Just the other day I went to a fellow fan's house who was my first real friend in fandom, twelve or thirteen years ago.
I live too far away from my first fandom friends to visit, but I'm less than 2 miles away from a couple of fan friends I've known for 15 years, and spend nearly every weekend at their house. It boggles me sometimes how much fandom has actually changed my life.
(I came in in the fall of 1999 and still feel like a newbie).
I wonder if anyone ever stops feeling like a newbie -- 'cause seriously, going on 20 years here, and I felt so weird writing this up, like I'd been around fandom long enough to do something like this!
So, you know, a useful reminder that they're still there - just not where most of us are congregating at the moment, I guess.
Heh - I'm still on dozens, myself! Although only a few are as active as they were 10+ years ago. Even some of the newsgroups are still active, and there are still people out there who are only in offline fandom, and only trib to or read paper zines. It's sort of amazing, really; we're an unbroken chain of our own history.
That's one reason that this series wound up only covering through the early 2000s, even before LJ came along; it was the proliferation of free web-based mailing lists that really changed things, along with the ever-increasing influx of people as things got more affordable and easy in the early 2000s (when all the computer companies started advertising that their computers would work "right out of the box" to convince people they were easy to use and get online with, and access was cheaper/more available), and the explosion of Harry Potter fandom...
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I live too far away from my first fandom friends to visit, but I'm less than 2 miles away from a couple of fan friends I've known for 15 years, and spend nearly every weekend at their house. It boggles me sometimes how much fandom has actually changed my life.
(I came in in the fall of 1999 and still feel like a newbie).
I wonder if anyone ever stops feeling like a newbie -- 'cause seriously, going on 20 years here, and I felt so weird writing this up, like I'd been around fandom long enough to do something like this!
So, you know, a useful reminder that they're still there - just not where most of us are congregating at the moment, I guess.
Heh - I'm still on dozens, myself! Although only a few are as active as they were 10+ years ago. Even some of the newsgroups are still active, and there are still people out there who are only in offline fandom, and only trib to or read paper zines. It's sort of amazing, really; we're an unbroken chain of our own history.
That's one reason that this series wound up only covering through the early 2000s, even before LJ came along; it was the proliferation of free web-based mailing lists that really changed things, along with the ever-increasing influx of people as things got more affordable and easy in the early 2000s (when all the computer companies started advertising that their computers would work "right out of the box" to convince people they were easy to use and get online with, and access was cheaper/more available), and the explosion of Harry Potter fandom...