Until we learned Twitter’s data was for sale on the dark web. Oh, we laughed about it, those of us who never DMed private info, those of us who knew we’d deleted everything. Until the data came back to haunt us in the weirdest ways.

I joined Twitter in 2006, and naturally opted for a simple name that was available at the time: gb. I’d grow to regret that decision as the site’s popularity exploded and I got notifications for every typo of 2gb, for every person posting their team’s football schedule or score when it was in Green Bay, for people who mistook @ handles for # hashtags (strangely when referencing UK politics). As Doug Bowman and Dave Rutledge (@stop and @_, respectively) and I would often commiserate, it sucked having the name we wanted but a critical mass of people made using it insufferable.

I spent most of my 20s and into my 30s as an early adopter of any new thing, and so I started accumulating a lot of early-adopter names. I’m greg on dribbble, gb on Twitter and others, and I was angry that I missed out on on either with Instagram, so I got bowers (which I still use for pics of my kid and family stuff) and later gbbowers for a public profile. It was that bowers account on IG where I got my first blunt demands from randos (always guys, funny enough) who wanted my username.

“Yo, let me have it.”

“No, I’m using it. Fuck off.”

“I’m an actor / athlete / musician and I’m about to blow up… I neeeed your username.”

“Our last name is common as fuck, dude. If you blow up, people will find you. Be gone.”

Then I started getting messages about someone “needing to talk with [me] about a business opportunity” which was inevitably “sell me the name.” Ironically this aligned pretty closely with the crypto scam becoming a fad. In fact, there is currently a dude messaging me and posting on my public IG account that he wants the bowers name, and that “you’re not using it.” Generally I roll my eyes and ignore them now, but even for money, I’ll hold onto it just out of pure spite, which is my superpower.

All that is kinda annoying but I can easily ignore it. But the Twitter data leak turned out to bite me in the ass. But wait… I deleted everything from my account, what good would some rando find in there about me?

Oh. Wait. My personal email was associated with the account. And I used 2 Factor Authentication like any person with a mind for security might, but Twitter didn’t use any 2FA auth apps… they insisted on texting it to me. Texting. Oh shit, my phone number is there, tied to that short username. I hadn’t deleted my account because, well, spite is also my weakness, and I didn’t want some christonationalist jumping on it.

Naturally, I only pieced this together when my phone buzzed at damn near midnight. A text from a foreign country code.

“Hello, I want to purchase your Twitter account. I will give you $1,000 in cryptocurrency or via PayPal. [name], Japan”

I had scarcely time to read the text before a call came from the same number. I declined it immediately, and they left no voicemail. A few beats later and I realized what had happened, and blocked the number. Even if this person was genuine about paying me a grand for a username I clearly don’t use, the realization that this person had used a hacked database being sold on the dark web as means to contact me directly told me all I needed to know.

I’ve since had another text from a different person with a more vague sort of I need to talk to you tone, and some emails from what looks like different people. All within the past few days.

My decision to hold onto the handle despite moving away from Twitter has been largely driven by spite—why close the account and have some hateful person or party claim it—but if these contacts persist or become worse, what is the point?

I’ve long held that if I were to get rid of the name, I’d likely give it away to some person or group that could use it in a productive manner more closely aligned with my own values. The obvious answer is the Green Bay Packers, as they are the only community-owned nonprofit major sports team in the States, and enough people accidentally use the handle when talking about them that it might be useful for them. More specifically, if they didn’t move away from @packers, I would want them to use it for the Green Bay Packers Foundation, who do a lot of good for the people in Wisconsin.

I am currently sorting out my favorite options, but if Twitter is to survive, I’d rather someone use my name for good.

You can follow my posts via RSS reader, or follow @gb@w.gbbowers.com on Mastodon

Sadly, in the last few years my only blog posts have been these, the yearly lists. Even now I’m only writing this on 31 Dec 2022, knowing full well I likely won’t publish this before midnight. But if I’ve learned anything this year (and expect a long post about that) it’s to go gently with myself. I’m hoping to make these more common, because as always, I am anything if not opinionated.

So, as a semi-pro music listener, what did I enjoy the most this year?

The Beths – Expert in a dying field

Maybe I’m getting old, but the streaming algorithms beat me to discovering this band from Aotearoa. I don’t honestly know which track it was on the playlist, but when it hit, I had to go back and find the band name. Next thing I was ordering the record on Bandcamp. The sound is straightforward and infectious, with an indie rock sensibility that borders on power pop (which is always my favorite rock subgenre). There are no lows on the album, no moments that elicit a skip or could have been left out. It’s my top album of the year.

Sloan – Steady

I covered this album in a video I did on TikTok, but I’ll say this much here: the pandemic may have slowed down the recording and pressing of this album, but nothing is slowing down the Canadian champs of power pop. Their 13 album in their 30th year as a band, and it’s a cracking gem. One point I will call out is that the songs featuring Jay Ferguson on vocals are possibly some of his strongest ever. If I hadn’t discovered the Beths this year, this would have coasted in as my favorite of the year.

KOG (Kweku of Ghana) – Zone 6, Agege

Talk about taking a leap of faith based on one song… this album was one of my favorite and most joyous surprises this year.

Harry Styles – Harry’s House

Oh sweet jeebus I never imagined I’d be listening to a mainstream pop album, let alone it being one of the best releases of the year. To be fair, I didn’t intentionally buy this album (I’d preordered NOT TiGHT by jazz duo DOMi and JD Beck—which is definitely worth listening to btw—and UMG had a real SNAFU in their shipping dept) but decided to give it a shot when it was clear I wouldn’t be able to procure what I ordered. Well, slap my ass and call me Silver… it’s really damn good. The Peter Gabriel influence is strong.

Rocky Votolato – Wild Roots

I’ve long been a fan of Rocky, so when he announced a Kickstarter for his first album in 7 years, I was quick to back it. Then tragedy struck as the Votolatos lost their eldest child in a car crash. Rocky’s always pulled at the heartstrings, but there is a special tenderness in this album.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – Ice, death, planets, lungs, mushrooms, and lava

This was a busy year for the prolific sextet from Naarm. They started out with a remix album by other artists’ takes on last year’s Butterfly 3000 (with the aptly name Butterfly 3001), released a limited pressing called Made in Timeland (with two 15 minute songs), surprised us all by releasing a split with Tropical Fuck Storm with one side comprised of an 18 minute single from the new album Omnium Gatherum, and a collab 3-part piece called Satanic Slumber Party with TFS on the other. Omnium followed a few months later and proved to be an epic double LP, though it lost steam halfway through and in reality was a kitchen sink of unused songs (like Gumboot Soup and Oddments). The band surprised us again with 3 albums in October, one of which was Changes, which was not finished during the 5 albums of 2017, and why we instead got Gumboot. There was a companion piece to Timeland named Laminated Denim, and a plethora of live and demo releases as part of the band’s bootleg series.

Among all that, the one that caught my ear the most (once I got past the front-loaded earworms of Omnium) was the first of October’s releases, the aforementioned Ice, et al. 7 songs in the different modes of the major scale of western music. While that sounds like a strange lesson in music theory, the result is flowing and compelling.

And I’m going to call it there. That’s about half the list, but I’m tired of typing on an iPad and want to enjoy my NYE. As always, you can follow my Bandcamp collection and my Discogs for other music I’ve backed with money. I’m also on Last.fm, though that does get slightly polluted with music my wife and kid play on our Sonos.

All that being said, I’m excited to start writing in a more open, free, and federated format, as I have been doing on Mastodon for the past 5-6 years, just longer format. Will shit I post come back and lead to difficult conversations? Probably… but I’m trying to be the me that has been held back by decades of trauma, and those conversations should happen when they need to.

Anyway, if you stumble across this, I’m GB. There are RSS feeds and you can actually follow this blog from any Fediverse platform (Mastodon, Friendica, etc.). The future is distributed and focused on our collective welfare. Buckle up.

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