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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.

So last night I was on the phone with a good friend from high school with whom I tend to touch base three or four times a year, which means that this was the first he’d heard about my career-ending mud wrestling injury. I mentioned that there were photos of the match online, and he immediately plugged my name into a Google image search, although if I’d realized he was at his machine I could have just sent him my Flickr link–but if I had, we might never have made this amazing discovery.

A few minutes after he found the relevant photos, there was a long silence on his end. I prodded him verbally.

“Uh, Cabell, are these your boobs?”
“Excuse me?”
“Over this PS3?”
“WHAT?”
“I did a google image search on your name, and there is a headless bust over a PS3.”
“Well, it’s definitely not me; I don’t even HAVE a PS3–where IS this?”
“Google image!”

So I google image searched myself, and sure enough:

I would like to reiterate here that this photo is NOT ME. I know how sometimes people miss these things, like when I went to that strip club on amateur night purely out of sociological curiosity and NOT AS A PARTICIPANT, DAD, but apparently wasn’t clear enough on that point in the initial blog entry.

So, yeah. That photo up there? Not me. It is, however, in the top row of results when you put “cabell gathman” (although not actually with the quotation marks in the search term) into Google image search. The rest of the row consists of the side-by-side of me and Andromeda Sparks (my main CoH avatar), my Flickr user icon, a graphic from January’s winning IAP Games Competition entry (the team for which I was on), and two different photos from Truman State University’s newsletter that do not include me but do seem to be part of coverage of events in which I was involved.

So what’s with the PS3 boobs, you ask? Well, the graphic was originally embedded in an entry of the Electric SistaHood blog’s review section, and ESH once linked to a column I wrote on female gamers for Strange Horizons. As far as I can tell, the particular page in which the actual photo was embedded contained no reference to my name, though, so it seems odd that it comes up so high on the results, except that maybe there are a lot of people google image searching me all the time and that’s their favorite photo?* IT’S NOT ME.

As a researcher of social networking sites, I naturally hear a lot about context and context collision and people who didn’t realize that their parents/professors/employers were going to see that picture of them doing body shots at a party, but I hadn’t really considered the growing possibility of cases like this, where your identifying information may end up linked to bizarre things that have nothing to do with you because you are both connected to some random OTHER thing. Confounding factors!

Which is funny in itself, since this very domain is still inaccessible from many locations that employ internet filtering software because there was a time period during which it was in the hands of pornographers, and so it’s still on a lot of outdated block lists. You’d think I’d have thought about the way that spurious connections might arise out of the vast sea of data that is the internets.** It seems like I am actually LESS likely than most to fall victim to this, because I have a weird freaking name, but on the other hand, when your name is a truly unique identifier, people are probably much more likely to assume that okay, yes, those must actually be your PS3 boobs. (THEY’RE NOT, DAD.)

Probably having publicly admitted to mud wrestling doesn’t help, either, but you know, I’m sorry, that is just how I roll. But I do not now nor have I ever owned a PS3.

(And yes, I know this post is just going to make this search result about a billion times more robust, but at least there’s a chance that people will then click on it and see this blog entry, right? …Yeah, like I believe anyone but me checks the source page.)

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*If you or someone you know spends a lot of time google image searching me, a) don’t tell me, and b) Matt is going to be totally unsurprised, as he once claimed that I would have the most self-portraits available online of anyone in the world if it weren’t for cam girls.

**John: It’s not just a big truck you can just DUMP stuff in, you know. IT IS A SERIES OF TUBES.

Dad does not have a heart defect, or any other clots. He is out of the hospital with pain killers and anticoagulants and an appointment to see another specialist later, but they don’t think he’s at further risk although of course they still don’t really know exactly what happened.* He gets to give himself shots of Lovenox for a couple of weeks just like I did, though. For more information, you can see his account.**

Sophie was not on the I-35 bridge when it collapsed.

My health insurance is being reinstated by the UW, with a summer’s worth of premiums to be taken out of my first fall check. Also, since Dad’s heart is fine (and we’re still waiting to hear if he’s the source of my Factor V Leiden after all), there is no pressing need for me to get checked for Super Sekrit heart defects after all.

As previously reported here, my friend Laura’s daughter Abby is out of the hospital and back home.

I finally caved to my bizarre obsession and bought a Hannah Montana CD. It’s better not to lie about who we are, right?

Thanks to everyone for their kind words this week. Also, happy birthday to my mother.

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*Possibly the whole thing stems from him mocking Oscar the Death Angel Kitty.

**Apparently my mother threw down with an ER nurse. This is not surprising.

…but my father is in the hospital in Missouri with what, at last pass by various specialists, looks like it might be a heart defect. They’re supposed to be running tests today.

He feels a lot better than when he went into the ER on Saturday night, but they want to keep him for at least several more days, probably, to run tests. The hematologist who was brought in yesterday does not think his problem is Factor V Leiden (my clotting disorder), although there is evidence of (long) past clot-related damage. They did an EKG that came back clean, but apparently the possible defect is of the sort that wouldn’t show up on an EKG anyway.

This is interesting, because I actually complained about chest pains to my GP last year and got an EKG of my own. She was basically humoring me; she kept telling me that I probably just couldn’t tell the difference between chest pains and muscle aches from weight-lifting, which I found insulting, but the EKG came back clean, so despite the fact that I’ve had these pains intermittently at least since college I figured it couldn’t be that bad.* I guess if Dad has a Super Sekrit heart defect I’ll need to get rechecked.

My mother was not too happy when I mentioned this.

“You had CHEST PAINS and you never MENTIONED them to me?”
“Gee, I wonder why… The EKG was fine! They said I was fine! I feel fine!”

Mom called to update me just as I was leaving the grocery store; I arrived home to discover a letter from the UW Benefits Office, forwarded from Boston, informing me that they were canceling my health insurance effective TODAY because the premiums had not been paid. This should definitely not have happened, since the standard practice is to take the entire summer’s premiums out of the May check for grad students who have a fall appointment, which I do, but apparently–the benefits office returned my frantic voicemail at 6:35 this morning–nobody authorized this for me. No one really knows why.** They’re supposed to call me back either this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

I strongly hope that there are no further difficulties in resolving this, since I may need to get a freaking cardiologist when I get back to Madison. Not to mention a new GP–even if I don’t have a heart defect, this is also the woman who told me that I should never, under any circumstances, consume more than one alcoholic beverage in a 24-hour period and then strongly implied that I was an alcoholic. It was like she’d never seen a graduate student before.

The good news: my honorary nieceling Abby, who is almost 5 and who fell down a flight of stairs this weekend and suffered a fractured skull and subdural bleeding, has just been discharged from the children’s medical center in St. Louis. They have a follow-up appointment next month and a list of symptoms for which to keep an eye out, but this morning’s CAT scan showed that the injury has started healing (it was a long slow bleed, which is why they kept them for three days). Abby is very relieved that they will not be shaving her head for surgery and apparently is enjoying telling people that she broke her first bone: her skull.

Despite having been confined to a hospital bed, Abby never really showed many symptoms (it’s a good thing my friend Laura, her mother, took her to the ER, obviously), and she was definitely getting pretty bored. Laura said that last night she pressed the call button to summon a nurse and then demanded that her Care Bear’s blood pressure be checked. In case you were wondering, a Care Bear’s systolic BP should be under 50. Bedtime Bear is a healthy 35.

I hope they actually figure out what’s wrong with Dad today.

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*You’d think I’d have known better by then. Constant vigilance, that’s how you have to deal with the medical profession.

**Although let’s just say that this is not the first benefits SNAFU that I have experienced through my department in the past couple of years.

But man, I <3 Kermit the Frog, and this video clip is SO AWESOME. Although I don’t know why they didn’t use Miss Piggy for “my beautiful wife”…

Speaking of Miss Piggy, I get quotes of the day on my iGoogle homepage, and awhile back I got this one, attributed to Miss Piggy:

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”

Oh, Miss Piggy. I forget who told me that you are the mother of all drag queens, but I do love you.

Which, following the completely tangential nature of this post, reminds me of a friend who was once completely turned off of a beautiful woman at a party because she said something disparaging about Gonzo being “too weird.” The friend himself does an amazing (and adorable) Gonzo impression, although I don’t believe this is what triggered the fatal comment.

I haven’t been posting because I was in LA visiting my cousin, which was fun, especially when I a) got to go to the BEACH and swim in the OCEAN for the first time since I was like 8,* and b) wore my nerd shirt to an art opening and thus attracted the attention of probably the only other gamer-type in the crowd, who was lots of fun to talk to. Jade’s boyfriend Ian was amazed that nerds can home in on each other like that; I told him that wearing identifiable clothing helps.

I also got to hang out with Cyn, my doppelblogger. Originally we just referred to each other as doppelgangers, based on being grad students with (usually) the same color hair (Special Effects Atomic Pink), and sharing a host of other small traits (like being attracted to Ugly Sweater People**). Anyway, I’ve decided that we need a special word for internet doppelgangers, and although I realize not everyone online is a blogger, I feel like the term “doppelblogger” nicely captures the connotation while retaining the general sense of the source word.

To sum up, you can refer to anyone who eerily resembles you who you meet or learn about online as a “doppelblogger.” Pass it on.

It’s funny how similar our hair looks even now, when mine is actually a mix of Cherry Bomb, Blood Red, and Napalm, with nary a drop of Atomic Pink in the mix.*** Cyn was nice enough to bring me a bottle of it from her local Hot Topic, because I’ve been wanting to dye it back but there has been a SHORTAGE. Every online retailer that carries Special Effects has been out of that particular color for a MONTH–the guy at the Garment District in Cambridge told me last year that it’s like a two-person operation, so I suppose demand often outstrips supply. Anyway, I will probably be redoing mine in Atomic Pink this coming weekend, after I do that 30-mile bike ride I wanted to try. No point sweating pink all over myself IMMEDIATELY.

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*It is now somewhat more embarrassing when a strong wave knocks me out of my bikini top.

***On reflection, I think even our ROOTS are kind of the same color.

You know, all those years of secondary school gym class, I thought I hated physical activity, but it turns out I just hated fascism.*

I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

–Richard Brautigan, The Memoirs of Jesse James

(My other reflection on biking lately is that the older I get, the more like my father I seem to become. Biking, cooking,** and I’ve started contemplating camping, which was definitely not my thing as a child, at least not after age 8 or so.)

My hair is also getting really faded. I’m loathe to cover the highlights, which still look good (if faded), but probably I’ll dye it all back to Atomic Pink after I get back from visiting my cousin in LA. This does mean that Cyn and I will not be total twinsies if we get together for lunch, but that may well save the universe from implosion,*** so perhaps I should consider it a necessary sacrifice.

And speaking of the universe imploding, today’s Thursday PARC Forum is about dark matter. Maybe I should go.

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*I’ve remarked this to several people now, which is why I can’t remember who thought it should be on a t-shirt. I think it might be a little long.

***I’ve always been a big fan of parallel universes, such as Star Trek Dark Mirror and the Futurama Cowboy Universe. Maybe there’s one where everyone’s got pink hair EXCEPT Cyn and me. I’ll tell you one thing: I bet Evil Bizarro Cabell has really conservative hair. Lime green would be the photo-negative, but I’ve done that, too.

So it took me 90 minutes to bike into work today, but I think I can shave off some time tomorrow by not going 6.2 miles out of my way.*

First I forgot my cell phone. That cost me about a mile, but the real problem was when I forgot that Arastradero doesn’t start until after you cross El Camino, and failed to turn left on Charleston. Because I had written down directions for myself off the Gmaps Pedometer route I plotted over a map of bike lanes in the area, I was TOTALLY SURE that I was not supposed to turn left on Charleston, despite the niggling doubt in my mind as I sped through intersection after intersection with no sign of Arastradero. This is the peril of documents,** even ones that we ought to know are not exactly 100% reliable given that we created them yesterday and are notoriously bad at navigation in general. They just seem so authoritative. Oops.

So I didn’t lift any weights when I got in as I’d originally planned; just showered and changed and came upstairs to my office. At least I know how to get from home to work now, and am in good enough shape that I can handle a 6.2 mile detour.

As you may have gathered, I am safely in California–mostly moved in, even, largely thanks to the tireless efforts of my friends Greg and Stevie, who let me ship my many, many belongings to their apartment, helped me get my luggage and packages from my motel to my summer lodgings, and even took me in to the bike shop to get my bike reassembled this weekend. The house where I’m renting a room is pretty nice, and has pretty much everything I could ask for in the kitchen; I’ve already been baking up a storm. I’m hoping to finish organizing all my crap this week, so that my room doesn’t look so much like a dozen boxes of clothing, jewelry, and office supplies exploded in there. And I’m also planning to actually update again; I know everyone will be so pleased.

AMAZING CALIFORNIA DISCOVERY: There is a box karaoke place in Cupertino*** that has Belinda Carlisle’s “Summer Rain”**** in their catalog. This is like the holy fucking grail of karaoke for me; now I just need to find “Season of the Witch” and “When U Were Mine.”

And Stevie even took the best karaoke photo ever, as a bonus.

BEDSPREAD UPDATE: So Stevie took me to Target to pick up all the random stuff I still needed despite having shipped a dozen boxes of my crap to California, and I got a new bedspread to replace the one that, you may recall, I jettisoned in Boston because I hated it. At first I wasn’t seeing anything that really appealed to me in Target Housewares, but then I realized it was probably because I was looking in the adult bedding section. In the children’s section I found a comforter in PINK CAMOUFLAGE. Naturally I pounced on it. Now no one can sneak up on me when I’m sleeping! It is, after all, when I am at my most vulnerable.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR COMMENTERS: If at any time you ever posted a comment here and it never showed up, it’s because it got lost in comment spam. I had like 10,000 of the freaking things and just mass deleted them all, so I’m sorry if I accidentally trashed any legitimate comments along with the rest. I’ve just enabled a special spam-busting plugin that will hopefully solve this problem, though.

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*Yes, that pretty much doubled the length of the ride.

****No one ever knows this song. Belinda Carlisle is probably best known for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and possibly “Circle in the Sand”; at least these are the two songs you can expect to find at every karaoke joint. They NEVER have “Summer Rain,” except in Cupertino. Lyrics here.

Okay, so once again I have failed to post. In my defense, my sister Sophie is visiting, and also I’ve been very upset about my phone, which got a drink spilled on it at karaoke on Thursday and promptly died. Actually, it died in the most frustrating way possible, where the screen and HALF of the buttons still worked, but not the menu buttons or the call button or half the number pad.

Fortunately, the guy at the Verizon store where I took it in today and sheepishly explained that it had been drowned in alcohol totally ignored the large sign in the tech support area that says that the warranty does not cover damage caused by liquid corrosion and issued me a free replacement.* Then I called customer service and got them to swear that they’d credit my account the cost of redownloading ringtones and games, since they don’t transfer them between handsets.

Of course, the original plan was that I was going to wait until the Verizon website came back up from maintenance tonight, back up my contacts list, and then submerge the lower half of the phone in rubbing alcohol in the hopes that it might dissolve said corrosion. I was pretty sure I’d have to pay full retail price to replace the handset, after all, and we’re talking minimum $50 for a Razr. After 36 hours without a phone, however, I was willing to give them Sophie if that’s what it took to get a replacement.** We’re talking Shining-level crazy without my phone.

But at any rate, all’s well that ends well; the guy at the Verizon store gave me a free replacement and I redownloaded “Heartbreak Beat” (my default ringtone) and Tetris (a necessity when I am waiting for the T). I seem to have snapped off a small piece of my pink zebra strip snapcase (in the initial frenzy to try to save my phone from the drink spill), but I can get a new one of those and in the meantime it still stays on.

Also, karaoke was awesome. There definitely needs to be another one before I leave Boston, although I don’t know how many people here have the karaoke passion that Sophie does. Sadly, they did not have “When You Were Mine,” but Aaron and I sang “Don’t You Want Me” instead:***

Yeah, it was pretty much totally awesome. Box karaoke rocks.

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*Possibly he thought I was cute, or at the very least pathetic. I made an effort to keep my eyes very sad and wide while explaining what happened.

***OF COURSE he sang the girl part.

So my father, who in high school used to exchange with his then-girlfriend notes written in Elven runes, has created a family wiki.

I told frippy that so far I’ve spent the most time on Andromeda Sparks’s entry in said wiki, and she said that she bowed in awe of my ancestral geekiness, that my CoH character should have a page on the family wiki.

Hannah is not taking it too seriously, and as a consequence, her page has already been edited twice without her knowledge or consent. This is pretty much exactly what Dad said he envisioned when he created the thing: a history of family members and occasions that everyone could revise to suit their personal memories of events. Wi-quibble-pedia.