Fandom 1994-2000-ish, part 3

[arduinna]

(If you want to link to these and keep the cut tags intact for people, link to my front page or link to this archive page)

(disclaimer in part 1)

Time to talk about actual mailing lists!

Mailing lists changed over time; in a lot of ways, this goes back to "the medium defined the message" again.

(I'm going to caveat here and say: some of this information is 18 years old and got dug out of very dusty corners of my mind. This is all to the best of my recollection, but take that with a grain or six of salt, please.)

A brief history of lists

In the mid-90s, there were only two ways to own a true mailing list:

• Be affiliated with a university that offered mailing lists to its members (faculty, staff - I don't think undergrads had the ability to create lists)This was the oldest, most established way to run a list.
  
• Own your own server and install mailing list software on it, or know someone who had their own server who was willing to let you run lists off it. This was the first small step in the widening of fandom, as it was slightly easier to own/run a list this way, although the number of people who were able to do so was limited.

The other way to run something that functioned as a mailing list, even though it wasn't, quite, was to make a "reflector" list, where you were the central clearinghouse that people sent their messages to, and once a day or so you'd redirect the incoming "list" mail out to everyone on the distribution list. This worked fine, but was slower than a true mailing list.

That was it.

On the downside, that meant there weren't that many lists, and you just had to hope that someone with the right connections was into the same shows you were and was willing to run a list for them. If something happened and a list owner shut down a list, that was it; the fandom could well dissipate, if no one else had the ability to start a list, and tell people where it was.

On the upside, it meant that everyone was playing in the same sandbox. It resulted in a fair amount of friction in a lot of cases, but it also meant that the entire fandom hung out together, and everyone got exposed to all sorts of opinions and takes on canon. It made things feel a lot more cohesive, even if it was driving you out of your mind and making you stay up too late typing up responses to people who were SO WRONG omg.

Ahem.

It really did make for a sense of community, though. People expected to hear different opinions; people were expected to behave civilly. There was no "take your toys and leave" -- there was nowhere else to go (other than the newsgroups, of course). The main list in most fandoms was a place where everyone had a voice, equal to everyone else's voice.

Of course, people still wanted to hang out more intensely with people who thought the same way they did, and what happened there was email loops -- small groups of people who chatted privately amongst themselves about their preferred pairing or canon interpretation or whatever, while the main list chatted more generally. But it was a fair bet that anyone in the fandom, even peripherally, knew in general what was going on on the main list.

Even if you didn't like a list's particular culture, you stuck it out, or just left. The idea of making a second general/main list for a fandom was unsettling, and really implied the breaking of the fandom.

(The exception here, as with many things, was slash; slash was seldom welcome on main lists, which were considered general-audiences, while slash was considered to be always-adult even for the most innocuous observations. So there could be a main list and a slash list without anyone thinking it was breaking the fandom.)

By mid-1997, Onelist had arrived, allowing anyone to make a list for any topic, and by early 1998, fans were using it more and more, although not without some rumbles. Some people were worried because Onelist lists were public -- anyone could see what they were and what they were about, and just sub themselves to it, ack. "Regular" lists were safer, more under the radar where fandom belonged.

In summer 1998, eGroups started gaining users, although most fans stayed on Onelist. The two merged in 1999 (to a fair amount of crankiness from a lot of fans, who preferred Onelist); by that time, people were using these "public" web-based lists to create main-list lists for their fandoms, and starting lists for any show (or whaever) that caught their fancy, without necessarily waiting for a critical mass of interested people. Then in 2000, pretty much just as fans had finished adapting to eGroups and started to get fond of it, Yahoo bought eGroups and turned them into Yahoo Groups (to even more crankiness).

This was a lot of shakeup in a short period, but fandom had been doing even more internal shaking up. The advent of simple, web-based mailing lists that absolutely anyone could start/own/run changed the face of mailing-list-based fandom.

Lists exploded, basically, and by 2000 or so you could find one for anything you wanted, down to particular tropes for particular characters or pairings.

Which was great for being able to tailor discussions! But it meant that newer fandoms were starting out more splintered from the get-go, and it was harder and harder to get a full-fandom experience. We called it the balkanization of fandom, and while it was a natural result of fandom's steady growth, it was also sort of sad; no one's ever going to have that full-fandom experience again.


General list etiquette

Many lists had list-specific rules, but there were some general netiquette rules that tended to apply across the board.

Basically, they boiled down to: Be relevant, and don't be a jackass.

Being relevant meant staying on topic; stripping unnecessary cruft from your posts (long sigs, ascii art, most -- but not all -- of the post you were responding to, leaving just enough to provide relevant context for your comments); posting only substantive things (i.e., no "me too" or "me either" posts; those could go off-list).

"Don't be a jackass" meant you shouldn't be a jackass. (Don't flame, don't troll, don't forward list mail elsewhere, etc.)

There were a lot of unwritten rules, too, that people were supposed to absorb. That was easier in the early days, when the Internet rule of thumb was "lurk for a month before you say anything"; between that and fandom being smaller in general, people could absorb list and fandom culture before they started participating.


Gen v Het v Slash

The lines between all of these were much clearer in the 90s. Gen was far and away the biggest part of fandom, and for most fandoms, if there was a "big" or "main" list, it was gen. (The only exception I can think of offhand was Professionals, which was always mainly a slash fandom, and only in the past decade gained a stronger gen side.)

Het ("adult", although by the time I got online people were already calling it het, and "adult" was on its way out and/or being reclaimed as "explicitly sexual" for either het or slash) was next in line, and was pretty well accepted.

Slash was known and mostly tolerated, but usually not on the main list, and often not on the fic lists; you would need to get a separate slash fic list. (This wasn't every fandom, and in fact in several fandoms, the mixing of slash in with the other fanfic brought a lot of people who thought they were gen fans into the slash fold. But the strict separation did happen in places.)

Most "main" or "big" lists were gen, there to talk about the show as a whole, not specific relationships per se. Slash was pretty far under the table at the time; you could find out about it, but you didn't really talk about it publicly. If you were a slash fan you got good at picking up on hints and suggestions and gravitating toward your own kind (and then you'd find a general slash list, and exult.) sherrold told the story of how, in 1995, someone on the Due South list asked if anyone was into slash, and not a single person spoke up -- even though there were a whole lot of slash fans on that list. You just didn't go public with it except to other slash fans (we were all pretty good at hinting around and picking up cues, if it came to it).

Eventually some gen lists were "slash-friendly", where a slash fan could mention slash and not get yelled at for it; conversely, some slash lists were "gen-friendly", where you didn't have to make sure you were talking about a slash pairing, and could safely rec a good gen story without worrying about getting yelled at for it. ("Yelled at" meaning "someone snarks at you", mostly.) But they were still mostly geared toward one or the other.

Not every fandom could support an entire slash list, and there were sources out there that had mainly a handful of slash fans interested, but not enough for a full list of any kind. Multi-fandom slash lists came into play there. The grandmother of them all was Virgule, the first slash list on the net, started up in 1992. It was private and invite-only, though, so wasn't available to most fans.

By the mid-90s, there were other options:

Slash-sis started up around 1995 by Jenny Shipp, with a core of Garak/Bashir fans, I think, but was open to anyone and anything, and got very big and busy, very fast.

Slashpoint started up in October 1996 and grew to about 200 members (pretty damn big for a slash list of the day). This was the slash list that devoured slash fandom; volume tailed off sharply on both Slash-sis and Virgule as people focused on Slashpoint.

There was also "slash" on Onelist. which was a fluffier list than Slashpoint; allslash (for fic) and allslash-d for discussion, rareslash...

I have no idea if the gen or het side of things was developing multi-fandom gen lists or not, but the slashers were forming list-based communities all over the place.


Public and private lists

Public lists were ones anyone could join; if you knew the subscribe addy or could find it on one of the free web-based services, you were good. Some of these may have been a bit under the radar to keep membership limited, but people were allowed to tell their friends about them, and you could just email the admin to say you'd like to join, and usually you could. I wound up on a lot of small lists like that, from mentioning fandoms on public lists, and having people email me offlist to say "hey, if you like Starsky and Hutch, you should join [list name I'm redacting because apparently it's still private, heh]!" or whatever.

Private lists were invite-only, and existed for a number of reasons. Some were groups of friends; some were because TPTB wanted to be kept away from any hint of fanfic (famously, J. Michael Strazynski, resulting in the Unrest B5 list); some were snarky; some were closed writer's groups; some were because of fandom wars (the Ray Wars resulted in a bunch of invite-only lists); some were to save bandwidth on the main list so people could go off-topic as much as they wanted, etc.

Some of these were well-known -- the Sunnydale Slayers, for instance -- while others were not just private, but secret, never mentioned publicly (such as Virgule-L).

You could get an invitation to a private list in a couple of ways. If you were active on a public list and the private list-members or owners liked what you had to say, they might email you to invite you based on that. More commonly, you'd be having offlist conversations with people, and after a while someone would invite you to a list that they were on, because they'd interacted with you enough to know you'd fit in.

I was a newbie with zero connections, and inside two years had been invited onto secret/private/invite-only lists in four fandoms and at least two pan-fandom-ish private lists; within another two years, I was on probably half a dozen or a dozen more, and was running one of my own; I'm technically still running two (one fandom-specific, one pan-fandom), although both are dead. As long as you were willing to talk to people, you found out about things. The main barrier to entry was saying "oh, yeah, that sounds cool, I'd love an invite, thanks!"


What did people talk about, anyway?

People talked about everything. Most lists had rules against posting off-topic material, to keep things relevant for everyone, but there was a lot of stuff that was relevant.

Fandom was far more focused on ep discussion back then; fanfic et al were part of fandom, but not actually the focus the way they are today. People were as well known for their in-depth analyses of canon as for their epic case fic. Every week would bring a list-wide discussion of that week's episode (with the usual caveat that only 5-20% of a list's membership would be actively posting; as with most things, most people were lurkers), breaking down what people had and hadn't liked, how the ep tied in to other episodes, what the arcs were shaping up to be (if there were any), you name it.

There were also intense discussions about what constituted canon. We didn't have DVD extras, or deleted movie scenes, or even really interview moments where the creators said that they intended X or Y (okay, we had some of that, but mostly IIRC fandom in general wasn't interrogating TPTB for their interpretaion of things; we were interpreting what we saw).

What we did have, in some cases, was different versions of the same shows.

For instance, if you were a Highlander fan, you wanted to get your hands on the Eurominutes episodes; if you were a Forever Knight fan, you wanted the Canadian episodes.

In both cases, the non-US version had several more minutes of footage, because the show was created for both countries and the US versions had to be chopped up more for more commercials.

This led to debates about what constituted canon, as well; if different people were literally seeing different things on screen, which things counted as actual canon? Was it only the material that everyone had seen? If so, that meant that only the US version was true canon. Or was it everything that aired, or rather that was meant to air, or whatever – Europe and Canada got more scenes, or more seconds at least, so were those extra scenes also canon, even though many fans never got the chance to see them?

A question for the ages, really.

I am going to blatantly copy part of my writeup for Slashpoint on Fanlore to get into some of the other things that came up fairly regularly on lists:

During its active years, like other pan-fandom lists of the time, Slashpoint was a clearinghouse of information and discussion. It had announcements of new public lists and archives; announcements of personal websites (or updates of same); requests for betas; zine and vidtape announcements; mentions of articles in the press or academia (both rare, at the time); rants on bad writing and crappy grammar; show-pimping posts; (plaintive) requests for tapes; personal-address changes (how else would we keep track of each other?); slashy actor gossip; con reports; informative links to or quotes from gay sites; philosophical discussions on how people's nationalities affected their fanfic (and slightly less philosophical discussions on using Brit or Aussie English for American shows, or vice versa); spirited discussions of whether criticism was a good thing or not; anime and manga (and yaoi and shounen ai, etc.); the legalities of fanfic; sexual and gender identity; you name it, people talked about it. The list even occasionally had fanfic, including round robins, although fanfic wasn't technically allowed.

That description sums up most lists, really, except that on a show-specific list, you'd get tons of canon discussion as well, and fic and zine reviews, and somewhat less other-show-pimping. But announcements, and updates, and grammar pet peeves, and story pet peeves, and "trapped on an island" fic lists, and legalities, and identity... it was all there, and more.


RPF

The one big exception to "people talked about everything" was RPF.

RPF was forbidden on most fic lists, and really on most discussion lists as well, even as a topic of discussion. This was not out of prudery or anything, even though it was not generally as kindly looked upon then as it was today.

It was for fear of legal liability, and with reason. I don't know how many people remember this, or even knew about it, but on the Forever Knight lists there was a story posted in the mid-90s that involved Tori Spelling. it wasn't erotica; it was a gen story, which described her in a manner consistent with the press reports of the day, shall we say. It was posted to be fic list, and I believe it was archived on the FTP archive site.

And her lawyers found out about it. They contacted the university on whose servers the lists were run, and told them that there would be action for libel if the story was not removed immediately. The university contacted the list owner, who promptly took down the story, and created a rule that no fiction would be allowed to have a real person in it, without that real person's written permission. (This was huge, in FK fandom; every year there was a gigantic fandom-wide round-robin that was all about the real list members. The new rule meant there had to be “permission slips” from every person who wanted to participate.)

In those days, it was really hard to own a mailing list. If the university had shut down the Forever Knight lists, the fandom might well have vanished. The list owner had to comply with the request, and make sure that the list was in no danger from future action.

This spread as a cautionary tale to other list owners, who instituted similar rules, for similar reasons. After a while the story itself was forgotten, but the list culture standard of no RPF was pretty entrenched by then, and most lists almost automatically had a rule about it, the same as the age statement rules for lists that involve slash. It was just how it was done. RPF writers, as far as I know, were writing away, but the stories circulated hand-to-hand underneath even fandom's radar.

Most mailing lists I'm on still have rules about no RPF, for that matter.


Spoilers

Spoilers in general were harder to come by in the 90s; if you wanted spoilers, you had to actively seek them out.

Most lists had spoiler rules, although they could vary from list to list. What constituted a spoiler was particularly flexible; on some lists, it was anything that had aired within the last day or two and after that anything was fair game, while on other lists episodes were under spoiler protection for anywhere from a week to a month, and upcoming previews might also be protected.

Interviews, magazine articles, etc. were also a matter of list policy; on some lists they were considered spoilers because not everyone sought out that information, while on others they weren't because they were easily available to anyone.

The way spoiler information was presented was also up to each list, but there was a general format that many lists followed. You had to announce that you were going to be giving a spoiler up front (without saying what the spoiler was, of course -- no saying "Spoilers for Daddy Dief!"), usually in the subject line, then within the body of the post, you had to leave several lines of "spoiler space" so that if someone accidentally opened the message (or their preview pane automatically showed them their message), they wouldn't inadvertantly be spoiled.

When I came into fandom, 10 lines was enough space; this climbed to 20 lines as monitor resolution rose and more of the message was likely to be visible.

For safety, it was best to put a character of some sort on every line, because html-enabled email clients deleted empty lines. So to talk about Daddy Dief, your email would look something like this:

To: dsouth-l@lists.someuni.edu
From: marysue@worldnet.att
Subject: Spoilers for Wild Bunch

s
p
o
i
l
e
r
s
p
a
c
e

Puppies! Dief has puppies! That was too cute. Think he'll settle down now that he's a family wolf?

Mary Sue

Anyone who responded to you would leave your spoiler space intact, and answer underneath your comment.


Posting fanfic

This was pretty much just... posting fanfic, but there were a few differences.

Warnings were not standard or mandatory, and only slowly started to creep in, starting with death stories.

Posting WIPs was not very common; people posted in parts because AOL's email systems couldn't handle large posts, but generally speaking, the stories were completed before they got posted, and they all got posted at once (or at most, spread out over a few days, to keep from spamming a list).

I think it was the rise of ff.net that brought in the idea of posting WIPs one chapter at a time, but it was generally frowned on on mailing lists for a long time, not least because the people who did it at the time were often demanding feedback and saying that if they didn't get enough/the right kind, they'd stop writing.


TPTB on the lists

Many PTB knew about fandom and mailing lists (and newsgroups), and would come hang out and sometimes participate. The list owners would verify their identity and let people know that yes, this really was [Whoever].

On DSOUTH-L, the original Due South discussion list, "Due South script coordinator Scott Cooper was a member of the list, and due to the close relationship between the production office and the mailing list, there was a strict "no fan fiction" policy on the discussion list." (quote taken wholesale from Fanlore)

On the Forever Knight lists, Nigel Bennet (who played LaCroix) lurked; everyone knew it, and people kept their more personal (ahem) commentary about LaCroix mostly offlist or in fanfic. Fred Mollin, the FK music guy, was also on the list, and was a bit more active. That paid off for him, as people really liked him; when he finally put out the soundtrack, he announced it on the list, and asked people to buy direct from the distributor to show them that there was enough interest to put the CD out there. I was game, and called the number he gave us, and very politely told the operator "Hi, I'd like to buy one of your soundtrack CDs..." and she started laughing and said, "Let me guess, Forever Knight? We've had a few calls!"

J. Michael Strazinsky hung out on the newsgroups, and requested up front that no one post fanfic to any group he was on (he didn't lurk, he always announced his presence) so he didn't run into issues of writing an episode that echoed a fan story and having people think he'd stolen the idea. The fans respected that and kept B5 fanfic out of sight, so he couldn't stumble across it accidentally.

So there was a fair amount of it, and for the most part it worked out okay as long as everyone knew what was going on. (And as long as the PTB in question wasn't Aaron Sorkin, the big baby.)


Getting/trading source

There was a lot of source-trading going on, all the time. It was slower than today, but it was efficient (given the technological limits) and commonplace, and you didn't have to be friends with someone to trade source with them. It all happened on analog hard copy; everyone was on dialup, no one had any real digital storage space, and there was no such thing as torrents. (You didn't have to have source to trade; you could trade them blank tapes, if they were willing, or cash to cover the cost of the tapes they sent you.) There was also very little in the way of professional source to draw on.

Pro VHS tapes were very expensive in the 90s, when they happened at all, which was rare – it could cost $100-150 per season. (I’m specifically thinking of Highlander here, but it was true of other shows as well.)

When DVDs came out in the early 2000s, they were also very expensive – again around $100-150 per season, and that’s if you got the whole season at once. Many shows were released one disc at a time, at roughly $40/disc – at 4-5 eps per disc over a 26-episode show, you were looking at ~$250 for the full season. They also came out years after the show aired.

I now regularly buy full seasons of TV for less than I paid for one disc of one season of TV 10 years ago, usually within months of the air dates.

Anyway, so. No easily available pro source, which left fans relying on themselves and other fans to record things and then make copies of them.

So what you did was buy blank VHS tapes. Lots of them. In the 70s, this was ludicrously expensive; in the 80s, it was very expensive (I bought a blank tape in the 80s to tape some shows on. I think it cost me $15-20 for the one tape, and I used it over and over and over.) By the mid-90s, tapes were "cheap"; you could buy a package of 3 tapes for around $10-15, I think.

(Caveat: I honestly don't remember exactly how much I paid for tapes in regular stores in the early/mid-90s, so that's a guess, but it feels about right. Lower-quality tapes would be cheaper, higher-quality tapes would be pricier, and the type of store you bought them in would affect the price as well. Buying tapes individually probably ran about $5/tape. I don't think you could get packages of more than 6 tapes in regular stores, which probably ran about $20-25. By the late 90s/early 00s, I was buying packs of 9 tapes for $14 at Costco, a discount warehouse store.)

All you needed to tape your own shows was a VCR. You would tape everything you could: any show you liked (the more you liked it, the higher quality you taped it at), any movie playing on tv you thought you might like, any series pilot you thought sounded at least vaguely interesting, because you couldn't be sure of a repeat. (This was before the days when everything repeated all the time. For a lot of shows, you got one real shot, and if you missed it, you crossed your fingers that they re-ran it all in the summer and you remembered to catch it.)

There was a running cultural joke at the time that no one knew how to program their VCR, everyone just had a flashing clock on the front.

Fan clocks didn't flash.

But recording for yourself is never enough. For one thing, you probably only had the ability to record one thing at a time, so if there was a conflict (curse you, Strange Luck vs. Due South!), you missed something. You might need just one ep you missed; or a full season as it aired; or to get hold of a season of older tv you'd heard about and wanted to check out.

That's where tape trading came in.

You could ask onlist if anyone had the episodes you needed; some people also served as clearinghouses, making full sets of episodes for many many people. You would send enough money to cover the cost of tapes plus shipping, or in some cases you'd send enough blank tapes to replace the ones being sent to you, and then you'd get your eps.

If someone was taping a live season for you, you'd have to wait 2-6 weeks between tape deliveries, depending on how they were recording it (high quality was 2 hours per tape; low quality was 6 hours per tape).

If there was a special tape out there -- someone got hold of bloopers, or there was a spliced-together tape of con footage, or something -- it would make the rounds of a fandom via a tape tree.

Whoever had the original copy -- Person A -- would announce that they were doing a tape tree for it, and ask interested people to send them their mailing addresses. Once there was a list, Person A would make a copy and send that to the first person on the list, Person B, along with a copy of the full list. (They could send their original, but it wouldn't be smart, since things get lost in the mail. Also, the more you play a tape, the more it degrades; it's safer to keep a master copy as pristine as possible.)

B would make a copy, cross their name off the list, and send the "original" (the copy sent to them) to Person C. C would do the same, and on down the line, with the original second-generation copy traveling from hand to hand and being copied.

If there was a lot of interest, Person A might make several direct second-gen copies of their original and start multiple branches of the tape tree, both to get things moving faster and to make sure that the quality stayed as high as possible.

If you wanted to copy your tapes for someone else (or get a copy of a tape-tree tape), you needed a second VCR and the right cables to hook them together. When I started out in fandom, I had to research this on my own; the guys at Radio Shack had never heard of such a thing, and had no idea what I meant by hooking two VCRs together. (The guys at Tweeter, a high-end electronics store, knew what I was talking about, but I couldn't afford their equipment.)

If you were a vidder, you needed much higher-end equipment; I wasn't, and could get by with basic VCRs (four-head, always four-head! two-head were crap.) I actually still have my original Fisher 4-head VCR, which still works.

Anyway, so, copying. The thing with VHS tapes (and cassettes, for that matter) is that every time you play them, they degrade a little bit. Every time you pause them, you stretch the tape a little bit. And every copy you make is lower quality than what you're copying from.

What you got off the air and onto a tape was the first generation, sometimes called a master. The first copy you made of that tape was the second generation; this would be very nearly the same quality as the first-gen tape, and sometimes people would use that as their "master" for making copies for other people, to preserve the quality of their first-gen tapes.

VHS tapes could be recorded at three speeds: SP, or "slow play", which was two hours of footage at the highest quality; LP, or "long play", which was four hours at medium quality; EP, or "extended play", which was six hours at low (but watchable) quality. Most fans recorded at either SP or EP. Apparently everyone else did, too, because by the early 00s it was hard to find a VCR that could record in LP.

(Eventually they developed "8-hour" tapes, which had a little more tape on the spool; you could get 160 minutes at SP or 8 hours at EP. The downside was that the tape had to be thinner to fit more on the standard spools, so the quality degraded more quickly with repeated viewings. These got used, but the default was the 6-hour tapes; most people wanted the better quality unless they were just checking out a show for fun. It wasn't much of a cost savings, as the 8-hour tapes cost more to begin with; basically all it saved was a little space on the shelf.)

If someone made you copies, the absolute best you could hope for was second-gen SP tapes, if they had original, off-air SP tapes to work from. You were more likely to be getting third- or fourth-gen tapes; if your fandom was a show that aired in another country, you were probably looking at 5-10 generations down. By that point, people pretty much stopped counting, and called it nth-generation.

Seasons lasted for 26 episodes back then, so if you had a favorite show you wanted to keep in high quality, you needed 13 tapes -- $45-65. You could get the same show onto 4 regular EP tapes (if you cut out commercials; otherwise, you needed 5 tapes to get the last couple of episodes) for roughly $15.

Cutting out commercials was a personal choice; it was a lot harder than doing it with a digital file. Doing it on your master/off-air tape as you created it meant sitting there with a remote in your hand (or your hand on the machine itself), waiting for the beat that indicated the show was going to commercial and hit pause, watching the commercials, and guessing when the show was about to start up again and hit pause again to release. If you screwed it up, you could cut out dialogue or important footage.

Doing it on a second-generation tape was theoretically easier, since you could just stay paused till the show started up again, then rewind a bit and release the pause -- but every time you rewind and replay the tape, it degrades a little more, and you could start to get soft spots in the tape. (Sadly, this meant that rewatching your favorite scene over and over would result in a fuzzier and fuzzier scene.)

Cutting out credits had the same technical issues, but also brought in issues between people who thought credits, especially end-credits, were useless, and people who thought they were an integral part of the show.

... And that is more about tape-duping than anyone would ever want to know. Moving right along...

So I will wrap up with:

Getting to know people on lists

I was in an IRC channel a year or two ago, and someone mentioned in passing that she didn't know how anyone had met people back in the mailing list days; there was a general round of agreement. I was a little baffled, as I knew everyone in that channel from our mailing list days. It just wasn't that hard, if you were willing to talk to people (and if you're not willing to talk to people, you're not going to get to know them anywhere, no matter the venue.)

You made friends on mailing lists during list conversations when you got into arguments or discussions and riffed off each other and basically had a grand old time talking about things; eventually you started taking your conversations offlist and just going to town on everything under the sun.

You made friends when you wrote someone off list to send them a "me too" response to something they'd said, and maybe elaborated a little bit about how much you agreed with them, and they wrote back, and it kept going from there. Or when someone sent you a note off list thanking you for a post you'd made, and touching on something that really mattered to you.

You made friends when you sent someone feedback for a story, and she responded to you, because you had said something specific about what they did that they could respond to. That could be enough to start a conversation that would turn into a years long friendship. Or when someone sent feedback to you and picked out something you were particularly proud of -- or something you hadn't even noticed -- and it made you itch to talk more in-depth about it.

You made friends by offering to beta for someone, or asking someone to beta for you.

You made friends by borrowing or loaning zines to someone, and talking with them about the stories; you made friends by trading tapes, and letting them suck you into a new fandom (or vice versa).

You didn't make friends every single time any of those things happened; more often than not, it would be a single exchange. But not always; sometimes you really clicked.

Basically, there was a lot of off-list conversation going on all the time, among all sorts of people, and you could be carrying on 20 conversations with 20 different people at any given time. And at the same time you would be carrying on public conversations on the main list, possibly with all of those people.

And you didn't just know people online. You had snail mail addresses from trading tapes, and sometimes people would stick little extras in to make things more cheerful. People would pay attention to birthdays (some lists had opt-in "birthday lists", and every birthday would be announced so everyone could chime in to wish someone a happy birthday, even). People would exchange phone numbers and run up massive phone bills (back when long distance calls cost a fortune).

People organized local gatherings of fans where you could meet people in person; people met up at cons across the world. People planned vacations around visits to online friends.

It just wasn't that different from the way it is now. You saw someone whose posts you liked, and you responded to them.


And that is my incredibly long, yet incredibly brief and incomplete, look at fandom on mailing lists.

\o/

part 1
part 2

Comments

[kass]

This whole thing is awesome, but it's the end of this third post -- the part about making friends -- that makes me all misty-eyed. :-)

[kass]

btw, have added a bunch of quotes from this to the Mailing List post at fanlore. Feel free to change, move things around, edit, revise, etc. :-)

[arduinna]

Oh, you are awesome -- the whole time I was writing this up I was thinking I should do something about moving some of it to Fanlore, but it was a second giant task that I didn't want to tackle, at least not immediately.

[endeni]

Oh wow, really interesting! Thanks for sharing. ;)

[sholio]

Thank you so much for writing this up! I just got done reading it, and it's such a fascinating combination of total nostalgia - dial-up! tiny hard drives! ascii art! - and very different fannish experiences, since I was in totally different areas of fandom then.

Be affiliated with a university that offered mailing lists to its members (faculty, staff - I don't think undergrads had the ability to create lists

At least in some cases, they could - the first mailing list I was on (in 1995) was run by an undergrad. It's possible that you had to have some kind of "in" with the faculty or staff, though; he might have known someone who was letting him do it.

I got online just about the time you did, although under different circumstances; 1995 was when I went to college, got a university email account and had access to the university computer labs. I knew about this thing called the Internet because some of my parents' friends had it at home, but I was home-schooled, thus didn't have access to it in school (if schools had computer labs then) and that was the first time I got to experience it for myself! I still don't remember how I found my first mailing list - all I remember is that it was in the first month or two I was on campus; I found Usenet almost immediately, so it was probably somewhere on Usenet that I saw an announcement from someone who was starting a mailing list for discussion of world-building in sci-fi and fantasy. I thought that sounded awesome, so I added my name and email to the list of interested individuals.

I never participated in Western media fandom until I got on LJ in the mid-2000s, though. Back in the 90s, I mainly lurked; the few mailing lists and Usenet groups in which I regularly participated revolved around discussion of books and writing, from an aspiring-pro-writer standpoint, or other, completely non-fandom-related interests. After I discovered the existence of fanfic in, oh, 1997 or 1998, I started reading it when I could find it on websites - mostly for anime and comics (with Stargate SG1 being the big exception to that; I remember reading the entire Heliopolis archive, back when you could read the entire Heliopolis archive, but mostly I was fannishly interested in anime). And it was via anime that I eventually began to participate socially in the fanfic-reading/writing areas of fandom. So, like I said, a different path into it. My fannish trajectory didn't coincide with Western media fandom - all of its culture, norms and BNFs were completely unfamiliar to me - until I got on LJ and got into Stargate Atlantis in 2006.

But a lot of things do map over about the early fandom experience. Tny graphics (or no graphics at all; I remember that when I first moved off campus and used the painfully slowwwww, but free!, university dial-up, I had graphics turned off completely on Netscape because they took so long to load). Tiny vids; they were so rare online that I didn't even learn about them 'til I guess probably 1999 or 2000 - AMVs, of course, the anime equivalent. (My sister was hugely helpful in this, because I was living with dial-up, but she was now going to college and had fast university Internet and Napster, so she'd download AMVs and full episodes of anime, burn them to CDs and mail them to me.)

Ah the good old days. :D

[arduinna]

At least in some cases, they could - the first mailing list I was on (in 1995) was run by an undergrad. It's possible that you had to have some kind of "in" with the faculty or staff, though; he might have known someone who was letting him do it.

Oh, interesting! I know there were some grad students running lists, but I figured they counted as semi-faculty and just generally had more access to resources.

remember reading the entire Heliopolis archive, back when you could read the entire Heliopolis archive,

Heeee, I did that, although not with Heliopolis, or even with SG in general (too many of the early slash writers veered off into characterizations I couldn't buy, and those got entrenched for a long time). But I read everything in Pros, and on 852 Prospect, and several others.

I love that there's so much variety and choice now, but man, there was something great about everyone having read all the same things, so we were all having the same broad conversation -- a fanon canon, as it were.

Tiny vids; they were so rare online that I didn't even learn about them 'til I guess probably 1999 or 2000 - AMVs, of course, the anime equivalent.

Yeah, the AMV folks went digital much earlier than the vidding folks, and went for larger files earlier, too. My vidding partner and I used to marvel at the 50 MB AMVs in the early '00s, when vidders were putting up under-20 MB files because you couldn't expect anyone to want to spend hours downloading three minutes' worth of vid.

I hope someday someone does do a post like this for the anime-fandom version of things; I was only very peripherally aware of that side of things, and I'd love to see more about it!

[salinea]

That was an awesome read, very interesting! I was on the internet from the mid 90's; but not in fanfic fandom - and not in TV shows fandom - until the early 00's, so a lot of this is familiar and a lot of it is utterly unfamiliar and that was a very comprehensive and informative read :D

[arduinna]

\o/

[luminosity]

This was a lovely essay, and it is as I remember fandom back then, as well. I got involved via BBS's, many of whom linked users to Echonet and Fidonet, who, in turn, linked users to newsgroups and some listservs. I've been engaged in online fandom in some manner since the mid-80's, and I still feel like a newbie every time fandom reinvents itself (thinking about Tumblr these days--which is so young, so fragmented, so...innocent!).

The RSM started as a tape tree (Highlander) group in 1995! *all nostalgic*

[arduinna]

I came in early enough to know about BBS's, but never used them, not even to the limited extent I used newsgroups. It's so true, though, about the linking people around to other places. And some of it was codified; I got my hands on the 1993 edition of the Big Dummy Guide to the Internet and read it faithfully from beginning to end, and was all prepared for things like Telnet and Gopher and Archie and FTP and Finger (god, remember Finger?) (and can you imagine telling someone now "oh, we used to finger people on the internet" *dies*) and MUDs, with specific lists of places to start out -- and then there was Netscape and I shifted to the web, and never really used any of the others except FTP to any real degree.

Tumblr, man. I have one, and I poke at it to try to figure it all out, but the lack of ability to actually have a conversation is a huge barrier to entry for me. Ah well; in 5-10 years I'll have adjusted, in time for fandom to have already moved on to whatever even more fragmented, higher-noise/lower-signal platform arrives!

[copracat]

Thanks for writing these posts. What a nostalgia trip! I date media-fannishly from 1996 and still find the sound of a modem dialling a happy sound. Though I am most glad to have ADSL now.

You're right about Professionals. There were no gen lists in the mid-Nineties. As far as I know, no-one even wrote gen then.

I'd love to read something this detailed from fans out of a non-Western media and/or non-slash tradition.

Typo: the links to the archive post is borked on all three posts.

[kass]

I'd love to read something this detailed from fans out of a non-Western media and/or non-slash tradition.

OMG, me too. ♥

[arduinna]

still find the sound of a modem dialling a happy sound.

I meant to try to find a file of a modem dialing to embed! But having since looked around on Youtube, none of them are quite right. Who knew I had precise requirements for that...

As far as I know, no-one even wrote gen then.

I'd read some gen on the Circuit, and I'm pretty sure there was a bit of gen going into zines, but not much (like, I think Jane M's Quanta Leap series was a mix of slash and gen, depending on who they leaped into...) But that was pretty much it, and I know that the very few times I stumbled over het, or even het-designed-to-get-them-together, I was really, really startled.

I'd love to read something this detailed from fans out of a non-Western media and/or non-slash tradition.


Me too! I had a line in originally hoping someone would do that, but then took it out on the theory that it was possibly rude to put it out there like a challenge. But I'd love to see it.

And thank you for letting me know about the borked link! I'd been up all night finishing the post and then staggered right off to bed, then got up and had to rush out for the rest of the day, so I didn't have time to answer comments (... and here I am four days later, still catching up, ack), but I did at least grab the time to fix it. Much appreciated!

[copracat]

It occurred to me after I commented that perhaps I read what Pros gen there was as slash without sex or romance!

[executrix]

I encountered someone I knew from RL at Eclecticon one year. Then when I saw her at her work setting, I asked what she was working on fannishly. She said "A Pros genzine!" and we both collapsed in giggles, to the utter astonishment of the surrounding mundanes.

[copracat]

I can see how you might! It's lovely that Pros has a gen fandom now.

[meri_oddities]

Great essay. I got into fandom about 1994, too. And wow, I remember all of this. My first computer (other than work's) had a 28.8 modem built in. And I thought that was pretty cool. I'd been using a 9600 baud modem before that. They were the size of a hard cover book.

It's sort of amazing how fast the technology has changed. And how splintered we've all become.

[arduinna]

Built-in modems were the best, man. Instant communication!

The splintering is completely inevitable given the size of everything, but it still makes me sad.

[lunaris1013]

Oh, what a nostalgia trip! I got into fandom in the mid-90s; as a matter of fact, I modded allslash and allslash-d for a while.

There was a another option for mailing lists though. When some of us "old timers" from alt.highlander.tv wanted to start a private list, I did so by paying for server space from a company and learning to use majordomo to run it. It operated like the university servers, but I was just a paying customer. Why did get fed up with the newsgroup? Some newbie spoiled Ritchie Ryan's death for us Americans!

Having recently fallen into a large, fiction-based fandom again (Sherlock) I'm astounded by the speed and ease with which I can get inexpensive pro DVDs (of a BBC show, no less), fan art, and fiction for every pairing, threesome, and kink imaginable. And I don't need to know the right people to get it. Which is all great, but I'll likely never form the kinds of enduring friendships in this fandom that I did when the entirety of Highlander fandom met in one place.

[arduinna]

I modded allslash and allslash-d for a while.

\o/

When some of us "old timers" from alt.highlander.tv wanted to start a private list, I did so by paying for server space from a company and learning to use majordomo to run it.

Ahh, that's right, I'd completely forgotten about that!

Why did get fed up with the newsgroup? Some newbie spoiled Ritchie Ryan's death for us Americans!

Oh, argh, spoilers. The bane of my existence, they really are.

And yeah, the speed of new fandoms is astonishing -- it's so easy and fast to get source, and everything fannish. But it's impossible to keep up with anything; there's so much going on everywhere, and no time to really dig into anything, it feels like. I'm sure there are lots of people who are well-adapted to that sort of speed, but man, it's all a blur to me!

[dorinda]

I get homesick for mailing lists, reading this. Not that they're perfect, of course, but they provided a lot of what I craved, in centralized and concentrated doses....more of what I wanted as signal, less of what I perceived as noise.

You've reminded me of the existence of those intermediate creatures which you call 'email loops' (put all the addresses in the To or CC field, and always hit "reply all"). I was on some small ones, usually a group of friends; but I also remember being on a big one or two. If I remember correctly, the big Pros list, CI5, started as a loop like that.

It's a bit of interstitial history that gets lost a lot more easily, I think, since it might not have a name, or an industrial server-with-archives. So I'm glad you woke that neuron of mine back up!

I remember Slashpoint getting very popular, and I was certainly on it, but I still preferred Virgule. Perhaps due to my general dislike of being studied. (Granted, Slashpoint was open and aboveboard about its relationship to academia and stuff, so it isn't like I was shanghaied, and there was interesting stuff on it. I could just relax more on Virgule.)

[arduinna]

I get homesick for mailing lists

I'm always homesick for lists. *g* Even though I'm still on several, some of them very active. Even with that, it's a completely different environment -- and most of the people who made the lists what they were for me have moved on to journaling, and now facebook and twitter and tumblr and who knows what's next.

But they're still more likely to have signal than noise, even if it's not signal I'm all that interested in.

'email loops' (put all the addresses in the To or CC field, and always hit "reply all"). I was on some small ones, usually a group of friends; but I also remember being on a big one or two. If I remember correctly, the big Pros list, CI5, started as a loop like that.


(four lines, woo!) I almost never made it onto the big ones; by the time I found out about them, they'd have become lists, like CI5, and even Senad. Although with Senad, the early server kept crashing, and the list was still small enough that we'd just revert to a loop for a while till it got fixed; we'd add " S/: " to the front of our subject lines for the duration so everyone could track the "list".

I remember Slashpoint getting very popular, and I was certainly on it, but I still preferred Virgule. Perhaps due to my general dislike of being studied.

I preferred Virgule as well, and even some of the others, partly for that very reason. But also because, as a list specifically devoted to academic study, the conversations went academic very fast; you could barely get through a week (I'm tempted to say a day) without someone spouting off about Derrida or whoever. And as someone who has no clue who Derrida was... I really didn't care, and those conversations turned utterly opaque almost instantly as they all used verbal shorthand with each other that meant nothing to me. It made it really hard to want to engage in any discussions, knowing they were going to be diverted to what I assume was lit-crit theory that I couldn't participate in.

Whereas Virgule and other lists had acads on them, but they were hanging out as fans first, talking about fannish things in fannish ways, using fannish verbal shorthand that was part of my language. Made a huge difference.

[mollyamory]

If somebody put a gun to my head, I could maybe remember 1/10th of this. =D Awesome, awesome stuff.

I actually find it harder to get to know people now than I ever did during our mailing-list days. 95% of the people in fandom that I consider friends, I met on mailing lists or via IRC channels that evolved from mailing loops. Now, there's just so much coming at everyone from so many different directions -- it's hard to slow down to the 1:1 level. You have to work at it harder, I think. Or well, I do.

Maybe it's a combination of life getting busier (I had more time in college!) and fandom also getting gigantic and sprawling - connections seem harder to make. Not impossible, just less probable, maybe.

Also - I totally remember when "who did you get your tapes from?" was a way of establishing your cred in fandom. And I remember getting mine from gloria v and there were these wacky things at the end of the set of tapes - like, clips of the show, over music? What the hell was THAT about. For years, I was baffled as to why anybody would want to do something so bizarre... =D

[cesperanza]

+1 to all of this! I think it's harder today, too.

[ithildin]

+1 for me too. I never felt more connected to people than I did then.

[arduinna]

If somebody put a gun to my head, I could maybe remember 1/10th of this. =D

Well, I didn't remember all of it out of my own head -- I had to look some of it up. *g*

Now, there's just so much coming at everyone from so many different directions -- it's hard to slow down to the 1:1 level.

That's definitely how it is for me.

It's also that the path to getting to know someone has changed; it used to be that you would know someone's public face, then start talking to them and as your knowledge about them grew, so did the level of intimacy between you; and the more intimate you got, the more personal the information you'd be given. The two things built slowly off each other.

Now the knowledge level starts out sky-high as people (everywhere, not just journals -- facebook, my god) post all the details of their life for anyone to see, and I just have no social training at all to be able to cope with knowing that much about someone I don't know in the slightest, other than those intensely personal details. It has never failed to wig me out. How do you introduce yourself to someone when you already know how often they have sex, or whatever?

And not just how do you do it, but honestly, what's the point? My friends know me better than anyone; if everyone knows me as well as my friends because I tell everyone the same things, what's the difference between them and the rest of the world?

Anyway. Modern social norms make me feel old. *g*

And I remember getting mine from gloria v and there were these wacky things at the end of the set of tapes - like, clips of the show, over music? What the hell was THAT about. For years, I was baffled as to why anybody would want to do something so bizarre... =D

Heeeee. For me it was Pros tapes, when the woman who'd been steadily pimping me into Pros put a bunch of multi-fandom vids onto one tape to fill space. I was also completely baffled. The only one I remember is a Quantum Leap vid, because I was all "ooh Quantum Leap!" and then I got so bored I started reading something while waiting for the weird music thing to end so I could get to the next episode.

[executrix]

Amazing job, thanks!
Although I'm 59, I've only been in fandom for about a dozen years, so I missed a lot of this. I do remember posting stories to the B7 slash-friendly ML in parts, and looking for appropriately cliff-hangery places to end a part.

[franzeska]

I can handle the +1's if they're in the form of a site mechanic like liking a tumblr post or giving kudos on AO3, but LURK FIRST will never leave me. I'm weirded out every time I see something demanding that everyone jump in and participate in everything ASAP.

As long as you were willing to talk to people, you found out about things. The main barrier to entry was saying "oh, yeah, that sounds cool, I'd love an invite, thanks!"

And age and being in the right fandoms, I think. I was never invited to any invitation-only lists; I didn't even know such a thing had existed until recently. I think it's half that I wasn't participating enough in the right places and half that I was 13 when I found fandom originally and many of the reasons for keeping your list private are also good reasons to keep 13 year-olds off of it. I found anime fandoms and HP much friendlier since they were full of other teenagers also looking for porn and unwilling to jump through hoops to find it. Ha ha ha. (But, oh god, the WIPs!)


The big thing I remember about RPF before everything exploded with boy band slash was that Usenet used to have quite a lot of creepy celebrity snuff erotica, mostly about Gillian Anderson. It was on the same newsgroups with other creepy erotica. From memory, hanging and cannibalism were very popular, along with all the other sorts of things you'd typically find on Nifty today. (The big non-fic erotica-writing subcultures were starting up online around the same time fic writing was.) I think that may have turned a lot of people off of the idea.

I could swear my VHS copies of Highlander were closer to $200/season. They were really freakin' expensive! And, at least at the time I bought them, they came with all of this extra junk to justify the price. I had a huge stack of cruddy posters and t-shirts and an actually nice watcher emblem necklace (that I promptly lost, of course).

[ithildin]

The first season when they first came out, was close to $200. And I remember finally getting them, and they'd put duplicates in the box, so I had half a season twice. It was a nightmare trying to get that idiotic Highlander store to fix it.

[franzeska]

They were the worst. THE WORST!

God, I do not miss those days.

[arduinna]

I can handle the +1's if they're in the form of a site mechanic like liking a tumblr post or giving kudos on AO3,

The AO3 kudos I can handle fine, because it's shorthand for a specific comment directed to the author. The comment itself might vary from kudoser to kudoser, from "great story, I loved it, thanks!" to "well, it didn't suck, so okay, *click kudos*", but it's all basically saying "well done, you" directly to the author.

Liking a tumblr post, though -- that's still strange to me, because it's so generic and weird, and not actually saying anything *to* anyone. You could be saying "hey thanks for posting this!" or "hey whoever drew this art that's now lost all its context did a nice job with the shading" or "oh I like this fandom" or anything at all. As far as I can tell, the poster doesn't get notified of likes, particularly; they just appear on the post in the Notes section. I dunno, it's all odd and distanced to me.

I was 13 when I found fandom originally and many of the reasons for keeping your list private are also good reasons to keep 13 year-olds off of it.

Hah, yes, being 13 probably had a lot to do with it, if you told people that's how old you were.

I know the age restrictions were frustrating for kids who then had to lie to get in, but as someone who came into fandom as an adult, I was grateful for them; I didn't care how much kids wanted to know, or that it was fine by their parents for them to hear whatever -- I didn't want to be talking about my adult sexual fantasies, or even just having a direct conversation about various life experiences, with children. I used to get really pissed off at parents who cheerfully said "Oh, it's okay, I'm fine with little Susie knowing about this stuff!" -- that's great, you tell her. Don't ask me to.

... But I digress. *g*

The big thing I remember about RPF before everything exploded with boy band slash was that Usenet used to have quite a lot of creepy celebrity snuff erotica, mostly about Gillian Anderson.

OMG YES. I didn't see it on the newgroups, but the first piece of fandom-based RPS I saw got posted to, I think, Allslash, and was snuff about David Duchovny; whatever actor he was paired with flayed him alive and what the FUCK. It was unbelievably horrifying, and a few years later when the boybanders were talking about how fun and happy RPS was, I had to bite my tongue really freaking hard not to point out that RPS also included things like that story.

I could swear my VHS copies of Highlander were closer to $200/season.

I never bought them myself, and was trying to remember what I'd heard people say. I knew it was something insanely expensive, but man. I believe it, though; the stories I heard about the Highlander Store!

They probably ran about $189.99, then - which now that I type that out, looks about right. Dear god. You can get 10 seasons of Stargate on DVD for that...

[franzeska]

Liking a tumblr post, though...

Tumblr is kind of weird to me, period. I usually 'like' things that I would reblog except that I have some reason not to (like I just reblogged something similar or they're not fandom-y enough and I'm mostly posting fandom content). You can view a list of your likes, so they could also function as bookmarks.

Hah, yes, being 13 probably had a lot to do with it, if you told people that's how old you were.

Oh yes. I don't think I ever lied much unless I was clicking some automated "you must be 18 to..." message on a website. There are all these ridiculous usenet discussions (sadly archived) where I'm arguing that being 13 doesn't mean you can't appreciate quality entertainment, and Concerned Parents are freaking out about kiddies watching the X-Files. ...and then there was my one-woman crusade to convince the teenage girls of the internet that masturbation is awesome. /o\ That's probably all preserved for posterity too, though I haven't gone looking. I was pretty much a roving vortex of TMI on usenet.

I know what you mean about not wanting to be the one to educate other people's kids. Ha ha ha. But I think the main effect was less frustration (despite the occasional high-decible whining) and more that a lot of people just went where the porn was out in public (ffn, anime lists, big chunks of HP fandom, web pages instead of mailing lists) and made their own norms. I didn't know about the secretive parts of fandom, so to me, they didn't exist. And then I'll see people's comments on Fanlore and be like: "What? That's not how it was! I've never even heard of that list!" :D

Someone handed off an anime list to me at one point, and I promptly changed the minimum age to 16 since the entire list was lying about their ages. I'm pretty sure the original mods and I were among the only ones who were actually old enough. Too funny.

[klia]

I didn't want to be talking about my adult sexual fantasies, or even just having a direct conversation about various life experiences, with children. I used to get really pissed off at parents who cheerfully said "Oh, it's okay, I'm fine with little Susie knowing about this stuff!" -- that's great, you tell her. Don't ask me to.

Sorry, for butting in, but I had to say, I'm relieved it's not just me. One of the things that put me off attending Escapade was when they started allowing kids, because it made me reallly uncomfortable. Yes, some teens are really mature and informed and cool, but the thought of engaging with them as peers still feels creepy to me.

[klia]

This posts have been great reads -- thank you! I enjoyed having my crappy memory jogged about stuff like tape duping and spoiler space, and now I'm feeling all nostalgic. Fandom feels so fragmented to me these days. ;__;

[arduinna]

These were so much fun to do. *g* And now I'm feeling totally nostalgic, and wanting to document more. I've seen a few people riff off this in their own posts, which is awesome -- I'd love to see a wave of reminiscences!

[morgandawn]

let me know if you see any more riffs? I am collecting links!

[arduinna]

\o/

Here's what I have so far:

vass Memories: An extension of mine, going into stuff I either forgot to add or didn't have time/space for, like how kink mainly meant bdsm and how there wasn't much of it; and wonderfully, going into John Ordover, whose name I'd heard at one point but had totally forgotten about.

ang no subject: short, but fab, because it's from someone who hated mailing list culture

some_stars no subject: short, but talks about archives and slowly downloading a video clip of X-Files (from The Red and the Black, "with the kiss!!! ♥) in 1998

jena fannish history: short, but talking a bit about lists

pearwaldorf no subject: talking about finding fandom via AOL in 1995 (and promising more to come, woo!)

[janissa11]

This put a huge lump in my throat. Making friends -- OH HOW WE DID make friends. Wonderful friends, fabulous friends.

And the episode discussions, the dissections of canon, interpretations, prognostications, characters -- I think Unrest B5 and Senad were the two lists I knew best, and particpated the most, but yes, intense and SMART discussion.

I still look at LJ comms and discussion threads and often sometimes think it was better in the days of listservs. But I don't think I'm necessarily right about that. I think there was a heady quality to the discourse, the act of discovering others who loved the same things you loved, after life in the wastelands of reality -- today online contact is of course one billion times more familiar, more common, less somehow magical. Nothing wrong with that, but it's very hard now to think of ways to communicate just how SPECIAL it felt back in the late 90s and early aughts.

Fabulous, fabulous posts. You made our own Wayback Machine.

[arduinna]

today online contact is of course one billion times more familiar, more common, less somehow magical. Nothing wrong with that, but it's very hard now to think of ways to communicate just how SPECIAL it felt back in the late 90s and early aughts.

I think it's not just that people are more used to online discussion (although that's obviously a big part of it); it's that people don't consider fandom a separate thing anymore. I used to have work, and home (errands, meals, cleaning, family and non-fannish friends), and fandom, which was a separate, special place where I wasn't thinking about bills or the project I had due at work the next week.

And every conversation was that focused; people didn't add extraneous things to their posts -- not personal things, not thoughts on other fandoms, nothing, just the topic at hand. You could really immerse yourself in fannishness. That's what I miss, as much as anything.

There was just nothing like being able to click on an email folder and get all the Sentinel discussion, and nothing but Sentinel discussion, with no other distractions.

You made our own Wayback Machine.

Hee! Nah, that's Fanlore, but I'm really glad to have done the posts and contributed! This has been a blast, not just writing them but reading everyone's comments. <3

[princessofgeeks]

thank you so much for doing this. i devoured every word.

[arduinna]

\o/

[moth2fic]

Thank you so much for such a fascinating history!!

It makes me feel sad, in a way, because I was around then, and would have loved to have joined in but didn't have the internet/computer skills/access. I didn't reach those dizzy heights till later *g*. And now, retired and with a laptop, I have all the time and access my heart could desire. But it would still have been nice to have joined in way back when...

I'm intrigued by every part of your account and must keep it bookmarked to re-read and to refer to.

[arduinna]

It makes me feel sad, in a way, because I was around then, and would have loved to have joined in but didn't have the internet/computer skills/access.

Oh, my sympathies -- that's like me and zine fandom, which I knew about but just didn't have the wherewithal to get involved with. It took 15 more years for me to plunge into media-fandom full-tilt, and I'm wistful about that; I think I would have had a good time in zine fandom.

Still, at least we made it! \o/

[moth2fic]

Indeed, and finding fandom was probably the best moment of my life. I have recently met (on LJ) a fan who is in her eighties and has only just, last year, discovered fandom, slash, the internet and everything. She is having a wonderful time, too. It's never to late!!

[astolat]

omg these posts are SO FREAKING COOL <3 <3 <3

[arduinna]

♥

[sinensis]

Awesome post--I am filled to the brim with nostalgia. (discovered fandom online in 1998.)

[arduinna]

\o/

[astolat]

I also have to say, this totally makes me want to set up like, a one-month modern mailing list experience -- set up a mailing list where, if you sign up, you promise to post everything, meta and fic, to the list first & exclusively for one week before you post it to your lj/tumblr/whatever, and we all just play on the list together for one month.

[out_there]

You know, I'd be very interested in that. I remember adoring mailing lists, but it's hard to be sure how much of that is the actual experience and how much is rosy-coloured glasses blurring my hindsight.

[arduinna]

Hee, sounds fun! I'd love to give that a shot.

But just for the record, lists are still around, and still active in a lot of cases. *g* Of the ones I'm on, Zinelist in particular gets right up my nose sometimes with many of the listees' attitudes, but is unbelievably active and chatty most of the time.

[treewishes]

Mem'ries... misty-water colored mem'ries... *cue soaring strings*

This was great - amazing to see it documented and codified like this! I paralled a lot of this, but it was a different experience for me because I wasn't a media fan - I came in because there were never enough gay-themed movies or perish-the-thought tv shows in the world.

So much of the discussion was "around" rather than centered on the slash then, and today as well. I feel we are more fans than we are slash fans. But we are even more than that, we are like-minded people, so strongly reinforced by this fabulous retrospective. Thanks!

[arduinna]

Yeah, for me at least it's definitely source first, slash second; I'm all about the slash in a lot of shows, but I need to be invested in the source to be interested in seeing if there's a pairing there I like.

It really was sort of amazing documenting this stuff; there was stuff I'd mostly forgotten, and stumbling over it again was such a treat!

[ladysorka]

I still have my VHS run of the entirety of The Sentinel and of Queer as Folk UK, both of which I got from a tape tree. I've gotten rid of basically all the rest of my VHS, but I still have those. I also have a number of Sailormoon episodes, because I can't seem to make myself get rid of them, which were from the anime varieties of tape distribution where you you sent a check and got back fansubs. Hell, I've been very slowly transferring some of the Sentinel tapes to digital because those second and third generation episodes are still better quality on some episodes than the one digital rip I can find (which is, ironically enough, missing tiny bits from Syfy cutting out for ads).

I also almost feel like I should make a post about being underage during the mailing list years, which was... a challenge. Most people I know around my age (I'm 29) who were in fandom then can talk about just how many fake age statements we had out there, how many years we were 18, and just how careful we had to be about who we talked to, because slipping up often meant being kicked off lists or losing access to archives - and therefore losing access to fandom entirely. Talk about a different atmosphere than fandom today.

[lilacsigil]

a post about being underage during the mailing list years, which was... a challenge.

I was 19 when I first got internet access. When LJ started, I was astonished to find how many people had actually been 12-13 at the time, and I thought were peers!

[lizbee]

I once horrified a Voyager writer by telling her, as a 19 year old, that I'd read her porn when I was 16 and thought it was great.

(This was also a lie. The sex seemed plausible enough, but the characterisation was so terrible that I opened it up on my ancient laptop -- so old it didn't actually have a hard drive, and booted from floppy disks -- and started rewriting it.)

[amaresu]

I'm 28 and I lied about my age so much back then. It was freeing to be on a list that just didn't care because the fandom was so small we needed every member.

Also the many websites that had the 'click here if you're over 18' pages. Those were a staple of my early fandom life.

[cellia]

I remember those "click here if over 18" pages too! I was so internet-unsavvy it took me months to realize that this was honor system and there was no way of checking this for me. Of course, by that time, I was only months away from 18, but I still remember the sliver of worry I had when I clicked one of those links for the 1st time.

[franzeska]

When I was handed an anime mailing list to mod at one point, I finally changed the minimum age from 18 to 16 just so I could stop getting a billion private confessions from the huge majority of list members who were a couple of years too young. I mean, it was an anime list! Of course half of us were 16! So were most of the people we were writing porn about!

[arduinna]

*cracks up*

[torch]

Age statements! Oh man, I'd forgotten about the age statements. And the people who told me in secret that they'd lied in their age statements. I seem to remember some list where the owner wanted people to photocopy their actual ID and send it in, or maybe that was just an idea that was never realized. I mean, I'd've never done that anyway, so if there was such a list, I certainly never joined it. *G* I'd love to read a post about the adventures of being an underage fan in those days.

[nestra]

Oh, man, I think I did that for a private Highlander list. I had forgotten.

[franzeska]

Yes! This totally did happen. I don't think I ever sent anything in, but I distinctly remember seeing instructions on a website somewhere. I wish I could remember which site/list it was for.

WAIT! WAIT! It was Aestheticism! (I think there were others too though.)
http://web.archive.org/web/20090313090003/http://www.aestheticism.com/visitors/info/index.htm

[torch]

I knew there was a reason I was never a member. I was on AMLA though, so the requirements to just Talk About Stuff must have been less stringent.

[arduinna]

... Holy cow. I knew about the Aestheticism site, but I don't remember ever hearing about that. Wow, it's a wonder they got anyone to join. Who would do that!

[franzeska]

They were the only game in town for a long time. :) One doesn't know what was in the fic archive without looking, but the types of manga they reviewed are ones that you still can't find information about in English.

Actually... I wonder if I did eventually send them a photocopy. I'm having this sudden memory that I may actually have joined some site with a weird policy...

[cellia]

Yup, I remember that. I think you needed to do it to get the hard copy scanlations/newsletter and also access to more adult/members-only parts of the site.

I think I must have done it since I was a member for awhile.

[some_stars]

I would read that underage post! I got into Star Trek fandom at age 12, then X-Files, and so on, and it was an interesting experience. I was (quite reasonably) cut off from the mailing lists I wanted to be on because at some early point I'd stupidly mentioned my age and it had gotten around, so I mostly lurked and read archives, but I did send feedback and make some friends and even got invited onto some private lists, somehow. But I also spent a LOT of time on AOL forums and chats, and on Usenet. I miss Usenet.

ANYWAY, yes, I would read your post! I think it's a fascinating parallel history.

[alethia]

I also almost feel like I should make a post about being underage during the mailing list years, which was... a challenge. Most people I know around my age (I'm 29) who were in fandom then can talk about just how many fake age statements we had out there, how many years we were 18, and just how careful we had to be about who we talked to, because slipping up often meant being kicked off lists or losing access to archives - and therefore losing access to fandom entirely. Talk about a different atmosphere than fandom today.

Oh, God, being underage in fandom. Yeah. I remember those days. Fun times with age statements. Quite a different atmosphere, indeed.

[arduinna]

I still have my VHS run of the entirety of The Sentinel and of Queer as Folk UK, both of which I got from a tape tree.

Heh -- I still have all of TS on VHS as well -- it's not like we're ever going to get full DVDs! And agreed, the existing rips aren't great, from what I've seen. I've got bunches more, too, including my full run of Kung Fu: the Legend Continues, Now & Again, Invisible Man (we're never getting season 2 on DVD *cries*)... anything I think I can't replace, I keep. They're finally out of my living room and stored in a friend's basement, safe and sound, but I can't get rid of them.

which were from the anime varieties of tape distribution where you you sent a check and got back fansubs.

Oh, awesome - I had friends who did that, but was never into anime so never had an experience with it myself.

I also almost feel like I should make a post about being underage during the mailing list years, which was... a challenge.

You should! Even though I'm currently sort of /o\ at realizing how young you were when I first crossed paths with you, way back when. *g* Good heavens.

Still, it's the sort of thing no one talked about, and it'd be really cool to see it laid out there. It really is completely different than today.

[sarajayechan]

/walks in 5 years late (sadly not with Starbucks)

Age statements, yes. I was 16 when I discovered fandom proper as well as adult sites, and AOL knew I was only 16, but I still managed to find access to hentai groups via AOL's Usenet reader. Plus there were other kids my age hanging around there, no one made too big a deal of it.

As for websites, I remember having an easy time lying my way into the 18+ fanfic section by clicking "yes" or tacking a couple years onto my age if asked for proof, but I think some sites or FTPs with adult content had passwords.

[lilacsigil]

Such a trip reading this! One other thing about the tape trees - for non-US, non-Canadian, non-UK fans, it was often the only way we got to see the show. Networks here (in Australia) showed little to no genre TV, except for X-Files and Doctor Who, and usually showed it years late, out-of-order and missing many episodes. We survived on kind fans posting tapes to us, and people with connections converting them to a watchable format. Once the show came out on video, it was usually imported here, but not always.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh - nth generation NTSC tapes with the whacked out colours! We watched all of Oz weirdly insulated from the violence because all the blood was green...

My run of The Sentinel was posted to me in a box that had a fruit-themed contact (sticky plastic) on it and I had to beg quarantine not to destroy my tapes...

(cricketk on livejournal)

[arduinna]

Oh - nth generation NTSC tapes with the whacked out colours! We watched all of Oz weirdly insulated from the violence because all the blood was green...

Hee! It's the reverse of what early Professionals tapes looked like in the States; after conversion from PAL to NTSC and nth-generation copying, you were lucky to see anything at all.

My run of The Sentinel was posted to me in a box that had a fruit-themed contact (sticky plastic) on it and I had to beg quarantine not to destroy my tapes...

Oh, man. I don't think "make sure it doesn't look like perishables" ever went into the general "how to ship things overseas" directions that always seemed to be floating around, but I do remember "mark it as a gift, worth $10, no matter what it is" to try to stave off merchandise fees at various countries' Customs counters.

Which was great training, as I still do that today. *g*

[arduinna]

Oh, yes, internationally shipped tapes! I meant to include that, that tapes went everywhere, and you could wind up with tape trees in different countries from that. Crucial, man, just crucial.

[batdina]

It was for fear of legal liability, and with reason. I don't know how many people remember this, or even knew about it, but on the Forever Knight lists there was a story posted in the mid-90s that involved Tori Spelling. it wasn't erotica; it was a gen story, which described her in a manner consistent with the press reports of the day, shall we say. It was posted to be fic list, and I believe it was archived on the FTP archive site.

Ah, the joys of fkfic-l. Yes, I remember this. If memory serves, the person who posted that story outright dared people to tell Spelling & Co. all about it, which of course, someone did.

I am pretty sure that it wasn't ever archived on the FTP site, because it generally took me weeks at a time to archive things, and that story was pulled from the digest in about 24 hours. Also, I have a pretty clear memory of who wrote it, and I don't know that I ever had permission from her to archive anything, and I never archived anything without the express permission of the authors. When I was recycling 5.25 inch diskettes a few years ago, I found the disk that had my archived permissions on it and perused it for old time's sake before I trashed the last drive I had that could read it.

(As an aside, that disk had the first ever contact I had with my partner of 16 years: her giving me permission to archive her stories on the ftp site.)

[ithildin]

I met ninjababe on IRC in 96, and got to know her when she asked me to beta a story for her. By the end of that year, she was living with me in California, and we still live together, though in Utah now.

[arduinna]

<3

[arduinna]

OMG, thank you for this! I've been telling people that story off and on for a decade now, and tend to get blank looks and "I've never heard of that, it never happened" responses. It is so good to get confirmation that I didn't somehow just imagine it! (Also good to get my own facts cleared up, about the FTP archive part of it.)

I didn't remember her daring people to tell Spelling & Co, but sheesh.

(As an aside, that disk had the first ever contact I had with my partner of 16 years: her giving me permission to archive her stories on the ftp site.)

I have been grinning about this for days. That's awesome.

[ithildin]

This has made me all weepy. I miss the email lists, I really do. And while I know the old days are never coming back, there isn't the intimacy in current internet fandom.

The bit about how did we make friends made me laugh How indeed? My whole life as it is now is from those email list/IRC days.

[eviltammy]

The bit about how did we make friends made me laugh How indeed? My whole life as it is now is from those email list/IRC days.

Yep - it's very funny looking at my FB friends list - it's fairly well divided into fandom people, high school people, and odd stuff to do with cats and/or knitting. And if it came down to needing to pare the list - the fandom people are so much more important to me. And I miss the intimacy of the lists and IRC.

And now I'm sniffly and have dust in my eyes...

[arduinna]

I know, right? I can trace so much of my life back to the 90s mailing lists, it's just astonishing.

[ninjababe]

I actually wrote myself notes while reading this 3 part treatise... :)

Here's my reply:

First... Fandom in the 90s created for me the foundations of my current life. I've had an essay drifting in my head titled "How Forever Knight Fandom Changed My Life" for the last 15 plus years. Basically, I got into FK fandom in the 90s, met people, and they're now my quasi-adopted family... There's bits about parents not understanding, strange cross-country trips with gansters and proposals, lesbian vampire cults, yadda yadda yadda...

I've personally received tapes from a tape tree when I was 19 or so. I remember they were about 10th generation, and while passing my room, my mother asked how I could watch something so badly taped?! The walls of a certain character's apartment were bright orange due to tape degradation.

And, because of fandom, I met my best friends. In fact, one friend in the 90's wasn't sure about posting a story (it was a bit adult for that time period). So, I went sent her a box full of post-it notes in encouragement. It took her years to use them all. :)

And, I remember being reprimanded for "spamming" one evening when I and another list member posted (I think) about 20 posts each in 8 hours. Even though they were on-topic... Back when bandwidth was a premium.

Personally, I think free email lists sites have destroyed the email list for the most part. Before, you had to play nice with others, and there were hundreds of people on one list. Now, it's like this: "I don't like that rule! It's bad! I'm going to make my own email list that is exactly the same as this list, but that rule won't be there, and I'm in charge!"

[arduinna]

how I could watch something so badly taped?! The walls of a certain character's apartment were bright orange due to tape degradation.

I know! I look back on the tapes I was desperately grateful to get my hands on, and at the shiny DVD and Blu-Ray source I expect to have now, and just boggle.

And, because of fandom, I met my best friends.

Yep! I had a pretty close group of friends pre-fandom, but after getting into fandom realized we were friends more out of habit than anything; I had so little in common with them. I still know them, but much more distantly now. Fandom people are my people.

And, I remember being reprimanded for "spamming" one evening when I and another list member posted (I think) about 20 posts each in 8 hours. Even though they were on-topic... Back when bandwidth was a premium.

Hah, I think I remember that. I'd completely forgotten that people had that sort of posting limit, as well as line-length limits. Man.

Before, you had to play nice with others, and there were hundreds of people on one list. Now, it's like this: "I don't like that rule! It's bad! I'm going to make my own email list that is exactly the same as this list, but that rule won't be there, and I'm in charge!"

Yeah, it really was a two-edged sword; it was great to be able to get out from under the thumb of dictatorial or unreasonable list mods, but the proliferation of nearly identical lists just fractured things so badly, and started convincing people that they'd never have to hear any opinions that didn't match theirs entirely. It may have cut down on flamewars, but I think it cut down on tolerance, too. (I just don't think that "you don't like it, cut it out of your experience so you never see it" is the same thing as actual tolerance.)