My Hometown

My Backstory

NW Roots: I was born in Seattle, and grew up North of Seattle in Lynnwood until I was 9. I've lived in the Seattle area most of my life, however I spent half my childhood growing up in Mississippi, Florida, upstate New York and Northern California. It took me nine years of traveling the USA, but I finally returned to Western Washington back in 1992 due to homesickness. I love Washington.

Seattle: During the 90s, I lived in various locations around the South end of Everett. I eventually moved wihin Seattle city limits around 2010, renting a little place overlooking a cemetery in the Greenwood neighborhood in the always-charming area of Highway 99 (which somehow seems like every other dreary urban stretch of Highway 99).

Career: After graduating high school in 1991, I worked in Customer Service roles in a variety of industries for over ten years. Those roles eventually evolved into jobs with responsibilites supporting their Marketing and Internet Advertising departments. My office skills helped me get my foot in the door with some entry-level QA testing jobs, and as of 2023, I've been working as a professional QA Video Game Tester for over seven years under contract on-site at a variety of Seattle-area game testing labs. QA Testing is most often under a contract basis, resulting in periodic layoffs; at such times I've also worked other side jobs, such as having fun as an Assistant Teacher for Creative Coding; where I helped teach Seattle's elementary school-age students how to create & debug their own video games.

Volunteering: In 2014 I was a volunteer on the Digital Content Team for Emerald City ComiCon; taking photos on the Con floor and running their Facebook page during their weekend event. This was followed by volunteering in their Gaming Department for 2015 and 2016, supporting Game Developers in their Demo area, as well as the Con guests in general. I also volunteered from 2015 to 2016 as a Radio Producer for KBFG 107.3, a Seattle FM radio station in development I supported in many capacities, as the little station was struggling to begin its regular broadcasting.

Pandemic Productivity: When the COVID-19 pandemic happened, I decided that someone who was almost 50 years old (me) should take some time off from work, to be on the safe side. I already had a nice PC workstation setup at home (mostly for gaming purposes, and from researching community radio broadcasting). So to keep myself productive, I used my spare time and PC workstation to support civil rights protests, by sharing & archiving the BLM protests in the months and years following the death of George Floyd, on YouTube, Facebook and my Internet Archive. I also enrolled in a bundled online course at South Seattle College, to learn a few coding languages: Oracle, Java and Python. Teaching myself to program is challenging, and a work in progress.

Gaming: I love games, from today's games on Steam, to the golden age of 80s video games (both arcade and home console). Tabletop games, too. I've played in TTRPG games with friends that lasted for years, using such game systems as D&D, Vampire: the Masquerade, Legend of the Five Rings, and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire.

Geek Culture: I enjoy geek culture in general, though I spend way too much time attached to my computer. I occasionally enjoy tinkering around with computer 2D/3D animation, while teaching myself computer coding for the sake of QA Testing and (eventually?) old-school game development. Since a layoff at the end of 2022, I've also been practicing how to create & manage my own web blog, NW Mystery Radio, for fun and for the sake of the learning experience. I'm definitely still learning things.