People I've known for 20 years are finally finding both people they already know on the internet, and using things like meetup.com to meet similarly minded strangers.

Or, in my case, when I brought meatspace friends into the internet.

One of the things that I love about the internet is that no matter where I am, I have a friend in 50 miles. When I first started doing a lot of work travel, I would bring work to do so I wouldn't get bored at night. I quickly stopped doing that because it was useless since I was always meeting/getting reacquainted with people from my threads.

Got the recipe for that 'shine?

He took it to his grave. He used to pay my mother a nickle a jar for washing the mason jars he sold it in. He was also quite proud that "nobody ever went blind drinkin' his recipe."

The b.org was different from other communities even at our conception, I think. I mean, when I came to you, I was coming straight from the gaming world, which was full of preteens and crazed obsessive people. It was fine, too, and I made long term friends in that environment too, just different sorts of relationships.

I think it's less an artifact of time and more something specific to us. Which is why I fight so fiercely to protect Us.

The book is a love song to a specific community, but I don't think we're antiques. I think we were weirdos then and we are now and it's nifty.

I've been pretty lucky, or maybe it's just pretty particular, because the only boards I've been so involved with that I actually met people IRL from them were both composed of (mostly) grown-ups who (a) are articulate, and (b) are mostly geeks about one thing or another.

The Buffistas are one, of course, and the other was the Fourth Turning board, dedicated to the Strauss/Howe generational theory of history. Both boards are filled with people from all walks of life (FT had everyone from a prof at the Naval War College whom I've since seen featured on a National Geographic doc on Sacco and Vanzetti to grade school teachers and Microsoft millionaires) who are passionate about at least one subject, if not more, and can discourse on said subject(s) at length, using proper grammar.

I socialised with people from USENET, non-Buffy people from TT and WX. I also participated a lot in a technical board called Builder's Buzz. When the site that hosted it (shades of the Bronze, I guess) decided they didn't want it anymore, well, it just died. It tried to move to another platform, but somehow it wasn't enough. I drifted away and every time I drifted back it was paler and paler.

I don't feel that b.org is too different except in it being the one I call home. I've seen people socialise over World of Warcraft or many other strange things that I figure all the stories are different, but they're about the same thing.

I think that's crap. I continue to make friends online and socialize with them in meatspace.

Yeah, I think the reviewer is made of stupid.

Given that people continue to make friends and meet each other through various online communities, like, oh, I dunno...FUCKING DAILY KOS?

Seriously, I don't mind people who think I'm a crap writer, but I do mind people talking smugly out of their ass without doing a simple google search.

This bit really nettled me:

I don't like meeting celebrities in person, whether they be actors, writers, politicians, diplomats, business men, or what have you. I always feel like we aren't on equal ground. It's embarrassing. And makes me uncomfortable. And I honestly have never understood why others do it. Allyson Beatrice makes no sense to me. I wasn't that type of fan.

The ATPO board was an atypical fanboard. It really was more for people who were obsessed with the show, not necessarily fans in the traditional sense of the word. Rarely did you see pictures of actors posted (like you do on the other boards) or postings about conventions, actor gossip or sightings. Most of the people on that board would not have been caught dead at a fan convention nor would they have tried to contact an actor or writer of the series. They were obsessed with the show more than who was behind the show. IT was more of an analytical/scholarly board than a fan board, I think. And I think at a certain point, people were more addicted to and fans of the interactions on that board than they were of anything else - to such an extent, that a group of us sort of brought it over to lj.

DUDE. The lovely community you describe in paragraph 2? Is exactly like the community you (erroneously) believe is being run by She-Who-Makes-No-Sense-To-You. As you would know if you'd read the book. (Well, except that we do have the occasional actor photo and bit of gossip, but so fucking what? I hate that "Oh, we're not that kind of fan; we're too refined and elegant for squishy enthusiasm" bullshit.)

That whole post is irrationally getting up my nose. What's with the "She apparently wrote a book" nonsense? She didn't apparently write it, she actually wrote it. Books that only "apparently" exist are not routinely sold at B&N and Powell's and quoted from in EW. And there's a whiff of sniffish drawing-up-of-skirts in her description of the fans who like to go to cons and meet the actors and such.

I'm just super-pissy lately, but man, that thing is getting up my nose.

I always feel like we aren't on equal ground.

This sentence got me too. Sweetie, that's not only an issue and not the truth, it's mentioned explicitly in one of the essays.

I just had to talk database organisation with someone who doesn't know anything much about databases, but uses them daily. It's a weird communication barrier, especially when they aren't interested in learning more, and there wouldn't really be time anyway.

I garnered a "ita's gone all Doris Day on us" as I took a corner getting back to my desk. What? A chick can't be corset one day and vintage sundress another?

And I'm also trying to find out what happened to Builder Buzz. Looks like it did get resurrected, but I don't know who the denizens are anymore.

I'm going to be spending Friday evening with a bunch of people I met online from the Lookout Landing and USS Mariner blogs. It's a different kind of community, because blog comments have to be at least kinda-sorta baseball-related (the link gets tenuous in the game threads during blowouts). But it's still a community, and one that's really come together only in the past 2-3 years.

I've been online since 1990, which I think makes me beyond a dinosaur. I'm more like a trilobite. But the only major change I've seen in the nature of online community is that back in the day I was an unusual netizen for not being a professional geek of some kind. Of course, I'm not on MySpace or anything like that, so it could be there are changes I'm not seeing, but my online community experience now doesn't feel that much different from my early 90's listserv and usenet days. It's a way to reach out across the miles and find more kindred spirits than if I was limited to my physical community.

I love the term " squishy enthusiasm"!