Charmed, I'm sure.

Lego, please make this a reality. A fan-made The Golden Girls Lego set could become an actual set available for purchase … but only if 10,000 fans vote to make this dream come true. The Lego Ideas program is kind of amazing. Fans are able to create potential Lego sets, which are put to the community for approval. It takes 10,000 supporters to make a Lego Idea a Lego Reality, which sounds like a lot but when you consider how many people love Lego it’s not that insane a threshold. User “lostsleep” saw the deep need for a Lego Blanche, Dorothy, Sophia and Rose, and has created the most amazing set we could ever hope for. Not only are the ladies we love rendered in Lego form, but their iconic home and a few other side characters made their way in, too. This genius Lego builder included “the Foyer, Living Room, and Kitchen built like a TV set, with one wall removed and a full view into the space… .

Daily drawing 56 - TF2 DISPENSER PLUSHIES!

OH BOY AND HOW. So I am not So Much Of An Old that I was around when print zines were the thing. I got into fanfic-type fandom through the internet. But here are some changes from the late 90s to today:

- In slash fandom, there were a lot fewer main characters written as expressly queer. There was a lot of (in retrospect) very teeth grindingly annoying “We’re not gay we just love each other” type romances. 

- Fic was mostly distributed via mailing lists (email), not by web archives, although some mailing lists also would web archive their stuff. People tended to be more monofannish because you would just participate in the list — people are more multifannish now because we follow specific people through their blogs and get introduced to their other interests, but this didn’t happen as much back in the day. People were definitely still multifannish, though. I’ve always fandom hopped.

- The aesthetic was very different. A lot of older fanfic reads in ways that were more influenced by profic romance novels, whereas modern fanfic has sort of its own, more realist style. (TBH there are also a lot more realistic/pomo style romance novels these days as well.) The stuff from the early 2000s, in comparison to 90s and earlier fic, and in comparison to modern fic, tended to be more experimental stylistically. Overall, fic tended to be longer, but also more uniformly long. There weren’t really many of those 200k monsters either.

- Not a lot of postmodern type fic conceits (i.e. stuff like the one where steve and bucky watch all the movies made about captain america while steve was in the ice, or SGA fic told through excerpts from academic papers, etc.) Early 2000s fandom went through this weird magical realism phase, also.

- In our headers, we used to measure story length in file-size, not in word length. I think this change came about in the early 2000s.

oh and then along the same lines you had guys running out to try and have sex with women and fail, or have sex with women but find it so unsatisfying, before ultimately admitting that they wanted this particular dick. also, considering the prevalence of WNGWJLEO, it was oddly mandatory to point out at great length how much each character never really loved his previous female partners.

basically fandom now, at least the well-written part of it, is a million times less homophobic and biphobic and, believe it or not, misogynist. obviously there were always exceptions, especially with the really good writers, and especially as you move into the late nineties. but as a rule, so much improvement.

oh, and every love confession required a full name. Firstname Middlename Lastname, I love you. where does that even come from, seriously?

i will give them this—there was a lot less badfic that was technically bad, like, unreadable and full of errors. shit got edited back in the day. someone was gonna pay money to print five hundred copies of that and they did not want your terrible spelling to fuck it up.

- elaborate ascii headers/footers/dividers on fic, which were mostly txt files (or bare-bones text-only pages to save archive space) I think?

- faking ages to get access to the adult stuff (which could get complicated depending on what country you were from and what country the admin(s) were from). This sometimes involved emailing an age statement to the owner of a mailing list and them deciding whether or not to trust you (or how much they actually gave a fuck) before giving you the password to an archive or authenticating your whatever to access the whosit, I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked.  Because I was fifteen at the time. Of course.

- There were people who were very adamantly ‘gay stuff is okay in fanfic but immoral IRL.’  Don’t ask me how that worked out logically, but it was a thing.

- DO NOT FORGET THE BEFORE-TIMES when there was no google and there were scattered archives everywhere, from ‘archive of [specific mailing list]’ to authors’ personal archives to pairing- or fandom-specific archives and the way you found a lot of them was like hoping aol or yahoo search would turn up something new?  But on the other hand you had a fair number of folks who were twitchy about having webcrawlies being able to find their porn because fanfic was already kind of side-eyed and porny stuff even moreso.

- there were archivists who actively trawled mailing lists and authors archives and such to compile their own interest-specific archives, sometimes asking the authors if they could host a fic… and sometimes NOT asking.  Cue: wank.

- OR you navigated WEBRINGS (which are like tumblr ‘networks’ I think? I don’t grok tumblr networks but ya’ll have fun with them, I’ll be over here in my rocking chair mmk) where there was essentially a master list of websites catering to a specific interest, sometimes with details but sometimes it was just a name and a link so you had no idea what you were clicking on half the time, you just knew it fell under category [thing the webring was about].

(…tbh, this was probably how I found out about slash, because of some X-Files or Pretender or maybe early SG1 webring, I don’t even know. I just saw “[fandomname] slash archive” and was desperate for new fic in [fandom] and hey presto “boys?? kissing?? GIRLS? KISSING?!! YOU CAN DO THAT? Ship things that don’t match what canon would expect you to ship?? oops now I have an exponentially greater amount of ships than I did before”)(given that description, it was probably stargate because there was a LOT of pretty to go around okay)

- let me TELL you about the recurring firestorm of wank that would rush through every goddamned fandom for at least a 5- to 10-year period there where someone would be like “all same-gender shippy stuff needs an NC-17 warning because that stuff is not okay for kids” and other folks would be like “can we not equate handholding to explicit PIV intercourse solely based on the genders of the participants” and holy jesus it was the EXACT same ugly nausea-inducing merry-go-round in at least six of my fandoms, which is why I am zero percent impressed with ‘family’ networks caving to that bullpockey because My People already hashed that out, get with the times, thanks.

- fanfic archives without search functions, where everything was just listed by date posted and sorted by pairing IF YOU WERE LUCKY.  One sentence summaries with no tags, no warnings, sometimes no ratings.  Sometimes no lengths (see above regarding length measured by filesize).  Because everything was coded in early html and some folks just didn’t want to (or knew how to) code all that.  This is why I give money to ao3, people.  I REMEMBER THE BEFORETIMES.

- oh, and finding That Reccer whose tastes ran similar to your own and posted like 10+ recs a week?  Like Santa and Baby Jesus came down from on high and showered glitter all over you before kissing you gently on the forehead and then disappearing in a double rainbow.  (You think recs help you filter wheat from chaff NOW, it was all the moreso when you had to do all this hunting just to find stuff TO sort though)

- yes this was also before lj and wordpress and basically any kind of rich text editor-enabled blogging platform.  Hand-coded html pages hosted on geocities with terrible font color choices and pixellated blinky tiled gif backgrounds, aw yus.

Your super elaborate headers usually stated that you did not own anything having to do with your canon and that you made no money off your fan fiction etc etc.

…Fuck you. We are not snobs.

You are so angry right now

This just made my life! Jimmy Fallon, Chris Evans & Chris Pratt photobombing people at the Super Bowl!

True Story: we were at a house show the day before SummerSlam. And amid the riotous din of “Cena Sucks”, a small boy turned tearful eyes to the rest of our row and wailed plaintively: “No, he doesn’t!” I thought of that small boy as John Cena took to the ramp Sunday evening (that new blue shirt is much easier on the eyes than some previous choices). And I thought of him again later as I reflected back on a performance from the Face who Runs the Place that was…good. Cena did good. He didn’t suck.

Truly, John Cena was solid on Sunday. He didn’t grandstand, he didn’t oversell to the point of sarcasm, and he put himself to work collaborating with Seth Rollins and Brock Lesnar to create a dynamo of a match that really kept me guessing. John Cena’s never going to not be a monolith in the company — there’s no backpedaling from that. So when John Cena finds an opportunity to look bruised, bewildered, and unnerved by an opponent, it’s a refreshing and compelling change. There were shades of the Wyatt battles, another controversial program that showed some of Cena’s best storytelling.

Brock Lesnar, likewise, is fascinating and terrifying to watch. All you see is impending disaster, but you can’t look away — he’s the human equivalent of hurricane doppler. And despite some criticisms of him as a disengaged part-timer, he never resorts to the jokey swagger a man of his stature could easily fall back on. He swallowed finisher after finisher in true immortal fashion, but every time he did hit the floor he sold the heck out of it. His stretcher job was rather convincing, as they go, and he’ll provide an excellent blockade at Wrestlemania 31, whether it’s for Roman Reigns or a surprise interloper.

And Seth Rollins. What else can be said? He doesn’t have a dependable PPV performance repertoire under his belt yet, so there’s always an unknown when he gets in the ring for a committed match. It was great to see Rollins back to a really athletic style after months of squirrelly evasion and DQs. I caught my breath every time he went airborne — he flies like a man 50lbs lighter, and that Phoenix Splash on Cena was a work of art.

This was pro work on the part of all three men. Three highly different characters, with vastly distinct sizes and styles, came together to offer one of the best ensemble performances we’ve seen in some time.

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