Gaming (Almost any kind), Role-Playing Games (D&D, White Wolf, etc.; If I have to explain, you won't understand), Anything that explodes, creates fire, etc., Music, Martial Arts, Game Design, Computing, Cooking,
I'd like to meet:
Kevin Mitnick, Robert Tappan Morris (rtm), Trent Reznor, Chris "Spud" Vrenna, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, John Carmack ("Carmack The Magnificent"), John Conway, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Hofstadter, David Foster Wallace, Siddhartha Gautama, Charles Stross
Music:
Nine Inch Nails! Radiohead! Muse! Canon! The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, The Prodigy, BT, Marliyn Manson, Incubus, A Perfect Circle, The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Dave Matthews, Sublime, The Distillers, No Doubt, The Living End, Nirvana, The Offspring, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Raconteurs, U2, They Might Be Giants, The Barenaked Ladies, The Pillows (Japanese Rock band), David Bowie, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, Muzio Clementi, The (Dixie) Dregs, Beck, Queen, Queens of the Stone Age, The Gorillaz, Hive, UNKLE, Basement Jaxx, The Dresden Dolls, The Faint, tweaker (Chris Vrenna), Earth To Andy, Audioslave, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, System of a Down, The Adicts, The Bouncing Souls, Goldfinger, Black Flag, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Beastie Boys, Fatboy Slim, Björk, Paul Oakenfold, Juno Reactor, Sonic Mayhem, The Flaming Lips, Massive Attack, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Weezer, Del tha Funkee Homosapien (i.e. Deltron 3030, Handsome Boy Modeling School, The Gorillaz, Doctor Octagon, etc.), Jurassic 5; pretty much anything other than corporate or "Gansta Rap" Hip-Hop (corporate anything, really), Country, annoying Pop and Pop-Punk (especially Emo... I have found very little Emo worth listening to), Street Punk, and crappy/ultra-repetitive Trance and House. INDIE 103.1 ROCKS!
Movies:
Sci-Fi and Fantasy, mostly, and a lot of Anime; The Matrix (the first one, thank you), The Animatrix (better than all three live-action ones, in my opinion), Ghost In The Shell (Motoko Kusanagi kicks ass), any Miyazaki (Totoro, Spirited Away, Nausicaä, etc.), Dune (the three-part miniseries, not the 1984 movie, that one sucked ass), The Lord of the Rings (duh), Ocean's Eleven et al., really want to see Vampire Hunter D, The Fifth Element, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Equilibrium (and no, it's not a rip-off of The Matrix, it was produced at almost the exact same time, and Christian Bale is a much better actor than Keanu Reeves anyway), The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (the new one, a classic in my opinion, fuck what Entertainment Weekly says, Wired and the LA Times gave it good reviews, so there; worth seeing for any Hitchhiker's series fan, and Zooey Deschanel, Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, and John Malkovich are all great), The Great Escape, Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kung Fu Hustle (the coolest, not to mention funniest damn Kung Fu movie I've ever seen, Stephen Chow is a genius), Serenity... that was one of the coolest fracking sci-fi movies I've ever seen. It was everything that Episode III should have been, and more. Oh, and Episode III blew. Really hard. Batman Begins was the one of the coolest superhero movies ever.
Television:
The only shows I watch on a regular basis are: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Real Time with Bill Maher; ER most of the time; Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica (the new series, one of the best Science Fiction shows ever made, it rivals HBO's and Showtime's material in both writing and acting quality), which incedentally, are all one after another on the Sci-Fi channel every Friday. If I still got HBO and Showtime, I would also watch Deadwood and Dead Like Me, but Comcast Time Warner Cable sucks and won't give us back our HBO. Oh, and Firefly kicks ass. The Dresden Files is awesome too, had a pretty good first season.
Books:
The Increasingly Inaccurately Named Hitchhiker's Trilogy, by Douglas Adams; anything by Neil Gaiman, the better novels of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series; Zodiac, Snow Crash, and The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson, as well as his incredibly awesome three-volume, eight-book, 2700-page magnum opus The Baroque Cycle; The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling (shut up); Neuromancer, Mona Lisa overdrive, and Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson; anything by H.P. Lovecraft, who had great ideas, but really was not that great a writer; The Dune Series, by Frank Herbert, although the "prequel" stuff by his son is complete shit; The Icewind Dale Trilogy, The Dark Elf Trilogy, and The Legacy of the Drow, (a.k.a. the Drizzt Do'Urden Series) by Robert A. Salvatore; The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien, although Return of the King was waaay too damn long and dreary; the series A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin; anything by Douglas Hofstadter; David Foster Wallace, especially A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again; anything by Charles Stross, especially Accelerando; Iain (M.) Banks' The Culture series, The Algebraist, and The Business;
Heroes:
Albert Einstein, Richard P. Feynman, Douglas Adams, Siddhartha Gautama
