(no subject)

[felicitygs]

Spending all day archiving valued tags also ended up with me seeing just how much more active I was when I first joined the fandom--sure, I was writing a lot, but I was also reading a lot, and I was much less passive about my reading too. There were buckos of fic recommendations, with little blurbs and thoughts about them, not so dissimilar from the way I write book reviews now. It's certainly made me consider if I want to get back into reading fanfic more often, and make more of an effort of rounding up new stuff in the particular ships I like.


Not to mention seeing the early stuff that so inspired me in the first place, the stuff that sucked me into the fandom on the whole. For all the tedium of spending 8 hours archiving tags was, never once did I regret what I was doing--seeing these little glimpses and bits of my old work, of the early fandom, of fanart and ideas and stuff that I never managed to pursue....


I'll have to think about it. I need something to post, both here and to pillowfort, and I certainly ain't gonna just magically be able to churn out fic super fast like I used to.

Comments

[terresdebrume]

Well I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt like this with the backing up (and I didn't even go into the things I posted outside of fics and important personal stuff so far). Although we were talking about growing older this morning with friends (unrelated to fandom) and it did remind me that the times when I was super productive in fandom where the times when I had a lot more resilience to fatigue and also just more time to do stuff (partly because I had no social life outside of the internet, which I don't regret) and that was a nice reminder to maybe allow myself to put quality above quantity instead of feeling guilty about not producing as much stuff x)

[felicitygs]

Yeah, my backup started with everything personal that I didn't want to lose, then I manually saved a ton of art with credits that I didn't want to lose (my jotun loki tag would be ripe for posts disappearing), and then when wayback stopped being blocked, I went through and got the important tags archived on that in the whee hours of the the 17th UTC.

Yeah, I definitely feel you. I was just so hype when I joined, and now I have other stuff that needs doing, so getting to fandom stuff (be it reading, reccing, or creating myself) is a lot lower on my priorities. Unlearning the guilt has been tough!

[terresdebrume]

Oh my I have no idea how to use the waback Machine but I actually probably should learn that at some point because I'm really not trusting tumblr with... anything, really, at this point xD

Yeah, it's weird to realize there's less room for something that take up so much of our time xD
It's still nice to get back to it, it's just a different way of dealing with it x)

[pennie_dreadful]

I feel, I feel. I never got around to backing up...anything, because I don't have either the time or a computer. I had an idea to kickstart my Pf blog but I just...have very limited motivation. :///

[felicitygs]

Yeah, I totally feel you. I have no idea what to really do with pillowfort tbqh; what niche is it filling? how is it going to be different from tumblr beyond disallowing vocal hate? Plus that's more time I need to devote to more social media, and I don't know. I'm working out how I want to keep engaging with things still.

Time and access to the tech to archive is definitely a major hurdle; the entire time I was doing my archival yesterday, all I could think about was how like... I got why people really don't archive as well as they should, and how good it is to have AO3 around for at least fic and meta.

[pennie_dreadful]

Hmm, it would be nice if fandom as a whole just agreed on PF, but with it still being in beta this was just not great timing on Verizon's part.

[felicitygs]

Honestly, I'm not sure if PF will be able to handle that load? I sincerely hope it makes it, but we're at a particular junction of increased purity politics going on in the mainstream (which we've seen canaried/echoed in fandom), and that means no one place is going to be good to go for a while, until that cultural zeitgeist changes.

I think it was on tumblr, actually, where I saw someone mention that it really feels like the wild west days of the internet are drawing to a close, and tumblr was the last real place you could just be a way that's been lost over time. I'm not sure how much I buy all that, but I can't argue that the internet now as far as connection to identity is a much different place than it was when I got started on it--and that the 'real world' is having a much stronger impact on it's shaping now that we've got people who grew up with it around taking an active interest in trying to police things on it.

(The laws written by olds who know nothing about the internet don't help; I'd have to double check the acronyms, but US based sites are being affected by two new laws that will go into effect that put blame for any sex related crimes on the site for hosting that, when before it didn't really effect them.)

It's a goddamn mess.