{"id":8,"date":"2026-05-16T04:18:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T04:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world-exe.nz\/?page_id=8"},"modified":"2026-06-23T08:38:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T08:38:09","slug":"hub","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/world-exe.nz\/?page_id=8","title":{"rendered":"about me"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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My studio energy<\/h1>

draws from a cocktail of inspiration:<\/p>

Doug Coupland x Glen Duncan x Greg Egan x Patrick McGrath x F. Paul Wilson x John Carl Buechler x Megagon x Mark Healey x Playdead x Eric Chahi x Jay Silver x Artscum x Terrahawks x Gracious Films x Park Chan-wook x Juhana Myllys x David Cronenberg x Lars von Trier x Carruth x Larry Clark x Dan Rozin x Richard Garfield x Jim Henson x Jxiidxii x VideoCult (Rainworld) x TU Studio (LOP whitefall) – with Paul Donovan, Al Pyun and Atmosfear vibes somehow holding the whole thing together.<\/strong><\/p>

Who Am I?<\/h1>

I’m a 44-year-old single guy from New Zealand. Caucasian, cis, straight, Pisces, 5’11”, stocky build, long hair, beard, and a great smile. Personality-wise, I’m an INTP with a lifelong addiction to silly quizzes and a tendency to disappear down rabbit holes of ideas, systems, stories, and strange connections.<\/p>

Professionally, I’ve worked across software development, nonfiction writing, game writing and production, art direction, scripting, worldbuilding, and creative development. At heart, though, I’m a multidisciplinary creator interested in building things that didn’t exist before\u2014stories, worlds, games, systems, conversations, and experiences.<\/p>

What I’m Building<\/h2>

My one-year goal is simple:<\/p>

Finish 20 art projects for my portfolio website and use them to secure a remote or hybrid part-time art-based role. I’d also like to move into a local two-bedroom cottage with a wargaming friend and establish a more stable, creative base of operations.<\/p>

My two-year goal is to create enough income from a mixture of books, publications, open-source content, Patreon prototypes, video art, radio shorts, screenplays, web series, software art, zines, comics, research, self-published novellas, scripts, indie games, TTRPGs, animation, freelancing, prop-building, and art direction projects to comfortably sustain a one-year runway.<\/p>

That runway would fund a bus-studio conversion, extensive travel, and eventually help me find a permanent home for the bus itself. I’d love to explore places including Osaka, Malaysia, Sydney, Oman, Chile, California, New Jersey, Miami, Italy, and Slovenia while continuing to develop creative projects along the way.<\/p>

Hobbies & Interests<\/h2>

Wargaming is a major part of my life. I enjoy Magic: The Gathering kitchen-table paper decks, MTG Duels, MTGO, Warhammer 40K Tyranids, Emperor’s Children, and Mutant Chronicles. I’m still learning how to build cool narrative-style decks and generally enjoy games that create stories as much as competition.<\/p>

My reading tastes range across horror, science fiction, literary fiction, fantasy, and strange fiction. Favourite authors include Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Greg Egan, F. Paul Wilson, Kurt Vonnegut, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Glen Duncan, Roald Dahl, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and Frank Herbert’s Dune.<\/p>

I’m also a lifelong comic collector. My shelves lean heavily toward DC, Image Comics, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Tony Wong, Jae Lee, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine Vol. 2, Warren Ellis, Earth X, Punisher, Marvel 2099, and Spider-Man villain books.<\/p>

As a gamer, I have a deep affection for retro systems including the Sega Mega Drive, PlayStation 1, Nintendo DS, Atari Jaguar, Amiga 500, Acorn Archimedes, Neo Geo, and modern indie games on Steam.<\/p>

Outside of creative pursuits, I love the water\u2014bodyboarding, body surfing, beaches, spas, and saunas. I enjoy good coffee, the occasional whiskey or lager, and sometimes a gin and tonic.<\/p>

Music<\/h2>

My musical tastes are all over the place. Some of my favourite artists include:<\/p>

The Band, Bob Seger, Steppenwolf, Arika Gluck, Troyman, Chvrches, Bon Jovi, Megadeth, Aphex Twin, Daft Punk, Everlast, Pantera, Neil Young, Rage Against the Machine, One Day As A Lion, Slipknot, Iggy Pop, Efterklang, Dez Fafara, Greta Van Fleet, Fly My Pretties, AC\/DC, Santana, Citizen Cope, Cam Cole, Ron Gallo, The Heavy, Chinese Man, Hilltop Hoods, David Bowie, and Owen James.<\/p>

Creative Philosophy<\/h2>

I built my creative practice around the idea that small-scale independent art can still feel expansive, emotionally charged, and culturally resonant.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Creative Social Circle Wellington:<\/b><\/p>

A Wellington-based creative social circle built around honest conversation, mutual encouragement, and long-term artistic growth. The meetup is intentionally small and focused, with only four participant slots available per night across two annual gatherings. This creates a calm, intimate atmosphere where every person has space to speak openly about their creative process, personal journey, successes, failures, and the realities of sustaining artistic work over time.<\/p>

The circle is designed for creatives who share a similar outlook and energy \u2014 people interested in meaningful discussion rather than networking performances or self-promotion. Writers, filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, designers, game developers, performers, and independent creators are all welcome if they contribute positively to the environment and genuinely care about creative development and community.<\/p>

Each session runs for several hours in person somewhere within Wellington, allowing conversations to unfold naturally rather than feeling rushed or transactional. Topics may include discipline, burnout, unfinished projects, experimentation, publishing, exhibitions, audience-building, creative identity, mental resilience, collaboration, and balancing art with everyday life. The aim is not competition, but solidarity: creating a dependable support network where creatives can exchange insight, celebrate progress, and stay motivated through difficult periods.<\/p>

The project is intentionally scalable. While the core format remains small and curated, additional circles, workshops, collaborative spaces, retreats, or mentorship structures could grow from the original model over time. The long-term vision is to develop a sustainable creative ecosystem built on trust, consistency, shared ambition, and genuine camaraderie.<\/p>

At its heart, the social circle exists to remind creatives that they do not have to build their artistic lives entirely alone.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Artists, Collectives, and the Modern Creative Commune<\/strong><\/p>

One of the reasons historic collectives succeeded was because they balanced shared life with private retreat. The caf\u00e9s of Paris were alive with debate and movement, but artists still returned to small rooms where they could think, write, sketch, or simply recover from the intensity of social life. The same tension existed within the Beat circles: long nights of conversation followed by solitary stretches of creation. A healthy collective is not permanent noise. It is rhythm. Gathering and dispersing. Discussion and silence. Communal energy and private concentration.<\/p>

In a modern creative commune, this balance becomes essential. The workshops and dining spaces may form the social heart of the building, but the sleeping rooms remain deliberately quiet and personal. One room per person. No forced dormitory atmosphere. No constant interruption. The room functions almost like a monk\u2019s cell or a ship cabin: a place to sleep, think, read, and regain clarity. Creative people often require periods of decompression after intense collaboration, and privacy protects the long-term stability of the community. The collective should encourage encounter, not surveillance.<\/p>

The shared spaces themselves would reflect another principle often neglected in romantic visions of artistic communes: cleanliness and maintenance are forms of respect. The woodshop, metal shop, prop studio, film rooms, and miniature workshops would be carefully organised and kept clean. Not sterile in the corporate sense, but orderly enough that tools remain usable, floors remain safe, and work can continue without chaos swallowing the environment. Some of the greatest workshops in history operated almost like laboratories or guild halls. Clean tools signal seriousness. They tell newcomers that the space is alive and functional rather than decaying into neglect.<\/p>

This practical discipline separates sustainable collectives from temporary bohemian collapse. The myth of the \u201cmessy genius\u201d often hides disorganisation, wasted materials, broken tools, and exhausted people. A functioning creative environment respects craft enough to maintain the conditions required for good work. Sweeping a floor, cataloguing props, oiling machinery, or organising lumber becomes part of the culture itself. The building is not merely occupied; it is cared for.<\/p>

The structure of mentorship inside the commune would also matter deeply. Rather than functioning as a rigid hierarchy, the space could begin with a founding creative director or curator who establishes the tone, standards, and artistic direction of the environment. The role is not simply managerial. It is atmospheric. Curating tools, conversations, projects, aesthetics, and values. Deciding what kinds of energy belong in the space and what kinds slowly erode it.<\/p>

From there, the collective evolves through apprenticeship. One particularly capable intern or assistant \u2014 someone curious, disciplined, generous, and quick to learn \u2014 gradually absorbs practical knowledge across multiple workshops. Instead of remaining permanently dependent on the founder, they eventually begin teaching others basic processes and maintaining continuity within the studios. This creates an organic transfer of culture. Skills move horizontally through the community instead of bottlenecking around one central figure.<\/p>

Historically, many artistic movements depended on precisely this structure. Medieval guilds, theatre troupes, film crews, ateliers, and workshops all survived because experienced members passed techniques onward while still continuing their own creative practice. Teaching was not separate from making. It existed beside it. A prop-maker might teach mould-making in the afternoon and return to sculpting creatures at night. A cinematographer might guide someone through lighting setups before working on an experimental short film of their own.<\/p>

This also protects the founder from becoming trapped in administration. The original creator can step back into personal work while remaining embedded within the life of the commune itself. That balance is important. The founder remains present \u2014 eating in the dining room, contributing ideas, building projects, occasionally mentoring \u2014 but does not become a permanently exhausted overseer. The community gradually develops its own internal intelligence.<\/p>

The architecture of the place reinforces this philosophy. The noisy spaces cluster together: workshops filled with machinery, editing suites, prop rooms, miniature cities under construction, costume racks, film sets, sound experiments. Then the building softens into quieter transitional areas: libraries, reading corners, long corridors, small tea rooms. Finally, the private sleeping rooms sit apart in relative silence. A person can move between stimulation and stillness depending on what their work requires.<\/p>

Meals remain central because they preserve collective identity without enforcing constant interaction. People may work at different hours and on entirely different disciplines, yet they continue crossing paths around food. The dining room becomes less like a cafeteria and more like an evolving salon. Conversations drift between practical engineering problems, story ideas, philosophy, cinema, folklore, architecture, mythology, and daily life. Some people speak constantly; others mostly listen. Both become part of the ecology.<\/p>

The ultimate strength of such a place is not merely productivity. It is continuity. Most artists today create in fragmented isolation, moving between rented rooms, unstable jobs, and online platforms that rarely produce deep community. A well-designed collective offers something increasingly rare: sustained creative atmosphere over years rather than weeks. Skills accumulate. Shared language develops. Traditions form. Workshops gain memory.<\/p>

Eventually the building itself becomes a kind of living artwork \u2014 not because it is perfect, but because generations of projects, conversations, and handmade objects leave traces behind. The clean studio floor, the quiet private room, the communal meal, the half-finished prop in the workshop, the apprentice teaching someone new: these ordinary repeated acts are what transform a building into a genuine creative culture.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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