I probably should have started with this, but it wasn't until someone asked that I thought to type it up. Oops. I decided to start this page for a number of reasons: - to publish my thoughts - to promote my values - to get better at writing - to have fun The most salient reason has to do with suddenly being unemployed. I was let go from my corporate job a few months back for being unable to come back into the office. I am a software developer by trade. There's no reason I can't do my job remotely. Despite having a legitimate health concern against it, they demanded I return to the office. I consulted with a lawyer to ask "Isn't there a law against this? Don't they have to follow the ADA?". The lawyer's answer was basically... Yes, but also no. Nobody is going to hold them to account, especially in this political climate. I was devastated. I'd managed to cultivate a marketable skill and I finally land a corporate job! The American pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps Dream, right? In my case, not so much. I was hired in late 2019 just before the pandemic. I had been working retail, and no-name places before this making just barely enough to pay the bills. My whole adult life up to this point I'd never even had health insurance. I was so excited to have landed this awesome new job. A job that paid "real" money. It didn't take long before I started really struggling. Not with my technical work. I was a rockstar in that department. However, my mental health took a dramatic nose-dive. I was desperately struggling with the day to day socialization and office politics. I was at the end of my rope, but I couldn't quit. We'd sunk everything we had into moving across the country (Florida to Ohio) for that job. It started to feel like I was looking down the end of a barrel and I didn't understand why I was struggling. Why did it seem so easy for everyone else? Just when all this was coming to a head, that's when COVID hit. We were all sent home to work remotely until it was safe to come back. I cannot describe in words the relief this was. The world outside had gone to hell, but inside the house I was thriving. No uncomfortable clothes. No forgetting my lunch. No sudden social interruptions at my desk. I was able to keep the lights and temperature just how I liked. It was just me and the code. I felt bad that everyone else seemed to be struggling the way I'd been struggling, but I personally didn't want lockdown to end. Mental health being the topic of the season I finally had room to work on some of my long standing issues. Why couldn't I do the dishes regularly? Why was focusing on code easy, but doing taxes extremely difficult? Turns out, ADHD and Autism is the reason I'd been struggling all this time. When they started hinting at Return to the Office I was very reluctant to go back. I presented my case to my manager and they were able to get an exception for me to work remotely. I was a key contributor to a bunch of projects, and I thought if I could make myself invaluable I could justify the remote work indefinitely. That was until the CEO put out a mandate to end all remote work, no excuses. They let me go at the beginning of December 2025. I find myself suddenly unemployed through no fault of my own. Because I am different. Because I don't fit the neurotypical mold that allows me to go into an office 9-to-5 without an immense amount of suffering. Something inside me broke. I'd been chasing this dream that was a total fabrication. You can call it a mid-life crisis. Or, as I like to think of it, I'd entered my villain-era. The thought of trying to find another corporate job made me physically ill. I decided I had to make a go of it on my own. In 2024 my best friend and I had been toying around with side-projects. We even started our own LLC. We'd been joking about being like the business men from Adventure Time. I'm not joking anymore, this is happening. I've been putting all my time in to Cloverfield Tech. We've released two apps on the App Store with a third on the way, and ideas for several more. I'm extremely proud of the work we've done. I'm done playing a game that is designed to keep me, and those like me, down. My mission in life has become to undermine the system that disenfranchises, exploits, and abuses people just trying to live a comfortable life. It enrages me that the word "tech" has become synonymous with this kind of exploitation. Social media, crypto, and now A.I. are all being used to *hurt* people, instead of making the world a better place. I simply won't stand for it. My contribution may be small, but all of our contributions together make a tidal wave. Our focus right now is the world of audiobooks. Audible represents all the worst aspects of tech oligarchy. It's a techno-feudalist platform designed from the ground up to lock you in and squeeze you for as much as they can. Not just readers, but authors, and narrators too. It's clear they have no respect for the dignity of their customers, or the integrity of the art that goes into making an audiobook. This is a bit of the old scratch-your-own-itch philosophy of design. We built DeerReader to play the DRM-free files you get from places like libro.fm, and we're close to finishing DeerLibrarian which will help you host those files on your local network to make it easy to manage them. We built CosmiCut because we were excited by the idea of spatial videos and Apple's foray into VR. Our software embodies our ethics surrounding tech. You should be able to control your own data. You shouldn't be locked into platforms. You shouldn't have corporations violating your privacy. None of us deserve to be treated like cogs in a money printing machine. We all deserve dignity, and respect.