Afterward, I noticed larger than usual activity on these re-tweets. So, I clicked through to each one of my accounts, and to my surprise, my oldest and largest account was back online. I don’t yet have an email explaining it, or even announcing it, but I’ve been actively tweeting on the account and everything seems to be on the up and up:
Man simulates time travel thanks to Stable Diffusion image synthesis – Ars Technica https://t.co/5jpd9cDSVw
Now, when this account was suspended by Twitter, it had over 5,500 followers, so it’s missing about 40% of its original audience, but it does still significantly boost my audience. This is very important to my small business!
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk was not just lying about amnesty for the accounts of veterans like me who vote Democrat. He is still allowing his staff to discriminate against me by LYING about my tweets… AGAIN!
Hey #America: next time you hear a Repugnican gun nut talk about why HIGH CAPACITY MAGAZINES can/will never be restricted, ask them how many rounds their shotgun holds.
If they answer more than 3, ask them if @ATFHQ knows that they removed the FEDERALLY MANDATED PLUG.
🦗🦗🦗
— Mad Squid Productions™ 🇺🇸⚓️ #VeteranOwned (@MadSquidOG) June 8, 2022
This will come as a surprise to nobody, but Elon Musk and the Republican Party couldn’t care less about freedoms. Freedom of speech in particular. This photo proves that Twitter will continue to operate with bias against THE LEFT while protecting and supporting VIOLENT TERRORISTS on ‘the right.’ Fuck Elon. Fuck Twitter. Fuck the GOP!
I erroneously announced this once before because I transposed the “25” in “225” in my head and thought, “250.” Anyway, this time it’s legit. It’s the real deal. My GIFs and digital stickers are finding a life of their own thanks to social media users like you! See the “GIFs” tab here on my site for more information!
In the face of the COVID pandemic, which only exacerbated my already shaky financial situation, Mad Squid Productions™ could easily have dwindled away into nothing more than the memory of a dream I once had. I was fired from the only good job I’ve had since leaving the Navy in 2003, on Trump’s Inauguration Day. Luckily for me, I had my personal projects at Mad Squid to keep me going. And my food delivery gigs.
In 2018 I became certified by the FAA as a Part 107 commercial drone pilot, and I was gradually figuring out ways to make money with my drone. But when the pandemic hit, my 2-year recurrent test was coming up, and I didn’t see much point in renewing my license if I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere and fly. Procrastination set in, and a few political distractions like January 6th and my TikTok account, and before I knew it a whole year had passed with my drone never leaving the ground.
I do many things under the moniker of Mad Squid Productions™. I sell 3D statues on Second Life. I make MEMEs. I have a handful of social media accounts. I publish music, every decade or two. I do amateur blacksmithing. And on, and on, and on. But the only reliable–and scalable–money maker in the bunch has been my drone piloting.
That money has come primarily in the form of stock media sales, not from for-hire work. I have sold numerous stills and 4k videos captured from the air with my DJI Mavic Air on Pond 5,Shutterstock, and Getty Images, as well as aerial imagery for the Australian mapping company SOAR. There have been a few for-hire gigs, all of them attained through the Drone Base app, but they amounted to less than $1k in all, and often resulted in wasted days and travel time. This was because I would be hired for a gig 100 miles away, only to arrive on site to find that the cloud cover didn’t meet requirements for the gig, or that there was too much snow on the roof, etcetera.
Then, my laptop battery began to expand. My external drives gradually began to fail. My licenses for music and sound f/x expired, and I couldn’t afford to renew them. I had lots of designs for products like posters and metal or glass wall hangers, shirts, hats, etcetera, but zero capital to purchase inventory. Everything that could go wrong with Mad Squid, was going wrong. It was all snowballing on me, and it seemed that the forecast looking ahead would only get colder.
And then the U.S. Small Business Administration stepped in and gave me renewed hope! This is not a joke! First, they approved me for a long term, low interest loan which allowed me to replace my laptop and storage drives. Then, they approved me for a pair of grants that have allowed me to pay off my work car, which I use for both my delivery gig work and my drone missions, upgrade my phone (which is also my camera and drone controller) and, finally, renew my drone license! As of yesterday, I am officially licensed under 14CFR Part 107 to fly drones commercially, again!
Of course, this has caused me to dig back through my 2018 and 2019 drone imagery to consider an improved filing nomenclature that will allow my collection to continue to grow without it becoming impossible to find anything specific. Combine that with the fact that TikTok recently approved me to upload 3 minute videos, and you’ve got a recipe for me to release a TON of content to that platform. In turn, once that is set up and running on auto-pilot, this will free me up to focus on other areas of content there. And, of course, I’ll be flying new drone missions to capture brand new, awesome drone footage.
Yesterday was the fifth week since I began making TikToks about my attempt to get constituent services from Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. Her office here in Grand Junction, Colorado–my hometown–has not been open once since Lauren was elected. This means that constituent services have not been available to anyone living in her district who needs, say, a Letter of Recommendation to attend the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. They haven’t been available for anything, actually.
Now, my weekly TikToks highlighting this absence of representation and service for the people of my district, have grown to be one of my most popular series on that platform. They helped to propel my first account to over 10k followers, a huge milestone. Then came the death threats from Republicans:
That’s just one example. The threats were many. Reporting them to TikTok resulted in a 7-day suspension of my account, which I appealed. Apparently, the appeal struck a nerve at TikTok HQ, because without any warning, my entire account (@realMadSquid) was “permanently banned.” Never mind my 10k followers. Never mind my content. Never mind the money I had on the account (for tipping live streamers). Never mind the threats to my life. Never mind that I’m a veteran. Just: DELETED.
So I started a new account (@MadSquidProductions) and started over, beginning with content that exposed irishsc23 for making threats against me. That content was taken down by TikTok for “harassment or bullying.” I couldn’t figure out why TikTok would want to silence a veteran whose life had been threatened by another user on their platform, and allow that person to continue using TT in spite of their blatant violations of “Community Guidelines.”
So, being the incorrigible person that I am, I re-uploaded that video, with huge lettering over the top stating that TikTok had taken it down, while allowing violent right wing users to threaten a veteran’s life. In the description I added the following:
“Take this one down TikTok and you’ll be speaking to the #FBI next. Protecting the guy who THREATENED a veteran instead of the VETERAN? 🖕🏼”
It stayed up, and eventually they put the original version back up. For this reason, one or two of my early videos on this new account appear twice. One, however, remains unavailable, though it’s 2nd iteration is still available. But I digress…
The new account is already back to 5k followers, and growing, thanks in large part to this weekly series of visits to Boebert’s office. People are really not happy with Lauren’s performance in office. From the milage fraud scheme that paid off a lien on her failing restaurant in Rifle, Colorado to the fact that she illegally carried a firearm into Congress on her first few days at work, an act that served as the impetus for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to take the controversial move of installing metal detectors.
Who can blame Speaker Pelosi, though? Lauren tweeted out “Today is 1776” on the morning of the terrorist insurrection in Washington DC earlier this year. In fact, this is the subject of one of my three sets of Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which Lauren and her staff have illegally ignored since January 20th.
Colorado law provides 3 days for a response, with a maximum of ten days with the allowed 7-day extension, which they must request of the CORA’s author. But they have simply ignored me. Somewhere around week 4 I did receive a form letter, with rubber stamped signature, which also completely ignored my requests:
So, long story short, I am still making TikToks about this situation and publishing them to my new account. Yesterday I made a trip down to Lauren’s office, again, and once again found the door locked, no signs on the door, and no answer to my knock, even though–as I commented in this video–I could hear voices inside. LOL.
If you watched the full, 11-minute video at the top of this post (you probably did, or at least skimmed it, because it’s most likely what brought you here in the first place), you will see first hand what unfolded afterward. First, I made a failed attempt to contact the building’s leasing office, to inquire about the payments for Lauren’s empty office. But they were closed.
So, I stopped in the lobby of the beautiful Horizon Park Plaza to film some “b-roll” to used in future TikToks. Once finished there, I decided to keep filming as I walked back past Suite 112, Boebert’s office, toward my car in the rear parking lot. If you haven’t watched the full 11-minute video at the top of this post, this would be a good time to do so, because what happened as I walked by their door on my way out, was PRICELESS!
