Hi! It’s me, Ash. Guess since I am an official member of the crew now I should formally introduce myself. Yall have gotten a pretty good idea of who I am over the handful of times I’ve been on the show: monsterfucker, fanfiction writer, horny video game journalist extrodinaire. The broad strokes. While the monsterfucker appellation is relatively recent, the other two are directly related to each other and in that exact order. As I mentioned briefly during this week’s podcast after being deeply unhappy with my life and career, I decided to pursue writing about video games as I felt writing was the only real marketable talent I had that inspired any passion in me (something I learned through decades of writing fanfic.)
I went to school in Indiana. Purdue University. I didn’t handle college very well because of ADHD / Autism spectrum disorder – something that wasn’t diagnosed in me until maybe 2 years ago (because of the general underdiagnosis of those disorders in the Black community especially women.) The anxiety that manifested because I went from being at the top of my class at a rigorous high school to barely being able to function in college meant that I had to leave Purdue on academic suspension. I didn’t have words for what was wrong with me and the general attitudes in the Black community (especially with Boomers because my mother was born in 1960) at the time meant that when I did get kicked out of college it was attributed to some sort of character defect instead of a mental one. I was shipped off to live with my Dad until my academic suspension was over when I was supposed to return. But, in the pain and embarrassment of essentially being told to ‘fuck off’ by my mom, I did not return.
And that’s how I wound up in Ohio. I finished school at Cleveland State University with a degree in History. I did a stint in City Year (an Americorps program, think Teach For America) in the middle of that which made me want to be a high school teacher. Though teaching is a noble profession, signing up for it consigns your life to poverty wages and I struggled a lot during school and didn’t want that for myself in life. All during this time, I met the person who was my first husband. After finishing school, I got a job working at the US HQ of a Canadian engineering company. It was a good, stable job, with good pay, and benefits. Essentially the perfect job for someone either later in life or someone with little schooling who has a family to provide and care for. It was a place you go where you do nothing of note or interest that will take care of you until you die/retire. And I felt that every day I worked there. Then I would go home to a partner who ascribed to nothing more than the four walls of our shitty one bedroom apartment and meals of literally Hot Ham Water (and rice) from Arrested Development.
Around 2016, that life became untenable to me. Trump became president and life got a little Sunday Scary. I figured (as I said during the podcast) if I was to die right now, I could not do it having done so little with my life. So I blew everything to smithereens. I got a divorce. I moved out with nothing but my corgi Ein and my PS4 and turned to writing.
I taught myself how freelancing worked, started pitching to places and very slowly but surely started building the chops I’d need to get a full time job. I used to write regularly for gamepedia.com which eventually became subsumed by fandom.com. I used to write weekly recaps of the first season of the Overwatch Leauge when I thought a specialization in esports would be what would help me get/keep a job at a time when video game journalist jobs were hard to come by let alone keep (IMAGINE THAT LMAO!) I also used to freelance for Minecraft.com making a princely ass sum of like $250-300 per post. (Seriously, they threw money at me, it was great.) All that parlayed into getting a full-time position at Kotaku after at least 2 or 3 applications/interviews over the years. Forgot to add: after about a year with them, a former G/O colleague who worked for Gizmodo asked me if I’d like to work with her at The Verge and after hemming and hawing about it (I really didn’t want to leave because I thought working at a non-Kotaku place wouldn’t let me write the way I want to with all my weird, horny proclivities) I said yes and that’s where I’ve been for 3 years now.
All while this was happening, I met my now current husband Travis (who I am aware I talk about a lot on the podcast and I’ll try to reign that in a little better). We met in 2018 and got married in 2022. We bought a house in Akron and a week ago we got a new corgi puppy that I named after my favorite historical animal Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus or simply Bu. And that’s it. That’s all the Ashley lore you get right now. If you improve your social links by liking and subscribing to the podcast wherever fine podcast products are sold you may get more. Or…you can just ask here, on Discord/Twitter/Blusky @adashtra.
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