I don't plan on using this blog all that often, but sometimes I think about things that I would rather not post on my LJ and I might as well do it here. :) No one I know IRL is on Mene so it's not like that would ever see it.

Anyway. I've been thinking a lot about online community, what it means to me and how it affects other people. Mostly because the internet community is personally very important to me.. but other people don't ever seem to understand that.

I haven't been online for very long by most standards. I only got a laptop when I was 18 and we never had internet at home. My only exposure to fandom and the like was through my brief moments during free period senior year when I would read every webcomic I could find. So.. when I hit my first year of college and had a fast connection, it was kind of a culture shock for me.

The first internet community I ever joined was unredeemed.net, a Draco Malfoy fansite. I was really into Harry Potter and read a lot of fanfic, so it was a logical jump. The community was just a small forum and there were a lot of fun times to be had. Through them I joined LiveJournal and continued to explore the (often-murky) world of fanfiction. HP really was my first fandom and will likely always be my favorite. Despite all the wank and drama (which I loved to follow), it was an awesome community to feel part of.

From there I guess it was all down-hill? Shortly into my first year, my friend and later-roommate introduced me to the world of p2p sharing via DC++. Our school has a network hub where you could chat with other people and download their shared files. It was definitely not legal and very hidden from the school itself. It was through the hub that I managed to find a large chunk of my college friends. It was reckless and dangerous, but I went one night to a mysterious "movie night" with my roommate that a bunch of the guys (including the founder of the hub) would host on Friday nights in a grad student lounge. They remain some of my fondest memories of college... staying in that room watching movies until dawn started breaking and we all wandered tiredly back to our rooms to sleep the day away. Most people now you consider the idea of randomly doing that to be madness I suppose. Same with the night I wanted cookies.. and the person I'd been talking to on the hub for the past week offered to drive me to Big Y. Ah the days of being naive.

Anyway.... the hub opened up an entirely new community to me. I random joined the Otaku Anime Network on DC++ and had lots of late-night fun chatting with people from all over the world. I even reached the point of being made an admin on the network. It was also through OAN that I found my first chance at affection. Internet relationships are a sticky subject among people, and even now I realize that what I had with the other person wasn't really a relationship so much as playing at one. But it was an important turning point for me personally I suppose. I still go on OAN sometimes, but the age of direct connect is coming to a close and most of my close friends from the network have drifted apart over time.

Since then I've mostly drifted into the avatar forum community. I joined Gaia where I felt so utterly lost that I gave up for a while. Then I found a thread to post in that was full of fun intelligent and literate people. It's the only place I bother going on Gaia now. From there I found Menewsha.. and well.. we see where that's gotten me.

I feel like.. I had a point to all this. I guess I just think about it a lot because of my recent break-up. He dumped me on Christmas night and the next day was dating the girl he dumped me for. When we talked, he told me that he thought I had no personality outside of the internet.. which I thought was odd and also hurtful. In a way.. my interaction with the internet community, taken in combination with my everyday interactions with friends/etc IRL has shaped me into who I am today. All those stupid chances I took back in the early years of college have helped me be open to the idea of random interaction. Without that I would probably have never joined the lolita community here (of course without that he may never have met the other girl in the first place but shh). Maybe I would have never gone to my first anime convention. Who knows.

A lot of people don't get that I suppose. The friendships you make online can be just as lasting (or more) than those people you see face to face. It just depends on how much of yourself you're willing to put into it.

v_v This is turning way tl;dr so I will stop. I imagine that next time I blog it will be to think about the idea of me having no personality, according to someone who I still care about a great deal. I have a lot of thoughts about exactly what happened and it's honestly faster for me to type it out..

So yea.. feel free to comment if you made it through that. xD