LJ-versary

Just a run-by post before heading out the door -- I am doing two back-to-back craft/pop culture shows with ellenmillion today through Sunday (SO MUCH ORNAMENT PAINTING) -- but I realized that today is my 10-year Livejournal anniversary!

I got this journal on Nov. 6, 2005. When I first noticed last summer that this was going to be the 10th year, I meant to do something special for it. Then I got busy, and busier, and spent most of October being ill, and all of a sudden it's the 6th and ... I have to be staffing a table in a couple of hours. >_>

But still, I figured I needed to pop in and say a little something about it. This wasn't the first Livejournal I got; the other, my real-name journal, was the one I considered my main one for a long time. This one was just for posting fanfic. But over the years I realized that nearly everyone I actually wanted to talk to was here -- all I did with the other one anyway was post Alaska photos and project updates, which I am now doing here -- and the handful of people from the other journal that I wanted to stay in touch with (and didn't think would look down on me for my fan activities) I told about this one, so I really only update the other a couple times a year, and there's nothing I post there that I don't post here.

The reason why I got this journal in 2005 was because I was starting to do fandom stuff again, after a dry spell. I wrote a TON of anime fanfic in the early 2000s, then got out of it in the 2003/2004 time frame. I moved to a new city, I was starting a new job and buying a house, I was super busy ALL the time, and I'd also managed to convince myself that in order to be a ~serious writer~, I needed to knock off this fanfic crap. (Pretty much ALL the pro writers I knew at the time believed that; I didn't know anybody who openly did both.) Then, with the original-writing thing going nowhere, I started falling back into it, a little bit at a time, and I got this journal just to have a place to put that kind of thing if there turned out to be anything to post. This journal was called "friendshipper" then, and my very first post here was basically "I have no idea what I'm going to do with this journal". (And sounds so ridiculously young to me now; omg, self.) I think the only fandom person I knew who was on LJ then was xparrot, having met her via ff.net.

.... aaaaand then I got back into Stargate (an old love, that I fell away from for several years), and got bit by the fanfic bug again in 2006. In retrospect I'm glad I fell into a big fandom right away, because it meant my journal started getting active pretty quickly -- people friended me, and I friended them, and I started learning proper LJ social etiquette and talking to people a lot. And over the next few years this journal became my main online hangout and social hub. Many, if not most, of my closest friends now are friends I made through LJ -- and DW, which I'm really not considering a separate thing here, since it was a social offshoot of LJ in the first place, and my flist/circle were almost 100% the same people in the beginning. (It's since differentiated quite a bit.) It hasn't all been roses, and there have been ups and downs, but I have had SO MUCH FUN here, and I know I wouldn't be the same person today without it. I wouldn't have met most of the people I cherish now, or have had a lot of the opportunities I've had.

So thank you for being here, and most especially for STILL being here, even as the fandom/blogging/social media world is shuffling off to Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook and even weirder places. I am in all of those places too, but LJ/DW is still where my hat is hung. I'm very glad you're all still here to talk to. ♥