+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.