Dan staat het ergens - heel de kaart van breda erbij pakken en het hele verhaal vertellen

That first job? Even more hell.

I already had been building webcrap for well over 5 years by this point. I had build my own framework (explain)[] and my internships ive described. Getting a job as junior programmer therefore, got me into a disconnect where I was in the same situation as with the original mavo indication. I was severly understimulated, and any attempt to get more complex crap was obviously denied because the current things assigned to me, werent considered to be delivered properly. Because I was understimulated, i delivered crap. Thereby never breaking out of that cycle. So this was, by definition, never going to get much better.

Because of this disconnect, my social stuff never improved much. Yes, that got lonely as hell.

I stopped trusting people. Fellow classmates, teachers, and not soon after, my own parents and family, and most of the health care workers, and therapists.

Because, as you might be able to guess, that while I noticed a life-sized disconnect getting bigger, I hadn't the faintest of idea's where or what it was.

My parents were of the mindset: get a job, get a indefinite contract and spend 40 years in the same employer.

Considering this particular decline into a rather dark space, I knew I had to keep up apperances, because of the simple fact that while I didn’t trust people or my surroudnings, no-one actually seemed to actively want to cause me any direct harm. This disconnect, I found to be unexplainable.

Seeing as a quick look out the window, or at family dinners or other normal life events, I was able to “switch” to acting like I was fine, and actually being fine in the moment, when people tried to talk to me.

For some reason, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the hell was wrong. I was missing something, I had to be. I drew different conclusions to things, had a remarkable sense of humour, it seemed luck of the draw if I got smiles or confused looks from people. This later, sometimes also applied to homework. Things I believed I delivered to be “fine”, were returned as graded with a lot of question marks. Other times, I actually got the intended 6/10-grade I was aiming for considering the original “challenge” I’d given myself.

DOCDATA

Going parachute jumping and filming it because you realize no-one will believe you otherwise.

Showing this off at work, and people reacting with a ‘.i… would not have thought that about you’

buying 30 books, to see how fast I can not only read them, but memorize them as well. Apparently, day 22 I was done. (And didn’t touch another book for the next 6 months)

an I memorize an entire town? Can’t be my home town, I can already see the headline: “Crazy dude crashing into random walls with his eyes closed, trying to badly explain he’s trying to walk around and predict where everyone is going to move and walk just by sounds made”. Yeah, that’s not going to make the police show up thinking I’m high as a kite (on drugs). Let’s definitely NOT do that.. probably.

white collar crimte reverse engineering middels quantum fysika en camera redenatie

parachute jumping and my familie expecting me to be full of adrenaline when landing. Me? Completely calm.. ‘meh, we can do it again.. sure’ correcting my glasses mid-flight and spending a good 30 seconds falling 150km+h/ trying to breathe and finally finding a curvature of my face vs the air that allowed me to breathe a bit because I was starting to get worried after about 20 seconds.

When falling? Noticed the camera in front of me, and noticed my plastic glasses not covering my actual glasses. Thus, they were coming loose. I simply put my index finger on the middle of my face of nose to make sure that didn’t happen. I mean.. I was falling rapidly while tandum jumping but aside from actively plummeting to my death with gear in the vicinity of me to prevent that from happening, not much else was happening. and got a remark of ‘nice one’ and it was on video as well although im not sure about that anymore.

barend 1e ontmoeting na dat ik eerst mn ouders nog over de streep moest halen dat het uberhaupbt niet goed met mij ging.

Alle computer shit weg doen, en klimmen vol gas ingaan

ik MOET iets veranderen. Het boeit me niet meer hoe. Breek alles maar, want met dit huidige setje mogelijkheden des levens leven we niet lang meer.

docdata – common object model opmerking – iets wat normaal gezien wordt als ‘dat hoort gewoon zo’ zonder te weten waarom.

Docdata: bedrijfsuitje – ergens om half 9 zijn en me dik verslapen. Queue the matrix freeway song and me being on time on the precise minute by walking through the front door in a fiat panda. Which.. kind of got noticed as being a grandma car, but..i mean. 4 wheels and I finally had freedom.

Docdata: collega die geirriteerd is over niet geven van persoonlijke info. Ik die dat 1 of 2 x probeer en vervolgens compleet wordt beetgenomen. Gee, I wonder why I don’t trust people anymore.

Quitting job at docdata because it’s either that or certain suicide. Thus having to cross the line of parent-thinking. Being utterly confused as to why dad is protesting me quitting, considering he himself had told me that I was capable of more’.

Timing my vegas escapades with docdata stock center testing, on intuitive level. And this working out to the exact week/day. My holiday started.

Getting the esb book from work docdata and burning through it. Thinking: this is fun, new concepts. Getting the question what the book was about, summarized, and trying to form a sentence that’s waay to long. Got interpeted as ‘dude.. no.. its just moving files around, you don’t understand it do you?’.

And also noticed that the test was testing things I was just shit at. The thing I was trying to communicate? to convey? I was going to need years of pain and patience before that would become apparent.

took another blow to my existence: the pyramid-circle sort problem. i / knew / it was comming, but couldnt verbalize that this wasnt going to work in any way shape or form.

After this test day and receiving the fairly obvious autistic/asperger diagnosis? Got the contact information of a communication coach lady.

Then it came to my first job, and quite frankly I had lost faith in the educational system. And I was about to lose faith in the job market as well as corporate-related dynamics.

While hobbying around, I had already programmed for a good 8 years of my life. Yet I was applying for a junior position in the first firm that would have me. You can imagine how boring this got, and how much we didn’t understand one another. The reason I had applied for a junior job? It was my first job. I didn’t realize that 8 years of hobbying in the same languages and making cool stuff could actually be put on a resume. To me those were 2 entirely seperate worlds. My parents? I asked them later why, and they didn’t know what the quality was so they didn’t suggest it. Queue me being frustrated, angry and losing faith in my parents.

Among other things, I was told I would never have a girlfriend, I was a loser and my ideas were never considered as applicable to the situation. Ofcourse, I didn’t exactly appreciate this, so I started doing what I usually do when I’m bored: what can I do under the radar, that doens’t cause any actual damage yet gives me the information I’m looking for.

Plus, the question of where the actual limit was, was brewing.

You see, my gut instinct knew that I could do a hell of a lot more than I had currently going on in life. This meant I had to find out where the disconnect came from, or get myself occupied enough (read: under enough stimulants) to take matters into my own hands, because this couldnt possibly be all there was to life.

Setting aside that I had done some (read: a lot) of preparation work and was about a one-liner removed from cryptolocking the entire company, and lived under that strain of stress for about a year. While, luckily, saner heads did prevail, and I simply moved on, I also noticed I liked the tension, the continuous chess game.

So, I took this a step further as a science-project for my brain. I bought 30 books (average of about 350 pages), with a variation in fiction and non-fiction, and challenged myself to burn through them as fast as I could. You see, I was curious where my limit was.

Simply buying them and starting to read, while a perfectly legible plan, didn't seem efficient enough.

So, I started thinking of ways to speed this up. Every book tends to be written in a certain language. And simply put? English is a hell of a lot more contextual than dutch. This means, you can have more information in less space. Plus, you can actually gleam some parts of the sentences to speed things up. Speedreading companies have already built this into consumer-ready products, while I did this on the fly because I didn't know they existed untill after this challenge.

So, the difference between fiction and non fiction, tends to be concepts and story line. The story line you can view as a 'video' in your head. This means that, after a while, you can skip the "the's" of the story, person names you can mentally make shorter or just gleam considering it's just an indicator of who's talking or doing something.

The non-fiction books? The explanation of concepts tends to be different depending on the author of the book. Longwinded or very short depending on the degree of complexity of the information inside and the intended audience.

But, just reading a book wasn't enough. I wanted to memorize it. And not just the generic outline. This meant, not just all concepts and their dependencies in one giant graph of sorts, but also knowing where in the book it was discussed.

This, and more, caused me to read 30 books in 22 days, next to a fulltime job and some hobbies. I didn't touch another book for 6 months. :')

Upon communicating this to my surroundings? Mostly silence, looks I couldn't dechipher (yet), and frustrated suprise of sorts. This, aside from a random stranger which I bought some 2nd hand books from whom I mentioned this to. "How on EARTH did you read a book a day! ? with a giant smile" (I - might- have made the statement slightly smaller in an attempt to fit in). Thanks random lady, you made my week that couple of seconds.

Lost my faith in the educaitonal system, corporate life wasnt doing much for me either (bored in both), and socially I was pretty much isolated aside from a couple of folks. So what was I thinking of doing?

Well, I seemed to have quite the memory and information processing capacity.

So, instead of that normal people would likely do, I asked myself the question:

Can I memorize an entire town? Ofcourse, memorizing streets, shops, and the like is easy enough as that is mostly static information that doesn’t change all that much. The thing about cities? They tend to have a whole bunch of moving parts.

So, there's varying degrees of difficulty in memorizing something like this. The roads, buildings and the likes tend not to change much, it's doable.

The more complex version would be to memorize routes of semi-variable components such as taxi's, their routes, busses, trains and such.

A possible degree after that, you either cross a whole bunch of privacy lines which seemed a bridge to far, namely: the people in the town. So, instead, to make sure we're on the right side of that particular line: events, gatherings and the like.

But thats just memorization. If I can read 30 books in 22 days, and memorize them (and not touch another book for 6 months after that btw), it's a more living thing than a book. A book is, in it's most primitive form, a rather calm set of stimuli. You tend to read it and block the external factors (if any) out. If you're reading on a couch at night in your home, or in a busy train and ignoring all folks in the same cabin.

If we then bridge that to the next step; a book tends to be written from the mind of someone else, or atleast the perceptuel truth/world it's depicting. So by the time you're reading it, you're already behind, time-wise.

So, an entire town? its doable, but, ofcourse, the most-used or most-relevant information (or deemed relevant by most folks) tends to be the thing they need to live their lives comfortably. I'm taking this slightly further then that.

Then, within this challenge, something like the weather, events triggering one another and thus eventually forming the living thing itself, we go from memorization to prediction.

Our civilization has already tried doing this for a sizable period of time by doing weather predictions. You need a "live"-model of reality to get a close as possible inside a computer calculation/simulation, to be able to predict what the weather and climate is going to do.

But, you see, I tend to have a more analytical view of things, forensic even. As a kid, reading 50+ csi books and being utterly fascinated by why people do what they do. Ofcourse this causes a gravitational pull towards the events that involve that same forensic view. And while interesting as puzzles, slowly changes your worldview of humanity if you're not careful..

So, events like major conferences, dance events, restaurants and their occpuancy, and the likes are rather predictable and we want them to be. It's simply a large part of normal life. Reverse engineering those financial books would have a lot of parallels wiht the xkcd estimate of how much hard drives google has in heir data center, only less difficult.

but, we've gone from memoriziation to prediction to a forensic view of things.

Trying to predict things, or playing the equivalent of giant chess matches gets your into the kind of math that makes weather predictions look easy. Every blood cell of every living person, every ant, bit of sand, all those lives, what kind of route the cars take, commuters. It’s simply too big. Yet, if we look closely, there’s one factor at play we can still play with: time itself.

Combine that with doing some (very basic) quantum mechanics research and thinking of ways to fit this into this entire thing. Because if a change on a very small thing, instantly reflects that same change on another very small thing in a different place entirely, or being a 0 and 1 at the same time, this means that at any point, at any time, things might change.

So any action I take, any change I incur in this world, is bound to be viewed by other folks at some point. Aside from the time-delay and/or lazy security guards, what is the one thing that’s not something we can and cannot directlry change? Light. You see, it takes some form of particles to make sure human a gets to see crap that a video camera is recording something human b has done or is doing.

And considering I can’t exactly introduce a dark mode in the world like that lovely browser-addon, I can change or adapt what I bring into this world. It’s actually a profession of sorts.

It’s called acting.

This allows us to concentrate on an event where my physical appearance and communication style was likely to be noticed yet simply diluted to an extreme degree where it didn't matter anymore. So any phones, cameras, wouldnt matter, I wouldnt raise eye brows. It'd just be business as usual from just about any perspective. It'd be a giant long-take from a movie of sorts considering I’d have prepared or atleast connected as much dots as possible from my end. And.. I – kinda – knew how to act that things were business as usual. Had that particular skill perfected rather early on in life.

Have you guessed yet? What I'm getting at?

During 3 days in vegas, there’ll be a tech conference with 20.000 individuals just like me. Or atleast, people that share the same curiousity. That tend to gravitate towards creating awesome shit and at the very least, ask questoins about the current way of doing things.

During these 3 days, people like me will stand out, yet if you’re with 20.000 people, standing out is normal again. People will notice but not think much of it. While an option closer to home would be the CCC in germany, I don't speak much german. :') And, crossing the ocean while doing crazy shit had more of an intense vibe to it. Think deadliest catch. Being far away from home, hazardous in the perspective to my world-view up untill then. Filled with folks who I assumed would be smarter than me and shared a giant context that I partly filled with the latest information I could pull from news events.

And while I originally was thinking of memorizing my entire home town, I mostly and grinningly figured that doing it with my eyes closed was definetly a bad idea. Probably.

Can you just imagine someone walking in town with their eyes closed, inevitably walking into random walls and muttering something indecipherable? Try explaining THAT to the nearest cop who think's your either dazed and confused, or on drugs.

While utterly hilarious, the challenge of this still remained as a grin-inducing possibility. Although, something on the other side of this insanity would be the Pokemon Go event that, for a short time, was pretty much the closest we've come to world-peace. In both scenario's, it temporarily pulls people from the normal grind of life, with the obvious difference being: walking in a town with your eyes closed and trying to predict/memorize everything, vs all folks playing Pokemon Go and running front of taxi's and other folks because there's some Pokemon in the virtual reality space.. there's some parallels ;)

The question pertaining to the limit? I was about to go and do something ridiculously insane and I was actively grinning from ear to ear. Or well, you know.. on the inside. I didn’t exactly show it.

I was curious, you see, if I could pull off the following:

1. I had figured out that ADD was focusable with heaps of adrenaline. This’d move the line from ADD to ADHD. The next step would be LLI. And I was honestly curious if I could make that work.

While the literature basically invalidates the statements of being able to switch from add to adhd and lli, and I completely agree with that assesment. But we’re talking about a person who’s bene through a hell of a lot of disassociative and locked-in syndrome type of hells here. Self exploration that has proven to be quite a story considering the amount of people with lli and an obsession with learning. And autistic people tend not to have filters, and thus probably have lower than normal latent inhibition.

The best visual aid I’ve found for this, is this one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyuhtmr36cs&pp=ygUfQWRkIGFkaGQgbGxpIHN0aW11bGkgZGlmZmVyZW5jZQ%3D%3D

1. Memorization of an entire town? Large parts of vegas would be irrelevant to the 3-4 days I was going to be there. Yet, ironically the lesser obvious things tend to hold a whole bunch of interesting information, as per usual. Doing it with my eyes closed obviously wasn’t going to kick off, yet I’d be in the company of a whole bunch of brainpower.

The problem? When doing or planning crazy shit out of boredom, you can very easily sound like a lunatic, and not in the fun way, to your surroundings. Not that this matters a lot, but you can imagine that while writing this, I'm inclined to atleast provide some context to make sure we're on the same page.

I layed out some ground rules:

1. I don't want to do any actual damage.
   1. This means: literal, but also: time, resources, and those factors. So no time wasting of government workers, no phyiscal damage, no computer-software damage etc.
2. While I might be frustrated or atleast noticing that the part of life that tends to grow between 16 and 30-ish? socializing and having 'fun' and having those experiences? Aside from not knowing how to participate, it was exactly that. MY problem. Not anyone elses. So no incel-bullshit thank you very much. It has quite frankly always baffled me to read about incels and their approach to this problem. You do realize killing people will by definition reduce the amount of women that’ll now be available to have some kind of chemistry with?

To bring some sense of ease to the reader, I’ll give one example that’ll bring some line of thinking you can think along the lines of.

Because, well, I tend to walk the exact line of about everything and thereby tend to make my surroundings flip the fuck out on occasion.

As long as the generic thinking remains on the side of the following Sherlock quote, your mostly on the right track of mad-scientistry.

"Did we just break into a military base to investigate a rabbit? ;'D " (source)[]

It's the lunacy of extremes, and doing ultimately harmless but still extreme shit out of the general curiousity and need to explore.

Right, so memorization of an entire town, vegas, hacking stuff computer magic crap:

The first chess match that I was going to kick into gear, was luckily enough also the easiest one.

When you book a flight from europe to America, you’ll inevitably get processed in a whole bunch of checks and systems that you know nothing about. One of those checks, however, is easy enough to learn about when reviewing flight companies and experiences/stories from others. The simple fact of booking a flight while providing your home adress from a computer that doesn't reflect this same information, might just get you pulled out of the line for some questions. Ofcourse, booking from a neighbouring wifi point will likely not cause too much fuss, but if your booking your flight from a random server in russia, some more questions might arise.

The even more interesting bit: where’s the line there. If I’m booking a flight, while being behind 8 other servers that eventually circle back to my actual home ip, how much of that information gets to the people and /or checking systems and might get me pulled out of the queue on entry into the united states?

Do notice however, that getting picked out of line is a semi-random event. So even if you get picked and questioned, it might not even be this particular lunacy that caused the dude in the uniform to line you up for questioning. And, you know, booking a flight but accidently leaving your vpn on because you misclicked it and you thought it was your work-vpn one is still a legitimate excuse.

Ofcourse, this isnt intended as a guide for people wiith less than ideal motivations to get into the country, so I’m not going to elaborate on what I ended up doing in this case. The bigger point I’m trying to make, however, is that by continuously playing these chess games, I learned a lot about the environment, checks, people, culture and more, while not wasting any time from either corporate or government official types because my aim was to simply not raise any alarms. So if I’m aiming right, and make no mistakes, I’ll learn a lot about where the limits are, not causing any damage, not wasting any time of government officials or border control and to top it off, I get to have a proper challenge. Correction: I get to continuously play various chess games in varying degrees of complexity. Let the games begin. ;)

The problem I then faced was, while my brain might be producing grin-worthy ideas, I can't exactly book a flight on my own for this. I grew up in a type of home that at least produced a sizeable dichotomy in contrast to this en-devour.

Plus, you know, if I'm playing these chess games but there's a sizable portion of the holiday that's really just nature and sight seeing, my dad simply was none the wiser.

So, I had to social engineer my dad a small bit, because it originally took about mount everest-like effort to get my parents to listen when i told them i wanted to be checked for an asperger diagnosis. Doing this crazy shit? This only upped the anti. On the bright side, because the smaller things were already taking quite the bit of convincing, the larger things weren't even going to be suspected. That made things easier.

And, you know, I probably shouldn't cause an inter-continental incident because I'm bored... probably.

At this point, I'm weighing about 45 kilo's as a 23 year old dude, and have been severly understimulated for quite some time.

What followed was the most awesome, adrenaline induced and high-pressure chess-riddled insanity I’ve ever embarked on.

You see, while not breaking any laws, you sure as shit are stimulated properly while doing all of this.

But, while all of this chess-insanity was about to take place, I needed a cover-story to make it more plausible why this glass-wearing, stereotypical nerd-looking dude with a hairdo from 'just woke up' and physical appearance of a walking skeleton was this early to a tech conference across the globe and seemed to be focused but tired. The easiest way I could think of?

In the documentary of Defcon combined with some internet research, I had noticed that the first order of business was getting an electric badge. There's only a limited supply of those. Considering the queue tends to be rather sizable (20k follks need to enter, 4 cassiers), you need to be in that line .. on time.

In my case, this meant making sure I arrived in vegas 24h early. I was going to need pull an all-nighter. This meant, I had to make a choice. Bring some books which, by definition, eventually make you sleepy. What food and water to bring, because I couldn't move from the queue. Once you step away from your spot as a lone dude? I wasn't sure if I'd be kicked to the back of the queue for going to the bathroom. So, simply preparing to not need the bathroom seemed like the best option. This would succeed...but at what cost :')

Embarking on a holiday with my dad while he was none the wiser about pretty much all of this was becoming rather interesting. You see, we had a couple of weeks of USA booked with a whole bunch of nature stuff, that happened to include 3 days of vegas.

This also meant I had a hell of a lot of preparation to do, because I was not going to know in which state I was when (As in, tired, bursting with energy, dealing with random unexpected crap, hungy, etc.). I was going to need all the preparation I could manage.

Memorization of an entire town? Knowing what business is where, which ones were the proper ones, which had been in the news recently, layout of the town, recent news articles depicintg recent events, crime statistics, and more. I had practised this before and the "skill (?)" came in handy.

Combine this with knowing, I was going to be in the company of 20k people, most of which have either a functioning brain with a lot of curiosity, but a sizable number of them are probably simply a fuckton smarter than me. So, I'm embarking on a crazy adventure on the line of adrenaline-induced insanity, while in the vicinity of folks that have more life experience, have been in the business longer, can see right through bullshit and tend to be much smarter than their employers.

There isn't a single part of this idea that SOUNDS ok, does it? :')

So, I was going to need to teach myself a whole bunch of stuff to make sure I was as prepared as I could be.

To start of with: malware, reverse engineering, videos and talks of the 5 years prior and all the names, speakers, crowd reactions and such. I’m not going to attempt to cover everything I prepared because, well, that doesn't seem all that relevant.

I wanted all of this done a week before the scheduled flight to the USA to have a bit of a 'buffer'.

My dad? Also had a to do list, and noticed I was pretty much on fire in activity but mostly guessed it was positive and learning related.

We went on the flight, and landed in LA.

When arriving, you tend to have been awake for 30+ hours, are rather tired and your internal clock is fucked up because you've just traveled to a timezone that differs about 9 hours. The most reasonable way of dealing with this, is staying awake untill about 21.00 in the evening, then crashing/sleeping and waking up at 7-ish. You'll have a proper reset and mostly can pick up a normal rithm again.

Me? I had slightly more crap going on in my brain. You see, I had the chess-induced things going on in parallel. Every check, every security guard, every camera, I was on high-alert while acting like it was a Sunday afternoon. Because I had of course, been looking where the bloody limit was. From booking plane tickets to other stuff.

What was rather smile-inducing was that out of the 2 of us, I could understand the american accent just fine, my dad? needed a bit more time. The gaming years and a whole bunch of internet had ironically enough prepared me a ton. It was as if I had lived here for my entire life. Which the environment noticed. Plus side? More of a connection and an easier time communicating. Down side? It suprised lots of them which I hoped wouldn't raise suspicion. Then again, with my physical appearance and demeanor? Mostly smiles.

The most of that holiday was quite frankly awesome, considering i normally don't care about nature or culture related things. But the sheer exploration-factor and stimulating envrionment that we found ourselves in (try photopgrpahing a well known nature phenomena.. it just wont come across as you're seeing it. Some things you just need to experience rather than try and capture. They're biggeer than life). This ofcourse, was a subtle clue pertaining to my future. Culture, beach holidays, going hiking/biking in "generic" locations? If it makes you happy, please, go for it. I just need the more... specific things in life that tend to be at extremes of life. Case in point: photographing a giant mountain.. it's just not going to come to life on the camera..

Upon a quick stop before vegas, we found ourselves in a rather semi-deserted town with like 4 or 5 buildings. Our overnight stay.

While unremarkable, I noticed the wifi wasn't exactly secured. I seriously considered securing it for them, but mostly guessed I'd be misunderstood. So i simply left some thhings in their logs telling them "you might want to fix this, the next tech guy might cause actual harm, im just trying to help"

Ive never heard anything of it.

The drive to vegas in and of itself is through the middle of nowhere. Upon arriving, you notice that the thermostat tells you its 45 degrees, its dry heat. So its actually manageable.

That, and the entirety of vegas is basically an adult playground. So the cab drivers and general population of industries (shops, workers, cleaners, etc) tend to notice an awfull lot of nerds just came to town.

Combine that with a hacker conference, chess-induced plans, and a city that never sleeps, and... well.. atleast I was properly stimulated. :P

I was going to get as much sleep as I could seeing as I wasnt doing 4 allnighters.. humans tend to die at some point of being awake for too long.

But, I sure as shit wasnt going to be late to the queue.

So, knowing; I had to figure out where the event was given that the hotels tended to be rather sizeable and not at all unlike narnia, it was time to do some prep work. Some things simply weren't google-able from home.. there were some dots I couldn't possibly connect no matter how much I prepared.

My dad mostly wanted me to land properly while the tech stuff was mostly magic. or atleast, that's what I guessed from his reactions. And there was still one part of the social engineering process that had to kick off for me to be able to do what I needed to do.

So, we went together, found the conference and where i'd need to be, and found out when it'd need to be in line in order to get a proper chance at an electric badge. Ofcourse, There's a proper chance, and pretty much a guarantee. So, Me being me? Fuck it, Ive gotten some sleep, im getting in that fucking queue and dont much care about how insane that is.

I ended up being the 4th in line. The folks surrounding me? While I was having metric fuckton of chess matches, things to take into account and the like, seemed ok enough. The occasional drone flying over our heads while leds, laptops and hackers did their thing.

Let's make a list shall we?

View to the outside world? Not available, no windows where I was sitting.

Chair? Kiiind of completely missed that part of the preparation phase.

Biorithm? A very basic reset was done, but this one was going to hurt.

.. uitschrijven van de rest van alle factoren

When putting this on my CV, there’s been veery few people that asked the question if I really put a music festival on my resume (Defqon). There hasn't been a single recruiter, manager or .. well human, that has gotten that particular joke of being 4th out of 20.000. Well.. one of them asked if I had won something. But can you really win QueueCon? ;)

I might have played some conversational chess with supposed (counter)-intelligence folks, gotten some contact info from some folks, and other crap I dont even dare mention in this book. The key point being that none of those folks are dumb enough to have their ID with them. It's a legal neutral-ish ground. Because the things presented are simply likely to of the information that's .. on the line, or with a cautionary headline, over, or going over. Things, we as a society, haven't yet figured out how to incorporate into our life yet. We don't know how to deal with it yet, that's the policians job.

A quick example - lets say someone hacked a vibrator that has some kind of internet connection or bluetooth thing.

If someone then scanned for all bluetooth devices and turned them all on.. how would that be interpeted? If some lady happens to be preparing herself for a fun night, and the random person remotely turns it on, without knowing she is preparing herself for that fun night, is that sexual assault?

And, the more lunatic version: a vibrator connected to the internet to make long distrance relationships work. Can you just imagine a couple gazillion vibrators all over the world being randomly turned on and off? xD

And now, lets say that the fix from the manufacturer has come down and fixed the way the person hacked the vibrators. That fix might just introduce another way of breaking it. But, if it's presented as if from the manufacturer, it'll get a wildly different reaction than if some randon dude on the internet pushes down a fix. The vibrator owners would be either happy they're safer or simply non-the-wiser. But if the manufacturer pushes down a fix that happens to also introduce a phone-to-home mechanic that allows the manufacturer to push down future fixes to the device remotely? Can you guess?

Can you see how changing simple parts of the information presented gets interpreted incredibly and wildly differently? verder uitwerken

The one thing i didnt account for? When youre in queue for this long (10+ hours).. your lymic system tends not to like it much. After repositioning and using up every limb i had, my ass, legs, feet, back and well, eventually most of my body just felt bruised, dead and tired. I had been in the queue for about 12 hours or so.

So, I can’t go to the bathroom but I do have to hydrate. Well, that’s just another equation line thing right? While I drank as little as possible, that particular equation/line graph was semi-controlled.

About 30 minutes before the cassiers were opening, tape was put through the line, we were made to standup, and use up less room. I was honeslty suprised i could still stand. While I was wearing glasses, I'm honestly glad I was back then. Contact lenses would have been a major fucking problem i wouldnt have accounted for.

At this point, I was positively dead-beat tired, bursting from the little I had drank, but had 30 minutes to go.

While people were ytrying to make some conversation with me, and I tried my best to answer them, my engilish was ok enough, and they deemed me 'seems ok'. Me? I was in full-on surivival mode. As intended. I had lost my trust in fellow humans, and while these folks seemed to be genuine, I was at the very least, skeptic.

That skeptism? Lasted about 15 minutes after the 'blow" from the supposed counter intelligence dude when he admitted he lied, yet his cover of html/css wasnt exactly bulletproof. And this made me think... if I immediately, even before you've spoken the end of your responding sentence, that it's bullshit, I've gotten a knack for language and context. It was mostly a confirmation of people being annoyingly always wanting something. If I, an untrained and extremely tired nerd notice this shit, this also meant: I might actually have a fighting chance here.

Aside from that one blow? I was, just about instantly, pulled from the dark hole I was in mentally and taken aback by the friendyness and bright answers of these folks. Still skeptical, but the good intentions were instantly noticeable. I'm guessing they ironically figured I was the silent type again.

Aanndd.. I - might - have made a small boo boo. Some grown up talked to me, and asked me with a smile: So, you're atleast bi-lingual. What do you think of someone who only speaks 1 language?

me, not exactly thinking this through because I'm not far removed from passing out: "a moron".

His answer: "An american"

me: "o... shit... sorry... "

he laughed and said it was fine.

Something tells me they had their suspicions of that I had going on in my brain, but I'll never find the answer to that.

These people really were THAT awesome. Dutch people e.g. my own country, had pretty much always sent the message in one way or another: "fuck off and die, we dont want you, youre strange and odd". These folks? It instantly clicked.

The most obvious clue I had more complex plans, was the fact I had no laptop with me.

You see, my gut instinct toild me i had a knack for language. My bulshit filter was very well developed and I always saw things either faster or drew not just different, but conclusions a few node-points in a graph, further down. This meant, I was playing a different game here.

Laptops, hacking, and learning as much as possible was interesting, but I was from a relatively small town from a rather protective home. While some problem with authority was present and I had prepared and studied a lot, I also knew: in 10 weeks im not going to beat the world-class folks that might just roam here, considering the CTF event that was taking place. Things like writing your own assembly instructions because you're bored, or building a CTF that contains challenges where the architecture of the thing youre dealing with, changes on the fly, were understandable yet also a message in and of itself: Make a net as big as you can, make all the notes, and memorize as much as possible, because alll the information from in here? I want it. O, and ofcourse.. try not to die, don't make waves and act normal. No pressure.

Walking through the room of competitors which was basically the equivalent of the wimbledon? Holy fuck. I'll never forget it.

The wall of shame was smile-inducing as all fuck-ups tend to be conference-wide up on the big screen.

But, I had more shit to do.

You see, in order for me to do what I needed to do, I needed a way to wake myself up without waking my dad, thus not making a single noise. I needed it to be a guarantee to work, not arrouse suspicion and most of all, this. could. not. Fail. If I made a misake? Breathe a single molecule in the wrong direction and I'd be somewhere between Beyond Fucked and actually dead.

It went as planned, and I'll simply never forget those hours of utter adrenaline and chess induced insanity.

After the event, it was time to pack up and go home. But, I had just spend a lot of hours in Vegas, but hadn't even come close to a gambling machine. That didnt seem right.

I threw my last remaining dollar in a random gambling machine and my last remaining dollar? i took with me. Now I could legitimately say: I took a gamble in vegas ;D It definitely didn’t take me 2 minutes of mumbling obscenities to the machine’s general direction to find out where the crap the dollar was supposed to go.

To put some ease to the minds of the folks reading: remember those groundrules?

Let's tally things up

Damage caused: -1 dollar (gambling machine, I hope you get the joke)

Amount of ego's bruised, including my own? I'm going to plead the 5th. - O wait.. ;P (I’m not an american, so pleading the 5th is remarkably useless for me)

My last dollar i took with me as keep-sake, which I still own. Sometimes a dollar is all you need to remind you of a life-sized memory.

they instantly got me: these are my people, yet I don’t trust people yet. And while in another timeline of this universe, I might have kept in touch with a lot of them, I wasn't ready for that yet. While my trust in fellow-humans had grown, it was nowhere near enough to be semi-functional. Although I might have met some folks that were on another line.

Have I mentioned I weighted 45 kilo's, being about 22 year old dude? So I almost went knock-out, seeing spots and having to go to extreme lenghts to make sure I survived, while also knowing: If i go harder, ill pass out, of i go slower, I wont make the planning and or do what i need to do, if i stress out? ill burn too much energy and ironically pass out again.

While in a hotel/town that never sleeps, and inside the hotel, all sense of time is easily lost as the windows werent always present. So you had to mentally keep track of what the time was. You see, I had scraped enough information together that I knew some folks would be fucking with 4g repplicator things. E.g. phone connections would be available to be toyed with.

All my gathered info? What did I want it so much?

Because I knew that information of the type I wanted, was only going to "spawn" / originate from places like this.

What is the easiest thing to get across a border? Information.

Aside from the obvious factors such as air, and the vehicles (cars, planes, employees), knowing something tends to be not exactly checked. Ist mostly drugs, plants, animals and the likes that are watched for. Since scanning people's brains for information and memories isn't exactly developed yet, and I simply had no interest or business with the things that were deemed to not cross the border with. E.g. plants, drugs, animals etc., this was going to get interesting.

Because, I came to realize:

The biggest problem of this universe? Information dispersion.

This also would unlock something of this world not a heck of a lot of people get a chance to experience: I'd have information that'd take society about 3-6 months to get across the border using the natural order of things. So things hit the news, and I had known for about 6 months by that time.

What do the controling/watching/checking vectors look for? That which just so happens to fall out of line, out of the current structure, the anomalies.

So, this also means, that If i can restructure or reshape information of the anomalious kind, to something that perceptuallly is equal to something that fits in the structure my surroundings were expecting? No-one would be the wiser. I was starting to see a pattern here.

This basically forms the conclusion of why I endured all the pain the comming years. I'd be trying to fit into a structure that's expected while working more than double as hard to make it fit and be suprised or disillusioned that folks wouldn't return the same level of energy, kindness, or general ciruiousity or appreciation. Aside from a couple of folks I've met since then, I now understand why. I simply receive more information and thus draw conclusions that are based on information people tend not to concern themselves with. Life for most people tends to be within comfort, within the given structures, away from pain and dare I say, a bit of curiousity.

The most notablle example of this, is when i applied for my first job, i had an application at a not to be named company. about 10 years later, I'd join that same company as consultant in a small team of folks that were tasked with renewal and innovation. to a next-gen level.

So, it took 10 years for them to catch up. This meant that, while smile-inducing given the conclusion that apparently the fight I had been in for a decade, had come to some sort of fruitition by validating that, yes, indeed, people DO understand, it is possible.

The downside? Given 10 years, I also realized that be me apparently always ahead of most folks, wasn't going to help me be undersstood by most folks. I would've liked more friends, but they simply didnt seem to exist.

Riding the informational wave of the conference. I. Live. For. This. Shit.

2e x defcon:

vegas: chauffeur die de achterklep bijna vergeet dicht te doen

bus die in de fik stond met vakantie pa, net rijdende na lange vlucht

My dad still thought I was simply going to a tech convention. He’d see the welcome poster of the event, and wanted to take a picture. He proceeded to make a selfie. I couldn’t laugh but holy crap it took a lot of effort not to.

Within the first night of the second time I’d go to defcon, I’d get to talking with this hacker chick, in line. Within 15 seconds, I drew the conclusion I might just be in love. Note, this isn’t some love at first sight bullshit. You see, this crowd tends to be a certain type of people. She mentioned she was working on a project that confused the shit out of nmap. With just that simple fact, plus the smile she had while telling me, was everything I needed to know.

What do I mean by this?

I knew she was attending this event, and had attended before. I knew she had the same line of thinking as me because there was immediate understanding. I knew what part of the field she was working in and the complexity that that entailed and required. Also saw the smile, meaning she was enthouasiastic about the work she was doing, and the general vibe of the rest of the folks told me they either knew her or she had been here long enough to be ok. I could go on, but you probably get the point by now.

Having survived this, while smile inducing, also got me to a rather depressing conclusion: If this shit wasnt going to kill me, it was time to help the universe out a bit.

I got so far as being a one-liner away from cryptolocking the entire company. While I never did bother to calculate how much damage that would have caused, I imagine it would be a whole bunch of zero’s atleast. On the bright side? Saner heads prevailed. Some readers might interpet this as a cocky fucker attempting to tell everyone how bad-ass he is. Once again, I urge you to reconsider. I honestly just wanted a proper challenge… albeit in a roundabout way. I was just severly understimulated and trying my absolute best to get out of that particular understimulated context. Ofcourse, offering idea’s which were more complex and better, didn’t exactly land well because of my actual title, and they were also misunderstood because the thinking in a more hierarchical setting tends to be more lineair. I tend to think on lineair, lateral, visual and often 3-d space at the same time. While having absolutely fuck-all in social skills and thus not exactly conveying it to be properly understood. Not that any attempt seemed to be made to understand it. In hindsight? we we both powerless in terms of crossing that particular bridge.

Back home?

Going back to my frankly misfit of a job like nothing had happened and I had a fine holiday was a rather unique thing to experience.

Also, immediately being called to a manager because the crap you built wasn’t working as expected.

While I saw a disconnect in the complexity of my job and the crap I had just pulled off, I couldn’t vocalize or explain this. I would not be understood.

Trying to give any sort of hints, the biggest one being my compiler project that turned Pascal into native JVM instructions, was met with a ‘o kindly go fuck yourself’-vibe of disbelief. They clicked open a random file and asked me to explain. My silence got interpreted as ‘see, you cant do shit and your making yourself bigger’. From my point of view? Youre asking me to summarize the entire dragon book [link] in about 1-2 minutes and I cant phantom how to do that. Because I doubted they knew the entire dragon book and thus I didn’t know where I’d be supposed to start talking from.

So, my silence, from my end? Mostly a “this isnt going to get any better, is it?”

All of this? while being paid about 1700 euros a month for 2.5 years while actually doing a job i was supposed to be paid 4500 euros netto for.

This company, currently ingram micro, can go royally fuck itself.

introduced this here to basically tell them i was bored as shit. TIS-100. Assembly game

Fiat panda ongeluk tijdens docdata tijden, tichelaar opgelicht

dishonored GOTY edition i talked about too, no-one gave a shit