Profile

I hate writing bios of myself.

I'm married to Lis, i.e., cheshyre I play GURPS and other roleplaying games. I cook. I've studied flair bartending.

While I'm cynical about people in general, I tend to really like almost all of the people I actually encounter.

I'm a snob and elitist. But it doesn't work the way people might think it does. What I expect of people, and things, is that they be the best examples of whatever it is that they are that they are capable of.

I'm a college drop-out. I flunked out of Brandeis, dropped out of Bunker Hill Community College, and Northeastern University. In the process, I've learned a little about computer science, English literature, rhetoric (both ancient and modern), communication theory, journalism, and various other things.

My guitar's name is Tracey; I got her when I was sixteen.

My sister's name is Leila; she showed up when I was five. She was used as the criminal mastermind/mad scientist villain in a comic book that a friend of ours wrote. My parents were very proud of her, because they felt that, as a criminal mastermind, she would probably be able to provide for them in their old age. In high school, her afterschool jobs were working in a garden supply store, developing a method to synthesize spider silk for next-generation balistic armor, and genetically engineering yeasts to eat TNT, to help with landmine cleanup. The first job was for Arrowhead Nursery, the latter two were for the Defense Department. When she was 18, she spent a year doing research on the Great Barrier Reef.

My mother's a religious leader and poet, my father's a construction contractor and inventor.

A little about the journal: there's a bit that's friends-only, and most of it is public. Maybe I do a half dozen friends-only posts in a month. If something is public, you can quote it, link to it, whatever -- just, if it's actually clever and good, give me credit. If it's private, and you're on my friends list, feel free to follow up to it, talk about it with other people on my friends list, email me, whatever. But it's sorta private.

I haven't yet set up filters that I've really used -- I made two, so far, one for a roleplaying game I've not started running, and one because I realized that everybody that we wanted to invite to a get-together had livejournals, and I was too lazy to actually, y'know, make phonecalls, so I just made a lj filter.

I check my "changes in friends list" every couple of days. If somebody friended me, I usually friend them back. Even if I have no clue who they are.

Sometimes, I friend someone who hasn't friended me yet, but it's usually someone I know in person. Or know from elsewhere on the net.

As a general rule, I don't block anonymous posts, nor do I log ISP addresses. If you want to comment on the stuff I post publicly and not let me know who you are, that's fine. I think that the ability to be anonymous is strongly tied to the ability to maintain freedom in general. Okay, commenting on stuff in my journal is probably not really going to make a big difference in world politics, but it's a general principle.

But, since this IS, in a sense, MY JOURNAL, I do reserve the right to change this policy.

I don't delete posts or comments, except when I notice a horrible typo and delete a comment to repost it with a correction. In general, if I say something stupid or regrettable, I'd prefer that it remains where people can see it. I may apologize for it, and try to distance myself from it, but deleting it seems too much like trying to rewrite history to pretend that I've not made mistakes. I'd rather have a record of my mistakes. I'd prefer it if, in commenting on things in my journal, you'd follow the same rule, but I certainly will not insist on it.

Why do some things end up behind a friends filter, and most things not? To be completely honest, it's mainly for four people: my parents and my in-laws. If it's something that I think that THEY would be embarrassed to read, it goes behind the friends filter. I really like my parents, I really like my in-laws. And I think that all of us would agree that there are things that parents should not know about their children's lives, and vice-versa.

It's not like they DON'T know anything that I write about in the filters; it's just, y'know, privacy.

Of course, now that my mother has a livejournal, rebmommy, and she's on my friends list, this kind of no longer applies. Oh, well.