Generally cool people.

FriendsActual friends of mine who have web presences. Other cool peopleAll kinds of other cool people. Missing friendsFriends I'd like to get in contact with again.

Here are some links to generally cool people. Go check them out.

This used to be my "friends" page. However, few of my closest friends have their own pages. This page is therefore mostly about various cool people I've found who are on the Web.

It's very hard to find people who are interested in the same things I am. It's even harder to decide which page of mine I should link to them on. That's another reason for having this page.

Actual Friends

• Claire Connelly. She's a fellow fan of good science fiction, a very careful and critical thinker and also has a great sense of humor. She also knows more about computers than I could ever hope to understand. Though I don't always agree with her views on some things, I do always respect them, because unlike a lot of people, she really has passionate ideas about things rather than just knee-jerk reactions. She's a friend in the best sense.

• Lyone Fein. She was one of my office-mates in grad school. She's now doing far more with her degree than I have done, and I've always admired her moral courage and puckish sense of humor. She's wise, cute, kind and a good teacher. Plus, she makes really cool jewelry.

• All Systems Go! from my friend Becky. She's a wild-and-not-so-crazy mod chick in Muplis. She and I go way back, with a long, interesting, confusing history.

• Quility, from Patricia Elwell. I met her at the 2004 Minicon. She's definitely a kindred spirit -- she's into gaming, SF, gender issues and many other cool things, plus she's living in Ioway where I used to. She also introduced me to "Eat Poop, You Cat," a terrifically fun non-competitive party game.

• Cattitude, by Andy Hickmott. Another person I met at the 2004 Minicon, he's also a very cool person -- a gamer, programmer, SF enthusiast, etc. And apparently, it was he who introduced Patricia to Eat Poop, You Cat.

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Other Cool People

• B.C. Holmes. A very cool person who's into RPG's and TG issues.

• Calpernia Addams' homepage. A very cool person -- former drag queen, artist, poet and very nice conversationalist, among other things.

• Mark Rosenfelder's Metaverse. Mark Rosenfelder is an amazing person. He's into gaming and SF, linguistics, Chinese, comics, Wang Fei, and all sorts of neato bits. His Verduria pages are world-building of the best sort, rivalling Tolkien and Hârn.

• Ashley Rachel Pollard's homepage. She's into gaming of various sorts (I met her through a starship gaming list) and gender issues. Cool!

• The Taipei Kid is an anonymous cool person living in Taiwan who likes dancing, politics and speaking the truth.

• Brian David Phillips' Life of Brian. An English teacher living in Taiwan, Phillips is also into gaming in a big way. See also his earlier Domain of the Werewolf.

• Doug Berry's The Amazing Adventures of Penguin Boy. He's a very nice, funny guy who's a big Traveller fan and ever so slightly, tangentially into GLBT issues.

• Victor Raymond is a very cool guy into gaming of various sorts (including particularly 2300AD and Tekumel) and GLBT issues.

• Making Light, the blog of Teresa and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden. They write about all sorts of things, but primarily politics, science fiction and the hectic world of publishing.

• I don't know how long it will be up, but the Invisible Adjunct is a thorough, useful and honest look into the problems of American academia.

Do you know any other cool people I should know about? Are you one of them? Please let me know!

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Missing Friends

One other major category of friends for me: people who've disappeared. For some reason, I've had a pretty long run of finding really cool people and then somehow losing track of them. Here are some people I'd like to get in touch with again:

• Suzanne Knadler. We happened to study in Beijing together, and then lost contact. Strangely, though, several years later, we ended up in Taipei at the same time (old China hands stick together, I guess). She and her boyfriend went back to the States for Christmas in 1997, I think it was, and promptly dropped off the face of the earth. They apparently never came back to Taipei. And Suzanne had two extremely important Classical Chinese texts of mine! People always seem to disappear when I've leant them stuff. I'm not that materialistic, it's just that those books were, like, my ability to read Classical Chinese in woodpulp form! I've been pretty much crippled since losing them. I'd also like to get back in touch with Suzanne, of course.

• Larissa. I don't even know her last name. We only talked a few times, but i thought our relationship showed real promise -- we're both interested in Chinese and Chinese culture (her Mandarin was in many ways better than mine), queer studies, art history and several other things. But she was apparently really busy being the manager of a band, and also disappeared off the face of the planet. (I gave her my phone number, but she never called me back.)

• John. Again, I don't know his last name. He was my best friend, my first quarter of college -- we talked about philosophy, played Pente millions of times in the dorm lobby (much to the amusement of the jocks around us), ate dinner together almost constantly, consoled each other about our mothers. But he didn't come back from winter vacation, and I didn't have any way to contact him.

• Others -- there have been many others, but they were perhaps not so important to me as friends.

If you happen to be one of these people, or know of them, please contact me immediately!

When you'd like to go back to my main page, please do.

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This page (http://www.jiawen.net/ friends.html) designed and ©2000-2006 by Rachel Kronick. Last updated September 14, 2006.