This is my resumé. Please hire me.
The Raven Express #23 - 4/10/25
In this issue of The Raven Express, I write out my entire work history so that hopefully someone will hire me for full-time work again. Because that would be dope.
Intro
Last month, for the third time in as many years, I was told that I cannot be employed in my current role anymore, through no fault of my own. I will no longer be paid, nor have benefits, nor co-workers. For 13 of the past 17 months, I have been without a full-time job, which also means that through no fault of my own, I have basically little in the way of unemployment benefits either.
I need a job.
Guys: I am so tired of being unemployed, even part-time. I’m tired of LinkedIn and Indeed and online job boards. I am tired of tailoring (nearly) everything I’ve ever done over a 25-year history of work into extremely custom formats that an AI filter will automatically reject, or an old company will force me to reconstitute across a thousand text fields on what looks like a 20-year old web site, or a fake company online will never receive, or an interviewer will simply ghost me on.
I am also a resident of the terrible peninsula of “just enough credentials to not succeed.” The underpaying, easy jobs that I’m overqualified for won’t even acknowledge my application because they know I’ll bounce as soon as something in my field pops up that pays better. (I mean, they’re not wrong, but I do still need a roof over my head.) The jobs that I’m almost qualified for and could quickly grow into eventually just send rejection emails too. There is a knife edge of “proper fit” jobs out there for me and it seems very small considering my generalized skills.
There’s always freelance, but there is always freelance.
So, being the exhausted contrarian I am, as I’m trying to learn how to animate in 3D with Blender, figuring out how to develop games in Unity and tidying up a screenplay, I’m typing this out.
I call it… a “reverse resume”.
Rather than whittle all of my talents, abilities and tales into a custom format for an individual potential employer who will probably ignore me anyway, I’m just going to list every productive thing and accomplishment of my 25-year work history, buffet-style, so that some curious recruiter can pick it over and literally acquire a gem of a talent and a human being who has been waiting for your inquiry.
This is presented in three acts with roles that allowed me to grow being more traditionally resume-esque in format and roles that were merely jobs being more narrative in writing.
Is it silly of me to presume that any recruiter will read this? Of course! But in a marketplace where there should be a far more equitable relationship between employers and employees, it seems that there is something fundamentally wrong if I can to live the life I’ve lived and produced the work I have and still struggle this hard to find full-time work: the fundamental requirement for existence in this America we love so much.
And yes, I know the job market is very bad right now all around.
Before we get started, here are some high-level summaries (with AI assistance!)
NICK RAVEN AT A GLANCE:
I am a creative generalist and experienced content creator with a strong background in digital media, communication, and technology, seeking to leverage skills in a creative and fulfilling position. I am a Colorado Springs fanboy, multimodal transit enthusiast and local activist. I have a proven ability to develop engaging content, utilize diverse technology, and communicate effectively with a variety of audiences.A LARGER GLAAAAAAANCE:
I am a driven and versatile media professional with 25 years of experience spanning retail, customer service, digital content creation, and journalism in the Colorado Springs/Denver area. I have a proven ability to adapt quickly, master new skills (from technical troubleshooting to video production and graphic design), and generate innovative solutions.
At Best Buy, I unofficially excelled in graphic design and videography alongside my official role, demonstrating initiative beyond my job description. My entrepreneurial spirit led to "The Escape Plan," a comprehensive gaming retail strategy pitched to corporate leadership. This proactive approach continued with the independent creation of "The Nth Review," a successful YouTube channel for long-form video game reviews showcasing strong content creation, editing, and online engagement skills.
My experience at the Colorado Springs Indy highlights my abilities in writing (nine cover stories), multimedia production (podcasts, video), social media management, and community engagement. I possess a unique blend of creative talent, strategic thinking, and a deep understanding of audience engagement.
I am seeking a dynamic role where my diverse skillset and passion for impactful content can contribute to your organization's success.AND SOFTWARE AND SERVICES I’M PROFICIENT IN:
Adobe Creative Cloud
- Animate (Flash)
- Premiere Pro
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Audition
- After Effects
- Media Encoder
Apple
- MacOS
- iOS
CapCut
Google
- Android
- Docs
- Sheets
- Gemini
- NotebookLM
Hootsuite
Hubspot
Meta Business Suite
Microsoft
- Windows
- Microsoft 365 (Office)
-- Word
-- Excel
-- Outlook
-- Teams
monday.com
OBS (Open Broadcaster Software)
Slack
Vegas
TrelloOkay, let’s get started.
No, wait, here’s my LinkedIn for reference. And my Patreon for support. And you can send me money directly this way, too.
Okay, let’s actually get started.
ACT I: What’s a Job?
Best Buy (2000-2010)
Media Product Specialist (officially)/Graphic Designer and Videographer (unofficially)
Colorado Springs/Denver, CO
At the tender age of 16 years and a few weeks, this was my first job.
As soon as I could get a job, my dad would point out any fast food joint and minimum wage-paying shop he could see and say, almost literally, “just walk in apply.” One day, I even tried to apply for a Gateway Country, but they wanted me to be at least 18. I don’t think they even existed when I turned 18….
I didn’t want to work just anywhere, I really wanted to work at the store with the aisles of big box PC games: Best Buy! Dad had worked at Best Buy #212 part-time selling computers and knew the general manager, which gave me an in. After a few interviews, they wisely placed me in the media department with the games, music and movies rather than selling computers across the aisle, which is what dad thought I’d be great for.
I’d initially shunned console gaming, but it was only a few months before I found myself regularly posted in the console aisles (think: PlayStation 1, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast) not just because I loved video games, but because it was the attachment center of the department. To pull off the “good numbers” meant mastering the end-to-end sale of a video game console, its accessories and games.
I had intended to work at Best Buy for five years: two years before I went to the Art Institute of Colorado in Denver and three years during as I completed my Media Arts and Animation degree.
At the age of eight, I wanted to direct the very first computer animated film — computer animation was a big deal in our house in the early 90s — but Steve Jobs and his little animation company beat me to it. In 2001, I crafted some animated experiments with Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash that I posted to Newgrounds.com and in a pre-Shrek era, becoming a digital animator and director was still the way I wanted to go. Unfortunately, it wasn’t financially feasible for me to stay, so after nine months, I said farewell to Denver, moved back in with my parents and continued working for the Big Blue Box.
Seeking other career options and being indecisive about further formal education, I got bored. So I applied myself toward doing creative stuff around the store. With nine months of college education under my belt, I employed my design skills to create custom signage, like the bundle ad you see below. It didn’t go anywhere career-wise, but it did force me to learn how to effectively mimic styles, abide by brand guidelines and produce marketing collateral very quickly.
Here’s my graphic design/digital illustration portfolio up through a few years ago!
By 2006, I was depressed. I was the store’s gaming guru, but selling memory cards and copies of Grand Theft Auto Whatever was less fulfilling than ever. This was clearly not a position that was going to get me anywhere on its own, especially when I was so frustrated that Gamestop had cool gaming exclusives, midnight release events and all kinds of rad stuff that we didn’t. So what did I do? I wrote a white paper.
“The Escape Plan” was a document I produced largely off the clock based on original research conducted with employees and customers alike with the rest filled in with lots of puns and imagination. In a nutshell, Escape was a store-within-a-store concept, something the company was experimenting with a lot in that era, but for gaming with a dedicated, uniformed Geek Squad-esque staff. We would use the company’s leverage as the country’s largest electronics retailer (save for Walmart, I guess) to become the country’s best and largest games retailer as well. I printed two copies of the document, both of which left the store up the chain and then I didn’t hear another peep.
I got depressed again, but before long, an internal social network was growing called Blue Shirt Nation. I took The Escape Plan and uploaded it there, which seemed like a home run considering a sizable chunk of the audience wasn’t from our 500-someodd stores, but in the Richfield, Minnesota corporate offices. By February 2008, I was on flights to the Land of a Thousand Lakes every other weekend to pitch the document and lend my gaming business expertise as a passionate store-based employee. Along the way, I learned as much as I could about corporate culture, methodologies, organizational hierarchies, and the function of higher learning in a Fortune 100 macroscale retail environment. I also got my first corporate email accountwith a whopping 1.5 megabytes of storage (through my corporate networking, I was able to bump it up to an entire 10 megabytes.)
With this new perspective, I thoroughly revised The Escape Plan and added timelines and other objective milestones that had previously been obscure to me. With some ambitious communication, I landed a one-on-one meeting with then-COO Brian Dunn, who would become CEO the following year, to pitch him on the ‘Plan. Unfortunately, the 2008 financial crisis happened shortly thereafter and even the discussions about the discussions about the document were endlessly stalled as the corporate employees I had worked with took buyout options and left the company. Needless to say, back in the store, with no ladder to success, I got depressed yet again.
You may ask: why didn’t I climb the corporate ladder? Hop from supervisor role to manager role on up? Take on the army of angry customers? Because I didn’t want to. I had absolutely no passion to leap into middle management or become a de-escalation champion. I wanted to spear the whale with my heart. So I languished in the store a bit.
Outside of work, I produced a documentary called Infinite Lives around my friends’ and my road trip to the world’s largest gaming convention: the Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3. Reaching out to and arranging interviews with games journalists and personalities alike, the film was completed in 2010 and saw limited self-distributed release before I just put the whole thing on YouTube. I am currently producing a recut of the film with all of the experience that I’ve gained in the 16 years since. I transferred this experience and shot video content in the store too, like a mini-documentary about our Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 launch. Corporate took interest in the nascent days of YouTube and social media, but would not provide a dollar to support it.
Just two months after receiving my 10 year milestone certificate with the company, featuring now-CEO Brian Dunn’s digitally printed signature, Best Buy terminated me for violating their social media policy. In the earliest days of social media with my very first smartphone (the Palm Pre, I loved that thing), I wound up getting into a lot of trouble with the district’s asset protection department. Why? Because of the exotic, hazardous, proprietary pictures I was taking, like an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants playing on our break room TV. I am not kidding. If Best Buy fired employees for posting that kind of content today, they would literally have no employees.
Perhaps more importantly, being fired from Best Buy broke my heart. I realized I was already at a dead end career-wise, despite all my best efforts, but I truly believed in the company and its mission. I bled blue for the company, I worked however many hours off-the-clock dreaming of making the customer experience better. I engaged in its various initiatives, networked with corporate employees all the way from a store in Colorado, and was dismissed, seemingly, on a whim. It would be many years before I felt a legitimate loyalty to any employer again. The failure of The Escape Plan to gain any kind of traction within the company became the basis of one of my weekly video essays many years later.
Time Warner Cable (2010-2013)
Tier 1 Customer Service Representative
Colorado Springs, CO
Through a complex web of corporate transactions, Colorado Springs was home to a call center that serviced Time Warner Cable customers in Los Angeles and various pockets across the mountainous west (that they conveniently called Mountain West.)
After eight weeks of training, my job was two-fold: First, explain the customer’s bill and then, wherever possible, upsell them on more Time Warner Cable services. (Like home phone!) Secondly, I was responsible for basic troubleshooting, like a cable box not getting specific channels, or the internet being out.
I became proficient in my role very quickly, acquiring as much specialty knowledge about the hardware and services we offered as possible, which we didn’t have direct access to within the remote call center, as well as how to effectively build work and service orders. I also developed “cheat sheets” to help fellow employees navigate even the most niche questions while utilizing company chat to help employees about as often as I did customers. It was my dream to one day become a trainer for the company or move into Tier 3 support, which was purely troubleshooting.
As good as I was in my role, as well as I sold and as much commission as I made, I hated this job. I took the opportunity to leave early without pay as often as possible. My weight ballooned, my blood pressure went through the roof, my anxiety peaked and there were several days where I marched to my desk, set my bag down, let out a huge sigh, and said, “absolutely not”, then left.
When the opportunity came to depart for my next career opportunity out of state, I submitted my notice. My supervisor catered a goodbye lunch for the whole team and me and I spent the next week binging Breaking Bad as I recovered from my two and a half year stint at Time Warner Cable.
FleshEatingZipper (2011-2013)
Galactic Emperor (we made our own titles, it was so cool)
Colorado Springs, CO/El Mirage, AZ
In 2011, some close friends and I created FleshEatingZipper, a podcast and then website to give our brutally honest opinions about gaming, technology, entertainment, news and more. It’s all still up there, you can read it/watch it/listen to it today!
Everybody loved the name, which Johnny provided, perhaps partially in jest.
Our immediate goal was to fill the site with content and as a writer, I chased news, gave opinions and researched in-depth tech topics like Microsoft’s “Metro” user interface system and the rise and fall of their Zune music player and subscription music service in an era before Spotify.
By the end of 2012, the site had become popular enough and our ad revenue high enough that as a team, we decided that I would be the company’s first full-time employee. My job would be to drive enough traffic to the site that we could continue to build on our financial success until all five partners were able to work on it in some kind of paid capacity. To this end, my childhood friend Kelly and I moved to the sunny west valley of Phoenix where two of the other partners already lived so we could produce content together as a single “house”.
In a full-time capacity, I faced different creative challenges every day that stretched a variety of creative muscles. It was extremely rewarding.
I subscribed to dozens of RSS feeds and broke pop culture news like Nightdive’s System Shock 2 re-release or fresh-off-Twitter leaks on early Jurassic World development issues. I ensured all pieces hit a minimum word count for Google News with titles optimized for SEO.
I produced a weekly podcast called The N5 Show and audio/video shows featuring the team that we recorded in-house called the Bro Sho (more “dress down”) and the Pro Sho (more “dress up”). I also shot and edited a small documentary about our trip to E3 2012 and crafted my first entries into edited video game reviews.
I engaged with public relations agents with various gaming and entertainment companies to receive products for review as well as line up appointments at E3 2013 while we were in Los Angeles. I effectively scheduled the team to ensure they had the best, most flexible opportunities to see and report on the games they were interested in without rushing across the LACC to reach their next appointment.
Due to reasons outside of our control regarding foreign botnets sending “illegal hits,” Google blacklisted our site, killing our incoming traffic and ad revenue in one large swing. I was out of work by July 2013, only four months after we’d moved across the country for the opportunity, as great an opportunity as it was.
ACT II: A Guy’s Gotta Eat!
Walmart (2013-2015)
Overnight Dry Goods/Grocery Stocker/Marathoner
El Mirage, AZ
I was tempted to leave this off entirely, but even the most dehumanizing job I’ve ever worked taught me some things.
Without a car in a car dependent Phoenix suburb, I took a job stocking overnight at the local Walmart. It was a 1.75-mile walk each way, plus roughly 10 miles walking in the store. After gradually embracing a sedentary lifestyle at Time Warner Cable, I had become physically large and weak, which made the first few weeks there hell.
By then, however, I had begun a couch-to-marathon fitness and training plan that saw me lose 100 pounds and then run a full 26.2-mile marathon in just 18 months. But those first few weeks? Woosh. I wrote about this journey recently for the 10th anniversary of the achievement.
The job itself was very simple — so simple, in fact, that I spent most of my shifts daydreaming. I wrote most of my second novel largely in my head at work before typing it out back at home — Madman: Love. War. Retail. was the result.
But the work was also dehumanizing. Our performance was a matter of pure metrics and productivity, often without the tools to quickly find where product went in aisles with denser planograms. I never got very fast, so I’d often be yelled at or written up with no actual desire to fire me. Thankfully, I preserved the health of my back and wrists through careful pacing: several co-workers would end up injured while stocking heavy entertainment center boxes or shucking multiple pallets of 50-pound dog food bags in an evening. Our store management had little interest in getting to know us as employees, either.
The job paid the state minimum wage, which was to be expected, but the hours were extremely variable. Even as many of us worked what would legally be considered an average of full-time hours in Arizona, we were never classified as full-time. In one of Walmart’s 2014 initiatives to raise worker pay across the board, a move more PR than HR, they gave us all $.50/hour increases. But in accepting the hike, we were required to forfeit our $.50 shift differential for working overnights, effectively giving us a $0 pay raise. Demoralizing.
While customers weren’t happy about our store closing at night when we’d previously been open 24 hours, it was quite a relief to not have people asking for Betta fish at 2AM.
My experiences here wouldn’t just affect my worldview and my perspective on jobs and work altogether, it would inspire me more than ever to engage in local politics, understand the side effects of modern urban planning and policy and have a new empathy for my poverty-level co-workers who just wanted to get by or even grow. My experience with bad jobs wound up becoming the basis for my review of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a science-fiction salvage game which is, in itself, a critique of bad jobs and oppressive corporate governance.
The Nth Review (2014-Present)
Creator
El Mirage, AZ/Colorado Springs, CO
With the failure of FleshEatingZipper in the rearview, I decided to tackle something new, independent and entirely mine: long-form video game reviews in video essay format. Over the years, I’d become less impressed with professional reviews in which evaluators sped through games and give less-than-authentic verdicts, especially as titles requiring persistent online connections were shipping in a different shape publicly than they were reviewed in privately in advance. I wanted to, at some level, redefine what professional game reviews could be if simply given enough time for a proper evaluation, even as the money is really in getting a review out in time for its release.
While I had previously edited content with Sony Vegas, I learned Adobe Premiere Pro as I began my channel, developing a whole new graphic design system for the YouTube channel and hoping to create a kind of cinematic sincerity with each review. Over the course of 10 years, I’ve crafted 26 “Reviews” with documentary-style elements, motion graphics and increasing attention to audio production and mixing. I produced shorter content during this time regarding other gaming and internet-related topics, like an in-depth video about the months-long process of creating each Review.
Beginning in 2021, I began streaming my content live over YouTube and Twitch, requiring me to learn, manage, upgrade, augment and customize OBS for live production and switching. This required substantial public speaking capacity, engagement with chat, planning, troubleshooting and more to produce, at a point, two weekly programs: a four-hour gaming stream called The Green Room and a topic-oriented podcast called The Nth Forum.
For the channel’s 10th anniversary, I discussed my YouTube journey at length, as well as its many ups and downs in a thorough retrospective.
As of this writing, The Nth Review, as well as its urban advocacy sister channel, Nth City, have accumulated nearly 23,000 subscribers and over 2 million views for a total of 900,000 watch-hours.
USAA (2016)
Member Service Representative
Colorado Springs, CO
Returning to Colorado Springs in November 2015, I landed at USAA, issuing insurance policies to members in their north Colorado Springs call center, a three-mile walk each way. This was just after I’d put together my evaluation for Fallout 4.
The company was incredible, the training was fantastic, the personnel were great and they even let me wear sandals in the office (but not my Vibram Fivefingers for some arbitrary reason.) The job required obtaining insurance licensure with the state of Colorado via a robust exam that USAA would only finance a few rounds of. Thankfully, I passed on the first try.
Unfortunately, my time with Time Warner Cable had caused its damage. As the weeks wore on and I still hadn’t fully grasped the complexities of individual insurance laws across multiple states (with more being added as time progressed), I felt old wounds surging back. By May, the ceaseless back-to-back calls were painful. Even the simple act of walking into the call center and hearing fractions of conversations as I made my way to my desk was enough to induce a panic attack. At home, going to sleep knowing I’d have to work the next day conjured the same distress. I resigned within six months.
Target (2016-2018)
Backroom/Logistics Team Member
Colorado Springs, CO
Shedding some of the pay and benefits from USAA to show up for 4AM grocery shifts doesn’t seem like an upgrade, but for my mental health, it absolutely was.
Working for Target felt a lot like working at Walmart, but with a lot more dignity. No forced hour-long lunches so management could keep tabs on us. No recycled plastic vests to wear. Better pay and hours, absolutely. Like Walmart, however, it did give me time to think, ponder and brainstorm, which gave me plenty of fuel when I got home to work on my side hustles and make me feel satisfied.
I was part of the team in charge with preparing restocks for workers on the floor while also fulfilling in-store pickup orders in a very timely basis. During my tenure, the store also added a packaging station in the back where available items were shipped all around the nation from our warehouse. Years later, I can still feel and smell that wet paper tape we used to seal boxes. My performance ultimately came down to metrics and speed, which… let’s sing it again, 🎵were never that great to begin with!🎶
I enjoyed my time at Target and left for reasons unrelated to performance, which I’ll get into briefly. Even with a similar 3-mile walking commute to USAA, I was able to re-acquire and maintain the shape to start running half-marathons again, which was a big deal (I ran three during my time there.)
A Dark Time (2018-2021)
Me, as a Person
Colorado Springs, CO
I won’t get into it at length here, because I’ve already done so (please don’t click this unless you’re in for a long, very sad read) but leading into COVID, my life was a traumatic black hole. I learned a lot about mental health, the ineffectiveness of our justice system to handle or rehabilitate the mentally unwell and how to effectively advocate for myself and others, which has led to larger activist roles in my community.
I took on some low-quality jobs to pay the bills, which allowed me to better understand, utilize and appreciate our vastly imperfect but entirely necessary public transit system.
For all these reasons and more, I acquired a lot of debt even as I returned to school to further my education, exhausting my Pell grant. As a result, I am incapable of any further formal education for the indefinite future.
Even as I set aside The Nth Review during this period, it wasn’t entirely without some creative highlights. I recruited my friend Aaron to help build a futuristic racing game for Android devices called Star Prix. Over a few years of development, we were still scratching the surface on progress, but we did have a pretty solid early alpha. I developed a design document to set the scope, tone and features for the game and then using tools like Slack and Trello, prioritized and managed feature development as producer. I contracted another friend for portraits of the aristocratic family who would populate the story. Progress stopped when Aaron had to take on other work, but I’d absolutely love to return to it someday. It’s been a dream of mine to develop games for decades.
Best Buy/Goodwill of Colorado (2021-2022)
Warehouse Worker/Ecommerce Associate
Colorado Springs, CO
Let’s do something different: work full-time hours, receive no benefits with two part-time jobs at the same time to keep my brain happy. Logistically it was a pain in the butt — open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday with a cross-town morning commute and close Wednesday and Friday — but I wasn’t interested in either position full-time and I had plenty of creative energy left at the end of the day to work on the YouTube channel.
At Goodwill of Colorado, my primary job was to list items online for auction. Old plate collections, toys, comic books, sets of this, bundles of that: my job was making sure their listings abided by company standards, were complete with useful, non-blurry photos and in a fun twist, the metrics didn’t ever matter.
Like Time Warner Cable, I became proficient very quickly and got to work in other departments. When photography wasn’t happening or I needed replacement photos, I’d grab one of the Android-based cameras and start snapping. By the end of my time there, I was regularly being pulled into QA where items were being pulled off of trucks and sorted in a very granular process to create the pipeline that allowed all the other tasks to happen.
Simultaneously, somehow after 12 years Best Buy took me back even as I’d been terminated originally. But I wouldn’t be fretting over sales numbers or credit card applications, I’d be there two nights a week to unload the truck and stock items. It was the most fun I’d had working in retail in many years. I picked orders on-demand, packed them and knew where nearly every phone case and home security camera was for a time.
It pains me that people don’t believe that workers putting in 40 hours a week doing even this most basic and repetitive work should earn a living wage or adequate benefits, especially split between two jobs. It’s absurd.
ACT III: Sparks! Fire! Layoffs!
Colorado Springs Indy (2022-2023)
Fellow Reporter/Culture Reporter/Social Media Manager/Podcast Producer/Video Producer
Colorado Springs, CO
What if I told you that the ever-growing mound of skills I’d accumulated over my work history allowed me to score a job as a local arts reporter? From writing five-hour Nth Reviews to streaming old games online for an audience, I was able to turn nearly everything I learned for my side hustles into something that could benefit the Colorado Springs Indy audience.
After pitching a number of stories, I went to interview the stoners of the gaming stream house “Down to Quest” for my “interview test” story. They had used their earnings from the peak of crypto to finance a total shed makeover and move their game-playing employees into a practically invisible HQ among a line of tract houses in the middle of town. With the 1,000-word article (plus pictures!), I won a fellow reporter role to learn the ropes as a journalist and explore the local arts scene.
I connected with the arts community, started attending First Friday art walks, attended plays produced by local theatre groups and told the stories of so many local artists in their myriad of mediums. In total, I wrote nine cover stories for the Indy, from “The Nerd Issue” — which became one of our most popular papers — to the rise of the Knob Hill Urban Arts District and a 50-year retrospective on the Manitou Springs art scene and the intensely creative flower children who kicked it off.
As arts reporter, I also conducted interviews with local business leaders for our sister imprint: the Colorado Springs Business Journal.
Within weeks of starting, I wrote another white paper on how we could expand our audience with a weekly podcast that I produced called The Indy 15. I connected with local media legend Dave Gardner and his Studio 809 podcast collective to produce the show in audio and video in OBS. This eventually allowed him to orchestrate an eight-hour live streaming event featuring players from the paper’s 30 years in existence called Indyfinity. With salesperson Viktoria Costantino and once-FleshEatingZipper colleague Kelly Karnetsky, we chatted about pop culture happenings for our biweekly podcast Hot Takes & Streaming Breaks.
I also worked on the Indy’s first video content in several years. Beyond the podcasts, this ranged from a small documentary produced in the wake of the 2022 Club Q shooting that killed five and wounded 19 to an interview between senior reporter Pam Zubeck and outgoing Colorado Springs mayor John Suthers to short-form vertical content where I just ate weird stuff (featuring stellar motion graphics by our art director, Dustin Glatz).
For a brief window as we were only a few paychecks out from complete dissolution, I served part-time as the publication’s social media manager. In conducting meetings with the team, I was able to devise a strategy to build engagement, increase membership and boost revenue. This even led to the creation of our very first Membership Sasquatch, conceived by executive editor Bryan Grossman and rendered by Elena Trapp.
Unfortunately, the most frustrating part of talking about my time with the Colorado Springs Indy — even more irritating than the fact that I was laid off from the publication twice — is that its new owners have been in absolutely no rush to re-publish the paper’s extensive archives. It means that the work of my peers and predecessors, as well as my own, is locked away on hard drives somewhere away from the viewing public with the exception of our YouTube video content and social media postings. It makes exemplifying any particular experience practically impossible.
During my time with the Indy, I interviewed for and won a spot in the 2023 Colorado Springs Mayor’s Civic Leaders Fellowship, granting me an inside look of the mechanisms of our municipal government. I also interviewed for and attained a role as an alternate on the city’s Citizens Transportation Advisory Board, an entity that advises City Council on multimodal transit legislation, whether automobiles, micro-mobility devices, bicycles, or good ol’ pedestrian action.
I’m currently writing the second draft of a screenplay based very loosely on my time with the Indy called The Last Days of The Express.
Freelance (2022-Present)
Arts Reporter/Graphic Designer/Social Media Manager/Video Producer
Colorado Springs, CO
I’ve freelanced for many years, but after being laid off in November 2023 ahead of the Indy’s complete dissolution (and eventual rebirth as another published entity), I sought a variety of new creative opportunities.
I continued my local arts coverage in this Substack, The Raven Express (check out early entries!) as well as the Pikes Peak Bulletin. I also freelanced pieces for NAMI Colorado’s newsletter.
I designed a series of logos for local political candidates, including a raft of candidates for Colorado Springs School District 11, a revision of Stephanie Vigil’s logo as representative for Colorado House District 16 and John Mikos’ campaign logo and branding for Colorado State Treasurer.
With Fireweed Analytics, I worked in multiple roles to support Joe Reagan’s 2024 campaign for Colorado’s 5th Congressional district. From managing Joe’s various social media feeds to editing vertical-friendly captioned videos for Instagram, YouTube and beyond, I also coordinated his Reddit AMA and helped serve as photographer and graphic designer.
In time for the 2022 election season, I produced a weekly political talk show called Badly Needed & Long Overdue: A Controversial Podcast About Colorado Springs. This work featured producing, hosting and mixing the show (which was recorded live in OBS), booking guests, creating the visuals (including a full graphic design package with motion graphics) and managing our social media and podcast delivery feeds.
I walked over 50 kilometers (31 miles) in one day and raised over $600 in support of NAMI Colorado, a local mental health resource.
XTIVIA (2023-2024)
Marketing Content Specialist
Colorado Springs, CO
While my time was brief with XTIVIA, an IT consulting firm based here in Colorado Springs, I did manage to stretch my wings with the company a little.
I was already familiar with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI application, but I learned to effectively use Google’s AI tools such as Gemini and NotebookLM to synthesize concise chunks of data (that were double-checked before publication! That was important!) from vast quantities of materials.
I became acquainted with and a daily user of monday.com, the company’s work management software of choice. I worked with C-suite and business units to migrate business plans into monday.com for easier tracking and standardized accountability.
I wrote copy, worked on various pieces of marketing collateral, updated employee Zoom backgrounds, crafted new employee greeting cards, designed awards and scripted our 2024 holiday video (minus CEO Dennis’ section at the end) among other right-brained creative tasks.
Conclusion
Reach out! Send me an email: talktotheravenexpress@gmail.com.
But please: no small talk or condolences, only big plans.
MEOW… MEOW… MEOW… MEOW.
- Captain Kirby Jack Raven, a.k.a. That was a chair.
The Raven’s Recommendation
This is something I’ve munched on since the last time we’ve chatted that I want to share with you.
I mentioned way, way, way up there that my dad (and subsequently I) was fascinated with computer animation in its earliest forms. The technology truly came into its own in the 80s and this well-produced video essay covers a lot of ground on how it impacted entertainment pop culture from its primordial origins.