#couldn't find this on the Google had to use the wayback machine

[psudopod]

"Sketches by Travis Moore of other hairstyles considered for Ric"

[blxxdingtoy]

POKEMON RANGER FANS, I'M HAPPY TO SAY I HAVE FOUND ALL THE SCANS OF THE MOBILIZE!!! POKEMON RANGER MANGA! From chapter 0 to chapter 12!

The quality might not be the best and it's only in japanese but finding it was such a big deal to me that I couldn't care less about that! If you are a big fan of Pokemon Ranger you might have heard about this manga and seen a couple of screenshots, but sadly, outside chapter 0, it wasn't in english and complete. Finding a physical copy also seems next to impossible (believe me I tried) that I no joke called this manga a lost media for Pokemon Ranger. BUT SOMEHOW I FOUND IT!

The only site that ever had all the scans shut down so I needed to go the Wayback Internet machine, someone already told me about this but idk how many people knew about the page or that you can use the Wayback Machine so I put the whole manga together in this Drive:

Hoping it works lmao, also hope you all enjoy the Manga!

[perplexingluciddreams]

today is misty outside! it looks mysterious and fantasy-like. makes me think of when they use dry ice in fantasy/magic films or TV to make it look magical and mysterious.

also it is chilly! i needed another extra blanket on bed last night (already have duvet plus 3 other blankets on top). couldn't find my starry blanket ☹️ so dad borrowed sister's blanket. it is nice it smells like her, very comforting and nice to fall asleep.

today is non-bath day so i am wearing AFOs. i realised that a part of what makes the AFOs so tiring is putting on and taking off slippers every time i get in and out of bed (necessary because the slippers have the wedges in them which makes it possible to walk with braces. also braces are slippy plastic so not safe to only wear those to walk). which is quite a few times a day because i go back and forth between bed and swing all day. and also bathroom trips. so today i am wearing the slippers already while in bed. it might get too hot. but it is a cold day so i will try it at least.

also i have period cramps 😡 but mum got me paracetamol 🥰💕

today i have blue LED lights with red and blue mix swirly projector lights (with green twinkles). the blue and red mix makes it look pinky-purply mix. it is one of my favourite colour settings for the projector. i remembered my light projector existed and i am having fun with it! 😊 but also getting the eye pain sting and ache and water, and light sensitivity headaches. 😕

i am binge watching Yonderland and Horrible Histories!! Horrible Histories i watched growing up and i read the books too (there was one of my primary school classrooms reading corner that had all the books there in order and i read them all (because of course i did 😆)). it is very nostalgic and very funny! i found all episodes of Yonderland from a link under a YouTube video to someone's google drive. don't understand what google drive is really or how it works but i clicked the three dots and then clicked download and it said "zipping file"... it took a few tries to actually get it to download onto my computer and i had to do series 2+3 over again because it didn't download all the episodes the first time. but it worked out in the end!

mum said i have to be careful downloading things from the internet in case it is not safe. i didn't think of that, oops. it was from someone's personal google drive so it seemed very safe and fine. and i remember from when i downloaded Young Americans from the wayback machine and it did the "zipping file" thing which compresses it so it is smaller (i google what zip file is - don't understand how it works but it is good apparently). apparently i should ask mum or dad next time i want to download something. but luckily it was safe this time. and now i have all episodes of Yonderland to watch!! 😄😁👍

[walks-the-ages]

Hey, EDAs fans! Remember that link that was going around a few years ago with some fan-made audiobooks of the EDAs?

[ID: a graphic of a muscular angel wielding a sword with their wings outstretched, gazing down into a fire below them, with the words "Heroic Efforts Fan Productions - Audios, Videos by R. A. Mitchell - Heaven is for the holy, hell is for heroes." End ID]

Remember how I had a project going, backing up all the links to the Wayback Machine ?

Well, I found out this year that the last of the EDA audiobook links have all died sometime last year after being on the website for ~13 years, so everything I had managed to save to my computer has now been uploaded to the Internet Archive!

this is why, when you find fandom gems like this, you need to start backing them up as soon as you find them!

Especially content that is older than a decade!

Webhosting does not last forever, especially if an account has been inactive for years, and we already know that Google and all its monopolies is changing their policies to start removing content that has been inactive for x amount of years....

If you see something, save something.

[ID: the cover of the Eighth Doctor Adventure novel 'Vampire Science', a mostly-rec cover with the silhouette of a giant vampire bat swooping towards the official seal of the United States, a circle with an eagle in the center, now styled like an Audiobook cover, saying "Doctor Who - Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman, Unabridged with Music and Sound Effects performed by R. A. Mitchell." End ID]

Get the Official Wayback Machine extension and set it to auto-archive all the pages you visit if they haven't been archived in the last 24 hours.

If you find fan-made audio dramas like this, right click on the play button and download them, and make folders with dates so you know what is from where and by whom, then keep hold of it somewhere safe.

If you find fan-made audios on Youtube, you can back the whole channel up to the wayback machine, and download the videos using a variety of websites and tools.

If you find old fan-made comics, you can usually save them as PDFs, or save individual panels in a folder, then create a PDF version from them.

Just like so many Classic Who episodes were lost to the BBC trashing reels because they didn't see their worth, so too does tons of fan-content vanish from the internet every year, either because the website finally broke or someone couldn't pay the hosting fee, or just someone vanishing one day and not being around to preserve their works!

Let's make this the official Doctor Who Fandom Motto please:

If you see something, save something.

[desertdollranch]

Dolls brands I never thought I'd own, part 4: Global PenPals

Meet Amity Anderson!

This doll was a tough cookie to track down. I first stumbled across her last year while searching for a completely different doll on eBay. I thought she was adorable, but priced way too high, so I let someone else have her. When I saw her come up again recently for a lot cheaper, I lost the bidding war. When she popped up unexpectedly a third time, I managed to snap her up right away.

The first time I saw her, I was curious about her origin, since the listing said nothing about the brand, Global PenPals. I figured it was someone's small business, because it's an unfortunate truth that many, many 18 inch doll companies produce beautiful and quality dolls for a few short years and then go out of business. Because she certainly didn't look poorly made or low quality; she obviously had a lot of love put into her production. I could tell she had a really nice wig and a carefully sculpted, realistic face mold. She was meant to be more than just a toy, but a little friend as well. That's what I liked about her. She was special, rare, obscure, and unique. And as much as I love my American Girl dolls, I also love the rare and obscure 18 inch dolls that have fallen into my lap over the years through pure luck. That has turned me into a connoisseur of obscure dolls. The rarer, the better.

So for that reason I couldn't get her off my mind. I became very fixated on finding one. I did a Google search that brought up nothing but the listing for her, plus a few dolls with similar brand names, or sites for finding an actual human pen pal. But I noticed the listing photo included a picture of her box, which had the URL of the brand's website. It was defunct, so I plugged into the Wayback Machine at archive.org to see what I could find.

Keep reading for a deep dive into The Global PenPals.

(Hello to anyone in the future who might be doing a web search about this doll! I'm sure you've found little to no information. I've put everything right here for your convenience!)

...

The site's first snapshot was taken in February 2011. It has a very short intro:

"This site is dedicated to children everywhere. Autumn Woods and Amity Anderson will begin pen pal corresponding with children in other parts of the world. They will learn about different living conditions and diverse cultural traditions. Will they discover that children are the same worldwide? Come along with us and see!"

None of the links on the sidebar were archived by the Wayback machine, so I looked at the next three snapshots, taken in July 2013, January 2014, and December 2014 (the final snapshot).

Now this snapshot displays a lot more content, although once again most of the site didn't get archived. The intro is more or less the same. But now we can see illustrations of the two main characters, Autumn Woods and Amity Anderson.

Clicking through the "Meet and learn more about Autumn" graphic linked to a page that had biographies for both characters.

Autumn Woods introduces herself first. She was born in October, hence her name, but she loves Christmas more. She lives in Kennewick, Washington with her parents and younger sister, and likes her school. She's athletic and loves to do cartwheels. Her best friend Amity lives in Basin City, near the farm where her grandparents live. She doesn't know a whole lot about the world outside of Kennewick, so she's looking forward to making pen pals all around the world.

Amity Anderson introduces herself next. She loves living on a farm in Basin City, and most of the other kids at her school are also from farming families, or live in the area seasonally, which has made her curious about the lives of other children of different background. Her family grows cherries, and sometimes the crops fail due to weather conditions. They also have lots of animals including dogs, cats, and cows. She has a secret hideout in the hay loft.

The next page linked at the top contains all of the pen pal letters to and from Autumn and Amity.

There are 10 pages of these letters. The first letter is dated June 11th of 2011, and the final one is dated August 14th of 2013.

Next link is Marcia's Dolls.

To sum it up, Global PenPals was started by Marcia Elovich in 2010. She had always sewn doll clothes for her granddaughter, and her husband built doll furniture. She used dolls to help schoolchildren learn more about the lives and perspectives of children all over the world. She modeled the dolls' faces on her granddaughter and niece, and hopes to introduce more dolls to the brand.

The next link is to the shop.

Only the Amity doll is being sold here. All the images are broken, but I can see that Amity cost $59.00.

The next tab, Media, is pretty much empty.

That's all that I can access with the Wayback Machine, but I didn't stop there.

I Googled Marcia Elovich and found the three Global PenPals books she has published.

These are current, no need to use the Wayback Machine. Here's the link to the list if you're curious about the books. You can click through and read summaries of each.

"About the Author" on the second and third books:

Marcia Harvey Elovich has enjoyed interacting with children in family, at school and other community settings. When she began looking forward to retirement from the local school district, she set up a website around two fictional characters, Amity Anderson and Autumn Woods, using her granddaughter and her niece as visual models for the character images she draws. Through the website, Marcia continues to story-tell to youngsters and adults alike. Amity lives on the farm in Basin City where, in fact, Marcia was raised, and she pursues many of the same interests and activities Marcia did while growing up with her best friend Linda. Autumn lives in town and attends Amistad Elementary School, where Marcia formerly worked as a para-eductor, and earlier as a nurse in the Kennewick School District. This was the birthplace of her peaked interest in interacting with children and later-in-life interest in education. Marcia has recently begun manufacturing of the character dolls and is now converting the website stories into children's books. Also within the framework of her stories, Marcia has interactions from her personal pen pals with whom she is communicating around the globe. Through contrast and compare, she can better present awareness of how alike we are from country to country, culture to culture, religion to religion. "Perhaps the next generation will be more compassionate, not merely tolerating diversity but embracing it!" she adds. In their retirement, Marcia works with her husband and sidekick Bob, marketing her dolls and his woodworked doll furniture. She has one young adult son living at home and an older son living within the community. Her daughter and grandchildren live out of state, so she has to love them long-distance. Through Bob, she has acquired a second daughter who lives in the area and a step-son living out of state. Marcia specifically wants to thank her mother and father, Bob and Kay Harvey, for providing a childhood almost as colorful as the fictional one of which she writes. They gave to her, her three brothers and many childhood friends their mentoring in an era when the village actually did help raise the children.

I also found Marcia's Pinterest profile. She has pinned exactly four images.

The first two are the illustrations seen on the website. The other two are pictures of the dolls.

This picture's caption:

"Amity Anderson if one of the first two characters at www.theglobalpenpals.com and the first to be manufactured as a doll. She is vinyl with soft body and has beautiful peach complexion, with perfect detail down to tiny doll- scale freckles across her nose. She comes in clothes as seen, turquoise tennis shoes, and the matching elastic headband on her long, tangle-free auburn hair. I designed the doll after my own granddaughter. Lovely presentation box designed solely for The Global PenPals."

This confirms that the doll I have is indeed Amity, not Autumn as I had sort of guessed. Amity is illustrated with bangs, but it seems that changed at some point in the doll's design.

I guess that's Autumn on the left? I see no indication on the site or elsewhere that she was ever sold, so it's possible she never made it past the prototype stage.

There's very little else out there about the dolls. A few pictures on Worthpoint with captions stating what I've already put here.

Amity seems to be one of those ultra-rare dolls that only a few collectors know about. After losing out on two other listings, I know that at least two other people do have one and know what Amity is worth. But I have no idea exactly how many dolls were ever produced and sold before the brand disappeared, which probably happened within three years of their debut.

I wonder if their failure may have been due to the price point, $59, which seems very low for a doll with such a nice wig, sleep eyes, a cloth body, a beautifully designed box, and proprietary clothing.

[bakanokiwami]

TOP 10 FANDOMS ON FANFICTION.NET BASED ON NUMBER OF FANFICTION (2002-2022)

To make this bar chart race, all series titles in the each Section on the same date nearest or on November 29 of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.

FFN used to allow Real Person Fics up until October 12th, 2002, which is why NSYNC immediately plummets off the chart at the start of the video.

The Books, TV and Play sections did not have an archived page on January 13, 2013, so I used the January 12 data.

The Play section also did not have an archived page on October 27, 2010, so I used the October 26 data.

The Games, Music & Misc. sections did not have an archived page on June 1, so I used their June 2 data.

In 2000-2001, I couldn't find a date that had all the sections archived, so the bar charts starts at 2002.

By November 2013, FFN started abbreviating numbers above 1,000 to K, so exact numbers aren't available for series with more than 1,000 fanfiction.

This bar chart was made with the assumption that the numbers listed in the each section are correct. I can't seem to get the same numbers for some of these categories when I go to the specific categories' page and toggle ratings, other filters, and language to All though... I'm not sure where the discrepancy is coming from. (And it’s not the crossover fic numbers that need to be added to serie’s total fics from what I’ve observed.)

Please refer to this post for more bar chart races.

Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏

[icantshutupaboutfrenesi]

The origin of Bluenos Album Art

TLDR: I have no clue where the album art came from after this post, i either find a lyric page scan or buy a Blueno CD (with zero garuntee of finding my answer)

(yeah we staying on topic after my last post)

I have no clue why this shower thought came to me a few days ago but damn it couldn't leave

so now Im looking into it lmao

My first instinct is to look for the origin on Tineye, maybe when it released or around that time there was some old ass dude on Limewire or Something Awful talking about it. Having a starting point close to release could've been really useful.

My closest hit was 2014, pretty lame

I still wanted to check these out though, cause you might never know

I first went to tok2.com (the top one), i did this somewhat cause of it being the oldest hit, and also being the only hit being a GIF.

I tried simply googling tok2.com, and i got a security alert (great)

I then went to the website via Wayback machine instead, which had 2 snapshots from May 3rd 2005 and June 7 2023 (wtf)

My Japanese is incredibly bad (so i used google translate)

please please please correct me if i get anything wrong

i tried my best comprehending a language Im only at unit 11 of Duolingo with and it seems this is rather a website for hosting music or selling music

Scrolling down i eventually find what were looking for and a list of contributors to the album too! (when looking for a contributors list before i could only find Fusako and Daisuke, but it seems i didn't look hard enough lol)

now seeing the GIF i save it in hopes Tineye finds something else

its 10 seconds of a still image and Tineye doesn't give me any new results (Lame af)

despite this i still have the contributors (No evidence to confirm this right now) list that's part of the webpage so i start looking into the people on there

i first start with Yoshie Tsunoken

to which im then taken to longer contributor lists on websites like rate your music and last.fm, but assuming these are reliable (like i said, no evidence to prove as of now) these don't even list who made the art, just instruments

oh well

i go back to my 3 other hits on Tineye

Discogs doesn't have a contributors list as of now

my next two (and last) are websites for Chinese Football(whether its the band or actual football, i don't know) , they have different domain names, both lead to the same website, and both images of Blueno Tineye hit have the same file name, they also have the same resolution and file size.

despite this I go back to the archive to look for snapshots of the websites.

all links have no archived Urls (and opening either website without archive gives an error)

there were also two websites with unavailable webpages, but just like these two the images are the exact same and redirect to the exact same website, just different domain

as for what avid Chinese Football fan was listening to Blueno, idk.

I then went to their Youtube topic channel and Youtube music (i forgot about these) and also found nothing

I still had one last idea though.

I decided to check my Frenesi CD's for if they listed who made the art, maybe if Frenesi did such Blueno could have too.

(these are my CDs, and i eventually plan to scan the lyrics page and the photograph on the back)

Considering all of these list who made the art for Frenesis albums there could be a possibility Bluenos CD does too

so now i either:

1: pray to the lord i find a scan/image of Bluenos CD lyric page in hope of a contributors list

2: buy one and do it myself

I have zero evidence to prove that either one of these will work :\

I will probably update on this soon (CD page scans or the actual art we looking for)

[mspiggy]

for the record it is actually pretty embarrassing how many people just believe this rumor is true without doing any sort of due dilligence beyond googling "dipper pines trans canon?"

how do i know they haven't actually done any research? because i actually did all the fucking research. i did this so that if anyone ever tries to pull out "um actually dipper was SUPPOSED to be canon transmasc" on your post about transfem dipper, you will have everything you need to debunk their misinfo on the spot.

so let's begin. if you use google to search for anything relating to dipper being canonically a trans man, you will almost always get a panel that says some portion of this:

hmm, i wonder if those fun facts are at all sourced! i'll click that link and continue my investigation under this handy cut...

well, okay, so the above DOES appear to be just a list with no links. maybe the poster provides more information, or even a source, in the comments?

no. TheJavaVoid still doesn't give us a source and throws in a south park reference to boot.

in fact, it's only after another GFwiki user named Moonlightkayla99 scaremongers in terfy "irreversible damage" fashion and asks for confirmation of the trans-coding that we get our first links...

...to a random tumblr post and a Comic Book Resource article. at least this is something, right?

no, but also yes! we'll start with the easiest link to investigate: the CBR article. it's simply a standard clickbait article compiling things the GF fandom considered evidence of "queer-coding". it was first archived by the wayback machine in 2021 and has stayed mostly the same over the past three years.

the link to the article was shared by TheJavaVoid in may of 2023, and at that time does not contain any actual confirmation of dipper being "trans-coded". at most you can follow some links to tweets from alex hirsch where he congratulates the owl house on having canon lgbt rep that he couldn't put in, and his response to being asked "is wendy a closeted lesbian or bi" is "Could be!"

HILARIOUSLY, the CBR article was most recently edited on september 4, 2024 to add the following passage... explicitly pointing out that transmasc dipper isn't actually canon!

as for our other source...

unfortunately, the tumblr post is from a dead blog.

even more unfortunately, this blog didn't play well with the wayback machine! but that didn't stop me. i needed to know what was said and whether i had been wrong all this time after all.

thankfully, archive.is helped me find EXACTLY what i was looking for: THE POST BEING LINKED TO!

...and it's a four note post from 2014 that's just some random person's headcanons! for the sake of completion, the two posts mentioned in the above screencap can be found here and here.

and to tie things up neatly, the "reddit confirmation" that everyone loves to bring up is from alex hirsch's reddit AMA in 2013, before season 2 was even released. you can find the question and his response here to verify for yourself that, once again, he never said a goddamn thing about dipper being intended to be transmasc.

somebody HAS to tell me where the "dipper was supposed to be canonically transmasc but disney wouldn't allow it" rumor started because it's like. Hilariously Absolutely Untrue On Every Level, but apparently widespread enough that ppl in their mid-20s just accepted it as fact and make sure to repeat and spread it on any transfem!dipper posts they see