Today we’d like to introduce you to Mingo Gomez.
Hi Mingo, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Who tf is Mingo?
I was born in Oak Cliff and raised in DeSoto.
Actually, I was born the exact same day Freddie Mercury died.
Growing up pumpkins and Halloween has always felt like this big party and symbol leading up to my birthday.
As a kid I spent a lot of time at our family owned bar in Oak Cliff, called Club Kemo’s. The smell of alcohol fills the memories of those days. Needless to say my family wasn’t conventional by any means. Most of my family was already here before they started drawing lines and calling them states. People given a shit hand and stripped of their indigenous culture. Forced to speak English and Spanish. My dad’s-dad’s side is from Puerto Rico which has its own complications and ironically enough being recognized as a state is one of them. I’m named after my grandpa Domingo Gomez. The older latin/hispanic community here in Dallas knows who he is, for all the right reasons and all the wrong reasons. However, I’ve done my best to live a life not cast by that shadow. Never got a chance to meet him tho because he passed when my dad was just a kid. He was shot outside a club somewhere here in the city and technically survived a bullet to the forehead. Obviously there were decisions that had to be made and my grandma had to make that call. They did what they had to do to survive and by the time I was around… the family was basically like something you would see in a movie. Like Scarface or Blow, think of like a retro version of Euphoria. I was kid tho so I didn’t know any of that wasn’t “right”, you know?
Music and gaming had always been an escape for me. Back then my time was spent with headphones on and my face buried in my GameBoy Color playing Pokemon Yellow or at home playing Banjo Tooie on my N64. Eventually I saved up some money and traded in my N64 for an Xbox and eventually upgraded that to an Xbox 360. We always had a computer in the house as far back as I can remember. “Don’t let your kids talk to strangers in chatrooms” was not a memo my parents got. I spent countless hours on the computer sometimes gaming but mostly searching the internet and talking to strangers in chatrooms. My teen years were pretty rocky around that time I was kinda in and out of cuffs but music really started to become an outlet. Call Of Duty was the only game I played for a while there. World At War with my friends Warner and Joe and my cousin Bubba was the start of a lot of what i have going on today. Long nights, match after match and laugh after laugh.
I would spend most of my time in high school with earbuds in and writing my own music to my favorite songs and whatever beats I could find. I liked hanging out at this studio in Oak Cliff on the weekends and record whatever I had been writing. My grades were declining because of my lack of interest in school and by senior year it was clear my GPA was unable to be fixed in a timely fashion for graduation with the rest of my class. However, I had heard about this school in Los Angeles that taught audio engineering and would train me in actual studios. Luckily i had a few teachers that actually cared about me and not a GPA so they fully encouraged me to just drop out and get my GED and hurry over to LA to attend this school. The Los Angeles Recording School aka LARS.
So at 18yr I dropped out and got my GED so I could move to Los Angeles. I worked some shitty job setting up and tearing down mobile trailers for construction sites. It was the first time I started to travel for work. It sucked but I was making some really good money and could finally afford stuff. I would have worked that job till the day I left for LA but my friend who got me the job was the bosses step son and he got caught with weed and blamed it on me so I ended up getting fired. I remember one time the boss who was cocky asshole joked “this is what happens when you don’t go to school” but I told him I was going to move to LA to go to that school. 2011 – My first day after moving to LA and into my new apartment, Leland Way aka “The Circus”, i went on a walk. Quickly I realized I had accidentally moved to Hollywood after seeing a sign on Highland Ave that said “WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD”. Yes, i actually had no idea what area i had moved to just that it was around the corner from the school I was going to be going to. I had chose something close because that’s all that really mattered.
LARS was an amazing experience. Some people definitely took that place for granted but i was so deep in rabbit hole of music production and audio. I made countless beats and songs during this time. I didn’t do much gaming for a while but Resident Evil 5 was my go-to when i wasn’t working on music.
Those California days just sitting in the courtyard of my building, soaking up the sun are some of my best memories. I made many friends at school and at my apartment building. Ted, Martha, and Jordan were some of my closest friends. Ted and Martha were this older couple. Ted was like the same age as my dad so I think he always kinda looked at me like a son but also a brother. Jordan was this 21yr girl who had been living on her own since she was 16yr. She lived across the hall from me and was probably the coolest person I had ever met. Jordan would take me to do little things like grocery shopping and stuff to help me not look stupid because she knew despite having an outgoing personality I was still sheltered in a lot of ways. We use to hang out a lot on the fire escape smoking and drinking. Sometimes we would leave our doors open and just walk back and forth from each other’s apartments like it was just a big house. Another one of my friends at the apartment was my friend Roman Dirge. He is to work on Invader Zim and also has his own comic book called Lenore The Cute Little Dead Girl. For my 21st birthday I actually got to celebrate at Lenore’s 20th anniversary at this goth bar called Bar Sinister in Hollywood. It was also the night before i started driving back to Dallas in 2012.
One thing that always creeped me out was when I would walk around Hollywood people would take pictures of me randomly. At first I thought this was normal till I mentioned it to my neighbors and they were like “yeah, that doesn’t happen to me”. One day I remember walking back from the Taco Bell on Vine down the side streets and this lady basically spun the block on me just to get a better picture. She even shouted “THANK YOU!” As she drove away. I would continue to not think much of this till later on.
I moved back home in DeSoto for about a year and a half before I was done and ready to go back to Los Angeles. My family wasn’t the movie-like version they once were anymore. At home my parents were clearly in need of a divorce but I wasn’t going to stay around for it. So in 2014, I ended up living in my car for almost a year in this parking garage off Hollywood and Cherokee. I also stayed in hotels and Airbnbs that were being ran by some friends in an apartment building conveniently next to the parking garage.
During that time i hired as security for The Troubadour. The Troubadour is a historic concert venue in West Hollywood. It was owned Doug Weston but he handed it down to his right hand man and electrician Eddie. The family owned bar vibes in a lot of ways felt like home. Working there was the best of times and the worst of times. We were expected to do everything as “security”. We were stagehands, janitors.. you name it.
At some point around 2014 I was at the Grove, an outdoor mall in LA known for its giant water fountains in the middle of everything and it’s wonderful farmers market, that those pictures from 2011-2012 finally made sense. There was some guy there who was dressed just like me with the same haircut. Basically he looked like the fashionista board meeting version of me. He knew, because he stood there shocked to see me. Had my likeness had been stolen by the best in the business? I would eventually watch little things about me become main stream in fashion. It was weird watching it happen then and it’s weird now looking back on it. It was like going through an identity crisis as an adult but I had witnesses. Anyways. Upon my arrival I started performing for local DJ gigs my friends had going on in LA as a vocal artists. Back then I was rapping and producing more. It’s also when I first met my friend and mod Reft. Eventually in 2015 I was able to scrounge up enough money to move into this tiny apartment in Koreatown.
I got to meet and work with some the biggest names in Hollywood while working at The Troubadour. Guns and Roses, Billy Idol, Gerard Way, Jay Z and Beyonce, Demi Lavoto, Jim Carrey, Maya Rudolph and even Halsey as she was going on her first tour.
I was there for some very interesting events in Hollywood. There’s a classic video of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone trying to drive out of this alleyway and Andrew freaks out. I was there for that. If you look up pictures of that moment you’ll see me looking a mess with my red Jordans on.
While working at the Troubadour I started working on music again with a singer. She had an amazing voice and we made some really amazing music.
I worked at The Troubadour till unfortunately I injured my back from all the stagehand work i was doing, loading in and out band after band every day and night. Also there was a girl who fainted one day and I was the only one who was there to pick her up and get her outside to revive her. I still feel like that was the night that did it.
I wasn’t really getting any help from the Troubadour and I definitely didn’t have any insurance so I wanted to start looking other places. The Roxy on Sunset Blvd was looking for more security so I showed up one day to fill out an application and same day the guy was like “you wanna work right now?” so I did. I was actually the last person to be hired by the Roxy before Golden Voice took over. The Roxy was like another family. Some of the people there were actually family like Molly and her dad who was one of the sound guys and had been a tech on tours for decades.
One night somewhere in the valley there was a DJ gig my friends had booked for producers and DJs in the LA area. I was added to the bill as a DJ. I’ve never really considered myself a DJ because I have too much respect for those that devote the time and energy to that hustle but I said yes. I went up to DJ some of the beats and such I had been quietly working on and per usual at some point in the beat you would hear “Who TF is Mingo?!”. A sample I edited down from a HBO show called How To Make It In America. The original line is “Who tf is Domingo?!”. The character they were referring to was actually played by Kid Cudi. Who recently retweeted me about the origin of my username with a simple “haha”. Small for him but huge for me.
Once I was ready to start working labor again I was picked up by a production company called Geared Up. They worked corporate events such as the annual Wall Street Journal – Tech Live and various other types of events like Ted Talk. I learned a lot over the years working for Geared Up. I was also finally back to traveling for work. We travel around a lot of California and even Las Vegas. I continued to work at the Roxy while I was in town and with Geared up while I was out of town. Eventually I started to work for e360 Sport. They’re a LED company that rents out to major sporting events. Once I started working them I started traveling all around the country working at different professional NFL and Baseball stadiums (Patriots, 49ers, Dolphins, Greenbay just to name a few). I’ve worked some of the biggest soccer games here in the states and all these games are broadcasted on networks such as ESPN and NBC. Around this time I also started working with my singer Zay aka ZVY. Our first recordings were rough but fun. We made one track that stood out “Treat Me Right” which performed well on Spotify. It’s not till later on that we made more of the hits that people have come to love.
For a couple years life was chill.
Then the pandemic hit.
During the pandemic I started to game more consistently again. I spent most of my time playing Call Of Duty – WARZONE, specifically their game mode called Plunder. I was a in the higher ranks of players in Plunder but I started taking it too seriously and with almost every match I would play I could feel my heart beating in my chest. My girlfriend at the time was playing Animal Crossing like most at that time. While I would be there sweating my butt off she would be chilling just working on her island. Eventually I caved and bought a Nintendo Switch and started working on my own island. I had found a new love for cozy gaming.
Early 2021 I got the call from Geared Up to help build the vax centers in Southern California. One day while on standby I was playing Call Of Duty mobile and listening to music off my phone speaker and just being my silly self. That’s when a co-worker with the most serious face told me “if you’re that funny and that good at the game YOU SHOULD BE STREAMING!” Which I could have taken with a grain of salt but instead it became water to a seed that was kinda always in my mind. I spent about a year gaslighting myself that I was already a streamer just to work up the courage to actually go live. I also started playing Fortnite around this time. There was a creator on Youtube I had found who made funny content while playing Fortnite so it made me curious. I downloaded the game and started having fun. It was like a less stressful Call Of Duty for me. So while I continued to gaslight myself that I was already a streamer I started to play with the idea that I was a Fortnite streamer. My favorite skin in the game at the time was Punk, a streetwear pumpkin. So I started theme this ‘steam’ around the character.
At some point Golden Voice moved a bunch of us from the Roxy to the Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd. Working the Fonda was pretty much the same old, same old. Until one day I went into work and they handed me the guest list and I started to see some of the biggest names in streaming.. Pokimane, Valkyrae, etc. All these amazing people with great energy. It was infectious.
October of 2022 I found a game called Dead By Daylight aka DBD.
When I first found it on the Nintendo shop for sale I was curious what it was because I wanted to play something scary for the Halloween season. I saw all the downloadable content it had like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween. What stood out the most to me was The Ring. Growing up she terrified me. Even till that day I was scared to look into a TV that was turned off because I assumed she would be in the reflections of the black mirror. I didn’t know what I was doing but I was starting to realize how deep into the games mechanics and lore I was ready to get. Nowadays I’m a P100 Sadako and a P100 Vittorio. I’m currently working on Chuck/Tiffany and possibly Vecna from Stranger Things.
By the end of 2022 that I finally said to myself and the universe that I was ready to start streaming. Specifically, I had been working a gig in New Orleans and hated my life at that point. Money was good but I wasn’t happy. I was being worked like a dog, my relationship was having it’s constant ups and downs. Worst of all, I knew creatively something was missing from my life.
January of 2023 I finally went live. Dead By Daylight was the game I chose to stream. At first it was just one of my friends, Reft aka “ReftWorks” and my sister Jazii. They helped me figure some things out but after years of working in production I had a decent understanding of what I was doing. Audio, video and lighting. It was almost like working production all over again.
My first year was so much fun. Slowly but surely all these people started showing up. Some came from my sister’s community but most were finding me from other people’s chats. I was a regular in a few streamers chats and people started to catch on to the fact I was streaming too. There’s an ongoing joke that my chat is all lesbians because they were the first to start showing up and forming what is now my community. All I did was go live one day and they planted their pink, white and orange flag. Needless to say we’re very much LGBTQIA+ friendly in my community. I actually told some of them just now in a VC that I was making this reference and they said “we found the one cis straight man that doesn’t drain our energy”.
Only a few months into streaming and I was asked if I was down to join another streamers team for a DBD tournament, I said yes. Entering that tournament was bold for someone new to DBD and streaming as a whole. I was up against people with thousands of hours and I only had a couple hundred at best. Our team didn’t do great but all these other creators in the space were proud of me nonetheless. It was bold and they liked it. I did a lot of my firsts that years like a subathon birthday stream, collaborations etc.
One of those collaborations was with my friend Reft. We had a little idea to team up while I played DBD he would go live and DJ on his channel and I would listen to his set on my channel. It was the perfect blend of gaming and music and my community loved it. So we started doing what we call “Dead By Daylight Drum n Bass Night” or “DBD/DNB Night” for short. As long as I’m not out of town for work, we make it happen. We have done it almost every Friday night for 3yrs now.
This was also my first year attending TwichCon which was held in Vegas. It was so surreal in the best way. All these people running around with cameras and merch. So many people I started to get familiar with were standing right in front of me. Most of them recognized me without even having to introduce myself because they were already lurking in my chat casually. It was reasurring to know these people were excited to meet me and not just I to them.
2024 was a rough year. I was finally going through that break up and trying to focus on everything I was starting to build. Music, streaming and my actual career as a traveling LED video tech. I was able to stay in LA and keep that tiny apartment in Koreatown till the end of the year but by that point it was clear it was time to move back home to Dallas. I tried to have as much fun as I could the that second half of 2024. I started going to shows and events again. Me and ZVY started making songs like “idgaf”, “3am” and “Strawberry Soju” and some of the toxic relationships and situationships I was involved in. Then some of my friends that I had made over the years in Hollywood and from work wanted to make a trip to go camping in Oregon.
The trip to Oregon was like rehab it a lot of ways. I was so far removed from the hustle and bustle of the city and anything that had to deal with my life or whatever it once was. During this trip we stay at a friend’s house out in the middle of no where. It was so quiet and peaceful. All the trees and beautiful weather. We stayed at his house for a day or two before we went out to our camping site. Some people left after the camping trip but I stayed at our friend’s house for a couple more days. My friend David was also scheduled to fly out a day or two later. Which worked perfectly because apparently both of us have the same camera and unlike me this guy actually took photography classes. So with two camera strapped around his neck and a pumpkin on mine we went around random spots and shot my pumpkin head photoshoot.
After my birthday that year my back had done something it hadn’t done in a while and gave up on me. I spent about a week or two not being able to walk. During this time I laid there one the floor staring at cracks of the hardwood reflecting on my entire life. I had also song scheduled to job in a few days and I had done nothing to create promotion for it so I laid there looking at what I had on my phone. With a fresh perspective I noticed a couple things. The pumpkin asethetic, glitchcore and the girlypops that created my community. So I started to experiment with a blend of all of these and that lead me to realized that without trying I very much created my own brand. “Halfway Home” became the reflection of everything. Failed relationships, the possibility of moving back home, the safe space I had unintentionally created. This is also around the time when Marvel Rivals released and started to become my main focus gaming-wise.
So at the top of 2025 I made the drive from LA to Dallas for the second time of my life. The first couple months I was just getting settled in and trying to find a route that worked for me. Watching my friend Falsities be as consistent as she is with streaming while still being a beautiful mess inspired me to lock in. So around March I started working on season 2 of a little reality TV show I host in the Sims called The Mod House. Originally it was only supposed to be a one-off but S01E01 I struck gold. It was the first time I had first time chatters turn into followers, that turned into 6 month subscribers. People were interested by the fact I’m not typically someone who looks like they would play Sims (straight man with a beard) but I was taking it way more serious than people who are known to play the game. Season 1 started with an in-game week long camping trip and that was supposed to be it. So many things happened within that in-game week that I had stuff to play off of for a few more episodes before the rest of the events in 2024 brought it all to a halt.
Season 2 of The Mod House can be found on Youtube and each episode is about 30-40min long, edited down from a 3hr VOD (past broadcast). S02 of The Mod House became such a huge success in my community and with other streamer friends of mine. The Mod House is a reality type show loosely based off Real World, The Circle, Big Brother and The Real Housewives. My moderators are the stars of the show and they compete in challenges and one person is eliminated at the end of each episode. Unless I have a twist in mind for the next episode. People say they love rewatching the episodes, some even use them to fall asleep to.
Throughout 2025 I wasn’t getting any calls from e360 or Geared Up so I knew I had no option but to focus on my streaming career. Not only that, I had become a video editor for several other streamers at this point. So I had a cliental for me to work with. About halfway through the year Marvel Rivals was finally starting to cycle out with a rotation for DBD again. One day i saw my mod Kai, aka KailaNOTokk, post a very unique selfie that inspired me to push her to take that imagine and turn it into footage for the “Treat Me Right” music video. The first indie music video i’ve ever made. I think it wasn’t till about September that I got one call for a gig in San Francisco for e360 to work at the Giants baseball stadium. By that point streaming on Twitch, selling beats and my video editing commissions were all bringing in a decent flow of money but out of town work is where the real money is. What’s nice is it help me keep doing what I really love doing the most.. creating music, streaming and simply living life.
Around this same time I was starting to realize I might have missed an email or two back in 2024 because I saw a friend from the Twitch Latin Guild post about a DBD tourney he was hosting. It made me remember back at TwitchCon 2023 I had met some people who were the leads of the Latin and Black Guild which were just starting to take form. They had told me to sign up and that it didn’t matter if I was a big or small streamer, it was for everyone. So I reached out to my friend who was hosting this DBD tourney to ask about the guild and showed him I had missed my approval back in 2024. He let me know where there was going to be a “front of the line” acceptance wave so I hopped in on it as fast as possible.
TwitchCon 2025 – my community and I rented an AirBnB in San Diego and lived together for almost a week. It was genuinely so peaceful finally being around these people who I had created such a strong bond with. These people have seen me at my best and my worst. My mods and VIPs have been there for some of these craziest moments of my life. They’ve seen me happy, mad and even been there while I’ve balled my eyes out. That first morning while everyone was barely waking up I was already up and cooking the whole house breakfast. It’s one of the only way I felt I could express my true gratitude for them. Most of us had gotten in the day before and grabbed our badges but some still had to get theirs so everyone started to break off for their showers and start getting ready for the con. Once we were there our group of about dozen or more walked up to the San Diego Convention Center and I felt so accomplished. This was the first year I felt like I wasn’t there just trying to introduce myself. The people who needed to know me already did, they were standing right there with me in line to get in. That weekend I was very much booked and busy going to release parties and running all around the convention center looking for friends. I felt so much of the love I had been giving out coming back to me.
Immediately after TwitchCon I had a gig booked not too far from San Diego so that Monday morning, Ian, my work buddy who I have known since LARS picked me up and we hit the road. I didn’t get back for about another week after TwithCon and shortly after I got that email from Twitch about joining the Latin Guild. Once I was finally in I quickly started making friends. Some of these friends started to see some value in having me around and suggested I apply for the mentorship program for tech support. I did and got accepted. I had already been helping so many other streamers along the way with my knowledge of audio, video and lighting but now I get to do it more officially.
From about December to January I was completely booked for video edits. The new year season is pretty big for me because so many people are ready for a new raid trailer or channel trailer. These trailers are used to introduce a streamer to their audience whenever they receive a raid from another streamer or simply uploaded to their Twitch and autoplayed at the top of their channel. Most like to upload them to their Twitter accounts and pin them so that it’s the first thing you see. About halfway thru January my work buddy gave me a call about a gig coming up in February and asked if I would be down to stay out there for about two weeks. I said Yes. At the end of January I flew out to Los Angeles. It was my first time being back since the big move of 2025. Shortly after getting there we realized that the gig was being canceled. Had I gone out there for nothing? Well luckily Nick, the boss of Geared Up, had already asked me to hop on a gig of his in Downtown LA. Also now he needed a guy to be there the entire week and half of production. With almost no money in my pocket I made the trip down to DTLA from my buddy’s apartment in Hollywood. 5 or 6am every morning walking down Hollywood Blvd to catch the subway. You can watch back these adventures on my Instagram highlights.
Well once our bosses at e360 found out I was staying with Ian they started scheduling for work with him. We were always kind of a dynamic duo for these production companies. So they were excited to put me back on the road with him. Where these calls were before? I have no idea. However, I back and ready to work my ass off. We started with a couple of soccer gigs in Orange County and Los Angeles. Then they started asking about my schedule in March.
Two weeks turned to two months.
I had a couple days to fly back and load up my suitcase full of clothes. This suitcase wasn’t just any old suitcase. It was a small but heavy suitcase filled with comics I had collected over the years. What was left of them at least because I sold off some of the more valuable issues and other collectibles in 2024. Reselling those items definitely helped me stay afloat during that rough period and this was the suitcase that just wouldn’t fit in the rental car that day. I had always been a Marvel fan, even before the movies. I remember growing up my dad would buy me comics at the 7-Eleven over by 67 and Cockrell Hill Rd. Which is why I was always going to play Marvel Rivals but I never expect the game to get as big as it has. I main Cloak & Dagger, Peni Parker and more recently Deadpool as a strategist. So this suitcase was very important not just because the franchise but because in it I had my copy of “SP//dr” Peni Parker’s first ever comic. Something told me that day in Hollywood (2024) not to sell that issue when I was selling some of my comics to Golden Apple. So it was like bringing back a brick of gold from the west.
So a couples days later I flew back to Los Angeles. That same day there was supposed to be a Twitch meetup here in Dallas but I was having to miss it. I was upset but ended up catching wind of a meetup happening in LA later that evening. So I hurried back to my friend’s apartment in Hollywood to drop my things over and get settled in. That meetup was exactly the kind of welcome back I needed. Especially before the chaos of work and traveling took over my life for the next month. While out in LA i saw DBD promoting their 10yr Anniversary in Montreal, Canada so i purchased tickets for the event and said I’d just figure it out later.
Throughout March I went from LA to Orange County to Florida up to DC and back down to Florida. Currently we’re still currently in the cycle of the “Road to 26” which is like something they’ve come up with in soccer to build hype for the World Cup.
After returning home in April last month I hit the ground running. I had previously signed up for this DBD tournament and there was a lot of drama going on behind the scenes while I was gone. So by the time I was back it was time for me to lock in. Our team had been thru so much and I didn’t want to let them down. We practiced every night for 3-4hrs. Yes, every night. My team was kicking my ass 7 days a week as Sadako. It was so bad that at one point some weren’t even sure if I knew how to play killer. That week building up to the first match I played in the tournament was insane. I felt like I was back in those Plunder days of 2021. Once it was my turn to play and we loaded into that map I basically blacked out. After the match I match my team unmuted from the voicecall we were all in within the tournament server and they were shouting from excitement. I didn’t get the “4k” (killing all 4 survivors) but I got a 2k and moried the last survivor (a Mori is basically like a fatality in Mortal Kombat) “you were doing 360s!” “dude! you can tell you’ve been practicing!” I had put on a show and made everyone proud. After that first match people in the DBD community have now started to claim me as “the best Sadako player on controller” which is huge. Especially considering the fact that the creator of The Ring (Ringu) Koji Suzuki just passed. Ultimately, our team made it to the semi finals before we were eventually knocked out of the tournament.
Since then I’ve been getting back into the swing of a normal streaming schedule. I’ve been collaborating with other DBD streamers a lot the past month. Recently I was nominated for “Best Horror Game Streamer” in the Gamer Feud’s Feudies Awards, so we’ll see how that plays out. I got the call about a gig here in Texas scheduled right before I leave for Canada so I’m going to be flying out for that soon. So I’ll be back home for like a day and then fly out to Canada. Then I got offered this opportunity.
I’m pretty much just waiting for June to hurry up.
PS: While filling out this application i got a call from e360 to drive a truck from their warehouse in Fort Worth tonight. So by the time you read this I’ll be on the road.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road.
Most of it has been a mix of adapting to whatever situation I was in, and learning how to keep creating even when life wasn’t stable enough to support it. I’ve had periods where I was living out of my car, bouncing between gigs, or working production jobs that were physically demanding enough to eventually leave me with a back injury that left me immobile for a while.
There were times I literally couldn’t walk, and still had to figure out how to keep moving forward.
I grew up around a pretty unconventional family environment with a lot of weight attached to it. History, reputation, and situations that I had to learn how to separate myself from.
A lot of my life has involved trying to turn what I was creatively building into something sustainable instead of just something I was using to survive.
The biggest challenge overall has probably just been consistency in more ways than one. Staying creative while rolling with those punches.
Streaming, music, and content creation became the first time I really felt like those things started to align instead of compete with each other. Everything I had learned started coming together and forming something that genuinely makes me happy to do.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a live content creator and performer, but my years working in multimedia production have shaped the way I approach everything I do. I don’t just stream… I create moments.
Sometimes I find myself leaning into improv comedy.
Outside of streaming, I also work as a traveling LED tech and video editor for other creators. I’ve taken my passion for music and incorporated it into both my streams and video edits.
One of the things I’m most proud of is building lasting content that people genuinely want to come back for, like “DBD/DnB Night” with my friend Reft, and my Sims reality TV series “The Mod House,” which turned into something much bigger than I originally intended and stars my mods and other people from my community.
I came into streaming from live events, concerts, and broadcasting instead of traditional streaming culture. So I naturally treat my stream like a live production, because it is. That blend of experience and creative instinct is what allows me to turn simple gameplay into organically memorable moments.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I think most of my life has involved some level of risk-taking, even when it didn’t fully feel like a choice.
Dropping out at 18 to get my GED and move to Los Angeles was a risk. Living out of my car while trying to stay connected to music and production work was a risk. Choosing creative work over stability over and over again was a risk. Even starting streaming felt like a risk because I had spent years convincing myself I should do it before I finally had the courage to actually go live.
I think my relationship with risk has changed a lot over time though. When I was younger, risk came from impulse and survival. Now it comes more from trusting my instincts and being willing to invest in myself creatively, even when there’s no guarantee something will work out.
A lot of what I do now still involves uncertainty. Traveling for production work, freelancing, streaming, editing, music… none of it really comes with a perfectly clear roadmap. But I’ve learned that some of the best things in my life happened because I said yes before I fully knew how things would play out.
At the same time, I don’t think risk-taking always has to look loud or reckless. Sometimes the biggest risk is allowing yourself to be seen. Putting your personality, creativity, humor, ideas, or emotions out into the world and accepting that not everyone will understand it.
Streaming honestly helped me with that a lot. It taught me how to lean into who I already was instead of trying to shape myself into what I thought people expected from me.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whotfismiingo/
- Twitter: https://x.com/whotfismiingo
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@whotfismiingo
- Soundcloud: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5suBO4918u2J2xogn65PZa?si=T-evQRTDSFCLNYr4jUuIHA
- Other: https://www.twitch.tv/whotfismiingo
