Meets

alt.fan.pratchett

This is my page about the newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett, hereafter known as AFP. There are lots of web pages about AFP; they've all pretty much said all there is, generally, to be said about AFP. I'm not going to duplicate them. This is not merely a page about AFP; this is my page about AFP. But first of all, links to things that other people have said about AFP:

L-Space Web: alt.fan.pratchett
What Is AFP?

AFP is a newsgroup. If you don't know what that is, don't worry. I didn't either when I discovered AFP.

MHC has a sort of weird approach to newsgroups, I think. In Pine, the standard email program, everyone is automagically subscribed to a certain set of local newsgroups like mhc.announce and mhc.chat. They're arranged right next to the INBOX in the layout of folders (unlike the rest of the newsgroups, which are down at the bottom; I don't know why). So one procrastinating day towards the end of November 1999 I decided to explore the innards of Pine and found the "add newsgroups" option. Not knowing any or, indeed, what a newsgroup was, I asked for the whole list and spent many hours of amusement poring through the entire selection of my college's news server.

Many of the newsgroups I found were subsequently discarded because of inanity, overwhelming spam, or disinterest; however, AFP (and its companion pratchett-groups) became the only newsgroups which I read regularly. I managed to fit in there relatively easily; even though I neither read the FAQs nor lurked even an hour after subscription, I didn't get even one "hi, welcome, have some chocolate" email. I found an interesting thread (about foreigners speaking French in France, iirc) and posted. I was already used to quoting and trimming text, and I avoided the faux pas of forgetting to tag (see the Tagging FAQ) by following up in the middle of a thread.

As time went on, I kept hearing people talk about this thing called "usenet," and I read the FAQs and gained a little more clue as well as recognition in the group, until in January (might have been February) Miq made my week by referring to me as a "Known and Respected Poster."

The rest is history... in the past couple of years there have been only occasional periods when I didn't read the group. I 've gradually become more and more involved with the group; I have quite a few friends through its influence, and last year meeting one of them, Kevin (Caomhin on the group) in the flesh led to a more... shall we say... personal relationship.

AFPers tend to get together every once in a while; these occasions are called AFPmeets, and I attended several while in Europe. In addition, I've volunteered to organize an AFParty meet in 2002. My page about it is here.

On the technological front, but still related to meets, I and two other AFPers are taking over the maintenance of the meets page. I get to learn CVS and other fun stuff. Yay!

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