#archives stuff

[sab-cat]

Apr 24, 2025 PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse. I was interested in PrepperDisk because I care about data hoarding and archiving more broadly, but I wanted to talk to Chace after it became clear that a lot of his sales seemed to be a direct result of Trump being elected president.  “Sales increased dramatically in the early part of the new administration as economic uncertainty and even uncertainty about government data prevailed,” Chace told me. “Elon Musk is pulling data off of federal websites, and we want to make sure people realize is like, ‘Hey, this might have a use case even when the internet itself remains up, but there might be political reasons why that data isn’t available.”.... PrepperDisk is similar to a DIY, open-source project that started in 2012 called Internet in a Box and which has become popular in rural areas in developing countries where internet access is sparse. The idea is basically that you can carry around an external hard drive-sized, mini version of the internet with you that creates a local network your phone or laptop can access. 

Another similar project:

[minyicho]

starting a collection of my favourite AO3 author’s notes

honourable mentions

[just-french-me-up]

'ao3 needs a like and dislike button'

what you need, my algorithm-rotten minded friend, is a grip

[moonchild311]

"people who stay up at night are either insomniac or In love" people who stay up at night read gay fanfiction on AO3 what are you on about?

[abbielauren2024]

Reblog if you’re grateful for your commenters <3

[theaftersundown]

fanfiction truly being the savior for everyones sanity

[kriz-smthn]

[kirby-the-gorb]

[kairithemang0]

I've got a lot of respect for smut writers. you write something incredibly sexual, it's probably somewhat of a look into your own soul, and then bitches are too scared to leave kudos of comments half the time, so it looks as though everyone hates your work. And yet yall still do it, and I love that

[artemisdesari-blog]

A writer friend told me something that broke my heart a little bit today; they're going to quit publishing their fanfic.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

So please, I beg you, don't hide your love of a story from the writer. It's just about the only thing we have.

[sab-cat]

Jul 24 2025

The San Francisco-based Internet Archive now has federal depository status, joining a network of over 1,100 libraries that archive government documents and make them accessible to the public — even as ongoing legal challenges pose an existential threat to the organization.

[quercusfloreal]

When you finally found a clue after two weeks of fruitless research.

But it won't take you to the archive you're looking for.

[moonchild311]

"you've already left kudos here. :)" ok and I'll leave some more. You got a problem? Because in my opinion, this work is so good and the author totally deserves it

[saggitary]

There is no greater bond than the one between a person and the fictional character they’ve written 50k+ words about