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Introductions and Abouts

Why Bastard Academic, you ask? You put the word Gentleman before both terms: the Gentleman Academic and the Gentleman Bastard (at least according to Scott Lynch).

The struggle with writing these biographical parts of a profile is not to just fill them with seemingly-endless lists of adjectives, most of which are representative of the self through our own rose-tinted glasses. I am not a fan of such things, one should always re-evaluate and challenge one's one preconceptions, about the self as much as about anything else.

I am a student, both auto-didactic and university enrolled (although currently on a gap year), specifically reading Cyber Security, and it's associated nightmares. Alongside this, I am reading into international relations, geopolitical theory, ethics and philosophy, as well as slightly easier things like, how to write, how to improve handwriting, and whatever subject comes to mind when it briefly touches my consciousness.

I am an atheist and an adherent to the scientific method. No, I don't think science has all the answers yet, far from it. But that's the point. Science is about doing something properly to get the best answers we can. It's a huge universe/multiverse out there, and we've barely scratched the surface of our own planet. We live in exciting times, and gods have nothing to do with it.

I'm a fan of the usual things as well; I have an extensive music collection (almost all of it in FLAC, for quality) covering all of genres, from Pop to Progressive Viking Metal (yes, that IS a genre) via Opera and Folk. I love film (MKV file format is a firm favourite), especially Arthouse, Thriller and Sci-Fi, but only when my head isn't buried in a book or 7 (my record is having 7 books on the go at once, and all of them finished in about 6 months).

I have pretensions of being a wordsmith, but so far have only really succeeded in university papers (some of which needed a desperate glance over to correct spelling, grammar, and wrong word placement before submission), and a Cyber Security blog for a specialist programmer recruitment agency, CoderSource.io, some of which will be shared here. Everything else I either abandon with the intent to return to, one day in the vastness of the future, or the project keeps shifting form before my eyes: my current fiction project, for example, began as a steampunk adventure novel. So far, it has mutated into background material for a tabletop RPG and no less than 4 short stories/novellas. This may or may not be a good thing, and may or may not be rectified. This administration makes no definitive statement either way.

The intention for this will be to collect some of my Cyber Security blogs for CoderSource.io, as well as supplementary information and resources on and around the field. I will also throw in the odd instructional post on things I’m learning or working on, as well as the occasional political theorising/ranting and philosophical musing.

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