Ever since I played watchdogs and shadowrun, I wanted to work in cybersecurity, especially as a Red Teamer, which is literally Shadowrun - you run complex ops that have to break in, and steal stuff from largre banks without anyone but the management knowing about the test, with almost nothing being off-limits, as long as it doesn’t cause some kind of damage.

Five years later, I do work as a Red Team Lead. Hpwever, our company was just scrambling to start doing RT since thats the buzzword now, and while we did have amazing pentesters, unfortunately pentesting and Red Teaming requires vastly different skills. Ypu never need to avoid EDRs, write malware with obscure low-level winapi, or even know what kind of IoC ajd detections will a command you run create, when you are doing a pentest.

But since no one knew better, and I love learning and researching new stuff, while also having Red Teaming romabticized, my interrest in it eventually led to me getting a Lead position for the barely scrambling team.

Mind you, I was barely out of being a junipr, with only three years of part time pentesting experience. It was NOT a good idea.

I quickly found out that RT is waaay harder and requires the best of the best from cybersec and maleare development. We didnt have that. Also, turns out that I love to learn now stuff and take on a challenge, but being a Lead also means you are drowning in paperwork and discussions with client, while also everyone from the team doesn’t know what to do and turns to me about what should we do. Which I didn’t know, and barely managed to keep learning it on my own. Our conpany didnt want to give us much time for learning outside of delivery, I was only working parttime, and I was slowly realizing that we don’t have almost any of the skills we need.

We were doing kind of a good job, most of our engagement turned out pretty well, but it was atrocious.

Turns out, I’m not good at managing and planning projects, or leading people. I’m better just as a line member.

You will probably have to get a domain, but some of the ugly TLDs can cost few bucks for a year, so it’s not that bad.

As for being able to access your Nextcloud from outside, if you don’t use it to share large amount of data often, I recommend looking into Cloudflare Tunell. It’s pretty easy to set up, and allows you to not only put a configurable firewall in front of your Nextcloud instance that you can for example geoblock traffic from other countries, but you also don’t have to deal with port forwarding, DDNS, or exposing your home network directly into the internet.

The setup is simple, you just download their cloudflared service, install it with a token generated in their web management (that ties it to a domain and tells it what port it should expose) on your Nextcloud machine, and it will automatically connect to Cloudflare server that will act as a port forward, but without you having to expose anything on your home network directly.

I don’t really access my Nextcloud from the internet that often, don’t use it to stream or share large files with large number of people, so I never had issues with it. But I’ve been told that it’s against Cloudflare ToS to use it for large data sharing, streaming or high-volume data transfers, so keep that in mind.

But it’s perfect for accessing my Home Assistant and Nextcloud when I need it.

Nigel Stanford has some amazing videoclips. I love Robots vs. Music the most (especially since the tune and the whole Automatica album is amazing), but Science vs. Music is also great.

And he also did a few making of videos. While I’m sure most of the final result is CGI anyway, it’s still a nice touch.

Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I. Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’

From Intentions, by Oscar Wilde. It’s one of my favorite books, all of the essays there are amazing, I definitely recommend anyone giving it a read.

Exactly this. It probably varies from person to person, but tapping my foot when listening to music at a computer in rythm with the song, or just noding my head slightly makes me way more invested into the song. Doing anything in sync with music is satisfying - that’s why games such as Beatsaber or BPM - Bullets Per Minute are sooo satisfying to play - if you don’t get dancing, I recommend giving BPM a try.

And dancing is basically the same. You don’t do that for others, but to enjoy the music more. And especially with drugs or alcohol involved (because it usually erases any kind of self-consciousness and focus on how you look, so you can focus just on the music), it just feels so great.

And as for ballroom dancing - being so well in sync with someone in addition to the music is an amazing experience. It takes time and requires a stable dancing partner, but once you eventually sync with eachother and know the steps well enough that you don’t have to think about it and it just flows, it’s an experience unlike anything I’ve had with a second person. And my dancing partner isn’t even my girlfriend, but just a friend.

One comparison I can make is what I had during highschool, where I’ve wasted several years literally only playing League of Legends with my best friend for all of my free time. We played ADC/Support, and after few hundreds of hours we were so synchronized that we would could instinctively react to each other without thinking or talking about it, and it was a really weird experience. And really interesting, I’ve never experienced something like that with anyone else (before I started dancing, that is), and it’s such an unique connection of minds and thinking that it’s an amazing experience.

Cryptocurrency is a scam. Not just certain coins, but the whole concept.

And anyone investing into crypto is literally stealing from others. The people who made thousands of dollars on the crypto hype are not lucky - they literally stolen the money from someone down the line. Someone who probably needs them more, because it’s the stupid people who will be stuck with worthless coins at the end. It will eventually be a zero-sum game. The only thing you can do with crypto is to sell it to someone else at a profit. It has no use or value. And it’s a miracle that people are still willing to buy it at such a price. And since it has no inherent value, every time you sell it to someone at a profit, you are literally scamming them, or someone else.

Because there will eventually be people loosing literally millions of dollars, stuck with a worthless stash of crypto they can do nothing with. Their only option is to hype up others, scam them some more and hope that they will buy it, so they can steal their money and let it be their problem.

Anyone making profit on selling crypto is evil and should feel bad about it. Because the thousands of dollars he made on it may as well be someones life savings they couldn’t afford to loose, but did. People should realize this, and not glorify the lucky individuals who got set up for life by getting in on it early enough.

Once the crypto falls for good, there will be many lives ruined. And a lot of people will be defending it, “you should have sold earlier, just like I did”, that’s how they will justify it. No, it’s not about selling earlier. Everyone who made a profit at selling crypto is responsible for it, and should be reminded that it’s his fault. And every one of those lives ruined was the price for the profit anyone has made by selling crypto. And we need to keep reminding them as much as possible, when this happens.

people would have lots more free time, instead of looking for ways to fulfill themselves sexually.

As an asexual, I can tell you that unfortunately that’s not the case. I suck at life, procrastrinate most of the free time I have and I’ve never really felt like it’s any kind of an advantage that I don’t have to deal with it, as far as “being more accomplished” is considered.

But I agree on your other points. I have amazing relationships with other people of both genders, because it turns out that it’s really a lot easier to make friends when you don’t need to fight the urge to bone them, or have an ulterior motives.

Just a headsup - don’t focus too much on meds, it won’t really help that much if you’re also lacking willpower.

I have the same problem as you, but have started meds about half a year ago. It helps a little bit, but also made me realize that whenever I’m stressed or have to do something I’m uncertain of, the problems are back.

I thought it’s anxiety that’s stopping me, because right now I have to finish my thesis to hand in in a week, and I’ve been sitting home and staring at the screen unable to work, progressing at a snails pace for two weeks already, to the point I will not be able to make it.

Due to that, I’ve gotten a short term medication for anxiety, because I thought that’s what’s stopping me and I can’t get over it.

It didn’t help, and while I wasn’t feeling that awful, I still didn’t manage to force myself to work more, and even though I would’ve comfortably made it, I progressed so slow that now I probably won’t. But it made me realize that the problem wasn’t anxiety, but willpower, and that the focus on it was just an excuse to justify postponing work.

I’m not saying that meds will not help you, but make sure you don’t fall to the same trap as I did - I used waiting them as an excuse for too long, that I’ve learned to just be OK with procrastinating. And when I finally got them, it didn’t help much , because I never tried building the willpower and have gotten too used to the excuses that even when the “need to wait for meds, nothing I can do” excuse wasn’t true, I was still turning to procrastination by habit. Or you’ll just think “meds aren’t helping, I need stronger”.

If you start forcing yourself, even if at slow pace, to not be OK with procrastination, then the meds will be a miracle that will suddenly make it so you don’t have to struggle so much anymore. If you on the other hand learn to give up trying and accept the excuse that you need the meds and there’s no point, and that it will be easier once you have them - my experience is that it won’t, because then getting rid of the internalization of excuses only made it as hardy, or even harder, than it was without them.