Child, death is a dance on the forest floor

questionoftheday asks: What is your internet history? What websites were you a part of that might not be around anymore, and do you have any fond memories of them?

My answer:

My very first online social interaction was via NeoPets, circa 1998. Friends and I would try to get to school as early as possible to play on the library computers, because of course the school internet was better than anything we had at home. I learned my very first HTML to spruce up my personal store in that game, and developed what would become a life-long (at least thus far :P) aversion to visually-complicated website designs. (It's a good thing I never really got into GeoCities....)

My parents (and our bandwidth) were pretty restrictive of what I could do online at home, but I had a little Tripod website that I barely remember. I think I posted some fannish gushing about Star Wars and my favorite books, but I didn't have any kind of web-ring, or forums, or anything. A few years later, in high school, I had a Xanga page for a while, but had had "don't post ANYTHING REMOTELY PERSONAL on the internet!!!!!1!11!!" drilled into me so hard, I was never really comfortable saying much on it.

When I went to college, I got over my conditioning, and for all four years, my relationship with internet recreation and socialization was about 5% following webcomics and 95% World of Warcraft. I made friends in that game I'm still close to IRL, and became a really heavy participant in the server social scene - my housemates and I played on Silver Hand, and we plugged into a multi-guild raiding organization called Leftovers when it was still fairly small. I haven't played the game since Cataclysm, but I still get insanely nostalgic about those couple of years where I was no-lifing the game, and when I was an admin for the organization. It was just... a really socially formative and important time for me in a lot of ways.

I had a year off between undergrad and grad school, and that's actually when I discovered internet fandom - I got on DeviantArt and FFN and gorged on Labyrinth fanart and fic. It had always been my favorite movie, and encountering its fandom was very "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE!?"

I started writing my first Labyrinth fanfic in my first year of graduate school, posting to FFN, and my first comments from readers were like a drug. I was hooked. Not quite a year later, I did my first cosplay ever, Morrigan from Dragon Age, at DragonCon, with an old friend as Surana, and we fell in with a really large, vibrant group of Bioware fans and cosplayers that go to that con every year. She ended up pulling me onto Tumblr, into a really zany, loose Dragon Age RP group not long after that, and it was later via Tumblr people that I learned about kink memes on Livejournal (wound up helping curate the Skyrim one for a while, myself), and then AO3.

Tumblr has been a *trip*. The RP that I originally joined didn't go on much longer, but the social circle remained, and we all swapped to personal blogs (which is the same one I still have). A year or so later my girlfriend and I were doing indy Dragon Age tumblr RP and got pulled into a formalized group one - and I'm not going to get into details about that group because it's a whole bloody soap opera, but suffice to say, it was an important time for me.

I've been coasting along on Tumblr since after the group roleplay petered out, and I've also been periodically active on Reddit, though that... even the fandom spaces don't feel like what I consider fandom, there. It has its uses.

And now I'm here! And so are a ton of other people! I'm excited! :D