I do kind of hate the word "cosplay" while often admiring the costumes. It makes me think of Jello pudding.

It would bring a whole new wrinkle to Picture Pages.

All I know about cosplay I learned from Venture Brothers, so every time I see the word I hear the Monarch in my head saying huffily, "I am into costume work."

I love the word cosplay. Maybe because it sounds dirty and isn't, or maybe it's just when I say it that it does.

Raq, I guess for me if you're learning Klingon and making bat'leths by yourself, you're a fan. When you start speaking it to someone (who doesn't think you're crazy) or fighting someone else, you may very well be in fandom.

If my boss's office were close enough for her to holler at me, she would. She will walk to my desk to ask me questions (she's shorter than the cubicle walls, so she just appears like Beelzebub), and worse, to ask me to come into her office so she can ask me questions that I have to go back to my desk to get the answers to. She won't use the phone or read her email. If she's forced to send an email, it takes her 15 minutes to write it and it still has mistakes. She works like she did twenty years ago before we had computers and the department was only seven people.

It probably comes as no surprise that I have been around a lot of cosplay. Some of it truly excellent, and some execrable. I don't do it, myself. I loathe having my picture taken.

Maybe because it sounds dirty and isn't

It doesn't sound dirty to me, it sounds icky. And it's neither, so I don't know why that should be.

Changing the subject to another that is on the table: The public perception of male fans is that they are loners who even if they do congregate together do so more becaus ethey are rejected by everyone else than because they want to be a community. I don't think that the difference between primarily-female and primarily-male groups of fans is in the gregariousness per se, but I think the way the members of the group think about the group is different. Men tend to form societies while women tend to form communities. I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that, but it's tickling something I picked up studying 18th century Europe that makes me think i might be on to something.

they are loners who even if they do congregate together do so more becaus ethey are rejected by everyone else than because they want to be a community

Huh. I must ponder this revelation. And ask some of my male friends who, say, gathered with (existing, and therefore not a proto-fandom as such) friends to watch Buffy every week, but left it at that, without seeking more people to share the experience with.

I'm glad we've got the guys we've got. But we really are a chickfest.

Possibly Alpen:

Went to the doc about the finger. He squeezed it many times, failed to identify or diagnose it, and gave me a referral to a hand surgeon.

Harrumph. But he wants me to wait before I make the appointment. Harrumph again.

ita, not Dr. Z?

Nope--my new insurance requires me to route everything through my PCP. Z would have stuck me right there and then.

But I don't want to see him anymore--primarily because of the grief his front desk gave me every single time. I always turned out to be in the right, but that didn't mean they'd not start again on the very next visit.