I became a cyborg today.

My prior ramblings on bionic technofetishism look a little silly now. I'd taken penetration of metal to be my frontier of man-machine marriage. But now I have electronics embedded under my skin.

I purchased an xSIID from Dangerous Things, less than a week ago. I went for the white one—figured it'd be 'neutral', as tempting as red might be. Per tracking, I wasn't expecting it for another few days, but when it showed up this morning, I knew exactly what I had to do. I'm very far from religious, but when an opportunity to get a "Mark of the Beast" on Halloween presents itself, it's hard to turn down. Not that it's the right hand, but who's paying attention to that?

I actually did a whole unboxing video, and captured my whole installation process—and yes, it was a self install. The nearest DT partner is in Indianapolis or Toronto, a 4-hour drive in either direction. I watched some videos of other installs, studied the materials for professionals—I mean, I'm not a professional piercer, but I'm basically a professional hacker, and that's close enough, right? Ultimately, there's something about the spirit of a self-install that drew me to immediately deciding on it, days ago. The spirit of bio-hacking; the experimentation and risk! My selection of "L0"—between the thumb and index finger—was typical for a first implant, and known to be reasonably low-risk. I had very high confidence in my ability to operate on my own hand.

My nerves made me work for it, however. The unboxing vid was sort of a disaster—not having experience with such content creation, plus the anticipation causing me to blank and stutter. The install part was even worse: several times (about 45 minutes in all) I paused the feed to collect myself, take a few deep breaths, pace a little, have a banana, have a shot of espresso, have a shot of liquor, ...nonetheless, eventually the deed was done—the procedure was actually close to flawless, the pain negligible compared to the anticipatory discomfort. My rebirth had occurred.

I became a cyborg today.

I immediately tried scanning it, and it lit right up and opened the default-encoded link. I pretty quickly rewrote it to go to my website—first the newly-provisioned homepage but soon after a dedicated landing page. I have ideas of encoding (or linking) a vCard eventually, for quick and quirky sharing of contact info.

I'm still riding the high. I could see this being kind of addicting. After mere hours of being implanted, I'm already mapping out future upgrades. Maybe it's a good thing the ones I want are all out of stock! I'm going to try not to be too insufferable to my friends as I geek about my new enhancements over the coming weeks.