wickedqueen.net

So all this past semester, everyone in my comm arts class (”Rhetoric and the Intarwebs”–okay, the official title was slightly different) kept raving about hulu.com, where you can stream all kinds of random television with the usual intermittent ads from Visa and shit. There’s some current stuff–The Daily Show, for instance–but also a lot of OLD stuff, like Knight Rider and McHale’s Navy. I kept telling myself that I was too busy to go near such a colossally perfect timesuck, but then it was summer, and I finished the IRB application for my research and I have no official job,* and so I started nosing around the site.

I have no recollection of how I first stumbled upon Cleopatra 2525. I have vague memories of having heard of it in the past, but I had assumed it was some kind of Ancient Egyptian steampunk deal. It is not. “Cleopatra” is the title character, a cryogenically frozen 21st century exotic dancer who awakens in the 26th century when Earth has been conquered by the machines and is taken in by two scantily clad resistance fighters, one of whom is played by Gina Torres, who I had no idea had come up quite THAT much in the world when she got on Firefly.

The show appears to have been produced in someone’s basement with costumes by the Frederick’s of Hollywood clearance grab bag.** It is mostly bare midriffs and laser blasts. As my friend Leanna commented, I cannot believe it is not still on the air, with millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise and some kind of theme park. Consider this theme song:

(Spoken)
Five hundred years into the future
She will enter a world where machines rule the Earth
Mankind has been driven underground
And Cleopatra is about to discover
There’s no place like home!

(Sung, with awesome drama)
In the year 2525
There are women with the will to survive
Fighting for a brand new day
Nothing’s gonna get in their way
In the year 2525
Three women keep hope alive
Joining forces to reclaim the Earth
Looking ahead to humankind’s rebirth!

Dude. Hot girls with lasers in the post-apocalypse. If this had been around when I was a kid, it might partially explain how I turned out this way.

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*I’m enrolled in three credits of “directed reading” in order to continue to live off the government. It’s not the solution I would have preferred, but it does free up my time to work on my dissertation proposal. Assuming I can stop watching hulu at some point.

**This is a real thing, or it used to be. You tell them your size, you get a random dress and pair of shoes. My dad got a Halloween costume out of it once.

Her name is Isabeau. “Izzy” for short; “Dove Isabeau” for long; “the foulest beast in Christendom” for longest. It’s from a folk song (naturally).

Already she has improved my life by immediately developing an upper respiratory infection upon her departure from the Humane Society, resulting in two days of not eating and concomitant frantic worry and attempts on my part to get her to EAT SOMETHING, followed by a Monday trip to the vet that ran upwards of $50 for a penicillin injection and instructions/equipment for syringe-feeding. She’s already eating a little on her own now, and is a total crazed ball of energy again. For my part, I now remember why I don’t actually want a human infant any time in the immediate future. Win-win.

As you can see, she a) has giant ears like a bat and b) enjoys sitting on my shoulder/back during those rare moments when she is not break-dancing in mid-air for a mouse on a string.

She also likes the cat tower.

She did sleep under my desk for a little bit, but it was while she was starving and not in top form.

For the most part, she is in isolation in the bathroom; I put Bart and Dora in the bedroom to let her out to play. I was planning a slow introduction anyway, but now that she’s got hideously contagious cat flu it will have to be even slower. On the plus side (for Bart and Dora), I feel bad enough about disrupting their lives that I am constantly plying them with treats, including special hoity-toity grain-free wet cat food in various flavors that include 100% quail. I know; it’s a little embarrassing.

Really EPIC asshaberdashery, though. Srsly. And it happened at WisCon, my first and favorite con, by way of a miserable self-hating gamer girl named Rachel Moss, who as it happens is also a graduate student at my own institution.

You may want to take a moment to catch up with the Angry Black Woman’s comprehensive explanation of what happened. (And skip to the bottom if you have no idea what WisCon is.)

I use the term “gamer girl” above with a healthy dose of irony–Moss does seem to indicate herself that her primary fannish interest is in game, and she is female, but in general I try to take care with my application of the label “girl.”* Here, I mostly want to highlight something that I see as a problem: many people who have reported on the Incident and/or discussed its ramifications have identified her as “young” or “very young,” often in an attempt to render her in some way pitiable–not excused; very few people are on board for that, but somehow slightly less responsible, or at least that’s how it reads to me.

Moss is 25 years old. She’s a year younger than me. She’s a graduate student at UW-Madison, just like me. Unlike me, she apparently struggles with an eating disorder** and has for many years. Like other posters on the subject I hasten to clarify that I think it is very sad that she has an eating disorder, and should never be grounds for attacking her–or, conversely, seen as an insult when I note that she has one; she has spoken about it publicly and it is, if I may say so, profoundly fucked up to act like saying “eating disorder” is equivalent to “her mother’s a whore.”

However, having an eating disorder and being an asshole are not the same problem. They do seem to be at least peripherally related; Moss hates other women, and what she hates in them seems to be all the things she most fears to see in herself: fat, “inadequate” or somehow unconvincing gender performance (as I’d interpret her transphobia), disability, etc. Claire Light puts it beautifully, and acknowledges some unpleasant similarities inside her own head that I would bet almost all women in this culture have experienced:

But watching fat people get smacked down makes me want to cry because while most of me is an ally, a small part of me still tugs me towards the smack-down crew, and how can we fight this when I’m also the enemy?

There’s still a little voice in my head that agrees with such awful people as Rachel Moss when they say awful things about fat people. I’ve come close many times to stomping that little voice out, but it’s a tough one. It’s the same voice that tells me I’m fat, but it’s okay as long as other people are fatter. I know a lot of you out there know that voice, even if you won’t admit it.

Rachel Moss knows that voice, only she has completely failed–if she ever tried–to stomp it out. She’s let that voice take over, and it’s a monster’s voice. That’s what she’s turned into for the time being: a monster, who’s projected her hatred of her own body onto the bodies of others, to get some relief. Who can really doubt that that’s what’s happening with women who hate on fat women?

I definitely know that voice. I have done the “fatter than me” count in a room more than once. But the thing is, I don’t agree with it. I know the voice is fucked up and wrong. Even if–especially if–I start feeling like I believe it. Recently, I was discussing weight and body image issues with one of my favorite WisCon goers, and I noted that the big problem I have in entering discussions like that is that people often assume that because I am a small woman with a fairly intense workout schedule, I am judging them for lacking my “discipline” or however you want to term it. I’m not. I do sometimes get a little nuts about a couple of pounds of personal weight gain, mainly because I put on about 40 in my first two years of grad school and I recall that it starts with two or three, and also I prefer it when my clothes fit. And I like being strong, and knowing that I can bike 50 miles, etc. But this is my personal standard. It takes a lot of work. When other people are not as fit as me, I don’t think they are lazy slobs; I figure they have other stuff to do, because, eschewing false modesty, most people are not as athletic as I am.*** Most people don’t spend the time on it that I do, most people don’t bike 100+ miles a week, most people don’t do weight training ~3 times a week. Why the hell would they? Keeping in top shape is kind of like chasing storms or keeping a log of all the trains that come through town: important to some individuals, mind-bogglingly boring and/or insane to most.

So I don’t have an eating disorder, but I can get a little hyperfocused sometimes. On myself, not other people. And other people do have eating disorders–a depressingly large number of them, in fact. So far, only ONE person has come to WisCon two years in a row with the express purpose, on her second visit, of taking photos without permission and posting them online to mock people for being fat, disabled, trans, not white… In her original post, from what I saw, Moss was mostly focused on misogyny and fatphobia, but she didn’t shy away from asserting her authority to racially categorize all participants and thereby delegitimize their identities, and the racism that followed from the SASS crowd is, to a sheltered white academic, truly staggering.

I think Claire is absolutely right, both in her assertion of the psychological motivation behind Moss’s acts and also in her implication that Moss is very different from most women, who hear the voice but who do not develop a full-blown case of demonic possession by the patriarchy. For fucksakes.

A number of people have reposted and analyzed Moss’s opening remarks about the con–the con that she, remember, paid registration fees to attend not once but twice, although as a Madison resident she probably didn’t pay for lodging:

[WisCon] is like any other sci-fi con, except that well over half of the attendees are female, about a third of the panels are political, there is no gaming, and absolutely everybody is a huge bitch.

LiveJournal user hederahelix noted that contrary to her third assertion, Moss was sitting next to a gamer at one panel at least–since she sat next to hederahelix, and hederahelix is a gamer. I was on a panel about gender swapping in gaming during which there was a great deal of discussion about both MMOGs and table-top RPGs. At that panel, we also discussed the sexism and misogyny inherent in gamer culture on a number of levels: the automatic equation of healers with women, the reaction of a mostly male player base to the hiring of a female community manager at NCSoft, the way that male players often attempt to roleplay women (and absolutely refuse to hear “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” from actual women)…

I said that Moss is not particularly young, and I don’t think she is, at least not in any way that excuses or even explains anything. But she reminds me of an angrier and more poisonous version of 14-year-old me in the sense that she is obviously looking for an environment where she has no competition for male attention, and I think what she hates most about WisCon is that it both fails to provide much in the way of that commodity AND fails to acknowledge that commodity as inherently valuable.

When I was 14, I was the only female member of the RPG club at my high school. I was a sophomore, and for an entire year it was me and a bunch of role-playing guys. The next year, four or five other female students joined, and at the time I would have preferred it if they hadn’t. I was younger than everyone else, I was funny-looking, and I wanted the gamer guys to myself. And even then, I didn’t try to chase anyone away, I didn’t give up on it myself, I didn’t turn around and attack the other women in the environment. I thought a lot of crazy things at age 14, and I made a lot of bad decisions. But even then I realized that other women were not the automatic enemy. And I was not a complete asshole.****

On a more positive note: the thing that I love most about WisCon is the way that its attendees celebrate ourselves. It is, I suspect, this very quality at which Moss grits her teeth like the Grinch looking down on Whoville.

Many people have commented that the photos held up for mockery by Moss and others show people who appear to be having a wonderful time. Many of them are photos of my friends: hilarious, kind, wonderful, brave people. People who are not afraid to BE. WisCon is one of the few places where I never feel like I am Too Much: too smart, too weird, too flamboyant, too chattery…

Not that I make much effort to tone these qualities down in Real Life; I have pink hair for godsakes. But at WisCon, I feel like people GET it. Instead of mere wide eyes and the occasional burst of helpless laughter, my ensembles garner heartfelt appreciation. No one wonders WHY I am wearing a lovingly restored lime green go-go dress with hot pink fringe dangling big plastic flowers. They just marvel at the matching go-go boots. They appreciate my nerd/folk mix CDs (speaking of, I met my goal of distributing 100 of them this year).

So on the one hand, I’m not much moved by people pushing pity for Rachel Moss, who set out to deliberately humiliate and harm a number of people whose happiness I value highly, and who is DEFINITELY not sorry about anything other than possibly getting caught. But on the other… okay, yes. I do pity her. I pity anyone who can stand two years running in the middle of all that exuberance and Not Get It, like Kay with a chip of ice mirror in his heart. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then why come back? There’s got to be something there that she wants, and she hates everyone who has figured out how to let themselves have it.

I love WisCon. I am extremely bummed that I missed almost half the con laid up with the Wischolera (and how awesome is a group of people that collectively comes up with the term “Wischolera”?) but I am already looking forward to next year, when I’ll be living right by the conference hotel again. I just don’t have much time to spare for people whose lives are governed by fear.

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ETA: It occurs to me that many people may be totally confused about what WisCon IS. It’s a feminist science fiction/fantasy convention held in Madison, WI over Memorial Day Weekend every year. It attracts a lot of academic types, enough that there is an academic programming track; I presented a paper on gender-swapping in MMOGs there a couple of years ago, and it was really nice to be talking to an audience that didn’t need a 15-minute primer on “What is a virtual world” before I could get to the substantive content of my paper. A lot of very cool people attend from all over the country and even outside the US, and of course they (and the late night parties at which we get to hang out and drink ever night) are really the best part of the con. Some of us are, I suppose, “huge bitches”; others of us are really fairly small bitches with tall shoes to compensate.

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*Not quite as much as I do with the term “lady”; if you hear me use this word or its plural, you may assume that I am mocking some misguided person’s ideals of “modern chivalry.” This is pretty easy to cue into given how much I tend to extend the “a” when I say it.

****At age 14, I admit, no one is a complete NON-asshole either.

It is a PTERODACTYL.

Pterodactyls were dinosaurs, which were REPTILES.*

WHY is the “artist’s rendering” DISTINCTLY FURRY?

What ARE they teaching them in these schools, dammit?

And dude, how awesome would it be to have a tiny pterodactyl of one’s very own? A tpersonal pterodactyl, if you will? I move we redirect all current bioengineering resources to this vital project.

Note: tpersonal pterodactyls should be available in pink.

—

*As I think I have previously mentioned, throughout my childhood, my parents mocked me relentlessly for saying “rep-TILE.” “Crawl on your belly like a REP-TILE!” they would cackle, insinuating that I was talking like hillfolk. To this day, I say “REP-tull,” which causes virtually everyone else to mock me relentlessly, but I cannot overcome my childhood conditioning.

So today I was buying candy for my classes in honor of V-Day–an endeavor which led to me phoning my father from the Walgreen’s candy aisle to ask him if sodium lactate (Jolly Ranchers) is an animal product, which it apparently is probably not if it’s in commercial food products (they use bacteria to get it out of carbs) but we’re still not sure about calcium stearate (Sweet Tarts–I have some vegan students, okay? and it might be derived from hydrogenated vegetable oil but it might not)–and I probably went a little overboard because, you know, I love holiday candy and I love Valentine’s candy more than most, and if I feed it to my students it will not cause me to gain weight.

Anyway, so I was hauling my candy (in addition to vegan options, I got Dove Promises, Reeses peanut butter cups, and Butterfinger and Nestle Crunch hearts for the misguided milk chocolate lovers–peanut butter cups are exempt from this criticism because PEANUT BUTTER) back to the office, and suddenly, I had a Valentine’s epiphany.

Valentine’s Day has not been an awesome milestone in my life ever. When not actively and crushingly disappointing, it has been uneventful and vaguely depressing in an annoying way. But today, carrying a giant bag of shiny pink hearts* and shit, I realized something.

Valentine’s Day is based around:

• Candy
• Hearts
• Stuffed animals
• Stationery
• The color pink

That’s right. That romance/couples/enduring love crap is INCIDENTAL. It is basically CABELL DAY. It’s practically my second birthday.

The students seemed to enjoy this revelation, although possibly they were just happy about the candy. Now if only they’d do the reading.

—

*The one thing I don’t like about Dove Promises is that the heart-shaped Valentine’s version are wrapped in red and gold for the dark chocolate, and pink and silver for the milk. I dislike milk chocolate. But I want pink and silver wrappers! Thus far I have not actually switched to buying a kind of chocolate I don’t actually like to achieve this. But it causes me emotional distress.

And not the good kind, either, where someone gets caught being wanton in the conservatory and has to get married by special license.*

I got an email a few days ago from Rikhei asking if I’d heard about the possibility that Cassie Edwards was a plagiarist. At first I thought she was talking about well-known fanfic rip-off artist Cassandra Claire, which was confusing since that happened a long time ago, although I am STILL kind of appalled that someone would rip off Zelazny’s Amber for HP slash.** (This reminds me, I keep meaning to write a post about Zelazny and Amber. Later.)

Anyway, then I clicked the link to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, which I have actually read in the past and I don’t know why I stopped keeping up with it, and realized that no, she was talking about Cassie EDWARDS, well-known horrifying American Indian culture appropriater, unparalleled in her use of the Noble Savage Standing in for Sensitive New Age Guys Who Would Actually Be Too Anachronistic To Stand, Even for Zebra.*** Indian romances are pretty common–generally featuring an Indian or mixed race hero and a feisty white heroine. I actually did a project on constructions of American Indian masculinity in these books for a sociology of gender course I took as an undergrad,**** in which I concluded basically that they were stand-ins for Sensitive New Age Guys Who… you get the picture.

Well, apparently, the Smart Bitches tried plugging some of her more wooden and weirdly out-of-place passages into Google, and they discovered that the reason they were out of place is that they were TOTALLY FREAKING PLAGIARIZED. In at least one case from a 1928 ethnography, which I take special note of as a social scientist. Perhaps someday chunks of my dissertation will appear, uncredited, in a lusty tale of Facebook intrigue.

I thought this was sort of half entertaining, half infuriating, given how pissed off I get about plagiarism in general–I was, after all, raised by academics–and then I was browsing my usual infotainment sources today and discovered that the story had broken in the popular press: Nora Roberts says peer lifted material

(In case you are not particularly romance-aware, Nora Roberts is a Big Deal.)

The AP article actually pulls its best punch by using one of the less egregious passages from Edwards’s work; you should definitely review the SB series to see some really incredibly obvious theft. Confronted with it, Edwards response was not particularly surprising:

Edwards, interviewed earlier this week by the AP, acknowledged that she sometimes “takes” her material “from reference books,” but added that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources.

“When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” Edwards said, speaking from her home in Mattoon, Ill. She then asked her husband to get on the phone. He told the AP that his wife simply gets “ideas” from reference books.

“She doesn’t lift passages,” Charles Edwards said, adding that “you would have to draw your own conclusions” on how closely his wife’s work resembles other sources.

Although the part where she put her husband on the phone to handle it was kind of shocking. I realize that the woman is like 70, but one assumes that she’s handled the majority of her business contacts, etc., at least in communication with an agent. And really, what more is there to say after “she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources”? It’s like she’s an undergraduate or something! A plagiarizing culture-appropriating bosom-heaving undergraduate. I am totally putting some of the examples from SB on my next “What is plagiarism and how terrible will the vengeance of my TA be if I commit it” hand-out.

In fact, the AP article actually quotes the developer of TurnItIn, UW’s preferred plagiarism detection software: “Ms. Edwards’ unattributed use of other peoples’ work as her own definitely constitutes plagiarism.”

I wonder if she’ll be stripped of her RWA (Romance Writers of America) lifetime achievement award.

—

*Ask me about the peerage some time. I should also note that I use the term “bodice ripper” with love. Before 11-year-olds could find porn on the internet, there were other people’s mothers’ stashes of romance novels.

****It was the only sociology course I took as an undergrad, actually. And now I have a masters degree!

Last month I was sitting around in the TA office and someone commented, scornfully, that “tilapia” was just a fancy name to make the stupid bourgeois eat catfish. Having been raised relatively bourgeois, I blinked and did not mention that I had never heard that tilapia was catfish. It did actually make a fair amount of sense. Who among us had heard about tilapia, say, six years ago? Not bad evidence of some kind of clever marketing ploy, I thought.

I was so convinced that I even attempted to pass it on to a carful of people on our way to the Victoria’s Secret semi-annual sale over at West Towne Mall,* although I did admit that I didn’t have independent confirmation.

Keely was a little skeptical, although she allowed that she hadn’t heard of tilapia before she moved to Madison, but argued that since she didn’t eat fish before then, why would she have noticed? Other passengers, however, confirmed that they, too, had only become aware of tilapia in the past few years.

So when I got home, I looked it up online and discovered: tilapia and catfish are about as distantly related as it is possible to be and both be FISH. Wikipedia informed me that tilapia are of the family “Cichlidae” while catfish are classified into about 50 freaking different families,** NONE of which are “Cichlidae.” According to the Wikipedia catfish entry–which, sure, take with a grain of salt–5% of vertebrate species are catfish. AND YET. Tilapia? Not catfish.

Being motivated to correct the misconception I had inadvertently been spreading, I brought it up when I called home in the evening, which set Dad off, and led to his confirmation–he, too, turned immediately to Wikipedia–that catfish and tilapia are, as noted, as totally dissimilar as two fish can be. I don’t know if “not tasting like much of anything” would be considered a phenotypical similarity or not; as my friend Crystal says, people fry catfish because they like the taste of fry and the catfish are handy.

By “set Dad off,” I mean that we are both compulsive reference checkers. I may or may not have previously related the story of an argument I got into with some of the girls in my 8th grade gym class, the subject of which I have long forgotten although some corner of my mind is convinced it had something to do with gypsies–I could totally be making that up–and so I went home and looked it up that night and came back in, the next day, vindicated, and told them loftily that I was, in fact, totally right and backed up by encyclopedic sources.

For some reason no one was at all impressed, and I was probably lucky to escape the interaction without being stuffed into a locker. It turns out that citations are not pertinent to junior high debate. So now you know why I’m in graduate school.***

Dad, anyway, had apparently known about tilapia since the early 80s, when they were the hot new thing at the University of Arizona’s School of Agriculture. They can be raised in very densely populated tanks, or, for that matter, in irrigation canals. The internet also tells me that they only require 1.2 pounds of feed to put on one pound of flesh, which compared to 6-8 pounds of feed for one pound of cattle flesh is pretty damn good. Plus, you know, they taste like whatever sauce you put on them.

And goddamn are they cheap. I picked up a bunch of frozen fish at Trader Joe’s this week as part of my effort to get back into shape, and you can get over a pound of tilapia for $4. That’s at least three meals right there. If I had a drainage ditch I could cut out the middleman… but I think I’m willing to pay for Trader Joe’s to handle it. Now the real question: what do I put on it when I bake it for dinner tonight?

—

*The sale started three days ago so it’s probably hopelessly picked over by now, plus any time you enter the VS store you’ll be surrounded by 12-year-olds, but the sale seems to bring out the especially inappropriate, e.g. the woman who was dragging her approx. 8-year-old daughter from bin to bin screaming, “Let’s look for some EXTRA SMALLS for you!” I mostly try not to judge other people’s parenting and god knows I am no arbiter of What Is Appropriate, but sweet fancy Moses, someone is going to be telling a therapist about this someday.

***Also, of course, a number of my family members went to graduate school. I don’t know if my father’s father was a compulsive reference checker or not, but it wouldn’t be a huge surprise.

Awhile ago, someone on LiveJournal mentioned the National Weight Control Registry, which is a study associated with Brown University Medical School “developed to identify and investigate the characteristics of individuals who have succeeded at long-term weight loss”–here defined as people who have maintained a 30 pound loss for one year or more.

Despite having regained a bit of weight in the past two months due to first being Full of Blood Clots and then, a week after they finally let me go back to the gym, catching the Death Flu, I am still within five pounds of my original goal weight, which I reached on December 13, 2005–coincidentally closely following Clot #1; I only missed about a week of gym time for that one. Anyway, my study consent forms arrived with my held mail today, so I got to initial a bunch of stuff and provide evidence that I did actually lose all that weight.

They offer two options: you can get your doctor’s office or whoever to provide documentation, or you can submit before-and-after photos. If there’s one thing I have ready to hand, it’s photos of myself–admittedly quite a few more “after” shots than “before,” as Matthieu has commented on in the past, but definitely enough “before” shots to prove that I used to be fat.

Although not, actually, the worst and most horrible of “before” shots, which for some reason my father had on his website for MONTHS after it was no longer accurate, until he finally listened to my desperate pleas and took it down. I don’t know what happened to that one. I looked like Jabba the Hut. It would have been PERFECT for the purpose of demonstrating how fat I used to be, so I am actually kind of sorry.

Anyway, here are the photos that are actually getting sent:

Before:

(October 7, 2004)

(June 2005)

(Christmas 2004)

AFTER:

(December 2005)

(July 25, 2007)

(July 23, 2006)

The Christmas 2004 one is probably the worst of the lot, mainly because that was when I weighed the most (178 pounds when I, inexplicably, decided that it would be a good idea to weigh myself like two days after Christmas). It’s actually pretty encouraging to be looking at those old-old photos, since I’m actually only about five pounds over my preferred weight at the moment, and while that’s worse than it might initially sound because I’m also down quite a bit of muscle from being benched for so long, on the other hand, I do not look like Jabba the Hut. My face is still pretty much the way it looks in my “after” pictures, for one thing, rather than all chipmunky.

My gym is closed until January 2–I did get in some cardio and probably some strength-training shoveling snow this afternoon; I could only do so much since no one has been in residence for over a week and people have been walking on the sidewalk, packing it down, and eventually I got very, very tired of hammering away with the edge of the shovel to remove 1/8″ of snow from the walk. I put down salt. Come January 2, I will be doing 5-6 days of weight training a week until I am back to my former glory:

My biceps have really suffered. But I will get them back into shape.

Recently my friend Travis created a wiki to keep track of his City of Heroes (and City of Villains) characters. Naturally I gave him shit for failing to create the wiki as a joint effort.* Who STARTED him playing City of Heroes, anyway? It was my class assignment;** he jumped on my bandwagon. And who made the original GoogleDoc spreadsheets that let us keep track of what level characters we had on which servers, hm?

When I created those spreadsheets, I originally made them for my characters only, of course. I was going to grant read-only access to my CoX buddies so that they could see at a glance what I had available for teams of various levels, but then it turned out that read-only access on GoogleDocs doesn’t let you sort, which seemed fairly important for the purpose of quickly finding a level ~10 scrapper for a team, so I made them collaborative–which had the added advantage of allowing all of us to list our available characters in one place, even if I frequently forget to update when I level up.

It’s pretty easy to keep a spreadsheet sensible, even with multiple authors. There were fields for character name, server, level, class, and powersets. It was a simple structure and it didn’t need any tweaking. Wikis, on the other hand, grow quickly and in many cases incomprehensibly without a pretty strict template. Editing wikipedia, I’ve encountered this even with minor edits of my own on entries concerning my favorite traditional folk song, Child ballad #10 (the sister-killing song). People don’t like bits of structure on the page–headings about alternative variants. Some people apparently do not like calling anything a “variant” of such a folk song, and other people think that the structure of the page should match other pages. There was some argument on the talk page, the last time I looked, about what exactly a “variant” is and why the last editor (me) was wrong to use the term.

I found this annoying. For one thing, I hate being gainsaid; for another, I hate the sneaking suspicion that I am not adequately equipped to participate in a particular discourse. In the course I took this past semester on collaborative learning, we read a piece by Cress & Kimmerle (2007) that explicitly considered how people use wikis and what motivates them to participate, postulating that the major motivation is that people find a discrepancy between their own knowledge structure and that of the wiki, and are motivated to bring the two into synch by contributing to the wiki. It wasn’t really discussed, however, what people do when they know that they know something that isn’t included in the current wiki knowledge structure, but don’t really know how to go about conveying it.

Wikis, despite many of my colleagues’ impression of them as unlawful, Wild West-ish virtual spaces where anything goes, are very norm-bound. If you don’t edit them right your edits are likely to be absorbed past all recognition. There has to be another push for a person to feel motivated to learn the norms in order to edit at all, which I suspect might come from the critical mass of a LOT of knowledge discrepancies, all of which could be righted by the reader if they were confident that they had a grip on the norms for doing so. Having only felt particularly motivated myself to add known recordings of Child #10 to the relevant pages, I’m not really there yet for wikipedia (and of course, there are some kinds of knowledge that you can probably add without understanding the norms, as when expanding a list).

With a new wiki, though, there’s a different set of problems, which is that everyone enters them with some idea of what a wiki, or this particular wiki, should look like, and in my experience there isn’t much explicit discussion of those norms. I’ve done wikis for several courses now, as well as participated in a few recreational small wikis such as Travis’s CoX site, and the most frequent issue that seems to arise is one of, at least from my viewpoint, people just dumping things every which way like they’re making notes for a prelim or something similarly not meant for the eyes or comprehension of others.

This is how it looks from MY perspective. No doubt from the perspectives of others I am equally irrational and opaque in my organizational preferences, but I’m not psychic. I just know how it looks from in here. It’s possible that we tend to assume too much common understanding once we determine that everyone knows, basically, what a “wiki” is. None of the courses I’ve been in spent any time developing any kind of template, which might have ultimately saved us a lot of frustration.

Another issue, which might stem from (perceived) distribution of labor, is related to collaboration or the lack thereof. Other class wiki participants have noted that some people are not as interested in collaboration as others, and don’t seem to get the basic idea that a wiki is a collaborative work in which particular individual contributions generally disappear. More subtly, it seems like some people don’t think about the need for iterative collaborative work in the context of a wiki–it’s not enough to just dump some information; you actually need to integrate it into what’s there, or check back periodically to see how it’s being integrated by others. Collaborative authorship only works if people really keep working together, keep contributing, keep adding and editing and revising to create a truly collaborative product.

It seems likely that certain teams are going to be better at this than others. Some people were probably not meant to be co-authors. Some people are probably better at collaboration in general, but there is also a quality of partnership in collaborative work like wikis or, more traditionally, co-authored papers. You’re never going to get a perfect team out of a randomly assigned class of people, but it might help to make course wikis truly semester-long endeavors to encourage the development of collaborative practices in groups that might not necessarily have a knack for them at the start. Starting later and asking people to synthesize previously collected material doesn’t really seem to encourage the kind of collaborative creation that course wikis are intended to promote.

Despite my own natural resistance to surrendering authorial control, it can be very satisfying to see a wiki page develop into something bigger than I could or would have created on my own. It’s like those “magic rocks” that grow into colorful stalagmites. Except with knowledge.

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*Don’t worry, he let me in, if for no other reason than to stop my whining.

**One person remarked at the time that assigning an MMOG to students in a course on virtual worlds was kind of like assigning pharmacology students a heroin addiction.

I had a blood draw this afternoon, because I really didn’t want to go in on Friday this week with all the other shit I have to do. Less than an hour later, I got one of the usual totally content-less phone messages, although strangely it was left by a phlebotomist rather than a nurse, and it seemed like an unusually fast turn-around time.

Well, apparently, that’s because they didn’t actually have any results to report, because they didn’t, in fact, run any tests on my blood, because it turns out that THEY LOST IT.

The nurse I got when I called back–she seemed surprised that the tech did not explain this in the original message–said that it “got put in the wrong tube.” The wrong tube? WTF? I think we can all agree this means that THEY LOST IT.

So now I have to go back in at fucking 8 am tomorrow, which I scheduled this blood draw–which ran late, incidentally, and made ME late for other obligations–SPECIFICALLY TO AVOID, and I will almost certainly be late for the lecture of the course I TA, because it starts at 8:50.

I hate everyone. Also, I only have SO MUCH BLOOD.