Snowflake Challenge - Day 6

[accioslash]

In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul.

Comments

[lobelia321]

Oh, this so resonates me. I didn't do digging like you did pre-internet but I always felt there was something missing in my life, and I didn't even know what. I read gay romance porn for a while but somehow it didn't do it for me beyond the first two weeks. I came across Constance Penley's essay on Kirk/Spock and was mightily intrigued but then forgot about it as something that happened somewhere else in a galaxy far, far away. Until I web-searched (probably using excite or somesuch?? this was pre-google, I think - or maybe not?) 'Sam Frodo kiss' in January 2002 and fell, head over heels, into the Lord of the Rings book archive and squeed with a thousand squees. When I opened my own website (remember geocities?), I unhesitatingly named it 'My niche' because I felt that I had found my niche on the internet. My people! (I hadn't even known there were others... when I read that book about women's erotic fantasies by whatsername I trawled the entire thing for m/m: nothing! I thought I was the only one in the world!) Hah, goodbye

[accioslash]

when I read that book about women's erotic fantasies by whatsername

... Nancy Friday?

And, yes, indeed. I really miss geocities. All that fandom history lost. A lot of the Trek stuff, though much more, I'm sure. It's fascinating to me that copies of zines with a print run of 50 still exist, but something on the internet is gone forever.

[lobelia321]

Geocities: gone! My site survives on my hard drives and in truncated form on a friend's server but I never go there anymore; I don't even know how to upload anything to it... This is why I welcome A03 so much! They care about history and archiving. Also, the old yahoo lists that ate posts once they hit a certain limit. If you posted new stuff, the older stuff got deleted. Horrible. No way to retrieve anything. Wayback machine? I dunno. It's posts like yours, a sort of oral history, that help to reconstruct stuff.

Yes, Nancy Friday!

[accioslash]

I do appreciate that there is a centralized location for fanfic. Love the idea that all fandoms, all pseudonyms can be listed together. Though I really wish there were a place that would host art without fear of being deleted.

[crystalusagi]

Being a slash fan is a way of life for me too. =)

[citiesandsigns]

Slash has definitely been a place for me to find an identity too, although that identity is not so much 'slash fan' so much as 'queer person' - although the two are not necessarily completely extricable from each other, either, and I don't know how long it would have taken me to get anywhere with the latter without having access to the former. One is young, but not so young that anyone ever mentioned the existence of the LGBT community except in the context of AIDS when I was growing up! So fandom has been the arena where I've played with my personal identity and been able to think about these things in a way that wasn't terrifying. Well, relatively not-terrifying, anyway.

[felaine]

We love you.

[mordyn4]

Well put. :)

Pulling for you, hard.