Introducing myself after way too long

[solitaire-au]

Hi.

I’m solitaire_au, (the au because I’m Australian.) I’m female, married and old enough to know better, but still young enough to be a fool. (In other words, I’m Gen X.) My husband knows about the fetish, and indulges me, but my online activities are my own. 🙈 

I’ve been using the Internet since the web was in its infancy and the only services were telnet, text-only email,  simple web browsers that took forever to load a page, and Usenet newsgroups. I remember the time before search engines and how much it sucked.

Initially, my only access was at university, so it was years before I felt I had enough privacy after hours at the computer club to start searching for content.

I think I first came across tarotgal’s content after the Alta Vista search engine was developed, but I can’t be sure.

I did some Googling and was reminded of the existence of the old Sneezatorium board in the ‘00s

https://hcrecs.livejournal.com/677.html

There was a sneezefic board spinoff for male sneezing fiction IIRC, and tarotgal even set up an archive of the fics, some of which can still be found.

http://sfarchive.tarotgal.net/archive/fanfiction.html

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace had come out in 1999, the X-Men movies started coming out, plus the release of the first few Harry Potter books, and the Buffy, Angel and X-Files TV shows lead to an explosion in sneezing fanfic. I loved all of it, but I especially liked tarotgal’s, Liberty Belle’s and nermal90’s efforts. I only wish the latter two hadn’t deleted their online presence. I miss them. (I gather LB deleted her personal archive The Belle Tower because her real world identity had gotten linked to her username?)

I wrote a few drabbles of Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan, Snape and Matthew Gideon (from Babylon 5:Crusade,) but that was as far as I got. I’m a terrible procrastinator.

I’ve been struggling with depression for almost 30 years. Fear of discovery, and fear of not being good enough held me back, so I mostly lurked.

I really struggled after moving away from everyone for my husband’s work and giving birth to my kids plunged me into isolation even more and my libido all but disappeared. Until last year after trying TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) when it’s returned!  
I started lurking on the forum again (the stories have always been my favourite part.) I tried signing up but something went wrong so I gave up. (Depression tends to make me give up easily at the first sign of an obstacle.)

I’d started watching The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and Star Wars: The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch with my family and fell in love with the characters, but especially the clone troopers because the tragedy of their stories really hits me hard. I love the way Dee Bradley Baker voices all the clones, giving them unique voices and personalities, and to know that he thinks of each of them as real people, not just sketches for lines he does a voice acting job.

There’s some great clone trooper fanfic on AO3 and tumblr and other places, but not much in the way of sneezing, sadly. I’d eventually worked up the nerve to create an account on AO3 so I could leave feedback for both SF and normal fics that I loved. (Maybe one day I’ll do the same for tumblr but I can’t wrap my head around the way it’s supposed to work.)

Then I read the Final Fantasy: Crisis Core story Humanity that @SexualOddity posted, and I loved it so so much, 🥰 but I didn’t see many comments, and I know for writers that getting feedback means everything. So I tried again to create an account on here, and this time it worked.

So here I am! It took way too many years, but I got here in the end!

 

[SexualOddity]

So, so glad that you made it here Solitaire and thank you for sharing your history.  It’s so interesting to hear about your background.  I didn’t even know that this was even a fetish that other people had until about 2010ish so I knew very little about the stuff that pre-dates the forum.  I’m so glad that you managed to rediscover your libido.  Think I might just tootle off and google TMS now!

 

I’m right there with you with Tumblr by the way.  I feel so old and confused 😅

Edited June 16, 2023 by SexualOddity

[kiku]

@solitaire-au Thanks for sharing your story! ❤️

Sorry to hear you had such a hard time, but it's good to know that things are going better for you now. 🤗

Ahhhhhh yes, the good (and not so good?) od days!
Gosh, it's been more than 20 years since I found out about the sneezy community on the internet...
You know, the internet is funny sometimes - there seem to be days when the search engine spits out exactly what you need! I remember I - just for fun - typed in the word "sneeze", and one of the first hits was "Diary of a sneeze fetishist".

I thought, "WHAT?? I'm not that much of a weirdo after all? There are actually MANY people llike me? Just normal people??" 😄
Very soon I found tarotgal's site too, and Serotica, and a bit later, this forum too.

Anyway, good to have you here with us! 🌷

[Privatedancer]

Another Gen-x here that definitely had the fetish LONG before there was anyway access to material.  Do happy there is now!