Hey y’all; hope everyone’s having a safe and joyous holiday season! My name’s Alex, you can call me whatever you like 
I discovered Thrive a month or two ago, fell in love with it, and recently applied to be a tester and hopefully take some of that load off the programming team so they have more time to actually program. I have a good amount of relatively casual experience doing focused testing (ensuring functionality of a specific feature or narrowing down the search for the cause of a particular bug) and providing feedback for Early Access games in a variety of genres as well as other software, but this is my first time officially being part of a team and my first time working on an open-source project. I greatly appreciate everyone who’s helped me out so far with learning GitHub and remembering the little things that someone else usually takes care of when you’re doing unofficial testing for a closed-source project 
I also write music sometimes…used to do it a lot but now that I’m pushing 40 years old it’s hard to find chunks of free time big enough to be able to feel like I’m actually getting anything done 
I use my SoundCloud as more of a personal blog than a professional portfolio so it’s kind of all over the place in both genre/feel and quality, but I think this one is close in vibe (if a little melancholy/dark at points) to what’s currently in the Thrive soundtrack - a bit spacey, a bit contemplative, not too intrusive.
Hoping to get involved in some of the design discussions down the road but for now I’m still getting the lay of the land; what the vision is for future, what’s already been suggested and determined to not fit with that vision, etc. One of the reasons I really wanted to get involved with the project is I think it has great potential as a tool for teachers to not just making learning biology fun, but to give students a feeling of connection with the material. I think the best way to get people to really appreciate something is to have them experience it for themselves and I think a game like Thrive is the best way to do that for biology besides actually getting into the lab and creating new forms of life yourself, which is probably beyond the capabilities of your average grade school science lab anyway A game that’s relatively easy to figure out without needing to pore through a wiki but that also doesn’t feel unrealistic or just downright condescending in its accessibility is something that I think both teachers and students would really appreciate.
TL;DR: hi, happy holidays, happy to be here