I just volunteered to be bumped off the last flight out of Salt Lake City tonight. Off to find my hotel for the night and figure out what time I have to be back here in the morning.

On the national anthem front, it probably helps ease of remembrance that "O Canada" has a melody that human beings other than Mariah Carey can hit all the notes of.

So I saw Annalee at the WWD Salon in Borderlands Cafe today and said, "Guess what? I'm a Buffista!" And we talked.

First thing: I told her people were uncomfortable with the link to b.org, and she took it down while we were talking. So that's taken care of. She clarified that Fast Eddie never took credit for starting Buffistas; he had said something like "We moved to Buffistas," and it wasn't clear to her what he meant, so the original article was simply worded poorly, and that was her fault. She's also sorry that her article ended up reopening old wounds.

We talked a lot, and I don't remember all the details, but let's see what I can put together.

She spoke to Fast Eddie on the phone, and he had a Southern accent. Interestingly enough, Gus did not come up at all during the phone interview, but he e-mailed later to say that Gus was the "personality"—his use of quotation marks—behind TV Tropes. When she asked him when Gus died—and both Fast Eddie and Janitor claim that Gus did die, and of MS—he replied from Gus's e-mail address. Which she thought was creepy. Much like the fact that Fast Eddie admitted that after Gus died, he and Janitor kept posting as him for a while until they decided that...wasn't cool. (As Annalee said, either Gus was real and they did something fucked-up and wrong, or Gus wasn't real and they did something fucked-up and wrong.) He said that he used to post under many different names, and he decided that Fast Eddie was going to be his "unified identity"—his phrase. Which explains why no one here had heard of "Fast Eddie"—he only took that name after Gus died. When Annalee asked him if he would give her his real name, although it was okay not to, he said he was uncomfortable because his real name had some negative associations with the gaming community, which she found curious. She actually e-mailed someone at Kotaku, a gaming blog, to ask if they'd heard of a Fast Eddie, and they hadn't. Fast Eddie did say that his work involved back-end game programming or something like that (Annalee used specific phrases that I don't recall now).

As for Janitor, she said she was a Korean biochemist in Italy. She never spoke to her on the phone because her Korean accent was too thick and no one could understand her. Except she also said that she was at MIT in the seventies, so Annalee was skeptical that her English was so unintelligible after thirty years.

Once when she told Fast Eddie that Janitor had said the three of them were at MIT together, he was kind of surprised and asked where she'd said that. So she pointed him to the thread on TVTropes, and he was all, oooh, yeah. Which was just as sketchy as everything else about the story, now that she was getting the context. She was actually kind of pissed at the idea that Janitor may be a fictional creation because she was such a racist stereotype. At least let your fictional Korean girlfriend speak English!

Annalee thinks "Fast Eddie" may actually be schizophrenic, the way he talked about his "identities" and "personalities," but he could just be a regular guy who puts on different personas for any number of reasons. It's a mystery!

Thanks P-C. Is it really really wrong of me to be relieved and pleased to get corroboration that the whole affair is effing creepy?

Wow. Thanks, P-C.

Yikes.

Although, I'm not going to lie, I used to work with a guy who had been working in the US for at least 30 years, and was still hard to understand over the phone sometimes.

he decided that Fast Eddie was going to be his "unified identity"

Wow. This kinda reinforces my theory.

Oooookkkkaaayyy.

I've been slogged and skimming, so, WTF you talking about P-C?

Can someone Nilly me to a post or something?

Tom Scola "Natter 65: Speed Limit Enforced by Aircraft" Feb 24, 2010 1:57:19 pm PST