Salutations earthlings, creatures of the deep, and those whose existence is beyond my feeble comprehension! My name is Cory Scheviak, and today I invite you to join me on a journey of discovery, adventure, and countless mistakes as I document the process of launching the website of my first ever company, Panoplay.
Since I’ve never had a blog before, I’m going to loosely follow this very succinct guide on how to organize my first post.
1 – Who I am
As I said, my name is Cory. I am also known online as ‘Cojo’ on IRC and ‘Cojomax99’ pretty much everywhere else. I have lived in Raleigh, North Carolina my whole life and recently graduated from NC State University with a BS in Computer Science with a concentration of Video Game Design. Here is a list of some cool things I have done / am doing:
- Created a mod for the game Minecraft called Tropicraft with a handful of talented people from around the world. Tropicraft probably has something like 15 million or so downloads by now.
- Spent last summer interning at TeacherGaming, LLC in Tampere, Finland. They are the creators of MinecraftEdu and KerbalEdu. If you’ve never been to Scandinavia during Midsummer, add that to your bucket list. It’s a truly life-changing experience.
- Am currently developing the website and business for my company, Panoplay, which I hope will energize and inspire unsigned music artists around the world. More on this in section 2.
- I visited 7 different European countries last summer. For someone who had never traveled alone outside the United States before, it was an incredible coming-of-age experience that gave me an entirely different perspective on life.
2 – Why I am blogging
A few reasons. First of all, I simply have a lot of things to say, and I’d like a place to say them. Through this, I would like to find the others.
That being said, I am also going to use this blog to write about the development of my company, Panoplay. Now, for those that haven’t heard of Panoplay, it is a website that will essentially sell “pay-what-you-want” mixtapes of music from unsigned artists that we compile on a weekly basis. I came up with the idea of Panoplay because of my friend who made music for Tropicraft. When I asked him how unsigned artists get their music and names out into the world, the answers I got were ‘sign to a record label’ and ‘pure luck.’ Neither of those are very helpful for those artists working for themselves. I want Panoplay to happen not just for music fans to discover awesome new tunes, but for the creators, because artists who truly love what they do should be able to make music for a living. Plain and simple. Talent should not be wasted simply because not enough people know about your gift.
As for numbers 3 and 4 on the ‘first blog post’ guide, I think I will leave #3 up to the future to decide. I expect many posts will be about the cool things going on with the business, several will be about cool things going on in my life, and a handful will be me quoting Shia Lebouf in his ‘JUST DO IT’ video. As for #4, I can always be reached on my Twitter page.
I look forward to posting a lot more in the coming weeks as the business gets closer to launch!