My name is Tommy (not a Tom or Thomas, so don't even try.) I grew up in Chicago and its surrounding areas with my mother and sister, visiting my father on weekends. I have the most wonderful wife on the planet, Mollie. I have always been surrounded by a lot of artists; most of my friends were involved in art, photography, or were musicians, and my mom used to draw, paint, and play guitar, and even helped in the early stages of Kindermusic, a children's music school that was formed by a family friend. I played piano as a kid through high school- I was pretty good, but it was always more of a hobby than anything I took too seriously. I've always loved computers- my first one ever was a Compaq (remember those?) and a big part of my childhood was spent playing learning games, like the Dole 5-A-Day game and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I later discovered RTS games like Dune 2000 through some friends of mine, and my uncle started playing a game called Diablo (definitely not a learning game), which first introduced me to online-play. My impression of games until then was that they were basically just learning tools or time-wasters, which changed when I was about 12.

When I was in middle school, my best friend Brian and I used to make fun of Dave. Stupid Dave. Dave was this annoying little transfer student in the 7th grade who literally never shut up about some video game he started playing called Final Fantasy VII. We'd try to hold conversations with him to be nice, but to no avail. So, Brian and I, being insensitive little witless children, decided him to be a lost cause and resumed our laughter of him during our usual mischievous lifestyles. Then one day, Brian came up to me, looking scared. He pulled me aside and swore me to secrecy for what he was about to tell me: he tried FFVII, and it was amazing. Considering this a much more valid and reliable opinion than Dave's constant ramblings, I went out, rented the game, and proceeded to stayed home from school for 3 days doing my very best to deceive my mother of my fake illness. This was such a radically different game than anything I ever played, with a longer and more complex story than I thought possible for a silly video game. It was my first major introduction to what the world of interactive storytelling was capable of.

After high school, I numbered among the many who had absolutely no idea what to do with their life. School was usually just an obligation brought on to me by my parents, who wanted me to attend university or at least take general classes, and naturally, I defied them, not because I was some misunderstood emo punkass but because I literally did not see the point of going to school if I had no direction. I took a few classes here and there over the years, but I put absolutely zero effort into them, for working for works' sake was just redundant to me. I even took a few art classes, but despised drawing (a tediousness I now tremendously regret not sticking with.) Eventually, I ended up at Columbia College in Chicago for music composition, as music was one thing I was always naturally pretty good at. Almost three years into my education there, I found out I had carpel tunnel, which put a huge damper on my ambition to continue with piano performance since I couldn't manage to play longer than 10 minutes without needing to stop. Unfortunately, I let this bad news affect my judgement regarding composition too, and I put everything on hold. For whatever reason, I still had not really made the connection between music composition and media because it seemed such an unofficial route to take in college, so it was very easy for me to give this up since I never saw the potential of what this education could lead to.

Then, I found a program that broke this way of thinking. Tribeca Flashpoint Academy in Chicago offered a program for recording arts and sound design for games. I didn't know it was possible for a program like that to exist at a school, as I never really saw this passion of mine as a viable career until this crossed my path. I always loved writing music in rudimentary editing programs like Garageband, but this was the first exposure I had in a more up-to-date and professional environment that helped me realize how possible it was to turn this into a career. I've never had more fun at a school  in my life. (And believe me, I had attended quite enough schools to appreciate this.)

After I graduated from Flashpoint, I helped/co-formed a group called SomeFriends Studios (I was never a fan of the name, but you know whatever (insert bitter face emoji here (oh I found one! ))), where some recent grads got together to make our very own video game, called Evo. I put more time into my work in this group than may have been healthy, but it was the first kind of work I ever had that was truly fun. Ultimately this group fell apart as people needed to get paying jobs and thus had less time to put in, as is quite common with startup groups like that, but this experience was my first glimpse at what it would be like to have a job I really love.

It took years, but it is now very clear to me how things need to be. The creation of this website is now my permanent channel for my ideas, no matter how stupid or bad they may be. I no longer want to wait for opportunities to come along, hoping I'm in the right position to act on them. From now on, I will implement a life-law that as often as I can, until I am super-dead, I will upload something new to serve as my on-going portfolio. Even if nothing else comes of it, it will be enough, because this is for me.

The name Fablezim came to be when I was just out of high school. I was previously using Tomiboy for a lot of my online work/presences ("Tomi" being my name in Japanese, which I was learning at the time), but due to an overflowing amount of spam mail sent to that email address, I decided to start over with something new. I was currently playing the game "Fable" (still an amazing game) while watching one of my favorite shows (...do I even need to say it), Invader Zim. As you can clearly tell, I put zero effort into this alias, but somehow it stuck around for like 15 years and now here we are. I am Fablezim.

I think the two most powerful things on the planet are stories and music. It seems like our entire civilization revolves around regularly escaping from our lives into a good book, a movie, a series, a play, or a video game, most of which consist of music as well. I have always loved writing music that fits into more scenic or abstract mediums, and it is that which I want to get more involved with again.

Music: //  I've been writing music for as long as I can remember; one of my very first songs, titled "Sad Song," I think I originally wrote when I was 12 or 13, and it was perhaps the only one from that time that remained in my muscle memory by the time I discovered Garageband. I have a voice recorder app on my phone that I will just hum melodies in to; they sound ridiculous, but it's a good way to record the idea and save it for later. My main weakness with writing music has always been drums or drum tracks, which is ironic because I used to be a pretty good drummer. I tend to use loops because I can't physically play drums well enough any more and manually writing drum tracks is very tedious, so that is one area I would definitely like to improve.

Writing: //   Another thing I've always enjoyed was writing, I just don't do it that often, which is partially the reason I revived the blog portion of this site. Have you ever noticed that you have good and bad days with different things in your life, like "Wow, today my handwriting looks amazing!" It seems that writing is one of these areas for me, where sometimes I just can't seem to articulate what I'm trying to say. This is another area that I would like to regularly practice for the sake of developing stories I can use for any gaming or drawing/comic projects.

I have so many interests in life, and I think everyone should, but I will basically be your best friend if you like any of this stuff as much as I do. In no particular order, these are my absolute favorite things. I love Harry Potter (obviously the books (and its OB-viously, not obvi-OUS-ly))- in my opinion, it is the best story ever told, with so many life lessons woven in its depths. My other favorite books are the His Dark Materials triology & the Ender's Game saga. My favorite shows include Avatar (Airbender), Game of Thrones, House of Cards (before Spacey betrayed us all and ruined the show), Fullmetal Alchemist, Naruto, Bleach, The Office, Parks & Rec, House, Simpsons, Futurama, and a ton of other random shows & anime. For games, I grew up with Command & Conquer and Dune 2000, the Diablo series, almost every single Zelda game (especially BotW), Final Fantasy 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10, Crash Bandicoot, World of Warcraft, old DOS games like Crusader or Death Rally, Halo, Fable, Metal Gear, and again, a myriad of others. I love riding the musical Youtube train and just seeing what stuff I stumble upon, and I love meeting new people to game with or just to pen-pal with about all this nerd #%@!.

Thank you for visiting my website, it's really just a place I use to track my own progress with my projects, but I hope you enjoy perusing through its pages. If you have any feedback or questions I'd love to hear them- I can be reached through the Contact page on this site. Stay cool, it's a hot one out there today!