Hi! I am a dude who makes things. Pleasantries.

I make video games. I also write stories. (I was a creative writing / computer science double major in college. "Sooner or later you're going to have to choose," my advisors said. They were wrong. :3)

Listening.

Introspecting. Extrospecting.* Writing silly love letters.
* This is totally a word. It is now.

Finding neat new things, both in the real world and on the Internet.

are usually wrong. I murder preconceptions.

Look at my profile picture. What do you see? Just another Asian-American tech industry blancmange, right? Smug and stoic on the outside, polished dull on the inside. Deep pockets, empty pants. Listens to Jason Mraz instead of Johnny Cash, sees Andrew Lloyd Webber shows but has never heard of Harold Pinter, thinks of Keanu Reeves, not Slavoj Zizek, when he hears the words "welcome to the desert of the real." No dreams. Cares more about problems than people. Poster child of the Southeast Asian underpopulation crisis.

Take a good look. Now close your eyes and imagine the exact opposite--his moustache-twirling, muse-courting, savagely intellectual doppelganger, minus the moustache.

That's me.

It might also be worth mentioning that I can switch between aloof, gentle soft-spokenness and gregarious, charismatic excitement (what I've heard actors call being "on") pretty quickly. Neither persona is a mask. I'm just kind of complicated.

Given that this is section is really a thinly veiled excuse to reveal a) whether we have anything in common and b) where would be a good place to go on a date, perhaps this would be better expressed as a list of places where I hang out. More useful than telling you I'm the umpteenth guy you've met who likes sushi, speculative fiction, Community, and Homestuck, right?

Post-apocalyptic DIY spaces like Shea Stadium, NXT LVL, and Secret Project Robot, where third grade arts and crafts grew up and became a way of life. Blisteringly novel music over tiki bars built out of plywood, windows cut into walls, giant plasterboard sculptures of the number 8, and some of the most truly impressive restroom graffiti you will ever behold. The newly reopened Silent Barn, especially--headquarters of Babycastles, the homemade arcade project for which I sometimes volunteer, and home to some of the kindest, most sincere, most hardworking people I've ever met.

The Tank, home of low-budget, big-dreams unconventional theater: puppet shows set to live covers of '90s bands, one-man improv, and an incredible monthly chiptune show. The Brick, where they do conversational narratives in form of cell phone texts and Shakespearean tragedy in the setting of King's Quest V, as well as adaptations of universally loathed classics like Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Goodbye Blue Monday, beyond description, in a class of its own.

The Strand, with its umpteen miles of books (though it does get a little smothering) and its wonderful recommendations. The unabashedly pretentious St. Marks bookstore, with Zizek and Barthes in the window, as if to scream, "Yeah, so what if we're snobs. Fuck you, anti-intellectualism!" Forbidden Planet, local purveyor of all things nerd, with entire shelves devoted to Gaiman, Whedon, Ellis. Sundaes and Cones.

Prospect Park, especially that one spot in the Long Meadow which at midnight is the only place in Brooklyn (and perhaps all of New York this side of Long Island) where you can see stars. Rooftop Films at the old can factory. Any of myriad terrible dive bars in Williamsburg or the LES which I hate, but keep coming back to because some nights you don't want to rock out with your cock out, you just want to sit down and sip a jack and coke while listening to a friend pour his soul out over an acoustic guitar.

The Brooklyn Public Library main branch, with its extraordinary variety and its stubborn, noble populism. The Museum of the Moving Image. The Brooklyn Museum--all of the astonishing beauty of the Met with far less of the politics, and a monthly all-ages dance party to boot.

Diners in the deep Midwest, far, far, far from New York. Quiet places with water and trees, or, failing those, endless fields.

Just one. Hope.

The weight of the world is heavy on my shoulders. Some guys want to see the world--I'm from it. I came of age with the children of diplomats, so, to me, everything big that happens in Italy and the West Bank and Bahrain and North Korea might as well be happening down the street. It seems like any time a bomb goes off anywhere, I'm sending concerned emails asking if people are okay. I couldn't care less about how good the parasailing is in Phuket or what the best time to see the Eiffel Tower is, but when I hear about ethnic tensions flaring in Hong Kong or the labor crisis in Greece (much less torture of student protesters in Syria or pretty much anything that's been happening in Sudan), I grieve. The world is small and guns are big.

But the world is not as mad as CNN makes it out to be! In the past year I've learned--by my own initiative, not through magazine articles--lots of lovely things about Swedish hell sausage, illegal Austrian performance art, the emerging Nigerian cinema industry, late-night Egyptian kebab stands, and pop music collaboratively produced by Japanese messageboard communities. Turns out people are all alike, except when they're completely different.

Being someone who makes them for a living, I also devote a lot of daily brainpower to video games (and game design in general), from a cultural, historical, and literary perspective. I know it's a trifling thing to obsess over, given all the big things that are happening in the world, but it brings people together and keeps them sane. If you ever want to get me super excited about something ultimately insignificant, ask me about chess and Hamlet sometime.

See "Favorite x, y, z...."

This makes me grin every time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssl1RxwMWNA

- you wish dating was more like making friends and less like a job interview.
- I sound like your next boyfriend.

(Apologies if I keep popping up in your visitors list. It's hard to say hello to a charming stranger, and I can be shy about this kind of thing.)