Who is the guy behind xJ4cks? Sorry, I'm not comfortable fully doxxing in 2023Q4. I'll give you some background here so you'll know what I'm passionate about and what I'm working on, though. The 'why' will follow.
a collage of NFTs + an un-issued Bank of Lannuvar note
who & what
First off, my professional background.
- Some early jobs I worked: buffet runner in a fancy hotel, movie projectionist, bank teller.
- I enlisted in the U.S. military after 9/11, was trained to perform a Top Secret IT job, hence...
- I lived in both S.Korea and Japan & enjoyed exploring their cuisine and tourist spots.
- I freelanced in web development, from 2018 onwards;
- Began working in web3 (blockchain + Discord) in 2021;
- Created graphics & lore, from 2022 onwards;
- & Started freelancing in cloud software engineering in 2023.
I currently live in Oregon, in one of the most progressive cities in the USA. You may have heard about the racial justice protests that occurred here during the early COVID years, and you may know us for our homeless crisis more than for our incredible city parks and restaurants, but the same policies and public attitudes that created the latter have also precipitated the former. I grew up in the Pennsylvania mountains a few hours outside of New York, so despite the drawbacks of life in this Pacific Northwest city, I vastly prefer it to the cold, mercantile Northeast of my youth.
My 5.5 years in the US Air Force were a whirlwind of travel and learning (mostly on the job, but sometimes on the weekend), plus my first forays into tourism and blogging. Those archives are strewn across flickr and facebook, but maybe I'll collect them together again someday.
why web3
Why web3? Hope, of course. It's ideally built around a new economic model, not just hustling NFTs (unique picture metadata on a public database). The core of the new model is the idea of DAOs (Decentralized, Autonomous Organizations), and this appeals to me because it shows us a way towards community-oriented capitalism. I believe strongly that a new model which enables humans to better trust each other is the answer to the runaway profiteering and exploitation that we're now living with.
The culture of my favorite blockchain, MultiversX, is exciting because its DAO landscape is robust and entrepreneurial-- some of the vibes remind me of the late 90s Internet (early web1). I think this is mainly due to its tech, which is well suited to amateur projects (we have extremely cheap transactions versus Ethereum). MultiversX has a large, well-connected developer community, very active on Discord and The App Formerly Known As Twitter. The landscape feels a lot like the www before big corporations discovered it...
I have enjoyed creating promotional graphics and writing some lore for DAOs and projects on MultiversX, especially in 2022 when it was called Elrond. Some links to that work can be found by exploring this site.
Promotion I created for the Lost Pages NFT collection
