Hello! I'm new to this community so I'll take a bit of time to post an introduction.

I'm a queer pagan-ish atheist living in San Francisco and working as a software engineer at Apple. Well, I have lots of pagan friends anyhow; I'm still not sure I qualify for the P-word myself. I've always been fascinated by and enjoyed myth and fantasy, and exploring nonrational experience is a growing interest of mine, but in the end stories are stories and experiences, however esoteric or fantastic, have to be analyzed and integrated into daily life. Basically I'm using esoteric techniques from a purely psychological perspective. If you can get past the woo-woo (and that is often very difficult indeed), the practices themselves can be surprisingly rich. The nice thing about pagans is they're incredibly tolerant and open-minded, and a surprising number are secretly nor not-so-secretly atheists.

On the flip side, I've read nearly all of Ayn Rand's published works and a broad spectrum of science writing on psychology and evolution (Daniel Dennett is a particularly good writer). Ms. Rand was a big influence for a long time, for both good and bad, but in the end I got tired of dealing with both the cult of Objectivism and her knee-jerk opponents, and pretty much gave up on discussing her work critically with anybody. I don't spend much reading time on these topics any more, as I'm already convinced, and am more interested in practical self-development than general theory.

I look forward to meeting folks on this site, but I'll say in advance I don't go adding everybody I meet to my friends list. If we find ourselves chatting a lot or interacting in forums, then we can make a relationship formal. ;-)