....the Internet? The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another - but sometimes people will make a kind of weird Jay & Silent Bob shrine. Well, a gay one.

Some of it is to immortalize my favorite defunct-since-2007 fanfiction archive, the rest is whatever I want it to be. Who cares?

The main fuction of this site is to archive JayandSilentBobSlash - or rather the fic archive from its mailing list, as the main site went by the wayside of the Wayback Machine many many moons ago.
(Like, 20 years worth of moons ago.)

The site I'm recreating here is the fic archive from AllMyFault.org - it was used from 2004 on & is still up on Wayback Machine for the time being. (It looks like the hosting expired in 2020 - did 2020 really have to go that far?) but the internet is a rapidly detereorating place (even though we're all threatened by it being "forever") so I figured I might as well make a back up version of the site while (most of) the links were still functional.

Save for a few scrollboxes & headers to make navigation less convoluted - I've left the J&SB Archive just as it was at its last update in 2007. It's not very pretty - and it's mostly raw text files, but hey - that makes it mobile friendly & the whole reason I wanted to recreate it was for the content, not the bells and whistles that 2021 internet gives us.

Now that that's out of the way, JayandSilentBobSlash was a Yahoo! Group archiving works from the JSB-Slash mailing list that became entirely defunct in 2001. (But likely existed pre-2000) JSB-Slash hosted a gallery, links to other slash groups/webrings, and fanfiction as far as the eye could see. Despite the name (and the name of this site) it wasn’t all Jay & Silent Bob, they hosted plenty of works about Holden & Banky, and even stories about Silent Bob & the Metatron. I’d never had access to it outside of seeing LiveJournal links - I was in first grade when it originally went offline. What I refer to as the “Fic Archive” here - is a copy of the JSB-Slash section of AllMyFault. What’s that? Do you care? I’m telling you anyways.

In 2004, the JSB-Slash archive moved to AllMyFault.org - it’s hard to pull up too much information about the site itself, but they hosted a LOT of fanfiction - and archives for Askewniverse fanfic sites & mailing lists that weren’t JSB-Slash, like Straight Askew & KS Slash - or Movie Slash which wasn’t exclusive to the Askewniverse canon at all. I’m sure there’s like, two dozen segments of AllMyFault that I’ve never seen with my own two eyes & can’t pull up captures of at this point. Either way - that’s the site I’m familiar with. The JSB-Slash section of AMF was last updated in….March 2007. Yeah. But staying untouched until the site went down completely in 2020 - it was a standalone slice of old-web, if you knew how to stumble into it.

There’s a ton of overlapping content there - as most of these were mailing lists, and many of the fics I’ve saved for the Fic Archive here & their authors existed on those sites as well. But why bother archiving it? I’m dancing around the question here.

Oh man, am I glad you asked. Why am I archiving a site that hasn’t been updated since 2007? Why is anyone writing or reading View Askew fanfic? I don’t know. Well, I kind of know - we’ll get back to that. But like - why spend the time doing this? Shouldn’t we let old .txt files & fanfiction from 1999 just kind of, fall by the wayside?

I don’t think so. Or at least not always. I’m very lucky that AllMyFault is still available on Wayback Machine - but I know it won’t be there forever, and I doubt someone else has it backed up somewhere - or if they do, that anyone has a way to contact them and see where everything went. You can say “the internet is forever!” as much as you want - and it’ll still only ever be partially true. For every site we still have Wayback access too, I’m sure everyone can name a handful more that they used to visit that aren’t available. When webrings & Yahoo! Groups were big I don’t think most of us were thinking about being able to access those spaces or that content ever again, it was just floating out there and fun in the moment. But like every other person on NeoCities - I miss that energy of the internet. Mailing lists that aren’t advertisements barely exist anymore, and it’s fun to think that there were dozens of people trading stories about movies - and not huge, super relevant popular movies either - I know Kevin Smith is popular to an extent but it’s not like we’re looking at Star Wars content here, it’s pretty niche. And even more niche when you want to make those characters kiss each other. I digress.

People worked hard on these fics, and people worked hard to send out mailers, and build the original archive - and again to build the archive on AllMyFault. I don’t want that to float off into cyberspace forever. Some authors are up on AO3 or FF.net - but when I say “some” I mean like, two, and maybe two of their Askew fics made it over to those platforms. (I get that some people might be embarrassed by their old content - and if that’s you, and you’d like me to remove and of your work let me know. I know folks signed off “Archive: Yes!” in their text files, but I doubt they were assuming that might apply to someone archiving their work, yet again - in 2021.) Fanfiction takes a lot of work! Even now, lots of authors are lucky to get a kudos on AO3 or one comment every 5-6 fics.
Past wanting to preserve old web content - fanfiction is a great medium for wiggly human connection bits, it's nice being able to read someone elses version of a character you already “know”, you get room to add your own headcanons - and damnit, they're just a good time. Fanfiction is something I don’t think a lot of us value as much as we should. For fucks sake, some are just as long as “real” books are. In a weird way, despite only seeing it once it had already been seemingly abandoned - the JSB-Slash archive meant a lot to me - I figured maybe it was worth sharing, or at the very least having on hand for the next time I needed it. Maybe you'll get a laugh out of it, too.

The Fic Archive here is like a shrine, to both old-web & the content itself. Why? Why the fuck not.

All of the archive content is from 2007 & much, much earlier. If there's any problematic language or themes - I didn't dig through and touch fics that weren't mine to write. Most have disclaimers attached to them as well. This site is not intended for minors, period. Please don't come at me sideways for hosting a fic someone wrote in 2004 that might not be the kindest. (And please remember that though a great deal of kevin Smith's work stands the test of time comedically - there's lot of stuff, like Jay saying the f-slur in Clerks that he doesn't co-sign now. This is old content, as it was. & that's how it will stay.

If you're one of these fics authors, or someone that used to help with JayandSilentBobSlash first off, I would die for you - second off, let me know if you want any of your content removed. I just didn't want the entire site to me lost to the void in a few years