Rob McClure

Puppet camp truly redefined my preconceptions of puppetry... I'll never forget learning that before a puppet can speak... he has to inhale. It's those details that make the characters truly come to life.

Portraying Mozart is a scary task. Whenever I'm asked to portray actual historic figures, it comes with extra accountability. Not just to your director and playwright, but to the man himself and the beloved persona that the public forms.

If you think hard enough about it, Rowlf the dog playing the piano on 'The Muppet Show' - what kind of insanity was happening underneath the cameras to make that happen? His mouth is moving, and he's got two hands playing the piano. That's two people under there!

I always wanted to be a surgeon, because I had a lot of admiration for my father, who is also a surgeon. I also wanted to be a heart surgeon. That was motivated by the fact that my young aunt, a sister of my dad, died in her early 20s of a correctable heart disease.

You've probably heard the stories about how io9 got its name. And maybe you know that io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders and I were inspired by Kathy Keeton, whose groundbreaking magazine 'Omni' combined coverage of real science with science fiction. But what you probably don't know is how unlikely it was that io9 ever succeeded at all.