Hi, Reddit!

If you're here from Reddit, hi! Glad you found me! The best place to start is the cleverly named "Where to Start" page, kind of like a Guided Tour of Galiana: http://galianachance.blogspot.com/p/where-to-start.html

For the rest of you... I'm doing a Reddit IAmA ... AMA today.

Reddit is... ummm... gosh, how to describe Reddit. If I just send you to reddit.com, it'll be overwhelming, unless you're already addicted to it, in which case you will mock others for feeling overwhelmed. It's like a series of community discussion boards strung together by caffeine, awesomeness, geekery, red and grey robots, and sometimes narwhals and rainbows, but usually less brutal than 4chan.

That didn't really help did it?

Well, for example, there's a section called IAmA, where eople post starting threads like my personal favorite of yesterday: "IAmA (Retired) Cat Burglar - AMA" (AMA="Ask Me Anything"). And people do ask anything at all. The cultural norm is that the person who started the thread sticks around all day to answer as many questions and respond to as many comments as possible.

Today I'm doing "IAmA phone sex operator with an IQ of 142 - AMA".

If you're a phone sex worker reading this and thinking "oh great idea, I'll do one!" please let me advise you to wait at least 2 weeks since the last person did one, and understand how to avoid being accused of "trolling", or your thread will go suffer a horrible death by way of a flaming ball of downvotes.

I expect people to call me fat. I will /pat them on the head, remind them my opening statement contained "I am 50 pounds overweight" and point them to this blog post about weight. I will not let those people affect how sexy I feel, nor will I miss them when they pass forever out of my life.

The possibility exists that someone who knows me from my off-phone life will have an unpleasant shock (IAmA has almost 200,000 subscribers, so that's not a completely crazy thought). I don't mind most people knowing, even ex-coworkers, because I don't seem to be headed back to a tech career any time soon. And if anyone has a moral objection to phone sex, hopefully they won't go poking around in the thread in the first place. And if they do, we'll deal with it

Most importantly, the people I am closest to already know ... except for three. None of those three read Reddit, but they're married to people who might, but the odds are slim. So if your initials are CD or RL or MC and you're married to one of my best friends, please call me first before you tell them, so we can figure out timing that will minimize their trauma. Sorry!

The logistical down side to doing an IAmA is that it's likely to wipe me out today - the scrolling and reading and commenting will make me dizzy. The up side is that Friday afternoon and early evening are the only slow times in my week I've been able to accurately anticipate, so I'm okay with that.

I love talking about what I do. I love sharing my thoughts and observations and ideas. And I love amusing geek boys while doing that. So. Much. Win!!

But really, the big compelling up side is: it's likely to be extraordinary fun for my Inner Exhibitionist. I haven't had much public sex lately, so she's been getting cranky, and when my husband had the idea for an IAmA, she became so insistent that I haven't been able to say no. I expect her to end the day as a limp, sweaty, glassy-eyed, blissed-out ragdoll, being dragged off to sleep by the rest of the gang while mumbling "one more comment... just one more..." One can only hope!