Hi, I'm Mikko. Born in Alaska, raised in the Philippines, back to Alaska for college, then off to New York at 20 with two suitcases, sight unseen. New York gave me my twenties, Alaska gave me the start of an HR career, and then I came home. I've been in the Philippines 15 years now.
I've stopped trying to pick one thing. I once quit a corporate job to make crafts for a living, then came back to the corporate world with the crafts intact. The overlap is the point.
The corporate one. I'm a certified HR professional with opinions about hiring, org life, and how work should treat people. I keep that world on LinkedIn where it belongs.
I moved to New York at 20 chasing a magazine job I never quite got, and the itch outlived the plan. I've been writing on the internet since LiveJournal, back when thinking in public was the whole point. I've co-authored four craft books and made five oracle decks, two of them entirely my own, and the novel is still on the list. The journal here picks up where LiveJournal left off, with a mood, a song, and a location under every title.
I was a gymnast who dreamed of the Olympics and secretly of Cirque du Soleil. I tried pole right before the pandemic, after watching Hustlers, just to see if I could. Turns out I could. Now I train and teach pole, aerial, and flexibility at Polecats Manila.
I made my first font in 2008 and made it official in 2015 with Mix Fonts, an independent foundry for handwritten type. For a stretch of my life it was the livelihood, and it never stopped being the favorite. If you've seen a cute mystical font on a planner or a Halloween shirt, there's a nonzero chance it's mine.
For the record, I built this website myself. My first HTML was a GeoCities page in high school, and I've been hand-building sites since the early aughts, this one included.