Snowflake Challenge

[thisbluespirit]

Since I seem to be accidentally doing this, as I did #1 the other day and in the course of it, also did #5 and have friended and talked to quite a lot of people!

So here goes for the rest:



Challenge #2: In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

I partly covered this in the intro, but I started out when an Information & Library Studies lecturer introduced us to newsnet while at uni back in 1995. He said there were groups for everything, including breakfast cereals, and not being much into Weetabix, I looked for Doctor Who... and found fandom and fanfic. I settled in alt.drwho.creative (rec.arts.drwho was a bit scary, although I did read it) and wrote stuff, and then the TV Movie came out and things livened up. We started our own pretend-official Doctor Who series called the Internet Adventures, which we wrote as round robins.

I had written odd bits of things that might count as fic before, for both Doctor Who and Dungeons & Dragons (the cartoon), and had DWM since I first discovered it on holiday in 1991, but it was the first time I'd been able to do creative and fannish things with people and I loved it.

I lost internet access for ages after that, but in 2006/7 went looking for the remnants of newsnet in Google Groups, found alt.drwho.creative and joined back in, and asked where everyone was. They pointed me to A Teaspoon and an Open Mind and that was amazing. (I mean, you could have italics even! I was still writing italics like *this* because that was how we did it in newsnet when you had no html). And Teaspoon was full of links to LiveJournal and I followed them and fell in love. It took a while before I had an actual flist, but it was pretty much the perfect format for me. The bad stuff was still around, but it was so much easier to pick and choose where you went and who you interacted with.

And that was that, basically. I have a tumblr, but it's just an extra and I wish everyone would come back to journalling. I can't live without communities, adjustable privacy and boundaries and threaded commenting. And icons.

I also wound up tag wrangling on AO3 in about 2013 or 2014, which was partly due to vilakins, who suggested I might like it after that time I added tags to b7friday.

I flirted with forums for a while, but on forums I always spent all my time in the off-topic thread talking about a different fandom to the one the forum was about. (That was how I ended up watching Blake's 7: I was on the Spooks forum talking Classic Who in the Off-topic section and then my two fellow DW fans suddenly started talking B7 and I couldn't join in. And then told me that if I liked Classic Who and Spooks then I would definitely like B7, and they were totally right. I did. It was also the start of a downhill road, because that was the first time I found that other old TV could also be awesome, because that first B7 watch was just amazing.)

I used to be more monofannish, as you can see from this all being Doctor, but LiveJournal and yuletide are enablers and so is AO3 and I'm basically incurably multifannish these days. I like flitting about and having one night stands, but I'll always come back to my main fandoms.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

I have mixed feelings about it, because it has helped me find some nice people into old and obscure telly - but I wish I could bring them back here!!

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Mixed feelings... that's a very good way to describe it. I did meet some lovely people there, but overall it was terrible for my mental health, which obviously is totally on me, but still, i've never had that experience on LJ or here on DW. So i've tried other social media things, but over the years, journalling is the one that's stuck! <3

[lirazel]

I like tumblr for memes and pretty gifsets, but as a main platform for fandom, it really sucks.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, I have to agree! But then, we're the ones who are over here, so I suppose we would!