My Bio

Hi, my name is Andrew G. Watters. I am a radically honest, category-defying polymath based in Redwood City, California, USA. I am primarily a lawyer, with a law degree from U.C. College of Law San Francisco (formerly known as U.C. Hastings College of Law), a bachelor's degree from UCLA, and twenty years of professional experience. I have had my own practice since 2012, and my own law firm since 2016. I offer legal services, including complex private investigations; and a custom software platform for attorneys called Slash. I am married to Mrs. Right, with whom I welcomed our daughter Jennifer in 2022 and our son Thomas in 2026. My personal trademark is my carbon fiber briefcase from Tecknomonster, a combined aerospace/luggage company. For entertainment purposes, I recently resurrected a popular anonymous discussion board for lawyers called JD Underground, which has been a great diversion from the law firm for me. I also sometimes build computer systems and custom guitars, which I find to be self-actualizing. I am originally from San Francisco-- and I always enjoy telling people that because Dirty Harry shares my hometown. Finally, like Thanos and Tony Stark, I have a hero complex and I am cursed with knowledge-- and I try to use these substantial gifts for positive things, such as creative writing (the girl on the horse above is a character from an original story I wrote), and engineering-type pursuits.

News

November 4, 2026: Well, I was right that it's the most consequential election in my lifetime, but I was wrong about which direction. After the Democrat blue wave, the America 250 celebration now looks like a funeral-- with the borders reopening under a likely Democrat president in 2028, Western Civilization is going to decline and the entire country is going to become a one-party state like California. Where would we move? Texas just turned blue. I guess that also answers the question of what the longer-term future holds for humanity: the Great Filter is a globalist world government that prohibits or strongly disincentivizes the innovation necessary to make life multi-planetary. With Elon Musk likely in jail, or worse, we won't get any more flying cars, civilian space travel, sight for the blind, thought computing, and all his other innovations. Instead, we will get mediocrity and consensus championed by a Chinese Communist Party-style bureaucracy. Mark my words, now through 2028 is the prolonged death of freedom and the end of the American golden age. And it will end badly, with major cities becoming depressing, dangerous hellscapes like where San Francisco was going (maybe still is). Our only hope for the future will be superintelligence that disrupts the logjam of bureaucracy, but the odds just got a whole lot worse for that to happen in America. If the Democrats try to pause A.I./S.I. development, China will win and the world will suffer as a result. I think I know what the future holds, and it's coming sooner than expected. This also likely means that the era of free speech on the Internet is finished, which doesn't bode well for my raw and uncut takes on various things. This is what people voted for-- comfort over freedom. It's a very sad day in America.

November 3, 2026: Election Day, which is expected to be the most consequential election in my lifetime. Please vote.

For the hell of it, I'm going to start embedding YouTube videos of what I'm listening to or appreciating recently:

A visionary who performed at his own preemptive funeral, two weeks before he passed. Amazing.

Ventures

Attorney - general civil litigation and complex family law, with twenty years of experience and 40+ trials. Also available for complex private investigations, including missing persons/homicide and cyber/corporate espionage. Software platform Slash for licensing to fellow attorneys who want a non-Clio solution.

Rællic® - my personal innovation hub where I document ideas and engineering efforts. Among other projects, this is where my special, custom guitars live.

Tutorials and Articles

Here are my popular tutorials/articles/videos:

Andy's List - Made in USA products.

Linux tips and tricks - random tips learned the hard way. 🔥

Creative writing - I seem to have an unusual connection to the ether that gives me a limitless supply of material-- essentially, I watch the words appear on the screen, and the typing is almost involuntary. The background image on this page is from an original story I wrote about a teen girl who wields a knight's enchanted gauntlet that is imbued with special powers for the worthy.

Animal House - the most realistic fraternity movie of all time, and should be required viewing for everyone considering joining a Greek Letter Organization. I was going through some old boxes and realized that I have a trove of great material from the 2000-2002 era of my life that will be nice to revisit, and I intend a write-up of this film in that context. Literally every principal character in this movie had an analogue in UCLA Theta Chi, which I joined in 2000. We even did a tribute/parody video internally where we tried to mimic one important scene from the movie as part of a recruiting video.

Jack Reacher - "He doesn't care about the law. He doesn't care about proof. He only cares about what's right." That's why Jack Reacher is my hero. This is going to be a write-up of the 2012 film, which is my favorite version of Jack Reacher because Tom Cruise fits the role so well-- and the film doesn't shy away from controversial topics, such as mass murder and sexual homicide. Coming soon.

Run your own email server Howto - have you ever wanted to take full control of your email? Not for the faint of heart.

Privoxy on macOS Howto - have you ever wanted to block ads on the web on your Mac without having to install MacPorts? This is for you.

Lattice™ - next-gen user interface for slash.law, featuring a novel technique for focus detection and raising.

Andy's Dashboard - a free charting solution for server administrators.

Introduction to microexpressions - my guest lecture at Stanford.

Unboxing a new IBM Model M keyboard - travel back in time to 1988.

Andy's Hardware - market research on the concept of a Made in USA hardware store.

100G office network Howto - the fastest, most reliable office LAN that money can buy. Supersedes my tutorial on 10 gigabit networking from 2019 in my previous office, which rocked.

The Forever War - my superfan-level tribute to the greatest science fiction novel of all time.

A fractal crystal lattice of Gaussian primes - research on the fractality of prime numbers in Mathematica.

My trademark concept art - I commissioned this piece from a vision in my head, and I used it as my background for many years until updating to the latest artwork in 2026. The dark knight motif really fits me, I think, but I went with the lighter-toned Raellic art just for the hell of it.

Hall of Fame: services, products, and service providers that I use and strongly recommend.

Hall of Shame: if someone gets me to the point of posting a whole web page about them on here, you know they went way too far in whatever they were doing wrong.