Just peachy

Audio cr. x

pacemaking (noun)

the activity of helping the heart to beat at the correct speed, through a natural process or using a small device inside someone's chest

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

Now, through the efforts of so many wonderful people, Renegade Bookbinding Guild has developed out of the Discord server I originally created just to answer questions about paper, fonts, printers and such. I figured there would be no more than 15 people joining. We have surpassed 3000.

I hope in another 20 years time my little tutorial still be kicking along out here, my bad photography and potty mouth sitting forever at the foundational level of an exploding practice of radical generosity and community, preserving the best of fanfiction from the ravages of time and digital threats and censorship, and giving authors the best thank you I know how to give.

I was checking some of your fics in this link https:// www.trickster(.)org/speranza/stories(.)html and next to the titles there is a number like for example Eight Sessions (270K) -my favorite dS fic ever- and I was wondering what is the number? I thought it was the number of words but I didn't remember that fic being so long so I checked ao3 and yeah it says 34,432 words. Then, I checked other fics' word count in both pages and at least some of them don't match. What is that number then?

LOL - I love this question, even though it makes me feel OLD AS DIRT.

In the olden times of the dial up internet, the number you put next to a story was NOT the word count but the FILE SIZE - it was 240k in size, this is to say, a quarter of a mb--and this told the reader how long it would take to LOAD in your BROWSER. Now of course 240k is not very much, but understand me when I say that my first computer/word processor was an Atari 130, which had as its total system memory, 130k!! (Which was double my dad's computer, which was an Atari 65, which had--yes--65k total memory!)

Anyway Eight Sessions was written in--hm, looks it up, May 2002! Which means that only 20% of people had broadband internet at that time - so 80% would have had dialup and have to get the story through a modem. I posted the story to the F/K email list in parts, and then when it was only you wanted to make sure people knew how big it was so that they could anticipate the loading.