About Me

Q: What is your name in real life and in games?
A: I'm Andy Dunn and in most games players know me as Twiddler or Twiddler Thereian.

Q: When did you start making game content?
A: I started playing There in April of 2003 and for the first year I just wanted to hang-out and socialize; I couldn't get enough drama and good gossip. Near the end of my There adventures, several of my friends were starting to make a lot of There content. Starley, Quistis, Nerina, Cytra, and Sidney had all started making fashions and a couple of them were doing well. I began reading tutorials and started to learn Photoshop and Gmax. I found both programs difficult and I'm still learning them today. I was able to make 30 or 40 items and began to enjoy the content creation aspect of online games. I think the turning point for me was when Sidney and I worked on an item together and created the Paintball Dunk Tank. I think we were both very proud of how it came out and I knew at that point that I wanted to make more fun stuff!

Q: What were your three best selling items in There?
A: I'm not exactly sure but the three that come to mind are the Please Don't Lick Your Monitor t-shirt, the Big Black Box with Secret Center, and the number one seller of all time is the Wicked Rocket Ramp. Although I would like to take credit for the t-shirt slogan, it is adapted from an old David Ogilvy ad slogan for Lifesavers where he asked readers not to lick the page. The Big Black box was a silly experiment with Booleans in Gmax. I think players liked that there was no door so you had to do a hack to enter the cube, like bouncing off a dune buggy. The Wicked Rocket Ramp again was another Gmax experiment and buggy jumpers must appreciate the angle of the lip or something.

Q: When did you start Second Life?
A: I did the beta of Second Life, when many of us were in The Sims Online...maybe early 2003. At the time I hated the ugly SL avatars and barely knew how to walk. None of my friends played SL at the time and I got frustrated with the steep learning curve. I tried playing three times over the years and always ran away to another game. In March of 2005, Starley offered to hold my hand, and teach me Second Life. She showed me how to paint textures in Photoshop, how to manipulate and attach prims, and how to box products to sell them in world. She used to always say that I was Second Life's oldest noob (this is still true btw). My creation date is 6/1/2004 when they made the offer for Thereians to get that last name. I made my first saleable hair in SL in the summer of 2006.

Q: When did you start IMVU?
A: I started IMVU in early beta; my creation date is 09/06/04. Many of us who had been enthusiastic about There were just as excited about IMVU since Will Harvey, founder of There, had created this new 3D Instant Messenger. The founders of IMVU took knowledge from the There content creation program and improved on it. I knew enough Gmax that I was able to make a couple things in 3D Studio Max. In March of 2006, Starley and I decided to team up as avatar Taunt and we began to make awesome complete outfits for girls. I would make the 3D hair mesh and Starley would create the skin and fashions. This is where I made my first commercially available hair. I was also learning how to make hair in SL at the same time but it took a little longer since I wasn't as familiar with the build tools.

Q: Why do you specialize in hair?
A: Hair is one of those products that is popular in any game that let's you buy it. Hair let's us personalize our character and it changes over time with fashion. I enjoy making hair since it's both technically and artisically challenging. There are only so many hours in the day and I am a type person that likes to focus on one thing, doing it over and over. I find it easier to learn one product and grow, rather than learn many products. My primary focus is hair but I'll occasionally try and create other things like scenes, clothes, and animations. I must be hoochi-at-heart because I love seeing girls with big sexy hair!

Q: When did you start blogging?
A: I started blogging before it was called blogging and you had to update the pages by hand with nasty ftp clients and html text editors. Back when I had several banner exchange porn sites, I began writing an email newsletter which helped adult webmasters make more money with marketing and advertising tips. This newsletter was published on the web each week in a blog format. I wrote this newsletter called SexSwap Trix for six years (from 1997 until 2003) and ended up with just over 300 issues. It's funny looking back because I remember clearly writing "this new thing called blogging could be really big some day!"

Q: What are you other blogs?
A: Here are blogs from old businesses and old hobbies:

SexSwap Trix
Foosball Fanatic
Cobra Lads
Great Companies Great Charts
Pirates Of HorsePower
Sims Online Secrets
There Frisky

Q: Where are you from and where do you live now?
A: I grew up in Northern Ontario Canada (just like Bob and Doug) and then moved to Southern California to complete an MBA. I became addicted to the sunny weather and decided to stay.

Q: What did you do after college?
A: My wife and I opened a real life sign shop in 1991 and ran it for seven years. We made signs and banners in 24 hours at our store called Swifty Sign. I used to be a Mac evangelist! We did everything on a Mac IIcx, a 19" greyscale monitor, and Adobe Illustrator 3. I left the Apple world when I had to play Quake2. This game was so cool that I crossed-over to the evil side of the tracks and bought my first PC with a Monster2 Video card from 3dfx. This is when I first tried multi-player online gaming.

Q: How did you stumble into porn?
A: Way back in 1994, it was just me and 37 geeks on the Internet. My sign store was doing well and I was enjoying the dial-up AOL chatrooms. AOL offered everyone free webspace and I used mine to create a website for the sign store. Sadly my website got one hit a day. I decided I needed to learn how to get more traffic on my little website and decided to study the top 10 sites at a webcounter place. The top website as tracked by this counter, was called Ian's Brain. On Ian's site was a picture of a brain and it said "I like the Cure"...or something like that, and we was getting 40,000 hits a day! I befriended young Ian and asked him to teach me his magic. Ian said "simply place lots of sex and swear words at the bottom of your page in white so no one can read it except the search engines." I was shocked but took Ian's advice and placed hundreds of dirty words on the bottom of my sign store website. The very next day it got 5,000 hits and I got a lot of hate email saying "where the hell are the boobs?" Although I had increased traffic, I didn't sell one stinking sign! I decided to forget about the website.

A few days later I got an email from a mysterious character named Frank. Frank wrote "Andy, I see you are well positioned in the search engines...I run an adult live camera business and would pay you 10% of every sale if you put my banner on your sign store website." My wife laughed and my employees teased me and said "He is a crook! He will never pay you."

I didn't listen to them and decided I had nothing to lose so I tossed an adult live camera banner onto my sign store website. I forgot about it and went about making signs. Ten days later the Fedex lady showed up and handed me an envelope from Frank...inside was a check for $500. That is exactly how I stumbled into porn. I eventually founded SexSwap Banner Exchange which at one time, was showing almost as many banners as Yahoo. I eventually sold my banner exchange around 2001.

Q: What do you do for a living now?
A: I trade stocks and occasionally futures. I make a small number of trades, only two or three a month, which leaves me with lots of time to enjoy my passions of online gaming, blogging, virtual worlds and game content creation.

Q: What is your wife's real name and fake names?
A: Her real name is Sanya with a "y" and you may often hear me refer to her as Sanchy, Sanch, and Sancho. She does dog rescue.

Q: Why are you always peeing your frilly white panties?
A: I'm excited! hehehe I'm excited about the internet, online businesses, game content, and the metaverse! It's a great time to be a geek. In the last few years, people have stopped watching TV and started instant messaging and killing horde. More and more people spend more time online, socializing and gaming. More women are gaming too! Peee! lol

Q: What is a shim and are you one?
A: Mojo Mary Poppins and I coined the term Shim as a cross between a shill and a sim. This generally refers to a male in real life playing a female avatar in games. Since I'm usually running around as a girl avatar with big Taunt hair, I guess that makes me a shim now too! lol Mary will have fits.

Q: What are Frisky Pirates and how did you become one?
A: The Frisky Pirates were first created as a social group in There. We had sliding parties and buggy races but later the Frisky Pirates became the infamous Elune guild in WoW. Anyone can become a Frisky Pirate by meeting two criteria: 1) they should be on the frisky side and 2) they should have a pirate patch or at least say a good deep "Arg", "Yar", or "Gar" now and then. :)

Q: What font is the Taunt logo made with?
A: The Taunt font celebrates my taste for tequila with House Industries' Latino Samba! The font under the Taunt logo on the main page is a sign maker favorite called Antique Olive.

Q: How can I contact you?
A: My email is andy@lips.com