Strike Da Mic

<forumuser name="Strike Da Mic" /> Strike Da Mic, usually called Strike for short, is a Swiss gamer, an amateur graphical and musical artist as well as an amateur web designer. He was born on 13 May 1986 in Winterthur, Switzerland. Currently, he lives in Erstfeld in the Canton of Uri together with his fiancée Sabrina. His real name is Thomas.

Life, school, work

Strike attended kindergarten and his first five years of school in Rorbas, Zurich. On his third year of school, he was reported to be an exceptionally silent and uninterested student, which lead his parents to believe that he had some form of learning disability. Upon being checked by a psychiatrist, Strike was assessed to be a so-called "highly gifted" person (which he still does not believe to this day), seeming to have a special affinity to languages. Thereupon he was enabled to skip one year of school, going from the third year directly to the fifth.

Strike started to learn English, a language he soon grew to love. He listened to US-american HipHop during his teen years, which helped him adapt an American accent that's minimally flawed by his Swiss German linguistic heritage.

After having attended college, Strike advanced to the University of Zurich. He studied Anglistics, Journalism and Educational Theory. After four semesters, however, he grew tired of the constant schooling and decided to take some time off studies to go to work and earn some money.

He currently works at an electronic entertainment reseller in Zurich as a Customer Service Representative. Strike visits the Sonic Retro IRC channel almost daily (except on weekends). Though he constantly tries to entertain the crowd with jokes and what he considers to be funny stories from everyday life, he usually fails.

Hobbies, personal interest

Strike's first "big" gaming console was the Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis in the US). It had been shipped together with the game Sonic the Hedgehog, which hooked him up on the character of Sonic. In succeeding years, Strike became a huge fan of the character and the storyline, even dressing up as Sonic in a tailor-made costume at carnival. He's still a passionate gamer, spending much time playing games such as Counter-Strike: Source, or different console games. He owns a Nintendo Wii, a Sony PlayStation 3, a Sony PlayStation Portable (homebrew-enabled) and a half-broken Microsoft Xbox 360. Next to Sonic, Strike's a big fan of the Metal Gear Solid series, having played and completed every game of the series at least five times.

Strike also draws from time to time, or plays his instruments. He also enjoys spending some "quality time" with his fiancée.

Strike is the founder, owner and admin of sinister.ch. Formerly used as a portal for dark lifestyle, the domain's content has been changed to be a more personal space for Strike to use as a blog-type CMS. Content includes comic strips (own and from other artists), news, software projects (sinister software) and more.

Currently, Strike is working on a PHP/MySQL based movie database software named fliXXery. The piece of software helps users organize their movie and TV series collection over a simple intuitive web interface, and was primarily created for the port 80 of NAS devices (which ideally store the movie files). You can access Strike's own NAS at http://nas.sinister.ch, and fliXXery can be found at http://nas.sinister.ch >> fliXXery (if the NAS is running - user: visitor, pass: visitor).

Music and musical work

From early on, Strike had a passion for music. Supported by his parents, Strike took piano lessons, which he continued to take over a time span of roughly twelve years. Around 2002, he started to learn to play electric guitar, which is now his favorite instrument.

In his teen years, Strike listened to HipHop excessively. He started to write rap music himself and create beats. Together with a friend who owned a small home music studio, Strike recorded a couple rap songs in Swiss German, which had only been performed once in front of a live crowd. As the years went by, though, he realized that Metal music appealed to him, so right now he switched between HipHop and Metal, with a tendency to the latter. His current favorite bands are Slipknot, Stone Sour, Alter Bridge, HIM and Killswitch Engage.

Strike had two bands with friends, Jug (thrash metal) and Tales From The Dark Side (gothic/death/dark metal), which were fun but did not succeed altogether.

Usually, he works with Fruity Loops Producer Edition, Apple GarageBand and Steinberg Cubase for simple musical arrangements. He does not own any hardware for sound engineering, apart from a simple USB keyboard. Right now, he's learning how to use Propellerhead Reason 4, but he can already say that he loves the possibilities and is very fond of the software. Strike has a passion for epic film scores; right now, he mostly listens to Desperate Chase, Metal Gear Saga and Metal Gear Solid 3 Theme by Harry Gregson-Williams. Strike would like to sing, but he simply cannot sing - it sounds horrible.

Art and graphical work

Like many artists and most kids, Strike has been drawing stuff ever since his motor nerves were able to make his hand hold a pen. Many old drawings display Sonic and characters from the Sonic universe. Since a couple of years, he's been drawing comics for fun, or as gifts to younger relatives.

Strike is a huge fan of graphical novels and comics. Amongst his most treasured items in his comics accumulation are the two Maus albums by Art Spiegelman. He loved to watch the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons, which had been given to him by an American friend (since those had never been released in Switzerland), and reading the Sonic der Comic (Sonic the Comic) albums, which - much to his disappointment - had been canceled by their German publisher after one year.

Right now, Strike's learning to draw vector art in Adobe Illustrator CS4 after having used Adobe Photoshop CS3 for quite some time.

Additionally to drawing, Strike does movie editing (in Sony Vegas 8 and Adobe Premiere) and web-design. He is currently working on is own PHP and MySQL based movie database (see Hobbies, personal interest).

Personal comment

Wow, it's weird to write about myself in third person. I hope you don't think I'm some kind of egomaniac after having read this. :P Just wanna let you guys'n'gals know who's behind the nick.