rewarded for their hard work. I really appreciate the quality of their work, and the fact that they have put their money where their mouths are in releasing it under a Creative Commons license is just fantastic. Several months ago I started releasing my own EP character sheets, then I added a short GM aid with a few NPCs and settings. A few weeks ago I overhauled my gaming website and added a lot more material, in an attempt to provide a convenient place for those interested in EP to quickly obtain an overview of what it's about, and hopefully jump in and start playing. The site is Unpossible Labs.

I generally don't like identifying myself as part of a movement or as a follower of a particular world view or philosophy. I also have not studied enough of the core texts of transhumanism to understand it sufficiently.

If the question of 'Who are you?' is mostly answered by a list of age, occupation and interests then AI's that will be just as human as us are not far away. In any case, to go along with the general theme; I am a 31-year old seemingly neverending student from Sweden, currently living in Lund where I am hoping to very soon finish an education in... well I guess "nanoengineering" would be the most appropriate translation. At the moment I am running simulations in Matlab on a Feve-pump (sort of a quantum dot with oscillating potential attached to a quantum hall bar) to see if it would be possible to use it to cool down a system (scatter the electrons that travel through the dot down in energy). When sending only one electron it seems that according to my simulations, in theory it should work but when you send in a whole Fermi distribution of electrons unfortunately it doesn't. At least not for any relevant temperatures. Anyway, enough of that. I am what should be referred to as a role-playing addict. It is the one most important interest in my life and I easily loose myself in too much of it. Currently I am having a solo campaign (that is me and one player) in Eclipse Phase and about to begin playing (hopefully that is) a Burning Wheel campaign after another EP project (with more people) went bust. I don't really know what it is but ever since I first tried role-playing I knew that was what I'd been looking for my entire life. I've always been very creative, making up stories and as a child I read lots of fantasy and sci-fi books so I guess it was just a natural extension of that. But had I for some reason never been introduced to this amazing hobby my life would have been very dull indeed. As far as transhumanism go, I am a christian but not a bioconservative. If I could get genetic treatment to make me immortal or cybernetic implants to enhance myself I'd say 'bring it on'. However I do believe that such advances should be availible to everyone and not be used to create even more inequality than what the world already offers. The more people that gets access to long stable lives and education the faster science and technology will develop for us. Politically I guess I would be -hypercorps along with +socialism and +individual freedom. It is sad that "social-liberalism" isn't a viable option in elections in many countries today. Somehow people seem to think they are mutually exclusive and maybe they are but I've always been a bit naive so I refuse to give up hope! Anyway, that's enough of me for now. A bit confusing post I guess as I am distracted by what I really should be doing. :)

i'm a 26 years old Québecer I have a really bad english primally I study cinema, semiotic, Comics, linear sequentiel media something like that ... I think i hope to become professor or something I was one of the red square in the street when the liberal gouvernement decide to augmente the tituition fees I mostly read some theoretical book cinema french or english I'm doing a minor in Anthropology, this cleary not my branch but to this date I dosen't do Visual Anthropology cours etc etc

I'm [redacted] a 24 year old historian(well once I graduate) from the Netherlands. I mostly just lurk around here and read things from time to time. Occasionally I take a peek at Zero State and a comment here and there. I game, study, walk the dog, hang out with friends and am currently doing quite well in my desire to become a writer. Just got a new job which is a major improvement(its at the golden arches, that should tell you how my previous job was.) with which i'm quite happy.

I'm bibliophile20, which should give you a pretty good insight towards my feelings regarding fiction and writing. 0.275 centuries old from the Great Lakes region; raised in Cleveland, escaped the Mistake on the Lake to Rochester, NY, where I attended college and have settled in nicely. I was working towards my education certification to teaching science and math at the high school level, and am now working as an independent tutor for those subjects. Right now, I think I'd have to either be a masochist or certifiably insane to want to go to work in the US public schools, given that the current narrative is that it is always the teacher's fault for anything and everything wrong. So I'm working as a tutor and biding my time while waiting for sanity to break out. Born and raised Jewish in a fundamentalist community, I am currently agnostic-bordering-on-atheist. This is due to the rampant hypocrisy and just plain petty evils exemplified by my former co-religionists, as well as being unable to reconcile the omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God indoctrinated into me as a child with either my family history of being Holocaust survivors or with the vengeful, petty, clinically abusive, aloof, and apparently highly insecure deity that observable reality, the "holy" books, history and the "faithful" tell me it must be. I still identify as a Jew culturally, however; I'm not going to abandon that heritage after what my grandparents went through. As for RPGs, I'm a relative latecomer compared to most of my immediate circle; I got introduced to the hobby when I was 20 by my former mentor. Ever since I've been either playing or running games, or both, on a near continuous basis; started with Shadowrun and D&D 3.5, also played or run World of Darkness, Dresden Files FATE, Diaspora, and a few other games. I've gotten to be fairly decent as a GM, but I despair of ever gaining the story plotting skills shown by people like Jim Butcher, Lois McMaster Bujold or Rich Burlow. I got into Eclipse Phase via Shadowrun and after having read over the philosophies presented and done some additional further research, I've found that I'm a pretty solid transhumanist, but I have distinct bioconservative tendencies in the direction of "I don't want the human race to become post-biological!" But that's for my personal attitudes, which I recognize as not being universally applicable; my philosophy in real life is pretty much "your right to swing your arms ends at the tip of my nose and visa versa." However, I firmly believe that we can solve our problems with human ingenuity and live up to our potential as a species--but that those who do not wish to participate should not be forced to. In Eclipse Phase terms, I'd say that I'm +Anarchy, +Morphological Freedom, +Voting With Your Feet, -Organized Religion, -Corporate Capitalism, +Extropian Mutualism, +Wheaton's Law Been working on an Eclipse Phase novel for NaNoWriMo; act 1 is finished at 50k word count, and I'm currently plotting out acts 2 and 3. Still haven't managed to get an EP game going, though, much to my annoyance. Beyond that, I'm either a bibliophile or a bibliovore, depending on one's personal definitions; I've chewed my way through an average of about a novel a day for the last two decades and I start getting antsy if I haven't read anything for pleasure. I've read the Sci-Fi ABCs (Asimov, Bester, Clarke) by the age of 18, and my father tells his patients with pride the story about how, upon getting my driver's license, I "went out and maxed out his cards." *cue horrified look on patient's face* "Library cards." I still find that funny. For my fellow bibliophiles, I'd highly recommend Jim C. Hines' new book Libriomancer, which can best be described as one author's ode to his love of the written word.

fafromnice wrote:

I hope we have an agnostic with us, shintoism maybe ?

I grew up in post-religious Sweden (immunized against Christianity by reading grandfather's Gustave Doré -illustrated bible: divinities behaving like that better not exist, or we would have to deal with them). As a teenager I dabbled in hermetic ceremonial magic, gradually shifting into chaos magic and eventually deciding it was all psychology and neuroscience - why not go straight to the source? But I still like the aesthetics of a properly drawn evocation circle. These days I am a Bayesian agnostic: I cannot assign zero probability to anything (in that case you would not be able to update your probability above zero no matter what the evidence you see), but the probability of this universe being run by any form of conventional divinity is infinitesimal. I think at the very least those possibilities are dominated by many orders of magnitude by the universe being a simulation run by posthumans or aliens.

Hi Everybody! I am OneTrikPony, I am a recalcitrant redneck and closet nerd. I was born in Utah and I've lived other places but I keep coming back here. I'm old enough that I'm starting to be shy about it but I'm still friken beautiful so I don't let it get to me. I make my living doing demolition and construction or, basically, hitting stuff with hammers or riding on stuff that hits stuff with hammers. It's dirty and uncomfortable but I'm well suited to it and hope I'm not replaced by software before I'm worn out. I was born into a protestant sect with a penchant for the apocalypse. Now I worship the Morning Gods, (Caus if you don't you wake up with a hangover), and I pay homage to the Gods of Fire and Iron every time I strike a welding arc. Other than that I'm an agnostic, from the "don't care" rather than the "don't know" point of view. I'm into transhumanism for all the selfish reasons; want to live for ever, want a super human body, want to read a book every night, want to learn to play the guitar without practicing, Really Really Really want to build stuff on Luna and Mars, (or possibly 44nysa I like extropians). However, I do have reservations about being made redundant by software and I'm in love with my physicality so I'd like to keep my biological body. I'm currently reading Kurtsweil's new book and it's looking like I'm going to be disappointed on both fronts. Regardless, I believe that transhumanism as a movement is superfluous because these changes can't be stopped or shaped any more than industrialization could have been. On a lighter note, I love EP because I love looking at the implications of science and technology that are coming down the pike. I also love the EP forums because I have face2face access to very few people with whom I can muse/argue about these things. There's really nowhere else I'd be allowed to hang out with people this much smarter or more educated than I am. So, Much Love and thanks to all the denizens of the EP Forums and mad propz to the Devs; Rob, Jack, Adam, Brian, John, and everyone who has a part in bringing this bit of enlightenment to my world.