Safety Lights Are For Dudes

Towards the end of the year 2000 I was working in a pub, and we had a regular customer who always came in after work, and sat in the corner with a book. We used to talk about books lots. He tended towards the SF&F; side of things, and was fun to chat to. One time he came in and the book he was reading had a bright red and yellow cover, and I said to him "isn't that a kid's book?" and he gave me the CS Lewis quote.

The book was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He lent me the first one in the series so I could check it out. I devoured it, immediately went out and bought the other three, devoured them, and then went on the internet to find like-minded people to talk to about it because OMG awesome books!

I found that the best Harry Potter forum was the Warner Bros one, because they were in the process of making a film of the first book. I found that there was a REALLY long thread about the actor they had cast as Snape, and I went to read it because I remembered him being the thing that'd made Robin Hood Prince of Thieves worth watching, and Snape was my favourite character in the book. It was titled "Anyone here like Alan Rickman?". The people on that thread were almost all women, and all witty and erudite and amazing. I registered and joined in. The thread got to 776 pages before the first time WB deleted us. We chatted about Alan's films, but we also ficced and RPed, all on one great big long thread on a forum. Eventually, after the WB had deleted us a few more times - for reasons I can absolutely understand, looking back - we went and set up our own forum...

Without Alan Rickman:

• I would not have met all the amazing people who populated that thread on the WB, some of whom are still friends 15 years later.
• I wouldn't have my screenname.
• I would not have learned code to set up that website and forum.
• My ex wouldn't have got involved in setting up internet communities, which is how he now makes his living.
• I wouldn't have migrated from forums to Livejournal at the suggestion of missdiane, would never have started blogging, would never have met matgb.
• If I hadn't met matgb I would never have become a Lib Dem.
• matgb and I would never have started The Alan Rickman List, or if we had, in the vanishingly small set of circumstances that we had met and fallen in love anyway, it would probably be called the Sue Perkins list.
• Without becoming a Lib Dem, I wouldn't have met amazing people like sassyscot and the Divine Ms Duffett, and Alisdair.
• anisiriusmagus and I wouldn't have got chatting about other films (I'd never have met her), wouldn't have decided to watch Tales From The Crypt together one night, wouldn't have gone in search of like-minded Zombie Mr Grimsdyke fans, wouldn't have found the BHF, and wouldn't have met her current partner or magister.
• I would never have RPed, never have publicly ficced, never have gone in search of fandom communities for other stuff I liked, without first having had the experience of that first, one, amazing fandom community.
• I wouldn't be here. None of you reading this would be reading it.

You might well think that Alan Rickman therefore has quite a lot to answer for. I think that my life would have been unrecognisable today if it hadn't been for Alan Rickman.

So, yeah, Bowie going earlier this week was devastating. This? This is worse. It's going to take me a while to process. But I'm so totally going to watch Galaxy Quest tonight.

And, you know, if after Lemmy and Bowie and Rickman you've had enough: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/support-us/donate - give what you can.