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.

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.

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*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.

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.

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*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!

As a graduate student, I am exposed to a lot of people hating on Wikipedia. It’s not like I don’t understand some of the pitfalls. Someone is always going to be quick to point out that
Swaziland (7 pages) is less thoroughly covered on Wikipedia than Gondor (9 pages)–although the latter is still beaten out by Bhutan (11 pages).

Although let’s be serious: the people who are editing the entry on Gondor almost certainly do NOT represent a drain on available resources for Swaziland. You really have to CARE about a subject to edit a wikipedia entry; noting a discrepancy between the information presented and your own personal knowledge (Cress & Kimmerle 2007: 159) is not sufficient, although I’m sure it’s a factor. Probably caring about a topic is correlated with noticing discrepancies; you know stuff about things you care about, and you’re motivated to ensure that other people know the Right stuff about them, too. This is why so far the only wikipedia entries I have ever edited are for Child ballads.

So anyway, you get bias, the way you get with any volunteer sample, but it’s unclear to me how different this is from the bias inherent in any information that someone cares about enough to teach you. Making everyone teach the thing they care about the least doesn’t seem like a workable solution to this problem. I think there’s also a barrier to entry into Wikipedia itself, though, separate from one’s personal knowledge and its fit or lack thereof with what the site presents. Cress & Kimmerle note that “sometimes people only add new information to an existing [Wikipedia] article, and sometimes people completely restructure an article” (2007: 158). I suspect that the people restructuring articles are experienced users who have developed a sense of themselves as Wikipedia-competent, separate from whatever expertise they may possess on a particular subject; new users may recognize their own lack of this kind of competence, and I think it presents a not-insignificant barrier to participation.

Overall, however, I still feel that Wikipedia is a useful resource. I refer to it frequently. Just recently Marc mentioned that it was to Wikipedia that he turned in his search for instructions for the preparation of spaghetti squash. This seems to represent one function of wikis, particularly smaller, less public ones: to build a database of relevant information to participants and make it easy to edit and access. One can easily imagine a recipe/cooking wiki devoted entirely to cooking instructions, and wikis seem to be a popular tool for teams involved in the development of particular products. It’s hard to pin down in these cases how a wiki differs from a very large, interactive FAQ.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, is often explicitly modeled after traditional encyclopedias, and many academics perceive it as some kind of informational Wild West, where anyone can say god knows what and nobody can be trusted to understand SCIENCE. It’s not peer-reviewed, after all.

In fact, as far as I know, neither are traditional encyclopedias. Most academics I know are all in a froth about the possibility of undergraduate students citing wikipedia in papers, but the real issue is that you don’t cite encyclopedias in scholarly research. Encyclopedias are by nature summaries, and you don’t cite summaries in scholarly research–you might, I suppose, cite a review article to support a claim about a particular broad trend in a particular field, but in most cases, you don’t want to be throwing around a bunch of review article citations, either. As I tell my students, you have to find the original source, because people do not trust your interpretation of Academic Telephone, especially if you are a freshman. That means no review articles and no encyclopedia entries, electronic or otherwise.

Maybe if more academics understood what a pain in the ass it is to actually contribute to something as huge and bureaucratic as Wikipedia, they’d have more respect for it, or at least stop acting like it’s run by third-graders with a strong commitment to homeopathy. Most likely we’ll just have to wait for a cohort of people to get old and retire–it is the most reliable mechanism for attitude change.

Some background in case you don’t know that Legba is now living with my parents: So last month, my parents hired the son of family friends to drive up to Wisconsin with a bunch of my stuff that had been in storage at their house, including my cats. I got a phone call at about 7:30 the day that this was supposed to happen, informing me that Legba would not be arriving that afternoon because my father was unable to get him into a carrier. I was a little snippy in response to this news, but I’d like to note that a) the phone call woke me up, and b) I didn’t know at the time that Dad’s valiant ATTEMPT to get Legba into the carrier ended up costing him a course of antibiotics and a tetanus shot.

So Bart and Dora arrived safe and sound at the end of August,* and Legba stayed at my parents’ house. Since he was the only remaining cat in the basement, my parents decided to let him come upstairs and mingle with the rest of the household. Now, Legba has always gotten along fine with Bart and mostly been tormented by Pandora, although occasionally he would refuse to cower when she swatted him and then she would go into paroxysms of feline rage. But apparently, he gets on with my parents’ two female cats, Finch and Darwin, like a house on fire. He loves them. He loves my mother;** apparently, when she goes to the bathroom, he and Finch and Darwin all hang around outside the door waiting for her to come back. He pays no mind to the dog. He also kind of terrorizes their older male cat, but Gurgi only spent like 30 minutes a day inside before, anyway.

My mother was lobbying for custody almost immediately. I was heartbroken, but when even my generally anti-extra cat father allowed as how he thought Legba was really fitting into the household and would probably be psychically scarred by yet another upheaval, I realized that I was going to have to leave him there. It’s not that life with me before was untenable, but making him come live with Pandora again after spending months with two sweet young things who worship him seemed borderline abusive.

And now we come to the upshot: I am not accustomed to a mere two cats in my home. I specifically sought out an apartment where I would be allowed to have three, so it’s on my lease. I love Bart and Dora, but I just felt bereft. I thought about it for awhile. As Travis pointed out, I didn’t want to go adopting a Rebound Kitten.

But I thought about it for a month and I still wanted a third cat, so I went out looking for one. The problem was that it’s not really kitten season anymore; the rescue groups have some strays and former ferals between 4 and 6 months old, but there’s really nothing much younger available in early fall. In general, the younger a cat is, the easier it is to introduce it into a household with adult cats, but I wasn’t sure how much of an advantage I’d have with a juvenile, and the only one that really struck me already had an application ahead of me.

So on Monday night, Keely and I went to the Humane Society, thinking they might have a bigger selection. As it turned out, they had no kittens at all, and so I thought some more about how MUCH of an advantage a kitten would really have, over an older cat, with winning the approval of a cat as inherently bitchy as Pandora. Then I thought about how, actually, I didn’t even WANT a kitten, because they are babies and they cry all the time and jump on your back with all their claws out and need special food that you have to prevent your already overweight bitchy cat from eating.

Then I asked the Humane Society people to bring out one male adult who seemed pretty cute and had all his original claws–this is a big issue at the Humane Society, where most of the animals are surrendered and I would estimate more than half of the adults are front declawed***–and was only two years old, and they told me that he’d only been surrendered three days ago, so they had his intake paperwork for me to look at first. The first thing the forms said was that he had been quarantined for biting a child, to which both Keely and I reacted immediately and identically: What the hell did the child DO to him?

So the former owners reported that he was a “chronic biter” and “gives no warning signal” and that they feared for the safety of their seven-month-old infant. Probably you shouldn’t leave your seven-month-old alone with the family pet regardless, but whatever–they also lamented that “he likes to go outside but he can’t in this neighborhood,” to which one might reply that a cat is not, say, a human adolescent, and can be contained pretty effectively in most cases, but you know, again, whatever.

Then I noticed that although the cat’s attitude toward other cats was unknown, the paperwork also said that he “got along well with former owner’s dog.”

At this point, I’m going, “Jesus Christ, how many owners has this two-year-old cat HAD?”
“Oh,” says the shelter person, “The people who surrendered him only had him for three weeks.”

Of course! I’d been figuring that these people had a cat, then they had a baby and the cat got kind of territorial, as they do, but no! There you are, with a six-month-old infant, and you think to yourself, What is this household missing? I know! A strange adult animal! An exciting unknown quantity! Some people are idiots.

But wait! It gets better.

“They got him,” says the shelter person, “at an estate sale.”
“WHAT.” is basically my and Keely’s simultaneous reaction.

That’s right. An ESTATE SALE. Apparently you can get cats at estate sales. Maybe he was inside an armoire or something. I’ll note at this point that this is a cute but unremarkable domestic shorthair. He is not a Persian or a Manx or a freaking Bengal or something. Just a brown tabby with extensive white splotches (see photos below).

So they bring in the cat, and we play with him for awhile, and okay, I’ll admit it: he bites. He’s not an AGGRESSIVE biter. It’s playful biting, but if you are an idiot–say, the kind of idiot who picks up a cat at an estate sale to watch their infant–and don’t, as it were, nip it in the bud, it can escalate into pretty intense biting. Still playful, from the cat’s perspective, but not so much fun for us tender little humans.

Also, it is extremely easy to tell when he might be about to bite you: if he has just been chasing toys around and is all hopped up, exercise caution. And if he DOES bite you, squirt him with a water bottle and watch him run like hell. (Unfortunately, Keely didn’t have one of those in the little room assigned for making his acquaintance at the Humane Society, but I don’t think she concluded that he was incorrigible, either.)

So yeah, as you might imagine, I adopted the two-year-old child-biting two-time loser estate sale refugee. I’ve named him Robert of Loxley, Loxley for short.**** Right now he is staying in the bathroom, with a blanket shoved up against the crack under the door since Pandora hissed at his paw when he was able to stick it out. I put another litterbox under the kitchen table,***** and when I’m home but not getting in bed, I put the other two in the bedroom and let him run around the apartment. For the time being I’m just trying to get everyone’s smells everywhere; I may try to introduce him to Bart in a week or so.

He’s two years old, but I think he probably didn’t get enough attention as a kitten–one assumes that his original owner was elderly, since he was SOLD OFF THE BLOCK AT AN ESTATE SALE.

Anyway, he’s two years old and has the adult cat physique, but he is CRAZY energetic. He basically acts like a kitten, but with less crying, and I actually think he’ll be pretty open to meeting other cats just based on his behavior so far. I have to take Bart to the vet on Saturday for further consideration of the demodex problem, so I made Loxley an appointment for the basic check-up–he’s got his vaccinations and is negative for feline leukemia and FIV, but he should have check-up. Microchipping was included in the adoption fee, which for an adult was a measly $40. (This represents quite the savings over a kitten, which would be $125.)

So. Yes. I got another cat, prompting a “What the hell?” email from my father when he saw the clues scattered around Facebook, but he is a sweetie and dear god, he needed me with his record. Poor Loxley. Ransomed from the Saracens and all that.******

It almost looks like he’s wearing a brown tabby hood, doesn’t it? Ha.

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*Well, mostly sound. We’re back at the vet for another round of ivermectin for Bart, who seems to be having another demodex flair-up.

******Humorous literary/folkloric reference. Not meant to malign actual Saracens or members of related cultural groups (see Gwen’s blog).

That’s me and some other kid in 1984. I’ve always loved that photo. Whenever I look at it, I think, If only I could get back into a wheelbarrow FULL OF GRAPEFRUITS. Everything would be okay if I was sitting on top of a wheelbarrow full of grapefruits.

My dad’s been scanning and uploading old family photos to his Flickr account. There was piece on CNN recently about the new trend in obsessive digital documentation of one’s children; as something of a compulsive photographer, however, I personally am not too worried about “fail[ing] to enjoy living in the moment.” I like to take pictures; it’s part of my enjoyment of some moments. I do get annoyed when I’m not IN any of the pictures, which is why it’s good that in my family, both my father and I take a lot of photos. It’s always a danger, when you have one documentary photo taker in a group, that they disappear almost entirely from the photographic record.

The article also panics over the possibility that photo formats could change; formats are always an issue with digital media, but I doubt we’re going to wake up one morning to discover that all of a sudden, .jpgs no longer work. Batch conversion is a pretty simple job these days. And while it may be true that “some parents buy additional disk drives to archive photos, burn them on CDs or keep copies online — not always mindful that photo sites often make it difficult to retrieve the original, high-resolution versions necessary for quality prints,” it costs $25 a year for a FlickrPro account that WILL retain the original high-res versions, and you can also order prints of photos you upload to Flickr, either for pick-up at Target or to have shipped directly to you. A lot of the problems that the tech news people like to focus on are really “less advanced user” problems, which you know, they could actually address with helpful tips.

It may, however, be worth considering that publicly available photos on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites really are available to “the entire world.” One of the photos my father put up featured my sister and me in the bathtub in 1984. It got 11 views in about a third of a day. It did apparently have “bath” in the title, and I’m pretty sure that the pedophiles are a heavily networked community, so I guess only one of them has to stumble on a particular photo to start it on the rounds. Dad set it to friends only.

Yes, I have always had freaky hair.

Thanks to wicked anomie, who posted about it first:

I am feeling a strong inclination to find one of Frontalot’s shows and throw my underwear at him. Although I suppose my dice collection might be more appropriate, as well as more likely to put out someone’s eye. Blinding someone with a d20 is nerdcore, right?

You can get the high-res version of the video at the official site, which also offers assorted merch. I am leaning toward the purple ladies t-shirt.

In case you did not play Zork and require some explanation: Grue (monster)

Actual interaction I had with some craigslist lame-o who emailed me and called and was two hours late getting back to me about picking up two six-foot floor lamps:

“Do they disassemble?”
“Yeah, they unscrew into like three pieces, so they’re easy to move.”
“Would they fit in a backpack?”
“…They’re SIX FEET TALL. EACH. …No, they will not fit in a BACKPACK.”

I had to email someone else, who showed up in like 10 minutes with a pick-up truck, so they’re not ALL freaks. And they certainly aren’t all freaks like this:

Missed Connections: Pedestrian hit by car this morning

I was in the car behind the red SUV that hit you this morning. I didn’t see much of what happened, but I know we had a red light. You looked like you weren’t hurt too badly - maybe a bit dazed, but walking around, so I didn’t stop. Kind of wish I had, just to be sure. Feel free to email back if you want, just to let me know you’re ok.

Oh, craigslist. You guys are freaks.

And apparently some of you are prostitutes. Yeah, who saw that coming.

I am getting sort of settled into my new apartment. I have furniture, and I’ve started hanging pictures and putting up posters and shit. Soon I should even have a bed frame. Oh, the luxury.

The important thing is that I hung the Scary Child:*

I thought long and hard, and that was definitely the scariest place to hang it. Home sweet home.

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*The Scary Child is a piece of art–we’re not totally sure WHAT the medium is–created by my cousin and given to his brother, another cousin, who promptly gave it to my mother when she saw it in his house and remarked that it really reminded her of me. This is the fourth apartment that it has graced with its terrible presence. Matt really hates it.

Isn’t it cute how I totally thought I’d be writing my dissertation by now?

To be fair, I do have a paper I wrote this spring that I plan to transform into a chapter, and I also didn’t realize when I made the post linked above that I would be spending Spring 2007 as a not-TECHNICALLY-enrolled visiting student at MIT rather than taking classes for actual credit back in Madison. I’d still only have a semester of coursework left, except that our required methods course is ONLY offered in the spring. It’s not so bad; I’m going to be TA’ing anyway, so a light course load is a good thing. And I HAVE passed both my prelim exams, which is probably difficult to appreciate if you don’t have any of your own to take, but believe me, it’s a relief (even if no one can figure out how I managed to finish prelims and still have classes left to take). Finishing up my coursework this spring, I should still be able to get out by Spring 2010, which puts my time in the program at the average for students entering without an MS (seven years*).

I still want a dining room table. And possibly another cat,** because I have not done enough damage to my marital prospects with all this graduate education.

I’ll be back in Madison in a week.*** It’s a little weird to consider, having spent a year away in places with TRAINS and many sources of Indian food, but at least they got a Trader Joe’s, and I miss my friends there. I’m feeling more positive about it this week than I have pretty much since last September, which I suppose could be a last-ditch self-preservation trick of my subconscious, but you know, whatever, I’m willing to just think I’m content if necessary. I’m looking forward to the farmers’ market, and having my cats again (and a vet who I trust at the UW vet school), and half-price cocktails at the Opus (the Cha Cha Cha matches my hair, and as we have recently learned, is a vital source of antioxidants by virtue of containing berries in its alcohol). I’m looking forward to classes (yes, finishing them especially) and being a TA.

I’m also looking forward to buying a commuter-road bike. Any recommendations on where to buy a new bike in Madison? Preferred retailers, etc.? I sold my 10-year-old mountain bike on craigslist this weekend,**** so this week I am riding my absent housemate’s commuter-road bike. I feel as if I have gone from a comfortable, well-bred mule to a high-strung Arabian warhorse, but this is probably largely due to the bicycle frame being too big for me, even with the seat all the way down. I still don’t want another mountain bike; even the good ones are too heavy for my needs. I do, however, anticipate that I will probably have to paint the new bike myself if I want it to suit me.

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*Mention this figure to a student in the hard sciences and watch them recoil in horror, but I sort of like the symbolism of it–v. folkloric. About the length of time you’d expect to spend, say, in the thrall of an evil witch+ or asleep inside a pearl at the bottom of an ocean of dragon spit.

+Not to imply anything about my advisors. No! Really! Please let me graduate.