Strike Da Mic

Strike Da Mic, usually called Strike for short, is a Swiss gamer and a graphical and musical artist. He was born on 13 May 1986 in Winterthur, Switzerland. Currently, he lives in Erstfeld in the Canton of Uri together with his fiancée. 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.

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 PSP (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.

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 on 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. 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.

Art and graphical work

As many artists and most kids, Strike has been drawing stuff ever since his motor nerves were able to 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.

Personal comment

Wow, it's weird to write about myself in third person. I hope you don't hate me after having read this. :P