Well, it seems I'm back again.

Month after month as I stray away from NG I wonder to myself, should I just cut my supporter payments off? I'm not using it, I haven't been there in X months. But I always tell myself, "It's not that much. You spend more buying a taco. It's something you want to support." It is in this way that the moment passes and has passed for most of this year.

I began today, upon returning after many months, by noticing that I could no longer post in my beloved General forum, which had been locked some number of months ago in an effort at pest control: "Keep your shitposts to Reddit" seems to be the general consensus. I've recently left that platform when I began to realize just how inundated with bots and trolls it had become. Russia's state-sponsored "Internet Research Agency" is the most obvious example that comes to mind, but by this point I doubt they are the only ones: Unit 8200 in Israel and China's Unit 61398 are also likely culprits, and I'm sure CISA has some back-office doing the same sort of work. Such is the new world of cyber-geopolitics, and we're just living in it.

This is all to say that we are in the midst of a new era in the history of the global internet, one in which world governments vie for your data and aggressively drive public discourse, battles will be fought over the laying of submarine cables, and data (and privacy) become the new gold. It was in this spirit of historical prescience that I started a little club here in this corner of the internet. I've got a few ideas for topics, but I'm always open to suggestions if there is something you think I should research.

More than anything, I hope to be able to offer my modest skills to serve as a curator of a sort. I'm sure there are other people doing this too, elsewhere, but they aren't me and there isn't here.

s e e y o u o n t h e b o a r d s . . .