Things I've very much enjoyed doing outside of work
Taking over the world, one sandwich at a time.
Sandwichers.com
In 2012, my dear friend Philip and I realized we had a critical common obsession: food; and more specifically, food surrounded by bread.
We mused about tackling various "Top 100" lists, and writing about our exploits, taking pictures, and ultimately forming enough of a material backlog to launch a web series. In the back of my head, an additional goal stewed: wouldn't it be a hoot if we could outrank restaurants on their own food items in Google Image Search?
What started as a joke became reality one Saturday morning when I woke up, threw on a pot of coffee, and went to town building out a Wordpress.org site. Much of what followed was entirely new to me at the time: domain registration, DNS setup, CNAME records, hosting provisions, and oh-by-the-way I had never used Wordpress, let alone experienced its insane store of plugins. By the end of day 2, Sandwichers was fully operational, and both of us were editing articles from our phones.
We never did make that web series, but a year on from when we let the site lapse, our pictures still regularly populate the top row of image searches.
Visit Sandwichers.com and bask in our attempt to become enormously well-fed.
Why yes, I would like to write about video games!
The Creators Project
In classic "I bumped into a friend of a friend at a totally awesome concert" style, I bumped into a friend of a friend at a totally awesome concert. At the time, he was an editor for Vice's The Creators Project, and he was looking for someone to write about video games. Interviews, top-whatever lists, reviews of strange games -- anything was on the table, and I was more than happy to oblige.
Over the course of a few months, I produced a small body of work for TCP, spoke with a small number of extraordinarily interesting people, and relished having a platform through which I could share any opinion that came to mind. My morning subway commutes, normally spent head-down in mobile games, included deviations into note-taking, headline-writing, and article stubs. My weekends, normally spent playing video games, transitioned to writing about them, transcribing interviews, and at times, doing piles of research to back up my writing.
It goes without saying that writing for The Creators Project was a brilliant experience, resulting in a much deeper appreciation of my chosen leisure-medium. Did you know mocap technology was around two decades before its inclusion in video games? Or that Diablo III's vast script comprised around 15,000 lines of recorded dialog? I certainly didn't until I got the chance to go down the research rabbit hole, write it all up, and watch it go live on a Vice blog.
For more from this project, go ahead and check out my author page.