Tags: anecdotal, cosplay, Star Trek
Status: draft
-> NEELIX: One of those species is the Benkarans. They occupy just ten percent of Nygean space, but take up nearly eighty percent of the space in Nygean prisons.
+> NEELIX: One of those species is the Benkarans. They occupy just ten percent of Nygean space, but take up nearly eighty percent of the space in Nygean prisons.
+>
> PARIS: Maybe they commit more crimes.
>
> —_Star Trek: Voyager_, "Repentance"
-(**SPOILERS** for _Star Trek: Discovery_ Season 1)
+(some amount of **SPOILERS** for _Star Trek: Discovery_ Season 1, _Fan Fiction_ by Brent Spiner, and [_Transcat_](http://transcatcomics.blogspot.com/))
-I [continue](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) to [maintain](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) that fandom conventions are boring. I enjoy _consuming_ fiction. I even enjoy discussing fiction with friends—the work facilitating a connection with someone else present, not just between me and the distant author, or me and the universe of stories. But for the most part, these big, bustling conventions just don't seem to facilitate that kind of intimacy. At best, you might hope to _meet_ someone at a convention, and then make friends with them over time?—which I've never actually done. And so, surrounded by tens of thousands of people ostensibly with common interests, invited to a calvacade of activities and diversions put on at no doubt monstrous expense, the predominant emotion I feel is the loneliness of anonymity.
+I [continue](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) to [maintain](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) that fandom conventions are boring. I enjoy _consuming_ fiction. I even enjoy discussing fiction with friends—the work facilitating a connection with someone else present, rather than just between me and the distant author, or me and the universe of stories. But for the most part, these big, bustling conventions just don't seem to facilitate that kind of intimacy. At best, you might hope to _meet_ someone at a convention, and then make friends with them over time?—which I've never actually done. And so, surrounded by tens of thousands of people ostensibly with common interests, invited to a calvacade of activities and diversions put on at no doubt monstrous expense, the predominant emotion I feel is the loneliness of anonymity.
<a href="/images/mask_con_morning.jpg"><img src="/images/mask_con_morning.jpg" width="240" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
-But that's okay. Ultimately, I did not come to [Fan Expo San Francisco 2022](https://archive.ph/2OI4H) on Saturday for the intimacy of analyzing fiction with friends who know me.
+But that's okay. Ultimately, I did not come to [Fan Expo San Francisco 2022](https://archive.ph/2OI4H) for the intimacy of analyzing fiction with friends who know me.
I came because of the _loophole_. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not _crossdress_ in public. That would be _weird_. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, _out-of-distribution_ weird.)
-But to cosplay as as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themselves do not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.
+But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themselves does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.
Conventions are actually _so_ boring that the loophole alone wouldn't have been enough to get me to come out to Fan Expo (been there, [done that](/tag/cosplay/)—seven times), but this time I had a couple of new accessories to try out, most notably [a "Taylor" silicone mask by Crea FX](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/).
-The "Taylor" is an amazing piece of workmanship that entirely earns its €672 price tag. It really looks like a woman's face! Just—a detached woman's face, wrapped in tissue paper, sitting in a box! [I had _said_ buying this product was probably a smart move](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#movie-grade-mask), and it turned out that buying this product was a _smart move!_ The skin color and texture is much more realistic than a lot of other silicone feminization products, like the cartoony beige of the [Gold Seal female bodysuit](https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-naked-silicone-bodysuit/) from TheBreastFormStore.com that I _also_ blew $600 on recently (and damaged badly just trying to get it on).
+The "Taylor" is an amazing piece of workmanship that entirely earns its €672 price tag. It really looks like a woman's face! Just—a detached woman's face, wrapped in tissue paper, sitting in a box! [I had _said_ buying this product was probably a smart move](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#movie-grade-mask), and it turned out that buying this product was a _smart move!_ The skin color and texture is much more realistic than a lot of other silicone feminization products, like the cartoony beige of the [Gold Seal female bodysuit](https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-naked-silicone-bodysuit/) from [the Breast Form Store](https://thebreastformstore.com/who-we-are/) that I _also_ blew $600 on recently (and damaged badly just trying to get it on).
-(As far as workmanship quality goes, I wonder how much it helps that Crea FX are visual-effects artists by trade—makers also of male masks and monster masks for movies and plays—rather than being in the MtF business specifically, like TheBreastFormStore.com. They know—[they _must_ know](https://www.creafx.com/en/crea-fx-at-the-german-fetish-fair/)—that a lot of their female masks are purchased by guys like me with motives like mine, but we're not the _target_ demographic, the reason they mastered their skills.)
+(As far as workmanship quality goes, I wonder how much it helps that [Crea FX](https://www.creafx.com/en/) are visual-effects artists by trade—makers also of male masks and monster masks for movies and plays—rather than being in the MtF business specifically, like the Breast Form Store. They know—[they _must_ know](https://www.creafx.com/en/crea-fx-at-the-german-fetish-fair/)—that a lot of their female masks are purchased by guys like me with motives like mine, but we're not the _target_ demographic, the reason they mastered their skills.)
Somehow the mask somehow manages to look worse in photographs than it does in the mirror? Standing a distance from the mirror in a dark hotel room the other month (that I rented to try on my new mask in privacy), I swear _I actually bought it_, and if the moment of passing to myself in the mirror was an anticlimax, it was an anticlimax I've been waiting my entire life (since puberty) for.
The worst nonrealism is the eyeholes. Nothing is worse for making a mask look like a mask than visible eyehole-seams around the eyes. But suppose I wore sunglasses. Women wear sunglasses sometimes! Could I pass to _someone else_? (Not for very long or bearing any real scrutiny, but [to someone who wasn't expecting it](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/).)
-It immediately became clear that I would have to cosplay at one more convention in order to test this, and decided to reprise my role as Sylvia Tilly from _Star Trek: Discovery_ (previously played at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018) at the next nearby con. There had been [a plot point in season 1 of _Discovery_](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vaulting_Ambition_(episode)#Act_Four) that people in the mirror universe are more sensitive to light, which I had thought was lame and bizarre at the time, but now gave me a perfect excuse for someone who looks like Sylvia Tilly to be wearing sunglasses! (I was soon disappointed to learn that one-way glass isn't actually a real thing that you could make sunglasses out of; what's real are [_half-silvered_ mirrors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_mirror) that are deployed with one side in darkness.) For good measure, I also added of a pair of [padded panties](https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-padded-panty/) from TheBreastFormStore.com to my outfit, another solid buy.
+It immediately became clear that I would have to cosplay at one more convention in order to test this, and decided to reprise my role as [Sylvia Tilly](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sylvia_Tilly) from _Star Trek: Discovery_ (previously played at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018) at the next nearby con. There had been [a plot point in season 1 of _Discovery_](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vaulting_Ambition_(episode)#Act_Four) that people in the mirror universe are more sensitive to light, which I had thought was lame and bizarre at the time, but now gave me a perfect excuse for why (someone who looks like) Tilly would be wearing sunglasses! (I was soon disappointed to learn that one-way glass isn't actually a real thing that you could make sunglasses out of; what's real are [_half-silvered_ mirrors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_mirror) that are deployed with one side in darkness.) For good measure, I also added of a pair of [padded panties](https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-padded-panty/) from the Breast Form Store to my outfit, another solid buy.
+
+So Friday night, I threw my [2250-era Starfleet uniform](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2230s-2250s)) in my backpack, put my breastforms and wig and mask in a box, and got on the train to San Francisco. (My ticket to the con was Saturday only, but it's nice to get a hotel room for the night before, and get dressed up in the morning within walking distance of the event, rather than taking the train in costume the day of.) Carrying the box around was slightly awkward, and the thought briefly occured to me that I could summon an internet taxi rather than take the train, but it was already decadent enough that I was getting a hotel room for a local event, and I had recently learned that my part-time contract with my dayjob (which started in April as a Pareto improvement over me just quitting outright) isn't getting renewed at the end of the year, so I need to learn to be careful with money (at least until dayjob IPOs and my shares become liquid) instead of being a YOLO spendthrift.
+
+Saturday morning, I got myself masked and padded in all the right places, and suited up to walk from my hotel room to Moscone West for the convention! They had a weirdly cumbersome check-in system (wait in line to get your QR code scanned, then receive a badge, then _activate_ the badge by typing a code printed on it into a website on your phone, then scan the badge to enter the con), and I dropped my phone while I was in line and cracked the screen a bit. But then I was in! Hello, Fan Expo!
+
+And—didn't immediately have anything to do, because conventions are boring. I had gone through the schedule the previous night and written down possibly non-boring events on a page in my pocket Moleskine notebook, but the first (a nostalgic showing of Saturday morning cartoons from the '90s) didn't even start until 1100, and the only ones I really cared about were the _Star Trek_ cosplay meetup at 1315, and a photo-op with Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden at 1520 that I had pre-paid $120 for. I checked out the vendor hall first. Nothing really caught my eye ...
+
+Until I came across a comics table hawking [_Transcat_](http://transcatcomics.blogspot.com/), the "first" (self-aware scare quotes included) transgender superhero. I had to stop and look: just the catchphrase promised an exemplar of everything [I'm fighting](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/)—not out of hatred, but out of a [shared love](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) that [I think I have](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) the more [faithful interpretation](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) of. I opened the cover of one of the displayed issues to peek inside. The art quality was ... not good. "There's so much I could say that doesn't fit in this context," I said to the proprietor, whose appearance I will not describe. "Probably not what you're thinking," I added. "Oh no," [she](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) said.
+
+I wandered around the con some more (watched some of the cartoons, talked to the guys manning the _Star Trek_ fan club booth). Eventually I checked out the third floor, where the celebrity autographs and photo ops were. Spiner and McFadden were there, with no line in front of their tables. I had already paid for the photo op later, but that looked like it was going to be [one of those](/2016/Dec/joined/#photo-assembly-line) soulless "pose, click—next fan" assembly-lines, and it felt more human to actually get to _talk_ to the stars for half a minute.
+
+(When I played Ens. Tilly in 2018, I got an autograph and [photo with Jonathan Frakes](/images/tilly_cosplay.png), and got to talk to him for half a minute: I told him that we had covered his work in art history class at the Academy, and that I loved his portrayal of—[David Xanatos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Xanatos).)
+
+I had recently read Spiner's pseudo-autobiographical crime novel [_Fan Fiction_](https://www.npr.org/2021/10/17/1046397441/brent-spiner-data-fan-fiction-review) about him getting stalked by a deranged fan, and wanted to say something intelligent about it, and so, my heart pounding, I went over to Spiner's table, and paid the $60 autograph fee to the attendant. (If Gates McFadden had written a book, then I hadn't read it, so I didn't have anything intelligent to say to her.)
+
+I told him that I thought the forward to _Fan Fiction_ should have been more specific about which parts were based on a true story. He said, that's the point, that you don't know what's real. I said that I was enjoying it as a decent crime novel, but kept having a reaction to some parts of the form, No way, no _way_ did that actually happen. He asked which parts. I said, you know, the way that the woman hired to be your bodyguard just happens to have a twin sister, and you get romantically involved with _both_ of them, and end up killing the stalker yourself in a dramatic confrontation—
+
+"I killed someone," he said, deadpan.
+
+"Really?" I asked.
-[TODO: explain hotel rooms and money?, box of breastforms and mask]
+No, he admitted, but the part about getting sent a pig penis was real.
-Saturday morning, I got myself masked and padded in all the right places, and suited up to walk from my hotel room to Moscone West for the convention! They had a weirdly cumbersome check-in system (wait in line to get your QR code scanned, then receive a badge, then activate the badge by typing a code printed on it into a website on your phone, then scan the badge to enter the con), and I dropped my phone while I was in line and cracked the screen a bit. But then I was in! Hello, Fan Expo!
+I gave my name as "Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. _Discovery_", and he signed a page I ripped out of my Moleskin: "To Sylvia", it says, "A fine human!"
-And—didn't immediately have anything to do, because conventions are boring. I had gone through the schedule the previous night and written down possibly non-boring events, but the first (a nostalgic showing of Saturday morning cartoons from the '90s) didn't even start until 1100, and the only ones I really cared about were the _Star Trek_ cosplay meetup at 1315, and a photo-op with Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden at 1520 that I had pre-paid $120 for. I checked out the vendor hall first. Nothing really caught my eye ...
+As far as my hope of the mask helping me pass as female to others, I didn't really get a sense that I fooled anyone? I guess it's not obvious how I would tell. A woman wearing a Wonder Woman costume recognized me as Tilly and wanted to get a photo of us.
-Until I came across a comics table hawking [_Transcat_](http://transcatcomics.blogspot.com/), the "first" (self-aware scare quotes included) transgender superhero. I had to stop and look: just the catchphrase promised an exemplar of everything [I'm fighting](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/)—not out of hatred, but out of a [shared love](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) that [I think I have](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) the more [accurate interpretation](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) of. I opened the cover of one of the displayed issues to peek at the story inside. The art quality was ... not good. "There's so much I could say that I could say that doesn't fit in this context," I said to the proprietor, whose appearance I will not describe. "Probably not what you're thinking," I added. "Oh no," [she](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) said.
-I wandered around the con some more (watched some of the cartoons, talked to the guys manning the _Star Trek_ fan club booth). Eventually I wandered to the third floor, where the celebrity autographs and photo ops were. Spiner and McFadden were there, with no line in front of their tables. I had already paid for the photo op later, but that looked like it was going to be [one of those](/2016/Dec/joined/#photo-assembly-line) soulless assembly-line "pose, click—next fan" procedure, and it felt more human to actually get to _talk_ to the stars for half a minute. (When I played Ens. Tilly in 2018, I got an autograph and [photo with Jonathan Frakes](/images/tilly_cosplay.png), and got to talk to him for half a minute: I told him that we had covered his work in art history class at the Academy, and that I loved his portrayal of—David Xanatos.) I had read Spiner's pseudo-autobiographical novel _Fan Fiction_ recently and wanted to say something intelligent about it. My heart pounding, I went over to Spiner's table, and paid the $60 autograph fee to the attendant. (If Gates McFadden had written a book, then I hadn't read it, so I didn't have anything intelligent to say to her.)
+/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/
- * told him that I thought the forward to _Fan Fiction_ should have been more specific about which parts were based on a true story; he said, That's the point, you don't know what's real; I was reading it as a decent detective novel, and kept being like, No way this happened, and he asked which parts, and I said, the part where the bodyguard woman has an identical twin and you're dating both of them, and attack the killer
- * I gave my name as "Ens. Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. Discovery"
- * autograph: "To Sylvia / A fine human!"
* I don't think I fooled anyone—not up close
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff