Disaster Zone Network

About Myself

General Information

Educational History

Manifesto

While labels and symbols mean different things to different people, I like to think of myself as a minimalist with a passion for information. I am on a journey to obtain horizontal knowledge and experiences. I hope to try my hand at many different jobs and gain knowledge in many different disciplines. My goal is to to be a generalist in the same way the great historical figures such as Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others were.

One of the best ways to get this wide range of experiences is supposed to be through travel. I have already spent the better part of three years exploring online worlds and meeting people from many countries. The experience was largely positive, and the logical next step is to actually do it in the real world. In order to do so, I must arm myself with more languages, particularly Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, and French. I hope to travel long term, and work a local job and absorb the local culture at each destination. I intend to wear local clothing, eat local food, and most importantly, refrain from judgement. The areas I would most like to travel to as of now are North Africa (Algeria to Egypt), Central America (Mexico to Panama), Middle East (Lebanon, Syria particular), USA (deep south) and China (mostly coastal). To a lesser extent, I would also like to go to Japan, Brazil, Russia, India, France, Germany, Italy (Vatican), and Argentina but doubt I can live enough years to make that work. This is also further complicated by the requirements to learn Japanese, Portugeuse, Russian, German, and Italian. West and Central Africa, the Baltic States, Australia, and Cuba are certainly inciting as well. The adage seems true, so many places to go and so little time.

With so little time to spare, it would make sense to get started as soon as possible. I once thought a person had to be rich to travel and see the world, but I have since learned that it is may not be the case. By lifting the intermediate goal of becoming "successful" and making money first, suddenly a wide range of possibilities become available. Why run the rat race of long work weeks to make some wealthy CEO wealthier or to make some high power bureaucrat more powerful? Why not cast off the shackles of success and materialism and enjoy life for oneself? I will not fall into that trap of conformity. I will define my own freedom and keep it at any cost. Even if this decision results in facing death, hunger, and loneliness, I look forward to meeting those challenges. After overcoming whatever trials there may be, I hope to have quite a story to tell in the end.

The Hanged Man

hanged man public domain art

My Internet alias, h4ngedm4n, is named after the respective Tarot card I identify strongly with. The following excerpt is tarot expert Rachel Pollack's interpretation of the Hanged Man, written in the Vertigo Tarot:

The Hanged Man forms one of Tarot's most compelling and mysterious images. We see him here close to the traditional iconography, suspended by one foot, upside down, from a tree branch. The legs form the number four, the number of the Emperor, representative of the inexorable laws of existence. Usually, the hands go behind the back so that the arms form a triangle, but here we see Shade bound throughout his body.

The most important symbol in the traditional card is the face. The Hanged Man does not suffer. We see him radiant and joyous, for the tree is the Tree of Life, and he has bound himself to spiritual truth. He hangs upside down because he has reversed the values most people live by, seeking Strength and Justice rather than personal profit or power. Here, golden light obscures his face, though we see a solar face beside him. He hangs above a map of the cosmos. For Shade, the tree is Madness, which for him is both a place and a tangible force. Shade gains power from it, but he cannot separate himself from it. Like the Hanged Man, he can only surrender. The Major Arcana begins with the duality of card 1, the Magician, and card 2, the High Priestess. The number 12, formed from 1 and 2, suggest a bringing together of seeming opposites. Shade uses the Madness to connect qualities we normally think of as mutually exclusive to each other. These include male and female, violence and gentleness, aggression and passivity, and even madness and sanity themselves. Above the Hanged Man we see a blur of red. The shape resembles a bird, and the color suggests the phoenix, reborn out of the fire that burns it up. Shade's own peculiar kind of sanity constantly rises, reborn, from the wild fire of the Madness.

The phrase I like most is "hangs upside down because he has reversed the values most people live by". Other phrases I liked were "spiritual truth" and "peculiar kind of sanity". It is certainly enough to choose it as an identifier. To make the identifier unique, I wanted to substitute the numeric representation of the Hanged Man's legs, an upside down four, for the letters "a" in the word "hangedman". Since the upside down 4 is not a commonly available character, I settled for the normal 4. The final result, h4ngedm4n, is an identifier unique enough to register online without tacking on random numbers.