I’m a Creative at a small agency called Zeus Jones.

I also started a pop-culture website called The Tangential.

I decided to create this website as a home for the work, creative ventures and tomfoolery that make up my life.

Plus, I’ve owned the domain name Leckybang.com since age 17, and I might as well do something with it.

Be my friend on Facebook.

Follow my Twitter.

Follow me on Tumblr.

Get to know way too much about me on The Tangential.

The last design of The Tangential was basically the WP Shower theme Suburbia with the colors changed and our own iconography/ fonts, but I wanted something more custom. I tried to build it from the ground up, but results were laughable. I ended up grabbing the most feature-rich WPShower theme, Sight, and deciding to work from there. I reskinned it to look very different, but if you are familiar with it you notice that many of its features are there.

I don’t have much PHP or CSS experience other than messing around with Tumblr themes, but once I get an idea in my head I want to do it as fast as possible. After a few mild nervous breakdowns that required whiskey + ginger ale, I had it at least passable. I ended up getting it mostly done in about 4 days, although a few kinks remained that I’ve since dealth with. I ended up getting a lot more comfortable with PHP, so I built on writer, category, tag and 404 error pages. I also customized the theme for Philolzophy and The Sport Hole. I’m sure that in the next 6 months or so I’ll impulsively redesign it again. Web trends change fast.

When I was in college, I liked to sit around and make up codes for the alphabet and take my notes in them. I was especially into shape-based, map systems that change the way reading looks entirely. Here is one colored sample I made.

I later got an iPad app that lets you make handwritten fonts. I took advantage of it to make an actual block font. You can download it here.

Part of the reason I’m so interested in the alphabet is because I see it in colors. It’s called associative synesthesia, and I didn’t figure out what it was until I was 17 and I stumbled across an article about it while making a collage out of some ladies home journal magazine. My whole life I have thought of the alphabet in consistent colors, as well as numbers, months, days of the week and musical sounds. My name, “Becky” is red, etc.

A lot of people didn’t believe me, so I made a chart that showed what the alphabet looks like in my mind.

I’m currently working on an alphabet that visualizes each letter according to its order in the alphabet, so hopefully I can add that on here soon.

Here’s a list of the publications that I’ve written for, and a few writing samples.

Twin Cities Onion A.V. Club

My best buddy from 10th grade, gay prom date and fellow Tangential editor Jason Zabel recently became the Twin Cities Onion A.V. Club editor. Score for me, now I get to earn some extra $$ by interviewing The Black Lips and the mayor every so often.

• The A.V. Club’s Down-to-Earth Guide to Drinking Your Way Through a Minneapolis Summer – Jason wanted me to write a summer drinking guide and I didn’t want it to be one of those guides that acts like drinking is a fancy rich people thing. I wanted to make a guide for people who get drunk. I think I did it.

• Interview: Black Lip’s Jared Swilley – this gets pretty wacky. I made him compare his album to a candy bar and we went from there.

• R.T. Rybak talks Twin Cities Pride – can I just say the mayor is a total babe? He looks like a president in a movie who’s out to kill Spiderman. He compared gay pride to “nirvana.”

Twin Cities Daily Planet

My friend, neighbor and Tangential co-editor Jay Gabler is the arts editor of the Daily Planet, and he’s helped me to keep up journalism post college. I admire his commitment to showcasing community voices and creativity rather than just promoting hard news journalism.

• Chuck Klosterman Holds Steady at Wits

METRO Magazine

I finagled an internship at METRO magazine when I was almost done with college. I loved news journalism, but magazines had always been more my style. METRO editor Chris Clayton was a kindred spirit – obsessed with Esquire too – and gave me some room to figure out what I wanted to write. I ended up moving into the advertising beat quite a bit, which actually helped me schmooze my way into a job after college.

• Artists We Love: Marc Sijan

I decided to interview this artist who makes sculptures that essentially look like people. When we carried it in, people thought we were sneaking a stiff dead body down the elevator, or something equally morbid.

The Star Tribune

I was an arts intern at the Star Tribune in my last semester of college. I got placed on the theater/classical music beat, which is – admittedly – not my area of expertise. I did get to do some sweet stories on screen printing (which I love) and interview some T.V. personalities. (I also got hassled by Yo Gabba Gabba!’s publicist a lot.)

• Interview with Screen Printer Adam Turman

• An interview with the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Dudes

• What kids really learn from their cartoons

Splice Today

The first time MN Daily co-editor Jay Boller and I went to Pitchfork music festival, it was a bit of a mess. We hadn’t realized key facts like a) you’re supposed to bring a photographer and b) you need to set up your own interviews, not just expect them to happen in the press tent. We ended up writing a more conceptual piece about “the types of people at Pitchfork music fest.” Our boss was displeased. (We made amends the next year.) Luckily, Russ Smith of Baltimore’s Splice Today liked our piece, and invited us to write about, basically, whatever we wanted for his site. We jokingly referred to him as “our new dad” a lot.

• Universal and Invisible – Is anybody speaking Esperanto?

• When Did We Switch from “Indie” to “Hipster?”

• Review of M.I.A.’s /\/\/\Y/\

Brave New Traveler

Somehow in college I convinced a creative travel writing website to let me write for them, despite the fact that I haven’t even been on a real vacation in at least five years.

• Jay Rubin: Translating More than Words – I  interviewed the translator of one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami.

The Wake

This is the first place I ever got published. The alternative alt biweekly paper at the U of M, it was pretty damn cool for having no budget. A lot of the writers and designers went on to do cool shit. I spent a semester as a staff writer.

After my first year, my ingenious boss, Michael Garberich, graduated and headed to South Korea to teach English, leaving the editor position to me. A lot of changes happened at the Daily when I was the editor. We amped up our digital publishing, meaning I started uploading all of our content online and managing a blog. I decided to kick off its digital media presence, starting a Facebook page, a Twitter and a Tumblr. While I was there, The Minnesota Daily was voted the best college paper in the country. I can’t take any credit for that though – we were always getting in trouble for having things like too many Q&A’s, too many curse words and too much literary writing – all things I happily transferred into The Tangential this year. I like Q&A’s and curses, thank you.

Here are a couple of my stories:

• A huge fucking feature on local public TV, which involved a quesadilla recipe and lots of interviews with interesting characters.

• The Creative Minds Behind MPLSTV – I loved the public TV reporting a lot, and was glad to end my stay there by writing about local creative non-profit MPLS.TV. The interview went well – we even got a little drunk afterward (shh.) They asked me to be on staff, which I eventually did, although I’ve since left.

• One-Word Reviews – a regular feature because I like short form shit and wanted to do more of it in the paper

There are probably a thousand stories I’ve done for the Daily, but I’m too lazy to list anymore.

As Tangential co-founder Jay Gabler likes to say, “Like Jesus, the Tangential was born of a bloody mary.” It was another stupid frostbitey winter morning and we had all slid down the hill to the nearest bar, a ribs place called Rudolphs, where we consumed breakfast drinks with Nebraska import Katie Sisneros. We had long been talking about starting a website where we could write whatever we wanted. Jaded by the worlds of hard-news journalism, academia and local ass-kissin’, we wanted free reign to do experimental, edgy writing and grow our style as we went. We started The Tangential in January.

The idea is inspired by the literary journalism of Esquire magazine, as well as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and snarky sites like The Awl and The Hairpin.

In our six months, we’ve grown. We went from having about 75 daily visitors to having over 23,000 unique visitors a month. We also got to submissions from writers like local fiction genius John Jodzio and a slew of other talented “litsters.” The best part was that I made a lot of friends who are crazy talented, like Sarah and Chrissy from Philolzophy and Emily, who writes periodically for The Hairpin.

Get reading already!