Tinker is an adventurer and explorer who has journeyed through the world collecting field notes from places most people only read about in books. A historian by instinct and a field engineer by trade, he has spent decades navigating the blurred lines between chaos and creation — from oilfields to icefields, and from the fringes of empire to the edges of reason. As the founding General Director of the Poltava Petroleum Company in Ukraine and later a project leader in Sakhalin, he witnessed firsthand the absurdities and triumphs of building modern industry on shifting ground. His work led him across some of the world’s most remote and unpredictable frontiers, where the tools were few but the wit was sharp, and where camaraderie often meant the difference between failure and legend. The FSU Scroll: Field Notes from the Edges of Empire is his first major work — a hybrid chronicle drawn from those years, written with equal parts grit, humor, and respect for the people who made the impossible work.