J!NX.com

About

Matt “Skydog” Gailey is the Emperor of Technology here at J!NX who spends his days designing and coding the website and maintaining all the computers at the J!NX Fortress. He’s had a love for gaming consoles since he first hooked up the Magnavox Odyssey 2 back in the 70’s right up through the modding of his OG Xbox. After spending a number of years reading, writing and teaching Philosophy he finally found his home with the J!NX family and has never looked back.

Ever since he read Tolkien in grade school Skydog has been fascinated with high fantasy and sword and sorcery. Naturally he progressed into the role playing world of Dungeons & Dragons. Today, if he isn’t busy sifting through photos of J!NX minions for Skydog’s Pic of the Week there is no doubt you will find him online bettering his troll priest alter ego Swampy. Ya Mon.

25 Things

1. I have a 12 year old black Labrador named Miss Maple. She is named after the first song on the album Peel by the Coctails.
2. I named my 13 year old female cat Zeno after the male pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who was famous for his paradox’s that were meant to prove that motion is just an illusion.
3. I talk to my dog and cat and I’m pretty certain that they understand every word I say and then communicate back to me telepathically.
4. I’ve always been passionate about music. I own two guitars, a set of congas and 2 Technics SL-1200 turntables with a ton of vinyl records. I have spent countless hours creating digital music on the computer, playing guitar, beating on the drums and spinning records. One of my dirty little geek secrets is that I don’t like guitar hero or rock band.
5. I have a master’s degree in philosophy and didn’t take a single computer science course in all my years of college even though my current profession has me administering servers and workstations and coding websites and databases.
6. “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel is the best 45 minutes of music ever recorded.
7. I spend entirely too much time playing, talking about and researching this silly game called World of Warcraft. If I worked as hard on my RL character as I did on my WoW character I’d be rich and famous.
8. I spent all my summer vacations when I was an undergrad following the Grateful Dead from city to city. I was upset when Jerry Garcia died and I still have hundreds of bootleg dead shows on cassette tape.
9. I’ve only been to Europe once for two weeks. I was able to see Paris, Bruges, Amsterdam, Baden Baden, Prague and some small town in Switzerland. I really need to do more travelling.
10. I spent a year living in a cabin up on Mt. Baldy outside of Los Angeles at about 5000 feet above sea level. The cabin had no heat except for a wood burning stove. Best year of my life.
11. A couple dirty little geek secrets of mine are that I have never read comic books and I don’t collect action figures.
12. I am a baseball fanatic. I listen to baseball games every day all summer long. I spend countless hours pouring over my fantasy baseball team statistics, and I will go to my grave a diehard Cleveland Indians fan even though they have never won a World Series title in my lifetime.
13. I love pencil and paper fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. I have always enjoyed the role playing, exploring and puzzle solving aspects of this type of gaming far more then the combat. I prepared countless dungeons and keeps as the DM for Windminstal and Jinx when we were kids.
14. I was an OG Halo junkie, I do enjoy a good FPS, but I prefer more RPG oriented video games.
15. Jinx and I used to play MUD’s (text based multi-user dungeons) together back in college just as the interwebz started to boom. My imagination still far exceeds the best video game graphics to date. The MUD world I imagined still feels more real to me then, say, Azeroth.
16. Jumping out of an airplane with a parachute is the most memorable and adrenaline producing experience of my life.
17. I refuse to use Window’s Vista, and I feel that I am in good company with my decision.
18. I love movies. I watch them over and over again and enjoy them each time, much like I continue to enjoy looking at a good painting, listening to good music, or any other form of art.
19. I spent many years obsessed with philosophical questions until I read Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
20. I have always been interested in human consciousness and feel like it came into existence around the same time that we began to record human history. I think that human consciousness evolved and that at one time the human race was not aware of its own existence, much the same way a dog is not capable of contemplating the history of canines. My question about consciousness is “why did consciousness in humans evolve?”
21. One of my biggest pet peeves in gaming is when someone I am playing with cannot setup their voice chat software correctly and you can’t hear them when they talk. L2Vent Nub!
22. My favorite sports video game of all time is Tecmo Bowl for the NES.
23. Saturday morning cartoons were always my favorite form of television growing up and to this day I rarely enjoy anything on television that is not a cartoon. Yeah, I hate reality TV.
24. I prefer reading science fiction novels and my favorite author is Philip K. Dick, especially his Valis trilogy.
25. Working at J!NX is easily the best job I have ever had and probably the best job on the planet. We spend our days talking about and promoting things that we love to do.