About Mike Schramm
Mike Schramm is a Chicago-based freelance writer, videogamer, volunteer, and if there was a word for a person who is merely interested in a lot of things, he would be that, too. He spends his days articulating his thoughts, and his nights actually thinking them up.Currently, he is co-lead blogger at WoW Insider, part of the Joystiq network of weblogs within the Weblogs, Inc. division of AOL. He oversees a team of around 20 that posts daily news, views, and insights about the extremely popular massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft. During his leadership at WoW Insider, the site has risen from a few thousand views a month to tens of millions of views per month, and become one of the main destinations on the Internet for the ten-million player WoW community.
Mike also writes and blogs at The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Massively. Massively is a site about all massively multiplayer online games, and Mike helped assemble the blogging team and launch the site in November of 2007. At The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Mike proudly blogs news about the thriving and brilliant Mac and Apple community, and happily covers the beats of iPhone and application news, and gaming on the iPhone and Mac.
Mike is also an accomplished broadcaster and podcaster, having created and hosted shows both online and over the airwaves. Currently, he can be heard every week on the WoW Insider Show, frequently on The Unofficial Apple Weblog's talkcast, and rarely on a number of other podcasts around the Internet, including Warcraft Outsiders, Massively Speaking, Canoodle Strudel, and many others.
Mike has also written for and contributed to a number of other publications, both online and in print, including the Wall Street Journal, Comedy Central's Indecision 2008 blog, Newcity, Time Out Chicago, Uber, and Opium Magazine. Additionally, he has made guest appearances talking about gaming, technology and culture in all kinds of mediums, including on G4, CNET, and NPR.
Additionally, Mike will often say to passers-by that he is working on a book, but so far no one's seen any of it.
Mike also volunteers in Chicago at McSweeney's 826 CHI writing center, as well as at the world famous NeoFuturists theater collective.
And needless to say, Mike is a huge fan of videogames. He currently owns an Xbox 360, a Nintendo Wii, a Nintendo DS, and hidden in the closet somewhere, a Sega Nomad. Mike also plays the ukulele and is learning the guitar, and he will almost undoubtedly beat you at Euchre.
Contact Mike (to set up a guest appearance, to commission a piece of writing, or just to say hi) at mike@mikeschramm.com.
About mikeschramm.com
mikeschramm.com provides fresh content almost daily about technology, the Internet, literary humor, pop culture, the entertainment industry, the greater meanings of life in the modern world, Batman, funny t-shirts, hot actresses, nerd culture, great television, videogames, movies, living in Chicago, great and crappy literature, search engine optimization, business development, psychoacoustics, social theory, indie music, great food, the continuum of morality, Star Wars, and the intersection of all of that.Oh, and bunnies. Bunnies are cute.
Here are five of Mike's favorite posts on the site. From these you can get a good idea of what you'll find here.
Godzilla in Love
A Conversation with Lindsay Lohan, In Which She Speaks in Song Titles From Her Latest Album
Mario's Journey
Greeting Cards for People Less Confident About Their Sentiments
The Last Planet of the Savages
Mikeschramm.com also hosts the podcast Happy Time (which Mike hosts with his friend Luke Lindberg), and The Board, a message board dedicated to whatever people want to post on there.
Colophon
... is a fancy word that a lot of sites are using to explain what software they used to make the site.To run the site, I use Wordpress, with a ton of little PHP hacks and plugins built into it. Wordpress is using a custom template that I built myself using jEdit and includes pretty little icons from graphicPUSH and the Silk set. I upload all the files to my server (hosted by H2 Hosting) with SmartFTP.
CSS inspiration is provided by the CSS Zen Garden and Open Source Web Design.
To make the images, I use Adobe Photoshop CS2 and, even more often, The Gimp. My photos are taken with a Canon Powershot A520, organized in iPhoto and of course I upload them to Flickr using the Flickr Export plugin.
I am now running an embarrassing amount of computers but considering that I work at home, most of it is written off on tax returns. I have an old 12" Powerbook that just barely serves my portable computing needs, as well as a custom-built PC for gaming, and a dual-core Mac Mini for grownup work.