Raised in south San Diego. Matured in San Francisco for 10 years. Marinated for another 8 years in Los Angeles. Cookin’ it up in Seattle for the last few.
I’m pretty nerdy about a lot of things, especially music, TV, board games, coffee, beer, crypto, and being a husband+father/Dungeon Master for my super cool wife and kids.
The family motto is: Be Nice. Be Good. Be You.
Be Nice: Above everything - be a good person. Live with humility, compassion, empathy, and laughter.
Be Good: If you do something, do it well. Life’s too short to not find the joys in challenges and achievements. We all start slow, but we can all get fast. Don’t stop until you do.
Be You: Being you is about unapologetically loving what you love. Find the joys in life and don’t be scared to love them. Music, movies, video games, comics, anime, board games, it doesn’t matter. The coolest people in our eyes are those who nerd out the most and don’t care who’s watching.
So let’s nerd out!
Here I am as a 3-song playlist. We are what we love, and I don’t hold back. If you work with me, I share the things that inspire me and make me feel things… a lot.
One of my all-time fav bands. This track just happens to be the song I'm listening to as I made this page on the site. It touches this fantasy and angst from the 80's kid that I happily carry around inside me. And, really, is there really anything better than 80’s youth angst?
This song… it represents SO much. The hardcore and emo scene in San Diego was world famous in the mid-to-late 90's. Not only does this song accomplish what everyone was trying to do back then, it hits the emotional drive that fueled who I was and who I became as a young adult. I was a straight-edge/hardcore kid in the 90s San Diego scene and owe much of my fearlessness for passions to that time of my life. So while this is a band from Fukuoka, Japan - it’s the sound that transcends.
One of my all-time favorite songs. Something I love about design is that it’s a creative pursuit through a maze of human behaviors and psychology. So I’m going to draw from that to explain what this song is for me. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who first coined the concept of “flow state”) shares descriptions of the flow state as experienced by participants in his research studies:
A musician describes it as an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist.
A poet notes that you can’t particularly force yourself through – you just have to float.
If I listen to this song, close my eyes, and let myself go, I feel like I don’t exist. I float. What POWER is that? For me to click play on a little youtube embed and for my brain to lift off? Damn, I live for it!