Living in interesting times

shadar wrote: I LOVED your Home page editorial this morning. Yes indeed, the amount and quality of content has never been higher than it is now (even more so, IN the immediate future). Not even close. So many people have labored to keep this genre of content alive, and now its going mainstream. Who'd have guessed.

As you say, some of us have been in this long before it was cool. Way before.

I have to say, you blew me away by remembering that the Aurora Universe started on the Amazons Arena BBS. That was BEFORE the Internet even existed. Back in the 1980's. In those days, you dialed up with a phone modem (at 300baud in the beginning) and connected to captive BBS software that ran on a single PC in someone's bedroom. It was terrible for graphic content but OK for unformatted text. For those of you who have, say 10 Mbps today, that was 0.00003 Mbps. A single picture of the kind we routinely share today would take weeks to transfer. Given you were lucky if your modem stayed connected for 30 minutes, it was impossible.

If you remember the original Alien movie (or Wargames), that's about 300 baud. Characters flow across the screen about the speed that you can read them, accompanied by beeps from the modem (if you left the speaker on).

Often you couldn't get into the BBS because the number of simultaneous users was a function of how many hardline phone lines the BBS operator was willing to pay for. Generally only a small handful. So when the lines were all busy (often the case with Amazon BBS), your PC would keep dialing and dialing (which tied up your home phone line, by the way) until someone dropped off and you were lucky to get a connection. You had to listen to the beeps and tones to know when it finally made connection and you could browse around. Also, you were lucky if it stayed connected long enough to download or upload a file. If anyone else picked up tahe phone in the house, it disconnected amid lots of yelling and shouting.

But the enthusiasm among fans was easily as high then as it is today. Maybe even more so given the scarcity of material and the challenges in distributing it.

Amazing how so many of those early efforts came and went, with many reincarnations. My AU came and went at least three times before I handed most of it over to Brantley for safe-keeping. Today we all gather here on SWM.

Payoff time.

Of course, to some of you, this probably sounds like your grandparents telling you that they walked five miles through the snow, back and forth to school each day (or whatever your local legends were). The difference is that this has all happened while some of us have maintained a near continuous focus on creating content. There is a well-worn path from the pre-Internet Amazons Arena BBS to the SWM.

It all started with Supergirl for me, and probably for many of you, and here we are, about to have Supergirl on TV. Amazing!

So if some of us are acting a bit obsessive about all this (like me!), please understand how long this has taken to get here. For me, 30+ years of writing this stuff and much longer since I became a fan.

Now I get to watch professionals with big budgets do it. I expect to enjoy the show greatly, but forgive me if I occasionally note that they are missing some key points. Or think they could do better. The show is going to be amazing in many ways, but nothing can match five decades of lucid dreaming and many thousands of hours writing over the last three decades about related topics.

All of which (for me) was inspired by one young lady from Krypton.

Shadar

(By the way, the Leave a Comment button at the bottom of the front page editorial doesn't work, so I started a new topic to reply.)

TwiceOnThursdays wrote: #kermitflail

This is also one of the junction points where CBS could choose to stop. Since we're not hearing that it's even better news.

I really want to see this.