Oh, Gossamer! I spent so, so many hours there, often spending the entire night in the university computer lab and walking home to change clothes in the early morning light. At one point, I had literally read every story on it, until it exploded out of reach of even my reading ambitions.
Huh, I don't think I ever realized that Naomi's AA software could post to lists for you (or I forgot because I never used it for that). I think by the time I started actually writing, the Part 0 hand-coded posts were already normal, and it was just a matter of learning how many text pages you could fit into each email part without it bouncing.
I still kind of miss lists and the big irc chats. Mailing lists used to be such a big deal because they were expensive to run unless you had free access to a listserv (usually at a university). I remember when Yahoo!Groups came around it was such a big thing because then anyone could create a list for anything -- and did, leading to a lot of debate over the "fracturing" of fandom.
I'm fairly sure "shipper" started on XF-Romantics (I was one of the first, if not the first, to use it just because typing takes energy and "relationshipper" was such a long, awkward word. It also used to be a bit of an insult). "Chan" in TPM did come from anime - someone had heard the term and it got snapped up and quickly adapted to fit what some of us were writing, though it wasn't really accurate. Wow, what a huge controversy that was in TPM fandom at the time, to the point that discussion of "chan" had to be banned from the mailing list and the stories themselves weren't archived on the main MA site. Is this term still in use anywhere? I mostly see people saying "underage" now, and it's no longer considered a big deal unless you have a personal squick.
no subject
Oh, Gossamer! I spent so, so many hours there, often spending the entire night in the university computer lab and walking home to change clothes in the early morning light. At one point, I had literally read every story on it, until it exploded out of reach of even my reading ambitions.
Huh, I don't think I ever realized that Naomi's AA software could post to lists for you (or I forgot because I never used it for that). I think by the time I started actually writing, the Part 0 hand-coded posts were already normal, and it was just a matter of learning how many text pages you could fit into each email part without it bouncing.
I still kind of miss lists and the big irc chats. Mailing lists used to be such a big deal because they were expensive to run unless you had free access to a listserv (usually at a university). I remember when Yahoo!Groups came around it was such a big thing because then anyone could create a list for anything -- and did, leading to a lot of debate over the "fracturing" of fandom.
I'm fairly sure "shipper" started on XF-Romantics (I was one of the first, if not the first, to use it just because typing takes energy and "relationshipper" was such a long, awkward word. It also used to be a bit of an insult). "Chan" in TPM did come from anime - someone had heard the term and it got snapped up and quickly adapted to fit what some of us were writing, though it wasn't really accurate. Wow, what a huge controversy that was in TPM fandom at the time, to the point that discussion of "chan" had to be banned from the mailing list and the stories themselves weren't archived on the main MA site. Is this term still in use anywhere? I mostly see people saying "underage" now, and it's no longer considered a big deal unless you have a personal squick.