About Me

I’m Buster Benson, temporarily human.

tl;dr:

• Basics: I was born in 1976, am a father to two boys, and currently live in Berkeley, CA.
• Book: I recently wrote a book titled Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Producteive Disagreement about the art of productive disagreement.
• Tech: I’m spent most of the last 25 years of my career working in tech (Amazon, Twitter, Slack, Patreon) and being an entrepreneur (Robot Co-op, Health Month, Habit Labs, 750 Words). I am currently rebuilding 750words.com, and working at Medium.
• McLeod: I also started and helped run an art gallery and bar in Seattle called McLeod Residence that was around for a few years.
• Find me: I’m generally very online. @bustrbensn on Threads, @buster@me.dm on Mastodon, @buster on Twitter, @bustrbensn on Instagram, Buster Benson on Facebook, etc. My DMs are open and you can email me if you’re old fashioned like that.

I was born in 1976, the year of the 🐲. Play That Funky Music and Rocky were top of the charts, and Gerald Ford was president. I’m a Gemini, which of course doesn’t mean anything. My mom collected bicentennial quarters to commemorate my birth year, since it was also the 200th birthday of America.

I had a good childhood. My father was a hippie, then an engineer, and wanted to build robots and live in a geodesic dome when he retired, but unfortunately he died from lung cancer when I was in high school. My mom immigrated from Japan in her 20s, is quiet and kind, and now owns a sushi restaurant in the Redlands. My younger sister has two children and lives in the house we grew up in together, in Irvine. I also found out in 2014 that I have a half-brother who’s 7 years older than me and lives in Virginia. He’s very cool.

I’ve lived in Irvine, Berkeley, and Seattle. I grew up in Irvine and surrounding areas, moved to Berkeley for college in 1994, transferred to Seattle in 1995, and stayed up there for a long while before moving back down to Berkeley in 2013.

I’ve changed my name a couple times. My birth name was Erik Keith Benson, and I changed my name to Buster Butterfield McLeod as an experiment for a while, and then changed my middle and last name back when I got married. The full story requires a drink or two, but it’s a good story.

I am a father. I have two sons: Niko (born 2010) and Louie (born 2016), whom I share custody of with their mom. They are the best. I have a cat named Pancake.

I like personality tests.

• My personality type is one that loves taking personality tests.
• According to Enneagram, I’m a 5w4 (philosopher).
• According to the Big Five personality test, I’m in the 54th percentile for Agreeableness, 91st percentile for Compassion, 9th percentile for Politeness (🖕), 87th percentile for Conscientiousness, 95th percentile for Industriousness, 60th percentile for Orderliness, 84th percentile for Extraversion, 86th percentile for Enthusiasm, 73rd percentile for Assertiveness, 24th percentile for Neuroticism, 31st percentile for Withdrawal, 21st percentile for Volatility, 98th percentile for Openness to Experience, 96th percentile for Intellect, and 96th percentile for Openness (bet you couldn’t tell).

I have likes and dislikes.

• I like: High-quality conversations, quality time, self-development, cognitive biases, systems thinking, kids, animals, games, writing, the internet, coffee, wine, morbid topics, ambiguity, divination, belief systems, speculation about the future, sushi, cults, bad jokes, hard problems, tulpas, psychedelics, animism, nonduality, some romantic comedy stereotypes.
• I dislike: Heights, busy work, mean behavior, willfully ignorant behavior, manipulative/political behavior, candy, systemic injustice, the hero’s journey, people who want me to be someone that I’m not, earthquakes, cancer, the idea of space travel, some romantic comedy stereotypes.

About this website:

• These are notes. This website represents my loose collection of notes and internet breadcrumbs that I’ve dropped over the years. Things I’ve written that seem at least minimally worth keeping around, assorted into piles, occassionally reviewed and re-organized into a tower of beliefs, standing the test of time (for now, at least).
• The current iteration of this website is a Jekyll static site using the minimialist sidey theme hosted on Netlify via this Github repo.
• This site is the latest incarnation of a personal website that has been morphing into weird shapes since 1998. Here’s a version from 2019, here’s one from a bit before that. Find even older versions here, and here, and here, and here.