I’m afraid I’m not as exciting as some people, including the people who have memed me. So you’ll just have to blame Lumand MMOGNation for being subjected to this. Edited to add: “this” being “a list of five things most people don’t know about me.”

1) I’ve been dead. But I’m feeling much better now. When I was 2 years old, I jumped into my best friend’s swimming pool to get a beach ball. Neither of us could swim. I nominated myself to go in because, well, I was older than my friend. My friend jumped in to rescue me, rather than doing the logical thing and getting his mom. Fortunately, we must have splashed around enough to get someone’s attention, and the EMTs managed to revive me.

2) I’m an Eagle Scout. I’m no longer as proud of this as I used to be, now that the organization’s beliefs have drifted so far from my own. But I earned the merit badges, did the time, did the community project, and I still keep my eagle ring on my keyring to remind myself.

3) I worked my way through college in a head shop. Well, technically, anyway. It was a small shop on Sixth Street, the main bar strip here in Austin. And while we had a small assortment of ‘water pipes’ in the back, no one ever bought any from us (they were hysterically overpriced). Instead, the shop funded themselves by selling overpriced cigarettes and soda. Out of 200 dollars of sales on a Saturday night, $170 would be three buck packs of cigarettes (which was gougingly high a the time) and one dollar sodas.

The job involved me working for an insane man. He owned the bar next door as well, and his hobby appeared to be showing up for work and just firing people at random. A few years after I left his employment to join the games industry, he was apparently shot dead by someone, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knew him.

4) I’m an advertising major. I did MUDs in my spare time at college, and never dreamed I’d make them into a full-time gig. Just as I was graduating, though, I noticed something troubling: I hated my classmates. When I interviewed for jobs, I noticed I hated the people interviewing me. This served as a warning bell, and around then Raph recommended me for a job to the people making Meridian 59. I came about an inch away from making toothpaste ads. Now, my advertising degree’s utility is mostly limited to noting how 99% of all game advertising ignores the most basic rules of good marketing.

5) I wanted to be a cartoonist. When I was growing up, I fell in love with Calvin and Hobbes as well as Bloom County. Later, it would be Doonesbury and Dilbert. When I was in high school, my first job ever was drawing cartoons for a guy who had a vision: he would write two-line poems with sort of a feel-good Family Circus vibe to them, and I would draw a one-panel cartoon that would match them. His goal was to sell the cartoons to– hell, I don’t even know, but I got seven bucks a cartoon, which in retrospect wasn’t bad considering his day job was working as a clerk at Nordstroms. Unfortunately for him, his poems were miserable, and my art was worse.

In college, I submitted cartoons to the college paper two semesters in a row, and got rejected both times. It was really hard- I like 4-panel strips (and I’m far too verbose for a one panel), but I’m incapable of drawing the same thing four times in a row. This ended up killing the dream pretty quickly.

Well, that’s it. I guess I have to point this at people who haven’t already been subjected to it. How about some people who need to post more anyway? I’m looking at you: Sara at We Can Fix that In Data, Will Wallace, Brandon at Extropica, J at Damned Vulpine, and Geoff Zatkin.