In 2002 I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 21. If you don’t know what that is, you can read about it here: http://www.nationalmssociety.org/ . For years I fought the symptoms and tried to maintain a normal life, but in the summer of 2008 it started getting the better of me. My symptoms got out of control and I started on a downward spiral that I never recovered from. By the end of 2009 I was using a walker to get around and was essentially homebound. By the summer of 2011 another setback left me unable to walk and I entered adult foster care. After living there for a year and a half, my health deteriorated again and I was forced to move into a nursing home at the end of 2012. Aside from a brief second try at adult foster care at the beginning of 2015, I have been there ever since. This has led to a further decline; I no longer have use of my hands and arms and am now, for all practical purposes, a quadriplegic. I’m not a “functional” quadriplegic. I’m fully immobile other than mostly uncontrolled spasms, often violent and painful, usually triggered by a touch.

When these COVID-19 restrictions are gone I still won't be able to take a walk in the park, with or without a mask. I won’t be going to parties or going on dates. I have a little freedom through a power chair I control with a joystick under my chin, which mostly sits unused. My only other connection to the world is through my laptop. Using speech recognition and eye tracking I can do basic things like web surfing, keeping in touch with friends and family on Facebook, distracting myself with YouTube, furthering my education through e-books and continuing my study of computer programming. It is truly my lifeline; without it, I feel certain I would have already gone mad with loneliness, boredom, and despair.

I’m asking for help to fund a new computer. My current laptop is almost six years old at this point and is constantly on the verge of failure, most recently temporarily losing the ability to charge or even run off of AC power after the internal fan died. I've realized I don't need a computer in the form of a laptop. I don't need a keyboard in front of me since I can't use it anyway and I'll be able to use a much larger screen with a desktop PC. A desktop computer is a lot easier to troubleshoot without throwing money at any problems that might come up. I’d like the replacement to last about five years and to be at least as powerful as my laptop was when it was new. My programming work requires high-end hardware.

What is my "programming work," anyway? I'm part of a community ( https://dictation-toolbox.github.io/dictation-toolbox.org/ ) building some of the software that allows me to use the computer in the way I do. I would like to spend more time contributing to these projects. The software we produce makes it a lot easier to do programming in the first place and is also helpful in building command sets for all the programs I use. That includes several games like World of Warcraft and Cities: Skylines. I also "wrote" software that lets me control my mouse using eye tracking hardware.

Simple video production is something else I would like to spend more time doing. I've already made an unedited video of myself playing World of Warcraft that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/460YpvrpjaY. A better computer would enable me to increase the production quality of the videos I make.

I would like to spend more time experimenting with things such as machine learning (especially speech recognition and eye tracking technologies), unusual programming languages, alternative operating systems, and countless other topics I haven't even thought about yet.

A computer that more or less replaces the laptop I have will cost roughly the same amount as the laptop did five years ago($2300). There is miscellaneous hardware and software that I will also need, so my initial goal is $3000.

That being said, I'd like to get a much more powerful system. My current pipe dream computer would consist of an AMD 5950X with at least 64GB RAM and an Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU, plus several terabytes of storage. I don't want to be artificially limited by the computer I have because I’ve underestimated what I’ve needed for a project.

After a period of time, possibly a few months, I will look at my options and use what money I have raised to buy the best available computer I can.

Please invest in my future sanity and help me buy a new computer. Thank you!