I am Martian. I am the Daikisai. I am an Aretic... All of these are names I choose for myself, and while each provides an insight into me, a precis of who I am, none of them explain in full. None will bring anyone true understanding of who I am, how I think, what I feel. And that, for reasons that I hope will become clear to both of us, is important to me. Not only to be known, but to be understood. And so, I set out to document my life. Where I came from, what I've done, where I've been, all leading us, I hope, to know who I am.
I am Martian. I chose this name for myself, though whether it was precient or directive, it is unclear. I chose it in random circumstance, and drew it from recent fascination. The relevance to my core self, the acuity with which this single word described me, I could not have been predicted in advance by any normal reasoning.
I was born 27 February 1977, in Wichita Kansas. I grew up in the town of Andover, and there attended USD 385 for K thru 12. Then followed three and a half years at Wichita State University, graduating with a BSCS in 1998. My timeline for moving to Seattle was accelerated by a job interview, and was effected 6 January 1999.
The primary thread running through my life was drawn around age six, when my father gave me a TRS-80 color computer. Quickly growing bored with the games available for it, I taught myself to program in BASIC, and thus was I doomed. A hacker for life.
Space has always been my second obsession. The Kansas Cosmosphere offered a Space Camp experience, and though I always knew it could not have compared with that of Huntsville, it was accessible and affordable. I attended three times, tho the third was primarily to let the old timers play on the new equipment. During the second round, I began to plan, with others there with me, a mission to Mars. We were designing ships, and facilities, and planning hows and wheres.
At the begining of high school, I was invited to join a local BBS run by a schoolmate. Asked what name I would log in under, I thought for a moment and decided on 'Martian'. Quickly, those who knew me online began to call me Marty for short, and this crept into real life as well.
Most of the friends I had upon moving to Seattle knew me originally from the internet, and so knew me as Marty. My first job here was contracting at Microsoft, which wasn't an environment where I felt like explaining the matter, and so I just went by Adam. My second job, encoding.com, was much more safe, and I started officially going by Marty Smyth for all but legal and financial purposes.
On 23 Feb 2010, just before becoming a full-time employee at my then-job, I finally had my name legally changed to Martin Regulus Tithonium. I was, by then, considerably more comfortable being Who I Am around work people than I had been ten years before.
Midwest to Northwest. Wichita to Seattle. Earth to Mars. Human to alien. These, then, are the stories of my life.