Hi, I'm Mikko. Born in Alaska, raised in the Philippines, back to Alaska for college, then to New York at 20 with two suitcases and no plan. New York took my twenties. Alaska gave me an HR career to start. Then I came home, and I've been in the Philippines fifteen years now.
I've stopped trying to pick one thing. I quit a corporate job once to make fonts and crafts full time, then went back to corporate without putting either down. That overlap is most of who I am.
The corporate one. I'm a certified HR professional with real opinions about 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 I've been writing ever since. I started on LiveJournal, back when thinking in public was the whole point. Since then, four co-authored craft books, five oracle decks, two of them entirely mine, and a novel I still owe myself. The journal here is where LiveJournal left off.
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 what paid the bills, 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.