The Great Purge

[LilG]

Sooooo...

Minna has decided to obliterate all “City of Hunger” content she has ever posted. If you look up “City of Hunger” in your browser, the site that would have formerly contained all the sci-fi goodness we’ve come to appreciate has been replaced by a single site which does nothing but promote her cursed bunny comic...

THANKFULLY...

The Wayback Machine has most of her devlog pages backed up on there, through which one can still scroll. The only exception is page 27, which unfortunately didn’t get archived, so whatever images were on that page we may only find through uploads on sites like Pinterest.
ALSO, the page which had the game prototype is archived with a link to the prototype which still works!
DOUBLE ALSO, in case Minna decides to purge her Dropbox, I have saved the game in my Drive and I don’t plan on removing it from there *any time soon.

*ever

[Tarnagh]

How sad to throw all that work away.

Thank you for saving it, LilG!

[catbirds]

Thank you for these links!

It was nice seeing this game's creation in real time, even though we never got to see what the actual story was about and we'll never be able to enjoy it Let's treasure what we still have of it!

[thegreyarea]

Thanks for posting that, LilG! Sevseres already had comented it elsewhere, so I'm not surprised, just sad because the game art was great! Couldn't she just create a new page and leave the old ones? Well, I don't want to go analyzing her motivations. It's good that we can still have access to those beautiful creations, and one of these days I may try that prototype just out of curiosity...

[Róisín]

Thanks for saving these! And we can still write fanfic and create art for this brilliant work. Where should we do that, please?

[catbirds]

This board will probably suffice for that for the moment, Roisin.

Oh, there was one particular background that I liked and kind of wanted to do fanart of from one of her streams that never made it onto the blog postings. All I remember about it was that it was mint green and had a deep blue body of water. I probably won't see that again Headed off to recreate it with only my imagination now.

[LilG]

GOOD NEWS!

Kat_o_Nine_Tails over on the SSSS Discord has saved every piece of CoH artwork posted by Minna on her devlogs and Twitter (including those that were on page 27, so when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING) and compiled them into a Drive which you can access here.

[SkyWhalePod]

Whooooooa. There aren't even links to SSSS and aRTD on this site. I would expect at least that from an artist's brand website, which I've always assumed hummingfluff dot com was (more or less).

this might be a good sandbox for some SPACE SCIENCE

[Jitter]

I seem to remember that in one of the first streams after LP came out she was considering to reveal her planned CoH story in some format. I guess that plan is out now.

I am saddened anew.

[Tarnagh]

Whooooooa. There aren't even links to SSSS and aRTD on this site. I would expect at least that from an artist's brand website, which I've always assumed hummingfluff dot com was (more or less).

this might be a good sandbox for some SPACE SCIENCE

The original CoH pages didn't have links to them either, if the Wayback Machine is any indication. I think the hummingfluff site was exclusively for her journey through putting together the CoH game, separate from the comics. I could swear that there were links to the comics but nothing I'm finding via the Wayback Machine indicates that is true. My mind playing tricks on me, no doubt.

I wouldn't take that lack of linkage to mean much, since there weren't ever links to the comics on that site. And it looks like she's using it now to promote her new stuff exclusively.

Well. Good for her, I suppose. I'm not signing up for her newsletter so unless she chooses to announce her new works on the SSSS page, I'll be missing out on that. Oh. Darn.

[Songbird]

I'm kicking myself as I write this for making a controversy out of something that so far isn't, but I cannot not do it. :'D It'd feel profoundly unethical from my part to not raise the question after seeing this thread.

One of the biggest heartbreaks you can feel as an author is to see your creation taken from you. To see it taken from context and redistributed, to see it even used by strangers as means to make money, to be unable to let it disappear. The loss of control over something you personally built and cherished and cultivated for so long before it meant anything to anyone else on earth is horrible. Wanting to make something disappear does not mean you stopped caring about what happens to it.

The act of salvaging and sharing this content to let the people following the development get their proper closure is an impressive display of compassion, don't get me wrong. But it's also something worth reflecting on. How much sharing, for how long is appropriate, if any? It'd be good to get Minna's permission; trying to get permission carries the inherent risk of attracting her attention to it and if irritated enough, reporting it to take the backup down.

This is a messy hard question without a correct answer. There was a break of trust between author-audience in how other projects of her were handled, there was a break in CoH where people following it where suddenly left out in the cold. Yeah, once we got the quiet notice the development was dropped one might have suspected content being taken down was on the table, but it's not correct to rely on this in lieu of a clear, transparent heads-up to get the message across. Those invested in the project expected it to remain online until further notice, they've grown to trust her and part of that trust manifested as not expecting she'd take anything down without warning.

So, the question is against all odds you managed to salvage this content, but do you want to knowing the other side of the coin? How to achieve proper closure without taking control from her? Is there a middle ground to be found?

[catbirds]

So, the question is against all odds you managed to salvage this content, but do you want to knowing the other side of the coin? How to achieve proper closure without taking control from her? Is there a middle ground to be found?

Personal feelings about her work aside, I can still find reason to respect this. She doesn't seem to regret the journey of trying to make a game, but we should get a clearer answer on how much she wants her work to stay floating around on the internet.

(In the past, she's been okay with her language tree floating around without due credit, but that's different)

I mean, I'm still thinking of how I can benefit from this archive, and the answer is Not Much? The one map that interested me never made it off stream and the demo is totally silent and very very short. So if she would rather not have any of it around, I'm not sure how much we would lose, though your feelings and everyone else's might differ.

That said, I think being an Artist On The Internet does require you to just. lay down your fear and accept that there will be things floating around outside of your control. Whether it's someone reposting (which you can and should get taken down because copyright) or it staying on someone's blog/phone gallery long after you've disappeared from the web. I didn't know that my old posts got deleted if I left this forum so no trace of my past account exists (except something in an advent calendar thing), but sometimes I still cringe at the fact that there are some very, very early and perhaps what I'd consider crude? drawings still within the SSSS fandom circle on tumblr (it's okay that they're there, I think they were charming somewhat, but if you showed them to me I'd get pretty flustered). That's there pretty permanently, and I do have to accept that there is a chance people will see a pretty messy phase of development if they know where to go. So I guess what I'm saying is that there's a possibility someone would've done this kind of thing anyway, or that it would've stayed floating around through some other means, though obviously sharing it is a different story. That's more of a practical take on it, on how what you did on the internet Stays On The Internet (forever. kind of), not a judgement on the ethics of saving artworks from an internet artist who has clearly deleted something. It would put a lot of this moral anxiety to rest if someone were to ask her permission, and I have a feeling she wouldn't be too harsh about it judging by how she has responded to this kind of thing in the past.

[thegreyarea]

Songbird, I see your point.
This seems to me like an author printing a beta version of a book and giving them to some people to read. The objective here is to show the work and get attention, so when its final version is effectively published there will be people interested. (Note that AFAIK she didn't ask for comments or contributions, it was all to show her work and create some hype).
After some time our author decides to cancel the project and removes the stand where those copies were before, freely accessible, replacing it with something else.
I see no ethical problem on the ones that already have those copies sharing them privately with some friends, unless the author specifically asks for not doing it.
That's different from setting up a public place to display and share that work, even if that place didn't make any money. In this situation, and considering the author attitude, we can imply that she doesn't want that kind of public display happening anymore, or else she would have left the copies there for anyone interested even knowing the project was cancelled.
By the absence of any statement in the line of "I don't see myself in that work any more, and I don't want it shared in any way" my understanding is that she doesn't care (unless, I presume, someone tries to make money on it, or sets it on a page for everyone to see)

TL,DR: I think there is a grey area here that allow us to admire and show that work in an ethical way, unless stated otherwise (see catbirds post on the topic) and as long as it is done in this small corner by a limited number of people.

[JoB]

The act of salvaging and sharing this content to let the people following the development get their proper closure is an impressive display of compassion, don't get me wrong. But it's also something worth reflecting on. How much sharing, for how long is appropriate, if any? It'd be good to get Minna's permission; trying to get permission carries the inherent risk of attracting her attention to it and if irritated enough, reporting it to take the backup down.

For starters, I'm not sure that the Wayback Machine (which, as mentioned, has everything CoH except devlog entry 27) is something that even Minna as the copyright holder can easily tell what to do, much less that it's up to us to influence.

Second, the content of http://www.hummingfluff.com/robots.txt (right now, at least) is

Code: [Select]

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10which implicitly permits crawlers, indexers, spiders etc. free access.

Third, I still remember somebody bringing it to Minnas attention (via Disqus) that someone illicitly made commercial use of her language tree artwork and she replied that she's not going to do anything about it, so I doubt that Minna would have such feelings and take action.

(And fourth, we could discuss endlessly about what is or isn't supposedly permissible in the "no explicit agreement" default case, if the differences between the limits of "fair use" in U.S. and German copyright are any indication.)

[thorny]

For starters, I'm not sure that the Wayback Machine (which, as mentioned, has everything CoH except devlog entry 27) is something that even Minna as the copyright holder can easily tell what to do

When the snopes messageboards disappeared (without warning, we'd been told they were being migrated to Discourse) apparently the many years of old posts were also prevented from showing up on the Wayback Machine. All you can get is:

Sorry.

This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

So it can be done, though I don't know how it was done.