Nice to meet you. I'll try to answer in the order of your questions.
1. Mostly self taught actually. I mean I read books and tutorials online. This is a side story but I did meet Bob Ross once in NJ (mid 90's). As for Pixel art, check out
https://pixelation.org/ I learned so much from that community.
2. Spaceballs was a game I was working on with a few friend. We had it pretty far along aside from the netcode.
http://web.archive.org/web/20031231225033/http://www.spaceballs.org:80/3. Yes and no.
http://opx.deviantart.com/ you can find some of my old work.
4. Mostly Abobe software but also free tools like The Gimp, Blender, Audacity (audio) as well as the editor built into SGDK2 (which I helped design with Ben)
5. I use a Wacom intuos 4, 9x12, at the time of FTS (2005) I think it was an intuos 2. (not that you need either for pixel art)
6. That's complicated
Lot of things happened in that 10 year or more time frame. Thats a talk over a long drink
7. Since I could write my name I was hooked, as a preschooler, I was drawn to art and learning. At now 36 I know much better artists than me, some of whom are near 15 years my junior!
8. Despite whatever my old readme.txt says, feel free to use that old tileset for whatever you want. Credit would be nice but its fine either way. Though I'm curious what you have planned.
I do have a facebook,
https://www.facebook.com/jeff.cruz.5686322
