An Introduction

As you may have noticed, TAG has invited a few of us other inmates, er, fans, to participate in his blog. Why, you may ask? Probably because he's lazy and tired of keeping this place up all by himself, but at the same time unwilling to let it slide. Of course, now if it slides anyway, he can just blame us newbies. Not that he'd be so devious. In any case, since I'll be contributing here, I thought I'd introduce myself, and explain how I came to be a member of this fandom.

If you participate (or lurk) on the PPMB, you know me as smk. For the purposes of this blog, I shall be hereinafter known as, 'the smk chick'. As The Kristen Bealer Guy noted, there was kind of a pattern to the names, but since I don't particularly want to be thought of as a guy, and since, unlike Kristen Bealer, smk is gender-neutral, I decided on the smk chick. And it's not capitalized because I'm pretty sure it'll bug TAG.

As for how I came to be part of this fandom, about two and a half years ago I suddenly had access to DSL. I'd never had DSL before, and wanted to compare the speed to dial up. It seemed that streaming video would be a good test, so I went to YouTube. That day they happened to be featuring a channel from nightwinggirl (I am unsure of the spelling, it's been awhile and since YouTube suspended the account [Stupid YouTube. But I'm not bitter.] it's a little hard to check). The channel had a play list with all of the Daria episodes, in order, including the unaired pilot. Over the next few weeks, I watched the whole series. Some of the comments referenced Outpost Daria, so I checked that out. I had never heard of fan fiction, but when the series was done, I still wanted more, so I started reading some of the fan fiction, on Outpost Daria and elsewhere. Then I clicked a few links, found the PPMB, discovered the Creative Writing forum, realized there was new stuff to be found there, and lurked for a little while.

I may never have decided to actively participate, if it hadn't been for one post. You see, prior to this, not only had I never heard of fan fiction, I'd never heard of message boards and had no idea that any fans other than Trekkies were active in any sense; the whole thing was unfamiliar and a little scary. When I'd been compulsively reading fan fiction, though, I did e-mail two or three authors. One was Lawndale Stalker. Once Upon a Time at College was unfinished, leaving a huge question unanswered, and I wanted to know, dammit! And he refused to answer, claiming he'd finish the story one day. (And has that happened? No! But I'm not bitter.) Then, in my lurking, I came across the following post:

http://www.thepaperpusher.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12442&p=208885#p208885

(I know I should probably be able to capture an image of the screen and post it here, but I don't want to brag on my 1337 skillz, so just follow the link and pretend, 'kay?)

That was me! He was talking about me! I was compelled to respond, so I de-lurked. Once the door was open, I found that participating in an online community (this one, anyway) was much less scary than I thought, and in fact have found that this is a comfortable place to be. Even though my online experience has broadened, this is still my favorite place on the 'net.

That's quite enough about me, and I promise that future posts will strictly limit use of the word 'I' (but I promise nothing about the parentheses).