akamine-chan:

seepunkrun:

So, the Wayback Machine. It crawls through the internet and saves stuff. Sometimes it has the thing you want. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it says it doesn’t but still does. So what can you do?

Shake the internet until it falls out, of course.

I use a Wayback Machine search plug-in for Firefox so I can just paste in the
address and go. If I’m lucky, the archive serves up the saved page without a
fuss. If I’m not so lucky, I have to go digging for it myself because
there’s still a chance it’s been archived. Unfortunately, the site isn’t very intuitive, so it takes some work.

Here are two tricks
I’ve learned:

1) When you’re viewing a saved page on the Wayback Machine, you’ll have a URL that looks something like this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615050101/https://archiveofourown.org/users/Punk

But maybe that’s not the most recent grab, or maybe it’s just a big sad face because the archive was down that day. To see all the saves for that page, all you have to do is replace that big spew of numbers (hint, it’s the save date) with an asterisk so you get something like this:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://archiveofourown.org/users/Punk

That’ll take you to the calendar page that displays the dates that page has been crawled, and you can see if there’s a newer or older save that has what you want. Just click on the colored dates on the calendar. The years above the calendar are clickable, too. If the year has a bar graph over it, that means there are saves from that year. No bars means no saves.

2) Next–and this is messy but it can pay off–sometimes you end up here:

[image: Wayback Machine screenshot: “Hrm. Wayback Machine doesn’t have that page archived. Want to search for all archived pages under ao3.org/works?”]

Now, that means the exact URL you’re looking for isn’t there. In this case, it’s because it’s a chaptered work on the AO3, so the Wayback Machine won’t have it saved under that particular URL. (More on this later.) It might have it saved another way, though. You don’t want to search all the AO3 saves because that’s nuts, but the AO3 often has all sorts of things it adds on to the end of URLs, so add an asterisk to the end of the AO3 URL and hit return. Your new URL will look like this:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582*

And, depending on how lucky you are, you’ll get this nasty business:

[image: Wayback Machine screenshot: “378 URLs have been captured for this domain.”]

That’s right: 378 URLs have been captured for this domain. And that goes on for quite some time. Eight pages of it as it happens. And only a few of those relate to the page I’m looking for. This is because my work id was 4582 and the Wayback Machine is giving me every saved AO3 page that starts with those numbers, but if you’re persistent, sometimes you can find a wayward save of the exact work you’re looking for.

[image:
Wayback Machine screenshot:

The very end of eight pages of results.]

Ah, there it is, on page eight. The very last result. The good news is that you can reverse sort any of those categories. So I could have hit the “URL” link at the top of that column and magically made the last result the first.

But that nonsense is only if you can’t find the page any other way. If you take the example I used and search for https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582 at the Wayback Machine right now, it’ll give you a redirect page that automatically takes you to https://web.archive.org/web/20180106223039/http://archiveofourown.org/works/4582/chapters/5746 which is the first chapter of that work, and then if you click “Entire Work” on your own, like an animal, it’ll give you the whole thing. Voila.

And of course you can use the Wayback Machine with sites other than Archive of Our Own, I was just using my stuff as an example. Use it anywhere you like. Try
it on the front page of the New York Times! They’ve got captures all the way
back to 1996. When the front page was an honest to god image map. Bless their
hearts. It was a different time.

So that’s using the Wayback Machine to find something. You can also use it to save stuff, though it won’t work on every site or every page. There’s a Save Page Now box on the Wayback site if
you’re feeling artisanal, but if you want something faster this site has a
bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar or there are extensions for Firefox, Safari,
and Chrome: If You
See Something, Save Something – 6 Ways to Save Pages In the Wayback Machine.

Heads up–if you try to save something from the AO3, you might need
to do some extra clicking if the work is chaptered or has a certain rating or
both. The Wayback Machine’s not logged in to the archive like you most likely
are, and so it’s only going to get the first chapter of something, not the full
work, and it’s going to get stumped by the “this work could have adult
content—proceed?” page. So you’re going to have to click the “proceed” and
“entire work” buttons yourself, like an animal. Just keep clicking, and make
sure when you stop you’re looking at a saved page that reflects the live page
you just viewed—is it all there, does it have all available chapters—and
then later, when you’re like, “I just read this, how can it be gone???” you’ll
have a copy squirreled away.

The Wayback Machine is an excellent resource, but yes, not at all intuitive to navigate. This is a great intro on finding stuff in the past.

jvlianbashir:

on the subject… i get really sad when people characterize sisko as this super grim hardass. like. he absolutely CAN be very severe. that’s pretty necessary for a man in his position. (even “soft boi” kirk could lay it down when it became necessary). but. he’s also 100% a family man too. he loves cooking. he invites his crew to come cook and have dinner with him. he loves his son so much. he’s always so loving and supportive of jake and his dreams. (honestly, he loves kids in general.) he likes nostalgia, baseball, folktales, and shipbuilding. and he is always, always showing how much his staff means to him, both verbally and in his actions. how many times did he bend the rules to protect his staff or to allow them to do something spiritually/emotionally important to them? and GOD, is he clever. 

i hate to see his character flattened out to “done-with-your-shit guy”

zomblequeen:

Favorite trope 348234: when person who nearly died wakes up in hospital bed, looks around, sees the object of their affection asleep in a chair next to them because they haven’t moved in days

mishacolins:

Unknown number: *calls me*

Me (while staring down at my phone): can you please not do that