fannish eras

[domarzione]

This 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:

* 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.

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? 

Comments

[vicki_rae]

Trekster Gods is my foundation era and wow that post brings back memories. I was in high school for all three years of Trek and best friends and I spent hours discussing every episode. We didn't know my English teacher was recording audio for all the episodes (on a wire recorder!) until he brought in The Galileo Seven for his classes to listen to and discuss. That was so much fun.

Was Dawn of Networking when some $$$ K/S fanzines started printing on dark paper so they couldn't be photocopied?

[domarzione]

I could not tell you about the fanzines trick, which I know Star Wars uses today for their scripts. By the time I was getting printed in fanzines, they were spiral-bound and then later had a digital PDF option.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

It feels like Dawn of Networking is too long, because Usenet and the BBS dominate are rather different than www. But we need someone that properly predates me because I really only was properly in media fandom once world wide web had occurred, though I'd been in Doctor Who and playing RPGs.

Webrings were towards the end of my First Internet Age. I 'returned', I'm not even sure what to call when I returned. I got my home here pretty shortly after, since I joined LJ just as the fork was occurring. Then it took awhile to get an invite for AO3 and start putting copies of my fiction there.

[domarzione]

There's definitely a sense of 'everything that happened in the computer age before AO3' element to that category, yes.

I was a late adopter of LJ from mailing lists and then ignored the account here for a long time. I had my AO3 account set up for me rather than getting an invite -- a gift, maybe? -- but I definitely start at Usenet. Heck, I found Usenet on *Gopher*....

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Gopher just recently came up in a conversation-I only used it very briefly. You must also recall silver platter.

[ratcreature]

In the boom of geocities time: The horrible autoexport from Word to HTML that inflated the kbyte numbers on people's websites and had weird windows charsets the non-techsavy windows-only people didn't even notice were not standard, but on my Linux system would not display quotes or apostrophes. I actually taught myself how to script textfile editing in bash just so I could automatically strip their fanfic files of crappy windows nonsense and read stories. Also there was one Sentinel author who inexplicably posted their story as images of text because apparently as I found out when I emailed, some desktop publishing layout program she formatted her fanfic in created that as automatic "web formatting" and she thought it was the same as text and really happy because her custom fonts and such all showed. So much wtf, in particular since I still had dial-up then and my eyes aren't great.

[domarzione]

OMG! YES. That effing Word HTML. I had to deal with it professionally for years because I was webmaster of our internal online documentation and holy crap....

But, seriously, wtf with the image text.

[ratcreature]

That image text thing was so bizarre. And unfortunately it was a good writer, so I wanted to read their stories. IIRC they also posted to the TS slash archive once stories were finished, where obviously things were readable, but WIP parts of their epic were available earlier on their website or something like that.

[kiratael]

"I was there Gandalf" and Citrus Cheesecake either overlapped chronologically a lot more than OP realizes or Citrus Cheesecake went on for a lot longer than I knew, because I definitely experienced everything in that era before everything in the first one.

I remember the websites where every page you clicked on would have a different background color (or worse, a tiled image as the background) and font style/color, so there were some stories I never read because I liked my eyes not bleeding. Websites with auto-playing midi files, ugh. Ditto for sites that used tiny animated gifs for page breaks.

[domarzione]

Oh, yes. Back in the days of awful backgrounds, flashing text, rainbow text, scrolling text, and unreadable fonts that were 'pretty' or 'dramatic.' Gray text on black backgrounds. Yellow text on white backgrounds. I'm getting a headache just from the memories.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Yeah, my directory page is tiled, and I do have the stories on various pastels. The monitors I was using the white was too much contrast.

Never any midi files. I grew up with brass music box mechanisms. That is my basement. There are not sub-levels.

[marcelo]

Oh, gods, yes. Dawn of Networking indeed. alt.startrek.creative, the Yahoo! mailing lists, fanfiction.net, the pair-specific sites, BNFs, the sweet sound of the modem handshake (in my case, phone time was expensive but cheaper after 10pm, so I waited impatiently that last minute...), The Shi'ar Coffee Story, that fic where it turned out Gambit was the time-displaced amnesiac son of Charles Xavier and Lilandra, the sheer impact of reading your first explicit slash fic (after all, I lived in a place where phone time was expensive, but cheaper after 10pm...), the warm glomping feeling of having a reader give you a nice comment (I still get that), the way almost every pair, by contemporary standards, was rare, so you cherished every fic.

[domarzione]

I am totally 10000% texting Alicia to tell her you are citing The Shi'ar Coffee Story as a Lasting Memory. :)

Gosh, yeah. There was no such creature as 'the pairing that ate the fandom' until, like, my fourth fandom. There was so much genfic. There was so much het because 85% of it was canon.

I had to wait until 10pm for unfettered dialup access, too. Which wasn't so bad because I grew up waiting until 9pm for cheaper long-distance calls to all the family.

[ilyena_sylph]

Tell her Marcelo isn't the only one, either!

[sally_maria]

Later Dawn of Networking for me, I'd say. Email lists, webrings. and lots of private archives, though it wasn't long before Onelist and eGroups started managing lists in my fandoms. If the story was long enough, I'd load it, and then drop the connection to read it, or just copy and paste the whole text.

I had the advantage of a separate line for the internet, so no having to worry about other people's phone calls, but I was still paying by the minute for the connection in the early days.

Of course, like ratcreature, I had the strange MS Word curly quotes problem - I used the Windows macro-recorder to automate find-replacing the codes with the proper text characters. And I still occasionally find an old story with hard returns making 80 characters to the line, because that's how it was posted to email back in the day.

[domarzione]

The best comment I ever got on a story was that the reader missed her planned girls night out because she was so immersed in my story and none of her girlfriends could reach her because the line was tied up. :)

Word HTML was the devil. Might still be the devil, but we have ways of dealing with it now.

I use NoteTab Light for my coding, even after decades of fancier free options, because I wept with joy at the 'join lines' button that fixed the hard returns without having to do it manually.

[skieswideopen]

A lot of this sounds very familiar. Especially the many mailing lists, with multiple copies of the same stories. And so many badly formatted author sites! I remember a lot of message boards too, somewhere between mailing lists and LJ.

Going to university was so exciting! I could save so much fic in the computer labs to read later.

[domarzione]

I've mostly blocked message boards from my fannish memory because I hated them so much. So much digging for so little reward.