User:Demivisage

The username is from a recurring dream involving masks I had in high school.

what i do
I have a bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts (Visual Arts emphasis) from UC San Diego. I make websites and pretty pictures. I also cook for a living.

what i love
My interests are multifarious:  Cooking (and eating). Favorite cuisines include Indian, French, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Italian, and Southeastern American (soul food and Creole/Cajun). My cream puffs will make you weep for joy. Anime, Japanese woodworking, traditional furniture, Japanese architecture, the language (an isolate), and many other Japan-related things. I am that most rare of Japanophiles -- a grounded, pragmatic one, fairly knowledgeable about the seedy side of Japanese history: racism in Japan, burakumin, and other subjects the Japanese would rather you not know about. Ask me sometime. Experimental film. Witchcraft, rootwork and other forms of magic. I do not subscribe to them nor do I practice, but they fascinate me as a possible precursor to religion and a psychologically interesting phenomenon. Music — favorites are jazz, twentieth-century classical music, punk (mostly British. American punk rock has historically been mostly unadventurous, with a few notable exceptions), post-punk, indie rock (whatever that means anymore), hip-hop, noise music, IDM, some trance, experimental dub, industrial, drum and bass and its offshoot drill and bass, and a host of other music I couldn't begin to classify. My tastes usually run towards the extreme, the off-putting, and the fairly obscure. The study of comparative religion. Zen Buddhism, particularly the Rinzai school. The study of maledicta (swear words).</li> <li>Physics, especially quantum physics, astronomy and chemistry. I was a chemistry student before switching majors, and my interest here has been near-lifelong.</li> <li>Spaceflight. I'm more of a history buff in this area, especially as NASA hasn't done anything terribly interesting since Skylab.</li> <li>Masks, their social implications, and uses in meditation.</li> <li>Typography.</li> <li>Linguistics and languages.</li> <li>Words in general. I still get happily lost in a good dictionary.</li> </ul>

wiki
I've been here for a while, but I tend to be more of a lurker. So far, my contributions have been rather minor: reworking of clumsy writing, correction of typos, and the like. If you're actually curious, you can see what I've been up to here or here.