Taking From Others

There's a good reason for taking stuff off of other sites and publishing it here. Stuff vanishes on the Internet.
For example, I like the game Grand Theft Auto. Not the forth or fifth one, mind you. Not the auto simulators where you spend the game running over people you don't like and blowing stuff up. I'm fan of the first one.
The first one looks so clunky now, in comparison. The graphics are ridiculously dated, and the game is hard to control and a migraine inducing exercise in frustration as you try to finish the levels. But there's something that can't be beat. The soundtrack.
You see, every time you jumped into a new car, you'd hear whatever was playing on that car's radio. If you took a pick up truck, you'd hear country. If you jumped into a BMW, it would be some techno. All very cool, and all an original score. The current versions of the game have music too, of course. But almost all of it is just tracks off of existing albums from recognized bands.
This game was unique, and the music was a reflection of that.
The only catch I had was that the lyrics to the songs were illegible. You really couldn't make much sense out of them. Since the songs were only on the game, it's not like you'd hear them on the radio driving around town, or have them in your CD collection already. They were wonderful, and very strange.
Then the Internet came along, and made things much cooler.
After a couple of years, I found the site of a super-fan who compiled a list of the lyrics by actually getting in touch with the makers of the game and going over copies of the score. Thankfully, he posted everything he found on his website, and I could finally understand the lyrics. As I thought, they were a riot!
But then the site disappeared.

So when I post something from another source, I'm doing it to preserve the dang thing. Yeah, I could just put up a link to the original, but if the targets host goes down or offline, then the link is broken and the information is lost. That would really be a tragedy because there actually are articles online that are worth preserving. Sometimes it doesn't seem that way, but it's true. I'll admit, that these articles don't contain any earth shaking revelations about the human condition or anything that vital to understanding life on this planet. But they are a joy to read, and the Internet would be a more barren place without them.