Nobody special, really. I'm a
B5 fan who started watching when I could find the show during the summer reruns in the first season at the urging of a friend. I started watching regularly during the original run of the second series and discovered "The Lurker's Guide" and the Compuserve SF Media Fourm (where JMS used to post all the time) around the same time. Not long after that I found The Station and other
B5-related sites, and even joined the fan club, something I hadn't done since I was a member of the "Merry Marvel Marching Society" about 25 years before.
I've been interested in the nuts and bolts of the TV biz since reading Gene Roddenberry and Stephen E. Whitfield's
The Making of Star Trek when the original series was still on the air. I later had a chance to have a private chat with Gene for about 40 minutes late one night after a
Trek convention in New York. (The rest of the convention committee and the volunteers at the wrap party were in the next room listening to William Shatner tell war stories. Gene was left alone in a corner of the Con suite, apparently unnoticed, and not minding it a bit. He was sipping a drink and reading a magazine when I found him.)
Gene R. was very nice about answering my questions, and after that I started reading everything I could about the biz. Over the years this interest (and my participation on the internet) has led to pen-pal friendships and even a few personal meetings with folks in the industry or related businesses (like advertising) and therefore to the odd scrap of genuine inside information.
But mostly what I know has come from other fans.
B5 has been the topic of internet talk going on ten years now, and many of the questions that new fans come up with have been hashed out repeatedly over the years, often with input from JMS when the show was still in production. (He's been less of a presence on the 'net in recent years, having had to put up with some truly horrendous crap including virus attacks, cyber- and physical stalking, and various permutations of slander and libel. He only stuck around through the full five years of production on
B5 because he had promised in the beginning that he would, and he keeps his promises.)
He has recently resurfaced on Compuserve (because somebody asked where the heck he has been for the past few months) but mostly he posts to the moderated newsgroup (where there is some measure of control and the genuine trolls and crazies can be weeded out.) He has also been known to lurk on fan sites, although he runs at the first sight of story ideas of fan fiction.
Over the years we have exchanged a few private e-mails, but I can't claim a real acquaintance with the man. I suppose that if someone mentioned my name he might recognize it, but that's about it. I've only ever e-mailed him when there was something I thought he should know about that I didn't want to publicize on the 'net. That doesn't come up very often.
The only time he has ever initiated an e-mail exchange was when some clown on the old TNT
B5 site posted a libelous message about JMS and Chris Carter (alledging that Fox and Carter were suing JMS and Warner Bros. for copyright infringement over the
Crusade episode, "Visitors from Down the Street.") The guy who posted the message had registered on the site with a close variation of my name, and had included my actual e-mail address in his message.
Let's just say that things were interesting for a few hours. Luckily one of the above mentioned e-mail pen-pals worked for TNT Productions. She was able to get hold of the webmaster, identify the imposter, delete the message and the account, and notify JMS that I had nothing to do with the whole thing.
One of the main reasons that TNT had gone to user registration on that board was the number of fake posts that were showing up under various people's names, including mine. (In fact, when they first set up the registration system someone registered as "Joseph DeMartino" before I did. I had to register as "DeMartino" to get onto the new system, where I found a slew of messages left by the imposter. Nobody was fooled by them, though, because the guy was such a
terrible writer.
TNT fixed that problem, too.)
In real life I am a (currently unemployed) computer network administrator. I've spent most of my carreer working on Novell systems, but after being laid-off from one job I discovered that there were very few Novell jobs left in this area. Everything is Microsoft now. So I collected unemployment for awhile and applied for a state "displaced worker" grant to pay for Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer school.
This requires that you pass a series of 7 tough exams once you finish the classroom work. I'm part way through the list now, so I have my basic MS Certified Professional designation. Unfortunately school finished up just around the time the economy went south, so there haven't been many people looking for someone in my line of work. And no one will hire me for a technician job because they figure I'll quit as soon as a network admin position becomes available. (And they're right, since the salary difference is between $20,000 and $30,000 in this area.
)
But things seem to be looking up in the last week or so. At least I'm getting a lot more prospects in my e-mail from Monster.com, Dice.com and the three or four other on-line job search places I've registered with. Even the Sunday paper had more jobs in my field or closely related ones than I've seen in months.
So with any luck at all I won't have nearly as much time to spend on this board and others in the near future.
Regards,
Joe
------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
