What the hell do you say to these? Hi! I benchpress small continents. I'm smarter than Einstein. I'm so sexy that underwear models hit on me in bars. I'm basically awesome in every conceivable way. Plus I'm unbelievably modest.

By trade, I'm a geek. You name it, I can code it. By choice, I like to consider myself an artist. I enjoy beauty in any of its myriad forms. I'm trying to start a game studio, combining trade and choice in one beautiful hilariously-doomed symbiosis.

I have perhaps picked up a trace of cynicism in my life, but cynicism tempered with sheer unalloyed optimism and joy. If the phrase "Oh, that's a fantastic idea. That couldn't fail in any way at all. Okay, let's give it a try!" makes sense to you, then you understand me, and you understand what my life is about.

My picture is terrible. I am aware of this. I will flat-out buy you dinner if you get some good photos of me. This is a challenge. I double-dog dare you - yes, you, the person reading this. Bring it.

Errata: I've been mucking with Icebreakers because it's rather fun. I've decided to add some interests solely to annoy IceBreakers. Yep. I am gaming the system. Watch me break shit. I cannot wait to see if IceBreakers starts triggering on these. breathing fun buckyballs thus water black holes yes, that is right, I am interested in breathing, why in fact I do it nearly every day

As mentioned previously, I'm starting a game studio. Am I crazy? Oh hell yes. But it's something I've wanted to do for many years, and now I've got a nest egg built up and I'm finally attempting it. It's going to be a very long and very difficult road.

So far it's been a two-year-long road, and I'm starting to kind of figure out what I'm doing. I still haven't sold anything but it's been a hell of a lot of fun. I'm now trying a new challenge where I make one game every month - yeah, that's right, one entire game every single month - and I would be quite thankful if you inspected the fruits of my labor at this link and told me what you thought.

You know. About my fruits.

Inspect my fruits closely.

More eternally, I'm doing everything involving imagination. Everything. Books games comics movies music roleplaying everything. This is just what my life is tied up in. Beauty is - at the risk of sounding like a moron - beautiful.

My last profile said I was good at geeky things. This is true. I am. But I'm sort of losing interest in a way. Geekery is, for me, a solved problem. You want it coded, I can code it. There is no question in my mind on that. And thus it is uninteresting.

Lately I've been mucking about with trying to decipher Fun. Fun, it turns out, is a curiously slippery* concept. People do not want to have fun, and will avoid it at every possible opportunity. It is like all of human behavior is geared towards spending an enormous amount of energy carefully dodging fun, then complaining that it wasn't fun. So you kind of have to trick people into having fun, and then they thank you for it, and innocently suggest that, next time, perhaps you might want to remove the very thing that they found fun.

I'm figuring out how to do this. Slow road. But making progress.

* (if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge)

I tend to talk quickly. I'm invariably trying to get someone to play whatever game I've most recently discovered. (Sometimes tabletop, sometimes computer, sometimes console. Depends on the mood.) Despite my apparent fixation on games and art, I do my best to be knowledgable in many other areas - science and politics, philosophy, cooking. If it is interesting, then I am interested in it, and vice-versa. This tends to become apparent when the conversation is on its fifth nested branch and we've forgotten what branches one through three were.

I will cheerfully debate essentially anything to the limits of my ability. I consider a good debate to be one that ends with someone changing their mind, even if it's me.

In summary, I tend to have very complicated deep conversations.

If you're going for a "physical aspect" answer, well, nobody can agree on what color my eyes are, and it comes up more often than I'd expect. So if you want that sort of answer, that's not it, because it's never the first thing. But it's something.

I basically just blew away everything I used to have written here because it did not make sense to who I am today.

I look for stuff that stretches my brain. Sometimes that's because it's glorious and amazing and I love it. Sometimes that's because I don't know if it's good. Sometimes that's because, despite the fact that it's not wonderful, it does something so very very right that I cannot help but worship it.

I have grown to realize that there is more to books than words, and there is more to movies than acting. There is a Thing, outside these media and greater than them, that some people tap into and others do not. Paintings are not pictures. Games are not code. Comics are not what you get when you lock an artist and a writer in a room together.

Art is more than the sum of its parts, and sometimes, despite all of its parts being inferior, the whole is great.

So let's pull the plunger and start this off on a hideously cliche note. Transmetropolitan, a fantastic series by Warren Ellis, chronicling the life of mad gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem, himself heavily inspired by Hunter S. Thompson. The feel is gorgeous, the flavoring impeccable, and even when you cannot help but hate Spider you also cannot help but love him. He is a Character, and I worship Warren Ellis forever for being able to write like that.

Another direction. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I do not claim this is a good movie. Honestly? I couldn't tell you what it is. I could tell you that you should watch it. You may enjoy it. You may not. I am still not sure if I enjoyed it, and yet, I am glad to have seen it. Why? I don't know!

Ping! Richochet off a bumper and careen down the Extra Ball lane, buzzers flashing wildly. Braid, The Path. I have long felt that games can be a form of art. These games are, in my opinion, unarguably art, but exploratory art - they are what they are, and you get out something similar to what you put in. You could consider Braid a gorgeous incredible puzzle game designed by a madman, or you could consider it an allegory for a thing which I shall not describe to avoid spoiling it for anyone who hasn't played it (note to you: go play it.) The Path is a game about growing up - it says so, that's the description - but what does growth mean? Is it truly what the game indicates, that growth is catastrophe and struggle and mental ravaging, or is the growth another aspect - our play through the game, our understanding of life, our evolution and thought with respect to what we've been shown?

Damned if I know.

Lights flash and sirens howl, steel orbs crisscrossing and refracting off relays and plastic. An ancient gear hums to life, dispensing a volume of paper tickets that can be redeemed for China-built trinkets and gadgets, some already crumbling on the display stand. Toys. LA Story. Crash. That's enough movies for now, let's go elsewhere. Daisy Kutter. Hellspark. Recoil. Chumbawamba. Monkey Island. MS Paint Adventures. War against the Chtorr. Oddworld. There, we've got books, comics, movies, and music. Good enough?

I could probably list awesome media for hours, if I had to, but I shall not. And I could talk about them for hours, and discuss what they did right and what they did wrong. This is what I do. This is what I am trying to learn, and what I am spending my life devoted to - art in all its forms.

I could talk about them more . . .

. . . but if you want that, you'll have to, y'know, send me a message. This thing's getting crazy enough already.

Plus I think the pinball machine's broken.

(1) The tools to make art, of whatever kind. I admit this mostly comes down to "my brain". I really like my brain though.

(2) Other people's universes to play in. So . . . other people's brains? Insert generic zombie joke here?

(3) New minds to meet. I admit to cheating. This is equivalent to #2.

(4) Good food.

(5) A sense of humor. If you can't laugh at yourself . . . well, we probably won't get along, and we will probably not do so in a reasonably explosive fashion. But don't let that stop you, explosions are fun and everyone learns things and tells stories afterwards and the world is enrichified.

(Enrichified is a word. I know this, because I have proclaimed it as such, and thus it is so.)

(6) New things to learn. See #5. And #2. And my entire goddamn profile jesus christ have you even been reading this thing

I know that this reply feels a lot like "oh well uh my brain and air and I guess I need water and food also, my blood vessels come in handy as well", but, honestly, that's what it is for me. I keep myself entertained. If you dropped me off in a desert with a supply of food and water and came back a month later I'd probably be trying to make sculptures out of sand and hold a conversation with a friendly scorpion.

There is nothing I have written yet that would lead you to think I am addicted to imagination.

Nothing whatsoever.

I won't mention it here either, as I feel like continuing my evil web of deceit and lies.

There is no good way to answer this question. I challenge you: Have you ever seen a good answer? Is such a thing possible? Is this question ever a plus, or is merely a neutrality, a checkbox to briefly glance over just to ensure that your potential paramour has not offhandedly mentioned a penchant for mass murder of prostitutes?

Given a choice between truth and awesomeness, I am publicly choosing awesomeness. Let the stream of consciousness flow.

On my typical Friday night I am fighting aliens, underwater, with Stephen Colbert, and the aliens are created by the bad dreams of kittens. We ride on magical carpets powered by yeti tears and woven out of the dreams of lost socks. Our weapons are physical manifestations of exuberance and schadenfreude, which we wield akimbo, festooned with informational crimson holograms.

Colbert jinks left and unleashes a joviality bomb, scattering loathing chaff in his wake like glittering contemptuous fireflies. The Neptunian hordes scatter in amazement and shock. Their limited training means they have never seen such a maneuver, and are unprepared for its glory and joy. In terror they flee, tunneling through reality itself to reach the Alterearth.

There, I wait for them. I have fashioned a net of frustration, with irritation as the warp and aggravation as the woof, a lattice of annoyance with dissatisfaction woven in for strength. They impact this net, belching involuntary cries of vexation, their strength ebbing into apathy.

Later, Colbert and I load the net into a trebuchet and fire it into the sun.

That is my typical Friday night.

I've made some pretty big mistakes in my life. I'm willing to admit that. I'd like to think I've learned from them.

But I'm not going to tell you what they are until I know you better.

Nyaaah. Now you're curious, aren't you? Sucks to be you.

(In fairness, my experience is that "learned from mistakes" is equivalent to "now you can make bigger, better, more spectacular mistakes". Such is life.)

Here is where people tend to put their requirements. If you've been looking around on OKCupid for a while, you'll notice these fall into two main categories.

Please Pay Attention To Me: Message me if you like walks in the park. Or if you don't! It's preferable if you have a pulse, but not necessary. I like women who are either above, below, or exactly five foot six inches. You must have an interest in things! "Nothing" counts as a thing. Send me a message, lol!

(For some reason they almost always end in "lol". Please don't end your message with "lol". It's not punctuation.)

Hold The Pickles and Half Of The Pepperoni, But No More: Message me if you're a five-foot-six-inch Albanian woman who likes knitting, GWAR, and chessboxing. You must own a yacht between 30 and 40 feet with a walrus painted on the side.

I admit I used to do the first. Then I used to do the second. I've learned, you see. From mistakes, that I have made.

My current requirements are both simple and difficult. I admit this.

Be both interesting and interested.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I live life in perpetual fascination with it. There's so much to learn out there, y'know? Why stop learning? Why stop growing? The world is a goddamn awesome place. I want to know everything there is about it, and I want someone to bounce stuff off. That's where you come in - I want you to be just as fascinated in the world. I can talk about game design and balance for hours - what can you talk about for hours? Will you to wax rhapsodic for half an hour on your favorite subject, then come back to earth and sheepishly say "but uh I'm not sure you wanted to know all that"?

And when I do the same thing, are you going to space out on me? Or are you going to be sitting there in rapt fascination, absorbing every last iota, just like I will when you do it?

Be driven.

I've gone through a few bad dates lately. There's a rather disturbing constant to them. When I say "what do you do" I get kind of a blank look and a shrug. Why, I work at Wal-Mart. No, I have no plans to do anything else. I'm actually kind of happy working as a teller at Wal-Mart. Let me tell you about our special deals.

I would not be happy working at Wal-Mart. Okay, that's kind of a lie. I think it would be a pretty neat challenge to run Wal-Mart.

The entire company, that is. Not any particular store.

That would be fun.

Have a goal. Have plans. Tell me how you're going to blaze your signature across the landscape, or across the world, or across the collective subconsciousness of humanity.

What do you want to do tonight?

The same thing we do every night. Try to take over the world.

Be smart . . .

If you use "lol" like a recruit uses "sir", it's probably off. I'll let you fill in the rest of the blanks yourself.

. . . and self-aware.

And here's the bit where I veer into what I consider to be "have a pulse" territory, only it seems like a lot of people actually don't have one.

If you're sitting there thinking "hmm I am not sure I fill these requirements" then I actually want to talk to you. Because self-criticism? The ability to sit there and say "I am not perfect, but I try"? That is cool. That is a good thing.

At the least we'll get a good conversation out of it.

That is what I am looking for, and if you're still reading, I suspect you should message me.