(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead. It's not a feature I've used in a decade, but it's worth nothing that google is dumping massive amounts of archived data from it's servers. This means if you use any online resource, if it goes down it might be super gone. If google is dumping the data to tighten their budget, if it's noticeable in their budget, no way can the Internet Archive snag it all.

* Nothing much else to report. Just editing, editing, editing. I usually hit some of the PDX Winter Lights Festival satellite events but this year there are not a lot and some of it is 'thing that is typically lit up somehow got on the listing'. That one building on Division? That is just how it looks typically. It's on through next weekend so I still might hit some, we'll see.

Comments

[profiterole_reads]

There haven't been cached pages on Google France for a while and that's always annoying when a website is temporarily down.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, I feel like this is something the information ecosystem took for granted for a long time and it's going to become a problem now that it's gone

[mistressofmuses]

Yikes, hadn't heard about that. I don't *often* used cached pages, but every once in a while it's come in handy to look for something prior to a hasty edit when fact-checking, or the like. It won't impact much of my internet life, but is still a pretty major change. Especially yes, because it's another way in which things may just be gone forever gone if they go away.

[olivermoss]

Cached pages is not something I've needed in ages, but it's a crucial thing sometimes. I am trying to signal boost it a bit in fandom because a lot of stuff is still on personal websites or old archives.

[mistressofmuses]

It is. I really haven't used cached pages more than a bare handful of times in the last several years, because I do use the Wayback machine as default when I'm looking for previous incarnations of a page. But even relatively recently, there was a long-deleted blog post I was looking for, and it had been removed by request from the internet archive, but I did find an old cached version.

It definitely deserves the signal boost. It feels like we're losing a lot of pieces of the internet, and it's not all being archived in a way that will keep it accessible. (Which is always something I have a lot of feelings about. A lot of people seem to shrug it off as inevitable and unavoidable, but I'm not sure it HAD to be an inevitability, at least large-scale.)

[olivermoss]

People got too used to the information being saved and we don't have a culture of keeping our own archives. Heck, even I am bad at it.

[mistressofmuses]

While there's certainly plenty of history of things being lost, I think people feel like things on the internet *are* forever. (And they can be, in the danger of having things continue circulating long after you wish they'd go away. But it's not true of all things.) Even as we keep losing sites along with all their content (geocities, yahoo groups, yahoo answers, whole news and entertainment websites and archives...) it still seems to be the general thought that we don't lose things that *matter.* From an archival perspective, that's a terrible attitude, yet so hard to fight against!

But also very true. There's a ton of stuff I don't have any additional backup of. Most of my writing I do, but not my journal. I imported my old LJ (in its embarrassing teenage "glory") to DW in order to archive it... but if DW goes away, that's that. My photo storage is almost entirely on the cloud nowadays. I *should* go through and download copies of the things I'd miss... but it's time and effort and storage space that almost always seems like a later project.

[olivermoss]

Part of it is that people don't know what's been lost. It's streetlight effect all the way down. One of my white whales is pictures of the largest luxury hotel this city ever had. I've seen pictures, but most of the artistic pictures of the actual space were from just after it closed and those pictures are gone. The top level by the river was curved glass enclosures. It was the hotel of choice for conventions for decades. When it burnt down it had the largest fire response in Oregon history to date due to how massive the structure is. I did massive pushes to find pictures twice and all I could do was find some old Orycon pictures that were taken there, but they were pictures of people in front of walls that could have been taken anywhere.

People are just oblivious to how skewed their perception of everything is because there is so much data out there, but they don't know how it's shapes or what is missing.

See also: me knowing Buckaroo Banzai was a fic fandom with archives and knowing Rawhide/Tommy was the biggest OTP but I've got no receipts because I didn't think to screepcap or preserve any of it back in the day.

Downloading and organizing data takes forever. For all the work I've done, it could be way better.

[mistressofmuses]

Absolutely! People don't - and in a lot of cases can't - recognize what's been lost... because it's not there to be seen. It's hard to prove the negative.

Oh man, that hotel absolutely seems like one of those things that *should* have record of it... and it's really sad to know that there's just... nothing left. That *feels* wrong.
How many cases are out there of the same sort of thing? We have things like that in the archeological record, where things were considered such "common knowledge" that there aren't any explanations of them. It's the case with so much lost media. How many places are like that hotel, with no record remaining because no one thought it needed recording?

And yes! There are things I remember, particularly about personal fansites and things, but would have zero way to "prove" anything about now. I *remember* them, but have zero remaining evidence of them.
I used to copy favorite fics from fansites into word docs for myself (so I could read them offline.) But I didn't keep any metadata, or even links to the original host in some cases. There's no context for any of it.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, so much wasn't recorded because it was just taken for granted as part of daily life. We have no idea how much is skewing our perception because people felt it didn't need to be said.

So many things I wish I had screencaps of, or stuff that I did document but got lost in that massive hard drive loss that haunts me. How many threats did I get asking too many questions about MZB and wanting to do a biography of her. At the time I felt like I was in the twilight zone but now I think I know why this happened, and I wish I had more than my word for it. And obvs I'd like to prove the size of the Buckaroo Banzai fic fandom that was killed.

[mistressofmuses]

Exactly! That's the sort of thing that skews history as well... people preserved things they considered extraordinary. Things that were mundane were so common that no one thought it was worth trying to remember, because duh, everyone is familiar with it and it's boring! That winds up leading to or intensifying huge historical and cultural blind spots.

Ugh. Hard drive losses are just... soul-crushing. That's part of what makes preservation so hard - equipment fails, media degrades, proprietary software loses support... But on the personal level, losing so much stuff is just the worst.

And man, the stuff like MZB or the Buckaroo Banzai fandom stuff touches on things like when things are DELIBERATELY "lost", too. There's certainly a lot of passive loss (or loss that's active in cause, like a host shuttering, but that aren't *deliberately* intended to remove content.) Then there are the things that are a lot more deliberately targeted. I mean, that was the whole deal with strikethrough on LJ, and is the case with fansites that shut down because someone wasn't okay with what they were doing/shipping/writing...

[olivermoss]

Yeah, you can't preserve everything but more people need to be aware of where the big gaping holes are.

Yup, I can talk until I am blue in the face about the harassment in the harassment in the Buckaroo Banzai fandom and that yes, for it's time it was a decent sized fic fandom, but without those screenshots most people wont take me seriously. I've even seen people making navel gazey posts wondering if it would have had a fic fandom if it came out today and arggg...lekjg

How easy it was to knock queer fandom offline was a big problem back in the day. A lot of that's been lost in general and a lot of people find even caring about that to be dumb.

[mistressofmuses]

There's no way to save everything forever. Accidents happen, some things are intended to be ephemeral, etc. BUT. Just because some things will always wind up being lost doesn't mean that everyone should necessarily treat it as a given that EVERYTHING will inevitably vanish/therefore there's no reason to try and preserve it/nothing that's missing was important because if it had been it wouldn't be missing.

It's deeply shitty that the harassment in that fandom was so extreme. But adkhagkj "wonder if it would have had a fic fandom." *scream into a pillow* To have that much fandom history deleted to the point where people don't remember that it existed AT ALL is really awful, and exactly why this stuff matters. There are gaps where all we HAVE is the equivalent of oral history.

And yeah. Queer stuff was an acceptable target for a very long time, and has felt like a viable "default" in certain spaces for a comparatively short time, really. Even in the places that were "tolerant" enough to allow slash/yaoi/whatever it was called within the specific fandom, I remember how inflated the ratings and warnings had to be to avoid grudge reporting and takedowns. I'm glad that isn't the landscape now, but it's frustrating that a lot of people don't realize that it WAS for a long time.

[olivermoss]

It would be nice if it was all taken seriously. I see a lot of people who are very smug about 'the internet is forever' and think they know more than me and it's like no, not even close.

I feel a bit silly calling fanfic being nuked queer erasure, but that's what it was. They nuked the gay away. They drove out most of the queer content creators and those that liked the content and pretend we never existed.

People act like there is no reason to care about that outside of feeding your kinks and... I mean, that is just how they view the world. Het is normal, anything else is lurid. I am just so tired.

Yeah, tolerating queer stuff is conditional and constantly on shifting ground and that does a lot of damage.

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh. That sort of smug attitude is so very frustrating. Some people who think "the internet is forever" seem just to mean "I scrolled back a decade and a half on a blog to find someone's embarrassing teenager-take on something to scream at them in a PM." So very many people have zero idea how much stuff has been lost completely, or is only very precariously preserved.

It IS true! It was very much queer erasure, and it HAS erased quite a lot of the queer history within fandom. Sure, fandom is a niche hobby, but it's one that has produced an enormous amount of written and visual art over decades. Having chunks of that deliberately removed IS very much erasure of the people targeted by the removals. Queer creators and queer audiences being pushed out of a space to the extent that people *don't even remember they were there* is 100% queer erasure.

It's extremely exhausting to have everything boiled down to "ew, you're just being gross and weird about fictional sex." A) so what if it were true, because sex isn't actually a dirty horrible awful thing, I thought we were culturally past that but hoo boy are we not; and B) that is also so fucking reductive, and is deliberately ignoring an awful lot of additional context and history.
But yeah, het is normal and fine and expected and isn't *inherently* dirty, even if it's sexual (though the Wrong Kind Of Het is sometimes also a target). Any sort of slash IS inherently dirty and suspect and probably gross weird fetish content, and at best has to "prove" that it meets some impossible purity standard, but should probably just be thrown out anyway.

Exhausting. And I recognize that yeah, I've got some baggage around encountering those attitudes when I was a baby queer just figuring out my own stuff for the first time, but... yeah, how can it not have an impact?

[olivermoss]

Also fanfic is how most authors get started. Just... double standards everywhere.

I did not plan on being this salty this late in life about this shit. I figure I'd have moved on done some projects to annoy the bastards, but here we are. It was an online queer subgroup in my fandom and it got scattered. Hardly the worst time that's happened to be, but these witch hunts also broke budding online communities.

[mistressofmuses]

Double standards EVERYWHERE.

I think it's really, genuinely hard to completely move on from some stuff like that. And I'm not completely sure that "moving on" is even exactly the right thing, because that sort of experience absolutely impacts the things you go on to do in the future. How can it NOT? It was a creative community, made up of a lot of queer people making queer art, that was utterly fractured and quashed and erased because other people hated it and the people in it.

Not to say the same thing in so many convos, lol, but "I wonder how different fandom would look if that hadn't happened?" How many queer writers wound up scared away from their work for years/decades/forever? What works would we have if that hadn't happened? How different would fandoms now look if that one hadn't been all but erased?

[olivermoss]

Yeah, communities that are scattered offline got scattered offline as well. And, in terms of getting into writing or art it slanted the playing field pretty badly. Can't fix getting that erasure or getting that bad of a start, but I'd hoped I'd go onto to do at least something to feel like I'd pushed back at least a little.

[mistressofmuses]

Yup. Communities getting utterly torn up by the roots that way is going to have a long impact. A lot of individual members could very well have been scared off from wanting to ever put their creative works out in public view again. And even if it wasn't so permanent, that does certainly reshape the playing field for who could go on to future careers (for those who were interested) and who had to spend time rebuilding in some sense.

Yeah, there isn't a way to go back and redo it, so there's nothing to be done but... deal and move on the best you can.

I think you are doing things that push back against it, though. You're still writing in many fandoms, you run comms dedicated both to fandom things and queer things in media, and you're working on original works as well. To me that sounds like pushing back against attempts to make the "icky bad queer cootie fans" disappear.

[olivermoss]

I've done stuff to try to push back at least. Don't get a lot of eyes on it, though. Honestly, one reason I started transmediaclub is because I am aware that a lot of AFAB trans people of about my demo graphic have long since left 'namespace' internet and are isolated. We've talked about how peer support isn't great for community building and I could NOT ever mod something like that. The idea made sense and it's good to have info somewhat organized, esp since some of it has been harder than you might guess to track down, but, eh, I will keep at it and we'll see what happens.

[mistressofmuses]

Isolation is very much a problem online, and some communities are extremely prone to it... and transmasc people seem to be really frequently pushed to the sidelines. As we've talked about, even in (almost especially in!) places that are supposedly queer-friendly spaces.

Peer support is something there may be a lot of need for... but yeah, it's absolutely awful for community building for so many reasons. There are lots of people hurting, and not a lot of people with the stability and energy to help them, and a lot of people who wind up just in perpetual crisis after crisis. Modding that sort of space seems next to impossible.

I love that transmediaclub exists, and I really do keep meaning to find things to share to it. I feel bad just being like "hey, a trans actor is in a thing!" without at least SOMETHING a little more... contentful than "a thing exists."

[olivermoss]

Yeah, isolation and also if your only experience with other trans people is seeing things play out on twitter and reddit it sucks. Before I made the com I was spending a bunch of time trying to help talk to some people who needed some reality checks that twitter is not real life and how people act like there is One True Trans Experience does not match reality. Also, writing 'transgender' instead of 'trans gender' isn't a terf dog whistle it's bog standard. A lot of them wanted a safe namespace type thing and I made the comm both to give a chance for that and also because I couldn't keep spending so much time trying to help others talk stuff out without support of my own.

Personally, I do post really basic stuff like 'trans person cast in role' just to have stuff to post. I want to keep it humming along, but with all the entertainment slowness of the past few years it gets hard.

Modding peer support would be a nightmare and things would go wrong no matter what.

[mistressofmuses]

I know that "terminally online" is often used as a really shitty insult... but sometimes it feels really apt for certain situations. A LOT of online communities can turn extremely toxic, and when that's your only "in-group" experience, I can only imagine how much it can fuck you up... doubly and triply so when you're already in a fragile place and struggling offline.

The weird attitudes about terminology! Whether a space between words is acceptable or preferred or forbidden! An asterisk going from unknown to preferred to mandatory to utterly unforgivable.
Insular spaces can really foster bizarre focuses... which I remember personally from some time spent in social-justice-oriented spaces on LJ that were, in retrospect, hideously toxic and counterproductive.

So many people need support, and aren't in a position to be able to meaningfully offer it. The people who want to provide support often need support themselves, and there's no one with the energy and ability to provide it, and then they burn out. It's good to avoid that burnout. Having a place where people can focus on an external (but relevant) thing feels like a very good thing.

The entertainment slow down has definitely been rough for anything media-focused, though.
The ones I can think of recently (for varying values of recent) are Morgan Davies in Evil Dead Rise, and Sena Bryer in Final Fantasy XIV. But I have so little to say beyond "they're there and that's cool!" that it doesn't feel like a post! It is possible I still have a very skewed view of what's appropriate/"enough" to post to comms.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, I've seen a lot of people struggle with how only having online spaces can lead to hiveminding and other things. Lots of 'everybody knows' and other stuff that feels very alienating unless you manage to really go deep on things. I've had people assume I am a terf because I still use the common spelling for transgender. (When really the reason people should be sus of me is because when you have 'transmediaclub' open in a tab on most browsers it shortens to 'transmed'. That haunts me. If it was possible to change comm names I would, but on DW I'd have to start a new comm and it's very messy)

Back in 2019 I knew someone who ran multiple transgender teen groups. Teens tend to spend a ton of time on social media. When I told them about having been dogpiled for not putting in the space they were baffled. Not only had they never heard of that or many of the other dog whistles or terminology things some of these online adults twist themselves into knots over, or make other people paranoid out, none of the the teens in their groups had even heard about any of it. A lot of this stuff isn't even common in online spaces.

But yeah from your experiences on LJ I assume you fully know how people can freak out over terminology, spelling and other stuff and derail everything. Group online conversations just trend towards weird absolutisms, especially when there are no personal connections between those talking.

Lack of good spaces, good spaces being presented with more need than they can bear, it's a lot. I wish I could do more about it, especially for the adults who feel swept under the rug. But I've also done what I can when I've had the chance.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh yes. SUCH insular hive-minding. You wind up with people who are confident enough or loud enough to seem like experts... and whatever weird pet peeve or bizarre take or complete misunderstanding they cling to becomes The Group Thing. People who lack any community outside of that, or don't have any real-life touchstones, can be really susceptible to someone who sounds authoritative and knowledgeable.

(Though nooooooo. I hadn't ever noticed that it truncated at "transmed" and that is tragic.
Not quite the same, but I was 100% one of those naive young teens who put 88 in a bunch of my online handles at the time, because it was my birth year and I didn't know! I have like, the ideal white supremacist birthday, and that too Haunts Me at times.)

Back in ye olde LJ days, I got torn a new one and dogpiled in the comments on a comm and a friend's journal for referring to a college friend of mine as a "transman", because that was how he referred to himself. He didn't like the space between the words, because to him it was one identity, and he preferred it as one word.
At the time in the comm in question, saying "trans" was also considered an unforgivable sin, because everyone know that you HAD to say "trans*" with an asterisk to be inclusive! Except then a couple years after that, the * was a dogwhistle and outdated and inexcuseably transphobic.

So much of the terminology wank really is like... an appeal to purity. That right-speaking will lead to right-thinking and right-acting. The idea that you can always identify a bad person through some easy "tell."
When... some of the absolute worst people I've ever encountered know exactly the right things to say to SOUND good; they're just demonstrably awful people who do a lot of actual harm, and often use that perfect terminology to avoid responsibility for it. Because how could they be bad when they say all the right things?

I'm glad that so much of it isn't actually nearly as common as it feels when it comes to those insular spaces. It is painfully derailing when it comes up, though.

(And dogwhistles DO exist, and sometimes it's worth being able to point out that something with an innocuous surface meaning really IS intended to convey something else. I get it! But there's a huge difference between a trans person referring to themselves or their own experiences with a term that's not the most in-vogue, and someone actually flinging covert slurs.)

There's such a gap in support, and things are just... really hard everywhere. There's a lot of need and not a lot of ways to meet those needs, and it sucks. Certain subsets of the queer community also do get swept to the side way more often, too. Doing what you can when you can is the best you can.

[olivermoss]

Saying Trans* instead of Transman makes no sense when it comes to a personal identity. Like, I don't identify as every possible variation on trans identity. wtf

Not sure if it's a good or a bad thing I missed out on that LJ group. The one group I was in on LJ was a shitshow for other reasons. I've since have people say to me 'we had community back in the day, guess you didn't know about LJ!' and just flames... flames on the side of my face. I even went back and used a backup of LJ that used to exist to double check what the comm was like when I tried to be involved and it was *worse* than I remembered. I don't want to get into it, but I will say no one was talking about actual gender identity or transitioning or other stuff. It was about getting some thrills. It as talked about as a kink or in even more problematic ways.

Yeah, people cling to The Group and how it thinks because that's all that got. I know I've said this before, but it's not just alienating to new people, but it also drives off anyone with a drop of perspective. Even the tiny scrap of connection I have to offline queer community means I will not put up with this One True Identity and Unifying Experiences We ALL Have bullshit. So they get cut off from people with broader experiences, who can provide more support, etc.

Though, even IRL I've had to deal with the Egg bullshit which carries with it problematic ideas. One is that 'once you crack you can't go back'. Yes, yes you can. It's common actually that trans people without support will suppress that side of themselves as a survival tactic.

[mistressofmuses]

The terminology wank got just so ridiculous. And it WAS so derailing to any attempt to talk about... literally anything. Because everyone had to get bogged down in just absolutely shredding word choice rather than focusing on any of the actual content or issues being raised.

I feel like the group was a weird spinoff comm that wasn't even SUPPOSED to be about that, but became a really social-justicey space. I don't know if it was ALWAYS toxic, or if it got worse as time went on, but I know it started to FEEL worse. There was a lot of dogpiling and callout shit eventually, but I think that was also right around The Death of LJ, and I have no idea what happened after that.

Oh, that is very "flames on the side of my face." HOW DARE, 'shame you didn't know about LJ.' The nerve!
But eesh. I think a lot of people do have really overly rose-tinted glasses for the LJ heyday. (I realize that I do about certain parts of it, too!) But yikes. That sounds really iffy, and not like the kind of space to feel wistful for.

Absolutely. That sort of insular thinking is really self-sustaining. It pushes the group members just a little out of step with everyone outside the group, in a way that causes a lot of friction if they do try to find any perspective or connections outside. (It's like how high-control religions work, pushing their members into situations where they WILL experience conflict, in order to scare them back into the fold.)
I'm not saying every crappy internet group is a cult, it's just that there ARE similarities in how it impacts people, *especially* when it's tied in with identity and concepts of self and things.
But yeah, once you've had some real-world experience, some of the online stuff is just so obviously petty and unrealistic.

God, the egg stuff. I think it's a fine metaphor for some people, but when it tips over into people basically "assigning" it to others, that gets extremely uncomfortable. I hate when people decide they can just "tell" someone is an egg, or is "cracking their egg" or whatnot, because often times... no! And it's none of your business anyway, random internet stranger!
Plus, exactly that! You can always go back! People can wind up returning to the closet for a lot of reasons, though personal safety is one of the largest reasons, I'd imagine. And in a less serious fear-for-self reason, there are people who just want to explore something and figure out if it fits them or not. It's perfectly acceptable to decide "ah, nope, that didn't suit me as well as I'd hoped, actually."

[olivermoss]

I think people have rose-tinted glasses for any place they found connection in general. I mean, if I had found connection in that mess I'd feel very differently about it. That is one of my big problems with the local, offline scene here. People are super defensive and it's hard for me to even say I've had a bad time here, and when I don't talk about it people assume I've just been hiding scared in my apartment my whole life.

And yeah, people will cling to whatever scrap of connection they've got. I've stayed in toxic environments because there is at least a glimmer of something. Leaving is hard. Giving up that glimmer is really, really hard and leaves you without that spark of hope.

The words "I cracked their egg" is just so smug, so paternalistic (or the gender neutral form of that). Honestly, it gives me the creeps.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, that's very true. Having good memories and associations with a place can absolutely impact how you remember it. I have rose-tinted memories of LJ, but I DO also remember some pretty horrid experiences had there, or that I watched friends go through.

It's really crappy how often that does make people defensive, though. Because someone else NOT having the same experience does not constitute an attack on yours, but a lot of people do react like it does. Saying "my experience in the local scene has been really unpleasant and alienating" does not mean "so you can't possibly have had anything good happen to you or made any worthwhile connections."

And same. I've stuck things out for way longer than I should have at times just because I wanted the little hint of something to pan out. Good connections are hard to find, and sometimes even the potential hint of one is enough that it's hard to willingly give it up. Other times, even a lackluster or crappy connection feels like it'd be better than nothing. (Not a good mentality, but one I know I've experienced!)

Ugh, right? It sounds so creepily self-congratulatory and... yeah, paternalistic feels like the right yuck vibe that it gives off. Proprietary, maybe? Just gross.

[olivermoss]

It's hard to know when to stay in or when to ditch. So much 'need to be open to chances and possibilities' type rhetoric got into my head and leaving felt like shutting down possibilities.

And yeah, my experiences are not canonical. Not everyone is going to have the same ones. People just seem resistant to getting that the world is a complicated place, full of randomness.

I've also held onto weak or bad connections, but it's like... which is worse? Especially in the moment, it's hard to know.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah. That sort of thing is true to some extent: if you never try, things don't happen. But sometimes the possibility just isn't there, and flinging yourself at the closed door does no good either.

But right? Different people can experience things very differently! And that's okay! Those experiences don't cancel each other out, or invalidate each other. Complexity may be difficult to deal with, but refusing to acknowledge it doesn't improve things.

A lot of times it does become a lot clearer in retrospect, when something was a shitty situation that you should have left sooner, or that you're glad you left when you did... but it's very difficult to tell in the moment. Because sometimes the reverse is true: I've been glad I stuck something out beyond an initial annoyance or bad experience. Often you don't know which it'll be before you go through it, which sucks.