#joanhello2

I wish you a swift recovery

Submission from @joanhello2 for August: “Welcome” 

“Can we keep ‘em?” If Lefty Dusenberg had been the praying type, he would have called it the answer to his prayers. He had been a master burglar, the head of a skillful ring of thieves that eluded the law for years. He was happily married to an equally thievish woman. Karla had been the advance woman who charmed her way into rich people’s houses and then, pretending to admire the decor, got the owners to give her a tour that might even include telling her where the safe was and which of the paintings were originals with resale value on the black market. It has been a satisfying life in all respects but one: they’d never had any children to bring up in the criminal way of life. So this baby who fell out of the sky seemed like the one thing he needed to make his life complete. The kid even came with what Lefty figured was a pet, a strange kind of fish with a face so expressive, it was almost like a person. It was like here was the family life he’d longed for all these years, dropped into the prison exercise yard years after he’d given up on ever having it.

Omar Jenkins had the opposite reaction, at first. He had seen enough movies to expect that, when something came from outer space, it usually wasn’t friendly, and his rise to ganglord necessitated being hypersensitive to danger. But Lefty’s question made him notice that the two little creatures inside the pod were pretty obviously harmless. Helpless, too. And the kid was blue. Another thing Omar was hypersensitive to was skin color, and so far as he knew, this was the only blue person on the planet. Poor kid was gonna need some serious guidance, growing up in this world.

“Get ‘em outa sight,” Omar commanded in a low voice. “Guards be here any second.” Lefty picked up the baby and the fish and moved through the crowd, away from the doors. Billy Bob, who was a father and knew that, with babies, something always got left behind, spotted the glowing pacifier, grabbed it, and followed Lefty. While Omar was insisting to the guards that what they were seeing was what the prisoners had seen that there’d been nothing inside it when it landed, Lefty was on the other side of a screen of orange-clad men, jiggling the two alien children in his arms and whispering.

“Who’s a cute little crook? Who’s gonna be da greatest criminal ever? You are. Yeah, you.”

Hm, okay, so this is something I’ve been wanting for a long time now, but have not had the energy to deal with: The LiveJournal Megamind_Movie Community deserves to be preserved. I never intend to delete it in any way, but things do happen. I’m not the owner of the community account, that is Fairest. Nothing stops Fairest from hitting the delete button (not saying she would, just that her doing so is 100% out of my control) and nothing stops LiveJournal from wiping blogs/communities due to whatever fuckery they suddenly desire.

The most important thing to note here is that people have been deleting their personal LiveJournal accounts for years, and LiveJournal also deletes accounts due to inactivity. Upon an account being deleted, this also deletes their communities, and all of their posts/comments made in other communities. This is why many older posts in the community look weird, and why many fanfics have gone missing. I highly advise against people just deleting their livejournal accounts for this reason, especially if they have left a major presence in a community. At the very least, if someone chooses to do this, I beg that they back up and archive their fanfiction/art/rp/etc elsewhere for the sake of keeping this content available for their fandoms.

As for the sudden Russian TOS and it’s scary-sounding wording, what I gathered from it is that it will have 0% impact on the actual content of the Megamind_Movie community. The community is almost entirely in English, for one, and has very little to do with anything that could be potentially dangerous in a legal setting, or even a Russian legal setting. However, what people have typed in their personal journals may be another thing. People may want to delete their private personal postings within their journals if they’ve been rather political in them lately, rather than deleting them outright.

I’ve been around on LiveJournal since back in the day when DeadJournal was a thing, heh, so I’ve seen this sort of thing come up once in a while. TOS changes one way or another, people realize their private posts are actually still readable by the owners, and people panic and delete. So I guess I’m just not shocked, but more concerned for the preservation of what used to be the main source of content for a fandom.

Oh, and one other thing that’s stopped me from asking about making an archive until now-- Everyone still has the rights to their own fanfiction/art/etc. If someone deleted their work, it was possibly intentional and I’m... actually unsure at what point we should be stepping in and preemptively preserving media instead of letting it disappear with time. I hate to see fanworks and discussions just disappear, though... It’s always hard to suddenly lose a huge source of fandom content with no warning and no backup.

So I guess I will post this and ask what others want done. Preserve the community’s content or leave it alone? How do we go about saving and archiving the content? I’m looking for ideas from everyone!

Many happy returns!