#photobucket is dead

[charybdiss]

LiveJournal just emailed to inform me about my 21st anniversary on their webbed site

[punkitypunker]

[cromerholt]

sorry i know it’s like a huge deal for some of you guys but why on earth were any of yall using discord as a permanent file host… like i kind of just assumed attachments and shit just got deleted after a while anyway…

[carrieway]

the smallest frankenstein's monster in the world

[somethingshifted]

this is what murdoc had on his facebook on top of an exhaustive list of everything he's listened to...

[ugh-yoongi]

listening to this rn and my only claim to fame might be seeing patd in ‘06 on the nintendo fusion tour before their first album even dropped and this being the only version that even existed

name something from 2006 you're still mad about, i'll start:

p!atd's "time to dance" demo is nine billion times better than the album version and they never should've changed it

[corneliushickey]

@ilynpilled

ppl being more interested in Fandom than the actual source text is so real like they do have their own nonexistent text thats just a recycled concoction of the same bland fandom incorrect quotes tropes over and over again which deviates so much from the canon and they prefer to the actual thing lol

my favorite example of sourcecreep is the fact that if you go on reddit, pinterest, or facebook, or google image search 7 years ago, or flickr and photobucket if you're properly fandom old, you will find image edits of disney's jack sparrow with the quote overlay "the problem is not the problem. the problem is your attitude about the problem."

if you've seen enough of these edits (there are many thousands of them), you might even read those two sentences in his trademark cadence.

the problem here, though, is not anyone's attitude about the problem. it's that this quote has never appeared in any of the five films in which jack sparrow appears. nor in any of the video games he stars or guest-stars on. nor in any of the tie-in young jack sparrow novels or the film novelizations. it is not from a deleted scene or an early draft of any script. it's not from any of the disney park parades or firework shows in which jack is included as a face character with recorded speaking lines. it's not from the original ride or the re-dress of the ride post-dead man's chest.

this is a quote from the YA series the sisterhood of the traveling pants. one of the characters' coaches says it to them in one of the books because they are children in high school. there is no reason for it to be attributed to this character or this franchise besides one patient zero at some point or another 20 years ago making an image with a text overlay on picnik photo editor and uploading it to their livejournal or whatever.

anyway this is how asoiaf fans on twitter absorb information about their favs from the series and then post about it. i believe there are many such cases across fandom at large.

[jessaerys]

the word father rotted in my mouth: i. tom stoppard, rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead. ii. nurnehpetsnur iii. anne carson, plainwater: essays and poetry iv. see notes. v. see notes. vi. genesis 4:9 vii. anaïs nin, winter of artifice viii. see notes. ix. slider.xxxxxxxx x. josh alex baker, death wish. xi. see notes. xii. eric larocca, things have gotten worse since we last spoke xiii. death note, c-kira one-shot. xiv. leah horlick, for your own good, xv. death note manga, L's death, mello's death. xvi. ocean vuong, someday i'll love, xvii. woyaocharlie xviii. death note short stories, a-kira one-shot. xix. anna belle kaufman, cold solace.

notes under the cut.

*iv. artist notoriously hard to track, there's several images on pinterest that are clearly the same style, tried with all of them and they all seem to come from a long deleted 2008 photobucket folder.

v. & viii. the oldest source seems to be long-deleted posts from this blog, which were re-posts.

xi. this is the only source i can find but i don't think it leads to the artist ): please hmu if you have any leads about all of these.

part of the mine and the bestie’s delusional headcanon that near and mello (& matt) did have somewhat of a mentor/mentee relationship with L (fuck them other kids….) whom although genuinely fond of them was a willing participant in the amoral watari industrial complex (did he care to be succeeded? did he find it amusing or an interesting long term project? were the tests and mindfuckery and hot/cold unpredictable behavior and purposeful sowing of a rivalry between them the only model of family and mentorship he knew and was capable of? did he ever really love them? will they ever know? etc etc etc.)

i’m handwaving away the “we only talked to L once” story as skillfully edited by near because 1. he loves to lie and 2. his complicated relationship with L and subsequent grief AND resentment is still wrapped in seventeen thousand layers of emotional repression and who wants to get into that. 3. also makes mello’s comments in LABB about not caring if near is hurt that he knows more about L than near does way funnier. sibling behavior

anyway the both of them have a brotherfatherhero complex the size of TEXAS but thankfully they can sublimate that in the bedroom through creative kinky means. i know the usual "don't ship them!" rethoric is that they're foster brothers but unfortunately that just makes them a billion times more compelling. to me

[melodyburst]

EMAIL TITLE: We killed your entire fucking family. They're all dead. We shot them in the back of the head. There's nothing you can do about it now. It's over.

EMAIL BODY: That's right your Photobucket account is very close to being terminated make sure you log in right now before photos of your loved ones are destroyed forever!

[solradguy]

Hey Sol! I remember quite a while ago, someone asked you about how to get into archiving stuff and you answered with a little guide of sorts of useful programs/websites/etc.

Do you still have that guide up? Is there somewhere I can learn more in-depth about how to begin archiving too?

Tumblr search is failing me and I can't find that post now... So! I'll type it again. Lately I've been thinking about writing some kind of "archivist's manifesto" type thing for my Neocities in an effort to hype people up about archiving and to guide them on how to do it. When I write that up I'll post it here too.

Here's a big post I wrote on how to scan books and where to upload them (this is also linked in the big GG masterpost that's in my pinned): https://solradguy.tumblr.com/post/722512206034501632/sol-radguy-scanning-guide

That guide also has some tips on photo editing that may be useful for non-book scanning stuff, like some free program alternatives.

I've tried finding professional guides on how to archive media but most of them are written for people looking to archive family photos/things and not web media or physical books. None of them have been very helpful, honestly. One thing they recommend doing that I think IS helpful though is the rule of 3: Keep 3 copies of an archive somewhere. A physical hard drive, cloud storage, a second hard drive stored separately from the first (in case of accidents/hardware failure), uploaded to separate file hosts, and printing new physical copies are some. Doing any 3 of those is highly recommended. I do the two hard drives and cloud storage/file hosts ones. My hosts are generally Archive.org, Neocities, and Google Drive.

Be very careful about trusting image hosting sites with valuable scan data because they come and go like the wind. Photobucket, Tinypic, Imageshack... They're either dead or require a premium to host files now, which doesn't help hobby archivists at all. Imgur's demise is on the horizon. It's just the way it goes with these due to how expensive and space-consuming image hosting is.

Absolutely 1000% do not ever use just Discord for archiving/hosting things. Nothing on that platform can be backed up easily or with automation, and the guys that run it have already made weird choices the community didn't want while also putting more and more things behind the Nitro paywall. I suspect they're going to kneecap image and file hosting some day soon, too.

For archiving someone else's files, something that helps greatly (if it can be done) is either including the source of the file in the file's name or writing a separate document with the sources and whatever other additional information there is.

Here's a basic example of some Sol images from my Sol folder:

The first two are from the Counterside collab event and then the second two are official art but the file names are descriptive and it saves time sourcing them for things later. For archiving fan art/fiction, the filename is a good place to put the artist credit. Something like [Artwork Title]-[Artist Name]-[Original File Creation Date].format ("Sol Badguy Missing Link - Daisuke Ishiwatari - May 14 1998.jpg," or however you wanna organize the folder) works good.

Windows 11 didn't like working with Japanese text in file names for some of the Vastedge stuff I archived and I had to translate/romanize them. If you can't read Japanese/source's language, just do your best (number them instead?) and include the native language text in a .TXT file if possible.

A more complex example from the Vastedge .TXT doc:

The Vastedge materials archive is pretty dense and had a lot of contributors so the first half of the .TXT document's just credits for who did what. This is useful for if something gets lost because we'll know who to go bother about it. Among other things.

The next section is a long stack of details about the files themselves. I won't paste the whole thing here, it's pretty long. It covers how the archive came to be, issues with some of the files, how the files were obtained, and some other stuff:

The last half of the .TXT doc is a listing of the folder contents. I included this for quick reference and because sometimes archives get fractured by people only reuploading certain parts of it. Future archivists or anyone else going through this archive now have a list of what should be in there and will know if something is missing.

Archive.org/Wayback Machine has a browser extension for quickly archiving webpages. I have that and WebP / Avif Image Converter by Nullbrains (Chrome, might be on Firefox?) installed to quickly archive pages and convert image files as I save them.

In summary:

Upload/store things in multiple places

Include credits wherever you can, however is easiest for you

Try to keep files in the most widely compatible formats (jpg, gif, bmp, png, tiff, mp3, mp4, txt, pdf, flac, etc). Google's .DOC, Clip Studio Paint's .CLIP, and similar file formats meant for a specific piece of software may not be supported in the future.

A bad/incomplete archive is better than no archive at all. Consider how exciting Sappho poetry fragments are compared to what it would be like if we didn't have anything. Don't worry about making it "perfect."

Hope that helps some!! I'll try to write the manifesto for my NC soon

[batwynn]

When you pay $5 to return your photobucket from the dead so you can get your old letter fanfic files and you open the portal to photos of hell high school.

[wyrmguardsecrets]

I miss the pixel dolling community of the early-mid 2000s. I wasn't amazing at it, but it would've been nice to have access to the base resources from sites like bunnystick or whatever other ones I can't remember. Was the only way for me to depict my OCs in some way, because I can't draw humans/humanoids (would always give credit for the base, of course, that's a given). Most of the sites are dead now and all my old photobucket shit is gone. Anyone else remember dolling? Anyone have any site resources with good doll bases?

.

[hidden-but]

my photobucket account is officially dead now, but i still think this is the most beautiful picture i had there

[starakex]

I wonder if people making self-indulgent fanworks know how powerful they are. Someone out there in the 2000s wrote a self-insert fanfiction of them getting isekai'd to Hyrule and dating Link from Ocarina of Time while Bart Simpson was also here holding the secret fourth triforce piece and this person will live without the knowledge that their weird little fanfiction found on some derelict forum was my entry into online fandom. Kids roleplaying as Pokémon on dead fansites who didn't even know that in a few years they'd sink just as much time as I did pretending to be a Mudkip on the hit new game Pokémon Mystery Dungeon just because they wanted to share their obsession with other nerdy kids. Weekly fanart uploads of Koopaling OCs where you HAD to be there the week they'd been shared otherwise all you'd find was a Photobucket default picture due to bandwidth usage.

There's power in how passionate you can get about things. Put it out there even if you don't think anyone would even care. I didn't even like Bart Simpson and I was still following that shit

[coffee-and-uhg]

Splendor in the Grass

source: dead 404 photobucket link

[ofmdee]

got an email from photobucket that my account was deactivated since they no longer support free~ accounts and that means all my old sims legacies/etc that i posted on lj/dw are p much dead, which..... idk. i've been thinking about deleting those accounts anyway because they are so old and not what i want my sims stuff associated with anymore, so, i'll probably just..... get rid of them, i guess, because what is the point?

i'm rly trying to consolidate my social media accounts in general, so, if you're looking for any of my downloads you can always find them here (NOTE, they are all for SIMS 2 except the first post)

my current sims related DW is NSFW 🔞 and can be found here, although it is p much exclusively used to post my ofmd sim story. if i get back into REALLY sharing sims stuff besides that in the future, i think i'll make a new DW, but i really haven't even logged into those accounts in ages, so it'll probably give me some peace of mind knowing they're not still sitting around with shit i half-forgot about posting over the years 😂

AND i know this account is not strictly sims related anymore, so if you wanna just see sims my sims stuff, check out @ofmdee-sims

i guess that's it!!!!

💋