I know I’m old, compared to the norm on LJ, but this was not always the case. When I was in High School back in SoCal, there was an online phenomenon similar to LJ called BBS forums.
We even had get-togethers, although rarely on the scale of the LA LJ Bash. At one gathering, I had printed out the collected conversational threads from the previous several months to share with the crowd as we chowed down on pizza (75% of the gatherings were at pizza places for some reason). Imagine trying to print out even a single day worth of the collected ramblings from this thing. Damn!