Spring league: up to A Division, a point short
My second competitive season at Two Plumbers. I climbed into A Division and stayed there, then missed the playoff cutoff by a single point on a strange final night.
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friends
20 entries
My first season of competitive pinball
I finally stopped being scared of league play, joined the winter league at Two Plumbers, and finished 2nd in C Division.
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Keokuk, Iowa, Driving to See an Internet Friend Play a Real Stage
A short October road trip up the Mississippi to a 1920s theater in the corner of Iowa, to watch a friend I met through Twitch, the musician Nalani Proctor, play live on a real stage.
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and an island called Island
My first Animal Crossing, started the day after it launched, the day the pandemic got real. An island that is mostly water, a friend who kept visiting, and a year of my life I can reconstruct almost entirely from the pictures I took.
Read entry →Meeting Mary
How I met my best friend on the internet in January 2020, right before the world shut down. A zombie in a Halloween house, a show recommendation, a pandemic we got through together, and a friendship that has not skipped a day since.
Read entry →Leaving Mercy, and the commute that broke me
A year building patient apps for virtual care, getting to hire friends, and finally admitting the drive was wearing me down.
Read entry →Leaving Monsanto, which became Bayer
Three years building software for plant science, and the friends who made it worth showing up for.
Read entry →Leaving the cable company
Two years where I went from web to iOS, met friends I still talk to, and learned what a good salary even feels like.
Read entry →Leaving Schnucks, after seven and a half years
My first real job out of high school, the grocery company that took a chance on a kid who had won a website contest. What I will miss most is the people.
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Pinball night, 2011
My first real pinball party. From the old hertzelle.com blog, and, as it turns out, the start of something.
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Craig, also known as TartarSauce
A tribute to one of my best friends, who I met healing raids in World of Warcraft. Two solo guys who texted every day, a decade of co-op games, the time a TSA agent waved me to the front of the line for my class, and a friendship I have never stopped valuing.
Read entry →For Vanessa
A friend from the old internet, an electronic composer who wrote hundreds of songs before she turned twenty-one, and the archive I built so her music wouldn't disappear.
Read entry →For Sara
Sara Stump, who I knew as Glitzymakeupgirly and as Sarasim. We met in The Sims Online, got married in the game, and talked for years on Yahoo Messenger, about music, life, and everything else. She passed in the summer of 2007.
Read entry →What running DragonSiblings taught me
A message board I started in high school that grew to 108 members and almost 29,000 posts. It was my first real lesson in databases, hosting, and looking after a community.
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How I became the Crimson Dragon
Before DragonSiblings was a forum with 29,000 posts, it was four friends. April and Diana started it, McKenzie made three, and then they recruited me to build a website and kept me. Our origin story, partly in my own words from back then.
Read entry →Extended Break
In 2003 I downloaded a free game called Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and fell in with a clan called Extended Break. I stayed for years, ended up a general, helped run the place, and captained the team while we climbed the ladder. Here is who we were.
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The Sims Online, and how I ended up helping rebuild it
My first real online world. Making pizzas by typing, locking skills at 20.99, a clothing store named after a restaurant I never ate at, and a strange full circle twenty years later when I got to write code for the open-source revival.
Read entry →The summer someone my age finally moved in
When we moved to the neighborhood I had nobody my age. Then, the summer before sixth grade, a kid named Tyler moved in from Michigan, and I made a friend I still have more than twenty-five years later.
Read entry →The summer we moved away
In 1997 we left St. John for a brand-new house in Lake St. Louis. A new school, a room of my own, and a goodbye to the only home and friends I had ever known.
Read entry →Sara, and the games she taught me
A third-grade field-day sack race with my friend Sara, who introduced me to Brain Bash and Bop It, and, in a hazy basement memory, maybe to computers.
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