Recently I bought some Star Trek zines online and while reading through, discovered this article. This zine is Archives I, published in 1979, and the article is So You Want To Be a Fan Artists! (fanlore article here) by Beverly C. Zuk (fanlore article here). She passed away in 2009.
In 1979, there was no computer software available for fanartists to draw in, no Wacom tablets or Photoshop. There was no internet to google references, no netflix/streaming to pull up specific scenes of past episodes. No internet and online fan communities to share your art on. Fans had to send their artwork to zines like these and hope to get published in order to share their work. The same goes for fanfic.
This book was published 4 years before I was born. By the time I was old enough to be a fan of things, there were livejournal communities and mailing lists. And now if I want stories or fanart, or to share my own fanwork, it’s clicks away. If I need a reference for any specific thing, I’ll have thousands in the time it takes me to type what I need.
I’ll never forget how lucky we are.
(PS I love the notes about Kirk being harder to draw than Spock, because the struggle is real and older than I am.)