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Friday, September 20th, 2019 07:50 pm
this is like finding some kind of lesser but important grail
So a bit back, I found an old WD external hard drive, back when 500G was totally the shit (circa 2008ish). And on it I found I'd very sensibly stored backups.
And I found....something else.
Gather round, children; we speak of ancient internet times. We speak of...the years 2000 and 2001.
For those who don't remember, being too young or--fuck my life, not even alive--this was web 2.0 territory. ww3 was only a baby, black background with white text was legit, everrrryyyyone loved iFrames, and automated archives were still Fucking Fancy Shit for the few.
For the rest of us: if you wanted an archive, you learned graphic design, web design including HTML and CSS, paid for a web page or got yourself some geocities accounts (multiple, this is an archive) and you hand-coded everything.
Within my backup drive is a zip. Within that zip file is every story in the X-Men Movie Fanfic Archive (XMMFF). All the handcoded stories. All those handcoded index and information pages. I probably still have the graphics in other folder. Roughly three hundred to four hundred stories. All just--there. My fingers remember all that goddamn coding.
This is so surreal.
ETA: And in an ancient Outlook folder, I just found
1.) every XMMFF fic from when I joined the list until the end of 2001, which could be as much as another 200-500 stories that didn't get into the archive.
2.) everything posted to WRBeta (X-Men, Wolverine/Rogue, reason for creation dramatic as fuck)
3.) some from X-Fiction when I was on that list.
4.) a lot of ASCEML (Star Trek, mailing list mirror of alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated)
5.) PTFever fic and discussion (Star Trek Paris/Torres)
...seriously, what the hell else is lurking around here?
And I found....something else.
Gather round, children; we speak of ancient internet times. We speak of...the years 2000 and 2001.
For those who don't remember, being too young or--fuck my life, not even alive--this was web 2.0 territory. ww3 was only a baby, black background with white text was legit, everrrryyyyone loved iFrames, and automated archives were still Fucking Fancy Shit for the few.
For the rest of us: if you wanted an archive, you learned graphic design, web design including HTML and CSS, paid for a web page or got yourself some geocities accounts (multiple, this is an archive) and you hand-coded everything.
Within my backup drive is a zip. Within that zip file is every story in the X-Men Movie Fanfic Archive (XMMFF). All the handcoded stories. All those handcoded index and information pages. I probably still have the graphics in other folder. Roughly three hundred to four hundred stories. All just--there. My fingers remember all that goddamn coding.
This is so surreal.
ETA: And in an ancient Outlook folder, I just found
1.) every XMMFF fic from when I joined the list until the end of 2001, which could be as much as another 200-500 stories that didn't get into the archive.
2.) everything posted to WRBeta (X-Men, Wolverine/Rogue, reason for creation dramatic as fuck)
3.) some from X-Fiction when I was on that list.
4.) a lot of ASCEML (Star Trek, mailing list mirror of alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated)
5.) PTFever fic and discussion (Star Trek Paris/Torres)
...seriously, what the hell else is lurking around here?
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