A concept album about the slow collapse of a fictional society that rhymes uncomfortably with the present. Each track is a dispatch from a different stage of the retreat: the denial, the bargaining, the long stretch where everyone pretends it isn’t happening.

Less an event and more an admission. The Duumvirati is the name I gave to the work once it started feeling like one body of output instead of scattered side projects: Empire in Retreat and the albums after it, the apps, the websites I make for the sake of making them. It isn’t a company. It’s the direction I keep walking when nobody’s asked me to walk anywhere.

Swiftknot started as a dare I made to myself: could Slipknot and Taylor Swift possibly live in the same edit? Turns out, more often than they have any right to. Eight pairings in, the answer is a confident yes. The project lives on Vimeo because YouTube’s content matching has strong opinions about it, but it might be the most me thing I’ve made. Two opposite worlds forced into one frame until they start to rhyme.

First PC I’d built with my own hands in twenty years. Career runs on heavy processing, hobbies run on editing and gaming, and at some point the math stopped pretending it didn’t add up. Two months from first part order to first boot, six months from first boot to fully paid off. Every component picked deliberately, every cable run twice because the first run was wrong. It is, by every measure I care about, the best machine I’ve ever used. Worth every late-night rabbit hole.

A second mashup crossed a million views. The first one took years to get there; this one got there faster. Nothing about either of them was algorithmically optimized. They just kept getting played, kept getting shared, kept showing up in recommendations long after I’d stopped paying attention. Most things I make do not do this. Two of them have. I still don’t entirely know why.

Hired for the web work, kept for the video work. I came in as Web Content Specialist on the strength of HTML and CSS, but the camera kept finding its way into my hands. By early 2020 the title was Video Production Specialist and the job was full-time editing and producing. The pivot wasn’t planned. It was the predictable result of being the person who said yes to the project nobody else wanted.

A serialized audio drama in the tradition of the old radio shows, built on top of a short story I’d been carrying around for years. It started as a way to give that story a body. It turned into an excuse to use every skill and contact I’d accumulated over decades: writing, recording, editing, scoring, casting. The plan was always to bring in other voices and other writers eventually. Patience required. Worth it.

Mark Petrie commissioned a music video for “Trace of Gravity” on a budget that allowed for exactly two things: stock footage and patience. I had both. The constraint shaped the whole edit. When you can’t shoot anything new, you learn to cut around what other people already shot, which turns out to be a useful muscle for everything else I do.

I’d never done real editing before Mediajuice put Premiere Pro in front of me. To learn the software, I set a song to a video. To learn it better, I did it again. Somewhere around the third or fourth pairing, it stopped being practice and became the thing. I started hunting for combinations: a track that needed a film, a scene that needed a score. A few of them have found real audiences. Most of them have found me.

One of the early Mashterpiece Theater edits hit a million views on YouTube. I remember refreshing the analytics tab the day it crossed, then refreshing it again, then closing the laptop because the number was going to be the number whether I watched it or not. First time anything I’d made had reached that scale. Felt like proof that the obsession wasn’t just mine.

An eight-part documentary series about video game history, made over two years and somewhere north of thirty thousand miles. I was the associate producer who brought it across the finish line. The role kept changing depending on what the shoot needed: camera, audio, interview research, travel logistics, editing, motion graphics, the website, occasionally just keeping the room caffeinated. As a lifelong gamer, sitting across the table from the people who built the medium was its own kind of education. I helped organize shoots, made travel arrangements for hundreds of people, edited video, hired artists, animated graphics, recorded audio, and did a million other tasks to help bring this show to life.

A friend posted a picture of her kid asleep on the stairs. The composition was already absurd; I had to see what would happen if I leaned into it. First pass landed too horror-movie (a child motionless on a staircase is more sinister than it sounds), so I kept reworking until it landed funny instead. The parents posted the final version to Reddit, and it climbed straight to the front page. First time something I’d made went truly viral. Not the last.

First shoot was at Mouser Electronics in a server room I’d later spend more time in than I’d ever planned. Jeremy kept asking me back, and the gigs split into two: the upcoming documentary series, and whatever else the studio needed. That’s the year I stopped being someone who used Photoshop occasionally and became someone whose week was Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects in rotation. The other thing I picked up was the production side: shoots don’t happen by themselves, and somebody has to be the somebody.

A story that interrupted whatever I was actually supposed to be writing. I got most of the first draft down in a single sitting, then put it in a drawer for years because that’s what you do when something arrives faster than you expected. Came back to it eventually, doubled the length, called it finished. Calling it finished is the part I’m least sure about. It might still want another pass.

Jenni was doing acoustic sets in coffee shops to rooms of fewer than ten people, half of them friends. The talent was obvious then; the audience just hadn’t caught up. I offered to build her a website because she was clearly going to need one and clearly couldn’t afford to pay for one yet. She’s been a working musician, band leader, and songwriter ever since. I’ve watched a lot of people try this. Few stay with it. She did.

A website I built from scratch for my cousin’s webcomic. No template, no shortcuts, just a custom build shaped entirely around what the comic needed: a reader, an archive, and a light CMS, all stitched together by hand. It turned into one of the more unusual sites I’ve made, and one of the more satisfying. It found its audience and stuck around, which is the quiet kind of success I value most. Something built carefully for one person that ends up working for a crowd.

After enough websites to make a folder, enough invoices to make it feel professional, and enough late-night fixes to know I needed a name for what I was doing, I made the business legal. Then the work expanded sideways into whatever clients needed: pamphlets, logos, posters, audio mixing, social media. The “websites” part was barely the point. I learned how to juggle dozens of sites at once, and how to never, ever do that again.

My first website for an actual organization, not a person or a single project but a whole professional body: an association of lawyers in Lubbock, Texas. Building for a group meant designing around a dozen opinions instead of one, and making something that could outlive my involvement. It did. The site has long since moved on without me, re-handled and rebuilt by others over the years, which is exactly what a good organizational site should be able to do.

A collection of stories from my last creative writing class at Texas Tech. The framing came from physics, the content came from wherever my brain was that semester. Some of them I still like. A couple I cringe at. That’s about the right ratio for work made by a twenty-something taking himself seriously for the first time.

Ten short stories written across one year of creative writing classes, packaged together because they finally felt like something I could show people. The alliteration in the title was the first decision I made and the one I committed to hardest. The stories themselves range from genuinely serious to genuinely absurd, with most of them trying to be both. Each one comes with a short note about the assignment that produced it, because half the fun of student work is seeing the prompt that broke it loose.

The story arrived as a dream. I wrote down what I could remember as soon as I woke up, then sat on it for years because not every idea is ready when you are. When I came back to it I knew what to do with it. The Next One Literary Journal accepted it for publication, which sounds more glamorous than it was. No money, modest circulation, didn’t run long. But I held a copy in my hands and saw my name on a page that wasn’t a school assignment. That counts.

An ongoing love letter to film scores, started in high school with a Cool Edit window and a stack of soundtrack CDs. The first version was three minutes long. The current version is the result of years of layering and rebuilding as the software matured into Adobe Audition. Dozens of songs, sound effects, and audio clips, woven into a single piece that’s meant to be experienced more than listened to. Closer to a movie without pictures than a song without lyrics.

The site you’re on now started in July 2000 as a learning project, became a hobby, became the foundation of how I make a living. The current version is leaner than the original. The original is still online at legacy.metzae.net because I coded every line of it by hand, and I don’t have the heart to take it down, even though it’s a monument to web standards that nobody uses anymore. Most of what I know about HTML and CSS, I learned by breaking this site over and over again.

The picture is nothing. A cloud, a sky, the kind of frame that gets scrolled past without a thought. It matters because of what it taught me, which is that I was paying attention to something I didn’t yet have a word for. I framed it before I knew what framing was. I noticed the starkness before I knew that was the reason. After that, I started looking at the world the way photographers look at it. Tens of thousands of frames later, that’s still the part that hasn’t changed.

The first time I right-clicked a webpage and chose “view source,” the internet stopped being a place I visited and started being a thing I could take apart. So I took apart everyone else’s pages and built my own from the pieces. The first real site was a Dream Theater fan page, decked out in every animated GIF I could find. It is not, by any measure, a good website. I keep it online anyway. It’s where I started.

A composition for full concert band, written for a class that was supposed to be advanced composition but was really an experiment in letting teenagers take themselves seriously. I was sixteen. The full title was “Awn Saum Bull: A Hymn for Her,” which is exactly the title sixteen-year-olds write. The band performed it at a school concert. Nobody hated it, which at that age feels like winning. I’d been playing music for years but had never built something from scratch. The shape of the work, and the panic of seeing other people read your notes, those still come back to me whenever I’m composing anything.

First computer that was mine, not the family’s. An IBM clone built around a 286 processor, beige in the way only mid-eighties hardware was beige. Everything before this had been borrowed time on my father’s machine, so the moment something had my name on it, the relationship changed. A computer in my own room meant a computer running my own experiments. That has not stopped being true. It just keeps acquiring new components.

The console that made games matter to me as more than reflexes. I’d played whatever was around before this, but the NES is the first one I remember disappearing into. The good games had stories worth following. The bad games had stories I made up to fill the gaps, which turned out to be its own useful skill. Forty years later, I’m still doing both, often at the same time.

My family owned the only arcade in our small town for the first few years of my life. I have almost no memory of that period except for one image: standing on a stool, jaw level with the joystick, playing Ms. Pac-Man on a cabinet that was taller than I was. I don’t remember winning. I remember the lights.

Family of technophiles, computers and gadgets everywhere. The kind of house where every birthday gift had a power cord and every adult conversation eventually circled back to how something worked. It doesn’t take much for an inclination to take root when the soil is full of it.