Full of Fannish Glee
Oh. My. God.
If you gals'n'guys want to know what fandom was like in the early days of the internet, look no further than this fat slice of magnificence on DW by Arduinna.
THIS. So many times this. I've been wallowing in nostalgic bliss all morning. This has taken me all the way back to the late 90s when I first got internet access and fell straight into Michael Wincott het fandom. I was on the one-and-only fan mailing list, plus a PVT Yahoo fan group, connecting with US fans in private chatrooms (I used to stay late at work so I could be in there when America woke up). This was in the days before Messenger, when live chat was brand new and super-exciting. We used to swap VHS copies of hard-to-find material via snail-mail - no DVDs or Megaupload back then! Getting into fandom was like following a trail of tasty breadcrumbs, because search engines were rare and fairly shitty. So fans would have a links section on their websites, leading to other fanpages they'd found, and you'd hop from one to another like that. Or scour Usenet for likely newsgroups, and if anyone on there mentioned a cool email list you'd badger them for the addy and beg for an invite.
You never knew where the breadcrumbs would lead you. I found slash fandom completely by accident; I was reading up on neo-paganism, and found a website with some really cool essays on Wicca - and the webmistress of that site was into Phantom Menace and had links to her fanfic page from there. Darth Maul/Obi-Wan slash fic, to be explicit. And oh, it was. And just like that, I fell into slash fandom. And here I still am.
Happy, happy days. Go read it.
If you gals'n'guys want to know what fandom was like in the early days of the internet, look no further than this fat slice of magnificence on DW by Arduinna.
THIS. So many times this. I've been wallowing in nostalgic bliss all morning. This has taken me all the way back to the late 90s when I first got internet access and fell straight into Michael Wincott het fandom. I was on the one-and-only fan mailing list, plus a PVT Yahoo fan group, connecting with US fans in private chatrooms (I used to stay late at work so I could be in there when America woke up). This was in the days before Messenger, when live chat was brand new and super-exciting. We used to swap VHS copies of hard-to-find material via snail-mail - no DVDs or Megaupload back then! Getting into fandom was like following a trail of tasty breadcrumbs, because search engines were rare and fairly shitty. So fans would have a links section on their websites, leading to other fanpages they'd found, and you'd hop from one to another like that. Or scour Usenet for likely newsgroups, and if anyone on there mentioned a cool email list you'd badger them for the addy and beg for an invite.
You never knew where the breadcrumbs would lead you. I found slash fandom completely by accident; I was reading up on neo-paganism, and found a website with some really cool essays on Wicca - and the webmistress of that site was into Phantom Menace and had links to her fanfic page from there. Darth Maul/Obi-Wan slash fic, to be explicit. And oh, it was. And just like that, I fell into slash fandom. And here I still am.
Happy, happy days. Go read it.