I love the term " squishy enthusiasm"!

The whole not-explicitly-articulated-but-still-vaguely-present air of "My fandom is respectable because we're all just madly cerebrating brains in jars!" thing bugged me. Not least because one of the points of the book is that media fannishness isn't really any weirder than, say, sports fannishness. In the eyes of much of the country, Suzi is a dedicated fan and an awesome delightful person (and the girl that many season ticket holders dream of) because she wears a green and yellow wig to A's games and paints her nails green and yellow during the baseball season, but if she went to meet a bunch of us dressed in, say, a prom dress and a black leather jacket and carrying a pointy piece of wood she'd be a wretched loser? Why is one fannishness applauded and beloved and All American and the other punched in the gut and shoved into lockers? Even (just a little) by other fans of the very same media?

I mean, I do understand why, but it bugs me when someone in the fandom (and she is, whether or not she wants to cop to it) tries to make that "Oh, I'm a fan, but not THAT KIND of fan" distinction. It's all very Jane Austen and the heroine of a novel saying shamefacedly, "Oh, it is only a novel!" Who's gonna stick up for fandom if even fandom is embarrassed by fandom?

Except, you know, the k*tt*ns and the Spuffists. They're totally craxy.

I should also add that it appears as though she enjoyed it and said some pretty nice things.

But I'm just stunned at the idea that it's somehow more difficult to find your tribe online now, than it was ten years ago.

Kathy, here.

eta: The above is the thing that's been bugging me. The "Hey, cool book about a quaint old antiquarian online community!" review is here.

I know it was in the early 80s, on my first apple on the noisy modem Ah, those were the days. We ran at BBS in the late 80s. It never seemed odd to me that I would meet people that I knew "online" until recent years.

I'm also sort of floored by the amount of criticism I've seen about the book, by people who haven't read the book.

This can only be a good thing, honestly-- it's not about your book, it's that lots of people have very personal relationships to their boards that no one has written about, really. You're in an untapped market and people are using the book to talk about something they don't get to talk about. There's metafandom, but there's not really metaboards. It's all part of buzz that gets people to pick up the book!

I know it was in the early 80s, on my first apple on the noisy modem Ah, those were the days.

Huh. I got my first "real" computer in 1985. I knew what modems were but I didn't see what the point of having one was.

Thanks, JZ, I hadn't read that first one yet.

Online since 92 or 93. Immediately smitten.

I bought a one-way plane ticket from CT to TX and then drove back home across country with an online friend in '95. My family was pretty sure I was going to be found dead on the side of the road. J. and I did kind of want to kill each other by the time we got back to CT, but there were no axes involved.

It seemed like 1995 was the year the internet suddenly started getting lots of more mainstream attention. Oddly enough, I was on the internet occasionally before then (running a text-based browser on a BBS that I connected to via old-fashioned terminal emulation), but my XT clone died in '95 and I was without a computer for a year and a half, so I didn't start to really hit the internet until late '96.