Once upon a time in fandom

[neadods]

Once upon a time, when the world was younger and I was younger still, the only way to get fanfiction that you hadn't written yourself was to buy a zine, and the only way to buy a zine was to go to conventions.

And THE convention for zines, no matter what your fandom was, was Media*West. I'd save every penny I had - at $20 a pop, the money went fast. (That's why it was more than an ego rush to get published yourself. It was one less copy to have to buy!) And the zines went even faster - back in the very early days, when many of the zines still smelled of corflu and the accepted practice was to print all the copies up front on spec - print runs were small and zines could sell out on Thursday night before the con even opened. (Then fandom got savvier but print runs got even smaller, because things went to print on demand and it was even harder to get copies.)

boogiebabe_smap and I would take zerox boxes and try to fill them up with what we found in the dealer's room and the hall crawl and our comp copies, and no matter how many I got, I'd read all through them before the end of June and couldn't imagine how I'd wait until next Memorial Day for my fix.

I often get nostalgic about the way fandom was right before Media*West. I'm finding myself particularly nostalgic this year.

This year, when I'm not driving to Michigan for the first time in over 20 years.

This year... when I'm boxing up all the old zines and putting them in the basement. Oh, I'm not getting rid of them. Whoever executes my will is going to have to figure out what to do with all those old Real Ghostbuster and KF-TLC zines, not to mention the pile of Beauty and the Beast ones that's double my not-insignificant body weight.

But I'm doing a lot of cleaning and a lot of pruning, and the brutal truth is, I haven't read fanfiction on paper in almost a decade now. These days the question isn't "how do I find shelf space for the new zines?" it's "how do I get fanfic from the internet onto my ipod touch?"

Comments

[neadods.livejournal.com]

That may have been me; I had all my 10th Kingdom fanfic on my palm. And then the palm died.

I haven't even connected my touch to the Internet yet. Floundering my way along...

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I feel about my Touch the way I felt about my Palm: I have no idea what I did without it

I pretty much bought the touch because I missed the palm - checklists, databases (the first app I bought was HanDbase, which I'd had on the palm) and a couple of games. And yeah - music, a zen timer, and I'm going to put some favorite Who on it too, and a bunch of photos.

Not to mention getting it connected to the wireless this weekend so I can use it to check email/LJ on daytrips and such.

How did we live without these things?

Koi pond? How does that work?

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I was looking at purses to hold the netbook, but now off the top of my head I can't think of a time when I'd be casually carrying the netbook. Oh, I'll travel with it - I don't want to liveblog ChicagoTARDIS from a Touch - but I don't need to carry it.

Now the Touch needs a fold-out keyboard. I really enjoyed having that for the Palm.

[shawan-7.livejournal.com]

I have a fold-out keyboard but I don't know if it fits your Touch. Might be worth checking before you spend $$$.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

This is Apple - I doubt anything will fit it.

[fyrdrakken]

My Blackberry is starting to fill the space that the PDA occupied in my life for lo these many years, to the point where I'm trying to note down the PDA functions I can't already transfer to the BB and track down apps to handle those. Internetz in my pocket, Twitter, grocery list, address book, enough music to listen to for two days at work without hearing the same song twice, a pretty good camera -- I think I just need the budget and database functions, and then to move over a handful of text files and start using the calendar on the BB instead of the PDA.