When My Past Returns to Haunt Me...
Jul. 30th, 2004 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterYou know the end of "Cat's in the Cradle" where the father realizes his son has grown up just like him? Or the end of "Jukebox Hero" where the rock-fan-turned-rock-star "passed his own shadow by the backstage door"? I just had something happen that gave me a similar feeling.
But first I need to fill in some background...so let's go back several eons in Internet time and about 40 lbs of body weight to a young college student who was turned loose onto the Internet for the first time back in 1992. (At that time we had to get a faculty or staff member to sign a release to let us get on-line, and the only thing we non-computer-science peons could use was a VM/CMS mainframe system to access it. Ah, how times have changed.) Revelling in the sudden ability to connect to like-minded individuals across the globe, taking part in a virtual community of all the people who liked the same things I did, I plunged deeply into on-line Robotech fandom. I wrote some of the first Robotech fanfic stories on the Internet, I debated various points on the Robotech mailing list...and, along with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
genchaos and Dave Deitrich, wrote a fan supplement for the lackluster Palladium Robotech RPG, chronicling some periods and settings that the RPG itself didn't cover.
Those were the glory days of Robotech fandom, back when the animation division of Harmony Gold was still in deep hibernation and an official Robotech site was just a pipe dream, so if we wanted new Robotech stuff we had to do it ourselves. There were dozens of people on the Robotech mailing list and FidoNet Echo, it was incredibly active, and a fun time was had by all discussing various incidents on the show, speculating on technological aspects, and so on. There was even a Robotech convention (I wish I'd gotten to go).
I was a different person back then. I suppose being able to write messages that could be seen by hundreds or thousands of people was still so new to me, it had gone to my head. I was very, shall we say, anal...I wanted adaptations to reflect the source material perfectly, and it was a source of continuing irritation to me that neither the Robotech RPG nor the novels accurately reflected the content of the Robotech TV show. Why, all you had to do was watch the Robotech TV show to see some of the contradictions.
Nor was this confined just to Robotech. I'm sure that I drovez_gryphon to distraction with, for instance, my insistence that the bridges of the Star Trek ships that were adapted for Undocumented Features should hew exactly to the design as shown in the Star Trek: the Next Generation Tech Manual, whereas he had changes he wanted to make.
But everything comes to an end; sooner or later all the discussions had just about been discussed out. With nothing new to talk about, minor disagreements and irritations magnified into flamewars, the list split, then fell into disuse. Many Robotech fans (such as Dave Deitrich and to an extent myself) stopped being active in the fandom altogether as we graduated from college, found day jobs, and so on. The Robotech list is still there, withninjarat as the list-admin, and the split-off Robotech Cantina list is, too, but they get very little traffic these days.
I've become a bit more mellow over the years; I accept that the Robotech RPG and novel people were doing the best they could with what little they had to work with at the time. As were Dave Deitrich,genchaos, and I when we wrote that fan-supplement—particularly when I decided to do a writeup of some of the Garland/MODAT mechabikes from Megazone 23 Parts I (which became Robotech: The Movie), II, and III (neither of which had any real relation to Robotech, but the mecha were neat). What we had were our memories, fansubs, Robotech Art III, and a sheaf of photocopies of Japanese sketches provided by Robotech research maven Peter Walker. Naturally, what we came up with wasn't going to be completely accurate—but like the Robotech RPG itself, it was a fair approximation.
Anyway, that was all ten years or more ago, and has largely faded into the back of my mind where I don't think about it much anymore. But yesterday (well, actually several weeks ago, but I didn't find it until I shovelled the spam out of my inbox) I received an email—three emails, actually: a main text and two P.S.es—nitpicking my Garland writeup for unfaithfulness to the anime in great and exacting detail. I am not exaggerating when I say that letter took me to task for literally everything down to the color of the paint!
At first I was taken aback, and a little irritated. But after a few moments I began to see the humor in the situation. If it had been me ten years ago, I would have written exactly that sort of letter. Who knows, perhaps I even did write such a missive to Palladium chastising them for their inaccuracies; I can't remember now. At any rate, this was so much like receiving a letter from my own ten-years-younger self that I just couldn't stop laughing. The fact that the fellow's email address showed he was a big fan of Transformers: Masterforce, a Japanese Transformers series of which I am also a fan, only made the whole thing spookier.
In my response, I told the guy that I couldn't rebut him point by point because I honestly couldn't even remember why we made whatever changes we made, but we did the best we could at the time. I also suggested that since he knew more about the Megazone anime mecha than we did, perhaps he could revise the information to be more accurate. There's certainly no way I would ever be doing it, since it's all faded out of my memory.
In the end, I forwarded the guy's email and my response on to Dave Deitrich, and then called him on the phone and talked for a while. We hadn't spoken in some time, and it was a fun conversation. And I'll be watching my email to see if the Masterforce fan replies.
But first I need to fill in some background...so let's go back several eons in Internet time and about 40 lbs of body weight to a young college student who was turned loose onto the Internet for the first time back in 1992. (At that time we had to get a faculty or staff member to sign a release to let us get on-line, and the only thing we non-computer-science peons could use was a VM/CMS mainframe system to access it. Ah, how times have changed.) Revelling in the sudden ability to connect to like-minded individuals across the globe, taking part in a virtual community of all the people who liked the same things I did, I plunged deeply into on-line Robotech fandom. I wrote some of the first Robotech fanfic stories on the Internet, I debated various points on the Robotech mailing list...and, along with
genchaos and Dave Deitrich, wrote a fan supplement for the lackluster Palladium Robotech RPG, chronicling some periods and settings that the RPG itself didn't cover.Those were the glory days of Robotech fandom, back when the animation division of Harmony Gold was still in deep hibernation and an official Robotech site was just a pipe dream, so if we wanted new Robotech stuff we had to do it ourselves. There were dozens of people on the Robotech mailing list and FidoNet Echo, it was incredibly active, and a fun time was had by all discussing various incidents on the show, speculating on technological aspects, and so on. There was even a Robotech convention (I wish I'd gotten to go).
I was a different person back then. I suppose being able to write messages that could be seen by hundreds or thousands of people was still so new to me, it had gone to my head. I was very, shall we say, anal...I wanted adaptations to reflect the source material perfectly, and it was a source of continuing irritation to me that neither the Robotech RPG nor the novels accurately reflected the content of the Robotech TV show. Why, all you had to do was watch the Robotech TV show to see some of the contradictions.
Nor was this confined just to Robotech. I'm sure that I drove
z_gryphon to distraction with, for instance, my insistence that the bridges of the Star Trek ships that were adapted for Undocumented Features should hew exactly to the design as shown in the Star Trek: the Next Generation Tech Manual, whereas he had changes he wanted to make.But everything comes to an end; sooner or later all the discussions had just about been discussed out. With nothing new to talk about, minor disagreements and irritations magnified into flamewars, the list split, then fell into disuse. Many Robotech fans (such as Dave Deitrich and to an extent myself) stopped being active in the fandom altogether as we graduated from college, found day jobs, and so on. The Robotech list is still there, with
ninjarat as the list-admin, and the split-off Robotech Cantina list is, too, but they get very little traffic these days.I've become a bit more mellow over the years; I accept that the Robotech RPG and novel people were doing the best they could with what little they had to work with at the time. As were Dave Deitrich,
genchaos, and I when we wrote that fan-supplement—particularly when I decided to do a writeup of some of the Garland/MODAT mechabikes from Megazone 23 Parts I (which became Robotech: The Movie), II, and III (neither of which had any real relation to Robotech, but the mecha were neat). What we had were our memories, fansubs, Robotech Art III, and a sheaf of photocopies of Japanese sketches provided by Robotech research maven Peter Walker. Naturally, what we came up with wasn't going to be completely accurate—but like the Robotech RPG itself, it was a fair approximation.Anyway, that was all ten years or more ago, and has largely faded into the back of my mind where I don't think about it much anymore. But yesterday (well, actually several weeks ago, but I didn't find it until I shovelled the spam out of my inbox) I received an email—three emails, actually: a main text and two P.S.es—nitpicking my Garland writeup for unfaithfulness to the anime in great and exacting detail. I am not exaggerating when I say that letter took me to task for literally everything down to the color of the paint!
At first I was taken aback, and a little irritated. But after a few moments I began to see the humor in the situation. If it had been me ten years ago, I would have written exactly that sort of letter. Who knows, perhaps I even did write such a missive to Palladium chastising them for their inaccuracies; I can't remember now. At any rate, this was so much like receiving a letter from my own ten-years-younger self that I just couldn't stop laughing. The fact that the fellow's email address showed he was a big fan of Transformers: Masterforce, a Japanese Transformers series of which I am also a fan, only made the whole thing spookier.
In my response, I told the guy that I couldn't rebut him point by point because I honestly couldn't even remember why we made whatever changes we made, but we did the best we could at the time. I also suggested that since he knew more about the Megazone anime mecha than we did, perhaps he could revise the information to be more accurate. There's certainly no way I would ever be doing it, since it's all faded out of my memory.
In the end, I forwarded the guy's email and my response on to Dave Deitrich, and then called him on the phone and talked for a while. We hadn't spoken in some time, and it was a fun conversation. And I'll be watching my email to see if the Masterforce fan replies.
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Date: 2004-07-30 08:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 08:43 pm (UTC)