From ashes,
by design.

From classroom dreams
to a workshop in the ashes.

I'm Gene — known online as OSUPhoenix. The name started as a 2007 Xbox 360 gamertag during my time at The Ohio State University, where I was studying music education. It followed me to Steam, then PlayStation, then everywhere — long enough that it stopped being a screen name and just became how people knew me. By 2011 I had my Bachelor's, but graduating into a thin job market with no immediate prospects meant the music classroom I'd trained for never quite materialized.

A few months later I met my now-wife Kristen, whose active-duty service rewrote everything about what my life would look like. Several moves and two daughters later, traditional teaching was off the table — you can't run a music program when your address changes every few years. I pivoted toward an MBA at Southern New Hampshire University in 2018, looking for something more portable. Then 2020 happened.

The pandemic put job-hunting on hold while my daughters navigated virtual school from home. Around the same time Kristen was diagnosed with Juvenile Polyposis Syndrome — a condition that often leads quickly to colon cancer. Between a world that had turned upside down and a family health crisis with no clear ending, I needed somewhere to put the anxious energy. That's how streaming started for me. Not as ambition — as coping. A way to fill the quiet hours with something that asked nothing of me except presence.

After another move I decided to take it more seriously. I went deep on Streamlabs OBS, then OBS Studio. My MBA studies kept pushing one question to the front of my head: how do you stand out in a saturated market? I wanted the channel to look different to people scrolling past. I started designing a logo and decided I wanted it to rotate in 3D — which is how I discovered Blender. The more I learned, the more ideas kept coming.

That's when this whole thing — what's now OSUPhoenix Streamworks — first started to take shape. Other streamers saw my overlays and asked if I'd build for them. Suddenly I wasn't just making one channel's identity, I was developing whole brands — logos that dictated color palettes, geometry, theming. To stand out from other artists in the space, I started looking for ways to make overlays you couldn't get anywhere else. Winnable Wednesday grew out of watching another streamer play Jackbox with chat and realizing the format already had a built-in scoring system. I started giving away real prizes — Blender-designed merch I made and shipped myself.

Then 2021 happened. Years of denial and avoidance hit a wall I couldn't climb. I had a full mental breakdown — the kind where you can't think straight unless you're walking in circles and saying it out loud. Kristen got me to help and stayed through all of it. That's when I finally started therapy and started unraveling the parts of my story I'd been ignoring for too long. Shortly after, I took what I thought would be a stable job at a credit union. It turned out to be the last traditional employment I'd have. The work was hollow. I was miserable, and the misery was leaking into the people I loved most.

Kristen sat me down and told me plainly: I couldn't keep doing this. So in 2022 I left traditional work and went full-time on creator services and content. That year was the lowest I'd ever been — and also the rebirth that finally made the phoenix in my handle mean something. I'd been carrying it since 2007. It took fifteen years to earn it.

I'd just become a Twitch Affiliate after a few months multi-streaming on Facebook Gaming. I could see where that platform was headed and walked away from those followers to commit to Twitch full-time. Around then I discovered Streamer.bot and started thinking like a programmer — building things for my own stream that I couldn't find anywhere else. I realized other streamers could use what I was making, and the tutorials grew out of the questions people kept asking. By 2025 I committed fully and started learning to code so I could stop building "almost-good-enough" and start shipping the real thing. After a couple of rebrands, all of it landed under one roof: OSUPhoenix Streamworks — streams, widgets, graphics, tutorials, the workshop where it all gets built and tested live.