Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Katherine G. Speaks, Part I
I was astonished and quite pleased to receive a message from Katherine Goodman a couple of days ago, out of the blue -- Ms. Goodman located the 2005 Excellence in Daria Fandom Nominees List (seen at the left) and felt compelled to respond. I have permission from Ms. Goodman to post both a mail she sent me, and the reply e-mail to a follow-up mail I sent her back.
For those of you who aren't aware of Ms. Goodman, she was the manager of alt.lawndale.com, which is probably the earliest premiere one-stop-shop / message board of Daria fandom from its earliest days. I'll let Ms. Goodman speak now, and I'll post the reply e-mail tomorrow sometime.
Hi there! I wonder, is contact from a dead fandom "legend" like receiving an email from beyond the digital grave?
As you no doubt could figure out from the name in your email headers, I'm Katherine Goodman, of the long-departed alt.lawndale.com. I found your email through the "2005 Excellence in Daria Fandom Awards" which my father found when he Googled my name. Ah, the days before internet pseudonyms and privacy concerns. I'd never use my real name on a public website now or publish the amount of information that I did back in the old days.
I read that I was nominated for your awards and smiled quite bemusedly. I'm not surprised that people from the old days of Daria fandom are still around but am a bit amazed that some of them still remember who I am. Then again, since then I've been involved in anime fandom in varying capacities and some of the old fans from the early 1990s are still remembered and even participating in said fandom. What a strange little online world it is. I'm amused and horrified by the continued existence of alt.lawndale.com (via the Internet Archive) and of that fanfiction that I wrote back in the day ... I can't bring myself to read the fanfiction, but going through the site brings back a slew of memories. *laugh* All those names of the others that were nominated! Man, I remember all of them except the very last one. Such nostalgia ...
In case you care, I'll clarify some of your information about a.l.c.:
1) I was a high school student at the time. It amazes me, when I think back on it, that I was as young as I was when I did all of that.
2) alt.lawndale.com opened (on geocities) and was operational from mid-April 1997 (a couple of weeks after the premiere of Daria, I believe) and was updated religiously through the end of May 1998. Coincidentally or not-so-coincidentally, the site fell into stagnation as I was preparing to start college. I was still somewhat active in the fandom for a bit longer, albeit as an extremely angsty, unpleasant college freshman. alt.lawndale.com was live but not being updated through about January or February 1999, when I finally closed it down.
3) MTV was actually in regular correspondence with me during my tenure as webmaster of a.l.c. I exchanged emails with at least two different MTV marketing representatives as well as Glenn Eichler, Alvaro Gonzalez, and probably a couple of other names that I'm forgetting. When MTV ran its "Daria Day" promotion for Season 2 of the show (on February 16, 1998) they asked me to advertise the "Ask Daria Questions" segment on my site, since I'm fairly certain that a.l.c. was getting more traffic from the fans than MTV's official site was. (They sent me some merchandise and let me ask a question of my own as compensation. Somehow I doubt such a progression of events would take place nowadays ...)
3a) I can't say for sure if Glenn Eichler was a fan of the site - but we did correspond several times, so I know that he was aware of it at the very least. If he was a fan of the site, that's pretty awesome. :).
4) I did co-author "Ragged Denim". I had started reading anime slash fanfiction and was heavy into that niche of fandom at the time, and I think that my co-author and I wanted to send a shockwave through the slowly burgeoning fandom by writing a slash story between Trent and Jesse. That was one of my final, if not my last, "contributions" to Daria fandom. I am also amused that the story is considered "infamous" - from what I remember of it (silk shirts and Morrissey lyrics?!) it was pretty infamously bad. *grin*
Anyway, sorry to ramble on - though as I'm sure you can tell from reading the remnants of a.l.c., brevity has never been my strong suit. I just thought I'd drop you a line ...
# posted by James @ 8:00 AM 
