Hello FC community, This is yet another periodic post about the difficulties of financing our family of projects and the lack of progress that stems directly from the lack of financing. There are two key issues here:
1) Our FC family of projects is mostly about hardware rather than software. There is very little in this space that can be accomplished through sw/fw hacking alone (beyond the very impressive results which I have already produced!), and any meaningful further movement toward any of our oft-repeated goals (whether my personal goals or the goals of those few people who have found some commercial use for Calypso modems doing non-standard things) will require more hardware development. But hardware development requires money, which is sharply different from sw/fw hacking which requires only time and a passion. I have virtually unlimited passion for FreeCalypso, translating to nearly unlimited ability to do FC sw/fw work, but money is much much more limited, putting a damper on anything that needs further hw development. 2) As most people here know from repetition, I have been funding FreeCalypso almost single-handedly over the past years, with my own personal financial investment being about 3 times greater than the total contributed by everyone else combined over the entire lifetime of the project. And as most of you also know, it has been a never- ending struggle for me to balance between my passion for FreeCalypso (i.e., dumping money into the project) and my gender/medical needs. Now here is the new development: with the Trump regime in Amerikkka continuing to look more and more like Germany in the 1930s, with my birth country (Russia) being extremely hostile and very unsafe for people of my kind (LGBTQ+, in my case both transsexual and lesbian), and with right-wing movements on the rise generally throughout the world, I have reached the conclusion that it is simply NOT SAFE for me to continue living as a non-surgically-corrected trans woman any longer, as the risk of intolerant people/governments/etc forcibly taking my hard-won female gender away from me is getting too great. With the political climate being the way it is, it has become clear to me that I need to get my sex correction surgery done ASAP, and to make it a financial priority first and above everything else. In other words, I simply cannot allow myself to spend any more money on FC until my safety-increasing surgery is done and paid for. More concretely, I have just scheduled my surgery with the Chettawut Plastic Surgery Center in Thailand for the date of 2020-05-25 (date chosen because it is the latest surgery date that still allows me to travel to Thailand and back with my current stateless person travel document without having to get a new one), and I have put down the required 20% holding deposit of about 80,000 THB (Thai Baht currency). At this point there are two possibilities: Alternative 1: if I can gather the rest of the money (whether on my own or from external donations) by around February (T minus 3 months is the deadline for rescheduling without forfeiting any of the already paid money), my surgery will proceed as planned: I will fly from San Diego to Bangkok, Thailand in 2020-05, leave my unwanted bits there, and come back to California as 100% girl in 2020-06. The total amount needed is about 21 kUSD, breaking down as follows: about 11 kUSD for the remainder of the surgery cost, about 1 kUSD for the round trip flight, about 2.5 kUSD for my time in Thailand (post-op recovery hotel, food, misc expenses) and about 6.5 kUSD to keep my partner alive and my bills paid back at home while I take 5 weeks off from my regular day job. Alternative 2: if 2020-02 rolls around and I have too little money to proceed with the original plan, I will have to reschedule my surgery for some time in 2021, in which case it will be that much longer before I can go back to any kind of further FreeCalypso development. How is all of this relevant to FreeCalypso? The answer is simple: I won't be able to do any more FC work beyond simple maintenance until and unless my absolutely essential surgery is funded. Therefore, the *only* way to unblock further FC progress is to donate toward the cost of my surgery; until then, the project is in maintenance mode. There are 3 ways to donate: Option 1 is Bitcoin: 159Yx6JRJ4oMLPTYrh1jW7fQ5D5tPHdnoM. Option 2: This weekend I am going to open a new Gofundme campaign, allowing easy credit card donations. Option 3: For anyone who is able to make a substantial donation but operates with conventional currencies rather than crypto, please email me off-list and I will give you bank wire transfer details. Finally, if there are any commercial business entities seeking to use Calypso modems for whatever special application you've got, you can have my undivided support and customized hardware for whatever you need if you pay for my full remaining surgery cost or at least a major portion of it; the exact terms will depend on how much you are willing to pay. Hasta la Victoria, Siempre, Mychaela aka The Mother _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected] https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community
