Frequently Asked Questions
Wednesday 17 January 2007 at 8:00 pm
- Who are you?
- What do you want?
- Never ask that question. Who are you?
- My name is Bryce Alexander Lynch. Most call me The Doctor.
- Are you the same Doctor Who that was interviewed in Phrack Magazine all those years ago?
- No, I'm not him. The one you're thinking of was in the LOD (the Legion of Doom) way back in the heyday of the HPAC/V scene in the 1980's. I've spoken to him a few times, though, and he's a pretty cool guy. I'm not pretending to be him, I'm someone who just happened to pick the same handle independently.
- You're not a web designer, are you?
- No. Does it show?
- What do you like to do?
- Oh, lots of things, though most of them are solitary in nature. I like to read, I write a little bit, I go wandering a great deal, listen to music, program, sometimes I give sketching a try. I enjoy travelling, especially to new places, though I do not get to go very often due to the fact that I am working as an IT ronin for hourly wages, which takes up most of my time when you factor in a two hour commute. If given the chance, however, I'll drive for hours if only to see where I wind up. I also like to people-watch; I think that people are fascinating creatures and someday I hope to understand them.
- Why do you always wear black?
- I don't always wear black, though it is the primary colour of my wardrobe. I do have a slight aversion to colours - I do not think that many of them are complimentary to my (computer geek's standard issue) pale skin. When I do choose to wear them my choice in shades tends to be on the absurd side.
- What music do you listen to?
- I listen to just about everything. Rock, country, rap, industrial, techno, classical, goth, soundtracks, musicals, the whole gamut.
- Where can you normally be found?
- Nowhere most people can find. I spend most of my time at the office doing network admin-type things, like pulling CAT-5 cable through the crawlspaces, making Linux and Solaris systems happy, trying to deal with Windows networking, dealing with end users and emergencies, stuff like that. If I'm not there then I've crawled back under my rock; maybe I'm jacked in, maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm completely exhausted from the crisis du jour, maybe I'm just tired and trying to catch a few hours of sleep. If it's the weekend it's entirely possible that I've gone on another cross-country jaunt or that I've dropped off the grid to recuperate.
- Do you play any games?
- Yes, oddly enough. I'm a member of the Camarilla, where I meet with the local chapter once or twice a month for a game. I've got a collection of RPG books that I rarely look at anymore (being a recluse is bad for starting a campaign). At any given time I've got one or two non-collectable card games in my pockets, just in case. Usually it happens to be Abduction or Gother Than Thou (where I know more than just the refrain from This Corrosion...)
- What books have you read?
- As a general rule I try to read five or six books that aren't related to my studies per week, though in practise it usually works out to be one or two. I prefer science fiction to any other style of fiction; my favourite genre of all time is classic cyberpunk, though there is a soft spot in my heart for pulp sci-fi (ala the Lensmen series or Tom Swift ). I also enjoy modern fantasy, such as The Wizard of Fourth Street or The Dresden Files. Anything else is subject to a case-by-case decision. I maintain a partial list of the stuff I've been reading on this page in reverse chronological order.
- What's your favourite book?
- Neuromancer by William Gibson.
- Blondes, brunettes, or redheads?
- Redheads, preferably.
- Men? Women?
- Either. I am bisexual. On the Kinsey Scale, I'm probably around a 5. (NOTE: Edited for correctness - I got the scale backwards.)
- Wanna yiff?
- No, but thank you for the offer. Just because I'm bi doesn't mean that I'll make a pass at anything with two legs and a heartbeat. I am extremely picky about my significant others... trust does not come easily to me and I absolutely refuse to become involved with anyone I don't trust.
- Are you male or female? The hair's got me confused...
- Genetically my body is male, more or less. I identify as no gender at all and consider myself an alchemical androgyne.
- How important is your sexuality to you?
- On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being the least, 10 being the greatest), it is somewhere around 2.50 to 3.50, depending on my emotional state. In contrast, programming ranks between a 6.0 and 7.5, depending on what kind of week I've had and how much my wrists are bothering me.
- What is it with you and stress?
- I'm a classic Type-A personality: I don't handle stress well and it shows. When things get rough, I start devoting mental processing time to things I need to get through. The sense of humour (such as it is) gets shut down, right along with the urge to go out and have a good time, watch television, have sex, or sleep. This isn't healthy, but it's all I've got to go on, and it does bring repeatable results.
- Do you drink?
- Occasionally. I don't like to drink because I don't like the effects it has on my body. There's also the little matter of having a very low tolerance to alcohol.... When I do drink I prefer red wines (merlot, preferably), Goldschlager, Wild Turkey, Tsingtao beer, Mike's Hard Lemonade, or hard cider.
- Coke or Pepsi?
- Coffee. As a rule I avoid processed sugars.
- Where do you reside right now?
- Somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States of America.
- When were you born?
- 15 February, 1978. Long enough ago that I fondly remember the 1980's but missed the Nixon administration.
- When do you plan on dying?
- If things work out the way I suspect they will, somewhen around 23 December 2012. If I make it past that time, I'll be bloody amazed. If my body kicks off before that date then I hope that my wishes will be honoured.
- As I mentioned before, I'm member of the Camarilla chapter at CMU. I'm also a member in good standing of the Church of Euthanasia. I am an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church. During the days of #insoc (after Don't Be Afraid was released) I was one of the members of the IILF (InSoc Internet Liberation Front, which was a group of regulars of the channel who were the first to unravel the secret of the white roses). I am a card-carrying member of the EFF. Theoretically, I'm a member of ToPY (Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth) but I'm not a member of a pack anymore. I am also a member in good standing of ' or 1=1--.
- What is your favourite song?
- Mirrorshades, by Information Society. It's on the album Hack.
- Hail Eris?
- All hail Discordia.
- Do you dance?
- I'm told that I can cut a rug.
- Do you sing?
- I'm no Sharon Apple.
- You've obviously a computer junkie - what's your favourite operating system?
- My OS of choice is Gentoo Linux, with NetBSD running a close second. I'll use Windows if I must but I'd much rather have an OS that I can rebuild if I so choose from the source code. The system configuration is very much like that of Solaris, and the initscripts are SYSV-like, which I've actually fallen in love with recently. Once I learn how to roll my own Debian packages (because I still compile a lot of stuff from source) I'll be all set.
- What about your favourite text editor?
- vi.
- Do you play any video games?
- Sometimes, yes. I still have my Nintendo 8-bit console and a few dozen games for it, which I bring out occasionally. I also still have a Sega Genesis unit with a handful of games (one day I'll get around to beating Phantasy Star II and III). Most recently I purchased a Playstation (June 2002) and I'm currently chipping away at the second quest of Parasite Eve. I should have it finished by the end of the summer if I keep up my "play it when I've got nothing else to do" pattern. I also have a small number of video games for DOS and Win32, which I'll probably try to play again once I get around to building the necessary system emulators for Linux (because I'm too lazy to build a Windows 95 system just to play Burn:Cycle or Adventures of the Smart Patrol). I have an extensive collection of Infocom games which I've been known to mess around with using Xzip or Frotz (homepage appears to be missing). I also have Quake 3 Arena and Descent 3 for Linux but I rarely play them, as I have no desk space so I can't configure my console conveniently. I've also been known to play Uplink for Linux). I one day hope to start playing nethack, but right now I don't have time. When I really do have time to kill I break out the C-64 or Atari XEGS to play some of the old school 8-bit games.
- What religion do you follow?
- I've put something together over the years from my studies of various paths and disciplines. After soul searching and a lot of reading on the Catholic religion, I left the Church somewhen late in the 1980's (I really don't quite remember when, it was very gradual). Early in high school I began reading up on seax wicca but discarded most of it as too unworkable. I read about various other pagan paths through high school, and was even a born-again Christian for a while. Unfortunately, the myriad contradictions within the structure of the Bible coupled with a profound disconnection of much of the information therein from any actual reality lead me to leave the path, though I do keep the basic tenents of Christianity in mind (as much as they are the basic tenants of most other organised religions, for that matter). During my time away at college I studied chaos magick in the style of Peter Carroll, in which I learned that improvisation and unconventionality are not bad things, but pragmatic in the sense of living and W/working in a manner which best befits the particular point of view of the individual and the circumstances (messed up or silly as they may be) of the situation at hand. However, I've found that a purely chaoist paradigm is not very useful if one needs some amount of structure in their life. Since then I've been doing more research into transformational and balancing paths in an effort to figure out my place in the universe and what, exactly, I should be doing right now. I've found Thelema and the various released texts of the Golden Dawn useful, as well as some of the pathworkings of the Old Craft for examining internal states and effecting change. I've been formulating my theories behind technomagick (using technology or a technical paradigm) into a system, but exoteric life being what it is it's slow going. In November of 2001 I dedicated myself to the deities of Eris (lady of strife and chaos) and Morpheus (lord of dreams); without them I would most definitely not have found any of these paths.
- Wait.. you're a Thelemite?
- Yes. I accept the law of Thelema.
- How long have you been a practitioner?
- Almost fifteen years.
- I've heard you make references in the past to being a furry. Is this accurate?
- It is. For as long as I can remember there has been a strong feline component in my personality, but I'd never really considered it anything but an eccentricity which I'd allow to appear in private sometimes until I happened to meet a number of west-coast furs at a convention (a hacker con, incidentally) who picked up on it immediately and sat me down for a chat. "Lad, you're a fur," they said. I really didn't know what they were talking about until I started looking up definitions of some of the words they were using. Yep, the shoe fit. I guess I'm nominally a member of the furry scene, but I'm really not active. I've got too much going on right now to really do much of anything. Not only that, but I feel like I'm on the fringe of the scene in general: I'm not into plushies (save the stranger ones; how often does one find a stuffie blue-ringed octopus, anyway?), I'm not a fursuiter, I'm not into puppets.. I'm just trying to make sense out of something rather odd with me (even by my standards) and trying to integrate that oddness into my personality and my life as best I can.
- I've noticed that you anthropomorphise your computers. Why do you do that?
- Habit. When I treat them like people I can figure out what's going on inside them more easily. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar; you get more information from people by talking to them than you do by ripping it out of their minds. You get farther with respect and kindness than you do with foul language and insults (the actions of many of my contemporaries to the contrary).
- You're weird, Doc.
- I'm saving up to be eccentric.
- I have lots and lots of interests and I switch through them from time to time. Sometimes I study this, and sometimes I study that, and sometimes I play around with this other thing... I really don't see why I have to limit myself to being just one thing: Why should I define myself as a pagan and nothing else? That's not my identity, it's just a part of it. Why should I define myself as a computer geek? That's not my identity either, it's just a part of it... all of these things are parts of who I am. I can no more neglect a single part than I can the sum of the parts. I am defined through synergy: The interplay of multiple facets making something more. It could be said that my W/will is defined by figuring out exactly what I am, which will no doubt alter who I am in the process. And someone's opinion of me will not change that. I walk my own path; I stay out of the way of others and if people get in my way I will go over them or around them to continue in my own.
- What's your record for abstaining from caffeine?
- Two weeks, six days.
- If your life could be made into a movie, who would the production team and actors be?
- William Gibson and Masamune Shirow would write the screenplay; the Wachowski brothers would direct; narration would be provided by Hunter S. Thompson; Val Kilmer (circa Real Genius) or James Spader (circa Crash) would play me. Information Society, the Cruxshadows, and Nyarlathotep would write the soundtrack.
- What single event has made you feel the oldest you've ever felt?
- Explaining to some people at a convention what a dot matrix printer was.
- What are your favourite languages to program in?
- Assembly (VAX and MIPS); C; Lambda; Perl. I've also been known to try to do the impossible with shell scripts just because I'm too lazy or too busy to write formal code in C.
- Who have you been mistaken for in the past?
- Andrew Eldritch (lead singer, Sisters of Mercy); Nick Cave (of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds); William Gibson (author of too many science fiction novels to name here); Tom Baker (who played the fourth Doctor on the BBC television series Doctor Who); Peter Murphy (former lead singer of Bauhaus); Keanu Reeves.
- What's your Purity Test score?
- On the Ferrett Purity Test v2.0 I am 52.85% pure.
- What's your Renn Faire Purity Score?
- I am 86.8% pure.
- Do you ever answer your cellphone?
- Yes, if I'm out and about. If I'm at the Lab I don't have my cellphone on - I have a landline, so there's no reason to use a cell at home. If I'm out of the Lab you can count on my having my cellphone with me. If I don't answer either I didn't hear it or I'm at work, where I'm not allowed to make or recieve any personal calls, in which case leave me a message in voicemail and I'll get back to you as soon as I pick it up.
- Why are you on a diet? You're too damn skinny.
- Being skinny isn't natural for my current body, it's because of dieting that it is that way. If left alone on a 'normal' diet it'll pack on weight and then not use it up. 2000 dietary calories a day is just too much for it. After many years of dieting and lots of exercise, as well as piecing together a diet which I adhere to fantically, or try to under most circumstances, it is finally presentable looking. I am not willing to un-do all that hard work, not by a long shot. I might look undernourished to you, but if I ate the way you did it would cache it all away, regardless of how much exercise I got.
- Did you really fail the Turing test?
- Yes. I was mistaken for a programme.
- You're into cyberpunk and stuff. What modifications would you have made to your body if it were possible? Money's no object; assume whatever degree of advancement in technology you like.
- Let me see... <rubs hands together gleefully>... a neurological coprocessor (head computer) with multitasking and math coprocessor capabilities; accelerated metabolism (ideally, I'd like my exterior to run on a minimum of 1700 dietary calories per day); at least two I/O jacks, slaved to the neuroprocessor; prosthetic eyes with 20/20 vision, IR, light amplification, greyscale analysis, and edge detection built in, cosmetically sculpted to appear to be cat's eyes (hell, while we're at it, LC overlays on the eyes' outer surfaces so I could control the colouration); boosted olfactory sensitivity; permanant waist-length hair (damned hairline), ivory white; replacement auditory receptors with volume control (depending on my mood, sculpted into cat's ears); ceramic extensible claws (for sharpness and transparency to metal detectors); larnyx modified to include a small vocoder; augmented immune system (just in case); reconstructed shoulder, knee, hip, wrist, and spinal joints (because I've damaged all of those many times over the years).
- Do you hang out on IRC?
- Not if I can help it. If I sit on IRC I won't get anything done, and I'd rather be productive than sit and destroy my wrists chitchatting. My RST is bad enough as it is.
- What's your average batman factor?
- My average batman factor is 2.8333, rounded up to 3 (by the definition of the term). This average was computed over 33 days of the year 2003.
- Your books are full of highlighter marks and there aren't any margins left because you've scribbled in them. Why did you do that?
- Because I'm an academic. I make notes on things. Generally speaking, the interesting bits of the text get highlighted, and insights I get into the facts go into the margins so that they stay in the context of the text. Usually at some point I summarise everything into a notebook (if it's important enough) and put my conclusions there. I don't write notes on the text into notebooks because then it's harder to maintain the association between the text and the notes; this way you can see immediately what's going on. Also, please keep in mind that I don't normally do that to books that aren't informational in nature, like novels and "fun books". They've got to be pretty special to warrant doing that.
- What does it take to get you to go anywhere?
- Contact me at least three weeks in advance if you want to do anything. When I'm up to going someplace and hanging out, I accept in the order that I hear about things going on. If I've already accepted another invitation, then I've already accepted another invitation. Sorry.
- If you're a top, how can you be a masochist as well?
- I'm technically a switch (someone who is comfortable on the top or the bottom of a scene) though I prefer the role of a top by nature. That said, there is nothing that says that the top in a scene can only enjoy inflicting pain - it is possible to enjoy inflicting and having inflicted pain. Over the years, my body grew used to being in pain of one sort or another: If it wasn't my back hurting, it was my shoulder or my ribs or my knees. In recent years, my wrists (due to repeditive stress trauma) have joined that list. People have different ways of dealing with constant or frequent pain - some people learn to ignore it, or turn it into something else. My brain wired itself to think that it was necessary to operate a body, one of the many prices to pay for being incarnated. I got used to it. When it's not there, when nothing is sending back error messages, I'm not sure what to do. I'm not sure how to act. Some days, that hole is best filled by having pain of some kind inflicted upon it. It reminds me that there's a body that I'm using, and that I need to at least keep tabs on it. I have to pay my rent, so to speak.
- I've known you for years and I never knew that about you...
- I know. I'm good at keeping secrets. I don't tell everyone everything. This FAQ doesn't tell everything about me, either.
- Are you really 829 years old?
- No. It's just a reference to my namesake. I do it for fun, to see if people are actually paying attention.
- How many people take you seriously when you say that?
- Good question. When I find out I'll let you know.
- What words don't I ever hear you say?
- You'll know them when you hear them.
- Why do you have a Jabber account even though no one else uses it?
- Somebody has to.
- Liberty or safety?
- Liberty.
- Art Bell or George Noory?
- Art Bell.
- Do you care if so many people link to your photographs to make fun of you on web forums?
- Not really. They only push my Google rankings higher. I get quite a few readers that way, too.
- You watch United States politics very closely. What political party do you back?
- I don't back any of them. Not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the Greens, not the Libertarians. The Democrats and Republicans are locked in a perpetual war where they try to gain control over the government, the Greens and Libertarians can't even make their voices heard. Hell, their candidates were arrested during the debates of the 2004 election because they wanted to participate in the debates... the political parties once represented the will of the people of the United States of America in government. Their representatives kept up with the issues of the people and presented them to the government for the benefit of everyone. Now the parties have only their own agendas firmly in mind, and unless you're a member of one of the parties and toe the party line, to hell with you.
- They certainly don't listen to folks like me, who actually are affected adversely by everything going on. The government doesn't listen to folks like me when we have problems; neither do the political parties. Thus, I don't support them at all, but I do respect the power they have over people and their methods of controlling popular opinion.
- Uncle Spider? Uncle Al? Uncle Chuck? Uncle Alan?
- 'Uncle' is a term of respect that the Doctor uses for certain people or characters who are considered (in)famous or influential to certain groups of people of considerable size in general and to the Doctor in particular in a "hee hee, only partially serious" sort of way.
- Do you ever speak for your employers?
- Hell, no. I'm a sysadmin, not a PR rep.
- Why do you put a string of numbers ([412/724/301/703]) after your name when you post to public forums and mailing lists? Magickians often put the numerical correspondences of certain concepts after their names as a way of connecting themselves to those concepts (the power of names and all that), but what you do doesn't make any sense in that context.
- Those aren't gematria, those are area codes.
- In the days of dialup and BBSes (bulletin board systems), it was inevitable that some people would select the same handle. To differentiate themselves, users would often put the area codes they were from or that they were most active in inside hard brackets after their names (for example, "Bullet Fragment [512]"). The numbers are the area codes I was most active in back in my BBS days, and serve to differentiate me from the other Doctor Who's out there.
- Hot anger? Cold anger? Blind rage?
- Cold anger. Patient anger. Cryogenic anger.
- Why do you rate restaurants in flare guns?
- Rather than use stars or spoons to rate restaurants, I use flare guns. The reason for this is twofold: They rank how ill you feel half an hour after you finish your meal (lower is better) and how much work you had to do to get the attention of your waiter or waitress (again, lower is better). A diner that left you throwing up and/or had lousy service would get four or five flare guns, while a gourmet restaurant where your waiter stopped by every ten minutes to check on you would probably get a rating of one flare gun or less.
- What's your Myers-Briggs personality type?
- INTJ - Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging. There's a description of this personality type here.
- Your website looks a little messed up. What's going on?
- I tinker with the layout of my site sometimes. I might add or remove something, and sometimes it needs debugging. Well, it will need debugging, because I'm far from a web designer and this stuff doesn't come naturally to me.
- Why don't you have a mailto: link on your website?
- I've largely given up on e-mail as a productive means of communication with people outside of work. After a couple of years of writing fairly well reasoned e-mails to people who never seem to respond, I decided to focus my efforts elsewhere.
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