For those of you who where breathlessly awaiting my return from perpetual hiatus, you asphyxiated long ago. Those of you who still breathing should message me as I am back and awesome.

-- Much like I-35, this profile is continuously under construction.--

Like everyone else I hate writing these things. I deal with the futility of try define myself here, by writing far too much. I've included a soundbite version below since the full version ought to include an intermission.

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I am one of the smartest persons you will ever meet. An alpha-nerd working on my renaissance man credentials. I’m a recovering shy person with the whole moody scatter-brained genius thing going for/against me. I’m a far better man than most, though not always good at showing that I care. Once I was going to be a philosophy professor, then I discovered that the field is glutted by mediocre thought mechanics who don't know wisdom from Windex. I couldn’t stand the idea of having to deal with them for forty plus years, so now I work as a paralegal for the state. My humor is dry. I’m not very socially ambitious (I’m too arrogant for that). I’m trying to live in accord with my beliefs. Occasionally I succeed. Also republicans need not apply.

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Unfortunately, I suffer from an abundance of interests, but none of them command enough affection to make it “what I do”. So this is not an easy task. My current plan is to become a librarian as the best solution that doesn’t require me to be Bruce Wayne (note: the library and I had a falling out over me being too awesome at my job, now I'm a paralegal for the state, but I like the "Bruce Wayne" line and have yet to come up with a new version on it. Librarian is still in the running, but no longer the clear front runner).

Interest wise I'm a generalist, one who knows less and less about more and more. I'm fascinated by the interplay of components and the gestalt (I just wanted to use that word). Overall I'm somewhere past nerd, but haven't yet reached full renaissance man.

My creative endeavors are hampered by difficulty accepting crappy work, even though I know it's needed so that I can eventually make what I want. And I have terrible hand writing which does not bode well for drawing. But I'm not half bad a photography.

I've been accused of being an amazing asshole and the best person in the world by two of my friends within the space of half an hour. I don't think I'm all that great in either direction.

Twice I've been asked to be Maid (er… Dude) of Honor, so I must be doing something almost right. Come to think of it, it was the same friends I just mentioned.

I'm a misanthrope in large part because I like people, but they're so very bad at it.

I'm a big believer in education and the virtues of honest inquiry being the silver bullet to most problems. Socially, I'm thinking maybe health care needs to be put right up there with it.

Mandatory religious warning: Due to too much philosophy I can't easily articulate my position, but let’s call it agnostic which on most days hovers near the atheist end of the spectrum. I'm irreverent by nature, but appreciate or at the least tolerate any view that embraces rationality and is accompanied by a good heart. It should be noted that some views/religions/political parties/cults are excluded because in the presence of rationality, they'd shatter against reality within minutes.

I have a nonlinear way of talking. I'm tangent prone, some of which are wild, while others form a net around what I'm trying to say. I'll continue a conversation days later without much of a transition.

My profile name is an obscure RPG reference. I would change it to something more representative, but I'm too deep in. Extra points if you can name where it's from.

I've been known to be pithy in person, but it just doesn't seem to survive the transfer to this medium.

A few years back, I was a philosophy graduate student but the department and I had irreconcilable beliefs. They believed that they were competent philosophers. I disagreed.

I went to work in a public library, to get experience while considering making it my career. After two years of being promised a full time job was "just around the corner" while working way below my skill level as a kick-ass circulation clerk, de facto tech support, librarian fill-in, font of obscure knowledge, unofficial page trainer, diplomat and problem solver, I thought that they should have given me a full time position. They disagreed.

Now I work for a state agency which spends most of its time pissing people off. I’m omitting the name in case of crazies with search engines. Let’s just say I make sure people pay when they order from the kids section of "How to Serve Man".

I’m a recovering MMORGs player, with occasional relapses into City of Heroes, WoW, and Age of Conan.

I do some table-top RPing, and associated nerdery.

Other than that, the usual: working, movies, hanging out, the occasional existential crisis.

Most things I try.

Arguing. I love a good verbal sparing match, particularly when I'm right, which I almost always am, and when I win which just as frequently. Yes I am throwing out a challenge.

Seeing forests and trees.

Becoming verbose and poetic when angry. If you ever drop out of a philosophy graduate program, I suggest you use the line "as much integrity as a Soviet political officer." in a teacher's evaluation. I've found it quite cathartic.

Playing with legos, stuffed animals, plastic dinosaurs and the like.

Being mistaken for serious when I’m joking and vice versa. I guess a wit can be too dry.

My intuition is intermittently amazing.

Diplomacy / counseling (people seek me out, I'm not sure why).

Attracting weirdos without apparent cause, or any action on my part.

The standard humanities nerd things, with some science stuff to boot.

I have an eclectic skill base, and a vast reserve of random facts that prove useful on occasion.

Writing an ‘A’ term paper in about four hours, without having a second draft. This skill is far less useful now that I’m out of school. Feel free to borrow it, just make sure to return it once you’re done.

I am a wonderful editor. I am seriously awesome at that.

Probably that I'm not paying them any attention. I may be reading, staring blankly, yammering away, walking furiously back and forth, fidgeting, crawling under something, or just sending "go away" vibes.

I have been known to fake being an extrovert and talk to people. I suspect they mostly notice that I give up after about a minute. Unless of course they're interesting.

I did the standard ask my friends what people notice. Apparently I am A.) Tall, B.) have curly hair that occasionally goes crazy, and C.) I'm "articlit", hopefully It's not just relatively articulate to him.

Books: This question is unfair. It's bordering on "Which is your favorite child?". Lets just say I love them all except for little The Confessions of St Augustine which had to be placed in a foster-bookshelf after I threw it across the room.

But here's a list anyway: Catch 22, Les Miserables, All Quiet on the Western Front, the works of H.P. Lovecraft, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Things they Carried, your standard litany of sci-fi and fantasy stuff (Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, Card.. whatnot), the Harry Potter books, Snowcrash, Neuromancer other miscellaneous cyberpunk stuff. The poetry of Leonard Cohen and Edna St. Vincent Milay. Many many more.

I have widely cast interests. That's a fairish sampling of the fiction I like. Nonfiction is generally history, language/linguistics/philology, philosophy, geography, sexuality, psychology, or esoteric (The Secret Life of Dust anyone?).

Comics: Hopeless Savages, Fables, Blankets, Neil Gaiman's stuff, Maus (Don't look down your nose at comics, this one won a Pulitzer), Astro City.

Movies: The Princess Bride, Contact, Kill Bill, Serenity, Lord of the Rings, Lawrence of Arabia, The Thirteenth Warrior, Run Lola Run, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca (how stereotypically masculine of me. Bogie rocks), Bladerunner, The Usual Suspects, Batman Begins, L.A. Confidential, Star Wars (Of course. But I don't mean those recent piles of wookie dung), the even numbered Star Trek movies, Lost in Translation, Apocolypse Now, CQ, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I Heart Hucklebees, Pi, Memento, Last of the Mohicans, Band of Brothers, SLC Punk, Fight Club

Television: Firefly, Battlestar Gallactica, Andromeda (First Season only! Curse you Kevin Sorbo!),Veronica Mars, Futurama, Family Guy, Home Movies, Venture Brothers, most of the rest of Adult Swim (Except you Inuyasha, you go stand in the corner with Kevin Sorbo and St Augustin.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Neon Genesis Evangelion, I Claudius, Blue Planet, the History Channel when it realizes that history didn't start in 1939 and end in '46, The Daily Show, Walking with Dinosaurs/Cavemen/Prehistoric Beasts, Connections 1-3/The Day the Universe Changed, Nova, the Ken Burns The Civil War,

Music: Leonard Cohen, Magnetic Fields, Cake, Bruce Springstein, Vangelis, Woody Gutherie (Mermaid Avenue, which is Gutherie songs played by Billy Bragg and Wilco is amazing),The Cure (my inner goth digs it), Lou Reed, Sex Pistol, Ramones, Bad Religion, Save Ferris (Ska = punk and swing's love child), Simon and Garfunkel, The Flaming Lips, Garbage... I almost forgot The Clash. Recent discovery I heartily endorse: The Dresden Dolls

Food: All Asian food (excepting Indian and Japanese can be sketchy), Greek, and Cajun. Look at that, a short list!

Something to write with, alone time, Something to read, Play, A healthy does of cynicism and the humor that goes with it to make the world funny as well as horrifying, Thaumos (which is one of those lovely untranslatable Greek words, meaning roughly an enthralling wonder (to the nature of (a) thing(s))).

Why OKCupid gives me the option of writing this profile in latin.

I don't want to have to edit this section. Stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Since a lot of this is philosophy junk, my opinion is refined since I wrote it. It's hard to write this stuff halfway clearly and succinctly and I don't want to have to update it every few months. Look it's somewhere in the neighborhood of this.

Epistemology / Pragmatic theory - I'm trying to either break it or fix it. It's no fun to not share the same concept of truth as everyone else. If ideas are tools for understanding reality then what about the fuzzier ideas? What level of hypothetical verifiability is acceptable? Why won't anyone take me seriously? It's pretty damn esoteric.

ethics / existentialism / evolutionary psychology - Evolution suggests emotivism to be true. Emotional responses can be irrationally inconsistent. Emotions have cognitive elements. Why does consequentialism have emotional appeal? It and emotivism can't both be right, except that emotivism reserves the right to be irrational. There appears to be something like virtue as well as good. We can't choose what we are, but we do choose how to behave (in a compatiblist sense), which is filtered through culture with some negative and some positive effects. I hear the echo of Nietzsche in this.

Linguistic / Philology / Etymology - I'll be going along minding my own business when I'll be struck by a desire to deconstruct a word to it's morphemes or I'll just look at a word and it'll fall apart into them. Sometimes I'll even see the corruptions. It's pretty creepy really. And of course I get a fair number wrong, especially since I know just enough German and Latin to make me dangerous.

Politics - Republicans, I hate the word, like I hate sin and all Montagues. Really, how dumb can America get? They're tearing apart the republic and they don't even have the competency of a proper demagogue. Don't we at least deserve an Augustus or a Napoleon? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Maybe if I watch enough West Wing I can convince myself that it isn't true.

More stuff. Even more stuff. I don't have much control over where my brain wanders. There were a few days where I was trying to design a better gear-shift system, something I have no expertise in, and not much interest.

I didn't have enough to do at work one day so I figured out how to use excel to emulate an enigma machine.

More stuff stuff.

With friends nominally playing role-playing games, but more often playing Arkham Horror, watching movies, waiting for someone to show up who never does, miscellaneous hanging out.

I have an evil pig puppet named Orcus who channels my darker side. Some of my friends like him more than they do me.

This teddy bear I know keeps a blog. Orcus hates him.

When I was younger I was very good at hiding under a blanket and playing 'rock'.

...you want to of course. This profile is here so you can find me.

...you're inclined to message me, go for it. The cost is minimal and the potential reward enormous.

And for those of you that wrote me and got no response from me, or a short response promising a real one later. The chances are good that I do not in fact hate you. I don't like writing sucky messages, so it's far more likely that put it aside to work on it when I had time, then duly forgot. That goes for conversations I wanted to start too.

((A special apology to Chelhell who I can't write now, her profile's gone.))

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Mega nerd points for identifying the quote below. Or, like, two if you have no idea but take the time to google it. More points if you can tell me why the note is placed first and the whole thing is here when it really ought to be just about anywhere else.

Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam!