Heya friendos! Some of you might’ve received the previous newsletters at weird times. I’ve been having trouble with my mail scheduling system for some reason. Sorry about that! Hopefully this one makes it in time.
How Am I Doing?
I’m back from my trip to Île-de-Bréhat and feel refreshed, rejuvenated, relaxed and rested. I had a great time with my family as well as some recharging time by myself. I’d be remiss not to share some pictures of the beautiful nature there, so here you go:
It’s a small island, but quite diverse in environment. There are beautiful rocky landscapes to scale, like those up here.
And you can scavenge for seashells and food when the tide is low, like up here.
My kneejerk reaction when I go to a beautiful place where I enjoy my time is “I want to move here.” Naturally, I had that this time around as well. I’m not sure if it speaks for my need to get out of the city or the wonder I feel when I’m in beautiful nature. Surely romanticizing countryside life is a factor as well. Either way, I’ll ride the high of this trip for a while yet.
What Am I Doing?
On this trip, I left game development behind for a bit. I still have some complicated feelings to work through with Rumorweaver, and don’t want to start anything new before my planned jam week with one of my friends. In the meantime, I could work on some frameworks I have lying around.
As I said last week, I also read up on some cyber security beginner reading. It seems interesting and fun, in the way that it really resembles playing a sport. A good way to learn is to simulate abstracted real life situations with an attacking and a defending team. You do recon, strategize beforehand and then execute your plan, while allowing yourself to pivot to other tactics if it’s not panning out. Kind of like heist fiction!
I’m especially interested in social engineering; the craft of manipulating real life situations to get access to stuff you shouldn’t have access to. I’ve always imagined myself to be a good spy for some reason. I used to daydream about planning heist situations while in school. Social engineering for cyber security reasons seems like a fun, mild variant of that.
What’s also curious to see is how corporate-coded cyber security training is. For example: “ethical hacking” does not refer to morally justified hacking, but to legally sanctioned hacking. That’s certainly a choice of words.
Why Am I Doing? (this)
I’ve got a lot of ideas floating around in my head at the moment, but they’re muddled and messy. Some of them are poisoned by the state of the world. I feel an increasing need to be politically active, but can’t put that energy in traditional activist means. I need to content myself with learning skills that can potentially help in the future, but progress is so slow that it can be frustrating sometimes.
I do feel like whatever I’m doing will make a difference in the long run, so maybe it’s just about finding peace in that. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing about it!