#This is some oldschool Livejournal shit

[rocket-sith]

Y'all. Y'ALL. I got anonymous hate on one of my fics for the first time since 2016. *sniffs* I feel so special!

Dear anonymous wanker:

Half the shit you said didn't even pertain to the fic, and the other half showcased your tragicomic inability to differentiate between the opinion of a story's author and the opinion of a fictional character within the story. *insert Shame Bell here*

tl;dr - Go spank your Twelve Monkeys to Shaw someplace else. There are plenty of amazing Shaw x Seven fics out there. I know because I've read them. I was also trolling an anti in your tags like three days ago on general principle while looking for fics, so once again - please learn to differentiate between the opinion of a writer (real person) and the POV of a fictional character (not a real person, whose feelings and perspectives we can only speculate about, especially regarding a dynamic that's clearly quite complex).

In conclusion, yo mama's so fat, Kirk broke the temporal prime directive by doing a slingshot maneuver around her ass. Also in conclusion - go touch grass. I may or may not be referring to cannabis. No stolen pots were harmed in the making of this post. This has been a message from the emergency GTFO system. *beeeeeep*

[olderthannetfic]

Really fond of your blog. I love that the conversations are like... nuanced, chill, mature. Maybe it's just because I'm a newbie but it seems really hard to find this sort of thing.

You speak with a lot of clarity on human sexuality; or at least kink stuff. I know you have several years of experience in fandom spaces and I'm wondering if the clarity that you have is a result of this, or if you have some kind of background in psychology. Or maybe you just read a lot of books on this stuff?

No hard feelings if this question is too nosy. I'm just curious.

--

It is weirdly hard. I think a lot of the people who used to talk like this are old and tired now and feel like "public" in fandom is actually public in a way they may not have 10 years ago.

If you go listen to ancient episodes of /Report, they're more squee and less blather about human sexuality, but they give me an oldschool fandom vibe I fancy I also have. Ditto people's long-ass Livejournal posts from that same era. More of us used to sound like this in places that were more findable.

In terms of human sexuality stuff specifically, I was a little perv growing up in the Bay Area at the height of Cleis Press's 90s output. I wanted to be a sexologist when I was 14. I grew up reading Susie Bright. (Hilariously, years later, I once got Susie Bright in the LibraryThing secret santa exchange.) My actual schooling was biochem, then linguistics, then film. I just read a lot.

I think if you grew up around here in the 90s, there's a certain amount of poppsych, self help, human sexuality stuff that's just in the water too. I wouldn't say it makes everyone actually smart about psych stuff, but there's a greater degree of talking about things and knowing buzzwords than some places.

I'm only 41, but I came out at 14. I think that's another difference. I'm back in my family home right now, and the old lesbians next door are still there. Now, my across the street neighbors are these two gay guys I scream about film noir with. One of them is getting into geikomi and I'm reccing him all my favorite old nonfiction books on gay Japanese dudes and BL vs. geikomi and the history of sexuality in Japan and such.

Years of being out with a supportive family and years of knowing queer intellectuals offline, including a lot who are way older than me has had a big effect. Years of knowing intellectuals in general has as well. As a kid, we spent a lot of evenings at my stepdad's friends' restaurant where all their friends would drift in and out, Cheers-like, and conversations were about things like this one woman's painting cycle she was working on that was about castrated Greek statues.

I think plenty of people build a life like that as adults, but they don't always get there until they've had time to escape their families and hometowns. A lot of queer discourse in fandom in 2022 is coming from high school and college students who haven't been out in the world and who don't know older queer people or even many offline queer people aside from a small circle of school friends.

I do think I have some clarity, but a lot of the difference between me and people I see screaming about shit is that I like myself.

I don't need to join a mob for protection or comfort. I'm not afraid of my own impulses. I'm not afraid to look intellectual in public. And I like procrastinating by answering asks on tumblr and am not scared to leave anon on.

None of that is rare in isolation, but a large proportion of older queer people, intellectuals, etc. are worn out from all the sealioning and screaming Youths who invariably have more free time and more self righteousness in any era. (I was a very annoying 14-year-old, trust me.) A lot of younger people who aren't joining screaming dogpiles don't have the chutzpah to stand up in public and potentially make fools of themselves. And even people who do post the sorts of things I do usually have less free time than I do. My offline friends are introverts who work long hours. And if you don't post a lot, you aren't findable. I always posted a fair amount, but it wasn't enough to be really findable before. It's only the last few years when tumblr is much quieter and I've posted very regularly that I've started to be found by people far outside of my existing sphere.

We're no longer a tiny circle of a few hundred to few thousand Livejournal slash fen who like the same 5 buddy cop series and sci-fi with The Beefy One and The Science One. We don't even have a profile page where you can see who we follow, like on LJ/DW. We're thousands and millions of random geeks who lack an easy way to connect.

I'm about to go to Escapade Con at the end of April. It's an oldschool con that is all this kind of conversation, and the attendees have still spent the last few years going "Where is everybody?" Finding shit is genuinely hard.

Last year, when we were all online, we attracted a ton of old LJ fans who've been wondering where everybody is for ages. Hopefully, they come back for the online wing of the con this year too.

[hvggybear]

looking back on the now 12 seasons of destiel its actually so insane that i was here for the 2012 era and not just like casually i was Here making shitty edits, browsing the tag on my ipod touch before school, making fic rec lists on livejournal and stupid little album art for my playlists. and thats so wild because i checked out of the fandom when s8 was airing bc i was frustrated with the writers not making them canon when they all Knew that was what the fans were here for and i sat thru lines like “he was your boyfriend first” and went insane at literal crumbs and STILL thought “these two are literally in love Hello.” fast forward 1pm november 6 2020 AEDT: episode 15.18 had just finished airing but i had no idea until i refreshed my twitter timeline and the one (1) random person i followed who still watched supernatural was screaming DESTIEL CANON and i just burst out LAUGHING and shared the confession scene immediately with my two bestfriends (that i met on twitter in 2011 and later all three of us went through destiel2012). two minutes later one of them changed the groupchat name to destielcrew and the pfp to some oldschool fanart and we laughed and shared every single meme for about two days all the while in the back of my head something was stirring. like i laughed at the last minute play for LGBT points but at the same time holy shit these motherfuckers really did it they really made this absolute fandom beast of a ship canon. and i get curious i open tumblr dot com and look at my old blog. i dont remember what gifset set it off but the same yearning i felt all those years ago smacked me in the face and ive been riding the train ever since being dealt incomprehensible amounts of damage by new things i’d missed like the widower arc and THEE biblical cain. and the stupidest part of it all is that like before november 5 had you asked me if there was anything about any piece of media that i’d ever consumed, you know what’s the one thing you always wanted, the one thing that’s fucked u up the most, made u feel the most, despite the bitterness and secondhand embarrassment i had felt towards supernatural over the last 7 years i still would have said fucking destiel

[kabutoraiger]

could you guide an anon to any dl links for high and low? also, is there any other delinquent dramas you'd recomment? series or movies

in very oldschool fashion, high&low subs are posted in a locked livejournal community that you have to ask to join https://mugenclub.livejournal.com/

i’ll assume you’ve probably already seen the crows zero movies if you like the genre at all so otherwise… hm. the movie “drop” isn’t too bad. https://mydramalist.com/299-drop it’s got kamen rider kabuto tendou souji in it which is pretty hilarious. he actually sells it remarkably well.

the show “wild heroes” is also pretty good, though it’s a little different in that it’s about adult guys who used to be delinquents but have to kind of return to their old roots when some shit goes down. (it’s another mr exile production afaik so it shares a lot of cast with high&low.)

i haven’t actually seen it yet but kyou kara ore wa looks really funny.https://mydramalist.com/28462-kyou-kara-ore-wa

and you gotta watch rookies & gokusen even though they’re more inspirational teacher stories rather than genuine rowdy boy shows. they’re both so good.

[olderthannetfic]

The furor over paying for AO3 apps reminds me of the old issues around paying for zines. IIRC, the consensus was that it was okay to recoup your costs but not to make a profit, but all my information is fourth-hand at best. Does the recent app discourse compare to debates changing-for-zines arguments? Were there scandals? What debates were reliable generators of wank? Basically, would you like to talk about zine-centric fandom?

BOY HOWDY, WERE THERE!

However, while zine fandom was still going strong in 1994, it’s not how I personally entered fandom. I was on Usenet, then mailing lists, then Livejournal. All of my zine knowledge is second-hand, usually from conducting oral history interviews.

In fact, a lot of excerpts of those interviews are on Fanlore, so now the rest of the internet can hear about zine shenanigans second hand. :)

The argument over “recouping your costs” is eternal. I even saw it on Zinelist a couple of years ago. The basic issue is what gets to count as a “cost”.

Livejournal era fandom is willing to accept that a zine needs to charge for the cost of the paper and the literal printer’s bill itself. Oldschool zine people sometimes meant that they should be able to pay the fee for a dealer’s table at a con--or even their own admission to that con, their hotel room, and their transportation costs. I’ve also seen zine editors say that they deserve something in return for their work...

Now whether they’re right or wrong, that’s a very interesting comparison to the app discourse because...

Internet fandom only cares about writers.

In all of the app discourse, there is a recurrent theme of: “How dare they make money when the authors of the individual fics are the ones who did the work?!” But AO3 is much more than the work of authors. It’s the work of coders. It’s the work of sysadmins. It’s the work of tag wranglers. It’s the work of people like me who once wrote the rules. It’s the work of current people who enforce those rules.

Why aren’t we outraged about those people’s work not being remunerated? Why aren’t they the logical comparison to the app-maker?

In the zine days, infrastructure was so much more visible because it couldn’t be taken for granted. Zine editors were the shit, and while authors were ultimately the ones you bought the zines for (and many editors were also authors and many of them put their own stories in their own zines), it was still the zine ed who was seen as most deserving to “cover their costs”.

Writers did get paid: the whole reason a lot of people developed their writing or art skills was so that they could contribute enough material to get a free zine. Suzan Lovett commented to me that this was her motivation. But I don’t see any historical evidence that people were talking about how writers should be paid back for whatever paper and postage they used to submit or that artists should be paid for their pencils and paints.

I do see that argument in discussions of buying individual pieces of fan art from the artist. I don’t see it in discussions of art in zines. Of course, many of those artists also sold copies of the art piece and the original itself, so maybe no one was worried about payment in a zine context (other than with a free zine).

I’ve seen zine editors talk about what their time is worth. I haven’t seen any awareness of what an author’s time is worth in that context.

In the AO3 app debates, I’ve seen commentary about what the app maker’s time is worth. I’ve seen anger that they’re profiting “off of authors”. I haven’t seen any awareness of or interest in the equivalent of zine editors, which would either be people who built AO3 or those writers’ beta readers.

So that’s how I think app discourse compares. As for zine scandals, they were usually over someone who accepted pre-orders and then disappeared, over someone charging too much, or over someone reprinting other people’s zines without permission or agenting poorly. As usual, a lot of it was over people making more money than others thought they should even if making some money was fine.

Some Fanlore articles to check out if you want zine wank include:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Zine_Pirating (an eternal source of wank)

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Open_Letter_by_Mary_Lou_Regarding_Explicit_Fanworks (Fans think gay = porn)

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Open_Letters_to_Star_Wars_Zine_Publishers_(1981) (Lucasfilm thinks gay = porn)

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_the_Editors_of_All_K/S_Zines_%26_All_Other_%22/%22_Media_Zines (hide the porn from the normals!)

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_and_Profit#Early_Zine_Publishing_and_Profit

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Agent_With_Style

Or, for a different flavor of zine wank, you can look at the debate between... ahem “print fic” and “netfic”. When I found out there was a term for online fanfic as though it were all the same--as though it were scarce enough that you could say something about all of it, even in the 90s--I was so intensely amused that I made up a tumblr name based on it. I don’t really think of myself as ‘olderthannetfic’. I just couldn’t get my actual name, Franzeska, on tumblr even in 2012.

But hey, what did it matter?

It’s not like I was going to be actually using tumblr, after all...

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Print_versus_’Net_Publishing:_One_Very_Biased_Fan’s_View

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Internet_Fans_Controversy_Du_Jour_(Sandy_Herrold)

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Zines_and_the_Internet

[rocket-sith]

Bless you and your fighting heart. Fighting the good fight for all the Obikin shippers (and honestly for all the people with some sort of common sense).

I might be suffering from Tumblr culture shock, IDK, but some of the shit that gets posted on this hellsite drops my jaw straight to the floor. I’m a fairly oldschool veteran of multiple fandoms based out of everything from Livejournal, to website forums, to AIM chats, to email-based RP groups, and I have never seen this sort of shit before.  (Silly shipper fights and general fandom wank, sure. “Go kill yourself you IRL abuser” in response to shipping preference, no way in hell.) Maybe I’m just some ancient relic from fandomhood of yore, IDK, but I’ve actually lost fandom friends to suicide before, and I will come out swinging when I see this crap. I also know good and well what IRL abusers are like, what types of horrific damage they can do, and how their victims are already terrified to come forward for fear their experiences won’t be taken seriously. Lightly tossing abuse allegations at someone for writing fanfic or some other stupid shit like that is damaging as hell to actual victims. It’s crying wolf, and it sends the message that “abuse” = “somebody created fanworks I don’t like” - which means the next time someone who’s an actual victim of actual abuse tries to come forward, they’re that less likely to be taken seriously, because the concept of “abuse” will have lost all real meaning.