Discovered in a Livejournal

If you've hovered over the Discovered in a Christmas Card Calendar, you may have seen that today is listed as Old Friends Day. There are four of our old Pros friends missing from this year's calendar, taverymate, probodie, minori_k and moonlightmead would all contribute to our Pros fandom, either with stories or pictures (and sometimes both!), or by commenting on Pros posts, and encouraging us all along, and I thought it might be nice this year to remember them.

minori_k
I was going to post Minori's calendar post from last year, which she made for discoveredinalj for our 10th anniversary, but someone has beaten me to it at another comm (!), so I shall post her pic from the year before, and there will two gorgeous memories of her in our flists today. *g* Minori's post from 2014 full of her gorgeous art, can be found here. She first posted to a Christmas challenge in 2008, and you can find more of her posts by wandering around the comm. She made banners for our Christmas challenges too, of course, and if you nip into the closing posts, you'll see them re-posted up.

moonlightmead
Moonlightmead first posted to the Pros Christmas calendar in 2011, full of enthusiasm, as she always was, and chatting away about Pros zines. I had met her not long before, when she very bravely not only agreed to meet two holidaying Pros fans, but invited us to stay for the night! Her first ever fic for Discoveredinalj was Raid, for the Discovered When You See This challenge, and of course she wrote many more stories for Pros, which I'm sure many of us know!

probodie
Probodie was another of the very first people I "met" in Pros, way back in 2005 - and then one of the very first people I met in Pros! I came across her first at the the_safehouse, where she had been posting since this post in 2004. She wrote stories and drabbles, made icons and banners, and generally joined in everything that was going on - including the very first Pros Christmas calendar - a feast for our eyes and icon collections. Her fic is to be found in various Pros comms, over at the Circuit and Hatstand archives (under "Zoe"), and of course here.

taverymate
Taverymate was one of the first people I got to know in Pros fandom, in 2005. She saw me asking about zines, and talking about stories, and fandom history, and she emailed saying she had some duplicate zines that she was getting rid of, and a few that she was selling, and was I interested...? From there we had some fab chats, and when a box arrived at my wee cabin in Alaska from her, not only was it full of zines and loose-leaf Pros stories, but she had sent me these three lads... - Cowley bear (with his tartan scarf, of course), Bodie bear (with his smart tie) and Angelfish! I've still got them, looking after my zines and fic, and reminding me of how generous taverymate was with her enthusiasm and memories and time for Pros. She didn't post much herself, but she posted to our Christmas Tree in 2012, and you can see the fantastic things she was doing. It was also partly thanks to Taverymate that www.palelyloitering was founded, and a great deal of the original information there came from her.

I thought it might be nice, this Friday evening, if anyone who wanted to join in remembering our much-missed Pros friends made a post here, perhaps with your favourite fic or pic or memory (or if you see this after midnight GMT tonight, then do leave a comment, of course). Re-posting other people's pictures and stories a la Tumblr and so on was never a Livejournal thing (though worlds change, of course), and we usually include links, but perhaps just for today, it might be nice to see the imaginings of taverymate, probodie, moonlightmead and minori_k re-posted here, if anyone has a moment. And for people who never had the joy of meeting our Pros friends, I hope that my introduction might take you off to explore new old corners of Pros. *g*

Sweet dreams and new worlds to you all, old friends - your hearts are still with us here in Pros, thank you for lending them to us!