vagabond jim

production manager / dream implementor

In the beginning...

...there was silicon and there was steel. There was rubber and there was glass. When the things crawled out of the waters, they took the silicon and the steel, and they took the rubber and the glass, and they began bending and twisting and welding and soldering until they created a box that channeled the depths of their imaginations through lots and lots of cold, clean electricity.

In the beginning, most of the boxes were used either to blow the shit out of things, or to put things back together.

Only a few of the boxes fell into the right hands.

These hands belonged to a particularly mad gang of things. These things were intent on finding out how far the box, the electricity and the imaginations could be pushed.

These things are geeks.

I'm the thing called Vagabond Jim. I'm a geek. While some geeks work at building the better box, and other geeks work on the electricity that flows through the box, I strive to push my imagination into the box as far as I can.

I'm not alone. Three years ago I wired my box to the millions of other boxes that make up the 'net. I would spend the day making chicken salad sandwiches for snide assholes in a deli in the middle of Tennessee then go home and postulate and pontificate with geeks from four different continents about the future of culture, sex, drugs, and, naturally, boxes.

I was existing in the present but living in the future.

Then suddenly...

...Aimee Cardwell, a geek who pushed on boxes for Sega of America, wrote me an email. She has seen something I did on the 'net. She felt I needed to work with her building Sega Online, Sega's online presence. I couldn't have agreed more.

So I found myself in the city I'd always longed to live in, working with something I was passionate about, and learning new things everyday. I was pushing my imagination into the box. I found other geeks, they called themselves Cyborganics, and they were pushing on boxes in ways I'd never imagined.

The more I learned from them and the 'net, the more I realized that the corporate walls of Sega were confining my imagination.

I was existing in the future, but living in the past.

And finally...

...Abbe Don, a Cyborganic who pushes on boxes in beautiful ways, wrote me an email. She has seen something I did on the 'net. She felt I needed to work with her building Electric Minds, the next evolution of communication on the 'net. I couldn't have agreed more.

Producing the place where these words live has changed the way I work, the way I think, the way I imagine. I was given more creative control and responsibility than I'd ever had before. I got to explore the depths of interface design, as we tried to do things no one else has done with a web page. After the design began to emerge, I focused on the production process and found ways to produce the gobs of content the we wanted to launch with as I watched July become November overnight. I got about six hours of sleep in October.

I came to Minds for the team. I've never felt the kind of energy we produce when we are together. There's nothing quite like coming to work and getting high off the people around you.

They've helped me realize that there's a hell of a lot of things I want to do, and that I've got just enough time to do them in. As soon as I get off my lazy ass and get started, you will read about it first on vagabondage (my site) and here on Electric Minds.

I've learned lots in the three months I've spent at Electric Minds from the most amazing geeks I've ever worked with. We laugh and scream and cry and think and feel and live right now.