Fuck it’s just. They’d just dropped their first album and it flopped and Stevie was staying alone and waiting tables and cleaning while Lindsey was out touring trying to make a living and it was such a pivotal time because they didn’t know what was gonna happen next. Stevie wrote that song as a young girl living far from home working awful jobs and living on a dream and I just wonder how she feels singing it live now. How she feels as an older woman staring out across thousands of fans singing this song that she wrote as practically a child. How much has changed. How the meaning of the song has changed.

I HAVE LITERALLY LIVED THROUGH ALL OF THEM WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT SAY ABOUT ME

Oh bb there is so much more to it than that.

First there were zines, lovingly mimeographed and stapled by our fandom foreparents, and those who remain to us from the Zine Age are powerful and wise.

Then there was Usenet, where formatting went to die. You know not the strength it takes to read 60k fics entirely in Courier New, or the pleasure of a really artistic looking section break marker composed of ASCII characters.

Then there was the Great Schism, as fandoms spread far and wide across the Web, and basic HTML was the whole of the law. Many of us lied our way into private “18+” listservs, and roamed the webrings, lamps aloft, in search of one virtuous author (or at least somebody else who shipped the thing).

From this dark age rose FF.net, that pit of voles from whose bourn many a hungry reader has returned, starved for citrus and heartsick from the cutesy author notes.

And FF.net begat Livejournal, which allowed easy archiving, threaded comments, flocked posts and invite-only communities. And it was Livejournal, in its death throes, that begat AO3, which once seemed like only a utopian vision and now bestrides the world like a Colossus.

OH MY GOD, REMEMBER WEBRINGS?