This is damn weird.

It's not weird that we are here! There are SO MANY OF US! We're not outliers, we're not oddballs. We are occupying a space we CREATED and we are still fucking here, having fun with all our younger online friends, which is COOL AND GOOD and NOT EMBARRASSING ACTUALLY. It's fucking rad.

Look. We *built* online fandom, comrades! We built it with Angelfire and Geocities and the fucking telephone cables we unhooked from our phones to plug into our enormous, boxy desktop computers to suffer through glacial download speeds that today's children can't even fathom. I think we should all agree to stop apologizing for being here when this is our fucking house. An excellent sentiment (not mine):

To all of my beloved young friends - remember this when you get older. You don't need to grow out of fandom. Who the fuck cares if it's cringe? Childlike joy is something to CELEBRATE, NOT SOMETHING TO BURY AND HIDE!

I'm Generation Jones, a term I found on Reddit. Late Boomer/early GenX. I'm 3 years older than David Duchovny, 4 years younger than Anthony Stewart Head. I was an active fic writer 1999-2005, then Life Happened.

In 2024 I was back home, stagnating creatively. My elderly dad was living with me, diagnosed with dementia and declining. I was balancing a full-time job, taking care of Dad (with some help from my self-employed sisters), sinking deeper into a decade-long chronic depression. I started watching The X-Files again in the evenings when Dad would start to sundown, and good lord, did that show still ROCK. I started watching more, found the X-Files and X-Files Fanfic subreddits, found out about Tumblr, and most importantly started feeling like I wanted to write again.

Dad died in April 2025. I posted my first new story in 20 years three months later. I posted all my old fics to AO3 and I'm still writing new stuff -- will be posting a new fic hopefully next week.

Hannibal (2013-2015)

God forbid a woman in her 40s try to host an event on a cursed murder island 😤

ANDREW GARFIELD