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fannish eras
30 Dec 2018 20:31This post is wandering around Tumblr with a not-inaccurate description of fannish eras, from the Great Foremothers of the Zine Period to the current zeitgeist. By this metric, I fall into the Dawn of Networking era, which happens to be the vaguest one and I added the following to it, in a slightly less endearing style, because it was more than webrings:
There have been a few reblogs with comments and "you forgot..."s and, since tumblr sucks for that sort of thing and I've known some of you fannish people for decades now, I think we might be able to carry on about it here. So go there, find your fannish era, or if you're my era, what did I leave out?
* Usenet and the trees of alt.whatever.whateverelse.thisthing.thatthing
* DIAL-UP. You wanted to read that longfic? Nobody in your household could use the phone for hours. Corollary: someone else in your household picking up an extension and dropping your connection. Sometimes on purpose.
* Mailing lists. Mailing lists were a HUGE part of that era.
* Tonnage limits per day: you could only post so many bytes (not words) per day because downloading the emails over dialup would take forever. Your chapters were 5kb over the limit? You either split them up over two days or got slapped by the listmod. [I posted a 203k word story to a mailing list. It took more than a month and it wasn’t a WIP.]
* That One Person With the Unreadable Formatting.
* That One Person Who Double-Spaced Every Line.
* That One Person Who Wrote Fic Nobody Else Read, But Was Very Prolific.
* Pairing lists and general lists and the people who cross-posted to all of them on the same day, so you got four copies of the same story in your inbox.
* Fandom pissing matches that resulted in offshoot mailing lists, so you had to subscribe to both so you could read all the fic.
* Saving stories by downloading emails to .txt files and crying at having to fix the formatting. Or realizing that you missed a chapter in a longfic.
* Archivists who had actual websites before Geocities or Tripod were a thing. They would ask authors for permission to put your fic on their site and it was like getting into university: you wanted to be asked by the picky archivists, not the ones who took everything in the fandom.
* IRC. At least in comics fandom, that was a huge part of the culture. *Glomping* new arrivals and apologizing for disappearing because a family member needed the phone.
* DIAL-UP. You wanted to read that longfic? Nobody in your household could use the phone for hours. Corollary: someone else in your household picking up an extension and dropping your connection. Sometimes on purpose.
* Mailing lists. Mailing lists were a HUGE part of that era.
* Tonnage limits per day: you could only post so many bytes (not words) per day because downloading the emails over dialup would take forever. Your chapters were 5kb over the limit? You either split them up over two days or got slapped by the listmod. [I posted a 203k word story to a mailing list. It took more than a month and it wasn’t a WIP.]
* That One Person With the Unreadable Formatting.
* That One Person Who Double-Spaced Every Line.
* That One Person Who Wrote Fic Nobody Else Read, But Was Very Prolific.
* Pairing lists and general lists and the people who cross-posted to all of them on the same day, so you got four copies of the same story in your inbox.
* Fandom pissing matches that resulted in offshoot mailing lists, so you had to subscribe to both so you could read all the fic.
* Saving stories by downloading emails to .txt files and crying at having to fix the formatting. Or realizing that you missed a chapter in a longfic.
* Archivists who had actual websites before Geocities or Tripod were a thing. They would ask authors for permission to put your fic on their site and it was like getting into university: you wanted to be asked by the picky archivists, not the ones who took everything in the fandom.
* IRC. At least in comics fandom, that was a huge part of the culture. *Glomping* new arrivals and apologizing for disappearing because a family member needed the phone.
There have been a few reblogs with comments and "you forgot..."s and, since tumblr sucks for that sort of thing and I've known some of you fannish people for decades now, I think we might be able to carry on about it here. So go there, find your fannish era, or if you're my era, what did I leave out?
