Brevity may well be the soul of wit, but it is not the essence of clarity. That being the case, understand that the document currently resting on the virtual fingers of your cyberself is long. Do not worry: there will not be a test. Memorisation is not required.

I am a friendly polar bear, and this is my self-summary, in bold primary colours (I assume - I'm colourblind), probably written in crayon. I'm not going to disclose my real name here, but you may call me 'you'. You may not call me 'u'.

After a wee stint of being a goth, I've decided to try being a me. It's a lot more comfortable, although I still have a soft spot for goth aesthetics, as well as parts of the lifestyle. I like computers and Linux, but know better than to go on about them to people who aren't interested. This makes me, as far as I know, unique among geeks. I'm also a bit of a Japanophile though I hesitate to mention that since someone on the forums (who, in the same post, said he thought he was quite smart) thought that that meant I like looking at little Japanese girls. In a world full of Naruto-obsessed kids, it sounds a little like a lame excuse to say I like the language, the literature, the art, the philosophies inherent in the culture. But I do. That's not to say I don't like anime (I do! Well... some of it.) but that's not what it's all about.

One of my three adjectives is 'self-contradictory', but in some ways I'm not; I'm very interested in disassembling contradictions: things we take for granted in our culture as polar opposites sometimes aren't so mutually exclusive after all.

I am an atheist Discordian. There is no goddess but Eris and She doesn't exist. Actually, I am what some might call a militant atheist. Nothing against religion per se, but I can get quite vocal about defending atheism from the slanderous misrepresentation it inevitably gets.

I don't get people who describe themselves as "laid-back". Isn't everyone laid-back about some things, intense about others? I know I am. Generally, I like people who see themselves and the world in all its glorious colours, not just in black and white.

Although this profile betrays the lie in it, my motto is "abair ach beagan, is abair gu math e" ("say but little, and say it well"). People complain that I'm too quiet, but I think there's virtue in that, especially in a world with such a low signal-to-noise ratio, filled beyond capacity with chattering inane buzz.

My hobby is telling people I am from the future. It's surprising how many people believe it.

Moving to Edinburgh to start a PhD.

I've always got some other project going on as well, though, either writing music, writing games, building websites, just generally writing. I'm more creative than active (though I can barely draw stick figures). Time will tell if I have time to have other projects all the time now, though.

I should say a bit about why I'm on this site. Principally, I am on this site because it is a thing on the internet, and therefore I have to be here. Meeting new people is always great, though. Well, not always, but usually. Well, I say usually... I mean sometimes. Rarely. Definitely not never!

Since I just moved from Aberdeen, and I don't really know anyone, I'd love to make some new friends.

Didactic conjecture. This means talking bollocks in a way that makes it sound like I know what I'm talking about. I'm even better at this in blogs, when I have access to the full fury of the internet to back up my statements, though I do carry a non-trivial amount of non-non-trivial knowledge in my grey matter.

Proper conversation (although more with people I know). Making people feel better. Analytical thought. Intuitive thought. Being patient. Making people laugh.

I'd like to think I'm really good at making journal posts, though you can be the judge of that, and I suspect you would judge "needs to be funnier". I am trying, honest. I do make a lot of pointless entries as well as the more thought-out ones, though, so some of my favourites are here:-
Matching
Profile philosophy: profile-as-story

I know π to 32 decimal places. This is not as good as sagocity but I'm trying.

I'd like to be really good at making music, but I have about eleventy-jillion different directions I want to go in with that, and as a result I haven't really done anything new in about four years.

My hair. It's so damn pretty and you're jealous of it, right?

After that, they probably notice that I can be quite quiet. I can have animated conversations with people one-on-one, but in a group I'm usually content not to be the centre of attention.

When I do open my mouth, I suppose they notice my accent. Well, back home they don't, but where I am now.

Ah, Books. One of my current personality awards is 'more literary'. I think I could agree with that, though for that I'm not particularly well-read. I don't have context for most of my favourite quotations. I'm really interested in literary paradigms, and in their cultural influence, but I've never read much of the work from them. Books that I have read and liked include The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, the Dune series by Frank Herbert, Girlfriend in a Coma (or anything else) by Douglas Coupland, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Philip K. Dick, Peace on Earth and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, Venus in Furs...

I just started reading Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami. It's my first Murakami, but I'm definitely going to read more.

The only webcomic I read is xkcd. I used to read Achewood, but I've got behind on that. Elf Only Inn was good before it went all MMO and turned into the very thing it was supposed to be sending up.

Movies... Generally (but not exclusively) I like sci-fi and weird stuff. In no particular order, I love Metropolis, both the silent classic and the anime. As I said, I love Philip K. Dick (yes, "I love dick", that's very funny), so I love A Scanner Darkly and Blade Runner and can even stand Minority Report (don't make me watch Paycheck, though), I like Labyrinth, Stigmata, Ghost in the Shell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Gattaca, Renaissance, Breakfast at Tiffany's and Casablanca.

I'm not a high-brow movie elitist, and sometimes something like great set design can make up for an otherwise awful film, which may explain why I like Aeon Flux.

I like Satoshi Kon and Hayao Miyazaki. I love how Miyazaki can put together a family movie where "family" isn't a code-word for "kids'".

Thanks to a few really good friends, I also saw and loved Holy Mountain, Dellamorte Dellamore (also called Cemetery Man), Uzumaki (also called Spiral) and Astrópía (also called Dorks & Damsels).

Music: Recently I've mostly been listening to Mosaic.wav -- "We love Akiba-pop!"

Also on the Japanese tip, I love artists that can be loosely classified as Shibuya-kei: Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, Buffalo Daughter.

I loving gothy e.b.m., futurepop and industrial, and if you play Rotersand, VNV Nation and Assemblage 23 for me in a row, I might just have to change my pants, but my tastes aren't limited to that, by any means.

For a long time I was your typical indie kid, and although I'm bored of a lot of that, now, there are quite a few artists I still love. The same goes for folk. I also love some alt. country like Sparklehorse, Lambchop and The Handsome Family.

I also have a thing for symphonic metal - at least in the vein of Nightwish, Kamelot and sometimes Dimmu Borgir (though I find them more funny than I think they're meant to be). But I'm not that metal: I don't think I like Metallica and honestly I couldn't even tell you the name of any track by Slayer.

I like pop (in the genre sense of the word as opposed to the semantic sense of what happens to be in the charts): anything bouncy and upbeat and addictive (especially if it's sung in Japanese) I'll gobble up like candy, (as is true of all goths, but shhh that's a secret!).

I love experimental music and post-rock, though I've been a bit out of the loop with that for a while, so I don't know what's current.

I also have a thing for big ol' classics like Nina Simone, Scott Walker, Jacques Brel and so on, and Russian composers do it for me as well - I don't mind non-Russian composers (including a Clockwork-Orange-esque devotion to Beethoven's 9th), but give me Khachaturian, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky and I'm happy.

My favourite artists, however, are probably Momus and Stereo Total. This sort of fits in with the Shibuya-Kei thing, even if they're not Japanese.

In terms of Games, I maintain that despite the fact that it's dated and flawed, Deus Ex is one of the best games ever. I also love Portal (though the quotes are only any good in context thanks very much). I very much tend towards the narrativist camp of gamers, so I like games that have a good story, especially if it's the kind of story that could only work as a game. I'm also a sucker for games that ship with some kind of editor, especially if it's Unreal-engine-based: Epic makes creating a mod feel like playing with Lego; it's brilliant!

As for food, my tastes are pretty basic. I'm a vegetarian, but I could basically burn water, so it tends to be sandwiches, cheese or houmous. I am trying to perfect a goats' cheese and avocado salad, but it always turns out too dry.

First and foremost would have to be the internet. I have no idea how I survived before it. I'm really interested in the social dynamic of it, but I've also seriously considered building a wearable computer so I can have access to that vast information (and misinformation) repository from anywhere (and also because it would look cool, which is what it has above a web-enabled mobile phone).

My music collection (though I could do without DRM) and my various tools of music creation are very important to me. I'm not much good at drawing and although I do write, I find creative writing quite hard, so music is really my main creative outlet. (I am having to live without this right now - both my hard drive and my iPod died, my CD collection is in Scotland, and my phone is loaded with only three albums and one playlist.)

Foreign language dictionaries are an absolute necessity for me. Although I don't get much chance to use foreign languages, I think different languages provide whole different sociopsychological contexts, so knowing at least something of foreign languages is important to keep from having thinking that is too ethnocentric.

My friends probably should come higher than fourth on this list, but who cares about ordering? They are awesome people who never fail to make me laugh, even when I think I don't want to, and they all have that quality of being incredibly intelligent but also all about fun, which is what I aspire to. Pretty much any friend of mine is a friend of theirs as well.

Tea. I do like my proper tea in different varieties. That said, being a student coupled with drinking so much of it makes affording it an issue, so I am more commonly seen buying 400-packs of bags of sweepings off the factory floor.

Freedom of speech. Civil rights in general are very important to me. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is my hallowed document, and I really do wish more of it was implemented throughout the world - even so-called first-world countries are slacking on that. That said, I also take issue with people who believe that "freedom of speech" necessitates that other people actually have to like/respect/care about what they have to say.

Game design, and particularly the unique narrative potentials of the medium which literature and film could never do.

Music, as should be obvious by now.

Logic - I probably love formal (mathematical) logic more than informal reasoning, but philosophy in general is one of my many cups of tea, and I love tea!

Politics. Less so party-politics but more politics in the abstract.

Human Nature. We are the strangest of species.

Science. It's what we need more of. What we need less of is alarmist anti-science types who don't even know the science they're protesting and often don't even have the most basic understanding of what science is.

Numbers. If I'm not thinking about anything else, numeric patterns run through my head unbidden.

Etymology excites me. I come up with really bizarre theories about the relatedness of words in different languages that may or may not have any basis in fact.　Etymology, but also languages in general. And, tying my interest in languages with my interest in computers, why we don't have a proper solution for mojibake even in 2009.

The romance of post-apocalyptica, the calm after the storm as ashes fall like hot ghost snow, the humble and warm survivor solidarity, the utilitarian and spartan aesthetic of post-apocalypse society. Of course I would never wish for such an event, but, damn, it's a beautiful fiction in its own way.

Religion and Mythology, though I tend to see the two as one and the same, I am a little more respectful of religion, or at least of people's right to believe in it.

Extra Stuff... Like why I can have a maximum possible match of 82% with someone on here, but an actual match of 84% with the same person. Okay, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that, but it's better than the tedious "Wah, why am I not 100% match with myself?"

Playing imagination games.

I cry at Spirited Away. Every time.

According to some knuckle-dragging, sloped-forehead males allegedly of my species, I'm not a "real" man. And, honestly, I thank fuck for that.

I like it when a woman is forward with me.

Most sport bores me to tears.

I also cheat at quickmatch.

According to OKCupid Summer Interns, you should message me if you're from Iceland, Finland, Norway, Germany or Sweden.

But you just should, wherever you're from. At least you should, since you've obviously at least looked at my profile. I do reply to every message (or at least I try), and I don't filter. I'll be nice. I'll try to be interesting too, but that depends on what I have to work with.

I've had some messages from people saying that they want to message me, but don't really know what to say. I can definitely sympathise, so here are some ideas for what you could talk about.

Just about anything geeky is generally good. Don't worry that I might not understand it. I might not, but even if I don't, there's a high probability that I'll be interested.

A surprisingly high proportion of conversations I have with people on this site involve languages and their relationship to culture in some way. I'd love to talk about things other than languages, but if you'd like to talk about languages, I'm always happy to talk about that, whether you know any languages other than English or not.

I'm more likely to have a negative impression of you if you're too serious than if you're too silly, so err on the side of abandon! Tell me about random things, tell me about something new you learned yesterday, tell me about your obsession with rubber ducks. Nothing's too silly.

If you are disappointed in the 21st century so far and want cool-looking futuristic stuff, like, NOW, then you could talk about that. What were your expectations for this century, and how do they measure up to reality?

These are just ideas, of course. You can message me about anything you want.

You can also -- why not? -- just message me if you don't have anything particular to talk about, but just want to get to know me better. I'm not terribly big on first impressions, so you shouldn't feel under any pressure to make your first message count.

If my IM's off, it means I'm away from the computer (though if my IM's on, it doesn't mean I'm at the computer), and I really don't know what to do with quickmatches (though suggestions are welcome!) so I won't respond to them, as flattering as they are. Generally, if you have something to say to me, go ahead and say it.