I like exploring.

I want to spend my life constantly learning and making new things. So far so good!

I get ridiculously excited about the world around me. Right now I'm into... animation, birds and how they fly, recording sound effects, ants, and road trips to impractically distant restaurants. Up next: more yoga, more dancing, some hang gliding.

I love finding things I'm terrible at. Such a great chance to learn more about a totally new area. Lately that's dancing. I'm taking classes now and even though I'm still a shitty dancer it's changed the way I move. I didn't use to do spins for no reason at the grocery store or get (as) excited about being in socks on a freshly waxed floor.

My hope in learning anything is that it's going to help me see the world in a new way. One example: I notice and appreciate shadows lots more after working with computer graphics, where you have to draw all the shadows manually. I love how nerdy, esoteric knowledge can sometimes transform basic relationships I have with the universe.

I'm perennially excited about design (especially graphic design + typography) and how to make things simpler. A well-designed door handle, bike bag, or salad tongs makes me happy every single time I use it.

I find smalltalk painful and I suck at it, so I transparently steer conversations to subjects people have OMFG excitement about.

I have a rule that if I've never had the milkshake at a restaurant then I have to order it.

I bike almost everywhere. Last summer I biked to San Diego. This year I'm spending a week biking around the Northwest, ending up in Vancouver for New Year's. I love LA but it's nice being out in the middle of nowhere once in awhile.

I try to add random churn to my life because I like having new stuff around. So I'm always looking for ideas I'd never think of, unexpected travel suggestions and opportunities for a coin flip.

I'm a video game designer.

My focus is on creating surreal experiences people have never had before, especially moments that evoke a sense of awe and wonder.

Right now I'm making a maze game where you can't see anything because the entire world is white. So you have to splatter paint to figure out where the walls, ceiling and floor are. There's a video of it here.

I recently signed a publishing deal for that game and I'm in the process of starting up a small company to make it. Which means I spend a lot of time doing stuff other than game design (like accounting, negotiating contracts, figuring out retirement plans, etc). I feel kinda silly doing work so far outside my area of interest/expertise but it's exciting that (a) none of it's all that hard, and (b) now I can make things that are larger, more varied, and more interesting than when I was working alone.

Building things makes me happy. It's the best way I've found to really explore something. I love how in the design phase you get to do lots of fun research and sketch out how you want things to work, then when you put it together you find out your first ideas were all terrible and don't make sense to anyone but you. So you get into a loop of redesigning, building, and testing, which is where you *really* learn about what you're making. And then there's the challenge of getting it done (mostly) on time and under budget. I love that mix of play and practical necessity.

I used to be a comedy writer, mostly for cartoons. Before that I was at the Onion.

Basically, I want to create things that are genuinely surprising and magical any way I can.

Throwing dinner parties.

Although lately these have devolved into board game brunches. They're mostly just an excuse for me to try baking new things.

I recently convinced my friend to let me bake his wedding cake, which reminds me that I'm good at talking myself into situations I'm not totally prepared for and then rising to the occasion.

I'm also hopelessly honest.

BOOKS: Cat's Cradle, Alice in Wonderland, Jonathan Gold's food reviews in the LA Weekly, Macbeth, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Giving Tree, Borges, Edward Gorey, The Iliad, Edward Tufte, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Much Ado About Nothing, Neil Gaiman.

MOVIES: Time Bandits, Tampopo, The Big Lebowski, Spirited Away, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Dark Crystal, All About Eve, Brazil, This is Spinal Tap, Dawn of the Dead, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Aliens, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Paper Moon, The Night of the Hunter, Fitzcarraldo, Twentieth Century, The Life of Brian, anything with Buster Keaton. I loved Juno way more than I thought I would.

MUSIC: Dr. Horrible soundtrack, The Decemberists, Metric, Compilations of rural 30s blues music, The White Stripes, Belle and Sebastian, Ladytron, Gilbert & Sullivan, Le Tigre, Blind Willie McTell, Daft Punk, Liz Phair, Elastica, The Fiery Furnaces, and Ethel Merman.
It's odd, most of my new music these days comes from OkCupid profiles (they're a good way of finding out what people I tend to like tend to like). Recent highlights: Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, MGMT, and Regina Spektor. Love, love, love Regina Spektor.

FOOD makes me crazy happy. It's kinda silly how joyful I get eating a ripe, juicy peach. Or the way my whole body shudders at a good chutney. I'll excitedly eat almost anything but I get especially weak in the knees around fresh bread, dim sum, and gooey cheeses I've never had before.

A bicycle, Google Maps, my backpack, public libraries, free time, and long hot showers.

Why people enjoy playing games.

Also, why is staring into a campfire endlessly entertaining?

I think littering is the only truly undatable sin.

UPDATE: also, bicycle theft. (twice in the last year!)

And I have a morbid fascination with tofu hotdogs and other fake meats. They're like the duck-billed platypus of the grocery store -- a little out of place no matter where you put them. Such a peculiar mix of culinary, aesthetic, and engineering challenges! I doubt we'll ever make soy bacon that's even close to being as good as real bacon but I *love* that we're never going to stop trying.

I have a genetic abnormality that makes me physically incapable of sweating the small stuff.

You're curious about practically everything and enjoy getting into animated conversations.