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ziq wrote (edited )

2010 - Got moved from the office I was working in to a converted shipping container outside. Thought it was awesome that a container could be repurposed like that.

Started growing tomatoes, papayas, pomegranates, grapes and greens on an empty lot. Learned about all my local wild edible plants, started foraging for some of my food everyday, became raw vegan because I was only eating raw fruit and greens I either grew or found while wandering.

Took out a loan and bought an acre of land to play with in the mountains. Got hooked up to a nearby village's well so I had running water. Planted hundreds of trees, vines and palms, built some ponds and water filters, trellises, experimented with growing water plants like kangkong. Didn't have electricity, but I'd charge my laptop at work and then be able to watch Seinfeld episodes on it for a couple hours at night before the battery died.

Got a shipping container and converted it into a little cabin so I could live in it on my land full time, learned about various green building methods. Built a composting toilet. Built a series of increasingly powerful wifi antennas so I could steal internet by pointing them at the villages in the valleys below.

Work moved me to a warehouse in the industrial area.

Started a self sufficiency youtube channel that made me briefly internet famous because some patent troll company claimed one of my videos as their intellectual property and I pushed back by writing about it on slashdot. This introduced me to reddit when the slashdot article went viral there.

After a couple years of greasy oil lamps and having to store my food underground, I got some used solar panels and car batteries and was able to get a small fridge and power my laptop all day.

Wrote a satire novel about collapse and the decay of civilization and self published it.

Built a house on my land for less money than most people's cars cost. Got some more solar panels and got a TV, washing machine and bigger fridge.

3G came to my area, so I could stop spending hours slowly moving my antenna trying to connect to the single remaining unlocked wifi 3 villages away.

Launched an anarchist news site, wrote articles for a year and some change, but realized anarchists didn't care and closed it down.

Tried to make better online communities - first r/socialanarchism, then r/leftwithsharpedge and r/anerchism.

Learned how to install satellite dishes and managed to find about 100 free to air English language channels, mainly news and documentary.

Finally convinced my long distance partner to move here. Got married. Then she left.

Started raddit because reddit deleted lwse for ACAB and white genocide memes. Met emma, who made my dreams of building an egalitarian internet community come true. Relaunched as raddle.

Met tequila who greatly improved my writing with their suggestions.

Wrote a bunch of anarchy essays that got turned into zines and translated into several languages.

Got a cast iron stove and started eating cooked vegan food again so I don't have to spend so much time finding fruit and greens to eat.

2019 - An anarchist publisher picked up my second book, which contains all my anarchy essays including new ones I wrote for the book.

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Blackbeard wrote

Damn Ziq, mad respect! Thanks for sharing that, I found it quite inspiring. Stories like these help snap me out of the general fog I find myself in, going through the daily grind. It's great to have a reminder that there are people out there actually bucking the system in some significant ways and really making it work. Well done.

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[deleted] wrote (edited by a moderator )

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ziq wrote (edited )

They put the patent troll's ads on my video and I appealed and the patent troll said they reviewed the video and confirmed it's their property. Google closed the case. So I wrote the article and it went viral and everyone started hating on the company, forcing the CEO to issue a public apology, do an AMA on reddit to curb the anger, and release my video back to me.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq wrote

The best part was he kept sending messages begging me to call him so he could apologize and salvage his company's good name and I just ignored him, and then he whined about it in an interview, saying I had no interest in forgiveness.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

That's a fascinating story of persistence. You've really made a home for yourself, despite starting from scratch and having to deal with various challenges and setbacks. Not just physically, but digitally at that

I hope to do this someday soon with a person I love very much. It will be a place for traveler comrades to stay, with space for collective projects and housing. Hopefully, I will be as successful as you have been!

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6c_6f_76_65 wrote

damn. I feel like you have lived three lives through different time periods. The amount of knowledge and experience you must have gained is inspiring.

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El_Sabate wrote

I spent most of 2010 deployed to Afghanistan. I was single, a member of what I now recognize as being an abusive religious cult, and profoundly broken, suffering from profound PTSD and depression...which led to

A faith crisis, an ideology/political crisis, and to have to question everything I'd ever been taught or thought I understood. I passed through just about every kind of crisis you could think of, come out of it so much better off. I am still kinda broken, still suffer from PTSD and depression, but I'm free of all of the ideological and religious blinders that oppressed me and all those around me.

In this decade I've gotten married, adopted 4 kids and had one of my own, moved across the country to a state I'd never been to, where I knew no one, and dragged my family with me. I've gone from faithful mormon to devout atheist. I've gone from guy who grew up very conservative but kinda liked Bernie to a full blown insurrectionary anarchist.

It's been a hell of a decade.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Do you consider writing creatively? Memoir might be a way that helps you isolate the traumatic memories on paper, making them less heavy to deal with in physical reality. At least, that is how I have approached my own untreated PTSD

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El_Sabate wrote

That's a good idea, I'll try it out and see if it helps. Thanks!

I'm hesitant to use something like Google Drive, even though that's the easiest. Any recommendations on other programs/software to use for this that can be stored in the cloud for access from multiple computers/locations?

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celebratedrecluse wrote

riseup.net has a documents service. It is plaintext format, so not as ergonomic as google drive, and it's publicly held on the internet without an account attached to it so you'd have to keep the link secret, and it'll delete after 365 days if you don't edit it at all in that time. However, it works, if you're just concerned about a plaintext

You can also upload here, under a burner account, or on this one. You can furthermore send yourself private messages on this burner account, and if you want you can later delete the DMs. That's what I would do, in a pinch. Then you just need to remember your login info, and you can access your writing wherever with nice Postmill formatting tools to use for paragraph breaks, italics, etc.

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OdiousOutlaw wrote

Holy fuck, that's almost half my life!

So I went from public school to being home-schooled to unschooling to charter school and finally graduating from a public high school before heading to university after 2 years of nothing.

My mom met my step-dad around that time; they separated around 2 years ago, but maintain a civil relationship. He's the father of my little sister who was born 6 years ago. My older brother became a father a few years after my little sister was born. My paternal grandparents passed, my uncle committed suicide, and my great-grandmother passed after living over 100 years. I went from being overweight to the point of having respiratory issues to dedicating myself to a regular workout regimen and maintaining a somewhat toned figure that I'm satisfied with. My diet's also changed; I've cut off soda and pork entirely and I've reduced my meat and fast food consumption considerably. I plan on switching to a vegetarian diet once I have more control over my food supply. I learned that I was diagnosed with Asperger's before I went off to college; my parents kept that hidden from me for an unknown amount of time. I went from Deist to apatheist; from Libertarian without much of an understanding of economics or politics, to Ancap without an understanding of economics or politics, to self-styled anarchist with some progressive liberal sympathies, to libertarian socialist, to anarcho-transhumanist, to ancom, to ansynd, to egoist, to just plain anarchist with egoist and absurdist tendencies. I also had a brief anti-feminist streak. I'm very ashamed of it, despite having kept these views to myself.

A lot of other things happened, but that's all I'd say I'm willing to share.

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[deleted] wrote

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OdiousOutlaw wrote

Honestly, I'm not sure if it's something I could recommend to someone else. I was unschooled for most of my middle school to my high school years; so I was kind of okay because I already had a foundation of knowledge to work with in terms of English and math. You definitely need to have an interest in a few topics in order to motivate yourself to learn about them in a consistent basis. Both my charter and public high school years were pretty easy, though that could just as easily be a testament to how subpar the education system is in the US instead of how effective unschooling was. That being said, I think I personally benefited from the experience: I got really familiar with using computers, learned some decent cooking skills, had a lot of leisure time, and worked through a lot of personal issues. My only real regrets are that I never took up coding during the time and that I didn't think about pirating text books.

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asbestosstar wrote

Almost everything! I changed Primary schools and started secondary school . I became good with computers and history and changed interests multiple times and got interested and involved with politics. Much more!

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jumboja wrote

How did you get involved with politics?

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asbestosstar wrote

talking about it, writing about it, even pretty much knowing anything more than who the US president was

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

I became convinced that ethics is the eternal seeking of better ways to live and living them, without compromise.

Eventually found my way to anarchism, and became one in a full sense over about five years.

For the first time, I gave absolutely everything I had to something important to me, and I failed with deep consequences.

I'm still here. Everything is tenuous. Aside from dying, there's nothing left to do but just keep on searching, growing, acting, with what energy I have.

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jumboja wrote

It's interesting that you came to anarchism from ethics. I wonder how common that is.

Did your failure allow you to grow as a person? Did you absorb the failure and find a way to do good with it?

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

It's interesting that you came to anarchism from ethics. I wonder how common that is.

Me too. I wonder where else people come to it from.

Did your failure allow you to grow as a person? Did you absorb the failure and find a way to do good with it?

No, and no.

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JOG_YOUR_MENTAL wrote

i put my dog inside a golden orb then i was totally corrupted by the force in the Abyss

listened to more and more good music so it balances

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celebratedrecluse wrote

What albums? I think I might want to release some music soon

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JOG_YOUR_MENTAL wrote (edited )

planning on releasing electronic music?

i have a unhealthy fixation on chopped&screwed, droning noises, heavy bass. i'll pass around more tapes

though i don't want to lower the energy around here with too much gloomy stuff.

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rot wrote

well I've been getting into this anarchist thing lately so...

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