Snowflake Day 2? Favorite fan moment
In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, crazy times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
So back in 2004, I was exploring the internet for Blake's 7 fandom, like you do (well, did), and I came upon this charming RPG that was a Blake's 7/Farscape crossover on a site called LiveJournal. I started poking around and found the journal of one![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
astrogirl, who I believe was playing Stark in the RPG, and very rapidly I came to find that I was surrounded by an amazing community of (mostly) women who were fannish geeks in exactly the same way I was, who knew what I was talking about when I discussed the dynamics between Blake and Avon (and cared!), and wrote and read excellent fic and meta about the sci fi of obsessions of the day. To date, it has been a unique experience in my life of feeling I had found "my people," in the form of a fairly large, active, unified community, a unique experience of feeling understood and appreciated for who I am. I really miss those days. I really miss that internet--and, more broadly, culture that still had major touchstones like that that almost all fannish geek girls shared.
So back in 2004, I was exploring the internet for Blake's 7 fandom, like you do (well, did), and I came upon this charming RPG that was a Blake's 7/Farscape crossover on a site called LiveJournal. I started poking around and found the journal of one
astrogirl, who I believe was playing Stark in the RPG, and very rapidly I came to find that I was surrounded by an amazing community of (mostly) women who were fannish geeks in exactly the same way I was, who knew what I was talking about when I discussed the dynamics between Blake and Avon (and cared!), and wrote and read excellent fic and meta about the sci fi of obsessions of the day. To date, it has been a unique experience in my life of feeling I had found "my people," in the form of a fairly large, active, unified community, a unique experience of feeling understood and appreciated for who I am. I really miss those days. I really miss that internet--and, more broadly, culture that still had major touchstones like that that almost all fannish geek girls shared.
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I've also been wondering a bit lately how much of these changes are due to increasing distraction, overwork, and too many things demanding everyone's attention, and how how much is due to the fact that, in the days before images and video and voice chat could be easily transmitted over the internet (and before text could be exchanged as casually and immediately as speech), the only people who participated in online fandom (or, before that, zine fandom) are the people who liked and were good at the longer, slower forms of engagement, even if that just means typing an entire paragraph at a time before expecting an answer. Maybe all the people who couldn't be bothered with that sort of thing now feel happy to participate... and there happen to be a lot of them.
Maybe we were always in the minority, and just had no way of knowing it?
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I think that's probably true. It seems to me that given the expansiveness of the internet, there ought to be a way to have a flexible system for multiple types of engagement. In the LJ days, for example, there were a lot of icon communities, which I always found a bit boring but seem like an ancestor to the more image-based feeds on Tumblr, and those communities coexisted easily with more long meta-based communities. It seems like theoretically there could be another platform where it's easy to post images and videos as on Tumblr but also easy to post text and have threaded discussions, and then folks could just choose what feeds to follow or communities to belong to. Too utopian? :-)
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That seems to me not just possible, but as if it should not be remotely difficult! Hell, LJ wasn't all that far off. It's not hard to imagine some tweaking that would make it friendlier for image posting and give you the ability to upload video.
What kind of gets me about Tumblr is that, despite being set up for videos and images, it's not actually very good at delivering them. It can be ridiculously slow to load and can bog down your computer. I've heard the code for it is absolutely awful. So it's not even ideal at what it's supposed to be ideal for.
(I also wonder whether any platform is doomed eventually, just because when a new generation comes along, whatever the older folks are already using is automatically an uncool and old and boring place to be.)