Alex Peake
Primerist Corsetier
I need a ride to Burning Man for 2-3 people
Please contact me at alex@openprimer.com or tacticalcorsets@gmail.com if you have any info or room in your vehicle leaving from the SF Bay area tonight or tomorrow to Burning Man. I can pay in gas share or in Tactical Corsets as trade so if you've always wanted a tactical corset or you want to learn more about my new project OpenPrimer.com, it will make for entertaining roadtrip conversation to have me and my 2 friends ride with you.
Who I Am
I am a Primerist, a Tactical Corsetier, a maker and a part of the maker culture. I am known by my works:
What I Make: Tactical Corsets
What I'm Making: Primer
My Space Program: Spacepunk
Where I Live: Hackerquarters, Oakland, California
Where I Hack: Noisebridge, San Francisco California
What I Teach: Gamebridge Unityversity Wednesdays @ Noisebridge
Contact
Email empowerthyself@gmail.com
Twitter @lxpk
Links
School
My 1st grade teacher thought I had a problem with authority. He caught me drawing with my own fine liners, not the block crayons he had decided were the age-appropriate thing. The child psychologist he sent me to asked me to do the standard "is everything all right at home" psychology drawing: a tree, a house and some people. Based on my drawing of an unerground kingdom of gnomes that lived in tunnels beneath the tree, she concluded that my authority figure had a problem with me and suggested to my parents that I needed a more challenging academic environment.
In 3rd grade I attended Open Alternative School, and in a year of mixed-age learn-at-your-own-pace classes I made up for lost time.
I taught myself programming in 4th grade from Dave Mark's Learn C On The Mac. It came with a demo version of Lightspeed C, and I overwrote the files in the example projects to get it to run my own simple games.
I attended Simon Fraser University's 3rd year computer science program with my mentor Dave Fracchia in 6th and 7th. Getting my hands on Silicon Graphics Indigo workstations meant I had to pick my first unix username, and since my full name had too many letters I just used lxpk.
The high school I was going to was a laptop-based program where we had one laptop per child and I could see that this plus a ubiquitous computer learning game could revolutionize education. I started developing my first game called Mage Princes of Averath. It was an online game that got players to compete and collaborate in economic, military and political battles. This was before I had Internet access, so I developed it for the Firstclass BBS software, which was designed for online virtual high school programs with laptops like mine.
Firstclass had no API to allow game development, so I used its electronic mail exchange to transfer messages between the server and the players. It worked, it took off, and I asked my players if they would pay $5 a month to play a more advanced sequel with more sophisticated economics and military simulation. More than half of them agreed, and I soon had a spreadsheet predicting how quickly the game could grow its players and revenue. Then the BBS dissapeared overnight along with my pre-Internet electronic mail contact list for customers I could no longer reach, and my hard drive crashed taking all my backupless code with it. It was a temporary setback.