EPTIn a couple of weeks, I'll be packing everything into my 2000 Saturn SL and driving 2,800 miles to San Francisco, California, all thanks to StarCraft 2. Here's a quick rundown of events that lead to this impending westward migration.
In January, 2010, my friend Michelle had just gotten a YouTube partnership for her vlogs with her best friend Grace (GraceNMichelle) and she talked me into starting a YouTube channel of my own. Not having any real area of expertise, I decided to just make a channel where people (namely people who followed me on Twitter or Tumblr) could just ask me questions and I would try to do my best to answer them in an entertaining way (AskJoshy). I got over 100 subscribers thanks to some help from Michelle, and made about 15 videos in that first month, but then the StarCraft 2 beta came out.
My job at the time was acting as a spokesperson for a local credit union. I was blogging and making weekly YouTube videos for them, so I already had some familiarity with Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Express. When the beta came out and I got in on day 1, I knew I could get a lot of views by FRAPSing some of the new maps and units and things, and I got to work immediately. I ended up just dropping videos about infestors and motherships onto AskJoshy because I was too lazy and/or didn't think it would be necessary to make a new channel just for StarCraft stuff. In retrospect I probably should have made JoshyStarCraft or something. Oh well. Since the beta, I've picked up 42,000 subscribers and over 9 million views on 700 videos from my clips, casts, and MLG footage.
Along the way I worked with a ton of great people in the community and made a lot of connections with players, managers, casters, and more. I worked with iCCup TV for several months, joined the Machinima network in October, and have been working with them ever since. I helped cover MLG Dallas 2010 for TeamLiquid.net and had a blast with the players for their first time all being together at one tournament. In January 2011, thanks to the recommendation of Ryan Rushia, I started working with compLexity Gaming as their primary caster and live event coverage guy. It's been a great experience casting The V for them each and every week, and I had a lot of fun at MLG Dallas with all of their players and managers.
I'm not moving to California to work for TL, iCCup TV, Machinima, or even compLexity, though. Nope, I seem to have landed a job that is perfect for me. I just signed the contract to become IGN.com's eSports Community Marketing Manager. You'll see posts from me here on TL in the near future for the IGN Pro League as Joshy.IGN, with a flashy icon and everything. I went to college for marketing and have a bachelor's degree to show for it, so my education and my interests are finally meeting in a big way. Their corporate headquarters are in San Francisco, just two blocks away from where the Giants play baseball.
It'll be quite a drastic change from the super-suburban Summerville, but I am confident I'll get used to it and show IGN that they made the right decision by picking me up. I spent my first 25 years living in South Carolina without a real career. Maybe I'll spend my next 25 years in California building one.
To celebrate my 25th birthday, I think I'm going to live stream some StarCraft 2 all day (between noon and midnight most likely) on Wednesday, May 25th (http://www.justin.tv/joshsuth). Come join me in channel AskJoshy on North America if you'd like to play some 4v4's, ffa's, StarJeweled, Nexus Wars, SOTIS, or whatever else we feel like doing. It's a celebration of life and SC2. =)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/tZX4t.jpg)
Thanks for reading!
