Blast from the past department

Back in the late 80s, when I was hanging out on bitnet relay and searching for information on gopher and subscribing to listservs, I was a sometime-reader of something called the Dargon project, an early shared world writing project and one of the earliest electronic webzines. The Dargon project had already been around for a while by then, four or five years. I sort of kind of learned the (fairly generic) universe; I sort of kind of came up with a few characters; and I even went so far as to write a Dargon story, one of the first stories I actually managed to finish (finishing stories was a major issue for me in those days).

I never did send the story to them. In retrospect, it was not very good, though it was not quite horrid. I think on some level I knew this, but didn’t yet know how to fix such things, which may be why I never actually submitted it. Instead I put the story aside, and got distracted by trying to write professionally, and never went back to it. The draft occasionally shows up in various rounds of office cleaning. I’m always startled I still have it; but I never quite seem to want to throw it away, either.

At any rate, I was startled today to find the DargonZine web site. (ETA: not to mention dargonzine_feed) Apparently the Dargon project has been going strong for twenty years now. More power to them.

And yeah, when I look at the late-80s issues, they do seem faintly familiar. For the ascii versions in particular, the flashback effect is much like that of listening to certain bits of 80s music.

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