I think my Buffistaversary is Monday...I am actually unclear if it is four or five years. First f2f...Emily came to my house when she visited the West Coast.

Alibelle!!!

I'd say spring for cable if you can afford it, but I have a long-standing grudge against California phone companies, so probably my opinion doesn't count.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, VORTEX!

My first F2F was with a bunch of Table Talkers at a kid-friendly Italian restaurant in Daly City. The axe-murderer risk was severely reduced by the fact that most people brought their toddlers. We talked and ate and ate and talked and talked some more, and then we repaired to Charlotte J's flat on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where her husband made a spectacularly memorable entrance, shuffling in all tallness and multicolored hair, squinting at the gaggle of women filling up his living room, and mumbling, "Hey, I'm Charlotte's husband. My name's Eric, but you probably know me as Mister Touchynuts [her online nickname for him due to a recent operation after her disastrous pregnancy]."

I mainly remember how sweet and vivacious (and busty) Charlotte was, and how intimidating and astonishing deb was -- she and Nilly are (oddly for people with such vividly different personalities) very alike, in that if you know them online, you know them offline: they write exactly what they think and feel, and they speak exactly the way they write.

The first online people I met were all pre-WWW.

I don't think it was pre-WWW, but it was pre the internet being common. I went what was supposed to be a gathering of people for a BBS I was part of that was hosted locally, but in the end it was only me, the BBS Admin (who I already knew via other friends) and one other user. Still, he and I had got along well on the BBS, so it was cool meeting him.

First person I met was someone from the tabletalk days. And I've lost touch the past couple years which is just LAME because we really got along well. kicks self

I'm actually very reticent about meeting people from the box. For no real reason, just am (lisah and Anne had lived in the same town as I for a LONG TIME before I met them.)

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Vortex!

Happy Birthday Vortex!

The first internet people I met were actually guys I went on dates with back in '98. Not too long after that I attended my first Posting Board Party and met a metric ton of Bronzers all at once (I recall AKA Becker and Jane were in the group I first ran across walking to the party venue.) I can't actually recall meeting Allyson or Kristen at any of the early PBPs, though of course we knew each other online-the Vegas Buffy-themed Halloween party where Kristen and I went as the Ampersands of Evil may have been my first face-to-face meeting as a Buffista.

The first online people I met were all pre-WWW.

Huh, me too.

(Weirdly, it was another TV-based-but-not-really group like this one -- the 90210 "LC" board on Prodigy. It never mattered that I'd never seen a full episode of the show.)

JZ!! Any little bit helps, thanks!

Happy Birthday, Vortex!

My first online friends meeting was probably about fifteen years or so ago. There was a local BBS called M-Net that I usually dialed directly. In many ways, they weren't too much unlike Buffistas -- there was some fannishness about this that or the other, different areas to talk about different subjects like movies and music, lots of techie and book-loving people, people had a penchant for regular F2F meetups and making funny quips that frequently referenced shows we liked.

They had regular monthly things at a nearby bar, and seeing as I had a bunch of meatspace friends who also participated, we just liked the excuse to go drink and be social with other people of a similar mind.

The first Buffistas I ever met were Kat and lori, over at the Miracleborn's place. I wasn't a Buffista yet, but I knew what a Buffista was, or at least that such a collection of people existed. The first Buffistas I met were meara, Theo, vw bug (I think), aurelia (both of us were still pretty new at that point), and possibly one or two other people. That was just before the weekend of the LA F2F, just about three years ago now.

I've been logging on to some sort of board or forum or chat room for a while now, and aside from M-Net, B.org is the only place I've ever stayed at for longer than six months. These days, I generally try to avoid other forums for more than just short jaunts here and there. Compared to B.org, other places are strange and offputting.

first meeting of online people I believe was the Buffistas from TT days. I invited a bunch of them to watch the Faith-wakes-from-coma episode at my house. This included: JonB, Theodosia, and a couple other TTers that I can't remember (Theo, do you remember? I thought you were friends with one of those guys). I invited my cousin to come over so that I could avoid being murdered. And, oh yeah, a cute, quiet, mumbly-funny shy British dude came over too... and then a few years later, I married him!