Bio
My name is Robert Bennett Keefe. I go by Ben.
My sensibilities are trusting and honest, something simple-minded and Midwestern. At first glance I'm a bit of a puzzle-box, a triply-locked safe, but as it turns out, the locks are already open, or maybe the keys already dangling from their cylinders. I'm an open book, if you couldn't tell by the paragraphs of semi-personal text written on a public website.
This is all thanks to a rather quiet upbringing in Kansas City, surrounded by a combination of busy middle-class love and a splash of mostly-normal Roman Catholic pedagogy. At Rockhurst High School, my tendencies for stay-in weekends and hibernating in the winter developed into a firm obsession with video games, computers, and the internet. Enough hours behind a screen can turn any academic-minded teenager into a committed computer science student, and so after an offbeat gap year in lockdown, I tried to mix up my life without shifting its trajectory too far from predictability. I did CS at the Colorado School of Mines, three years spent somewhere between total academic hermitage and spiritual adventurism in the American West, all that time keeping strong in school out of a personal attachment to CS and a curious philosophical studiousness in quantum physics. I graduated with a BS in CS and a minor in physics, and some strong headwind now tells me Kansas City needs me back, and that I need a regrounding to the sensibilities that got me started in it all. So I'm coming home for round two, suddenly grown up and confidently unprepared for whatever may happen next.