dontbenebby

Or alternate title: Why do folks accept the identity of accounts only in a negative context?

I'm involuntarily anonymous.

I made the mistake of using my teenage pormanteau of my first and last name on the email for a vBulletin as a teenager. (Or maybe I'm a persistent troll harassing a well known censorship circumvention researcher... narrators can be unreliable, after all.)

I met some of those folks at my second Defcon and... they were just... so terrible. So terrible I never went back to the forum, because I was a kid, angry at authority figures who abused their access and projecting things on to whole races and relgions when the issue was specific people.

It was a very dark moment -- my first Defcon, I wasn't sure if I was going to graduate from college, on probation for knifecrime awaiting expungement, and my second... and only allowed to attend because they were trying to nudge me to join the NSA or CIA.

<borat voice> Love to sit next to an empty placard for Hans Reiser and be told what shrews the wives of the linux devs are... NOT </borat voice>

I tried do the newbie event but someone physically slammed me down and yelled "YOU WERE HERE LAST YEAR".

So I started joking... my legal name is Gregory... my hacker name is Greg.

Anyways -- why is it when I make a nym for 1-4 years and do nothing but be kind, no one goes "hey, you're smart and kind and I know who you are" but... if I spin up a nym for activism, people sniff it out like bloodhounds and "notice" the most minor thing like they're the TA from Real Genius?

Most of my issues stem from lack of money -- I find myself slipping into depression or anxiety when I eat poorly, when I over caffinate, when I don't get exercise -- but... part of that is because I never had an intership with a kitchen, never had the salary to get a maid, to go to spin class and a takeout salad, and unlike say, Tokyo there simply are no healthy options at a price level of the "menu" in the French sense that they had when I'd crash VMware's cafeteria every day with my coworkers from... a research center in Palo Alto.

(I respected the space. I ate my food, talked about work, in one case watched some football, and left, not wandered the grounds jamming my... things... into... openings.)

It feels like a no win situation -- in order to find work, I will have to demonstrate my skills, but I'm forever beholden to people like the woman who abused one of my old coworkers -- she gave him an internship then said she wouldn't give him a good recommendation to anyone else.

And apologies in advance, for the times in the past I've violated guidelines here or other communities -- I created this handle surrounded by enemies, thinking I'd use it over on Twitter for a weekend in Vegas, and things rapidly escalated in ways too numerous to explain here, but I don't know what to do when folks seem to not grok: there is a very different culture in Appalachia than California -- we're simple, not stupid, with long memories and a rich history that you disrespect when you forever treat someone as some sort of... user experience... to... research.

TL;DR: How did you maintain your handles over the years? Am I just terrible at opsec, or was there some social factor I'm missing aside from not using IRC? (Plaintext sucks)

I'd love to do political consulting... I'm not a great technologist. I'm not a cryptographer, my linux skills are stuck in the 2000s... I'm basically a mid 30s scrip kiddie who did a lot of poetry on the side. I never had the nest egg that enables others to speak like I do in the clear, in the real. I wanted to be a writer, I didn't want to be a lawyer, and I didn't want to waste my parents' money, so I studied "information", the ultimate creative nonfiction.

I used to just encourage slow change -- get people to register to vote, not tell them how to, and hope that with each iteration, we'll get closer to how it was when America was formed -- more of a right libertarian versus democratic socialist debate, if we're going to force a two party system. After all, folks seem to forget that George Washington, like myself, was an independent -- I only registered as a democrat out of grave concern for our democracy, after being told by one of the local election judges it is how it is -- you need to declare a bias, or you're suspect...

I'm very good at telling people what to say and do to get into office. I'm less good at keeping them there, but... I also, like the Italian Five Stars, believe that politics should not be a profession.

And unlike the not-so-crypto-anarchists, I do think government can be a good thing, if done from the bottom up -- my experience has been that most politicians, and I've met scores of them in the informal context, having met scores of them... they're like that bald guy who gets gassed by Kevin Spacey on house of cards[1]. Or Frank Sabotka on The Wire[2]. Starting out with good intent, perverted by evil men (and women) who do not want to listen to the voice of the people, who think we have an "excess" of democracy[3].

Based on the above... where, if anywhere, should I apply? Who should I talk to?

I was immature, in 2016. I was too focused on childish things, like being a penetration tester, a job I'm not suited for... 80/100% out of state or country travel, juggling clients, and... I wasn't even making much -- I got roped into yet another nonprofit, one offer at a time, so I didn't have the nest egg to land gracefully.

Anyway -- I'm good at this. Picking people, putting them in, knocking them out (metaphorically).

How do I do it... for money?

Has anyone done this pivot, and if so, are you willing to drop your contact information in the comments?

My email is this username at proton m a i l dot c h if you want to reach out to me rather than go that way.

I'm off to return some library books.

(Apparently that's become the new "I'm off to return some video tapes"[4]) == SPOILERS IN CITATIONS 1, 2, and 4: [1] Peter Russo... was a Democratic Congressman from PA's 1st Congressional District. Divorced with two children... when Frank saw that Peter was becoming a liability, he killed him and made his death look like a suicide. [2] Frank is a respected Polish-American treasurer for the International Brotherhood of Stevedores at the Baltimore docks. As the pater familias for the docks' longshoremen population, it is his job to manage the finances of the labor union and make sure that workers are taken care of - a task made harder by the decline of the local shipping industry and lack of available hours... Suspicious of how a longshoreman could have so much disposable income, Valchek manages to persuade Deputy Commissioner Ervin Burrell to assemble a detail to investigate Sobotka's activities. [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20120309011043/http://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8coOHhotXY