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So hey, I've joined an Umbrella Academy fannish Discord Server.
That's been quite a delightful time-suck for the past three evenings.
Also, I am amused at how my fannish life has come full circle somehow.
When I posted my personal fannish history post last year, I traced my history from mailing lists to message boards to LiveJournal to Dreamwidth, and placed the start in my early 20s.
I joined the Discord server a few days ago, and looked through the intro thread where everyone was posting their ages (it's an 18+ server), and I discovered that I was literally the oldest person there by at least a handful of years (I'm 42; the next-oldest person on the thread was 36, and there were a whoooole lot of 18, 19, early-20s folks). So that was a little head-trip. And it reminded me of when I joined my first fandom, Once A Thief, and I was in my early 20s, and I felt so young because most people in the fandom were in their 30s or 40s.
I was discussing this with some people on the Umbrella Academy Discord (after one of them told me that I was the same age as her mom, LOL), and some of the early-20s folks were saying that they felt old in fandom, because there were a lot of high-schoolers in their fandom. They expressed surprise about my first experience, where I was the young odd one out while in my 20s, and somebody suggested that it might have to do with the fandom. Which is for sure at least partly true, but then I realized a bigger factor, which is that: back then, teenagers weren't in online fandom because they didn't have internet access! (I got my own private internet connection for the first time in grad school. And that's when I started posting fic.)
Anyway, I went away and pondered all this.
And then I remembered something.
I discovered fan fiction when I was in university, and started posting fic when I was in grad school. So I tend to mark that as the beginning of my participation in online fandom.
But when I do that, I'm forgetting something.
When I was fourteen years old, my family got internet access. (This was in 1992; we were early adopters, because in fact my dad was a computer programmer; that was his job.) And on the shared family computer, I was allowed to go on irc. And what did I do on irc? I talked about Elfquest comics.
Yes indeed. Let me repeat this for emphasis: My first online experience was in 1992, when I was 14 years old, going on irc to share my Elfquest theories and headcanons with strangers on the internet in ephemeral chatrooms.
So ... 28 years later, I land on Discord and look around and realize: oh my gosh, this is basically still irc.
(I shared this insight on the server too. And mostly everybody was like, "what is this ancient irc technology you speak of?" But one person was like, "omg, you are riiiiiight." Heh.)
That's been quite a delightful time-suck for the past three evenings.
Also, I am amused at how my fannish life has come full circle somehow.
When I posted my personal fannish history post last year, I traced my history from mailing lists to message boards to LiveJournal to Dreamwidth, and placed the start in my early 20s.
I joined the Discord server a few days ago, and looked through the intro thread where everyone was posting their ages (it's an 18+ server), and I discovered that I was literally the oldest person there by at least a handful of years (I'm 42; the next-oldest person on the thread was 36, and there were a whoooole lot of 18, 19, early-20s folks). So that was a little head-trip. And it reminded me of when I joined my first fandom, Once A Thief, and I was in my early 20s, and I felt so young because most people in the fandom were in their 30s or 40s.
I was discussing this with some people on the Umbrella Academy Discord (after one of them told me that I was the same age as her mom, LOL), and some of the early-20s folks were saying that they felt old in fandom, because there were a lot of high-schoolers in their fandom. They expressed surprise about my first experience, where I was the young odd one out while in my 20s, and somebody suggested that it might have to do with the fandom. Which is for sure at least partly true, but then I realized a bigger factor, which is that: back then, teenagers weren't in online fandom because they didn't have internet access! (I got my own private internet connection for the first time in grad school. And that's when I started posting fic.)
Anyway, I went away and pondered all this.
And then I remembered something.
I discovered fan fiction when I was in university, and started posting fic when I was in grad school. So I tend to mark that as the beginning of my participation in online fandom.
But when I do that, I'm forgetting something.
When I was fourteen years old, my family got internet access. (This was in 1992; we were early adopters, because in fact my dad was a computer programmer; that was his job.) And on the shared family computer, I was allowed to go on irc. And what did I do on irc? I talked about Elfquest comics.
Yes indeed. Let me repeat this for emphasis: My first online experience was in 1992, when I was 14 years old, going on irc to share my Elfquest theories and headcanons with strangers on the internet in ephemeral chatrooms.
So ... 28 years later, I land on Discord and look around and realize: oh my gosh, this is basically still irc.
(I shared this insight on the server too. And mostly everybody was like, "what is this ancient irc technology you speak of?" But one person was like, "omg, you are riiiiiight." Heh.)
