Tireless Neck

I'd like to meet:

I'm interested in meeting people who totally rock out and love the music. True heavy metal preferred, but anything that rocks, rocks. You know how that is.
Keysigners , oldschool hackers, cipherpunks, culture jammers, anyone who Big Brother might call "subversive."
Ok, I've had it! I no longer maintain my MySpace calendar; it screwed up one too many times. For now, if you want to know where the good shows (IMHO) are, check my You Can Still Rock in Albuquerque calendar at Google. (And if you happen to be on the Alibi LAN right now check this out (won't work for most people; sorry, be patient).)

Music:

Power metal, thrash metal, speed metal, traditional metal, progressive metal, progressive rock, doom metal, stoner rock, and yes, good ol' classic rock'n'roll. I'm not going to list bands, because there are just way too many of them. But you can check my AudioScrobbler Profile to get a rough overview of what I'm into.
Music somehow became pretty important to me. I have a little over a thousand CDs, I go to many local metal bands' shows (and I also follow a few local rock bands), I plan many of my out-of-town vacations around metal festivals.
But I'm purely on the demand side. When I think no one is around, and I get out my Gamma Ray karaoke CD , the world as we know it is imperiled. An evil wind blows in from a nameless quarter of the desert, dogs howl for miles around, the clouds darken from my foul blasphemy, and the dust from all the centuries' dead flutters, disturbed from its rest. Omnipotent forces that play unfathomable games in the void between galaxies, cover their ears and cringe in pain. They turn Their attention to our pathetic floating island, and briefly entertain the thought of crushing it like a bug, just to silence my abominable racket. Their mere gaze triggers solar flares, earthquakes, and realignment of the magnetic poles. It causes psychics in mental institutions to scream and pull their hair out in bloody clumps, and it makes cats all over the world arch their backs and hiss at the unseen menace.
Fortunately, I don't do it very often.

Movies:

Love and Death , Robocop , Aliens , Hard Boiled , Day of the Dead , Dr. Strangelove

Television:

Futurama , Babylon 5 , Frontline , Now, Nova, Junkyard Wars, Dirty Jobs, Monty Python, Whose Line Is It Anyway.
Alas, I've been TV-free for about two years. I have one; I just forget to turn it on. Maybe when Futurama comes back...

Books:

"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Doug Hofstadter
"Catch-22" by Joseph Heller
"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by HP Lovecraft
"The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A Heinlein
"The Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham
"A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. In fact, I just overall fucking love Vernor Vinge 's writing every time. Be like me, read his books.
Like a lot of people, I've been enjoying the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R R Martin.

Heroes:

Favorite Freedom Fighters:

Phil Zimmermann , for PGP . The courage he showed and sacrifice he endured when he stood up to the government for an important principle, will always be remembered. It's also cool that he won that battle (follow that link and read the last paragraph ("there are forces at work..") ten times, if you give a damn about anything political). If you've been following recent events, though (especially since September 2001) you'll know that we still have a war ahead. Once again, with his recent project , PRZ distinguishes himself.Richard Stallman, for GNU , the GPL, LfPF, and related stuff. I used to think he was a paranoid crackpot, but then his ridiculously unrealistic unbelievably stupid predictions started coming true and suddenly didn't seem so stupid (even if they remained unbelievable ;-). This guy deserves more respect than he gets, and should be admired. Theo de Raadt : Freedom has practical implications; it's not "merely" a "damned fool idealistic crusade." If you don't have source, how can you audit? There's a reason he doesn't like binary blobs and closed drivers, and there's a reason OpenBSD has such an excellent track record in security, and those reasons are the same. It's not a coincidence! Chris Montgomery , for Ogg Vorbis . This dude understands why we need unencumbered codecs, and then he put up and did the work. That it also turned out to be technically excellent (the best, IMHO), is icing on the cake.