I can get excited by a lot of subjects but I'm especially interested in birds, cooking, photography, sci-fi, animation, electronics, plants, printing, history/myths, game design and game soundtracks. So if I'm struggling with small talk diving into one of those subjects, or anything you have a deep interest in is a good bet.
My longest special interest has been computers. As a little kid in the early 90s I loved the game Myst. When I found out it was made in HyperCard (which also came bundled with our computer) a door of possibility and wonder opened up. I had never considered that something like Myst was made by real people, and that the tools they used were also available to me. I started playing with HyperCard and AppleScript and creating little "games" and scripts using books from the library, at that age a lot of the concepts went over my head. I started building little HTML text adventures before I had ever been on the web thanks to finding a book on HTML and learning all I needed was a text file.
I've never lost my love of the pre/early web era, its openness and the idea of freely sharing ideas and tools. Also the obvious in hindsight lesson that everything is made by humans and if they learnt how to do something there's no reason you can't also work it out. I miss the optimism and utopian or transformative potential of cyberspace. I see the seeds of it still in open-source and would love to be able to spend my work time contributing to the commons.
You can read a brief overview of my work experience or my values. The pattern in the background is an instance of the Game of Life running live.
