User:Demivisage

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).
Physics, especially quantum physics, astronomy and chemistry. I was a chemistry student before switching majors, and my interest here has been near-lifelong.
Spaceflight. I'm more of a history buff in this area, especially as NASA hasn't done anything terribly interesting since Skylab.
Masks, their social implications, and uses in meditation.
Typography.
Linguistics and languages.
Words in general. I still get happily lost in a good dictionary.

wiki[edit]

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.