My name is Dan Dickinson. In an attempt to disambiguate myself from other Dan Dickinsons (of which there are quite a few), here are some facts for which I may be unique:
- I am forty-something years old, and have spent about thirty of those years with a web presence.
- I live in Jersey City, and grew up mostly in upstate New York.
- I am the Executive Director of Institutional Communications at Weill Cornell Medicine. I have been with the institution since 2004; this is effectively my seventh role. Before that, I spent a few years at beloved Mac gaming company Freeverse Software.
- I am a retired sports journalist. I wrote for Gothamist, focusing on the NYC soccer scene. I also helped moderate the /r/MLS subreddit for four years, and co-hosted Seeing Red!, a soccer podcast, for about two years.
- I am generally found online under the handle “Remy”, which I started using in 1993. This has lead to a lot of confusion.
- This blog became briefly popular in 2004 when I wrote a number of tutorials for Quicksilver, a OS X productivity utility. Articles I wrote about the tool have been published by O’Reilly and IDG. A book was briefly in the works.
- From 2004 to 2009, I ran a gaming community website called VJ Army, as well as its sister site, Pop’n Navy. The sites specialized in score tracking for Konami’s beatmania IIDX and Pop’n Music music game series, respectively. VJ Army lives on now as Solid State Squad.
- Relatedly, from 2004 to 2014, I hosted a wiki dedicated to music games, called RemyWiki. It is named after me because I was more interested in getting it live than giving it a clever name. It lives on, and is still named after me, but I’m no longer involved in any way running it.
About This Site
I have had a web presence in some capacity since 1995; I began writing in a time-ordered blog format in February of 2000. The mass of content that cover the years of my life since live on through this site, despite repeat migration between hosting companies, domain names, and blog platforms. Earlier posts may reference functionality that no longer exists or content that is no longer available.
All the opinions on this site are mine. They do not reflect the views of my employer, my friends, my wife, or my cat.
Posts and comments may be removed or edited at my sole discretion. Commenting has been disabled on new posts because the internet has gotten weird.
Attribution
The name Primary Vivid Weblog is a reference to Konami’s beatmania IIDX 6th Style, which was subtitled “The Primary Vivid IIDX”.
The domain name vjarmy.com is in reference to a beatmania IIDX song of the same name. It originally appeared on beatmania IIDX 6th Style. (6th Style was effectively my first IIDX game; I guess it stuck.)
The site byline of Struggling with the dark and responding to the light is adapted from Bill Drummond’s project, the17. No music by Bill Drummond has ever appeared in beatmania IIDX, sadly.
Contacting Dan
I am somewhat accessible through a number of social networks; my accounts are linked in the footer of every page of the site.