Oh hai! I’m back in the real world. DEFCON was tiring as hell, but a total blast. I spent most of my time planning a party. It came together with tons of help of some awesome friends. I’ve never done anything of that scale before… if you were there, you know! Other than that, I got some art out there in meatspace and passed out some stickers with the site on em. Hopefully I get some gigs out of it. I posted the Skytalks art here, and I’ll get up my contributions to DEFCON art and 303 stuff soon. I did the designs for 3 of the shirts, including the goon shirt, one of the keycards, the program cover and a CD. 
I’m absolutely tickled that I got that much exposure. Thanks Neil!
I barely worked the Mohawk-con booth this year, but they did great. A fuck-ton of money was raised for EFF, Hackers for Charity, Denhac (my boys!), Heat Sync Labs, Alpha One Labs, and Skullspace Labs. Mohawk-con even got a writeup on CNN!
My goofy ass managed to get on the CBS evening news. I was giving an interview on mohawk-con and the hackerspace-challenge donation boxes, and in true media fashion, it was cut down to an intro to an unrelated story: Hacker convention mined by feds for recruits
Yeah… about that. I’ve never considered myself a hacker. When that link appeared on my facebook, I untagged myself and had a minor panic attack. I hang around some very clever people, and I think I can match most of them in drinking match, but really, I’m an artist, a rights nerd (<3 EFF) and a gadget lover. Honestly, when the reporter asked me what a hacker is, I was like a deer in headlights. Shit, what the hell is a hacker? I think of “Internet Security” right off the bat. That’s cool, but aside from attempts at being aware of it, it’s not something I’m into. Nah, I’m more into the creating side of it, the modifiers. The people who are so stubborn, they’d rather create something completely new or “fix” something to suit their needs. People who aren’t afraid to break something expensive to learn about it. How many of you got in trouble when you were kids for taking apart the VCR? Yeah, I thought so.
Hardware hacking is fucking neat. I suck at it, admittedly. My skill set goes about as far as circuit bending and not burning myself with a soldering iron, but I’m working to change that. DEFCON has the hardware hacking village, that I’m too much of a weenie to spend any amount of time at. I’m shy as hell (no really), and I don’t want people over my shoulder while I do… anything. I grabbed a “Getting started in Electronics” book from Denhac to fill in some gaping holes in my knowledge. Hopefully I can get somewhere fun with it.
What about body mods? Does that count as “hacking”? I kept getting asked at con “What was your talk about?”. Either they mistook my contest badge as a speaker badge or they mistook me for someone who knows something. Ha! I did think about what I could possibly give a talk on, if I could avoid passing out on stage. I had a magnet in my finger once, but I’m pretty sure that talk has already been done, and I borrowed the idea from them anyway. I wonder if I could talk about transitioning? I don’t think most trans people would appreciate me referring to it as “gender hacking”, but that’s a whole other can of worms. More on that next time. Off to bed with me.