theunitofcaring:

No that’s not a silly question it’s really cool and now I want all my followers to reblog with internet community journeys. 

 I hung out on Yahoo! Answers for a couple years (12-14), lurked various advice columns because I find them fascinating, got into Harry Potter fanfiction on fanfiction.net, found Methods of Rationality and through that LessWrong, where there are embarrassing posts as a record of my age-17 Eliezer-fangirl stage, got into the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, burned out of the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, got into tumblr SJ, and wound up here. The only sites I read reliably now are tumblr, slatestarcodex, and aforementioned advice columns. 

This tracks only slightly with my special interests during the relevant time periods, which from high school forward were the TV show 24 , Crichton/King/Grisham generic adult thrillers, Christian apocalyptic fiction, LessWrong, the Silmarillion, the manosphere and neoreaction, Clara, the Silmarillion again, social justice, and Current Special Interest which is a secret for obvious reasons. 

 

(This ended up much longer and more detailed than the other responses I’ve seen. I hope it’s long and detailed in a good way.)

When I was young, the primary places I went on the Internet were Nethack fansites (though I only lurked), the official Chalkzone discussion board on the Nickelodeon forums (my first fandom (and first perseveration that I can recall*), age eight), and–slightly later–Neopets. These aren’t connected to later events, though.

The continuous journey, the one that led me to where I am today, started when I was thirteen, and I saw that under the “other” section of the Girl Scout day-trip medical form Mom had written that I was autistic. (Her point being that if the supervisors saw me sneaking off to find a quiet spot to recover from all the noise and activity, they should let me.)

She later insisted that she’d already told me a few years previously, but either she misremembered, or she’d told me but not explained and I’d registered it as a meaningless, forgettable word (like I had “Presbyterian”), because it was news to me.

Of course, I had to learn more about this. Some news article led me to The Autism Crisis, which despite the name is a neurodiversity-based autism blog. This led me to other neurodiversity-based autism websites (at one point around this time I read the entire autistics.org library), and from there other neurodiversity sites. (This is why part of me always feels surprised when people who have been hanging out on the Internet for a while don’t have at least a basic working knowledge of multiplicity. Within a month or two of venturing out into the big wide Internet, I knew how to parse a caret in someone’s name.)

(During this time, the summer of 2007, I also read through the entire mental health section of when was then my local library. (It was a pretty big library.) The juxtaposition of these books with the blogs I was reading was an interesting experience.)

Stuff about snake-oil autism treatments led me to the skeptical blogosphere. One of the more religion-focused ones had a link to the Left Behind tag on Slacktivist, which I have updated here to reflect his move from Typepad to Patheos. (If there’s a way to make that show in chronological order, I don’t know it. I’ve linked to what is currently the last page.) I read the posts and left. I didn’t read the comments. Not yet.

When I was bored, I spent a lot of time reading TV Tropes. This gave me a lot of cultural osmosis that still serves me well today, as well as an epiphany about my sexuality. (No, really. It had never occurred to me that “fetish” was a framework that could apply to my particular fascination, but once they pointed out that was a possibility, I realised it made so much sense.)

It was probably from TV Tropes that I found the Protectors of the Plot Continuum. (Their sporkings are a little mean for my tastes these days, and I haven’t read any new ones recently, but I still like their characters and worldbuilding.) Back in the day, I even posted on their forums for a while, under a name I never used elsewhere.

Since I was in the general realm of sporking, there were more links to the Left Behind posts. I went through the “oh, right, that exists. *catches up on posts* *leaves*” cycle a couple more times. At one point, sometime around the autumn of 2010, I decided to stay. I read the non-Left-Behind posts. I read the comments.

In the comments, I discovered a thriving (if sometimes flame-y**) community of people. They used the comment threads like a forum, discussing not only the original post, not only tangents that could diverge quite widely from the source, but new topics that they brought to the table themselves. They also had the Greater Slackti-sphere, the blogs written by people who commented there, most of whom also commented on each other’s blogs.

On Christmas Day, 2010, I got up the nerve to join them. I took on a new name. I became Brin.

(I kept reading Slacktivist long after I should have stopped, after I began to realise that social justice was literally driving me insane, because of this importance to my history and development. I do still read and comment on some of the less sanity-draining Greater Slackti-sphere blogs.)

In May of 2011, we were having a conversation in a Slacktivist thread about Star Trek: DS9. Lonespark, a fellow Slacktivite, told us about this place called DS9 Rewatch, where people gathered in a chatroom to watch DS9 together and talk about the episode as it was happening. Like watching TV with your friends, only text-based and with people scattered across the world.

If you followed that link, you’ll have seen that I now run the Rewatch. The thing about “like watching TV with your friends, but with people scattered across the world” is that said scattered people pretty quickly become your friends. Not including me, only one of the people who was there when I joined is still there now, but I maintained friendships with some of the 2011 rewatchers even long after they left. (*waves at justice-turtle​*) (And of course, I also made new friendships with the relatively new rewatchers.)

It was probably also from the Slackti-sphere that I learned of Ozy, who at the time was a co-blogger at “No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?”. I liked them–in hindsight because they were the least sanity-draining feminist activist I had ever met–and followed them through a couple of blogs before losing track of them for a while.

I don’t remember whether it was through them that I heard of Less Wrong, but it was sometime around then. I read a couple of posts, a few comments, felt extremely intimidated, and left. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake.

(I liked the idea of HPMOR, but didn’t hear of it until after I reached the “perpetually buried in reading material” stage of Internet usage, and have never gotten around to it. I did read Luminosity, and greatly enjoyed it. The protagonist’s clever exploitation of the local laws of nature reminded me of the books of Jewish folktales I loved as a child***, and I found it very refreshing that said protagonist was allowed to not only want, but seek out immortality, without the desire being seen as a character flaw. (I’ve had transhumanist sympathies probably since reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a pre-teen.))

One of those Greater Slackti-sphere blogs was (and is) Mock Ramblings. I not only read it, but kept an eye on his blogroll, reading any posts that looked interesting and occasionally following a blog if it was interesting consistently enough. Michael Mock reads Comparatively Superlative, and as it was consistently interesting, so did I. At one point, shortly after I commented there using a profile containing a link to my Tumblr, I received a “comparativelysuperlative is now following you” notification. I read his Tumblr archive, found he was consistently interesting there too, and followed him back.

A few months back, he reblogged a post from you. I don’t remember which one it was, but it was interesting enough that I looked into the rest of your blog.

It was…I’m not quite sure how to put it. It was like seeing a braver version of myself, saying publicly the things I had hardly dared even to think. I…may have read your entire archive, and been disappointed when I found you had only been blogging there for eight months. I spread my net, reading other rationalist Tumblrs you linked to. I found that when I had encountered some particularly unhealthy piece of social-justice writing and it was getting me down, reading them helped me feel better. I realised that this was where I needed to be.

*It was also the first that I could recall at the time; I remember being surprised when it shifted.

**The thing that we now call “callout culture” tends to get treated as a Tumblr-specific or at least Tumblr-induced problem. It’s not. I experienced it in the comments of a Typepad blog, before Tumblr took off. Back then it was called “nuking”, and we lived in fear of the nukers then just as we do now. (Sure, one’s posts didn’t gain as wide a reach there, but it was a lot harder to block the nukers it did reach.)

***Possible factor in the disproportionate Jewish-ness of rationalists?

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Tags:

#long post #Brin talks about herself for a *reason* this time #the story of my Internet life #overly enthusiastic parenthetical use #the standard tag for this sort of thing is #my issues with sj let me show you them #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost