Four Old Fans · 4:00am Jan 27th, 2015
FIRST FAN: Yes, very passable, that--very passable bit of AppleDash.
SECOND FAN: Nothing like a good spot of Twilestia, eh, Josiah?
THIRD FAN: You’re right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH FAN: Who’d have thought four years ago we’d all be sitting here reading Twilestia fanfic, eh?
FIRST FAN: In those days, we were happy to have any story.
SECOND FAN: A short story.
FOURTH FAN: Without tension or character development.
THIRD FAN: Or plot.
FIRST FAN: Written on old typewriters and all.
FOURTH FAN: Oh, we never had typewriters. We used to have to read each others’ handwriting.
SECOND FAN: The best we could manage was to listen to each other on HAM radio.
THIRD FAN: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we had no fics.
FIRST FAN: Because we had no fics! My old Dad used to say to me, “Headcanon doesn’t buy you happiness, son”.
FOURTH FAN: Aye, he was right.
FIRST FAN: Aye, he was.
FOURTH FAN: I was happier then, and I’d read nothing. We used to go on EQD between episodes.
SECOND FAN: EQD! You were lucky to have EQD. We used to post stories on fanfiction.net. All twenty-six of us, no commenters, yelling stories into the void.
THIRD FAN: Eh, you were lucky to have fanfiction.net. We used to have to pass google docs links on message boards.
FIRST FAN: Oh, we used to dream of having google docs. Would have been a playground to us. We used to post stories on 4chan. We got woke up every morning by having our threads deleted. EQD? Huh.
FOURTH FAN: Well, when I say ‘EQD’, it was just an old Geocities page someone had put up for Gen2 ponies, but it was a fansite to us.
SECOND FAN: Our Geocities page was deleted. We had to go and read a licensed book.
THIRD FAN: You were lucky to have a licensed book! There were a hundred and fifty of us passing a fanzine around.
FIRST FAN: Xeroxed?
THIRD FAN: Aye.
FIRST FAN: You were lucky. We had to copy out our fanzines by hand. We used to have to write it out in our school notebooks, fish it out of the toilet after the football players dumped it, seven hours a day, week-in, week-out, and when we sent it off nobody would give us feedback at all.
SECOND FAN: Luxury. We used to have to calligraphy our fanzines—twenty copies!—before sending them out in the mail, and when we got done we’d get hate mail, if we were lucky.
THIRD FAN: Well, of course, we had it tough. We didn’t get mail, so to get our fanzines, we had to drive five hundred miles to the convention once a year, beg a man in a Klingon costume for permission to look, memorize the page, and read it from our heads once we managed to get home if we didn't run out of gas.
FOURTH FAN: Right. I had to get up early on the first day of holidays, swim across the Atlantic Ocean, hitchhike to Los Angeles, sift through the Paramount studio trash for discarded script pitches, and eat them to get them through customs on the way back. And then we’d be stuffed head-first into the toilet in our lockers by the soccer players while the local writer’s workshop danced about in our English classroom singing Hallelujah.
FIRST FAN: And you try and tell the young fans of today that… they won’t believe you.
ALL: They won’t!
This is pretty much the story of no one ever.
I like it!
I need to be able to upvote blog posts.
2750063
This happened because someone in an IRC channel was talking about refreshing FimFiction 20 times a day for new content, and I had to shake my fan-cane at him and tell him about when I'd read every 5 and 6 star story on EQD and about half the 4-stars. I reminded myself of this Monty Python sketch, and that was that.
Ah. Well, the more you know.
Also, in an inappropriately cheerful tone that will annoy everyone, FIRST!
I love you.
2750105
I know.
I could do without being frozen in carbonite and hung on Bad Horse's wall, though.
2750111
See you this summer?
2750116
Assuming they are all Not Jerks and let SPark in to vend, our schedule is BABScon, Everfree, and BronyCon, so yes.
Bring your own Sarlacc pit.
At least they closed down that one website that promised fics but never actually had any. Especially not any involving Cheese Sandwich. And don't get me started on the music they embedded into the site.
2750065 Me too.
Technically not a Monty Python sketch, at least not originally. But I only found that out myself relatively recently, so I'll forgive that inaccuracy.
It was originally written and performed on the At Last The 1948 Show, which included John Cleese and Graham Chapman in their cast. Monty Python later started performing it at live shows.