• he/they

It's a horrible day on the Internet, and you are a lovely geuse.

Adult - Plants-liking queer menace - Front-desk worker of a plural system - Unapologetic low-effort poster

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malymin
@malymin asked:

I saw you mention in the comments of a post going around that you're deeply invested in archival and curation regarding your interests. Do you have any advice on how to... begin undertaking that work, when the fandom at large has neglected it for a very long time? I deeply value accessible information, and think just having it can enhance the non-curative elements of a fanbase as well, but often I find that nothing exists but a very poorly run Fandom wiki that contains minimal information on the core text, and no information on outside materials that might help one understand the creative decisions that went into the text. Trying to scrounge up untranslated interviews, ancient website pages and Livejournal posts, and other materials can feel like a headache, even before I have to decide how to present my archeological internet-digs.

Hello! :D

I think the most important thing to keep in mind, based upon my personal history with burnout, is that your work doesn't have to be perfect. (After all, wikis are rarely a solo undertaking - like all of the good wikis are the product of many, many little iterations by a bunch of people!)

If all you do is save what you can find before it succumbs to link rot; if all you do is install the Archive.org extension and click save website, then CONGRATS, you have done a neat thing! So that is where, personally, I would begin: save/archive a bunch of stuff in case future you or future someone else feels up to the task of doing something with it.

From there? Perhaps a linkdump - literally just a page with a bunch of links to the neat stuff you've found. They can be extensive and organized (example: this plurality linkdump by @monsterqueers) but they can also be just like... a Rentry page where you've thrown everything for people to rummage through, and you can organize it and pretty it up some other time.

So I guess the moral of the story here is like, if it all feels overwhelming, don't feel afraid to just half-ass it? Even if that means like, half-assedly tossing a bunch of links into a page, walking away from it for several months, and then coming back to put them into slightly more organized piles. That's part of the beauty of this work, I find!


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in reply to @bazelgeuse-apologist's post:

Thank you! I've begun the link-dump process with one of my special interests (Princess Tutu... metafictional children's anime from 2002), though I did at one point hit a road block when I was completely unable to find a source I know for a fact once existed: an inquisitive fan pointing out a block of German text inside a book within the show, and finding it to be an exact quote from a specific real-world German academic journal, discussing The Never-ending Story. I believe it was a Tumblr post, but Tumblr is notoriously difficult to hunt down posts on, as regular search engines don't seem to capture individual posts well and the on-site search engine is garbage. Potentially the very blog the post was on has already been deleted!

I've run into this issue of an informative source being impossible to hunt down for other interests before... do you ever struggle with this issue?

Oh, Princess Tutu! :D I watched that with my partners, who were also the ones to introduce it to me. It's so good!

And yeah, alas, I've run into that problem in the past. I don't think I have an answer besides "make note of the gap and carry on, hoping that one day another dig or Just Chance turns it up for me."