About

The longer version

None of this came from nowhere. The disposition started early.

Elementary school. A flashlight and a book and whatever Game Boy cartridge I'd been told to put away — all smuggled under the covers, all the way too late. I was already in the habit of staying up too long with whatever world I was inside. Books, Saturday morning Pokémon, music, video games. Everything was an entrance into somewhere worth knowing.

In third grade I followed my favorite teacher into the chess club. Made it to the semifinals against kids years older than me. Lost the final match. Didn't actually mind losing — by then I'd figured out that the playing was the thing.

In my early teens, I started taking apart broken laptops. The ones my family had given up on. I got a few of them working again — not because I knew what I was doing, but because I wanted to know how they worked.

Around the same time, I started drawing. Graphite, pencil, charcoal. Mostly portraits, because faces are harder than anything else and I wanted to know if I could. I spent hours getting an eye right, a jawline right, the way light falls across a cheekbone. The intake had become output.

I fell out of reading for a while. The intake never stopped — it just kept finding new shapes. YouTube, games, conversations, code. Different shapes; same hunger.

Late in my teens, someone handed me a copy of the D&D Player's Handbook, and that was a different door entirely. Suddenly the worlds I'd been escaping into as a kid were ones I could build myself. I started writing — characters, settings, the rules of invented places. I still do. Worldbuilding turned out to be the thing where reader, writer, builder, and dreamer all collapse into the same activity.

By my mid-twenties I'd ended up running the business side of a company helping comics creators commercialize their work. The throughline I never planned was already there — what does it take to get a creative person's work into the world? — and I'd just been answering different versions of that question my whole life.

On the side I keep building things for myself. A personal dashboard. A library of my own reading called Commonplace. Small software tools. Things I needed and couldn't find. Most of what I make is just my philomath habit, externalized.

Lately, breadth doesn't feel like enough. I've spent my whole life pulling threads from everywhere — fields, books, conversations — building what I can only describe as a knowledge web in my head. Each new thing connects to something else. The web grows. That's the part I love.

But I can feel the pull toward depth now. Toward picking one thing and going deeper than feels reasonable. I'm circling a PhD — strategy, psychology, something at the intersection where business and human behavior actually meet. I don't know yet. I'm trying to figure out which thread, when pulled hard enough, would unravel into something worth giving a decade to.

I don't have the answers yet. The journey is the point — I'm working through it in public, mostly through writing. Come read.