Personal History

I saw a TV show once. I have no idea what show it was, but there was some neurotic woman that this guy hooked up with and she had amazingly tattered panties on and he was like "WHY????" 

So she explained to him that she HAD to wear them because they were her "lucky panties" and every time she stopped wearing them, some major political or social drama happened and she was convinced there was a cause and effect relationship. She HAD to wear them because if she didn't, it was HER fault when shit happened in the world.

I don't think I'm quite that crazy BUT I'm aware this post may look like that to other people. This post addresses the question of "Why write at all if I have no traction and make pathetic amounts of money?"

It gives you MY subjective point of view which I cannot prove is factually accurate. If my inferences are actually correct, OTHER people theoretically COULD verify parts of my story but I have zero reason to believe they will and every reason to believe they won't.

As a musician, I've always been amused that I'm both British and black; particularly because so many American musicians seem to aspire to be British while so many British musicians, in the '60s in particular, went to such great pains to be black.

That's a quote from the Wikipedia article on Saul Hudson, AKA Slash, the guitarist from Guns N' Roses. It sounds eerily like something I said on Metafilter while homeless which the classist asshole evil moderators -- who actively encouraged other members to bully me -- promptly deleted, so I can't prove I ever said anything along those lines.

If he stole that from a homeless writer without giving her credit, may he burn in hell.

No, I don't expect the classist asshole abusive moderators to back me up and tell people "Yea, verily, she DID say something like that on Metafilter and we DID promptly delete it because shitting on poor people is one of our favorite hobbies." After all, I'm banned for life from that cesspit for bullshit reasons and good riddance.

If a wealthy, famous musician SAW that comment in the short time it was live, decided that sounded good and he wanted to repeat it without crediting the homeless writer he stole it from with plausible deniability, I have zero reason to expect him to grow a set of ethics at this late date and admit to that fact.

As best I can tell, I am the highest ranked woman on a discussion forum called Hacker News (HN) which is run by a venture capital firm called Y Combinator (YC,). I don't participate much there anymore and stopped posting my own writing there some time ago, but at one time I was quite active and did post some of my writing there.

While I was still fairly active on HN, Sam Altman became President of YC. Due to his position at YC and my status on the forum they run, I'm reasonably confident the man knows I exist and if he doesn't, he's more incompetent than he seems.

HN is part of the YC funnel for applicants. You can't apply for VC money from them without an HN account and at least when YC was new, your comments on HN were used to help them judge applicants. So in theory, anyone participating in vetting and interviewing their applicants is READING HN and should organically be aware of any and all prominent and active members, at least to some degree.

At the time that Sam Altman was President of YC, I was homeless and I was very open about that fact (which I suspect helped get "mobile first" implemented more quickly as THE web standard). Being the extremely loyal and ethical sort, the nanosecond Sam Altman was promoted to President, he immediately began making noises about using that job as a stepping stone to running for governor of California and there was a series of articles outlining his political views.

He was pro UBI and pretending this meant he was going to bat for the little guy. I was homeless, anti UBI, very much one of the little guys and I came to believe he was full of shit.

I once tweeted @ him and he studiously ignored it though he likely knew who I was, likely knew I was homeless and supposedly was "for the little guy." I also had a blog where I was writing a lot about why I was anti UBI and pro housing solutions instead. 

I no longer write about UBI and that blog is no longer live. Here is my blog with my ideas about housing solutions.

When I was writing about UBI and how I was against it, articles about or by Sam Altman that outlined his pro UBI position seemed to consistently echo ideas of mine after I wrote about them, but twisted them into support for his position. This consistently happened AFTER I said something in particular.

Can I prove that Sam Altman was reading my blogs and using and twisting my better than his research to support a "looking good"/ "for the little guy" political position? Nope.

Do I expect Sam Altman to ever ADMIT he did something so shitty to a HOMELESS woman while LYINGLY pretending to be for the little guy? Absolutely not.

(UBI is not a means to solve poverty but it's an excellent excuse for rich assholes to cut the little people out of the halls of power, which was exactly what Sam Altman was doing to me by not acknowledging he knew me, not replying to me on Twitter, not admitting my writing was the source of his ideas though he didn't agree with my political position on the topic.)

Are there maybe other people who know that actually happened and could vouch for me? I have no idea, but even if there are I'm not expecting anyone to come forward and back my story.

At some point, I started a blog called Raising Future Adults. I posted a piece to HN called The Hand Licking Incident which got me zero dollars and ZERO cents and no new Patreon supporters but did see substantial discussion and about 60k page views over two or three days.

At some point, I googled the phrase that is the name of the blog and learned that right after I hit the front page of HN, there was a small spate of articles using that phrase in the title. None of them credited me as the source of the concept nor linked to my blog.

Can I PROVE a cause and effect relationship? Nope.

But it seems a bit of a stretch to try to claim it's WILD coincidence that several people simultaneously came up with that exact phrase and concept around the same time very shortly after I hit the front page of HN with a blog by that name. Nonetheless, when I noted that on HN once, I was essentially told that's exactly what happened. 

So I have no reason to think my readers won't see that and conclude "neurotic woman with lucky panties syndrome who imagines connections that don't exist."

In the ACTUAL"neurotic woman with lucky panties syndrome" category and wholly unprovable:

When the Global Pandemic, AKA COVID-19, started, Donald Trump was president and doing the sort of psycho controlling shit that inspired me to start this blog. 

I was seeing a lot of articles that made me feel like his excessively controlling approach was threatening to break the country up into multiple smaller states, like New California, Cascadia and Free Alaska. Locals were making noises to the effect of "This is not okay with us and measures shall be taken to protect our people should that become necessary."

I had a nightmare about President Trump slamming his fist down on a "table" and it breaking apart, an expression of my fear that the articles I was seeing suggested our country was in danger of breaking apart. So I wrote a blog post with (IIRC) "Mr. President" in the title to express my concern that he needed to lighten up.

He did lighten up thereafter and I stopped seeing those articles and stopped having bad dreams.

Do I expect Donald Trump to tell planet Earth "Yea, verily, when I was president, I was reading the typo riddled, rambling blog posts of a very ill homeless woman and taking her advice."?

Nope. Never. The idea is laughable.

But if it quiets my nightmares and hurts no one else, what the hell do you care if I write due to lucky panties syndrome?

Extremely Pedantic Footnote

Thanks to age and boatloads of prescription medication taken over the years due to a serious medical condition, my memory isn't what it used to be. In the interest of accuracy because I really am neurotic I guess, I wasn't in fact homeless at the time the Pandemic began but was still homeless when Donald Trump took office in January 2017. 

I got back into housing in September 2017 and was living in poverty housing and extremely poor when the Pandemic started.

I believed he was reading my blog while I was still homeless and I feel if he was, in fact, reading the blog of an extremely poor American and taking her advice, he should have credited me at the time and done something to help me escape poverty.

If he was in fact doing that and didn't credit me then, he's not going to credit me now at this late date. And even if he did, it wouldn't erase the glaring character defect of using a desperately poor American while President and doing NOTHING for her.

Anyway, you heard it here first: That deluded nutter Doreen Traylor believes SHE singlehandedly prevented the US from breaking up into half a dozen smaller countries as a consequence of an incompetent psycho controlling President fucking everything up during a global Pandemic.

So I HAVE TO BLOG, obviously.

/My ridiculous playacting of pretending this needs to be accurate because someone might actually READ it. Ha ha ha.