If youāre laughing at the tag line, youāre at least a Gen-X elder. Nobody tell the kids, make āem Google.
Thanks to my vastly improved health, things are about to change dramatically around here.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Health improved bigly, found that commercial gig Iāve been seeking. Pondering what to do with this Substack for its third year.
Origin:
Anyway, here we are, 731 days and 755 posts into what is now known as the Netwar Irregulars Bulletin, after renaming a year ago from Infowar Irregulars Bulletin. IIB was a better acronym, but far too many people said āSo ā¦ youāre an Alex Jones fanboiā. I would think it obvious that I am NOT, but oneās communications are what is heard, not what you said.
During that time weāve done a number of quarterly projects, then things got muddled after the 2024 election.
September 2023 - a sort of boot camp, meant to help develop skills with the tools needed to operate safely.
4th Quarter 2023 - using The Online Operation Kill Chain as a basic, we considered this from the aspect of a small ISR node characterizing and interdicting malign influence.
1st Quarter 2024 - loosely focused on PANOPTIC, short for Pattern and Action Nomenclature Of Privacy Threats In Context, a MITRE privacy oriented framework. Weāre going to keep coming back to this one when I find material.
2nd Quarter 2024 - for the Malign Influence Operations Safari we got access to a fancy new tool set in the form of Semrush/SEOQuake, and we also explored some high profile leaks.
3rd Quarter 2024 - Weāll be covering the Snivel War, working the long tail of MIOS investigations, and Tailscale is an epochal change in how networking is done.
Some things happened in that muddle - I sort of gave up publicly on influencing policy in Mourning Mankind, near the start of 2025. I became the Brand Defense Strategist for Cicada 3301. Then I got up off the couch over a chance to land a hit on an SVR Red Sparrow. This is a āone for the thumbā project for me, Iāve tagged all the other Russian intel tentacles at least once.
And then, fairytale style, I started messing with Claude Desktop and MCP servers after a surgery in early July, and thanks to that My Long Nightmare Is Ending. After eighteen years of describing symptoms to doctors, who generally dismissed me because Iām autistically odd in person, the AI kept suggesting MCAS as a diagnosis. Since then Iāve been to an allergist, then back to my GP, to get another allergist who does not hate on autismal oddballs. I have some additional lab tests ahead, but Iām following the OTC protocol, and itās working.
Facing The Future:
Cicada 3301 recognizing the value of Shall We Play A Game? was the beginning of a number of things, first the Brand Defense Strategist duties, then a reboot of the collectiveās crypto efforts. There is no immediate revenue, but the fascinating new friends and validation have been not just a breath of fresh air. Itās a good stiff breeze, filling my sails.
My writing here, which is more or less daily, long form, and technical, was noticed. I was contacted, we talked at length. They had been paying attention for some time. I had mentioned that I was done with conflict as a career, that I just wanted something commercial. And just like that, I have a new thing to do with a startup. Itās not precisely the āR&D CTOā thing thatās on my LinkedIn, but itās right in that general vicinity.
And I have a decision to make regarding education. I am re-entering the workforce, California will pay for classes and certifications if youāre poor enough, and I qualify, at least for the moment. Iāve started a dialog with them about what it would mean to have my income exceed the program limits, but it seems as long as Iām within the bounds at the start, this is something theyād get to count as a win.
So the question is ā¦ do I get the CISSP ticket, or do I go for a paralegal program with a focus on digital discovery? This is a ways down the road, for the next month I just focus 100% on those new duties. But I am pondering ā¦
Conclusion:
So I am not precisely sure what to do with this Substack going forward. Here are some things that might make sense:
We are due to revisit defense against the dark arts, so September is going to be another bootcamp, just like the very first month this Substack was active in 2023.
There is a thing I want to do for Q4, itāll be a bit like MIOS, but Iām not 100% on whether I have time to do it justice.
Settling in to a daily Geocyber post; itās easy for me to spot a video per day thatās worth three hundred words of context keeping. Corporate fiefdoms are ever more cocky about their self-emancipation and if Sam Altman is right about Artificial General Intelligence, we may literally be facing a Skynet moment before the end of this decade.
Leaning in on the application of Anthropicās Model Context Protocol to situational awareness and analytical tradecraft. Parabeagle was just the start, next will be LLM working memory, either something with Chroma, or cleaning up the problems with Memento.
Chronicle my pursuit of the education options, assuming I actually do it.
Having a drastic health improvement thatās going to stick is truly a marvel for me, as my next big birthday is sixty, and itās not all that far off. But that being said ā¦ Iām not sure I have enough years left to monetize having the CISSP or paralegal, so of the five, thatās the one thatās most up in the air.
All of this is contingent on what my revenue oriented daily duties are ā¦ which is a deeply weird thing to contemplate after having been so ill for so long.
Weird, but impossibly good. And I would not have made it without the generous assistance of regular readers whoāve soldiered along with this Substack. So again I say ā¦
THANK YOU, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU
Options!