Jacob Tender
ElissaI think a lot about the fact that I wrote games criticism for years, including a regular column on a web site, and none of that exists now. Vanished, maaaaybe findable only in obscure links buried and found under a peat bog in the wayback machine.
It's like part of my career is not just gone, has no evidence for itself. If I was applying for a job where it was relevant, I'd basically have to send them saved documents and they'd have to take it on faith that these were, in fact, published.
Paul Williams@vampiress this is like my early web career. I built so many websites but when I was applying for the current job I went to every url and the only sites still using my design if they exist at all are sites I still run myself. Everything down the memory hole.
Jordan@vampiress “all those moments will be lost in time, like tars in IA” 😢
kate@vampiress this was genuinely a thing that I worried about, when we shut down our old women's hockey blog. it was primarily fan coverage, but we had multiple writers who wanted to go into more pro careers. I tried to make sure they all had a copy of their articles, if they wanted, and technically I have the whole site archived in a backup. Sometimes I think about pulling all the content out into text and throwing it up on the internet archive or something.
@vampiress former music and entertainment critic here. While I was able to save *my own* publication (with some help from @terinjokes), sooo much of my writing was lost to time.
I was able to gather a lot of it over the years and republish it on my own website. Is that legal? I don’t know. But I figure if it wasn’t valuable enough to keep alive, it’s not valuable enough to threaten me over anymore either.
@Tender Yeah, that sounds relatable. 😕 Funny thing was, at a certain point with games criticism, there were many more sites than print mags, and there was a kind of eye-roll reserved from us arrogant digital writers for the people who "still" wrote for print mags. The irony was strong; joke's on us now, really. At least those people have tangible physical evidence of what they wrote, no doubt still in collections on shelves randomly about the place, too.
@vampiress so true. “Nothing ever dies on the Internet” was a lie.
I’ve recently been gathering up Wordpress and Tumblr backups for any contemporaries that have and are willing to share them.
Terin Stock@Tender @vampiress So many of the outbound links are dead, so in a way I feel like we only saved a portion of the content. 😢
@terinjokes @vampiress you can’t save it all…
Although for my current music blog, I do try to at least archive every outbound link…
@Tender @vampiress Two weeks ago I had to try to find if links pointing at one archive service that had gone rogue could be found at another archive. 😞