# What Happened to You?

As most of you know, my website and e-mail were down for several months starting in June 1999, when I virtually disappeared from the Internet and the zoo community. It wasn't intentional, and I apologize. It's a long story, and it's been almost as hard to write as it was to figure out exactly how to begin....

I guess this whole mess started in mid-June 1999, when a "reformed" (?) zoo by the nick of "Zoobuster" had my website shut down due to its content. He may have sent additional complaints using false names, to be more convincing, but that's just a rumor, and I can't confirm it. Regardless, my website provider caved in, removed the site, and e-mailed me a perfunctory letter of explanation. I returned the e-mail, attempting to resolve the situation, but my queries went unanswered.

Initially, I figured I was simply being ignored. However, a few days later I got a notice from NetAddress, my semi-anonymous e-mail forwarding service (actaeon@usa.net). It seems they, too, had received "complaints" of "inappropriate use" (Zoobuster again, no doubt) and had permanently deactivated my e-mail account. My webspace provider may very well have replied to my e-mails after all, but their messages would have simply bounced.

So I switched over to my seldom-used but still-active account at actaeon@iname.com, and tried e-mailing NetAddress and the website host again. No response. I sent test messages to myself, and they never came back. The anonymous remailer I used was evidently defunct.

> Now, before I continue, I feel a little explanation is in order here. Because I live out in the sticks, there are only a few ISPs that are local calls for me, and they're all so small that they'd point right to my home town, which is a bad thing if you want to keep secret the fact that you have sex with animals. So if I route e-mail through my local ISP's POP server, even using a false From: header (which my ISP won't allow, in order to control outgoing spam), there'll still be another header pointing back to my local ISP, and the only way to deactivate it would be to ask my ISP, who would probably want to know why I wanted anonymity. Too much fuss.

> So I use an anonymous remailer. The way it works is like this: you write your message as though you weren't concerned about anonymity at all, then before you send it, you change the To: address to the name of the remailer, and add some headers in the body of the message telling the remailer where you really want the message to go. The remailer strips away all your incriminating information and forwards the message to its proper destination. With a macro utility such as QuicKeys, this is a piece of cake: one keystroke, and you're anonymized.

> There are dozens of anonymous remailers out there. For more info, visit http://anon.efga.org/~rlist/, which lists the available remailers and their reliability. These statistics are updated frequently, since most remailers are free and therefore subject to massive abuse by spammers and miscreants, leading to them being overloaded or shut down for good. Since remailers delete your RL info, they can't tell you if your message was successfully forwarded, unless you add extra header information with a return receipt and cutmark separators, which is a hassle and isn't that reliable anyway. So your first indication that a remailer has failed is usually the vast silence generated by people not replying to your anonymous e-mails, along with the twiddling of your thumbs and scratching of your head while you try to figure out why no one is paying attention to you.

That's what happened to me: silence. I sent half a dozen test messages to all the remailers on the list, and made a chart of the results. God, that was depressing. About a third of the remailers were defunct, a dozen more eventually timed out, another dozen or so only went through part of the time, another several required ALL outgoing messages to be encrypted with PGP (which is a MAJOR hassle), several more were in MixMaster format, which required software for the PC (I have a Mac), and another dozen or so took days to make the trip. I was left with maybe half a dozen remailers which were consistently speedy, appeared to work every time, and didn't require PGP. However, all but two of them not only stripped away your RL info, but also ignored most or all of the headers I deliberately pasted in so recipients would know the messages came from me. Otherwise, they'd simply show "Anonymous Remailer" as the sender, and unless you were expecting such a message, you'd probably think it was spam and delete it without even looking at it.

So out of about sixty remailers, I was left with two. So I shrugged my virtual shoulders, sighed, and tried one. My first task was to send messages to about 300 video customers, to let them know what happened to my website and e-mail, and to reassure them I was still in business. A few days went by, and I only got a few responses. I checked the remailer status page, and the remailer I'd chosen had gone down. Sh*t.

So I sent another half-dozen test messages to the sixty remailers, and got pretty much the same chart. I re-sent the 300 messages using the two remailers this chart suggested were the best choices (so each person should hopefully receive two copies), and this time was met with complete silence. As far as I know, not a single person received those messages.

By this point, almost a month had gone by since my website had disappeared, and while some people found out about my actaeon@iname.com address and managed to reach me that way, I had no way to reply anonymously except to do so from the Iname website itself, one message at a time. Now, if you've never used a web-based e-mail service, you're lucky. It's a pain in the ass, especially when you have literally hundreds of people on your mailing list. I didn't have the fastest computer in the world, either, so screen redraws were quite sluggish. It's so inconvenient, I never seriously considered even trying it, because I knew it would just frustrate the hell out of me. I checked to see if Iname had bulk-mailing services (i.e., you send the same message to a list of addresses you upload to the website), but they didn't, at least not at that time. And they don't offer a way to check e-mail in a batch and reply offline in a batch, like you can with Eudora (my e-mail client of choice).

Now, some of you may be saying, "Why not use AOL, Netcom, Mindspring, Earthlink, Compuserve, or one of the other national ISPs?" Because they're all long-distance calls, and with the volume of anonymous mail I have to deal with, I'd spend a lot of money, especially since the rural phone lines are too dirty to maintain much over 33K, even with a 56K modem. If someone were to send me a large attachment, one login could set me back $10.

As time went by, the remailer situation remained unresolved, and no one wanted to host my website unless it were classified as a porn site (which it wasn't, and which would cost too much per month anyway) or had massive ad banners on every page. I didn't want to get too public, and I didn't want to put my website back up only to have it pulled again by Zoobuster. It was crucial that I find a thick-skinned host who would fight for me and my First Amendment rights. However, with no convenient way to reach out to such candidates, or to have them reply to me, I was essentially marooned.

I'm a chronic procrastinator by nature, and when a task has been idle for a few days, it's easy to let it slide for a week, and when it's been idle for a few weeks, a couple months doesn't seem too long of a delay. It seemed like every step forward resulted in at least one step backward, maybe two or three. If I were the sort of person who would think this was some sort of conspiracy or plot against me, I'd think this was some sort of conspiracy or plot against me. Eventually, the whole situation seemed almost hopeless, and I began to care less and less about solving it. Depression began to set in, especially with fall weather approaching. I suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder, or Seasonal Associative Depression), so fall and winter have always sucked for me.

Many of you know I also maintain the website and e-mail for furry artists Tim O'Rourke and Randy Muledeer. When my "Actaeon" e-mail address went down, so did theirs, since they were routed through mine. Plus, auto-forwarding was now a paid service at NetAddress, not a free service, and I really didn't have the funds for it. I'd spent enough of my own time and money to help them already, and wasn't in a position to stretch any further. So I could only check their e-mail via the website, which (as I said above) was a pain in the ass, so I wound up letting it slide. I didn't have the time, energy, or enthusiasm to maintain their websites, either, and with no new artwork from Tim, due to time, health, and money problems of his own, there was little incentive for me to do much.

Money was starting to get tight: I realized how dependent I'd become on the video income, how foolish I'd been to rack up my credit cards, and how much effort would be involved in straightening things out. We'd become increasingly busy at work, too, so I was putting in a lot of overtime. Since I'm on salary, I don't technically get paid for overtime, but I do have a great boss, and there'd be the occasional perks to compensate for the extra work I was putting in. Still, I found myself with a lot of debts, and I was getting home too late and too tired to do much of anything. Most of the time, all I wanted to do was eat, sleep, and watch TV, so I wound up gaining weight, making it more difficult to move around physically (even getting up from a chair required more effort than I was used to) and adding to my depression.

I've always had a problem oversleeping in the mornings, frequently dozing right through the alarm clock (even though I went to the trouble of buying the loudest one I could find). Since my dogs spend the night indoors, I would sometimes wake to discover one of them had had an accident on the carpet, so I would be angry at them and at myself. I'd put them in the kennel without feeding them, even though it wasn't their fault, then I'd go back inside and clean up the mess, and spend the rest of the morning sulking until I could get dressed and drag myself to work. I was frequently late, and would stay late to make up for it, so I'd get home even later, and have even less energy. If I blocked off the part of the carpet that attracted them, they'd find a new spot. If I left them in the kennel at night, they'd howl occasionally and I'd feel like crap for leaving them in the cold and the rain as punishment for what was really my own problem. If I brought them inside but restricted them to the kitchen, where they could only mess up the linoleum (which is easier to clean), they'd whine from loneliness, and try to get out and find where I was sleeping. The only solution seemed to be to move a cot into the kitchen and sleep with them. But they still had accidents, I still overslept, and I still felt like crap.

In late September, a light appeared on the horizon. I was contacted by a member of the Freedom From Fear Foundation, a long-time supporter of free speech on the Internet. They'd heard of my situation, and offered me about as secure a home for my website as I could hope for, even my own domain name: http://www.actaeon.org/. As long as I didn't break the law, they'd go to bat for me. All they asked was that I add a disclaimer that the Foundation was doing this for free speech, not to make a statement on zoophilia. No problem.

I was still having e-mail troubles, so it took a couple weeks to finalize the details, and in early October, my site went online, finally, in its new (and hopefully final) home. I hadn't written the disclaimer yet, so I didn't advertise the site much, but at least it was up again. I also learned that some zoos had joined together and filed a lawsuit against Zoobuster (who had been making things difficult for many of us, not just me), who then suddenly became much less visible in the zoo community, at least for now.

And then, in mid-October, my computer crashed. Literally. Not just "crashed" as a metaphor, but "crashed" as in "got knocked off the desk and broken." Son of a mother-f*cking b*tch. It was my own damn fault, too: I stumbled in the dark and knocked it onto the floor. When I examined the remains, I noticed right away that the LCD display (it's a laptop) was shattered like a car window after a traffic accident. I plugged in the AC adapter and crossed my fingers. It kept crashing on boot up, and further examination revealed that the internal hard drive was barely recoverable (backing it up took over four hours, even though it was only a 340MB drive, and I'm not 100% sure I got everything okay), the floppy drive was toast, the ports on the motherboard (serial/SCSI/video/etc.) only worked (and intermittently at best) when the cable ends going into them were propped up with corks, and the hinge on the display was slightly out of alignment, so the case didn't close securely.

I hooked up an external color monitor (limited to 640x480x256) and an old external 500MB hard drive which whined like an out-of-tune lawn mower, and I limped along while I waited for my business insurance to tell me what I could hope for. A week went by without a word from my agent, but by this time, I barely cared: I didn't think my life could get any worse, and I didn't have the energy to follow up on the claim.

After nearly a month had passed (this was mid-November now), I couldn't wait any longer, so I went out and bought a new computer, a 400-MHz iMac DV. I couldn't really afford it, but I couldn't afford not to, either. My old, shattered system was becoming less and less reliable, and when doing something is difficult or annoying, you quickly stop doing it, so I got further and further behind. I have very sensitive hearing, too, and that hard drive made so much noise I hesitated to turn the damn thing on.

In retrospect, I'm glad I bought the iMac: it's significantly faster and more powerful, with a hard drive so big I don't worry about loading it down with hundreds of megs of crap. I can even do digital video editing, which is something a lot of my customers have asked for. Having the iMac made me feel a little better, because using the computer was now a pleasure instead of a pain. There are still a few problems, and I still have to re-install or upgrade a lot of the utilities and applications I used to use but which are now outdated and not fully compatible with the new system software, so I'm not out of the woods yet, and I expect this will be a gradual evolution over the next several months.

I finally got around to following up on the insurance claim: it turns out they hadn't gotten my first fax, so I re-sent it. A week or so later (early December), they sent someone out to inspect the machine and take photos. The next day I learned that, due to depreciation, my investment of over $4,000 had a replacement value of at most $500, and probably less. Minus the deductible, I was looking at about a $200 settlement. Subtract that from the cost of the iMac (plus the necessary USB adapters for my old peripherals), and that one little stumble cost me about $1400. Just call me "Butterhooves." :/

A sudden burst of extremely bad weather in mid-December sent me even further into depression, to the point where I couldn't even come to work. Fortunately, my boss was very understanding, and did what he could to help. My doctor recommended a different medication, and after a very bumpy transitional period, I'm back at work and I seem to be doing better.

So here I am writing this, a few days before Christmas, and where do I stand? The remailer situation is still unresolved, so contacting people is very difficult. Financially, I'm barely keeping my head above water, and buying the iMac didn't help matters, though at least on a credit card I can limp along on minimum payments. The short daylight hours make outdoor work nearly impossible except on weekends, which are usually rainy. The office workload has returned to "normal," so at least I'm getting home roughly on time. I still oversleep, though, so I still occasionally wake up to find doggy accidents on the rug.

It's easy to point the finger at Zoobuster for much of this, and there's no doubt he set in motion a chain of events which made my existing problems much worse. There's also no doubt there have been times I wished I didn't have to hide behind a nickname, and that zoophilia were more publicly accepted. But that's not going to happen any time soon, and I've never regretted being zoo. What's happened to me isn't because of my lifestyle, or anyone else's. Just a case of very bad timing, where a lot of things all started happening at once, and they compounded each other.

It's going to take me a while to recover from what's happened to me, and I can't promise you a timeframe, even to the nearest six months. I need to get my video production back online, get the money rolling in again, lose about 40 pounds, start eating better and taking care of my health, pay more attention to personal responsibilities and financial obligations, and stop taking on new tasks and projects until I've finished the ones I have now. Any one of these goals could take weeks; together, I have no idea when I'll be finished. I want to attend Further Confusion in January (I think), and ConFurence 11 in April 2000, but I have a lot of work to do before then. I'm asking for your patience and understanding while I get back on my feet.

Thank you all for the time you took to read this, and I hope your holidays are (or were) merry and gay. Or straight, bi, zoo, or some combination thereof, as you prefer. :)

Sincerely,
Actaeon (actaeon@iname.com)
http://www.actaeon.org/ or http://come.to/actaeon

Index -- Updated Wednesday, July 19, 2000 -- E-mail Actaeon