User:Godless11B

This place feels like the perfect fit for my interests. Though I'm not a subject matter expert in any of the sciences I've always held a deep love of learning and a healthy degree of skepticism. I grew up fascinated by many of the pseudoscience and paranormal topics that are covered here, but was able to avoid taking them seriously as anything more than fodder for entertainment. (One of my earliest memories is of waking up on our family room couch to the sound of Leonard Nimoy telling me about voodoo.) I still find many of them interesting, in a "Neat. What if?" kind of way, but I've known too many good people who didn't have proper BS filters and I really like seeing a resource like this to help keep others like them from becoming victims.

I can't remember a time in my life when I believed in the supernatural even with years of being shot at and blown up now tucked under my belt. In fact, my grandmother still loves to recount the time when 6 year old me answered a query by one of her church friends' as to whether I was also a Christian by simply stating, "No, ma'am. I'm mostly German." She always chuckles when she finishes by explaining that this was the fourth time she'd taken me to church with her and the fourth time she'd been asked to come get me from the Sunday school class for asking follow-up questions.

That lack of belief carried over with me into the Army, where I spent a few years with "NO REL PREF" on my dog tags before I found out that my drill sergeants had lied to me when I asked if I could have "ATHEIST" on them instead (since they'll probably never officially recognize "APATHEIST" or "ANARCOMMUNISCORDIAN"). That's the inspiration for my username, actually. My nickname for most of my military career was "Godless" and my first military occupational specialty code was 11B, for infantry. I eventually reclassified to Aircraft Structural Repair and then to communications as a Signal Support Systems Specialist, which is a sort of jack-of-all-trades/EMT for anything the Army has that can send data. I set up, maintained, operated and repaired everything from vehicle intercoms, telephones and LANS, to backpack-portable satellite transceivers and the Army's specialized version of a fax machine.

I'm retired now, though, and need another hobby and I too frequently find myself ending the night with about a dozen articles open in tabs here. I've also always been pretty good at spelling (I went to state-level spelling competitions every year from 3rd grade to my junior year of high school) so I thought I'd lend my jan-ed-itorial skills to the effort here by cleaning up the little stuff that spell-checkers miss. I figure I'll probably just keep doing what I've always done here, going from random page to random page, but now I'll also take a moment or two to fix the little stuff that bugs me whenever I see it.