I'm dating myself. Dating myself as TOO YOUNG.

[eldabe]

copperbadge just gave an oral history of fandom on his tumblr and HE EXPLAINED WHAT WEBRINGS WERE FOR.

I literally had no idea wtf webrings were supposed to do when I stumbled on them circa...somewhere between 1999-2002? I remember just being really puzzled at them and poking at them and giving up on them entirely as something I would Never Understand. (No, really. I was so exited by them because they were about Things I Was Interested In, but I could. not. grock.)

I recognize how lucky I was to get into fandom post-ff.net (as much as I complain about it now.) It really informed my early fandom days of copying out giant swaths of fic and printing them out in teeny tiny print with the narrowest margins so I could inhale them on the morning bus rides to school. It's also been a great preserver of so much of the fic that would have otherwise been lost on personal servers and even LJs.

I love fandom, fandom culture, and it's weird, underground, oral history.

ETA: I recognize that a lot of fandom spaces are full of youths making the olds feel unwelcome, which suuuucks, but maybe it's the people I follow and the fandoms I've been in, but I still feel awfully young in fandom. Yes, even as the youths do things that mystify me and I find out that my fandom lexicon is completely outdated (lemons? squick? disclaimers???). Or maybe it's that I spend most of my time in old/closed fandoms. Or, really, it's probably that I am a fanfic snob and absolutely end up reading stuff by writers who have honed their craft -- unlike me, my stuff is adequate at best -- and I sorta wait for people to learn to separate between paragraphs when different people are speaking before befriending them. (I am a snob, write what you like.) So, in the end, still feel young, and it's wildly comforting to know there are people with rich, full, awesome lives still bopping around in fandom squee with us.

...is squee an outdated term too?