Weighing anchor

2019 has been a formative year - or perhaps a re-formative one. What began as a tentative experiment on my part to reduce my reliance on Google's search engine with alternatives like DuckDuckGo has exploded into my own personal war on Silicon Valley, deleting my Facebook and drawing down my Google services across the board, investing in VPNs, augmenting the privacy of my browsers, secure e-mail, and cryptocurrencies, a process stoked and accelerated by the relentless collective insanity pervading the mainstream world of "Web 2.0.".

All of which has at last brought me to Steemit. In leaving Facebook, I cursed how it has served to cheapen our relationships, erode our online communities, and sap all sense of authenticity from our interactions on the internet. Steemit is one of a few moonshots I'm making to try and rekindle the lost sense of wonder and community the internet used to provoke.

And I have a good feeling about it. From Steemit to Mastodon and Gab and the evolving revolution of cryptocurrency, at the grassroots there is a sense that our last and only hope is to embrace decentralization in order to preserve the values we most hold dear: freedom of association, privacy, and freedom of speech chief amongst them. The sense that we can no longer afford to side with the lesser evil, and that evil must necessarily be overwhelmed with good, pervades it. Even if it should all fail and come to nothing, it would still have been worth the attempt.

As for me, I've worn many masks and played many roles. My proudest and best achievements online have been in PC gaming, specifically modding. Those who played Skyrim on the PC may know my greatest work: Follower Commentary Overhaul, a simple mod that worked to enliven the NPC followers with recycled voice acting. Though it's been eclipsed by others in the past few years, it was a runaway success at the time, one which I am still humbled by the reception of. My accomplishments are not limited to Skyrim, though, and I've made mods for everything from Baldur's Gate to Minecraft.

I am also barely an artist as well, particularly in the pursuits of heraldry and vexillology, to which my DeviantArt is devoted. In my heyday on NationStates as Arizona Nova I easily made dozens of flags for players for many years, though of late I've been more often employed in the humble art of meme farming. Either way I'm always eager to find an excuse to fire up my reliable old copy of Paint Shop Pro.

If you want to track me down, I'll be around here but I can be most reliably found on the *other* Steam platform, under the same name. I also have a ProtonMail under my terzaerian name. I'm not actively developing FCO at the present time, but I'm always down to shoot the breeze on the latest Bethesda antics.