I mades you a fandom but I eated it.

Okay, dammit. thirtysomefic. Live it learn it love it. Pimp it or I will probably kill you. Join it or I will make people write you weird e-mails. Write thirtysomething fic or I will have you boiled alive in a huge pot of water!

Okay, I take all that back. But seriously. SERIOUSLY. Even if you don't want to write thirtysomething fic, still join! Even if you don't join, pimp! Even if you don't know a thing about the show thirtysomething (ABC, 1987-1990), your friends MIGHT! So send them over! thirtysomefic!

There's even an inaugural fic challenge. You could write me drabbles. You could love me. You could help!

Look, dude, I started a community and will hopefully proceed to start a fandom and fic blitz! It worked for scrubsfic -- when I started that comm there were three Scrubs fics to the internet's name, and hardly ANY porn. And now, just look! There's like a million members and it's like it was always there, just born fully formed as a fandom. And we can do it AGAIN!

So, again. Thirtysomething. It was, like, this TV show. By the guys who later went on to make things like the movie Glory and the shows My So-Called Life and Once and Again. It won tons of awards and was pretty much sheer genius for the four years it was on, capturing the rise of yuppiedom in the face of AIDS, liberal politics, family, kids, queers, romance, advertising, art, marketing, photography, extramarital affairs, a house under constant renovation, cancer, death, anxiety, and therapy. It starred people who are A-listers in film and television today, and its entire cast has pretty much gone on to join tv show staffs as award winning directors and guest stars. There is nothing about thirtysomethign that is NOT AWESOME, except its lack of fannish presence.

So, thirtysomefic? No, for REALS, I will pay you MONEY.

I'm going to pimp the hell out of this thing all weekend. Please, you also do said?

and dance by the light of the moon

Okay, I am embarking on a massive undertaking in an attempt to bring thirtysomething to the people. I have these DVDs that were made by someone who had recorded the episodes off of their Lifetime rerun airings, and assembled these onto DVDs with interactive menus, four episodes at a time, for 24 dvds total.

So, first, do you have a favorite DVD-to-avi ripping program that allows you to select individual episodes or chapters off an episodic DVD and rename them into individual .avis? I am currently using Aimersoft DVD Ripper, which does all those things quite splendidly but also outputs the avis with these weird bars on the sides. I'm figuring there's an option I can choose to get rid of the bars, but I am always up for trying new software. Those of you who have ripped shows from DVDs to avi, what have you used? Was it fast? Intuitive? Expensive?

Also, the guy who made these DVDs I'm using left off the episode titles on many of the discs, and didn't indicate episode number or season at all, so for that I'm cross-referencing with a Thirtysomething episode guide, and when all of this is done, I hope to have the entire 87 episodes of thirtysomething, broken down by season, in individual episode .avis, for youuuuuuuuu.

Your mission, should I survive and this task be completed, is to WATCH this show, to love it and share it with me.

This may take quite some time, but I'm committed to the task and will have this show available to you, STAT. Watch this space.

what if they threw a fandom and nobody came?

For those who have never seen "thirtysomething," are curious about "thirtysomething," or simply like polls, a poll:

( this show that was on in the late 80s and never came out on DVD )