the vagaries of the internet
May. 21st, 2007 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tinpraThis probably deserves a much better dialogue than the one I'm prepared to give it - it probably deserves a full blown meta - but it's late (for me) and I'm just not up to essay writing at the moment.
Anywho! As a fanfic reader, one of my biggest peeves about the net is the way fics can just disappear off the face of the internet and thus off the face of the Earth. If a book or a movie or an album goes out of print you can always have it special ordered or buy it off a collector or something. If your favorite fanfic archive gets hacked and loses fics it's had for so long that the authors have since changed both their email addresses and their screennames...what's an archivist and, more importantly to me, a reader supposed to do?
Good example of this is The Gambit Guild. A few years ago the site - dedicated to all things related to the X-Men character, Remy "Gambit" LeBeau - changed hands. Soon after that it was hacked. Stories that the site had housed for years were lost with almost no way of recovering them. If you clicked on the link you'll see that archive section of the site (the LeBeau Library) is full of both fic and authors, but those of us who followed the site know that it had been a struggle for the site owners and archivists to (a) get the site to the place where they wanted it to be after it changed hands as the site had been a wee stagnated beforehand, and (b) to get the stories back up after the site was so brutally hacked.
I was lucky enough to have saved some really good, really long fics before the site was hacked. But imagine if I hadn't? I saved one of my favorite stories back in 2003, and it was old then. It was only re-uploaded in 2007. There were four long years when some unfortunate souls missed out on some great writing.
It's that impermanence that so frustrates and annoys me. And with that in mind I try to save the things I really like to my computer for just such an occassion as site-hacks and site-hand-changes and people just flat out pulling their fics from a site. I want my own copy, darnit. Admittedly it didn't start that way. It started as a way to read fantastically long fics without being online for ten-thousand hours straight. But, lately, I've gotten lazy. With the advent of such wonderful things as del.icio.us and the ability to track my links literally anywhere, I've been hardrive saving less and less. That and there is just sooooo much badfic out there. You get tired of wading. And I seem to get pickier the more I do this.
Anywho, in my mad rush to del (my shorthand for saying that I saved the link to a site to my del.icio.us) every site I love, I del'ed my resource sites too. Places where I get info on my own fic. What an idiot am I. Why, if I know that fanfic won't ever stay around, did I think that fanfic resources would be any more stable? One of my favorite finds was The Fanfiction Glossary, housed at the Subreality Cafe. I didn't know when I first discovered it, or even later when I saved it to my del, that the sites main owner, and the person in charge of The Fanfiction Glossary itself,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kielle had died. It was, in fact, the first time that an internet death had personally effected me. I'd perused through the Subreality Cafe for all sorts of things...and it's mother had passed on. So here I was depressed on the one hand but glad on the other that kielle's child lived on. Until suddenly it didn't.
One day I went to the Glossary to look up...something...who knows what now...and it was gone. Not in a poof kind of way but in a "No, we have been a chair behind this door and there is no frelling way you're getting in." The front, main page was there, but the link to the glossary was a link back in on itself. No. No. Noooooo! What abject misery! I should have printed it out. I should have saved it.
I should have saved it.
It just so happens that today while surfing del for fanfic in general, what should I see on the first page of results? The Fanfiction Glossary. Knowing full well that it would just take me to the [mostly] useless main page, I clicked on it anyway. A fair number of people had saved it, and that made me feel all warm inside. So I clicked on it. And there on the screen - after a ridiculously long time...good grief, del...over-trafficked much today? - was one of the most beautiful sites I have ever seen: actual fanfiction terms. Someone remembered the old link. Someone had fixed it. I didn't frelling care. It was back.
And what was the first thing that I did when I got home tonight? Saved it.
Anywho! As a fanfic reader, one of my biggest peeves about the net is the way fics can just disappear off the face of the internet and thus off the face of the Earth. If a book or a movie or an album goes out of print you can always have it special ordered or buy it off a collector or something. If your favorite fanfic archive gets hacked and loses fics it's had for so long that the authors have since changed both their email addresses and their screennames...what's an archivist and, more importantly to me, a reader supposed to do?
Good example of this is The Gambit Guild. A few years ago the site - dedicated to all things related to the X-Men character, Remy "Gambit" LeBeau - changed hands. Soon after that it was hacked. Stories that the site had housed for years were lost with almost no way of recovering them. If you clicked on the link you'll see that archive section of the site (the LeBeau Library) is full of both fic and authors, but those of us who followed the site know that it had been a struggle for the site owners and archivists to (a) get the site to the place where they wanted it to be after it changed hands as the site had been a wee stagnated beforehand, and (b) to get the stories back up after the site was so brutally hacked.
I was lucky enough to have saved some really good, really long fics before the site was hacked. But imagine if I hadn't? I saved one of my favorite stories back in 2003, and it was old then. It was only re-uploaded in 2007. There were four long years when some unfortunate souls missed out on some great writing.
It's that impermanence that so frustrates and annoys me. And with that in mind I try to save the things I really like to my computer for just such an occassion as site-hacks and site-hand-changes and people just flat out pulling their fics from a site. I want my own copy, darnit. Admittedly it didn't start that way. It started as a way to read fantastically long fics without being online for ten-thousand hours straight. But, lately, I've gotten lazy. With the advent of such wonderful things as del.icio.us and the ability to track my links literally anywhere, I've been hardrive saving less and less. That and there is just sooooo much badfic out there. You get tired of wading. And I seem to get pickier the more I do this.
Anywho, in my mad rush to del (my shorthand for saying that I saved the link to a site to my del.icio.us) every site I love, I del'ed my resource sites too. Places where I get info on my own fic. What an idiot am I. Why, if I know that fanfic won't ever stay around, did I think that fanfic resources would be any more stable? One of my favorite finds was The Fanfiction Glossary, housed at the Subreality Cafe. I didn't know when I first discovered it, or even later when I saved it to my del, that the sites main owner, and the person in charge of The Fanfiction Glossary itself,
kielle had died. It was, in fact, the first time that an internet death had personally effected me. I'd perused through the Subreality Cafe for all sorts of things...and it's mother had passed on. So here I was depressed on the one hand but glad on the other that kielle's child lived on. Until suddenly it didn't.One day I went to the Glossary to look up...something...who knows what now...and it was gone. Not in a poof kind of way but in a "No, we have been a chair behind this door and there is no frelling way you're getting in." The front, main page was there, but the link to the glossary was a link back in on itself. No. No. Noooooo! What abject misery! I should have printed it out. I should have saved it.
I should have saved it.
It just so happens that today while surfing del for fanfic in general, what should I see on the first page of results? The Fanfiction Glossary. Knowing full well that it would just take me to the [mostly] useless main page, I clicked on it anyway. A fair number of people had saved it, and that made me feel all warm inside. So I clicked on it. And there on the screen - after a ridiculously long time...good grief, del...over-trafficked much today? - was one of the most beautiful sites I have ever seen: actual fanfiction terms. Someone remembered the old link. Someone had fixed it. I didn't frelling care. It was back.
And what was the first thing that I did when I got home tonight? Saved it.
