milestones

The sun is shining, the snow is blindingly refusing to melt, I am wearing the world's fluffiest bathrobe, Yuletide continues amazing, and today I have successfully been in the world for twenty-three years.

My birthday this year is inconsequential, though, because, as near as I can calculate it, today also marks the day in which I have been in fandom for a whole fucking decade. For Christmas 2000, you see, my mother and I got this awesome new computer that could be hooked up to the dial-up modem and access the internet! I had occasionally gone onto the internet using my dad's computer before, and, if memory serves, had mostly waited for long patient minutes for .jpegs of Beanie Babies to load on the official site, or racked up perfect scores on some Harry Potter trivia game on the Scholastic page. Now that I had my own computer, though, I went straight to Google! I typed in 'Harry Potter'! Somewhere in the first page was the link to the Unofficial Harry Potter Fan Club, so off I went, to play games and to look at fanart. And around the 27th, I started reading fanfic.

I didn't start posting fic until early April 2001, but before that, I think I spent most of January writing the fifth Harry Potter book. (It was 87 pages long! Harry and Hermione became Animagi! There was this hilarious Mary Sue who was Dumbledore's granddaughter! And I think I mercifully figured out not to post it and instead started writing MWPP fic. IDK.) Anyway, my point is, I've been cheerfully muddling about here for ten years.

( Instead of an end-of-year fic meme, ten years of fic statistics for the curious, and also for my own reference )