(no subject)

[ang]

vass linked to this series of posts by arduinna about 1990s mailing list fandom.

And man, I mean, I was basically very at the tail end of that. (I "got into" fandom around 1998-9) and I haaated mailing list fandom even when it was going on, because I've always been a weirdo who basically wants to read/write shit no one else cares about, but it kind of made me miss RS-X/Fiction Records anyway? (I do not, however, miss the Mercedes Lackey mailing lists. At all.)

I don't know, I always felt a little uncomfortable when I tried to do the mailing list thing outside of those two -- I guess because when you posted you posted to everybody, which is maybe why I was such an early adopter on the "moving my shit to LiveJournal" bandwagon. Although I guess I do kind of wish I'd found a show I liked so much I wanted to be on a discussion list, since those do sound like they were pretty fun. And I actually kind of miss getting into new fandoms via people writing RPS about stuff I knew nothing about on RS-X. (Although tbh I never really got, and still don't really get, actor fic.)

At the same time, I don't know, the etiquette was always sort of weird to me, which is odd, because I spent a lot of time on non-fannish gaming mailing lists in the mid-90s. (The classic "run by some guy at a university" type discussed in arduinna's post.) And, I don't know, in a certain way, my experiences with mailing lists were of feeling slightly... stifled. I always prefered posting to my own site, directly to archives, or even interaction on message boards instead. (I mostly missed newsgroups, although I did enjoy them.) Then again, I actually am still on two semi-active fannish mailing lists, purely as a lurker, so I don't know.

I am kind of nostalgic for plaintext stories with their length described in filesize not word count though. ~my heritagggee~