Link Dump: Everything Happens So Much

INSTAVERTED

Instagram Apocalypse Averted! I got it back! Woo-hoo!

After all that drama (I got hacked, I reported it, got my account back then suddenly deactivated due to all the reports during the hack)—I am back on my proper Instagram, andrewdrilon. If you don’t follow me there yet, I urge you to, as it’s where I’m most active and up-to-date in terms of posts.

Not that it’s been all that active lately, as I’ve been knee-deep in finishing a bunch of comics projects. But expect the pace to pick back up around October. In the meantime, here are a few links to dive into:

INTUITED

Interconnected talks about cricket of all things to propose a different approach to your work: "Don’t keep your eye on the ball but prime your intuition." To whit:

"This seems like a small twist in framing but actually I find the difference quite freeing: I can see now that I’m no longer meant to be right with my sketches. I’m not supposed to be straight to the point. What I’m doing is scouting the field; I’m loading up my unconscious with everything it needs to make the right choice later, intuitively."

IMMERSED

Osama Shehzad talks about how desi wedding dances and authenticity, citing the trending "Quick Style" shadi dance video as well as the recent Ms. Marvel:

"Desi weddings are portrayed in popular culture, as seen on Amazon's Made in Heaven and Netflix's The Big Day, as lavish multi-day affairs — such weddings do happen but are exclusively for the absurdly rich. For most desi people, the weddings are modest affairs — often each wedding looks identical to the other. In the US, that means that there is the same venue that every desi wedding in that city happens at, and the same local desi restaurant catering food. These weddings and their decors are nothing to show off on Instagram — and that is what we see in the background of the Quick Style video...It is the wedding that most of us have attended, and the wedding that most of us will probably have. "

Here’s that trending video, in case you just want to be mesmerized:

IDEATED

An appreciation article on a ten-year-old tweet:

"Over the past 10 years, “Everything happens so much” has been turned into a shrine and a site of pilgrimage for those who spend their lives in front of a computer. When the news is not just bad but overwhelming, people search out “Everything happens so much” and reply to it or repost it to their feeds, often with a note like “now more than ever” or “the eternal mood.” These messages acknowledge what feels like ancient wisdom: The absolute best we can say about this moment in time is that everything is happening, as it always has and always will, so much."

Source: Atlantic, Getty

Which led to this gem of a process bit:

"Bakkila told The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean that he couldn’t remember exactly where his most famous tweet had come from, but thought the original context might have been, “Everything happens so much faster when you’re retired.” In chopping that sentence in half, Orlean noted, Bakkila had made it koan-like. “I was trying to wrest wisdom from these wisdomless piles of information,” he agreed."

Which is a little meta in this post full of links to other posts, but you get the point. Everything is grist for the mill. The mill has to cut things down to make them useful, a la William Burroughs' cut-up technique or just plain old sampling.

INTERRUPTED

And with that, I must go. Labor Day weekend is over, and I have a lot of work to jump on at my day job. But I’m also super-excited for tonight as I finally get to see my favorite writer, Grant Morrison, in the flesh! They’re in NYC this week doing a book tour for their new novel, LUDA. Can’t wait to get a signed copy tonight and start this short week right!

Have a lovely one! All will be well! 😁

Instagram Apocalypse

So this week has been a special little social media armageddon for me.

My Instagram account (which I’ve built up over the last 14 years to 5k followers) was hacked on Monday. The attacker had taken over one of my friends’ accounts and pretended to be them, messaged and phished me. I was doing grocery at the time, my brain full of a recipe list I was trying to recall as I hunted down ingredients, when I received a message like this:

And, distracted and multitasking as I was, I thoughtlessly did as they instructed, thinking I was “helping them.” I was, except “them” was not who I thought. Within seconds of a verification link, they had locked me out of my account, changed all my credentials and edited my username with underscores and numbers.

I’ve spent the rest of the week since trying in vain to contact support via both Instagram and Facebook, while the hacker posted Bitcoin crypto-spam on my Stories and attempted to swindle more people out of their information while pretending to be me.

Wednesday night was the worst, as that’s when the hacker messaged pretty much everyone in my DMs, attempting to steal more accounts. Most of them saw through it and contacted me separately, confirming that I was, indeed, hacked. A few were sadly hacked as well.

Photo: Lorenzo Di Cola | NurPhoto via Getty Images

This whole thing has been a nightmare. I’ve been struggling with feelings of despair and guilt. It’s one thing to lose an account which I’ve lovingly curated and built up over years. It holds a lot of memories. I’ve made some very dear friends on that account, and it’s how I’ve maintained many relationships as I’ve moved continents.

But it’s quite another thing to have a malicious entity use your face and name to steal other people’s information. The thought of that really breaks my heart.

I’ve been encouraging everyone to please report the account. This past week, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the likelihood of me reclaiming that account is very low. The hacker really did a number on me, and the revision of my username basically invalidates any backup security codes I had.

But I’m hoping that if enough people report the account, Instagram will take it down. The fact that it exists right now, using my identity in malicious ways, is monstrous and offensive to me. I just want it gone.

In the meantime, I’m processing the loss of this.

As a tool for connecting to people, I really really valued Instagram. My daily habits included posting to Stories (a lot of dog videos, hellos and check-ins with whatever I was currently drawing.) I used it to help motivate my work. And while I can work without it, I miss having that feedback.

It’s going to be a slog building everything back up.

Ce’st la vie. Aside from being more careful with security, I’m looking at this as a reminder to not get so attached to one platform. I’m happy I still have this blog, my YouTube channel, Twitter and heck, even my Facebook account. At least I still have some of my network of family and friends on there.

For the time being, I’m going to keep trying to get the account back.

At this point, it’s just a repetitive circle of trying to get Instagram’s automated security to validate my identity. I’m told some people managed to get back in after weeks and months, so even in this dire apocalypse, hope springs eternal.