I’m a writer and builder of things.
I was born in 1976, the year of the 🐲. Play That Funky Music and Rocky were top of the charts, and Gerald Ford was president. I’m a Gemini, which of course doesn’t mean anything. My mom collected bicentennial quarters to commemorate my birth year, since it was also the 200th birthday of America.
I had a good childhood. My father was a hippie, then an engineer, and wanted to build robots and live in a geodesic dome when he retired, but unfortunately he died from lung cancer when I was in high school. My mom immigrated from Japan in her 20s, is quiet and kind, and now owns a sushi restaurant in the Redlands. My younger sister has two children and lives in the house we grew up in together, in Irvine. I also found out in 2014 that I have a half-brother who’s 7 years older than me and lives in Virginia. He’s cool.
I’ve lived in Irvine, Berkeley, and Seattle. I grew up in Irvine and surrounding areas, moved to Berkeley for college in 1994, transferred to Seattle in 1995, and stayed up there for a long while before moving back down to Berkeley in 2013. My birth name was Erik Keith Benson, and I changed my name to Buster Butterfield McLeod as an experiment for a while, and then changed my middle and last name back when I got married.
I have a family. I have two sons: Niko (born 2010) and Louie (born 2016), whom I share custody of with their mom. My boys are pretty the majority of what I use my Instagram account for. I don’t have any pets, but have had cats and dogs in the past (RIP Roxy, Chubbie, Holden, Phoebe, and Sopor) and like cats and dogs equally.
My personality type is one that loves taking personality tests. According to Enneagram, I’m a 5 (investigator) with a 6 wing (loyalist). My learning style is abstract random. According to the Big Five personality test, I’m in the 54th percentile for Agreeableness, 91st percentile for Compassion, 9th percentile for Politeness (🖕), 87th percentile for Conscientiousness, 95th percentile for Industriousness, 60th percentile for Orderliness, 84th percentile for Extraversion, 86th percentile for Enthusiasm, 73rd percentile for Assertiveness, 24th percentile for Neuroticism, 31st percentile for Withdrawal, 21st percentile for Volatility, 98th percentile for Openness to Experience, 96th percentile for Intellect, and 96th percentile for Openness (bet you couldn’t tell).
I have likes and dislikes. I like: High-quality conversations, quality time, self-improvement, cognitive biases, systems thinking, kids, animals, games, writing, the internet, coffee, wine, morbid topics, stoicism, speculation about the future, sushi, cults, bad jokes, hard problems, tulpas, some romantic comedy stereotypes. I dislike: Heights, busy work, mean people, willfully ignorant people, manipulative/political people, candy, systemic injustice, people who want me to be someone that I’m not, earthquakes, cancer, the idea of space travel, some romantic comedy stereotypes.
I like hearing from people.
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