Thank you so much for that post, dabac! That's exactly the kind of explanation I needed My wheel is all fixed now, your advice worked perfectly.

I used some school textbooks to put the wheel on, and then I stood on it. I was too light to make any big changes so I had to get my friend who's about 20 lbs heavier than me to help me out. He stood on it and pressed down pretty hard, and the wheel gave and bent back. It was almost perfect after that - not *completely* perfect, but good enough (and infinitely better than how it was before).

Then I laced the wheel back up, and worked on truing it. I followed Sheldon's guide (and a few others), and in an hour or two I think I did a pretty good job at putting the wheel back together. I trued it laterally, then I dished it, trued it laterally some more, worked on equal spoke tensions, stress relieved, lateral truing, etc, etc. I made sure to do a really thorough job on stress relieving the spokes. When I took it for the first ride, there was no pinging or anything at all, so I think I did a good job on that.

Overall, the wheel is as equal in spoke tension as I can get it without a tension meter, and it is pretty true laterally and radially (I had to sacrifice some true-ness for equal spoke tension). The rim is almost as good as it was brand new. Perhaps even better because I took care in building it back up really strongly.

Thanks everyone for your help! If the rim explodes or whatever, I'll be sure to update this thread. But for now, it seems to have worked perfectly