Fangasmic

I know a guy whose doctor prescribed him medication for extreme sun deprivation because he couldn't manage to break away from his desk for 20 minutes a day or something similarly ridiculous and go outside. It's not really funny, except where it's hilarious, and then it turns sad, because I remembered that in many ways, we in fandom are -- in many ways -- similarly tethered to their computers.

As a professional geek and a highly trained hermit, I've wasted more daylight hours than I care to discuss sitting inside during a beautiful spring day torn between running outside and sitting under a tree to read a book, or scrolling down a page containing some serious good reading in any number of fandoms. During the Dark Ages -- before everybody and their sister had an iPhone, anyway -- we as a collective of fannish consumers were cloistered by necessity, for access, and although I can already hear a couple of the old guard in the back of the room asking, "Well, what about zines?" I think we can all agree that somewhere in the last 20 years, fandom went irreversibly digital, and unless you wanted to mow down a forest and print your own fanfiction, you were shit out of luck. That's not even addressing the issues of the newest fannish products: kink memes, constantly updating with new entries; vids, which really lose something in translation when you print them out frame by frame; images, which suffer somewhat less, but suffer nonetheless.

( The question becomes: do I want to go outside more than I want to obsessively refresh this kink meme, basically. )