Scifirenegade's Trash Can

Of note, I'm a youngster (hypothetically close to a quarter of a century, let's see how the universe treats me).

I used to spend some of my time scouring defunct newsgroups and LiveJournal blogs / communities. On my Wii. Interesting times, those were. Cannot complain, I discovered Teaspoon! And a few of my favourite writers too!

On one of the communities I poked around in (dedicated to two certain teachers ;) ), there was a fanfiction masterlist. Here it is, if you're interested.

There was a name on there I recognised (someone I follow on Twitter, a big Barbara fan; I didn't go on Twitter much, and now I certainly won't touch it!). Turns out, he wrote a long, long story about Barbara post-The Chase. As a Barbara fan (could you tell), I had to read it. I read everything on that list, but not that one.

But as is the nature of the internet, she giveth and then taketh away, and the website was gone. The Wayback Machine could only archive four chapters or so. I mentioned it to the author and asked if, maybe, he was interested in reposting it somewhere. Nothing came of it, he has his own original projects.

This was a few years ago. I won't lie, I kinda lost hope.

And then, poking around the Wayback Machine, and the_chestertons community, and some of the blogs of the regular posters there... I found another link to the same fic. All chapters archived.

I posted a rec for it on tardis_library. It's good.

It shall forever live in EPUB form on both my phone and my computer (even if I cannot read a full book on a computer, but you know, backup your stuff and all that).

Now, getting off-topic but keeping on topic at the same time: why didn't I save that one fic posted on tumblr dot com and tumblr dot com only that had Ian playing with some alien kids who were intrigued by the concept of hair. And Barbara thought it was adorable! Didn't I learn anything from the Angels mishap? Now the blog deactivated, the posts are lost...

Again, the internet giveth and taketh away.

Or How I Learnt To Stop Clicking and Love Reading

This doesn't make any sense, now does it?

It all starts with an alternative application for Youtube on Android: Newpipe! It's great because you can listen to music while the phone is locked, there's no ads and you can get rid of the recommendation system.

It also let's you download videos, audio and captions.

So, when I am on my phone and find something on Youtube that shouldn't be there because of copyright, I immediately download it, and later put it on my PC or on an external drive. One of those things, was a certain episode from a soap called Angels.

( On Angels and Jacqueline Hill's work, for it got rambly )

Angels was always elusive. So when the lovelies Katie and Claire posted that picspam, I yelled and snatched it with Newpipe. And had it on my phone for months.

Then Network decided to release the legendary Maigret TV series with Rupert Davies on DVD amd Bluray. Awesome! Jackie was in an ep there too, and the show seems right up my alley. But the price was too much for me.

A few weeks ago, The Trap gets posted on Youtube. I do the same as I did with the Angels ep: snatched it immediately. Her performance is fan-tas-tic! Jacqueline Hill is a master of subtlety, and I loved looking at all the little gestures she made. Pretty good ep too, a bit dated maybe, but it threw me off the loop.

Oh Newpipe, my little friend. If only your user interface did not suck. Because as I was trying to clean up my downloaded videos history, you delete all the videos I downloaded.

All of them.

The good news is that I got almost them all back. It was a pain, but I managed it. The bad news is that it was almost all of them. Bye bye Angels.

Why is deleting all video files even an option? I'm assuming it's a techbro thing, but it's stupid. Even more stupid is the lack of "Are you sure?" prompts. And even more stupid is that the prompt is like

"Would you like to delete your downloaded video history or your downloaded video files?"

And they reverse the options, so the first option is to delete the video files. I'm not a UI expert, but I don't think that's how you do it.

So now I'm praying to Yetaxa hoping that the episode gets uploaded somewhere again that isn't a scam site.

Because William Russell is in it looking gorgeous as usual and I'm THAT type of fan (needs to watch everything this person I like had a hand in).
Mind you, I'm still watching the episodes that aired in July 1992.
( Corrie rambles )
In other "Russ in soaps" news, I wish there was more episodes available of Harriet's Back in Town. Seemed nice and quite fun. Wanted to see what type of shenanigans William Russell's character would find himself in (and if he wore that purple ahirt again, it was... a statement). Oh, and Colin Baker shows up at some point.

[1] This is giving me Planet of Giants vibes. You know, when Barbara gets poisoned by the insecticide and doesn't tell anyone. Been thinking about it a lot actually. We need more Barbara/Ian Planet of Giants hurt/comfort fic.
[2] No need to ask if I have a problem, I very much do. Do not watch Classic Doctor Who when you are a teenager, kids. You're going to get some weird crushes :P

I have a data hoarder mind. My fear of some sort of media getting lost forever is really big, so I love archiving!

When I heard that Sega's 7th Dragon websites were going down... I had to do something. So I'm saving them using the Wayback Machine + saving the .swfs (those sites are filled with Flash files, it's not even funny).

I'm not familiar with the franchise at all, but some people are, and it is for them I'm doing this :D

Since Photobucket is shite and tinypic is... nonexistant?? Also shite?? I'm saving a bunch of LJ icons. Cept they are mostly Doctor Who related. Classic Who related. Yeah.

I have more than 1000 now. And I'm doing these manually because Photobucket, as I said, is shite and is making me save them as .webp or whatever instead of .jpg or .png or .gif.