Blog beginnings

I'm remembering the times when I got to surf the net almost regularly. That was the time when we finally bought a PC and promptly hooked it up with a dial-up internet connection. I saw through the TechTV channel (too bad it disappeared from our cable soon after) about fans of shows like Dawson's Creek (this was the 'in' show at that time) rewriting the episodes to suit their specific tastes. The site was fanfiction.net. One even killed off either Pacey or Joey in a Joey-Pacey ship (that last term I only came to know about two years ago). Popularly known as fanfiction, or fanfic for short, that's the most extreme thing to being a fan of something I've ever heard of at that time.

So off I went to discover the site. Of course, there was a time when I tried to watch Dawson's Creek, so I tried to look at the DC fanfics first. But since I never got to watch the whole series, or even see the pivotal points in the story, I don't think I found a story that would tempt me. I don't know what happened next, but the next thing I remember is going through the Yu Yu Hakusho (locally known as Ghostfighter) fanfics, and I was shocked that there were plenty depicting Hiei and Kurama in romantic tussles and/or relationships (Vincent and Dennis, respectively, for the Pinoy viewers). Since I also hadn't watched the whole series, I wondered how both of them were depicted so as to inspire these storylines and fanarts (yes, I did come across some, but not on the site). And so goes my introduction to yaoi. Yes, m'dears. Wait... 

Now back up just one moment. I remember now... The first story I read at FF.net, and one which I printed at that, was between Max and Kyle Valenti of Roswell (another show I was interested in around those times, ca 2000). I just chose one at random, not bothering with the rating (I believe at that time, FF.net still allowed mature stories rated NC-17, which eventually were booted out because they prohibited stories which would merit mature ratings), and I guess the short summary didn't hint at anything either. So imagine my surprise when Kyle and Max (who, during the earlier seasons, aren't exactly the best of friends) started getting it on in the school bathroom. I was shocked of course. Repulsed also, probably. But I guess the novelty of what I was reading prevented me from stopping reading it. It was later on that I would know that I found out the name for what I was reading , gleaned from later encounters with anime yaoi fanfics. So there's my introduction to an entirely different world, nonexistent in my usual TV viewing.

Then I stumbled across the Slam Dunk fanfics. I would bet there's an equal number of yaoi fanfics and fanfics where the male characters acted as males all throughout the story. Which is how I got addicted to reading romantic fanfics. Most of the ones I've read revolve around Rukawa Kaede. Mitsui Hisashi comes second. I especially like Rukawa x OC (own character) stories because he was quite impenetrable, and I was amazed at how these writers got him to star in his own romance story. Whether it's chipping off the icy facade revealing a hurt past, or that one girl which would make him talk in complete sentences - I had fun reading those. And there are a lot of guys from four different teams. One writer even had a fanfic ongoing for each one of them - sadly, she didn't get to finish everything. But I love the one she wrote about Rukawa (the only complete fanfic I ever printed, and which is missing as of the moment) and its sequel. I just loved seeing their characters doing things besides playing basketball and competing with each other. (Other fun discoveries where Hermione Granger x Draco Malfoy stories :D) And here I discovered Filipina fanfic writers. On their profile pages, they placed the urls of their blogs. I saw two of those and they were appended with .blogspot.com after the name of the blog.

Before this, I came across a personal site by a Filipino teenager also, named Le Cafe Bleue. She had a sort of journal, a few short stories still in progress and some other stuff. She had different sites under that one name. The design of the website was, I believe, conceptualized by her, since it seemed personally made to me and different from the other sites I've been viewing. So there she is, an anonymous writer and web geek (she knew HTML and CSS and other sorts of cool stuff), and the bloggers writing fanfics. I think they set the impetus for me to set up my own blog, and remaining semi-anonymous until today, when website domains containing the users' own names are the norm.

I've been trying to keep a diary as early as grade four, so it was no surprise to me that I would use my blog as an online diary, since that was how blogs were used back then. Now, when I started blogging in May 2004, there were a number of domains to choose from (I searched the net for choices and even went through the tours). One of the more popular ones was livejournal. Another was blogdrive. But I wanted a url where my name would be placed before the host site, much like how blogger urls are. LJ didn't have that so it was out. Blogdrive and blogger were the only ones who satisfied the criteria, but the blogdrive blogs I have come across had boring-looking themes. Hence this blog that is now 5 years old still retains the url it started with.

There is still anonymity in the net. But I like to think back to those times where I think anonymity truly reigned, social networking was still to be conceptualized and you can't find anything if you search yourself on yahoo or google unless you're really famous (like the stuff encyclopedias are made of) - a time when things were generally simpler, online and offline. I guess that's why I'm still sticking to this blog and this url, as a reminder of the old days - my continuing fascination with writing, and having a little corner all your own on the vast out there that is the World Wide Web.