Photo by my friend @lallyiam - STiL Focus Media
Lifelong Geek/Gamer
So, I've covered this side of me just a little bit before, mostly focusing on how much credit I give the science fiction I read as a kid for how open-minded and optimistic I am now. By the time I made it to my first year of government indoctrination camp, I had already lived entire lives on planets like ours, and planets absolutely nothing like ours.
Here's one of my favorite examples of how my love of science fiction & fantasy set me apart from other kids:
I was somewhere between pre-school and 2nd grade, and my class went on a field-trip to the aquarium. At one point in our visit, we were all sitting together, and they played a few aquatic animal sounds for us. First up was dolphins, which everyone recognized. Next was a seal, which everyone also recognized. The last sound was something like this, and while everyone else had blank looks on their faces, I immediately shouted out "Humpback whale!" Now, how did 4-6 year old Kenny know that? Simple, because I had just recently watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Now then, the side of my geekiness that I definitely haven't talked about much on my blog (or in my life as a whole) is the fact that I've been a gamer for as long as I can remember. PC games, console games, board games, tabletop games, card games... I love 'em all. I love the various ways my brain gets to twist depending on the game, I love the friendly, contained competition, I love using my imagination, I love the magnificent art that goes along with so many games.
I remember playing PC games like Doom, Duke Nukem, and the MechWarrior games as a small child. By the time I was well into elementary school, I started down the road to card games. First was Pokemon, then Star Wars, then Yu-Gi-Oh, and finally I settled into Magic: The Gathering. I think I started to playing in 2000-2001, mostly just because the Odyssey set (2001) is the first big release I remember being part of. Since then, I've played Magic on & off ever since. At my peak (the Lorwyn block until Conflux), I was drafting 2-4 times per week, and playing standard (Blue-Black Faeries) another 2-3 times per week. These days, I occasionally play with friends, but that's about it. I do play the new free-to-play Arena version as well, sometimes. Feel free to add me as a friend if you play: KennysKitchen#96820
Besides Magic, I have definitely spent the most time playing PC games. RPGs have been my favorite forever, but I definitely got hooked on the Call of Duty series for a few years as well (COD2 - Modern Warfare). By far my favorite game, in terms of the game itself, was Baldur's Gate 2, but I don't think there's a single game I played as much as Diablo 2. I picked it up when it came out, and played off & on (sometimes WAY too on) for about 9 years. These days, I play a tiny bit of LoL (mostly the new mini-game, Team Fight Tactics), and the MTG Arena I mentioned above, but that's about it. The last game I got really hooked on was Star Wars: The Old Republic. I literally got a job for about a month before it released, just to build a new gaming PC, and by the time I gave it up a little over 2 months later, I had over 25 days of time played.
One of my craziest gaming stories was about 7 years ago, when I got into the mobile game Marvel: War of Heroes. Not only did I play the game rather obsessively for months, joining one of the top-ranked clans on the planet, and placing in the top 5 for individuals in more than one event, but I actually created a keyboard & mouse macro (a simple bot) to create accounts, and sold "referrals" to people (every time a new account used your referral code you got some free stuff.) Over the course of just a few weeks, before the company capped it at 10 referrals per account, I bought 7 computers off Craigslist and set them all up running my bot, ultimately walking away with just over $2000 in profit.
It feels good to share this part of myself with you all, because it's definitely something I've felt shame about over the years. Early on, simply because being a geek wasn't cool yet, and more recently because it doesn't necessarily feel like a way to spend my energy that aligns with crazy high expectations for myself around making every part of my life activism. I'm trying to find balance between the different Kennys, to find peace with myself.
Sometimes you just crush it :-P
Researcher
This particular facet of Kenny is particularly relevant, because it really blossomed because of this community, this ecosystem. Don't get me wrong, I've always been the sort of person who questioned everything, who wanted the actual data & facts, not someone else's take on them. But until I found Steem (ya, I wasn't going to say the name, but whatever) in 2016, all that had ever amounted to was lots of reading, note-taking, and consuming documentaries, podcasts, and interviews by the thousands.
Once I found this place, found that people wanted to hear what I have to say, and that I could make money doing it, I really found my voice as a writer, and specifically a researcher. Now, if you've been following my blog, you've noticed that most of what I write is about me, about my journey, about my life. That is primarily because that's the only place where I am truly an expert, but also because every time I do dive into a research project, it tends to devour me for weeks at a time.
I currently have a long list of topics that I plan to do research projects on, including a few that I started publishing piece by piece but just never finished (my vaccine exploration sent me spiraling into a deep depression for months, and I haven't gotten back to it in over a year.) I feel like I'm pretty great at consuming, comparing, and synthesizing the information, I am always careful to source everything (thank Source for hyperlinks), and now the biggest thing I need to work on (AFAIK) is keeping my tone & language more neutral & unbiased, so that my research is more accessible to people who aren't just ignorant, but actually have pre-existing beliefs about what I'm covering.
Here are a few of my favorite research projects (in terms of the product, not necessarily in terms of the research process) since I became @KennysKitchen:
- The Rainbow Gathering: 5 Decades of Beta Testing Anarchist Society
- Down the Vaccine Rabbit Hole
- All The nCoV19 Things You May Have Missed
- Capitalism vs the Free Market
- What To Do If You Get Pulled Over
- Do You Own Your Body? Can You Prove It?
Kickin' it with my dawgs - Just my friends, not my pets
Abundance Conduit
This is another piece of Kenny that sort of existed before Steem, but not nearly in the way that it has unfolded since finding this community. I think I really started to feel this ability to call in abundance, to send it in all sorts of directions, when I was a drug dealer. Even though I had barely any money to my name (full-time job, rent, car, and some addictions...), I was able to get fronts of pounds of weed at a time, ounces of cocaine fresh across the border, and suddenly I could turn that into cash, into other drugs (people love trading), and was always able to do as much as I wanted, and share with friends, without having to worry about it. Until that all crashed down of course, but that's another story.
My very first post on Steem was titled Feeding the Masses... For Free, and was all about my adventures dumpster-diving in Colorado. Literally turning trash into delicious, healthy food for dozens of people. From there, I started sharing all about my life and my adventures, and people seemed to like it. I received quite a few votes from some of the platform's biggest whales (SO much gratitude for @complexring, @xeldal, and @Jamesc [who we will talk about more in a moment])
In the Summer of 2017, I created a little account called @TribeSteemUp. The idea was simple, I had over 150 friends who had joined the platform, and most of them were getting nothing for rewards. Most of us also weren't even aware of each other's blogs (every week I would discover another friend, who had been Steeming for weeks.) It started off quite small, a bunch of minnows pooling our resources, until Anarchapulco 2018, when first @TerryBrock, then @LukeWeAreChange, then @SashaDayGame each more than doubled the SP in the account. We had a vote worth more than a dollar, and it was exciting!!
Of course, in that same time SBD & STEEM were soaring, along with most of the crypto-sphere, and I was able to use my rewards to book the Abraham-Hicks Cruise I had wanted to go on for years, even covering the costs for a friend to come with me. In the weeks leading up to, and during the cruise, I ran a project called FundTheMusic, where I started with some of my own crypto, gifted the rewards from a few posts, and pooled it all into a few thousand dollars for a handful of independent, conscious musicians.
A couple of months later I was in the desert of Arizona, cooking for a camp-out at @AdamKokesh's farm, and I got a call from @JamesC, who I had gotten to know a bit at the last couple Anarchapulcos. After explaining what @TribeSteemUp was to him, how it started, and my vision for it, he said he would give us a big delegation, and he sure did! I think that first delegation was around 400k SP, and with STEEM's high prices at the time, suddenly I was dropping $20 and $30 votes left and right. Since most of my friends had already given up on Steem, and I had all this new abundance to share, I added about 50 people to the tribe right away.
In the year's since, tribe members have come & gone, the crypto market has gone up and [mostly] down, and our delegation from Jimmy has doubled. People from the tribe have spun off into other projects like @NaturalMedicine, and I've had the pleasure of being a conduit of abundance for hundreds of people.
At this point, we delegate thousands of HP (and SP) to @informationwar, @naturalmedicine, @ecotrain, @build-it, @homeedders, and @artemisshares, and our auto-voter has over 110 accounts on it. Myself and the folks who help with curation (@trucklife-family & @eco-alex) also vote on various other great content we find, and we had just launched our @TribeWelcome project to help new folks get started, when the Tron/Steemit fiasco began.
We've decided to re-name ourselves @Abundance.Tribe, and are in the process of getting that spun up, as well as putting energy into @TribeWelcome, which seems more important than ever at this point. Please give both accounts a follow to stay updated and help support these community-building projects.
The craziest part about this whole thing is that I said (many times) back in 2015-'16 as I started living my life out of my backpack, that I would soon have a million dollars or more, not of my own, but that I would be able to direct towards amazing things. And so it is (once Hive gets up over $1 at least, haha!)
I call it "Abundance Reclamation"
In Closing
