RhymePhile's Rat Race

This morning I was looking for a photo I had taken of me in Mulder's office (I was standing in front of a green screen) back at the X-Files Expo in 1998. I had it saved on my old, old (last updated 2000) website over at Tripod.

Well, I discovered that Tripod finally killed it. It's kind of ironic, considering the new movie is coming out soon, and my little home on the net had been up for eight years without an update. *sigh*

I don't think my brother (the webmaster who made it for me) saved much of the info on it.

Back in 2005 I had the good idea to send a lot of my older fic to Gossamer, most of which had never made it there for whatever reason. In the old days a lot of my fic (they were written in rhyme, thus my net handle) went to a different Gossamer archive that has since ceased to operate, and I didn't want to lose stuff.

Back when I started fanfic in late 1997, I didn't have a computer. I had WebTV, which was this box you hooked up to your TV and a phone line in order to get on the net. Our family didn't have the money for a computer back then, so a $300 piece of equipment that let me get on Usenet and read stories and check e-mail was all I needed. And man, did I use that thing. I wore out two wireless keyboards, and when they implemented new technology on the service, I would be one of the first to get it sent to me to be tested. I didn't upgrade to a computer until 2004!

Anyway, WebTV didn't have storage ability, which means I don't have anything saved anywhere except Gossamer.

Luckily I was able to access the Internet Wayback Machine and save four rhymes I had written that I never sent to Gossamer, along with two original pieces of art I had on the old website. One rhyme is lost to the Internet ether, as are all my photos I took at the Expo in 1998, and the on-location X-Files photos I took when I was in vacation in California in 1999. Not a huge loss as I'm sure I have them around somewhere at home, but still.

It's a good thing I checked this morning. It makes me feel a little sad though, knowing that a piece of my fanfic history is gone.