shipperx | Hee! Fanfic Lasts Forever

Or at least over a decade. A discussion over on TWOP brought to mind the very first fanfic I ever became involved in. It was a group effort in the mid-nineties called Alternative Days (I didn't become involved until somewhere around the fiftieth or sixtieth episode). I got a laugh at how antiquated and naive the whole endeavor was. And I got a kick at how damn slow the net was in those days that the "webspinner" (who I don't think I ever knew. I was fairly limited to only writing a few characters in the story) was concerned about there being no graphics on the site so that it would download faster. (I remember those days. It was something less than 15,000 baud!)

Get a load of the intro:

Last updated: May 29, 1996

ALT.DAYS is an ALTernative version of NBC's "Days of Our Lives" and has been in production since April of 1993. It is based on many of the NBC show's characters but the storylines are original and have nothing to do with present (or future) episodes of the broadcast show.

The web page made its debut in April of 1995 when it became patently obvious to me (the ALT.DAYS web spinner) that there was a desperate need for a public archive for this fine effort.

An attempt has been made to limit the number of images utilized in these documents so there should be little delay when loading the pages.

Every effort has been made to use the same (standardized) layout for each episode but there's no way to anticpate every contingency so please be patient if things don't look as you expect them to.

A final comment about the "coolness" of the graphics on the ALT.DAYS page. It has been suggested that the ALT.DAYS page would be "better" if it was more visually appealing. I have toyed with the idea of adding backgrounds and fancy-schmancy navigation buttons or image maps to these pages. But, frankly, I'm against the idea of adding a lot of graphics for two main reasons. First, it goes back to the history of ALT.DAYS. It started out in the land of Usenet. Usenet is a land of ASCII-based graphics. The logo you see at the top of each episode is derived from the ASCII logo that appears at the top of each episode when it is posted to Usenet. I rather like having the tie-back to the history of this fine effort. And, second, bandwidth considrations are important to me. Each episode of ALT.DAYS already takes long enough to download without adding graphics that add nothing to the content of the episodes into the equation. The "meat" of ALT.DAYS is the text. And, I want to keep it that way.

Heh. Antiquated fanfic. Who knew it would be around so long to haunt us with its cheesiness.