Solution Architect.
Father. Drummer.
Music obsessive.
Detroit die-hard.
IGL. Collector.
I'm a Solution Architect. I live for my kids, bleed Detroit, play drums, and still get in the pit. I don't change who I am depending on the room.
It started with a 486 in my parents' house. I pulled everything apart to see how it worked. Never stopped. Meshuggah at 14 changed everything. Not just the music. The idea that something could break every rule and be better for it. Rules are starting points. You learn them until you know which ones to cross.
Over 50 hours in the tattoo chair. My great-grandparents came from Norway. I've been on stage with bands, in enterprise architecture meetings, and deep in the pit. All the same person.
Music is not something I do. It's what I am.
It started before I even knew what I was looking for. I'd go through mum and dad's CDs, tapes and records. Not really listening. Just looking at the artwork. Something about those covers. Bat out of Hell by Meat Loaf I requested more times than I can count.
Real independence came when I got Metallica Garage Inc on CD, a big wooden Metallica poster, and my own boombox. I would have been 9. I put it on and nothing was ever the same. It was so heavy. Like nothing I'd heard before. The thrash metal obsession started right there. Thrash drove me through the genres. The Big Four led me to the classics of death metal. By 12 I was deep into Dying Fetus, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse. I kept going further in.
Then at 14 I walked into my lead guitarist's room. He was older than me. Working, driving, living. I was still at school. He said "check this out" and put on the Meshuggah album Nothing.
Instantly my mind was blown. I don't even know how to describe how it felt listening to them for the first time. It was like the music was demonstrating the way my brain worked. Chaotic, loud, odd, different. Time signatures I'd never heard. Accents in places that shouldn't be accented. It broke every rule I knew about music. There was this metaphorical glass ceiling and Meshuggah just catapulted me through it. Love at first listen. Still my number one. Nothing has come close.
I started drums at 12 or 13. A friend's birthday party. He had a kit, nobody there could play it. I basically spent the next few hours working it out. Breaking the way my arms moved from the way my legs moved. By the time my parents arrived I could play For Whom the Bell Tolls. They bought me a kit not long after.
Playing drums is hard to explain. It's hard work. Mentally and physically. Growing up on thrash it was all about that thrash beat and double kick rolls. Convincing mum and dad to buy me double kick pedals was probably my first sales pitch. I played them One by Metallica. Explained exactly why I couldn't do it without the pedals. How they worked. Why I needed them. They bought them.
A few years later I was on stage with my band. We'd won two or three Battle of the Bands. I could drive. These were some of the greatest times of my life. I met lifelong friends. Experienced more than I could have expected. We were playing alongside Parkway Drive, I Killed the Prom Queen, The Red Shore, and other up and coming Australian bands. We signed with a label, released two EPs, and were building toward something real. It never came. Our singer joined another band and toured the world. We tried to keep going but it wasn't the same. We parted ways the right way though. One final show. People moshing everywhere. Crowd surfers. Kids jumping from the stage into piles of people. I'll never forget it.
Since I turned 18 I've been seeing bands five to ten times a year. Just days after my 18th birthday I saw Cryptopsy in Melbourne. Flo Mournier was a huge influence to me at the time. Our band manager Storm basically crowd surfed to the front to make sure she caught his drum stick when he threw it. She brought it back to me. I still have it.
Now in my late 30s I still go. Five to ten a year. Do I still mosh, crowd surf, get in the pit? Hell yes. What's worse for my body than standing still for three or four hours? I get right in the guts and experience it the way it should be experienced. My body feels better for it every time. I guess I am one of those elder metalheads now.
Meshuggah was my first tattoo. There was nothing in my life that had the impact they did. I knew immediately I wanted them on me. Family pushed back. A few aunts tried to change my mind. My mind was already made up. Meshuggah on my arm. I will always love it.
Thirty years in, I explain music to people like medicine. Some people have something they need every day to keep them alive, keep them sane, in control, healthy. That's music for me. Without my music, there is no me. It connects to everything I do and am. Complex, fast, heavy. Sometimes it's sad. Sometimes angry. Sometimes it lifts you off the ground. But it's always something. I would rather go blind than go deaf.
Cards, jerseys, memorabilia. Not as an investment. As devotion.
It started with the Pistons. As a kid I liked the Bulls but so did everyone else. This was the 90s. Really though, I wanted to root for the team that made Jordan's life miserable. The team that gave it to him. The team that refused to back down. That was Detroit.
The deeper I dug into the history, the more I realised I was made for this. The Bad Boys. The bad image. The hard play style. Laimbeer. Isiah. Dumars. I watched the DVDs. I rewatched the games. I learned where it all came from in that late 80s run. That team is my personality on a basketball court.
The Ben Wallace era is where I fell completely in love. No superstar contract, no ego, just dominance through sheer will. Rasheed. Mr. Big Shot. RIP. Tayshaun with those insane lengths. That team had something you can't manufacture. Defense first, built on grit, played like it.
In 2004 I was in Year 10 and had discovered live music. Basketball had taken a back seat, which is how I missed the championship run. Coming back in 2006 made it hurt knowing exactly what I'd walked away from. And there was no easy way back in. No streaming, no League Pass. I paid for a service that would burn the local broadcast feed onto a DVD and post it to me in Australia. I'd watch the game days later on disc. I had hundreds of those DVDs before League Pass existed. That's how much I wanted back in.
The Wings came next. A friend of mine, Cameron, a Canucks fan living in Canada at the time, got me into hockey. I figured if I'm going Detroit, I'm going all the way. Enter the Wings.
Once I was in, I was gone. The Yzerman and Lidstrom stories. The championship legacies. The rivalry with Colorado, brutal, physical, earned. Howe. Yzerman. Federov. Delvecchio. Shanahan. Chelios. Probert. Konstantinov. Draper. Now Larkin.
The Winged Wheel is one of the most iconic logos in sports. Pulling that jersey on in public is one of the most recognizable ways of saying I love Detroit. Simple as that. It makes me proud every time.
The 2011 to 2014 run locked me in for life. Deep playoff runs. Conference final Game 7s. Chicago. I can't talk about it. Absolutely heartbreaking. But that’s the thing. Heartbreak that deep only happens when it means that much.
The collection spans all eras but right now it's all Cade. Signed pieces, memorabilia, basketball cards. Some high-end hockey cards too. The collection is serious and still growing.
Detroit resonates because of what the city carries. Blue collar to the bone. Hard work is rewarded. They've been knocked down over and over and they keep showing up. That mentality doesn't just describe a city. It describes how I want to operate.
I've been die-hard Detroit for 20 years and I haven't experienced a championship as a dedicated fan. Not once, across any sport. I want the Pistons or the Wings to be the first. Getting married. Having kids. Pistons championship. I have no idea what it will feel like. I imagine tears of joy. Tears of confusion. Probably a lot of confusion. So many fans watch their teams win chip after chip like it's nothing. For me it will be everything. When it comes, it will be one of the greatest moments of my life.
As I write this the Pistons are 53-20 and sitting top of the Eastern Conference. That sentence alone is something I never imagined writing. We are ahead of schedule. Most of my life has been losing. It's the winning that's hard to get used to. I'm keeping the lid on. Staying calm. Enjoying the ride.
I've played this game since I was 13. I haven't stopped.
Not the shooting. Everything else. The reads. The strats. The way you can study five rounds and know exactly what's coming on round six.
I play IGL. I call the plays, write the setups, read the map, read the enemy, and make the call in real time. When my team doesn't know what to do, they look at me. That's where I belong.
Professional Counter-Strike is the sport I follow. The technical depth of this game is bottomless. I've never found the bottom.
Collector and builder. The sets live in display cabinets. Everything is built with intent.
It started young. Pirates. Knights. Racing sets. Built, taken apart, rebuilt. Lego was just part of growing up. As an adult, with adult money, I came back properly. As a collector.
Star Wars comes first. But this goes beyond Lego. Star Wars is a massive part of my life. The books, the movies, the shows, the animated series, the merchandise. All of it. The Lego collection is an extension of that. Ships and vehicles mostly. The design language, the scale, the detail. Built and displayed.
The Empire specifically. People call them the bad guys. I'm not sure that's right. Are the rebels terrorists? Worth sitting with. Either way, I love the Empire. Always have.
Batman started at three years old. A VHS of the 1960s series. That was the hook. As I grew up it became the Michael Keaton films, and Keaton remains my Batman. Always will be. The Dark Knight trilogy was something different entirely. I remember sitting in the cinema at the end of The Dark Knight Rises and crying. People around me asking why. I couldn't fully explain it then. Batman was invincible to me as a kid. That scene, flying out over the water with the bomb, giving everything. Felt like something dying. Not just a character. A part of my childhood closing out. It hit that hard.
My favourite set is the Keaton Batmobile. It gets front and centre in the Batman display.
Building Lego locks you in. For that time you have one task. Sure, you're following instructions. But you're the one doing it. Turning coloured blocks into something real. Something that sits in a cabinet and holds its shape. There's nothing else quite like it.
The displays take up serious space. I take a lot of pride in them.
The collection started with Detroit. Jerseys, jackets, hats. All personal. What I wanted to wear, what I wanted to own. Then I figured out there was a market. A jacket I'd paid next to nothing for was worth real money to the right person. That was the start of maxis_sports_vintage.
The sell side funds the addiction.
The focus is 90s and 00s. That's where the best stuff is. Bigger graphics, heavier fabrication, branding that meant something. That stuff was built to last and most of it has.
I source everywhere. eBay. Depop. Instagram. Local thrift. When I visit family in the States we thrift as a group. Holidays turn into buying trips. Some of the best finds come from those days. You walk in not knowing what's on the rack.
The chase is fun. It's also hard. Finding something with real value, at a price below that value, to sell at value. Three things have to line up at once. Most of the time they don't.
My favorite piece is probably the GIII Carl Banks Pistons 3x Champions jacket. Found it on eBay around 2008. Shipped it from the States. Been in rotation ever since.
For keeping, one question: will I wear this over something I already own? Yes means it comes home. Any doubt and it goes in the sell pile. For selling: would I want to buy this if I was a fan of that team? If I wouldn't pay for it myself, it's not getting listed.
I grew up on Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. That's the baseline. It never left.
Somewhere along the way the fear response stopped working. No jump scares. No flinching. Most people would take that as a reason to stop watching. For me it turned into something deeper. An obsession with the craft, the atmosphere, the darkness underneath it all. Now I watch everything. Psychological, slashers, gore, torture. The more uncomfortable the better.
Michael Myers is the definitive one. Not because of the kills. Because of the calm. He doesn't run. He doesn't rage. He just moves. That stillness amongst the chaos. You never knew if he was human or not. That question is the whole film. Myers, Freddy and Jason are on my left leg sleeve. They earned it.
Terrifier 3 is the best horror film in years. It feels like classic slasher but modern. Uncomfortable the whole way through. Art the Clown shouldn't be loveable. He is. That contradiction is what makes him work.
The scene that has never left me: the ending of The Devil's Rejects. The Firefly family driving toward a police roadblock. Free Bird playing. They know exactly what's coming. They drive anyway. Something about that hits different every time.
If you want one most people haven't seen: Bring Her Back. Psychological. Heavy. It stuck with me.
Horror is taboo. Uncomfortable. Dark, sad, unsettling. Not what most people want. That's why I love it.
It's hard to say where the obsession ends and the work begins.
I've always built my own gaming PCs. Always chased the latest hardware. AI has made the passion louder. The more possible it becomes, the harder it pulls.
Gaming started this. My parents' 486. PC games that required you to understand the machine just to run them. My first support role confirmed what I already suspected. I never really left.