I for one welcome our new Hive Overlords! Introducing myself, CodeRad/Jay W. Raymond.

Heyo! It's me, Jay W. Raymond. AKA CodeRad, Microangelo, Hargrove Derby, Mister Teapot, Professor NoPants, possibly more I'm forgetting!

Thought I’d finally take the plunge and introduce myself here on Hive.

So who am I? Well, I’m a graphic designer, UX/UI designer, sound guy, musician, sometime coder, and a longtime gamer. I’m a kid with a wild imagination and an artist with many brushes. I spent five years at Electronic Arts working on game audio, took my band on a cross-Canada tour from Vancouver to Montreal and back, worked at a carnival, hosted an FM Radio show, done projects in Basic, Pascal, C, C++, C#, Java, Python, SQL, JS, React and yes, I even wore a chicken suit for wing night at your local pub.

In short, I'm someone you want to know.

I’ve been programming since I was about 10 years old with a Timex-Sinclair TS-1500, web designer since 1996, post EA-indie app/game development since 2010. These days, I’m one half of the Gods.Exchange dev team, and actually designed the final currencies for Immutaswap.io before they shuttered.

I’ve been active in the Gods Unchained community since Divine Order, although aside from GEX I'm probably best known as the author of the Comprehensive List of High Impact, Low Effort fixes for Gods Unchained UX Reddit post from Nov 2023 (In fact revisiting this post is probably going to be one of my first GU related posts here on Hive). Creator of Gods Unsealed, and currently helping with UX on GUStakes.gg as well, I'll have an announcement about that pretty quick.

On the music side, I’m the main guy behind The Judges, a Vancouver punk band where we dress like old English Magistrates and sing about the law. Before that, I fronted the Likely Rads, with 5 albums and a cross-Canada tour, The Humans, a silly but totally brutal industrial band where we all wore goat leggings, and Descendentsage, a Descendents cover band that was basically an excuse to play music while under the We-Own-Everything-You-Make contract that EA foisted on me. I also started Rad Radio on CJSF 90.1 FM back in 2009, and it’s still running today.

And because I don’t know how to sit still, I recently kicked off NCFNM, an AI industrial band/video project which has presently 9 industrial parody videos using different AI Video Tech.

There’s a ton of random stuff about me floating around online if you care to dig for it... interviews in The Georgia Straight, Absolute Underground, my old MobyGames profile partially listing my extensive EA credits (about half I'd say, sometimes I was just credited as EAC Audio Department). I've been in the public eye (as a Z lister) for as long as a can recall so I'm not shy.

What else... I used to run a Minecraft server that hit #6 on Semi-Vanilla on MCSL back in 2013! That was gnarly. I also just released a coloring book a couple months ago, Psychedelic Lovecraft which is doing pretty well. Oh and then there's the Beatidudes, my sweet sweet fake Christian Reggae band:

I’ll be posting about music, game dev, blockchain projects, and whatever other weird experiments I get into. Possibly building a zoo on a space station in Starbound. Defnitely breaking down some Gods Unchained topics. Looking forward to seeing what Hive is all about so please do drop a comment and say hi! 🚀