Tall, dark, and curious.

I'm learning nerd stuff, every day. I read too much. Sometimes I grumble about history. I like to sew. I'm studying historical fencing.

Funny history stories. Knowing something useless about anything. Making faces. Cryptic quotes. Being an asshole while remaining perfectly civil. Impressing your grandmother (four out of five grandmothers agree: I am a "nice young man.") Those projects you'd have back in school to build a bridge out of cardboard or toothpicks or something.

I read mostly SF, history, and science. I'm no good at favorites (I'd be here 'til morning) but here are some things that impressed me lately. You should ask me why!
Books:
Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint
Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain
CJ Cherryh, most fondly Merchanter's Luck and Devil to the Belt. (Heavy Time carries an almost physical load of distrust, it's pretty remarkable.)
Jo Walton, Farthing/Ha'Penny/Half a Crown
George Alec Effinger, When Gravity Fails

What I really like in narrative (besides, apparently, spaceships and John Brown) is... You know that moment right after you get punched in the gut? After the impact, but before it really starts to hurt, when you're just feeling that collapse, that what-happened-to-my-breathing feeling? I like that. Though it's nice if the story doesn't end on that note, because you don't probably want to walk around all day feeling like that.

Music: I mainly listen to gothic/industrial and EBM (recently: The Retrosic, Spetsnaz, The Dwarves, Dismantled) but I like odd corners of everything (I'm fond of Public Enemy, Finntroll and Eluveitie, New Model Army, and James Brown).

Movies (again, recently enjoyed rather than all-time-desert-island): Fist of Legend, A Bittersweet Life, Twilight Samurai, Army of Shadows.

I like the usual shows that thinkin' people like (The Wire, Breaking Bad, Firefly, The Shield, Treme, The IT Crowd), but that doesn't really tell you much about me, does it? Here are some of my more idiosyncratic favorites:

The Sandbaggers was a British TV series in the late 70s. It was a spy show, but very much the opposite of a James Bond depiction: most of the show consists of conversations in (usually rather dingy) offices. So why watch, right? The show absolutely refuses to flinch: awful things happen to the characters, they make terrible sacrifices, and those things are never hand-waved away. But those sacrifices are not valorized; in fact it's rather strongly implied that the job is not worth the price paid for it. (It's not all that grim, but it is grim: certainly not for everyone).

The Secret Life of Machines is also British, which is where the similarities end. Each episode describes the invention and basic mechanics of a particular machine (vacuum cleaner, car, fax machine, etc). So far, so boring, right? It's the most (inadvertently?) hilarious thing you'll ever see. Our hosts are Tim Hunkin, who looks like a windblown Harry Potter, and Rex Garrod, who is a kind of bowl-cut-wearing troll in a sweater. Rex only occasionally manages eye contact with the camera, but he is very excited to show you an electric motor he made out of a tin can, a cork, and some wire. There's a very strange passion that shows through the whole thing: Hunkin and Garrod are very clearly doing this because it's important to them, but the way it matters to them is not the way you'll see in anything else on TV. There's enough polish to make it very watchable (though certainly not slick) but you'd never confuse it for something created by marketing demands or even educators: it could only have been made by people who love machines and love to learn about them.

Iron that cuts, polished silver, a sprig of mistletoe, and a loaded pistol.

Human nature. Algorithms. The White Rose. Theology (yeah, even though I'm an atheist). Building the true Germany. How to be a good friend. The odd intersections of Soviet totalitarianism and utopian aspirations. King Albert I of Belgium. Joining the Foreign Legion. Books (I'm sure that comes as a surprise by now).

I get really excited about ideas, because I am a big giant nerd. If you keep listening long enough, it is very likely that I will start to wave my arms. It's okay if you laugh: I know it's funny and I'd be laughing too if I weren't so busy being excited about ideas. (It's big work, I need my whole brain and apparently also my arms).

Chewing bubblegum. From time to time I do also kick ass, but the truth is that with modern just-in-time inventory management techniques, I rarely run out of bubblegum.

I used to have a box which proudly declared itself to contain "KEYBOARD: The Ultimate Input Device." I think I lost it, though. I'm actually kinda sad about that.

-You think you might like The Secret Life of Machines almost as much as I do.
-You would like to hear a story about the Dutch royal anthem, or about the real winners of the Second World War.
-Actually, if you've read this far and you're not sneering in contempt, we'd probably get along. Try it!
-If you've read this far and you are sneering in contempt, perhaps you should fix yourself a nice cup of tea? I hear chamomile's good for relaxing the face after a hard day's sneer.