When you’re someone that cares about television a lot, enough to run a blog about it, or go on breathless, angry rants about it, or, hey, travel halfway across the country to spend a weekend at a television festival, and you’re also someone that works a day job, or has non-television-inclined friends and family, or just in general has to interact with so-called “normals” out there in the world, there are certain phrases you get sick of  hearing. “It’s just TV,” is a popular one, or the even more condescending “I don’t even own a TV.” There’s also “Why do you care so much?” and the glassy-eyed smiling and nodding thing that much of my family does–out of love–these days when I start to get worked up.

Don’t get me wrong, it was nice of my parents to shift from “It’s just TV” to the smile and nod around the time that it became clear that my passion for the medium wasn’t going away, it’s nice that my mom is always up for discussing the latest Mad Men or The Good Wife (or at least listening quietly while I go on a tear about the industry), nice that my sister and my roommate have similar tastes to my own, but it’s nicer still to have someone who can talk back to you in depth, who can engage with you beyond just “wasn’t it cool when this happened?” and “what do you think is next?” Who wants to talk about why Fox’s comedies are such a mess these days or the pros and cons of a 13 episode season over a 22 episode season. It’s nice to discuss TV with people who take TV as seriously as I do. This is why fandoms and similar communities flourish on the internet, where it’s easier to assemble people with the same interests, no matter the physical distance between them.

I’ve been talking about TV on various websites, through various viewpoints, with various specific interests, since I was about 13 years old, but these days I mostly do so on Twitter and on this blog, through a critical if hyperbolic gaze. (I’m on Tumblr, too, but I mostly use that to reblog funny gif-sets and to get weird about Chris Evans in my tags.) That’s a change from when I used most of my energy yelling into message boards about my favorite ships on Gilmore Girls, or crying into my LiveJournal about Rose on Doctor Who, both in the people I’m talking to and the way in which I am talking. Not everyone that loves TV wants to talk about it critically–that’s not a bad thing, it just means that my online community has restructured as my interests have evolved, and that restructuring has lead me, for the most part, to Twitter.

Twitter has an innate ability to turn broad, 140-character statements into conversations, whether you’re participating in them or just watching them happen, and TV Twitter is one of the few places where criticism feels like a dialogue that just keeps going, branching off into new threads, petering out and picking up again over hours or days or sometimes even weeks. The website is often praised and derided for the access it grants to the people who are actually making television: showrunners, writers and actors are close at hand, and there’s always the smallest chance that your voice will be heard in the din that is directed at them 24 hours a day, that they might answer your question or even just acknowledge your existence.

If you were to pull TV Twitter out of the internet and into the real world, add humidity, tacos and barbecue, and lessen the din directed at the stars (in front of and behind the television camera) to just a few thousand voices, you would have something not unlike the annual ATX Television Festival, which just ended it’s third “season” in Austin, Texas.

The ATX TV Festival draws an intense, generous, overwhelmingly–though not exclusively–female audience to Austin, Texas, in the first (hot, humid, sweaty, sticky, sweltering) weekend of June each year. Many of the attendees have probably risen up through fandom, but just from listening to the questions asked in any panel that’s opened up to the audience it’s easy to hear that this crowd engages with the medium on a critical level. These questions aren’t soft-balls, these are the women and men that read Sepinwall and The A.V. Club and Vulture with religious fervor, the ones who groaned aloud when half of PaleyFest’s 2008 Buffy reunion panel was eaten by the “What’s on your iPod?” question, they take to Twitter in droves after each new episode of Fargo or Mad Men or Game of Thrones to dissect and discuss. These are my people.

I’ve wanted to attend ATX Fest since its first year, but last summer, after reading the tweets coming in from a handful of the people I follow on Twitter, my second-hand excitement and first-hand jealousy was so great that I impulsively bought a season 3 ticket in June, a full year before the 2014 festival was scheduled to take place. For 12 months I planned and anticipated and saved, and last Thursday I flew into Austin by myself, for my first ATX Festival and my first solo vacation. I was excited, but I was also nervous; I know myself well enough to know that I could easily end up sitting alone in corners, looking at my iPhone and not talking to anyone off of Twitter.

But that’s kind of the beauty of ATX Fest: it’s Twitter in the world, it’s TV camp, it’s maybe the safest real world space I’ve ever found to be a voracious, unapologetic fan of television.

By the time Thursday was over I had met up with people I knew from Twitter, made a handful of brand new friends and butchered a Mandy Moore song in front of much of the cast of The Night Shift. On Friday I hugged Grandma Saracen and commiserated over the cancellation of Bunheads with Stacey Oristano. Saturday I attended 5 different panels (Orphan Black, Enlisted, Everwood, Parenthood and Fargo) and had the opportunity to ask questions in 3 of them (I was also less than a foot away from life idol Lauren Graham). Sunday I got to preview a couple of new fall shows, and I was present for the fifteen year Roswell reunion, as well as the breaking of one of this weekend’s biggest entertainment news stories: Nasim Pedrad’s probable departure from Saturday Night Live.

But as fun as all that elbow-rubbing was (and it was such fun!), truly the highlight of ATX Fest is the opportunity to talk about TV with other people who care. Again and again I found myself talking to strangers in lines and panels, at Friday night’s Friday Night Lights tailgate and on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday evening in Austin’s too-loud bars, about the oppressive Austin heat, yes, and the best tacos, burgers and food truck treats we’d experienced as we wandered through the city, badges flapping around our necks, but more than that about television.

Waiting to go inside for the Enlisted panel I talked to the blogger in front of me about the show we were waiting to see, but also the oeuvre of Joss Whedon, character archetypes on Friday Night Lights, and how serialized television, unlike other mediums, allows writers and actors to study, develop and grow a character over time. In a half-dark theater waiting for Fargo to start I discussed the pros and cons of fandom with the girl in the seat next to me. Driving back from seeing The Fault in Our Stars with a few new friends we debated the Battlestar Galactica and Lost finales. All weekend long television was on everyone’s mind, and when you brought up Veronica Mars or Buffy or Mad Men or The Mindy Project or just about any other show it was easy to dive into a new stretch of conversation. We didn’t all always agree, but we all cared. No one’s eyes glazed over. No one asked “why does it matter?”

Everyone needs to find a safe space to care about the things they love. Sports fans have games, music fans have concerts and film fans have dozens of festivals. There’s fashion week for the fashionable and Comic-Con for all things great and small in geekery. And now we TV nerds have the ATX Television Festival.

My new friends are scattered across the country, but they’re all close at hand on Twitter, where these conversations can develop over the next year–if the festival was liking pulling Twitter out into the real world then all we need do for the next 12 months is move the dialogue back to its old venue: the internet. And in June of 2015 we’ll all be back in Austin for another summer of TV camp. We already have our tickets.