So like ten years ago a dude wandered into a subreddit I'd literally set up to prove how easy it was to set up subreddits. Needed help with his speech for clemency. I put like 45 minutes into it 'cuz I word good. He was looking at like a 10-year bid because minimum sentencing and had a 5-year-old kid he didn't wanna grow up without a dad. He liked what I wrote. Asked a while later if there could be someone to relay art out to the world while he was serving his sentence. In for a penny in for a pound so like a chump I volunteered. Long story short he was a spectacular case study for overriding mandatory minimums so he did 18 months. I posted his art.

A troll army loosely associated with violentacrez thought it would be hilarious to get him investigated for molesting his son. Reddit refused to do anything, said they had to violate the terms of service if I wanted anything to happen so I spent a year and a half getting them to violate the terms of service. Trolling the trolls, as it were. Got my wife doxed, got daily death threats, got violentacrez to dedicate himself to ruining my life which in turn got him doxed to Adrien Chen which landed his ass on Anderson Cooper, launched the ridiculous mess of /r/creepshots and led to the ridiculous and scummy battle for the heart of Reddit that ended... I mean, butterfly effect. The guy who founded /r/thedonald was a guy I curb-stomped into triple digit negative karma for lashing out at me for insulting Clarence Thomas but by then I was a fading memory.

Dude made good. Radically improved his art. Landed a job at Reddit - think he's their oldest employee now. Got full custody of his son. 50k instagram followers, reality TV, entrepreneurialism, all that good shit. We still talk. Not nearly enough. Friend of his, whose name I've heard for ten years but never met, vanished into Zion a couple weeks back. He refused to face facts. Was one of many who kept up the pressure well past the point of reasonability. Poor dumb SAR out in Utah spent a week looking for a desiccated corpse because a small number of vocal friends did everything they could to turn this into a story.

They found her yesterday. Alive.

Pay it forward. People helped you. You help people. The more people you help, the more help there is. "Look for the helpers." I got a deeply insincere apology out of Alexis Ohanian for the shit I got dragged through because they're too sociopathic to do the right thing but today I don't care anymore. I'm not out beating the brush in bumscratch UT but I know that every choice we make has consequences.