When walking a new road...
Just this week I have time enough to realise I haven't saved any of my favourite fanfiction works so I decided to do just that...
Problem is...how the hell one goes about the business? And I don't just mean the technical hell that signifies (digging 'round ff.net, lj's old accounts -the ones still alive- ao3 and other sites) but what's the best format for it? and how save it in a portable device? laptop's hardrive? How to avoid saving the same fanfic several times? Because I'm quite aware this will not be a one day effort...
But more importantly..the authors would want me to save a copy of their work? I suppose that people over archiveofourown know the site has a very lovely button called "download", but what about those sites where the author simply posted her/his story and at the moment no one asked for permission to download the story.
This lead me immediatly to think about my favourite authors on the Sherlock Holmes fanfiction world, and specially on one named nlr alicia, and her stories. The site where her stories are hosted is still up. she started posting around 2007 and I think her last known activity there was on july 2008: and so next year would be a decade since she...well, disappeared and so should I be saving her creations?
After pondering this for a while with no immediate conclusions, what did got into my mind fiirmly -and I swear to god I'm not a stalker- was this:
how to you go about finding someone who's presence on the web suddenly vanished overnight??? Because from what I can read on the comments from her site, she did have plans to continue with some of her stories, so I can only hope she's alright and RL just got really engaging and then lost interest on the writing.
Whatever the situation, this last month got me thinking really hard about how damn fast life seems to be going and how slow I seem to be evolving to adapt to that. I got in lj some 10 years ago. 10 years ago I was 17, just about to be going to university and having a very different aspect of life forced upon me. Most of it for the better, thankfully, it opened my eyes to many ways of thinking and that, coupled with internet access, the natural sense of curiosity that has never abandoned me and a whole new set of people to be around, really shaped an approximation to whom I am now.
That person changed when I moved out of my parents house and started a new jobs with heavy responsabilities. In that time, a few years ago, I had to change again to adapt, which made me end my years long relationship, some personal beliefs and some attitudes as well.
I feel like another change is coming or should be coming, and that I should be getting ready to decide what to leave behind. And I think for better or worse, this whole thing about lj and its new shitty policies and lj comms and journals moving away or being shut down is another call for me to wake up and make decisions. The kind that you make when you stop distracting yourself with electronic devices or with other people; when you turn the lights off and it's only yourself you have for company.
Problem is...how the hell one goes about the business? And I don't just mean the technical hell that signifies (digging 'round ff.net, lj's old accounts -the ones still alive- ao3 and other sites) but what's the best format for it? and how save it in a portable device? laptop's hardrive? How to avoid saving the same fanfic several times? Because I'm quite aware this will not be a one day effort...
But more importantly..the authors would want me to save a copy of their work? I suppose that people over archiveofourown know the site has a very lovely button called "download", but what about those sites where the author simply posted her/his story and at the moment no one asked for permission to download the story.
This lead me immediatly to think about my favourite authors on the Sherlock Holmes fanfiction world, and specially on one named nlr alicia, and her stories. The site where her stories are hosted is still up. she started posting around 2007 and I think her last known activity there was on july 2008: and so next year would be a decade since she...well, disappeared and so should I be saving her creations?
After pondering this for a while with no immediate conclusions, what did got into my mind fiirmly -and I swear to god I'm not a stalker- was this:
how to you go about finding someone who's presence on the web suddenly vanished overnight??? Because from what I can read on the comments from her site, she did have plans to continue with some of her stories, so I can only hope she's alright and RL just got really engaging and then lost interest on the writing.
Whatever the situation, this last month got me thinking really hard about how damn fast life seems to be going and how slow I seem to be evolving to adapt to that. I got in lj some 10 years ago. 10 years ago I was 17, just about to be going to university and having a very different aspect of life forced upon me. Most of it for the better, thankfully, it opened my eyes to many ways of thinking and that, coupled with internet access, the natural sense of curiosity that has never abandoned me and a whole new set of people to be around, really shaped an approximation to whom I am now.
That person changed when I moved out of my parents house and started a new jobs with heavy responsabilities. In that time, a few years ago, I had to change again to adapt, which made me end my years long relationship, some personal beliefs and some attitudes as well.
I feel like another change is coming or should be coming, and that I should be getting ready to decide what to leave behind. And I think for better or worse, this whole thing about lj and its new shitty policies and lj comms and journals moving away or being shut down is another call for me to wake up and make decisions. The kind that you make when you stop distracting yourself with electronic devices or with other people; when you turn the lights off and it's only yourself you have for company.