About

I made this website so I could be unabashedly self-indulgent and write whatever I want for an expected audience of no-one. With that in mind, let us commence the Story of My Life From a Certain Perspective!

The Spawning

Spawned in Mo i Rana in Norway in ’81, I grew up in Bergen: City of rain, fish and big rocks. Beyond the absolute buckets of rain, Bergen is a city of culture, don’t you know. Home of Edward Grieg and Aurora, but also those two guy who made What Does the Fox Say… So, you know…There’s that.

Baby Huld was – much like Adult Huld – swathed in a cloud of confusion. I was confused about the world and the world seemed confused about me. I didn’t know I was neurodivergent which maybe isn’t so weird since growing up in the eighties the only explicit autistic representation we had was Rain Man and you could only have ADHD if you were literally unable to stay in school. Did I know I was trans? Did I fuck! I knew something was weird about me, but again: Trans rep in the eighties… Not the best!

So spent most of my childhood… and teenage years… And twenties… I spent a LOT of my life not knowing who I was or what I wanted from life. I passed my time playing video games, reading comics and watching movies. Naturally, I desired making them too!

Creative Ambitions?

I made my first comic book before I could properly read or write, about a skeleton whose toes curled in the rain, titled “Skiletet som aldri fikk fred i lant” or “The skelington who never got peace in t’land“. In true ADHD fashion – and as a herald of many creative projects to come – it was never finished. I half-finished a double page spread of a massive action scene with an erupting volcano and never returned to it.

Didn’t stop me from continuing to seek creative outlets, though! I once stole multiple workbooks from the supply closet at school to write an epic tale of a man with a head shaped like giant kissy-lips who went in search of a treasure. Reader: He did find the treasure. Mister Kissy-Lips-Head became obscenely wealthy and built a Scrooge McDuck style vault for all his money.

The sequel was never finished. I spent most of my time drawing all the booby-traps he created to protect his money and realised I didn’t really have a story to go with it. An early education in the uselessness of obscene wealth if all you’re gonna do is hoard it, or just ADHD again? I’d love to say it was the first, but my radicalisation happened disappointingly late in life!

The dream of making my own games has been with me for the better part of three decades. I remember making incredibly basic choose-your-own-adventure style games in Turbo Pascal in the early to mid nineties, but my brain was never cut out for anything more than the most rudimentary programming, and I contented myself with drawing platform game levels in my workbooks at school and getting told off for doodling.

I never stopped creating. I developed concepts for games that never found a collaborator – like my idle-game inspired by Progress Quest Bork: On His Own, which would star a little stick figure guy in search for treasure and notoriety. I wrote plays, poems, and kept drawing.

These days, I still draw and develop ideas, but I spend most of my limited time and energy for creative work thinking about my (Norwegian) book, doing pottery when I can, and making weird masks out of cardboard!

The Information Super Highway

Oh the Internet of the Nineties!

I spent my days Surfing the Web, reading web comics (I particularly remember a strip called Abductee, about an alien living on Earth), browsing for porn (an activity that seriously tested the patience of even a hormonally fuelled teenager back in the days of 28.8K modems), engaging with the anti-Barney-The-Dinosaur subculture online (Look, I was a teenage edge lord. We listen and we do not judge), chatting on Alamak Internet Chat (which somehow still exists) and later IRC, and – of course – making webpages.

If you’re a middle-aged nerd like myself, maybe you remember GeoCities. If you’re not, maybe you remember MySpace. If you don’t, at least you’ll know what Facebook is. MySpace is like Facebook, but without the aggressive monetisation or the homogenisation on people’s pages, and without the never-ending scroll of doom. GeoCities is like MySpace, but instead of a single “page”, each user can make a whole-ass website entirely from scratch and put on it whatever they want.

The “Cities” part comes from the idea that all the websites are situated in virtual neighbourhoods centred around common interests.

My first website I co-created with a friend we used to call Kramer on account of his tall body and hair. We named it Norwaymen Homepage and it was a hodgepodge of Simpsons imagery and obnoxious gifs of rotating skulls, topped off with an autoplayed Simpsons theme midi file.

At the time, I played a lot of Wolfenstein 3D and DooM (one must capitalise the M! Always) and so I made a site I called BJ Blazkowicz’s Hideout (named after the protagonist of Wolf3D), though I 100% didn’t spell it correctly at the time. I converted all the map files to GIF and uploaded them to The Hideout, as well as linked to mods people had made. That website was my crowning achievement in the nineties and netter around 3000 visitors a month, a wild achievement for me!

At some point in the early 2000s, I finally got a cheap web host with a domain and made my very own home on the web for the handle used back then; OverTilt. Part online diary, part art sharing page. It became what I now think of as my platonic ideal for a personal web page. Self indulgent and a bit pointless, but a playground for anything I felt like sharing and experimenting with. Photography, art, journal entries and even a fairly regular journal webcomic.

Eventually, in 2005, I shifted my online presence to the handle Magnulus, a handle I stuck with for the next fifteen years. I would keep doing my thing on that site for a long time until I eventually lost interest in updating on it. After I changed my name to Huld, the Magnulus handle stopped feeling like home. I deleted the domain and just… never made a new site just for me.

And now we’re here!

To Act or Not To Act

If you asked me at any point in the past ten or fifteen years if I like attention, I’d huff and say I don’t like attention, I just tend to draw it because I’m impulsive and loud.

*Narrator voice* I love attention.

Attention is fuel for me. The problem is just that fuel can catch fire and get out of control. So I love attention, but when combined with shame, it’s… potent. At a certain point I became ashamed of enjoying attention, so that’s been fun! So I started lying to myself, pretending that attention was just a tolerated side effect of being me.

But I always loved performing. As a tiny child and well into my teens, I would dance for the adults, I would write song parodies I’d sing at family gatherings. I would dream up much-too-elaborate costumes to make. At age 8, I was tasked with saying a line in the Christmas performance at school while dressed as a Christmas present. I drew several concept sketches of how I would walk in as just a present with legs until hey presto! I’d pop my arms and head out of the box to reveal myself to read my one line.

I loved attention. But more than that I loved recognition. And as an aggressively mid-tier student with terrible organisational skills, recognition was only going to happen from performing.

Acting saved me during the school years. As social dynamics at school got more and more toxic I retreated into school plays. Did I get recognition? Oh please! I didn’t say I was good at acting! At nineteen, I was cast as “Robert”, the Romeo character in a modernised Romeo and Juliet. This was in a school theatre group renowned for being the launching pad for people who later became famous actors and comedians. Remember that song about what foxes say? The guys who made that, Ylvis, they both came from this school. So local and regional news papers had their eyes on us. This was my chance.

When the reviews came in, they were aglow with praise for the incredible young talent on show. Multiple paragraphs extolling the incredible talent on show. My part of the review read “- and [Huld Martha] plays Robert.”

Of course I was upset about it, but I was also just glad to get to perform. I kept performing whenever I got the chance to, and always wished I could have made a career out of it. But my parents insisted I have a Plan B. Real job skills. Get an education.

So I did the natural thing. Went to University in Scotland to get a degree in a job market that is much more secure than acting. A Bachelor’s in Film and Photography…

Listen. I was never one to make choices that made sense.

I spent three years acting in as many of the films we made as possible and joining a drama society. I then crashed out after failing to hand in any of my projects on time and decided to try out this acting thing for real.

I’m nothing if not predictable.

For six years between 2010 and 2016, I made a go of it. I started by appearing in a Fringe play, then took a pittance to tour nursing homes in the West Country for a month with a three-person panto. During the 2010 Snowpocalypse. That was a TIME!

Then I spent 2011 at Butlin’s in Minehead playing Robbie Rotten in a stage version of LazyTown. That was simultaneously some of the most fun I’ve had as an actor and the loneliest I’ve been in my entire life. I made an insulting amount of money and was away from my wife Marit at the time for a full year with only brief time together. I was glad to be done.

2012-14 was spent mostly doing free gigs for film students while I developed a showreel. I got to have a lot of fun and do a lot of strange stuff, but I knew I couldn’t keep going like that forever. Eventually, I had to try to shift into more professional work. If nothing else, Marit was supporting us financially and I couldn’t let her take the entire burden forever.

I had to figure out if this acting thing could actually pay off.

Eventually, I scored an advert for Lowe’s and a two-scene part in Outlander. I thought I’d finally cracked it! This was the moment! I mean LOOK at this showreel! How could any casting director refuse! I was about to become a Jobbing Actor!

*Narrator voice* I didn’t become a jobbing actor.

Deciding to only do paid work meant that all I ever did was travel to London for two-minute auditions I didn’t get and sit around the house trying to figure out where I was going wrong.

One place I went wrong was that I couldn’t figure out Networking. If I went to events, I spent the entire time feeling awkward and out of place, so I stopped going to them. I was fine as an actor, but terrible at what the actual WORK of acting is for a lot of us: Getting the jobs.

So in 2016, I retrained and became a Personal Trainer instead. And that’s the end of THAT I guess!

Enter the FMV!

to be continued…