Snowflake Challenge - Day Two
I'm participating in the 
snowflake_challenge - it looked like fun and seems nicely low-key and adaptable to time and brain availability.
Day 2 is: Talk about your fannish history. A basic summary is already in my Sticky Post, so here I'm talking about some earlier "milestones" that were relevant to my fannish life. *g*
In the spirit of keeping it low-key, I did not double check airing or release dates, so there might be some brain smush.
1992: I discovered Star Trek: TNG while in 6th grade. I think the third season was airing on German television. Wrote my first, long, Mary Sue fanfic, mostly while in class under the table. (In a stack of recycling paper A5 Schulhefte. I still have them somewhere in the basement.)
1994: On a school trip to England, I bought my first Star Trek tapes with the original audio and my first English language Star Trek novel, which I read with a dictionary next to me.
1995: Started working in a comic store. My lifelong confusion at comics ("but what is the canon? what is the timeline??") began here. Half my pay was in merchandise; this is how I bought the ST:DS9 and ST:Voyager VHS tapes. I also discovered fan fiction on the internet. For access, I would cycle to the inner city library (it was about an hour's ride), sign up for the hour of internet you got on their machines, buy a floppy, and download everything I could find, to format&print at home. I mostly read Voyager, B5 and XFiles het, but also stumbled over my first slash story, which I found quite puzzling.
1996: No longer found slash so puzzling.
1997ish: Got my first computer. It made finding the no longer puzzling slash much easier.
1999/2000: Got into Highlander, wrote my first "proper" story.
2001:
solo offered to be my beta for my first Highlander fic. Many terrible things followed.
2004: I was completely blown away by the BSG reboot miniseries and suddenly found myself with a het ship.
2006~2008: Fell out of love with BSG in the most horrible, drawn out fannish break-up I've ever had, to the point where I was relieved the other day when I discovered I'd never actually uploaded my fic to AO3.
2008: Akame and KAT-TUN happened. Solo and I started writing The Same Deep Water As You (2008-2012, 450.000 words). Many more terrible things followed.
2018: Guardian happened.
2019: The Untamed happened.
Stuff like the floppy hamstering is amusing to me in restrospect (and I'm sure lots of fans in my age range have similarly amusing-from-today's-POV stories), but a lot of these "milestones" stand out to be because they also had a big effect on my life in general. I learned English through Star Trek tapes, basically; the public library floppy excursions were in retrospect a big step in developing independence (and also made me appreciate the importance of public libraries); I got my first job that wasn't babysitting or similar to afford fannish things; etc.
I'm still confused by comics. There are currently
comments on the Dreamwidth version of this post.
snowflake_challenge - it looked like fun and seems nicely low-key and adaptable to time and brain availability.
Day 2 is: Talk about your fannish history. A basic summary is already in my Sticky Post, so here I'm talking about some earlier "milestones" that were relevant to my fannish life. *g*
In the spirit of keeping it low-key, I did not double check airing or release dates, so there might be some brain smush.
1992: I discovered Star Trek: TNG while in 6th grade. I think the third season was airing on German television. Wrote my first, long, Mary Sue fanfic, mostly while in class under the table. (In a stack of recycling paper A5 Schulhefte. I still have them somewhere in the basement.)
1994: On a school trip to England, I bought my first Star Trek tapes with the original audio and my first English language Star Trek novel, which I read with a dictionary next to me.
1995: Started working in a comic store. My lifelong confusion at comics ("but what is the canon? what is the timeline??") began here. Half my pay was in merchandise; this is how I bought the ST:DS9 and ST:Voyager VHS tapes. I also discovered fan fiction on the internet. For access, I would cycle to the inner city library (it was about an hour's ride), sign up for the hour of internet you got on their machines, buy a floppy, and download everything I could find, to format&print at home. I mostly read Voyager, B5 and XFiles het, but also stumbled over my first slash story, which I found quite puzzling.
1996: No longer found slash so puzzling.
1997ish: Got my first computer. It made finding the no longer puzzling slash much easier.
1999/2000: Got into Highlander, wrote my first "proper" story.
2001:
solo offered to be my beta for my first Highlander fic. Many terrible things followed.
2004: I was completely blown away by the BSG reboot miniseries and suddenly found myself with a het ship.
2006~2008: Fell out of love with BSG in the most horrible, drawn out fannish break-up I've ever had, to the point where I was relieved the other day when I discovered I'd never actually uploaded my fic to AO3.
2008: Akame and KAT-TUN happened. Solo and I started writing The Same Deep Water As You (2008-2012, 450.000 words). Many more terrible things followed.
2018: Guardian happened.
2019: The Untamed happened.
Stuff like the floppy hamstering is amusing to me in restrospect (and I'm sure lots of fans in my age range have similarly amusing-from-today's-POV stories), but a lot of these "milestones" stand out to be because they also had a big effect on my life in general. I learned English through Star Trek tapes, basically; the public library floppy excursions were in retrospect a big step in developing independence (and also made me appreciate the importance of public libraries); I got my first job that wasn't babysitting or similar to afford fannish things; etc.
I'm still confused by comics. There are currently
comments on the Dreamwidth version of this post.