About Me
Hi.
Uh. My name is Butterfree and I own this website. Of course, it is not actually Butterfree - my real name is Hlín - but on the Internet I prefer people call me Butterfree (or Dragonfree, or antialiasis, though the last one mostly gets used in non-Pokémon contexts). "Hlín" just looks kind of stupid in the middle of English text, and when I'm communicating in English my brain is firmly in my-name-is-Butterfree mode, so it kind of throws me off to be suddenly confronted with my real name.
If you're thinking "What kind of a name is Hlín?", it rhymes with "spleen", it's Icelandic, and yes, I am Icelandic and live in Iceland. I learned English mostly from video games, Harry Potter and the Internet. Most people in Iceland speak decent English, as we both learn it in school and are generally exposed to the language a lot through English-language movies, TV shows, video games and so on (we subtitle movies and TV shows, but if you're going to play video games, you'll just have to know English whether you like it or not). The name Hlín can mean "earth", but it is also the name of a protector goddess in Norse mythology. Just to make things confusing, it is also used as a name for a completely different goddess in Norse mythology; Norse mythology likes to be weird. (It also has a male god turning himself into a mare to seduce a horse in order to win a bet. He gets pregnant and gives birth to an eight-legged foal. No, really.)
Anyway. I am female and was born on February 18th 1990, making me twenty-one years old at the moment. I'm pretty thin, I have long hair that I insist on calling blonde even though it's been getting brown over the years, and my eyes are blue. I wear glasses, get freckles, and my mouth looks really odd when I smile (especially so when I'm photographed; I tend to look like I'm out to get your children if I try to smile in a photograph). I also have awesome big dangling earlobes. My personal life is generally not interesting; I normally spend most of my free time either sitting around at my computer (if I'm feeling productive, I'll be writing or working on this site; if I'm not feeling productive, I'll be pointlessly refreshing a bunch of forums or indulging in my current obsessions) or sitting around at my boyfriend's house with my laptop. (My boyfriend, of five years and counting, is the 'Shadey' I mention every so often; that is of course not actually his name either, but an affectionate nickname that I coined from the name he usually uses for renamable player characters in video games. He is not in the Pokémon fandom, so if you think you know him you probably don't.)
I am currently studying computer science at the University of Iceland, but since 2010 I've had a summer job as a web programmer for a small company. My dream job is to be a writer (hence all that fanfiction), but I realize that's not the most practical of occupations and I expect I'm going to spend most of my life working as a web programmer of some sort, which suits me just fine as that's also something I really enjoy. I have a very wide range of interests, in general; aside from writing and programming, I'm also fascinated by psychology, some aspects of philosophy (especially the philosophy of communication and ethics), genetics and evolutionary biology, and some branches of mathematics, especially number theory, cryptography and complex numbers. (I also like quantum physics because it shows that the world actually runs on complex numbers. People who don't find this awesome make me sad.)
Personality-wise, I have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies, most notably a meticulous perfectionism and love for redoing things if I don't like the way I did them the first time anymore. I also have periodic obsessions when I happen to discover or rediscover the awesomeness of... well, anything. While obsessed, I have an annoying tendency to ramble fangirlishly on about my current obsession to everybody and spend my free time looking up whatever I can find about it on the Internet (which unfortunately means I'm not productive in the meanwhile). When obsessions subside, they can surge back up again when I'm reminded of the existence of whatever it is; I generally never stop loving anything I've once obsessed over, but after a while it seems my brain tends to decide it's had enough of this one thing for now and looks for something else to squee about.
I generally don't like to start conversations with people I don't know extremely well, so when I'm around shy people I tend to be very quiet; when there are more outgoing people around (like Shadey) who can do the conversation-starting, however, I can get quite talkative, and ditto for when I'm with people I know very well. In general, though, I actually really enjoy listening to other people's conversations without necessarily participating, so I don't really mind not talking. Relatedly, I really enjoy watching other people play video games, which is a great help since I tend to suck at anything that's not completely turn-based.
My What Pokémon Are You? quiz fairly accurately tells me this:
Random last-minute facts!
- I have a cat. He's tabby and completely adorable and his name is Brandur Tási Snotruson, although nobody actually uses his name and we all have different nicknames for him. Shadey, meanwhile, has a Yorkshire terrier named Lukka, who is also pretty adorable, although I'm more of a cat person.
- I am an atheist. This means, for clarification, that I don't believe in the existence of a supernatural deity in the sense understood by religion due to the lack of sufficient evidence for it. It does not mean that I hate religious people, that I am angry with God, or that I actively have faith in the nonexistence of God.
- I have an odd fascination with death, torture, murder, suicide and capital punishment, mostly from a psychological perspective. When I was little I would make up these morbid little stories about nameless characters being tortured and executed in horrible ways. (I was a strange child.)
- In general I've loved to make up stories since I was little, but even when they weren't exclusively about people being killed, I would squeeze the death penalty in some form somewhere into most everything if I possibly could. I had one story, kind of disturbing in retrospect, about a sympathetic mass murderer on the run from the authorities and the death sentence awaiting him, for instance, and one that went off in a tangent taking up literally a third of the story explaining the fictional society's two types of capital punishment, death and a fate worse than death. Along with the death thing, I also had a bit of a resurrection thing: one particular story had every single main character killed and then revived by magic several times.
- Despite the fascination, by the way, I am passionately opposed to the death penalty. I only find it interesting because I find it so extremely twisted and disturbing. A common theme in those stories was good guys capturing some bad guys, torturing and/or executing them horribly, and then realizing with remorse that what they just did was far worse than anything the bad guys ever did. (This would optionally be followed by the good guys committing suicide at the realization and then everybody being resurrected as better, wiser people. Again, I had a thing.)
- I don't eat fruit. The texture just kind of disgusts me. In general my eating habits are kind of odd; 70% of what I eat is Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Clearly, they are reasonably healthy, since I have not dropped dead from malnutrition yet.
- I don't drink, even though I legally can. Alcoholic drinks have zero appeal to me and that doesn't seem to be changing. Shadey feels much the same way. (We also don't smoke or do other recreational drugs, for that matter.)
- I wear my watch on my right hand, ever since I was little and the button on the watch I had then hurt my wrist when I had it on my left hand. I switched and have worn it on the right hand ever since.
- I get random nosebleeds, with there being periods of none at all and then periods (such as when I'm typing this) where I seem to get them every other day. Seems to be genetic, since my brother and my dad were that way too. Funnily enough, Shadey is the same even though we're not related. Soulmates?
- I have a LiveJournal, although I don't update it very often and it consists mostly of my various crazy dreams and lengthy breakdowns of everything I do on my vacations abroad. I also have a Twitter account, where I, well, tweet about whatever crosses my mind; it is not necessarily remarkable or interesting (a lot of it tends to be me fangirling about my current obsession), but hey. Please note that as both of those are more personal venues, they may occasionally contain (or link to pages containing) significantly stronger language than you would find on this site (well, outside Morphic, anyway). I don't swear much, but it's there. I'm not going to put a rating or age restriction on them, but if you don't think you should see it or don't want to, don't go there.
You're still here? Interesting. I always thought I was the only person who liked to read long "About Me" sections. Since you've proven me wrong, I'm going to give you a reward: a Secret Link clue!
Page last modified November 05 2011 at 02:06 GMT
