Hello World [Green Gabbro]

Welcome, Gentle Reader, to my new series of Internet tubes. You'll notice that I haven't completely unpacked - there's no pretty banner at the top, the blogroll is woefully incomplete (it's probably even missing your blog!), and my profile page is not nearly as verbose as it could be. It'll get there in time.

You can expect to see this space filled in the future with rocks, water, progressive identity politics, primal screams of terror associated with my master's thesis (due in May) and/or my upcoming wedding (September), and maybe some lolcats. Oh, and pie - I am quite keen on pie. If you're familiar with the old Green Gabbro, though, you may notice a change...

I'm finally blogging under my real name
Is this unwise? I don't know. Maybe. It certainly feels scary, especially since I'm only a few months away from a job hunt.

Then again, my pseudonymity has been mostly a joke for most of the 6+ years I've been blogging. I've already suffered the embarrassment of a professional acquaintance Googling me in search of my email address, only to find not just my blog, but a recent quote'n'link entry about someone's clever literary analysis of the sex scene in Brokeback Mountain. My parents and in-laws read my blog. I can't really use it to vent, spread libelous rumors, or reveal the titillating details of my sex life. Clearly, all the fun has already been sucked out of my writing, leaving behind a shambling blog-golem made up of nothing but dry facts about boring old rocks - and that's why I was invited to join ScienceBlogs.

I was talking about this with a purple-haired friend. He told me that even in the traditionally anything-goes field of computer programming, and even in San Francisco, he found several prospective employers willing to tear his resume to shreds as soon as they saw him. He also found some who immediately assumed he was a genius, because why would someone of only average abilities handicap themselves with purple hair?

Fortunately, I have the economic wherewithal to wait, at least for a little while, for an employer to read this blog and decide that I must be a genius (or at least that I know how to write).

I will make one concession to the professional panopticon, though. From now on, there will be much less fuc feh foo pottymouth. This apparently means keeping a carton of strike-out jokes on hand for a quick substitute whenever I get the urge to swear, which is all the time fracking fudge time.