After seven years, I'm restoring this page to its original state.

Earlier online versions have padded out Ferd and Hunt's exchange, making things a bit clearer but also dragging them out:

SIEFERT: Bogus. Fandom isn't divisive. It's a community, a meta-city founded a trivial like of a certain TV show and moving on to... (slight pause) to other points of commonality.

VERMITH: Good man, that is the point! There can be only one community in this land! We had a name for another isolationist community, back in the day. We called it the Confed'racy. My great-grandfather, though it pains me to say it, was wrong to segregate then, and you are wrong to do it now!

SIEFERT: (rubbing his temples, as if his glasses were chafing him): Ow. The Civil War is a bad comparison. Many people consider themselves... um... Democrats or Republicans, but they're all still Americans...

VERMITH: But this independent candidate wonders if they know it!

10:47 PM

VERMITH: These hackers, these Yahoo-breakers, are they disgruntled Kosovans, guerilla Iraqis? No! They are religious fanatics who worship their own cleverness!

SIEFERT: (massaging an intense migraine): I... I had a point...

Hunt Siefert's name is a fusion of two Science Fiction Club presidents, Hunter Keeton and Chris Siefert. There, the similarity ends: his personality is based on an older sort of science-fiction fan. "Actifandom" was a term with real currency as late as the 1990s, although its real heyday was the 1970s.

Looking back on this, a lot of my ideas about fandom were dated even by 1997.