What this Substack newsletter is all about
Hey everyone! Welcome to the official Kim Crawley Substack, Crowgirl’s Skycave. I just launched it today, November 22nd, 2023. Whether you’re joining now or months later… welcome aboard!
I named this newsletter Crowgirl’s Skycave because Crowgirl is my nickname, and I do indeed live and work from my skycave home. You see, the origin of my surname Crawley is “Crow Valley,” I have a Crowgirl knuckle tattoo (eight characters for eight non-thumb digits, perfect), and I live in an actual skyscraper on the Lake Ontario shore in Toronto. So there.
I have built a career and a reliable livelihood from writing about cybersecurity and computer technology professionally. In my job, I write about a vast array of cybersecurity topics, from Advanced Persistent Threats to SCADA/ICS attacks, from consumer phishing to enterprise ransomware.
I have worked for many tech companies over the years. But if you’re outside of the cybersecurity industry, then the only ones you’ve likely heard of are AT&T, BlackBerry, and Kaspersky.
My current salaried day job is to do pretty much all of the whitepaper, blog, and copywriting for an enterprise cybersecurity technology company based in Washington DC called Assured Enterprises.
One of my more interesting side gigs is my book writing. Just this month (November 2023), I have two new books out— Hacker Culture: A to Z for O’Reilly Media and Cloud Penetration Testing for Red Teamers for Packt.
So I bet, by checking out my Substack, you must be looking forward to posts about intriguing new cybercrime groups or mysterious Dark Web happenings. Or perhaps some drier cybersecurity fare, like cyber incident response policies or how to apply CIS benchmarks.
Well, I shall dissappoint you… Crowgirl’s Skycave isn’t the place for that stuff!
I write about cybersecurity when some company pays me to do so.
This Substack is for my non-tech writing! This Substack is for the ideas and emotions that I have that I must get out into the world, but no company would ever pay me for. My ideas about cybersecurity are profitable to corporations. But my outrage at hypocrisy in the apparent Covid cautious community, my anger at the maskless plague spreading masses, my self-discovery as an autistic and ADHDer woman, and my other political and cultural impulses… Those ideas aren’t at all profitable to corporations.
Perhaps you’d like to pitch in $8/month or whatever to support my non-capitalist overlord pleasing writing. That would be much appreciated. Although, I will post most of my Substack content without a paywall, because ultimately I just need a non-tech outlet. And if you’re limited in how many Substack writers you’re able to financially support, a struggling writer would be a better choice for your limited donations. I personally support several Substacks.
I kept a Medium account going for several years now. But that platform has frustrated me. It does indeed seem like Substack is the superior platform for this sort of thing.
I just shared my first Substack blog, World Health Network’s maskless mascot and their loss of credibility, which exposes hypocrisy at one particular supposedly (but not really) Covid cautious non-profit org. It’s actually a re-posting of an identical article I published on Medium in mid-October.
My next blog, and first Substack original blog (if this doesn’t count) will further expose dangerous hypocrisy from people who are exploiting the goodwill of genuinely Covid cautious people. I will also soon share a November 2023-updated list of good Covid information sources online.
These Covid related writings are a public service and won’t be posted behind a paywall. We all need to take the currently ongoing pandemic seriously, wear a respirator at all times in public (something the hypocrites whom I expose won’t do), and support the underdogs who are truly doing good work and need your help. Not the fancy MIT academic-founded orgs, and fancy Washington Post columnists who pretend to be Covid cautious but are maskless wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing.
In addition to the Covid pandemic and inevitable upcoming pandemics, I will likely also write about societal collapse, being neurodivergent, astrology, and anti-capitalism from time to time.
Thank you for taking an interest in my non-tech ideas.
Kim Crawley, buttondown.email/Crowgirl, @crowgirl.bsky.social, @crowgirl@hachyderm.io, linktr.ee/kimcrawley