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.

On Burning Out

It’s mid-August in New York and I’m writing here again for the first time in over a month. If you detect a little guilt in my tone, it’s because even though there isn’t a huge audience for this little blog (which was part of the point of starting it) I set a goal for myself to do at least one of these a week.

It’s been six weeks since I hit that goal. There are reasons for this, which will sound like excuses but they’re not.

In short: July was an intense month.

At work, we launched a new space for artists and a video series that I’m writing, filming and hosting. On the social front, I had family visits from two different countries. They’d both gone through a long and brutal quarantine, and so I tried to give them as much time as I could during their stay. I also started on a few new projects, spurred on by my approved work permit and an eagerness to pursue paying projects. All this on top of the YouTube channel, a running habit, setting up a store and feeding social media.

These are all good things, of course. Just too many at the same time. (Like I said: reasons, not excuses.)

And so: I may have burned myself out a bit.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Usually, when I burn out, it’s preceded by a successful period of prolific output. I get excited because things are working just as planned. People around me get excited. I commit to more things and I pile on, because I feel invincible.

“I can do it all,” I tell myself, and before I know it, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Downtime is the first to go, and adequate rest with it. Quality starts to slip. I wear myself out meeting every task. Something in the machine fizzles, sparks and spirals out of control. BOOM. Crash and burn.

This is a pattern that has gotten less dramatic over the years. This time, there was no crash-and-burn.

July was busy, but everything went as intended, minus those blog posts. I’ve gotten better at recognizing when I’m about to hit my limit and pulling back. We are our own worst taskmasters sometimes. Remember: to thyself be kind.

Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day and I took the entire day off: went to Forbidden Planet, picked up a bunch of books and devoured them at a coffee shop, on the train home and for the rest of the evening until I feel asleep. Today, I’m still indulging in a bit of healing over my Sunday chores. I’m writing this now after an epic laundry-folding session, letting the words unspool and sit on the page just so. The stress is fading. I feel relief.

Writing this has been such a comfort. I hope it’s been a comfort to read. More soon.

Andrew Drilon / New York / 8.15.2021

Between Every Rainbow

This is one of my favorite strips from Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac, the middle part of an epic serialized story in 2005 wherein Danders the guinea pig gets lost in the city as he tries to make his way back to his cage in the preschool:

I suspect it’s a micro-parody of Homeward Bound and all those animals-quest-for-home stories.

Speaking of, here’s a panel from WE3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely:

He is indeed a GUD DOG. God, this comic is so good, I tear up every time I think about it. If you get the re-released version, they threw in a few more pages that weren’t the original. The climactic “IS COAT NOT WE” moment gets shown and some other nice bits.

It makes me think about Morrison’s “hyper-compression” technique and how much story he actually leaves out of most of this work. Think of all the little scenes we’re missing when we read or watch anything; what beautiful interstitial moments are often left on the cutting room floor? Think of how cruel you have to be to abandon the inbetween.

I was dog-sitting this past weekend, which is probably why I’m ruminating on animals seeking home. We walked around Hell’s Kitchen several times, enjoying the vibes of the Pride Month, where rainbow flags fly high from the tops of buildings and sparkle from people’s clothes.

New York City lifted its restrictions this month and all the festivities feel like people have forgotten we’re still working through a global pandemic, which is a bit unnerving. I wore a mask the whole time while the dog trotted next to me, happily oblivious to any of these complexities. Little anxieties welled up between our steps, between every rainbow. But the celebratory vibe persisted, and we made it home okay.

Fragments in the Void

Today’s bus sketch.

Okay, so I’m just starting a quick sentence to note down that I don’t feel like I have anything to write about today.

My mind keeps coming back to that quote by Austin Kleon, about how you don’t write daily to say things that you already have to to say—instead, you’re writing to figure out your thoughts and parse them out in words. (Note to self: find the actual wording of this quote for later.)

I think I get the principle of it, but its practice and execution feels much easier said than done. Obviously, as a human being, I have no shortage of thoughts, but they’re mostly disjointed, scattered fragments that often don’t cohere into anything that resembles all the lovely writing I read on a daily basis.

This is compounded by the info-dense world we live in, where an ocean of notifications, messages and ideas threaten to drown us in information. So many of my day-to-day musings never resolve into anything substantial. Incomplete, they float off into the void, conclusions aborted, as my attention divides across manifold distractions.

I suspect this is the same for everyone. Good writers just have the clarity of purpose, and probably a good measure of patience, to organize their thoughts on paper.

That’s where the craft of it comes in, I guess. Find a nugget of a fragment of a whisper of a thread, and braid it together with some offhand knowledge. Splice in some memories and wrap it up in language to produce a readable string of sentences. I dream of doing this without struggle, letting the words flow out of me the way I imagine it does for the great writers of our species. Until then, I’ll keep plugging away at it, like Murakami on a marathon, focused on the journey rather than the destination, each word a step that takes you further toward that horizon.

Hey look: a few paragraphs just materialized. Not bad for having nothing to write about. More tomorrow.