3x08, "Wireless Girl"

[tylik]

"You folks know better than I do, but repeated behavior can show up in unconnected mental cases--like tinfoil hats to keep out the voices. You'd think sometimes there was a handbook got passed out."
Captain Thiele

Well, there are manuals, really. Anyone remember the rash of reports of recovered memories of intergenerational Satanic ritual abuse that were traced back (in large part) to the book Michelle Remembers? 

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I think it's fairly common, but that the environment shapes it. Yours was open to the fantastic, so the stories opened to the magical. Whereas I'm in an environment where an unkind assessment of my friends and extended circle would be the chattering classes, and the stories tend to be ones that would be dumped as unreasonably improbable by even the more lurid shopping and f***ing authors.

...and you should have heard some of the stories I got when I had my name and home telephone number up on fliers all over the city as the contact point for a large open pagan event. (At some point the local SCA chatelaine, a contact person for the Camarilla, several other similar groups and I all traded numbers, for to better redirect people who were obviously looking for something a bit different than the events each of us were associated with...)

[tylik]

...I think I had a run in with this same dude.

0.0

So... do you hope it's the same dude, or do you hope there are actually more of them?

(It's one of those questions. Like wondering if you give more credit to the people who sing and pray and have psychic battles with imaginary Satanists and always win... or the ones who also lose, sometimes?)

[tylik]

Seems like some stories keep repeating, and yes, I know someone who this could apply to as well, though as far as I know the ex's haven't ever gotten together consciously.

In our defense, none of us were exes...

[MadGastronomer]

Well, there are manuals, really. Anyone remember the rash of reports of recovered memories of intergenerational Satanic ritual abuse that were traced back (in large part) to the book Michelle Remembers? 

I actually dated someone with recovered memories of intergenerational Satanic ritual abuse. Complete with ritual abortion, or possibly forced birth for infant sacrifice, I can't recall which. No, I didn't know that about her when I started dating her. No, I didn't date her for all that long after.

[DavidG]

...and you should have heard some of the stories I got when I had my name and home telephone number up on fliers all over the city as the contact point for a large open pagan event. (At some point the local SCA chatelaine, a contact person for the Camarilla, several other similar groups and I all traded numbers, for to better redirect people who were obviously looking for something a bit different than the events each of us were associated with...)

Now that has story potential, whether you play it as contemporary, or urban fantasy!

[Elizabeth Bear]

...I think I had a run in with this same dude.

0.0

So... do you hope it's the same dude, or do you hope there are actually more of them?

(It's one of those questions. Like wondering if you give more credit to the people who sing and pray and have psychic battles with imaginary Satanists and always win... or the ones who also lose, sometimes?)

Mine has a habit of e-stalking female SF writers.

[Cole]

Felicity Tabor? Really?

Unicorns, apocalyptic imaginings, and a desperate wish to be Special were pretty consistent with *my* experience as a teenaged girl... and apparently there's a pretty big market for it, given the popularity of certain strains of urban fantasy, especially in YA...

Now I'm wondering what Felicity Tabor would think of my current crack-read, the Killer Unicorn series by Diana Peterfreund.

I love those books! Strong heroines, all kinds of cool unicorn lore! Definitely among the best YA books I read last year.

[tylik]

I actually dated someone with recovered memories of intergenerational Satanic ritual abuse. Complete with ritual abortion, or possibly forced birth for infant sacrifice, I can't recall which. No, I didn't know that about her when I started dating her. No, I didn't date her for all that long after.

An old friend* told a story in which a friend of his was doing some kind of past life regression. He was arguing that it's mostly about suggestion, she asked him to sit in on it... so he made a point of saying a few things that she would recognize as Star Trek references. And sure enough, she remembered her past life as an ensign on the Starship Enterprise. His intention was to convince her that the whole thing was bunk, but she just took it and ran with it, and would go on at some length about the differences between the real Kirk, as she knew him, and the show... (Parts of this I can vouch for - I knew her, later.)

* Er, at least he was a friend at the time. He's the one who soaked the straw figure in gasoline, in fact... but what I've heard of his more recent activities leaves me more than a little leery.

[tylik]

Mine has a habit of e-stalking female SF writers.

Ew.

I can totally see if from the guy I described... but then, it seems likely that it's not an uncommon type.

[CJ]

The stories I've heard are different, but the general concept is the same. There are quite a lot of these people out there! My favorite was the one who had a huge series of claims about past lives and present contacts and witch wars and so on and so forth and he was going on about these things at length and really impressing several young and naive types. Now I looked younger than I was, and I'm not sure I ever was quite that naive, but I was listening in for the fun of it. And amongst his claims about his current life were multiple degrees in martial arts and fluency in Japanese.

He didn't know I'd lived in Japan for two years.

I started talking to him, at normal speed, in Japanese. Just run of the mill "where did you study?" type of stuff. He couldn't respond. I slowed down. He started making excuses. I simplified. He couldn't even recognize numbers. He sputtered a lot. The young and naive types went to find someone more believable to talk to. Mr. Big Talking suddenly got "attacked" by one of his "enemies" and had to leave.

I giggled a lot.

[tylik]

Do you remember an incident back in the early days on a mailing list which I believe we are both members of, involving a young woman who was experimenting with automatic writing who had produced some pages of Chinese?

I felt a little bad - I don't generally feel like there's much point in calling people out on that sort of thing unless they're using it egregiously. (Your twit would qualify, I think. And the would-be Cherokee shaman had this distressing habit of finding emotionally vulnerable people and trying to get them to be dependent on her.) I offered to see if I could translate, and offered a few face saving possibilities for why I might not be able to... and she never mentioned the subject again.

[DavidG]

I just re-read Part 4 because it was nagging at me there was something that warranted discussion:

"Chaz."

 He stopped, dropped his chin, lowered his eyes from the reinforced window and a glimpse of Raleigh, who waited to let him out.

 "Do you want me to get the treatment?"

Hafs has moved from denial to questioning, she's starting down the road to 'yes'.

"I thought invasive procedures involving the brain might be a little nervous-making, but I wasn't sure. Especially when they're designed to hunt down a piece of me and kill it."

 "Suppress it," he corrected. He had to dig his nails into his palms to keep from adding, "And it isn't a piece of you."

 "Suppressed." She smiled and stretched her arms out like a game-show assistant showing off the new car. "Kind of like this."

When Haf's says "Kind of like this", she actually means the Faraday cage around her burrow, but 'kind of like this ep's anomalability' is an equally valid answer. The treatment may 'save' Hafs, but how different is it really to the injury the Gamma left behind?

"Just like this," he said, and forced himself to say it firmly and to meet her eyes. "The Bug gets to live in the box. But you can walk out."

Sometimes you don't need the gun, sometimes you can be utterly ruthless with just a single sentence.

[Lioness]

...I think I had a run in with this same dude.

0.0

So... do you hope it's the same dude, or do you hope there are actually more of them?

(It's one of those questions. Like wondering if you give more credit to the people who sing and pray and have psychic battles with imaginary Satanists and always win... or the ones who also lose, sometimes?)

Mine has a habit of e-stalking female SF writers.

Eep.

Mine wasn't exactly an e-stalker.  She just... well. She just told people I was hitting on her over and over.

Then again, given that she also told people that she was Piers Anthony, a member of the Mossad, and a descendant of a tribe of immortal lion-people from the Swiss Alps, it went over about at well as you'd think. (Also, one of the people she picked to hear her tale of my  Deep Romantic Obsession With Her was a good friend of mine who was going to be staying with me after the convention at which she regaled him with this saga of her utterly special snowflakeness. He waited until she'd told him the whole thing before he smiled and said, "That's very interesting," and told her some actual true things about me and my life and loves, at which point she suddenly developed pressing business elsewhere.)

There's another part of the story which involves the Best Delivery Evar of a line (by Joel Rosenberg), but that one is best told in person.