Within a week of being introduced to the video game "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes" I started working on this spreadsheet.

For those not familiar with the game, the premise is that you and someone else need to collaborate in order to defuse a bomb. Catch is that the manual is confusing and poorly organized, and if you're the one with the manual, you can't see the bomb; everything you need to know must be communicated to you.

The inefficiency of the manual drove me crazy because I knew that I could do it better. So I did. The result is a spreadsheet that I still occasionally improve that takes the effort out of the game, and more-or-less nullifies the role of the Expert. It automates as many as the responses as possible and has handy spaces for recording key information for the parts that do still require the Expert to pay attention.

April of 2015, three weeks before final exams, I was (ironically enough) on my way to the doctor's office on my Suzuki Burgman 400 named Steve. At a dead stop, multiple stopped cars in front of me, I was rear ended by a Ford Econoline van going 40+ MPH. I wound up in the hospital for a week, drifting in and out of consciousness with a TBI and my pelvis broken in six places. Two weeks in live in rehab, three months in a wheelchair, and three surgeries later I'm finally done with the ordeal. While I was wheelchair bound I couldn't leave the apartment (there were stairs) so I had to channel my creative juices somewhere. That's where XQ came from.

Blended from Pathfinder, AD&D, and my own ideas, XQ is a fairly simple tabletop role playing game that I developed that utilizes different gemstones to do different semi-useful things. Although I'm not linking the XQ stuff here (I dunno how much of it is copyrighted that I borrowed), if you want to see it, shoot me an e-mail and we can talk about it.

Going from being an active person to not being able to move without pain left me with a ton of energy and nothing to do with it. I decided to funnel that excess of energy into creative pursuits. Among those pursuits came constructing prop weaponry from (clean) toilet paper tubes, plastic cat litter containers, and masking tape was born. So far I've got a full-sized balanced (weighted) longsword, most of a fantasy-style battle axe, and the beginnings of an 8' tall wizard's staff.

When my best friend (and her mom and grandma) moved into their new house a problem immediately became clear: all of the food storage was either too high up (they are all short) or too low down (they all have issues bending over). Needless to say, I couldn't stand by and watch that be a problem.

I contacted my step-dad, Tom, who is a journeyman carpenter and set to building them a vertical shelving unit (pantry). From drawing the initial blueprints to picking out the wood to nailing it together to hand staining the entire thing to installation I built this for them with Tom's help.

I've heard way too many times in my life that you can either be a math inclined person or an artistically inclined person, but not both. That's total rubbish. Both are important and valuable and you can enjoy both of them. They are not mutually exclusive things. I enjoy sketching, painting (with weird mediums), and what amounts to creating my own temporary tattoos. I decided to throw artsy stuff in this section even though it's not exactly a project, 'cause why not?

As a gamer, I wanted to have a nice rig. I started out with a prebuilt back in 2011 which I crammed a hand-me-down graphics card into and called it good. Recently, I wanted to upgrade my computer and wound up building a new one from scratch with the help of some friends, PC Parts Picker, and sheer force of will, I built my baby: Thomas Mk3.

My first graduate level class was split right down the middle on conceptual knowledge of statistics; half of us had been in multiple statistics classes and had been using statistics in our lives, the other half had no idea what was going on. Friendly Statistics is my pet project to condense all of my statistics knowledge into a friendly, easy to understand reference website for myself and other students.