Who’re you?

My name is Herbert Snorrason. I’m from Ísafjörður, which is in the northwest of Iceland. I’m a historian by training, and have also managed to flunk out of a master’s program in international relations twice.

This is because I managed to get myself involved with some pretty odd stuff while trying for it. In 2010 I wound up volunteering for WikiLeaks for a couple of months, leaving after being asked to seek verification from chat room regulars that they had no FBI or CIA connections. (Ironically, my replacement eventually went to the FBI as an informant. Go figure.) Presumably due to that experience, although that hasn’t really been directly confirmed, Google was served with a search warrant for pretty much every shred of information they held on me.

After that, I was connected with a project called OpenLeaks, which wound up dematerialising; partly in a cloud of acrimonious bickering between WikiLeaks and the only other person publicly connected with OpenLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. I occasionally still get hate messages over that thing, funnily enough.

A couple of years later, a group of people centred around some of the WikiLeaks collaborators decided to see if there was interest in getting a Pirate Party formed in Iceland. I’ve been told that, informally, one key person had said that they’d be up for it if thirty people could be convinced to show up. I believe there were about forty of us at the initial meeting, with more showing up each time until the annual “death of Iceland” – summer holidays in late July and early August. The party was ultimately founded in November. I wound up being chosen as a board member by lot, after having consciously decided not to run for a seat as it would take too much time out of my studies. I ultimately ran as a candidate in my “home” constituency; a position where I could be sure not to get elected, but still on the hectic side. We wound up with three MPs, a nearly-impossible scenario, and not enough resources to get much of anything done. Fun.

And then, seemingly from out of the blue, around November 2014, our poll figures started growing exponentially between months. By March we were polling as the largest political party in Iceland. That kept up for just over a year, when the then-Prime Minister wound up implicated in the Panama Papers release, and resigned. Early elections were called, which got ten Pirate MPs in.

Currently, I’m wondering what the hell to do next. I still don’t have a clue.

Colophon

In printed books, this is where you get information about who, where and when the book was published. In some books, you also get information about the typeface, the paper, and various other technical details that nobody except a complete nerd cares about.

So, obviously, I’m going to provide information that can be considered analogous. (If you didn’t get the impression that I’m a huge nerd from the above, I must question your reading comprehension.)

This site is generated from a set of Markdown “originals” using Hugo. The stylesheets are written in LESS, and automatically compiled on save by my text editor. (Emacs.) The colour scheme is built from Solarized.

I’ll grant that the typography could be simpler. The body text uses SIL’s Gentium, and body headings use UnifrakturMaguntia. Over in the sidebar, the heading is set in League Gothic and other text in Adobe’s Source Sans Pro. Code blocks are set in Courier Prime and coloured using highlight.js. All fonts are served through Adobe Edge Web Fonts. (Somewhat hilariously, Adobe’s paid font service, Typekit, doesn’t offer all the fonts in question.)