Hmm, well I was trained by the military as a Medical Laboratory Technician (though did the job of a Medical Technologist for the most part). I am trying to pursue a degree in Clinical Microbiology with a focus on Virology. I say trying because it's damned expensive, whether it's school, rent, food, etc. I have also worked with computers in various jobs, currently in regards to slot machines, previously with hotel minibars and as a hobby for building them. So, I have a bit of an eclectic skill set, but the strongest three would probably be clinical laboratory science, computers, and various customer service/team work skills.

I guess I am in those blurred lines between science and engineering. My field of knowledge is in nanophysics mainly, so I'm obviously quite curious of the nanofabrication part of EP. Which may be part of the reason why I'm currently looking into lithography using Scanning Probe Microscopes. Manipulation of single atoms is exciting!

I have a BSc in Computer Science, have worked in the field as a software developer for over a decade and am currently doing a Master degree. Computers are my life and I have a decent background in artificial intelligence, but I have a broad and keen interest in science and technology (as well as science fiction, roleplaying and game design). I consider myself a transhumanist and have been involved in transhumanism and extropy for much of my life and pursue nutrition, fitness and cryonics (best current backup option) as longevity strategies. Among the things I find interesting in Eclipse Phase are AGIs, morphological freedom, transparent societies, consequences for the death-of-death (and forking, etc.), uplift and exhuman rights, reputation based societies and the adaption and engineering of life to inhabit the entire solar system (the explorer in me loves astronomy as the exploration of the universe).

I am most of the way to a Bachelors in Education with a minor in Sociology. By night I train technical support agents for a couple of different clients, develop web-sites, and do a lot of unfocused general IT stuff. I'd like to think I can code, but I am really not very good. As you can probably guess from my education my interest in EP is at the social level. I love looking at these (different?) societies that have cropped up since the fall and searching out the inevitable cracks that crop up with any group of people. Then I dump the PCs into those cracks and see what happens. I'm not sure I'd consider myself a transhumanist, but I am sympathetic. I feel a little like Elliot Rosewater when I participate in discussions around here: "I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell." Someone has to think about this stuff.

I've been heavily involved at high level in management, negotiations, real estate, investment and finance most of my professional life. And I've read a lot of theoretical stuff behind much it, like psychology and game theory. I was in the army (trained as sergeant in the Danish army's reconnaisance) and I'm a hunter, so I have some knowledge on tactics and firearms. I practice MMA and did some Krav Maga earlier, so fighting and self defense too. I also used to be a bit of a math and physics geek and that sort of stuck, which seems to have been the most relevant to the EP forums so far :)

I'm a scientist. I just finished my MS in Computational Linguistics and have a BA in Linguistics, with certifications in software engineering. I'm currently working on a biomedical informatics / NLP team at a cancer research center. I couldn't decide what the hell I wanted to do when I was younger, so I've also done 3/4ths of a Chemical Engineering degree (I ended up ragequitting that), several years of biology (used to be an EMT, thought I was going to be a trauma surgeon), and philosophy (used to be a law clerk, thought I was going to be a Lawyer). I also have a love of robotics, rocketry, and spaceflight - if I were to go back and do it again, I might have focused on those. I love Eclipse Phase for it's focus on the mind/computer interface, and as a playground for exploring extremist (and not so extremist) social and political philosophies. Oh I also practice Aikido, Fencing, and ran a Medieval Combat Club - so I have a decent bit of experience with a sword / spear. Which is somewhat more practical in Eclipse Phase than it is in reality :P

I've spent 20 years in construction, all phases, both residentiial and comercial, my specialties are concrete and structural steel. Since 2010 I've been working for a demolition company as an estimator and equipment operator.

I've a computer science degree, and the interest in but not the patience for higher degrees. (Damn homework.) I've been a programmer for over a decade, and a webdev freelancer for the last five or six years... And I also have a minor in English, which included rhetorical training and linguistics, and most of a history minor (damn homework). So when it comes to EP.... pick a topic, and I've probably got an interest in it. ;)

I've got a bachelor's in human evolutionary bio. I've got a few months of field research experience on smaller things, mostly frogs and rodents. Also a tiny bit of medical experience from getting EMT-certified, hospital volunteering, and a class I took called Introduction to Vertebrate Surgery. No med school, though. For now, I'm moving into health policy. Views on EP: Though I've done a fair amount of research on chimps and on Neandertals, I don't find the hominid uplifts as exciting as weird and completely novel morphs. Many of the most fascinating parts of EP involve how evolution would work outside the constraints that exist on Earth. Augmentation allows a bewildering range of phenotypes and massive developmental plasticity. Forking allows reproduction with neither recombination nor the high investment cost of child-rearing. And, of course, there's all the space medicine and exobiology. This background also gives me a slightly spergy attitude towards medichines and basic biomods. (Putting aside the [url=http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=175]large[/url] [url=http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=448]obstacles[/url] to making nanomachines that could work in the human body in the first place). In short, for them to work there should be constant work to keep them up to date, and their exact programming and the drugs they carry (and/ or are programmed to synthesize) should vary by habitat. It's very hard to outperform the human immune system, despite its many seemingly jury-rigged features - but it's even harder to make something that microorganisms can't out-evolve. Of course, no sane player wants a plot about coming down with the flu and needing to get a firmware update to secrete a different antiviral. :P

I'm a loser dropout who was majoring in music theory/performance and linguistics. Not much else to say.

I have an AA in Liberal Arts, and am about halfway through my BS in Criminal Justice, though I was originally going for an English Writing degree before I realized that was too expensive. Outside of that, I've always been a bit Dilettante (under the definition of "someone who engages in a field as an amateur out of casual interest rather than as a profession") so I have a shallow, layman's knowledge in a lot of fields, and almost always interested to know more. I was homeschooled most of my youth, so my parents tended to throw subjects at me and see what stuck. I was interested in EP as a teenager because I was (and am) a giant nerd and it contained a lot of the themes I was interested in both in fiction and in real life, and has actually probably influenced my views on transhumanism and anarchism a lot since then. My particular knowledge base hasn't impacted my interest in EP, but I suppose I tend to view the game on a slightly more narrative angle than some people ("Even if its not logical, the intent of the authors was clearly to invoke a specific feel in this area") and improved my realism in handling law enforcement a little.

Currently working on a Bachelor's of Applied Science in Management, but had a focus on military organization and technology since I was young. In early aptitude tests I placed in the at or above 160 IQ range, and was placed in the 100% percentile in visual-spacial reasoning. (I guess that counts as off the charts?) I qualify to join MENSA, but, I dunno, for some reason it doesn't really interest me. Original life plan was to become a fighter pilot with the Air Force, but I ended up needing glasses, and they would prefer you to be able to see properly. Developing an arrhythmia killed any further hope I had of being a pilot, and also managed to kill my hope of joining the military in general. Very much a trans-humanist. Obviously I have a bias on the matter, but I feel that the failures of our bodies, and of our minds, can be fixed. Evolution can be directed, damage repaired and capabilities improved. To this end a modern sort of genetic engineering-oriented sort of eugenics makes sense to me. There's no justifying killing someone that happens to contain bad genes. Same with preventing them from having kids. But their kids don't have to have the bad bits of their genome. Gattaca was a favorite movie of mine for a long time, and still is, though Guardians of The Galaxy might have just recently unseated it for its broadly fantastic writing and acting. (It's hilarious!) I don't really understand or connect to people, never have. I've had pretty severe memory problems for a while now, too. But I get organization, efficiency, and the flow of production. I've studied manufacturing and its processes pretty extensively, studied to become a gunsmith, and even looked into game development for awhile. Economics just makes sense to me, though I don't really like doing the hard (like hard science) math for it. Pretty much leaves running a business as my last route of making money, no? ^^' On the topic of Eclipse Phase, I don't know how I've managed to go this far without hearing about it, as it's a combination of just about all of my favorite things. I've always loved science fiction, of all varying flavors, and the horror elements really just make it all the better. I just wish I had any real contact with people in the real world so I could play it with them, you know? I've done a lot of writing and role-playing in the past, but the universe provided by Eclipse Phase is... outstanding. Even just reading the rules, frankly, is addicting. Heck with the rules for package-based character generation in Transhuman, I fear I'll never get any further than just generating dozens characters. xD I hope i didn't run too long, and if there's anything else I can add, just let me know. ^^'

Broad but not the deepest. I never quite got a degree because i spent so much time switching majors and courses. This left me with a large number of unconnected classes under my belt. I also spent some time with some of the less legal parts of society, and have a practical working knowledge of underground trade networks. As a result I have a working knowledge of basic metallurgy, computer repair, programming, and networking, drug chemistry, law, economics and politics, mathematics, philosophy and ethics, and the practicalities of evidence removal.

I am a android Developer

I studied theatre for a bit, but don't know much about it. I've considered going back to school for something meaningful, but am fairly well ass with math. I mostly just spit witticisms and meander. I like doing voices for different characters, though. Once, for a Shadowrun game, I obsessively studied doing a German accent for a week and a half before the game, came in rocking a fairly serviceable one. Had a lot of fun with that. Twice I've gone into games doing an accent that the (different) GM(s) found hugely entertaining, only to have another player wind up getting shut down hard when they attempt it. I find that entertaining. Picking things like that up is a byproduct of my obsessive nature.

I work for a big electronic payment provider. Yes, probably that one. My specialities are systems and application monitoring (with all that entails, feedback, business analytics, alerting, networking, etc.) and security (InfoSec, data privacy, etc.). At Gymnasium (yeah, Germany here) I had a math and physics focus (including earning a free membership in the German Physics Society as best in my year) and actually gave computer science class when the teacher realized I was way ahead of them ^_^ I studies CS at the local university, together with, consecutively, math, psychology and finally pedagogy and history, before finally dropping out when I realized I was not an academic (Though I very firmly believe in the scientific method and open access to all research results, paywalls are evil) and was far more interested in building things, bricoleur-style (was a member of the Chaos Computer Club and am nowadays a Free Software Foundation member) and learning practical coding stuff (thank you, O'Reilly, you were more career-enabling than anything the university ever taught me). My interests today, besides what I need for work (Hey, it's great being paid for my biggest hobby ^_^) are Cryptography, Image Synthesis (think Raytracing & Co., coming from a Game development interest), Distributed Computing, Robotics and IoT/Home Automation (think Raspberry Pi), Space Technology... My private life is decidedly non-mainstream and wouldn't be amiss in a Heinlein novel, make of that whatever you will... I consider myself a Transhumanist/Immortalist, believing that technology can and will continue to make our lives longer and better, hopefully one day giving us technologies such as mind-uploading, backups and forking (Oh, what would I give for that!). That said, I believe it likely that humanity is a transitional species. We will, hopefully, create true AI at one point (farther into the future than most of us would wish for, I think) and experience a singularity. Contrary to most peoples opinion I am not worried about that. I am absolutely certain it will be hard take-off and has a high chance of wiping us out. And I'm ok with that. Evolution (of intelligence, not one measly species) does that. My view on EP is that, as both a horror and scifi aficionado I love the setting, and as a technologist I am really happy to see a mostly realistic depiction of possible near-future tech. There are some gaffes, especially when it comes to details in the hacking rules, forking or copy-protection, etc. But I understand why these are the way the are based on the needs of Game flow and to enforce certain narrative requirements (I suspect "real" forking would be much, much, much more powerful than the degraded-copy thing we have in EP). One remark: Is anyone tracking these in a database? From a social sciences point of view the answers I've seen are far more diverse than I suspected, I'd love to see someone who knows their chi square to have a look at it...

I got hired as a videogame tester last year for an Indian IT corp that has a branch office in Redmond. Part-time thing, not nearly enough hours to support myself. I just got a second job as a remote transcriptionist for a Chinese IT corp that is the Indian corp's rival. Sometimes it all feels like I'm living in the cyberpunk future of Eclipse Phase hypercorps, and that's not a good thing. (Yes, I know from the canonical description, hypercorps don't really come about until corporations escape the gravity well, but) isn't the whole "gig economy" sorta what the hypercorp future will look like for the typical worker on Mars or Luna? Like "Uber" or "Mechanical Turk" or whatever. (Sorry if I'm going a bit off-topic by digressing about hypercorp theory)

Reading everyone's responses in this thread and I'm just over here like: "I-I'm... trying to write a fantasy novel..."

Don't get me wrong, I love seeing magitech in stories. :p Just saying, everyone above me is like, getting doctorates and the like and I'm here just like... yep, I'm diploma equivalent at best. Yep, I can know stuff too! Like... where commas go, and...

jackgraham wrote:

The great paradox of SF is that it's largely a bunch of humble humanities grads entertaining scientists & engineers. For every Peter Watts in the field, there are 5 other writers with English degrees (or no degree).

William Gibson! Gibson is one of my favorite examples of an English major writing scifi. I've seen other nerds object that he lacks deep technical knowledge (and that does show, I think). The thing is, as far as I can tell, the crux of "Neuromancer" (for instance) isn't "What happens when hackers become futuristic super-hackers who can hack all the systems?" so much as "What happens when society becomes futuristic super-capitalism that eats everything?" That is why that 30-year-old novel still feels so fresh to me.