passing commentary on passing commentary

[sideways]

1) The warning bells have been ringing for a while on the possible collapse of FF.net in the near future, and they seem to be getting louder.

FicHub and FanFictionDownloader have been passed around as options for quietly saving anything you don't want to risk vanishing into the abyss. There are definitely a few I'll take pains to download as I'd genuinely grieve lose them (though I also hope no well-intentioned archivists start mass cross-posting other people's work to AO3 without permission since, oof, that seems messy). Typing it out by hand is... not going to happen, Tumblr user prismatic-bell, please put down the monk robes.

In the meantime, I suppose I need to decide whether to rescue any of my own works. There's always the option to just yeet them into the orphaned life - but I don't think the self-insert Bionicle fic is going to make it.

2) A collection of Goodreads reviews so scathing they obliterated the authors from their (admittedly misused) social media accounts makes for an interesting read if you don't mind watching murder happen in real time. Every insight I have into writer Twitter makes me even more determined to Lemony Snicket it harder than Lemony Snicket Snicketed it, in terms of having a public identity. Possibly it was just a mistake to link so many artistic egos into a hivemind like this.

3) Semi-relatedly, a friend recently sent me into a tailspin by revealing one of the main creative contributors to indie video game The Beginner's Game was a member of the same niche forum that formed the backbone of my early online experiences. Once I stopped laughing ("it's like the online version of 'hey, I went to the same school as that guy'! only more like hey, I was part of the same cult* as that guy?") I did an idle search around and found this old combo blog post and comic from the other main creator, Dave Wreden, in which he lays out in compelling honesty his experience with the strange weight of fame and success in the modern age. In particular this sentiment struck me: "Each new receipt of [praise] does little more than set the new standard of my own satisfaction." What an easy trap to fall into.

(*This is a joke.)

4) A video meme has been going around for a while featuring various slapstick moments set to A Hard Knock Life, and alas, it tickles my funny bone enormously. This Scream compilation was one of the first I saw and still leaves me chuckling, so you can imagine my delight when I found the TMNT guys are on it too: for both the 2003 and RotTMNT generations no less!

Comments

[silverflight8]

I feel like people have been saying FFNet is on the brink of collapse for about ten years. It could happen! Archive what you care about for sure. But is there any evidence?

[sideways]

Lack of any real activity on any managerial front for about a year now seems to be spawning the current wave of alarm, and that is a rather large gap.

[atamascolily]

My take is that FFN could literally go down any day without any warning whatsoever, so I'm glad people are taking steps to archive now rather than waiting until it's too late. That said, the site will likely continue to putter along as is for a while, but that doesn't mean people should get complacent about it being there forever, OR the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive having backups of everything.

If and when FFN does go down, I foresee a lot of crossposting of saved works in spite of the rules, so I hope A03/OTW has a plan to deal with that, because, yeah, it's going to be messy. It would be best if A03/OTW could just back up FFN officially, but the FFN site owners don't want to cooperate, so I'm not sure that's going to happen, even though that's the best and most logical solution for everyone involved.

I am using the Webpage to Epub converter browser extension in Mozilla Firefox to download fics as packaged epubs, since FFN broke FanFicFare, the Calibre plug-in I'd previously been using. It's very easy and you can save the fic in a few clicks, and it keeps much of the available metadata automatically.

[sideways]

Digital permanency is a pretty flighty beast by default, but it really does hit harder when you consider the sudden loss of an archive like FFN. Picking out a few things to save has rubbed in how much I'd still be terribly sad to lose! It's a real shame they won't just allow a mass back-up to AO3.

Ooh nice, I did also hear Firefox had a good extension.

[seven]

Okay, but I must know who the Beginner's Guide person is. >>

[sideways]

Naturally ;)

[muladhara]

I wondered if something was going on with ff.net, because I'd heard very vague rumblings, and was surprised it was still around (I last uploaded something there in 2008!). And then yt recced me a video (which I haven't watched) that's pleading with peeps to save fic from there, presumably because it's about to go down the toilet. So maybe it finally is happening?

[sideways]

It's honestly hard to say - there were similar alarmed rumblings around a year ago and nothing really happened. And people do like Getting Very Alarmed about things on the internet. At this point, though, I just feel like I'll have only myself to blame if it DOES go down overnight and I have nothing backed up, haha.

[muladhara]

People certainly do like to get alarmed about stuff. But also I have seen websites go poof in the past, and ff.net's situation does seem to be precarious. I guess we'll have to wait and see!