wickedqueen.net

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.

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.

This past week for my collaborative learning course, we read three articles on activity theory, a theoretical perspective concerned with how actors work towards goals/objects from particular motives/passions, using certain tools to do so–based on the little triangular diagram that seems much beloved of activity theory, I would include “rules” within “tools,” which is of course very ethnomethodological of me.

That is to say, ethnomethodologists often argue that rules are never sufficient to account for people’s actions, no matter how frequently people claim that they did things “because of” rules. Rules are simply resources, another possible tool in the toolkit when people are accounting for action–and in fact, one often sees cases in which people justify a seeming violation of a rule by demonstrating how it was in fact following the “spirit” of the rule or something similar. I like to think of roles in a similar way, actually, although I would freely admit that some roles are harder to get out of or into than others, and of course accounts can fail in the sense that other participants do not accept them. But anyway. Activity theory.

One of the articles, Wolff-Michael Roth’s* “Activity Theory and Education: An Introduction” (2004), discusses the early absence of activity theory from the discipline of education (the course I’m taking is in educational psychology, if you’ll recall). He attributes its rise in visibility in part to articles published in English by Engestrom and notes that you can trace this ascent by looking at the increasing attendance at activity theory-related sessions as the American Educational Research Association national meetings.

As pretty much all academics know, there are trends within academia. Certain topics or theoretical perspectives get hot and everyone wants to get in on the action. Sometimes these trends are Madonna; sometimes they are Britney Spears. In the case of activity theory, the main barrier to its having been promoted earlier seems to have been a lack of English publications; this is certainly a problem for non-English-speaking researchers in engaging in dialogue with a larger audience, but one that I think is often not considered much. I’m guilty myself of crossing off potential references without a second thought if they’re not in English–I’m a graduate student; I have papers to write and articles to submit and classes to teach; I just don’t have time to learn German. This is, however, a good example of how what we know, or think is important, is often shaped by forces that are mostly invisible to us. Even if we know they’re there, we mostly don’t think about them.

Language barriers are an obvious example, but in fact academics’ perspectives are typically a lot narrower than that. We get trained in certain disciplines, with bodies of literature behind them–some of them are older and more entrenched than others, but graduate education is pretty focused anyway. Interdisciplinary research seems to be getting more and more buzz, and it seems obvious that it’s a good approach when you have a particular topic established. I remember a couple of years ago talking to a guy at a party who was interested in autism diagnoses. He wasn’t a sociologist, and had no idea about the work within conversation analysis (narrower and narrower) that had been done on the topic. He was really interested in it when I told him about it. I suspect he probably never read it, or maybe read it and got frustrated and decided to stick with more sensible perspectives.

By which I mean, more sensible to him. Academic training is all about learning a paradigm and working in it. Interdisciplinary research and perspectives seem like a great idea, kind of like ending world hunger, but then they turn out to be really complicated and confusing and people keep referencing pet theorists and very few people actually want to quit being a sociologist or a psychologist or whatever, and there’s a tendency, I think, to get frustrated with people for not having had the same training as you. It’s probably worse when you’re all sort of in the same division, like social science–physicists are clearly alien; you don’t expect them to know anything about Marx. But when people know about Marx, and then turn out not to know what YOU know about Marx, it’s confusing–especially when you start out thinking you know the same things, because duh, why wouldn’t you?**

For example, one of the other articles, a piece on online community, includes a bit on sociability:

The important design point here is that designers shift their focus from simply supporting usability to supporting what Preece (2000) described as ’sociability.’ Barab, MaKinster, Moore, Cunningham, and The ILF Design Team (2001) described sociability as ‘those social policies and technical structures that support the community’s shared purpose and social interactions among group members’ (p. 83)” (Barab et al. 2004)

I realize that what is being termed “sociability” here actually diverges rather sharply from Simmel’s definition of sociability as non-instrumental, but it comes as quite a shock, to a sociologist, to see the word “sociability” and not even a breath of him. This may just be an exaggeration of a problem common to a lot of social scientific terms, which is that we tend to use words like “self” and “motive” that already have vernacular connotations that may not actually mean what we want them to mean.***

I don’t mean, actually, to be negative about interdisciplinary research–I think it’s a good idea, just like a bunch of other people do. I do think that when attempting it, participants needs to really think about their own differences in perspective, and try not to ever assume that two people using the same word mean the same thing. There are language barriers amongst English speakers.

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*It is not often that I encounter another academic with an apparently English name as non-normative as mine.

***I was told once that Japanese academics, as part of their academic training, have to learn new sets of kanji (Chinese characters) for the technical terminology of their discipline. I wonder if their social sciences follow this convention as well, or if they, too, use words pinched from laypeople.

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.

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.

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.

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.

…and yet, every time I hear “You Oughta Know,” the Uncle Joey connection still pretty much weirds me the hell out.

Someone has developed a ‘Top Eight’ plug-in for Facebook.

As most Facebook users know, recently Facebook started allowing third-party applications that you can embed in your profile. Unlike MySpace, they still exert a lot of control over profile appearance; you still can’t put in background images or blinking text, which I think we can agree is for the best. However, the “Top Eight” is ganked directly from one of the bare bones defaults of a MySpace profile: the display of your eight “best” friends’ names and profile icons.

I’m not sure if the new Facebook plug-in uses a static order the way MySpace does; I’m a little reluctant to install it, although my reaction is not as negative as some:

stop trying to make it like it - if you wanna depress people by saying who your “best friends” are then go to myspace.com

As reported elsewhere, this smacks more of favouritism than convenience, and as such, I disapprove of it, also, but at least we do have the option of whether or not we use it, unlike with MySpace.

definately. myspace is ok, but facebook is more for school people than every single person in the world… leave the top friend drama at myspace

This is not myspace. I won’t be friends with anyone who uses this tool…

Wow, facebook is really turning into Myspace. I remember when facebook was for college students only. I miss those days.

ahh this is so lame!! i can’t believe this obvious copy of myspace!
and to the people who said don’t add it and it won’t be a problem — you still have to deal with your friends who get it. how would you feel if you have to find out through facebook that you aren’t one of their “BFF”s ?

Why am I not surprised that most of the people who like this application are high school punks?

exactly..thats why facebook isnt for middle school, theres no need for the extra drama.

Young son, when i was in high school, Facebook was for people who got into real colleges. Yeah this app bothers me too and yeah I’m not gonna use it. I don’t wanna leave facebook cuz there is nothing else like facebook the way it was about a year or so ago (man it was perfect then). Next people will be able to change their profile colors and make them annoying pink and purple [editor’s note: this is an interesting foray into implicit misogyny–makes a nice break from the classism, anyway], then there will be wallpapers, then youll be able to change the font, then music will play automatically when you go to someone’s profile, then there wll be all kinds of moving crap in the background. The changeable layout and these little apps like top friends are just the start of it. They keep trying to make things better when in reality “less is more.” Facebook was better like a year ago and I wish there was a way to keep it from slowly drifiting toward myspace. Reply and fire back if you want, I don’t care.

To all the high schoolers who tell us to just “not use this app”, go back to Myspace. College students never truly wanted high schoolers or anyone else for that matter, aside from college students, on this website and now look what’s happened.
All of these apps are being developed with Myspace-ready high-schooler friendly mindsets. Apps like THIS do NOT belong on Facebook. Just like adding music that plays automatically to your profile doesn’t. Just like changing your profile away from the basic blues and simple style doesn’t.
It’s all a matter of time before the high schoolers/outsiders demands get too heavy and Facebook begins pandering to you dimwits.

The discourse has a lot of references to the general superiority of Facebook over MySpace, and specifically to the idea that opening Facebook to non-(college) students made it more like MySpace and therefore not as good. This is really just a continuation of the discourse that sprang up immediately before and after Facebook opened membership to the public–just now people can point at specific things they dislike and say the riffraff caused it. There are plenty of people making the counterargument “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it,” so don’t take the comments cited above as indicative of a unified stance on Facebook (yeah, it is to laugh).

I can certainly understand objections to MySpace-ification, but it’s interesting to me that people so immediately blame the presence of non-university students, as if they’d never met anyone they disliked or considered stupid in college. Don’t any of these kids have to take College Writing with a bunch of idiots? Also, the perception of MySpace as dominated by high school students is not entirely accurate–certainly not if you think they’re the driving force behind the mp3s that play automatically on profile pages. I’d say the indie musicians who use the site for distribution are much more invested in that particular feature. The internet and pseudo-intellectual elitism: two great tastes that continue to taste great together, I guess.

Actually, looking at that throw-away reference to pink and purple profiles, I’m now wondering if MySpace suffers from negatively valenced feminization in the same way that LiveJournal does; the site is often perceived by internet users as a young, female ghetto, despite the fact that there are significant enclaves of older and male users, and who you see there really depends on your particular social network and how you manage it. Just not the kind of people you want to be associated with–stick with Blogspot.

Interesting.

So I have a big nasty rash. It’s a much more intense version of a rash that I had mainly on the back of my neck a couple of days ago, now spread out across my upper back, chest, and arms. After some consideration, I realized that the rash probably corresponded to more frequent and longer term use of the Banana Boat Kids SPF 50 sunscreen I keep in my apartment–while I used it for awhile with no rash, I was typically going to the gym early-ish in the day, showering it off, and replacing it with Banana Boat Sport SPF 50* from my locker afterwards.

The two lines have significantly different ingredients, so it seemed pretty likely that there is something in the supposedly hypoallergenic children’s preparation to which I am violently allergic.

At first, Google was not terribly enlightening on this subject. It confirms that sunscreens may contain any number of different chemicals and pretty much all of them cause allergic reactions in somebody. I figured that. And I definitely have a rash.

But then something else dawned on me. Most of the sources I found emphasized that sunscreen allergies are only very rarely immediate contact allergies; rather, the allergic reaction is actually triggered by the interaction between the chemical and the UV rays from which it is supposed to be protecting the person wearing it. So you only get a rash after the sun shines on, say, the back of your neck which has been covered in Banana Boat Kids SPF 50.

Well, last night I spent about three hours in a karaoke room with various bits of interesting lighting. I didn’t actually see a blacklight, but I’ve noticed them in other rooms there that I’ve sung in, and it is the case that afterwards, a rash that was only slightly bothering me during the day (after about 45 minutes walking in the sun) had transformed itself into a monstrous itchy affliction. I suspect that whatever that karaoke lighting was, it interacted with a chemical to which I have a photoallergy in much the same way that prolonged bright sunlight would.

I would add this to my long-standing list of outside-the-box methods for vampire slaying,** but even with four Benadryl in me and a hefty topical dose of hydrocortisone cream, I am still a little too uncomfortable to be amused.

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*If you wear SPF 50, as I must, you are pretty much limited to Sport and Child lines.

**A Russian Orthodox incense burner on one of those poles that you swing around is another favorite. It’d be like a mace, except a special HOLY INCENSE UNDEAD SLAYING mace.