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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

Masks are terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.

Devonian - Devon is the only English county with two coastlines. Also I have a fondness for red sandstone, and it was the epoch when fish grew legs and sex was invented. Must count for something.

Loves: science, technology, the Enlightenment, weird music, A. N. Other Mefite (not telling, but it's reciprocated), anything that emphasises truth, beauty and thoughtfulness over their opposites. Stuff that sheds light on consciousness. History. Prehistory. The Future. (Not so keen on the present, but apparently I'm stuck here.)

Bit of a nut for anything to do with radio, from Maxwell (my hero!) to pulsars via John Peel (my hero!) and the Third Programme. If you start a thread about radio, I WILL be there. Was once an engineer, so there's that.

Words to type by: I dislike what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. As Vonnegut says, one should automatically be on the side of the victim. Discourse, however is sacred.

(Over-use parentheses -- and em-dashes.)

Ideal job: manning an enormous radio observatory in the Oort Cloud. Absent that, sitting on a tor on Dartmoor among the ascending larks, talking to distant voices on a slow-fading shortwave channel to a backdrop of faint static and the distant murmurings of the ionosphere feeds my soul well enough. It's a hell of a planet.

Been online since the days of hex and 16-bit address buses. So many stories.

Feel free to MeMail, on the slightest excuse.

I help fund Metafilter! Also, I abuse the edit window.

To foil keystroke profilers and protect my identity as 'Z' at GCHQ (*), all my text is entered by my valet, Jarvis, whose impeccable typing cadence is due to his training at the Sorbonne Ecole de la Servitude. Any interjections I permit Jarvis to make on his own behalf will be marked in square brackets thusly [Very kind, sir, but I will avail myself of this sparingly]. Very good, Jarvis.

(* Not THAT GCHQ. The Giggleswick College of Halma and Quoits, dedicated to preserving Edwardian games for posterity. Oh, and deep packet inspection.)

I approve of really long profiles.