Back before Twitch and Twitter, back before Facebook, back before being internet famous was a thing, a good friend pulled me aside at a wedding and said, “Have you heard about blogs?” That was the summer of 2001.
At the time, I was a reporter for the then #1 television station in Upstate South Carolina. I served as the chief crime, political, and investigative reporter for many years. In 2001, I started this blog as an anonymous outlet for my non-television personality. Some of the stories were a bit blue and not necessarily in line with TV reporters’ morality clauses, so I wrote under a pseudonym for several years. After leaving TV in 2005, I dropped the pseudonym and continued to write here. Rapid Eye Reality is, against all odds, a niche-less blog that has lasted for going on two decades.
The stories here cover my time as a new reporter and the decade since I left the business. The latter came about when Wil Wheaton (yes, that Wil Wheaton) recommended me for a freelance job covering a poker tournament in the Bahamas. At the end of one week of work, the people running the tournament asked me to cover events in a lot of different places. I quit my job two weeks later and flew to Copenhagen, Denmark. Since then, I’ve been all over Europe, North America, Central America, South America, Asia, and in the Caribbean. I’ve written for most of the major poker magazines and several web sites. I’ve done guest commentary on radio, TV, and internet shows. I publish a majority of my poker writing at the PokerStars Blog, a site I founded in 2005 and still manage today.
Now, Rapid Eye Reality is a travelogue, family diary, and the place I put the missives that don’t fit in 140 characters on Twitter. If you’ve just arrived here, you can find some of the more notable posts here.