Profile

Today the Surrealist Compliment Generator told me, "The expanse of your intelligence is a void no universe could ever fill." Thanks (I think)...

I was born in 1974, shortly after the vernal equinox, when science fiction author Philip K. Dick went insane. Those three events have no connection. I learned to read at the age of two, so in kindergarten all the other kids kept asking me to read to them. I still like reading to people.

My grandfather used to take my family to Walt Disney World in Florida every year since I was born until I was about eighteen or so. This was more important to me than Christmas. He still takes some of us every once in a while, and for me it's almost a pilgramage. I've been there more than twenty times, but the exact number depends on whether you count the trip I was in the womb.

Instead of attending an animation school and pursuing my dreams, when I was 18 I believed it was God's will that I get a useless art degree at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, a school that puts the "mental" in "fundamentalist." Later I became what some people call a "devout secularist" but which I refer to as a "recovering ex-Christian." Just to see what all the fuss was about, I drank my first taste of alcohol at the age of 29; a Chardonnay. It tasted like Drano but I was open-minded enough to try a margarita and that was OK. I also intend to learn this ritual convulsion called "dancing" which people seem to like so much for reasons that escape me.

These days I participate in running all-volunteer not-for-profit science fiction conventions. I do temp jobs in graphic design and am going back to school to learn web development.

I organize all-volunteer not-for-profit science fiction conventions, particularly Penguicon. I do temp work in graphic design but I'm looking to switch careers.

Toward that end, I work for Escape Artists, Inc., a family of short fiction podcasts. These include Escape Pod science fiction podcast, Pseudopod horror podcast, and Podcastle fantasy podcast. It's the second-largest paying market in the world. Short fiction is the lifeblood of the genre, and Escape Artists is on the cutting edge of internet content delivery. I get to talk to everybody involved with those two things. How cool is that?

I run PodDisc.com for them, selling archive CDs of podcasts.

I have one very amicable divorce and no children. My website of essays, games, and wacky calendar/spelling/metric reform schemes is www.nemorathwald.com. I work for On Yudkowsky's Future Shock Scale I rate a 3.

My social bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/Matt_Arnold.

Look me up on Second Life with the handle Nemo Benmergui.

Forecast: Uncertainty is up, expenses are down, issues remain stable. Slightly scheming today with 80% chance of improvement over the weekend. As of 5:00 p.m. I had 1,371,624,462 seconds estimated left to live.