A Geek History of Time - Episode 219 - Fan Fiction Part III

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

Wow. You're gonna like this. Oh no I'm not. Cause there is no god damn middle. This is not unlike ancient Rome by the way. Not so much the family of circus. Yeah. I did, when I did Miratelia, I had the same issue as before Nancy.

A lot of them wanted to create self-sustaining farms and got into crystals. I know. Okay. I understand that. But yeah, I'm reading Livy, who is a shitty historian. Because Irrigan is. Others say that because Laurentia's body was common to all the shepherds around, she was called a she-wolf, which is a Latin term for horror.

You were audible, lassies. It was just most of it, where you slamming the table. As the Romanists at the table, well, duh. Obviously, Ipso facto. Right. You know, it's your original form. Ipso, duh. You have a sword rat. Thank you. This is a geek history of time.

Where we connect nursery to the real world, my name is Ed Blalock. I'm a world history teacher and I had an English teacher here in Northern California. And just the other day, I had to start wearing a wrist brace to work, holding it up in the camera here. Because earlier in the year, I hurt myself working on the house, and because I am no longer as young as you are. I have a habit of re-injuring myself from time to time. Don't know how I did it, but when I first started wearing the brace to school, I had my students who were all six graders, remember, ask me, Mr. Blaylock, what happened to your hand?

And I, you know, didn't wanna let them know how I'd hurt myself, but I didn't really have a great answer. The only thing that occurred to me was just to look at them and say, where wolves sit out. And when they immediately, of course, naturally asked follow-up questions, I said, you know, what I get up to in my own time is none of your business. Sit out. And so that her collated and I had, you know, some of the more innocent, you know, childlike kids go really and, you know, I chuckled inwardly. Well, I had to start wearing the brace to school again.

And this time I had another couple of students ask me, Mr. Blaleck, is it the werewolves again? And this time I looked at them and said, no, dark magic, sit down. So like if you don't get to try to mess with your students' heads, why are you even in education? Like why are you even teaching middle school if you don't try to mess with your students heads. Why are you even in education? Like, why are you even teaching middle school if you don't try to fuck with them? Like, I mean, figuratively, obviously, but you know what I mean. So that's what I have going on. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin and US history teacher here at the high school level. By the time this drops, I might be done being a Latin teacher,

depending on how far ahead in the recording queue we end up being. Yeah, but anyway, I actually, the difference between a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, I would have been like, oh, from its repetitive motion stress, I was at a faculty meeting and they were talking. So, that's the biggest reason I want to move to teaching at that level is being able to unleash that. But yeah. So for me, my son and daughter just finished an author's lab thing where they publish your

stories for you. It's kind of cool. Second one for my daughter, first one for my son. He was writing a fanfic of Sonic the Hedgehog and in that universe. And then mixed it with the video game ultimate alliance, Marvel's ultimate alliance. Unfortunately, because I guess they sell the books, they had to go through and change all of his characters names So is to avoid copyright stuff, which is a it was a bummer form, but you seem to take it in stride

Yeah, and I wonder if they actually understand what a control F is because it sounds like they had to go through in every single one And I'm like you could just find a replace, you know like Yeah, as Kim all the names he used. He'll tell you, like, we were watching an Avatar the last airbender episode tonight, and he just looks like, oh, this is the one with Maru. And I was like, who the fuck is Maru? Like, we watched this three years ago. Yeah. And I was like, what are you talking about? And sure enough, oh, and Maru's out there like bending, bending sand and shit. So it's not like his memory wouldn't have worked.

But anyway, so he is very stoked and his next project that he weren't to work on is what if Rocket Raccoon stole the golden spike from ProMontory Point? And I'm, yeah, I was like, do it, do it. I'm down for that. Yeah, so. like, do it. Do it. I'm down for that. Yeah. So yeah. Now I look into the screen. And the screen looks back into me much like an abyss. And I see that there are two familiar faces just like there were last week. Ed, would you like to introduce our guests? Yes. so our two guests are my very good friends and now friends of the show I can say

Sean and Tessa I don't want to put out last names just you know in case So but Flipping a coin in my head and Tessa why don't you go first introduce yourself to the people? Hi, my name is Tessa. I am an artist on the internet who draws lots of really funny shit and lots of somewhat questionable shit, which is why we won't be having any kind of buying factors on here. I've been in fandom spaces since I was 12 maybe.

And I'm okay so like now, well into my 30s. Yeah right, well into my 30s, we're going to be 36 next month. Wow. Okay. So yeah, that's, uh, yeah, 24 years of sandal. Okay. Okay. I just need to break in here. You're going to be 36 next month. Yeah. Okay. That means that the very first class of kids that I taught are your age. that the very first class of kids that I taught are your age. I taught a group of sophomores back in 2002. Yep, that would have been. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a senior we graduated 2005.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. That was my first year at my current assignment. Yeah, you're seeing your year. So I am. All right. All right. Luckily our next guest won't make me feel so old. No, I think I have the, the most great hair and the least of it in this particular group. I am Sean. I don't mind using last name Smith. I am Sean, I don't mind using the last name Smith. And I am a geek engineer all around nerd, professionally speaking. And wildly unprofessionally speaking, I've been in fan spaces and a fan fiction writer and editor and Baylor and so forth forever and a day. I just did the math a little bit

ago because I was realizing just how old I was and realized the first piece of fan fiction that I wrote and published decrepit. Hi. Okay, so wait, what was that? What or what fandom was it in? You can, you can just leave it at that. The end of the referees, Dragonwriter series. Okay. Oh, the pern. That's. Yeah. Yes. Oh, so you were, you were doing fanfic pern. Yes, I was very writing. Dragon pern where you are. Let's see where this thread leads us, shall we? Oh, goodness. There was a book game called Ace of Aces, which Ed will likely remember. Just two books and you do call out numbers.

There was another one that came out called Dragon Writers of Purn. Same exact mechanic. McCaffrey had licensed it, I guess. And so that's the only exposure I've ever had to the Pniverse as as I'm sure it's called but but yeah so I've been I've been hunting down that that that book game for my daughter and I for like the last three or four years no no luck under $200 so oh shit really because they know it's a it's a seller's market on that. Yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. That that does make sense. Wow now for our audience Just just so y'all know

We we recorded two other episodes prior to this with these two guests So if you've just come into this one you're a monster and you don't understand how a social contract works Go back and listen to A and B first. That way you'll understand the context in order to understand this episode. Yeah, just as a warning for you, if you are one of those sociopaths, like seriously, you're going to have a very hard time following along. You need to go back and listen to the first two. All right. You still might have a hard time following along because

well yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, people with hyper focus. I was going to say in co-8, but sure, yeah, I prefer focus. Sounds good. All right. So, we're last we left off Ed. Where were we? Yeah. If I'm remembering correctly, when we left off last, we had been talking about the differing legalities in in Japan as opposed to the United States and the flourishing, I'm going to call it subculture of dojin as a as an accepted part of manga culture as a whole, as kind of as a contrast and also because of cross-germanation that then occurs within those fandoms from Dojin into fan, fan works created on this side of the Pacific. So, and then chronologically in terms of Western fandom we had, I think, gotten to the end roughly of the 1970s and have been talking a lot about Star Trek, which is where a lot of, to summarize, where a lot of the culture of fan fiction in the American sphere has its roots. So where do you want to take us

from that jumping off point? Well, I'm hauling this the silver surfing age Seems good and starts with 1980 and so 1980 just setting the setting the menu setting the table for everyone We're talking about now a three dollars ten cent minimum wage It is time time of Empire Strikes Back. Also other amazing films such as The Forbidden Zone, Bavle Beyond the Stars. Yeah, for a little bit less on the bad and more on the amazingly awesomely bad, also flesh Gordon. I remember seeing that one in a drive in and yeah, man.

Yeah, well, you never forget your first exposure to Brian Blessed. You know, it's kind of odd. I hear he grew up in a town that was also home for a school for the deaf. One what never would have thought. Shocking. But not shocking. I'm dying. You've actually got the beard now. Yeah, I kind of do. I'm kind of proud of that. I have to say, well, you know, I got you'd be like the physique. But,

uh, EV, we're talking about three company mesh, Magnum PI. Okay. WKR peans and Staddy. Okay, so it's good stuff to win. That's a win. Okay, for everybody who is not ancient decrepit, 1980 was the year the poor identity came out as a novel. Okay. Just in case you're curious, Matt Damon, not always cast as the careethoreal. Yeah, well, true story. Wow, and yeah, I know, right? For Damon, Han Sullivan lost legacy. With his public share, yeah, yeah. I love that one.

Yeah, that's also, did the stars end come out before that? Stars didn't came up before that one. Yeah, okay, yeah. I love the great, those are absolutely outstanding. And the, oh, okay. Yeah. I love the great. Those are absolutely outstanding. Sorry. So what I'm seeing in the science fiction space and what I'm remembering from other research that I've done is everybody in their uncle was trying to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars by putting out a lot of shlokki ass sf. Yes. And just nobody else quite managed to figure out the hero with a thousand faces magic,

the Cambellan wonder of the original, but everybody was trying. Yes. Okay. Now, there is one bit of interesting thing in the original, but everybody was trying. Yes. Okay. Now, there is one bit of interesting thing in the book, Rina, a pantheonious when Robert Asperin published Myth Conceptions. Anybody here, Robert Asperin fans?

No, I know you are. Yeah, I don't count. I know. You told me. I be a profan fan, my son. Thanks. Well done. It does a lot less damage to your liver. I know. I'm more of a lawyer. I be profaned fan. My side. Nice. Well, that does a lot less damage to your liver, I believe. Yeah. That's Robert Tylenol. Oh, okay. Right. Yes.

Actually, I think Tylenol is the one. Anyway, sorry. Carry on. So, uh, myth conceptions actually really awesome, first book in a really awesome fantasy series that came about because Robert Asperin was writing really, really grim dark, dark ultra-grim stories, with mercenaries, bearing themselves alive underground to avoid allowing the other side to get the accurate head count of who was killed off in battles and this kind of stuff. With writing this and got burnt out about halfway through the book, I was like, I don't think I want to write this anymore. And so he stayed up late watching, and kids, once upon a time, TV was pre-programmed by other people and you were forced to watch

whatever was on the three available channels. And here it was Bob Hope and Bing Crossby Road movies. And he ended up watching that all night long and was like, this is awesome, I love this. And then presented to you basically completely steal the entire plot and characterization from a couple of being crossed the road movies and say, what if they were you know, a wizard in the dragon in the unicorn and a demon? How about we have that? So that explains why Oz is always drawn that way. Yes. He's Bob Hope. He's Bob Hope. Fuck me.

Sorry. Sorry. No, no. It's a wonderful description of a great little piece of very professional fanfic, which is, uh, I love this thing. What if I flipped it into this other completely unrelated genre? And so, you can find cool stuff. So, so it's an officially published version of an AU or alternate universe fanfic. I am so proud of you, Ed. Look at you, Lose You, in terms. Well, but the actual thing to cause is this to be the start of the civil-surfing age. It is absolutely deep geekery that no one will care about other than me. But this when Unix to Unix copy protocol or UUCP

This when Unix to Unix copy protocol or UUCP was first introduced to create the start of use net. And use net is only just now out of existence. It's only recently now in the 2020s faded out. But it was right in discussions like a modern social media network like Twitter or second of thing. Only it was originally intended for scientists, computers, science geeks, all of these kind of nerds. And yes, absolutely, that goes back to DARPA Yes, absolutely. That goes back to DARPA to be able to disinvey the information. The problem was who was going to run this? No one wanted to. And so the idea was not a problem. It will just be a bulletin board. Exactly. You post and it's up there and anybody wants to subscribe. They pull it down

copies from the nearest server. And so imagine if Twitter or similar had nobody running it. Okay, more so than now. Okay. Yeah, even more so. Actually, I had nobody in charge instead of having the worst possible person in charge. Yes, yes, actually completely decentralized. No one ran it, no one controlled it. Kind of everyone did. And this use net is the origin of things like the earth, like FAQ or FAC, flame, sock puppet, spam. Email. Well, it's not the origin of that. But I remember my first emails were things that I got arguing with people on BBS is absolutely. But I should and there's a reason I bring up, you know, blame sock puppet span flame lore.

The history of pan thick for this period is then full of flames, sock puppets, and flame wars. What was the internet like at the time? Okay, this is where it gets cute. Modems were either 300 or 1,200 bod or put it in another way for everybody who's got like a one megabit connection and thinks that slow. It was 0.12% of that speed. Yeah, you could literally see the text crawling across. And if you're a quick reader, you could actually have to

wait. Yeah, I remember that very, very vividly. Yep. I remember reading fanfic on BBSs actually. A lot of my first experiences of erotic Brady Bunch stories were on BBSs. Really? Yeah, yeah. I got Ed Prank and may have converted Tessa. You can't, you can't shock me. You're not for that. You forget.

You forget. Yeah. I just wouldn't know if anybody wrote the song. Not that I saw. Not that I saw. You see, that would be necessary. I didn't know if I ever called my voicemail, have you? No, no.

Do you have an erotic Brady Bunch song on your voice mill? Not erotic, but boy, how do you am I getting some ideas? It is a version of the Brady Bunch theme, though. It's an erotic version of the Brady Bunch. Pretty much, because I was forget it's there until somebody reminded me, but this reminded me. Yeah, and now I realize I'm going to have to give test a call. Okay.

It's great. It's a good time for Michael. I'm pretty proud of it. So we have the earliest, most painful, two-color black and green or black and monochrome. Version of the internet. Moving along at the speed of heat, one, wealth of 1% of a megabit. And the DeLorean, there's a new car. Yeah, there you go.

As we're kind of like going through this period, we're getting to about 82, 83. now just so that we have some perspective here. DeLorean was a new car. The cost of a cross country astrologer was roughly $3,000 a month. Just keeping that perspective like that's that's where the market was at the same. Right. Right. Well, okay, admitted admittedly that was a high-end That's true. That's true. That's the presidential suite. That's the presidential that's the that's the first ladies astrologer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Say no. You know, you know, you know, the voting Republican. I was gonna say Santa Deep but sure. Yeah, well So, uh, so that's what's going on in the 80s, is 82,

83, like you said. They're going to be 83, we get TCP IP installed. But the thing that everybody thinks is the core of the internet actually wasn't installed on ARP and it until 83, until that it was actually using even older protocols. And then 84 rolls around. And here's where you get a couple of things happening all of a sudden real fast. The first Mac is released at 2,500 bucks, which is the equivalent of

7,000 in today's dollars. Yeah. at the executive line. Oh, Nancy. Nancy, Nancy. Our chef, Marsha Marsha Marsha. See, we're back to the Brady bunch. But please, no, no Brady bunch, Nancy Reagan. You're on the crossovers. No, why not? Why not? I believe no. Okay.

Little 34. Point out that and Reagan and famous for such things. And good for her. And good for her. So 84 also when Arpanette was restructured. This was kind of a bit of inside baseball, but Arpanet was originally built as a communication method for nuclear weapons and then a research tool and between the different universities and military bases associated with that.

And it grew and about 84 was when they said, you know what, I'd actually like to pull all the military functions off of this the whole internet thing. Because we've noticed you've created use net and there's a lot of stuff on here that is not military. It's they created mill net and and arpinette all the sudden started looking more and more civilian. This is also 1984 is Sony versus Universal City Studios. If anyone's familiar with that one, that is the Bayna Max case. The Supreme Court rules, the videotaping TV shows is legal. I know that had to be adjudicated.

But this is the first time that they're saying, hey, you know, there's actually some various and sundry kinds of fair use, including the right to record. Okay. Also published at this time, Hunford October. Conflatsy's first novel. Oh, how he was looking? And please note, hunt for October is board game fan thick. Oh, Harpoon, Harpoon, it is. Okay.

It was originally created as a military tool for training exercises for anapolis, midshipman. My dad actually played it in the Navy War College as part of his, one of his tours. Yeah That's where you have to chase down a rabbit and get it to have sex with you is that We said harpoon so Yeah, harb not here. Oh, oh

Harb harb harpoon Yeah, um Harp, Harpoon. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Holy Boston. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Uh, yeah. And, and just as a side note, um, from, from a board game nerd or a table top war game nerd, even worse. Um, Har, Harpoon is notable because it's, slightly less complicated than Starfleet battles. Oh, no, I think it's a lot less complicated. Starfleet battles only slightly less complicated than building the Star-Spinner price.

Granted, yes. All right, so we got one for our cover, which is based on a board game. Yes. So we got some some some very big, successful pieces of fanfic coming out now. And are they known as fanfic to the general public? No, no, but this would be an homage. It would be, I think, what most people tend to reference to as is an homage. Yeah, well, I think... You know, I can see in, like, fandom circles that there's a lot of running jokes about stories that are considered classic, great pieces of literature that are absolute

inf fiction and people will make like jokes about exactly what type of tags the fanfiction that have like my personal favorite is Dante's inferno because Dante's inferno is a self-insert oh yeah hypophantic where she inserts himself into the story and then tells it in his own like bay and it's really funny because you're not drawn in saying that you're actually perfectly accurate and you can pull specific things but one of the things too especially because at this time and continuing on as we're going I'll chime in a little bit more as we start to get a little bit more into my realm, but this is still highly

female driven female identifying individual driven queer individuals driven and so it's considered low brow or subpar media And it's really looked down upon and it's actually like still pretty low down upon even though it's starting to get a little bit more recognized, but like You'll see people take great offense Mm-hmm to having like John Deezerna would be called a fan-tick right because by that point it's classic Exactly which for some reason they can't exist on the same plane because one has to be less which for some reason they can't exist on the same plane because one has to be less. It's an odd to me how much women-driven creation seems to always be looked down upon and viewed as somehow less.

Yeah, the other interesting, because when you look at Do Jun-Shi, a lot of Do Jun-Shi clearly is the one that I look at. Maybe I have like a weird lens. And that a lot of female creators of Dujunji wind up becoming well-known for their work. And sometimes like Rumi Kitaragashi being able to work for publishers once their art gets noticed. But they also, the way that the manga, the people that create the manga,

the artists are treated is rough, which is the whole other thing. Anyway, I'm getting off of a tangent, keep going. Okay, well, I don't feel bad about tangents because I'm about to bring one up. Okay. And it's 70% of what we do here anyway. Or more. But speaking of the

email-centric nature of the creation and speaking of the you know, fan-fick ghetto to you know, borrow a term. The ghettoization of the genre by outside forces. There's a story that I remember hearing that there was a panel at a Star Trek convention and Harlan Ellison, who famously wrote an original script or the original script for city on the edge of forever

was one of the panelists and I feel terrible about this but there was a female star trek writer who was there at the table. There's a woman there who was a star trek writer. It's okay. It's okay that there are female Star Trek writers. You don't have to feel terrible about that. Yeah, I feel terrible that I don't remember her name. So what I'm saying, sorry. I feel awful that I don't remember her name, but she had gotten noticed based on fan fiction

that she had written and then had gotten a place at the table. And Harlan Ellison opened his remarks at the panel, and this is Harlan Ellison, who famously was convinced he was always the smartest guy in the room, which to be fair, a lot of the time he was, but he was a prick about it. He opened it up by making some kind of remark to the effect of, well, you know, here we are, you know, alumnus alumnus alumni of the of the Star Trek writing room. And then he pointedly looked at the only woman on the panel and said, and fanfic writers. Wow. And then, and then, carry on with his remarks.

And I don't remember who the woman was. And I don't remember what her writing credits were. And I feel terrible about it. I am not positive. This is, this is, I'm pulling from the memory banks here over in the Smith-Hell hole, but I believe that was Diane Kerry. Okay. And if so, in my opinion, when my favorite Star Trek writers of novels, so she's got two that I would tell anybody to read, Dread Not in Battle stations, and they are

um, thread knot and battle stations. And they are a million, billion percent fanfic. Uh, I mean, so many tropes that you have for bad fanfic writing and then they are instead taken and they are amazingly awesome. Um, when they announced the uh, next generation a TV series, I was kind of disheartened to discover they were not going to be using those books as their Bible at the time, because they were just that good. It involves the next generation, involves a cast of recent Academy graduates who are idolizing the heroes of the Enterprise, you know, who've just come back from their five-year mission being awesome. And, you know, you've got the young woman and the Vulcan who had been kicked out of the Vulcan Science Academy that she has a troubled extensive history with and many issues.

And there's the Southern engineering student with a 20-draw and uh, uh, down homeisms. Um, uh, oh yeah. You know, it kind of sounds like what I'm, what I'm noticing is the, some of the dynamics and the Southern engineering student with the folks, the draw, I know I can point to a specific character in a Star Trek series and go, Hey, wait a minute, they did eventually pick up on that and use it, right? There's a really interesting dynamic to between fan creators and the people that create the hub, the intellectual property. And once we get a little bit more into like A or Free and we talk about our archive of our own, we'll theme that they have and like kind of how they realize where fandom was lying and the people that are involved in fandom and how do you make a

community out of it? Boy, there's a lot of really interesting things with seeing intellectual property holders who work with fan artists and or fan creators and bring them in and what they have to do legally versus in some cases where like they actually can't engage with fan content because of the intellectual property of the fan content that the fan creator has made. And so probably if you've got a character that is resembling this character that this fan writer created they probably had to do some kind of legal

Agreement in order to be able to use the intellectual property of This fan creator creating content within the intellectual property of another person. It's really interesting. Well, in this bigger case, Dreadnought and Battle stations were both published by pocket books. So Paramount got their cut that way. Oh yeah. But she absolutely started out that at least in Star Trek that way. started out that at least in Star Trek that way. And at this point, we get to 91. Al Gore creates the high performance computing act of 1991. He actually wrote it. And this is where that whole endless joke about Al Gore created the internet comes from his, he kind of did, created the funding to work on web browsing and to build a fiber just infrastructure across America. This is when internet speeds start looking not like one, wealth of 1% what you see as

the bottom basement now. Yeah, it went to like the 14 for modems. 28 eight. I remember that in the early 90s. Yeah, by the mid 90s it was the 6K and it kind of topped out there until you get to like DSL and cable and stuff. But yeah, but like yeah, you're talking about 91 92 that's about the 14 for era Mm-hmm. Yeah, and this were 91 is also when the World Wide Web project was announced on a news group and the very first web page was written in 1991 and This is kind of a probably good time to mention the structure of use net because this is where I become much more involved in the actual story of fanfic.

So use net addresses are basically backwards from web addresses. The web address, the big overr transcriptions on the right. So www.google.com, the commercial group owned by Google, here's the web server. Right. Used at what the other direction. And so the first, the leading bit was describing what general category and for all a fandom it would be under alt, alternate or alternative. Because this was not the things that used that was originally built for. AKA, whatever, but you actually want to do use it for. And depending on your fandom, it was either alt TV, alt movie, alt books. And then from there, whatever your fandom group was.

So as someone who was an ex-files writer, that was alt TV ex files creative. Because it was separate from the discussion forums, or the kind of thing. It was, here's where you'll find stories. Sure. And this period gets kind of a little wacky, because we're talking about, I don't think the kind of, how to put it, and then completely lost its plot. So you got the alt fandoms.

Thank you. Yeah. Just totally went off the rails there. Yeah. Me anytime Ed starts telling a story at the beginning, because it's always really fascinating. And I'm like, I forgot what I was going to say. So I get you. I get you, I completely get you. All right, so.

Hold it, ma'am. Yeah. It gives you no, the all fandoms all had were these various groups each associated to their different fandom and have their different creative writing groups. But unlike the old days of But unlike the old days of fanzines that were printed at conventions, that were printed and distributed at conventions, these groups, one, came to your house or your university. They were just showed up on the computer. You could, so there were a lot easier to get to. And there were a lot more ephemeral.

There wasn't any storing of these things. So, if your server admin only retained 30 days of use net postings, if. A lot more people had access to it. The cost of entry, I mean, when you look at the cost for computer being $7,000, you're thinking the cost of entry is ludicrously high. But when you're dealing with universities, when you're dealing with businesses, those costs are being borne by somebody else. when you're dealing with businesses, those costs are being born by somebody else. Yeah, it occurred to me when you talk about the access to it, this would, I don't know if it would intensify any kind of skew, white collar, and university educated, but it would definitely reinforce that

For men to see it's done. You okay quite so in the same way that doing all those psych experiments on college campuses skews your sample data towards you know 20-year-olds wanting beer money So basically all 20 worlds. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, this is absolutely true. And you get. Also a couple other kinds of weird drifts you that really show up. You'll see an awful lot more resemblance to like the.

Other niche publications like mystery novels or similar where they rely on somebody's personal professional knowledge base being extremely usually the mystery novel writers telling about poisons or you know bot fly larvae rates or whatnot. You'll start seeing all this kind of thing appearing now in fanfic because it's being written by college students or college grad students who are buried up to their eyebrows in one technical class or another. And that starts coming out at least in these stories. I mean, you see that in authorship in the 70s, I mean, Ken Keezy famously wrote one flu

over the Kukus Nest based on his experiences as an orderly, if I recall correctly, in a mental facility. And then you see Michael Crichton writing the pilot to ER back in the 70s based on his experiences as a med student. So it would make sense that fan-fix stuff would also be that same kind of thing. By the way, I should point out, Michael Pratton, anybody should read his earliest works back when he was a med student because that was actually,

I think, some of his absolute best work. There's a wonderful novel there that is based around the abortion rights debate and the role of doctors and saving people's lives. And the lives of actual people, not the lives of clusters of cells. And I mean, quite frankly, it was pretty, pretty solid stuff for being written in, I think that was 78 or 79. No one. Anyway, anything I think can pitch his writing from the days when it was a little bit less sensational, I encourage. So we can get to 1993 is when NCSA Mosaic browser was created. That's the very first web browser. 1983 is the first of the start of the actual web. Okay, the worldwide web goes online August 4th, 1997, removing human decisions from

speech defense. The web begins to learn rapidly and eventually becomes self-aware. 2-14am, Eastern daylight time, August 29th, 1997. In a pan, a human's-right-of-shut down the, I'm sorry, hang on, I'm reading the wrong note, that was kind of it. Never mind. The web's fine, nothing's wrong, everything's great. And having multi-billionaires by media companies will not go awry in any fashion story about it. No, no, not certainly not. So with the web, this is why we tax them less actually, because then they'll be able to make better decisions with their mouth. That makes such a good idea. Yeah. We're the try. Yeah. Yeah. That's what. All right. Between the 80s and up to 93, if you had the internet at home, likely what you had was

AOL or CompuServe. And these were walled gardens. You can dial into that company's servers and see the content they have on their server for you to see, and you can send emails in and out. But not a lot else. With this, with the creation of the actual web, it was literally a year later in 94 that they opened up those World Gardens and said,

okay, we'll allow you to get out onto this whole internet thing all the way down like it. This is when they started calling for the death of AOL with copy-surfing. These businesses are going to stop being going concerns. This is also an interesting piece here, happens. With the, we mentioned the Sony Betamax case back in 84. Between 84 and 94 got this 10

year period where fan thick goes into the video space. People started editing videos predominantly music videos but now you can see AMVs AMVs and they are animated music video? Yes indeed and they will slide scenes from various animations over songs but generally get claimed by fandom as like the song for whatever it is that you're trying to do. And it fascinatingly has carried into take talk. Okay. Yes.

First one came up on my four-you page and let me tell you I was sitting there going, what year in film? Time is a flat desk. Well, I remember going to cons back in the in the early 90s and there'd be a showing room a video room to playing Endless streams of people's amvs or music videos and it was like MTV had been taken over by Studio Toho. I mean, some of them are really well known, like even for this day, there are some that like, people, or they would do it too, or like they would, instead of it being a music video, they would use it with voice overs of audio means. The one of the soup aisle, I'm at soup store, which is insane and is literally just people

yelling about how they're at a soup store and there's only soup aisles. It's as weird as you would imagine it. If you don't know what it is, I highly encourage you to look it up. When you say audio meme, are you like I'm thinking of a modern equivalent of like, what is your name, Tony? Is that like, okay, okay.

And then you just plug that into other circumstances. Yeah, at least paste that audio over other stuff. Gotcha, gotcha. Oh, cool. And there was like, I vividly remember, and Sean, I don't remember whether this was one you made, or if you were just like, this is so awesome, you have to see it.

I do this sharing it with you. Okay. But I was still in my Metallica phase at that point in college. And somebody had done, somebody had done, and I don't remember the anime series, but it was like a magical girl series that they had done, uh, intersandman over clips from it. And I remember which no, I might, no, I might be wrong when I say that girl, but it was a female

protagonist. I was a quarry kind of a yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, and I remember that one being especially well done. Like the editing on that one was absolutely pitch perfect. And yeah, it was much better than the actual music video that the band put together here. Yeah, I mean, you didn't have to look ahead field. So right there. I mean, like, we had in their early 2000s, we had what they would do where they would do like. Almost like misheard lyrics with songs that were heavily associated with certain series,

particularly Carmel Danceon, which is initially in Swedish, and people would make AMVs of this song that had the misheard lyrics in English. And I mean, they were ridiculous, but I still, I still, if I have a Swedish version, if I hear the Swedish version, I will still sing the wrong lyric from these AMVs because they were that. Like, you were just inundated with it. Yeah, it was catchy, but it would also like, oh yeah, it was like, it's the music, but it's like, if you don't speak Swedish. Yeah. And one of the bit of interesting thing happens here in 94 is this is when the Blake Seven Star Trek crossover music video, which I don't necessarily get because I've never really been a Blake Seven fan, but the only reason to bring this up is because this is the first digitally edited fan film.

We've actually done it on a computer in 94, which is kind of wild. That goes back to the start of the age of the power PC chipset and stuff like that. So we're going back to where that was kind of ludicrously ambitious. 95 is when the internet becomes privately owned. The first PlayStation comes out. And over on my part of the world, the Gossamer project starts. So the Gossamer project starts. So the Gossamer project is very specifically linked to the X-Files fandom. There are other versions for other fandoms, but effectively, the part about

use net being ephemeral. Several different people had said, you know, I don't like this. I think we should be collecting these somewhere. And with the birth of the internet, different people have then created their own archives. The Gossner Project, which is still around, although they've stopped accepting Newark in 2016. But there's still out there.

If you look for fluke.gossner.org, you'll find it. Collects all the X-Files fanfic that had been posted to use it. And you start seeing these pop-up one for X-Files, one for the Star Trek groups, one for the sliders, the space above and beyond people, the, several one for the people who like the Superman, Batman, DC heroes, and that kind of thing. Because that was also when the Superman, Batman animated series about.

So all of a sudden, a lot of new people are coming fans of that and being introduced to the two kind of key sees version of the ultimate sea universe. Let's redo all the origin stories and update them a little bit. So this predates the ultimate series of Marvel too. It does actually. And again, we're starting to see this kind of recursive effect. And again, we go back, you want to go by far enough, shit, we can, you know, like you said, Dante's in Ferno, you know, Romeo and Juliet is just fanfic of, you know, Tristan

and he sold, but like it's recursive. Like the fans take it, run with it, and then the people who only IP are like, well, shit, that's a good idea. And they pulled it into the IP. And this is where you start to see that really cool blend of these fans growing up and starting to get jobs in these areas of IP that they are huge fans of. And so what you've got is them in the IP, able to work with the IP, and then they start reinvesting

some of the materials so that it is updated for modern younger audiences to bring them into the fan, which is why we have so many versions of the Joker, and so many versions of the Joker and so many versions of Harley Quinn and so many versions of Wonder Woman. I mean, when you look at it, it's the infiction all the way down, but yeah, that's what we really start to see and it's really, really interesting. There's a lot of what we're starting seeing, the writers room started to be more like the 15 to 20% female writer rather than the 1%

it had been. Right. Yeah. And again, like the only difference between fanfic and canon starts to be who has the IP. Yeah. Yeah. Very much. For now. For now. For now. much. And for now. And so the the end of this era of the youth net is basically

nigh. It's 1998 is basically the end of it. So things I was kind of shocked to discover happened in 1988. Did you know that a 19-year-old Russian semen barricaded himself into the torpedo room of the Kula class submarine and tried to detonate the torpedoes and thus the nuclear reactor in 98. I had heard about that case. Yeah, I don't remember the details, but as I'm taking it, I was like, what? Yeah. I was staggered to find out this is something that happened in my lifetime. Unrelated to anything else, just you discover things that are just not on the news. Um, so we get to 98. The very first multi-fandom automated web archive, vanfiction.net, is launched. I have opinions about it. What's that?

I have opinions about canvases that I'm not going to wait. Well, they are. There we get there. Before we get there, let's back it up just a hair. So you blaze through the 80s, which is fair, because nothing of good happened. But in the 90s, you have a lot of shifts and reactions to things. You have several cases that allow women into formerly male spaces only. You had several court cases regarding federally funded schools that do that. You had Don't Nass Don't Tell. You had also the contract with America, the culture wars. You also have some really major intellectual properties, damn near-go-bankrupt, in the mid-1990s.

Marvel was looking for ways to sell. It's licensing to other people and could not find any. It was almost a dead brand in a lot of ways. That's the time period that's responsible for us not getting to see Spidey and the X-Men and the Avengers together on screen until, you know, the megalith that is Disney bought them all. I'm kind of glad for that considering what the Fantastic Four movie was. What the Fantastic form movie was. And I'm not a form movie.

And I'm not talking about the ones that were released in the 2000s. I'm talking about the one that was made just to keep the copyright going. But you're seeing a lot of reactionaryism in the political sphere. And so I'm starting to note that, and you're starting to see a splintering of things. You've got Vertigo, you've got Dark Horse. Those get kind of really start to grab on to the public zeitgeist in the 1990s.

People are getting sick of just Marvel and DC and Marvel and DC are restarting and rebooting in six different ways. Yeah, well, Vertigo started out as an imprint under DC as a way for them to do. Right. I'm thinking of the spooky weird you are thinking of image I think, but you know, Vertigo Vertigo is an attempt by DC to deal with that kind of fracturing of the market, because it was where they did all the literary spooky. Yeah, but you're seeing a fracturing of what had previously been fairly monolithic

or polarized intellectual properties. Again, I would point out ECW works this way in. You start to see the rise of independent wrestling. You start to see things imploding on themselves and then having to reinvent themselves. So by the time we get to 1998, you also have a Republican party that is trying like hell to find ways to delegitimize the Clinton era. And luckily for them, he is kind of a dipshit and a monster and a lot of personal ways. And so they're able to grab on to that, but you start to see 24 hour news cycles also starting to fracture and splinter,

giving birth to an entertainment group that purports to be news. In terms of grabbing a huge market share, you know, I'm not saying these things didn't exist previously, but now they're really starting to gain traction. And I just find it interesting that as these things are happening, that's when you see, I don't want to say essentialization because I don't know what you're about to tell us, but there's a website that is specifically fanfic. There's almost like, okay, this is the Coca-Cola brand of fanfic. I would love to hear more about this, and so I'll be quiet in a second.

But amidst all the splintering of the main stuff is when it sounds like the fanfic is really starting to come to the fore. Very much. I mean, it's like you were there. What do you think of it? What do you think of it? What do you think of it? What do you think of it?

Well, it's okay. So it's 90s, no one's paying attention. Why else do you think the music sounded like that? Yeah, the biggest thing, the biggest takeaway out of the out of the out of what happens with fan with fanfiction.dead is that with the use net, they were they were unknown. And thus they were unstoppable. I mean, it was full on serenity. Can't stop the signal mal. It was literal anarchy. There was no rule. There was nothing except for the effect that I think you had to be 18 to register,

but we all know that you don't have to actually prove it to be 18 to register. Oh no, on the use then, there was absolutely nothing. The use there was just wild, wild west. And so the amount of things you would see, the people's voices that you wouldn't have previously heard was phenomenal and was even more democratized and available.

And I just heard from people I had never, you know, and lives I'd never encountered before. So of course all good things must come to an end. And so we now have the rise of the gatekeepers. And that's the end of the silver surface age. Because we always have to have gatekeepers for some inexplicable reason. You've also got this really interesting phenomenon of fanfiction becoming a lot more known in the mainstream consciousness because when you have a website that specifically exists for fanfiction submissions and to archive these submissions, people become more aware of it. And so in becoming more aware of it,

you start to have IPs that maybe weren't as aware of it or weren't as engaged with it, become abundantly more aware, especially of the quantity and the amount of interactions that are occurring. But with fanfishing.net, it is fully automated. The rating system, there's no accountability and the rating system will be like, broad.

Oh, we should bench to how you get to the rating system, so because it didn't start with that. No. They started off with a not a bad idea. Most things. It was a great idea. I almost want to do, I mean, Ed, can you convert it into Babylon 5 opening crawl? Because I feel like I'm seeing you put me on the spot. Now I don't remember the battle on five opening crawl. Um, five stations were founded to be to be, uh, uh, points of contact or points.

Did you say points? There was a six station made and it was hidden from the other five. And now, yes, that, but they were all deceived exactly for a sixth for a sixth station was constructed right Um, oh Yeah, I'm sorry man. I'm letting I'm letting down the Strasinski side like I'm sorry man. Am I right? Oh Oh, I got them all I got all three. That was good. That one that one that one that one did apparently go as intended. Yes, that was nice. No, so fan fiction. That is still going strong now. And now they've even got mobile app versions of their location. Hey, I'm saying it exists. There you go. So it exists. Yeah. By the way, when I mentioned using it as the origin of

claims and claim wars. There are reasons I brought that up. So what happens here is something kind of interesting and kind of deeply unfortunate. 98 is when they're launched, they start like pulling their readers shortly thereafter. And by 2000, the average age of their readers was down in the teens. So it had dropped specifically,

I write a teens please, I'm talking 13 to 18. Not, you know. Because initially for fanfishing.net, you had to be 18 or older in order to engage with the material, but then in the early 2000s, 2000, I think they dropped it to 13. You had to be 13 to engage and then that's where the rating system kind of... What's up?

It didn't work so well. What happens is they're multi- they're a multi-fandom archive. Hey puts stuff up there and their idea was not a problem. We're a bunch of fans. Everybody hears you know minimally competent and not a complete jackass first year. So we'll have a rating system that is intended to let you know what you're getting into. So it's purely, you have to register to post, but the ratings are voluntary and they're roughly based on the MPA movie. Exactly. And have just the exact same level of specificity and

exactitude that the MPAA has. Absolutely none. Yeah. Yeah. Which is very nice. That's below bar. That's unfair. Low bar. With cancer should not get one of the other things that they wound up doing was initially they had an empty17 rating. And then once they saw that a majority of the people that were interacting with it, they purged the NC-17 content. This happens in 2002. Yes. And the issue though is that what they consider to be NC-17 content also include most

queer material regardless of its closeness. And so a majority of queer content gets purged. I would clarify there's a couple of details there that I would tweak a little bit. It isn't so much of the maturity of gay content. Well, perhaps, but part of it is also, it wasn't that the majority of gay content, so much that was, gay content was rated more explicit for the same material. So, exactly. A lot of gay content was and remains there, but if you have a pair of gay characters kissing, that's going to be an R rather than a PG-13.

characters kissing, that's going to be an R rather than PG 13. Being though. Yeah. And that's the that's from now. So it gets get away. It gets get away. Yeah. Now there are there are in point of practice, actually, there isn't a purge of fanfic. There's two in 2002. They say, wow, most of our readers are kids. And we've got to think of the children. And so they They say, wow, most of our readers are kids, and we've got to think of the children. And so they go through and they notify authors that hey, you know, this stuff is, we're gonna be pulling us down.

There's a notice period, and it's kind of done openly publicly and they announced it. Chris, this sounds like Tumblr from a very ago. Yeah, it does. It does a 19th Tumblr, we'll get there. Okay. It's the same cycle. Yeah.

And point of fact, when this happens, there was another site, a horrible, awful one called Adult Fanfiction, a dot org, which was a USB baffling tool. It still exists. Although it's now completely broken. The, the, it uses language is no longer supported by anybody. So they can't shit, fix any of the errors and it's been down for a while. But, um, you want to go on an adventure, though? Open a phone browser.

No, it's hilarious. How lucky it tried to cope with a phone browser. I was sitting there like going, I can't even find the bottom of it. It's really funny. Oh, dear. It's great. But so people, some people switched over to using AFF for their material. Some people moved to Tumblr, some people moved to live journal.

Live journal and Zanga. And unfortunately for the rest of us, Tumblr, live journal in Zanga, don't have a integration into a search engine for you to say, hey, I want to go read these authors. Can you go find this for me? And that was incredibly sad. I'm wondering if we should pause here though because I'm thinking that could be the next part. Where are we at time? Because I feel like this is a good break before it brings us into citrus and the tagging system. Is this a logical breaking spot? Because I mean-

I feel like it might be, do you think so, John? breaking spot because I mean I feel like it might be do you think so John? I could picture it being that the end of the silver opening age or picture being here or picture being at the end of the Bronze Age. I think picture kinds of things. I think thematically this is probably a good spot for us to pause. Sounds good. Okay. Because then we can go off on our rating adventure and our type of our own and how Tumblr, Live Journal, etc. have laid the groundwork for the rating system followed by the God tier rating system that's a lot of me. I'm not.

No, no, not not in the least clearly. Clearly a pillar of of nonpartisan ship. You are so neutral. You could call this glitzelun. Especially if it really been neutral. Not actually that anyway. We're getting off the subject. Yeah. Not killing my joke. All right, well then that being the longest way to get to yes, this is a stopping point. There we go. Let's go around the horn. What are people recommending that we read Ed will start with you. I am going to very strongly recommend in preparation for my dissertation on Cyberpunk. I'm going to recommend that people go out and see if either online, probably online trying to find a PDF,

it would be the easiest way to do this. I want folks to go out and look for a copy of the original Cyberpunk role playing game that is set in the far off future year of 2013, because the setting as written for the first edition of that game was an amazingly strong distillation of all, literally all, of the other sources that I've mentioned to you. I think as a role-playing adaptation of a concept of an overarching kind of thematic setting, it's amazing, and it's probably one of the best ways to familiarize yourself with what cyberpunk sounds like. So that's my recommendation. All right, Sean, what are you recommending? I'm going to recommend that anybody interested should go take a look at the Gospel archive, which is still online.

And if you dig in there, there are a couple of authors, live in Gooh and Amperage, or two of them, third one is unique, spelled, y-o-u-u-k-n-e-k. There are some writing partners in mine. I will say definitely 18 and up, but some of the best fanfic you're going to read. Put the best writing you're going to read. All right. Cool. And Tessa, what are you recommending?

I literally can't remember if I recommended this. But if you are somebody who also abhors a certain author who created a world of wizard and the absolute turf bullshit that they have done. And you would like to instead read something that would, if she could find a way to do it and scourge it from the internet because it's gay as hell. And better than her books actually. I highly recommend that you read this one. It is a cult classic. Many people have read it before but it's all the young dudes which is in Marauder's era fanfiction focusing specifically on Remus Lupin from before his arrival of the student in Hogwarts up until he was on the train in the prisoner of Azkaban. I'm not kidding, it's better than anything JK Rowling could ever hope to read. I, or right, I literally knew what was coming and still

sobbed my eyes out. It was so well done. lore is created that fills hot holes. There's consistency. There is nuance and depth to these characters that are literally mentioned maybe two or three times ever. Full full personalities full back stories the world building is just incredible it's by Miss K being I can was a number I want to say five eight six nine but if you just search all the young dudes I mean it it has a fandom of its own and I can't recommend it enough. I took a long time to read it, so I regret that. Very cool.

I'm gonna go ahead and recommend warehouse dreams, which is a book by a friend of the show, former guest of the show, author Teresa Halverson. Halverson is with an E at the end. Halverson. And it's warehouse dreams. It's essentially it's a it's a coming of age romance about people with special abilities, supernatural abilities, and so like that. So it's kind of a post-apocalyptic, not quite, but certainly dystopian story. Anyway, I highly recommend it. It combines a lot of the things I like about a lot of the other fandoms that I enjoy.

She's her own original author, but I highly recommend that. So, again, the warehouse dreams. Okay, real quick. I realized that I gave the title of what I wanted to recommend without mentioning the authorship. Cyberpunk the role playing game is from Artel Sorry in Games and written by Mike Pond Smith. So, let me make sure to note that. Cool. All right. Where does anybody want to be found if they can in fact be found? If there's anything you want people to go look up that you have done online or elsewhere. Ed starting with you. I am currently a shadow in the warp and I do not desire to be found

really anywhere right now. Cool. Sean, how about you? Oh, that sounds great to me. If I could be appointed to be found on the internet or on a live actually. All right, uh, Tessa, how about you? I will say that this morning I decided to test tumblers or in fan by sexualizing the shit out of how Wolfwood of Tri-Un holds his Jesus Newk 9000. So I'm not gonna put any, I said, the fire's out there. But if you see that, that, that was me. Okay.

Cool. Well, let's see. I'm unsure when this will drop. It'll definitely be after our May show. It's probably gonna be after our June 2nd show. So I encourage people on July 7th to come back to Luna's for capital punishment and see me there slaying puns. I've already booked it out and it's going to be a really good show, good good competition, some real good punsters, some folks returning. That will be the seventh anniversary show too,

which is pretty, pretty rad. So come out to that. And if you miss that, then come to the August fourth show, same place, same time. So Ed, anything else you want to tell folks where to find us? Well, you've obviously found the podcast somehow either on our website, gkistorytime.com or through either Stitcher or the Apple podcast app. Whatever it is that you have found us, if the option exists, please make sure you subscribe. Please make sure to give us the five-star rating that you know our guests have earned us on this outing and otherwise. Well, I think that's it.

I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock and until next time, keep rolling 20s.