Google Deletes Artist's Blog and a Decade Of His Work Along With It (fusion.net) 465
Ethan Chiel, writing for Fusion: Artist Dennis Cooper has a big problem on his hands: Most of his artwork from the past 14 years just disappeared. It's gone because it was kept entirely on his blog, which the experimental author and artist has maintained on the Google-owned platform Blogger since 2002 (Google bought the service in 2003). At the end of June, Cooper says he discovered he could no longer access his Blogger account and that his blog had been taken offline. Along with his blog, Google disabled Cooper's email address, through which most of his correspondence was conducted, he told me via Facebook message. He got no communication from Google about why it decided to kill his email address and blog. Cooper used the blog to post his fiction, research, and visual art, and as Artforum explains, it was also "a platform through which he engaged almost daily with a community of followers and fellow artists." His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.WayBackMachine has some of the pages from his blog, but they are only screenshots. Google Cache is also of not much help. Slashdot readers, just out of curiosity, is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?
Good excuse. (Score:3, Funny)
The blog ate my homework.
Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?! (Score:5, Funny)
shit.
Re: (Score:3)
Wait, WHERE is cloud?!! shit.
Don't be dense now... it's in the sky! How can they take the sky away? The sky belongs to everyone!
Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?! (Score:4, Interesting)
I never trust "the cloud" with anything anymore. Whoever came up with that name was probably trying to send a message- clouds have a habit of blowing away.
You can't even trust gmail anymore. Recently I did searches for some important email conversations I had and they had just vanished without a trace. I thought I was deleting them myself by mistake. Eventually I realized that for the past year, whenever I reply to an email, and ONLY if I reply to it, Google throws the whole conversation into the Trash folder.
Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten? (Score:3)
A rouge Right To Be Forgotten?
Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten? (Score:3)
Rouge? What shade?
Re: Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten? (Score:5, Funny)
The Cloud Is Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
until the lightning bolt comes out of it....
Re:The Cloud Is Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)
After that I moved my homepage to a machine I control (danielpovey.com)
Save often, make backups (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean...really? It's 2016. Your art is your passion, and you don't have it backed up ANYWHERE?
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What about the computer he used to create the GIFs in the first place? I mean, he had to have written and created most of his long fiction and GIFs offline, then uploaded them.
Something seems amiss with this narrative.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Insightful)
is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?
Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".
Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Insightful)
is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?
Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".
Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.
Did you ever work in retail at any time in your life? One of the first things it teaches you is that there is an entire class of people who absolutely HATE lifting a finger to do anything at all for themselves, no matter how easy that thing may be, no matter how much sense it might make. They resent the notion of ever having to take care of their own affairs.
It's sort of like the people who wait on hold for 30-45 minutes for tech support, only to ask a question that's answered in the manual, in the FAQ, in the help file, on the web site, and often, what they need is right there in the menu if only they'd click on it just to see what it contains. Plus, the people who really do need a technician (say, because the problem is on the ISP's end) get to wait extra long because of the backlog of useless people.
I don't know what the percentage of them is, but a lot of people are just helpless. Entire industries play a role in helping them remain that way. The only thing left is for restaurants to offer them pre-chewed food.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Backups are for pussies. Real men just upload their shit to some FTP server... ehm, never mind.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:4, Informative)
The FTP server on OneDrive. Which went from 15GB to 5GB and ate your data anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That'll teach them to change the terms of service on a free offering.
After giving you a chance to opt out of the reduction.
I'm all for bagging on MS when they deserve it, but you're butthurt the gift horse has developed a cavity.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:4, Insightful)
First, yes, local backups should absolutely be done. But also: doesn't Google have millisecond backups on every continent and two oceans? Just wondering if his lost data could be restored from one of those.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Funny)
Creating backups is soooooo last millenium... it's all in the cloud now and these "big data" NoSQL solutions are failsafe. Or failproof. Or whatever. The data is not lost, it's just missing in action - it may even show up one day all by itself.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Funny)
they're using /dev/nul which is the secret sauce to being web scale.
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It's not lost, it's intentionally deleted for unknown reasons.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Funny)
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" ~ Linus Torvalds
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything I'd say this guy is ahead of his time. Those of us who started in this field in the 1980s are fully aware of value of backups, but m kids' generation trusts the cloud to always be there for them.
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If anything I'd say this guy is ahead of his time. Those of us who started in this field in the 1980s are fully aware of value of backups, but m kids' generation trusts the cloud to always be there for them.
That is a bit of revisionist history. The kids of the 80s had to learn that floppy diskettes and hard drives failed too and this developed an appreciation for backups, just as today's kids will learn that "bad things" happen in the cloud too, which is actually something the "kids" with the 1960s/70s learned on their centralized mainframe based storage. Every generation starts out "trusting" technology and is eventually relieved of that silly notion.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Informative)
He was probably counting on Google, as the service provider, to backup his data for him. The way that (if you let it) Apple backs up all of your iPhone data constantly so that if you drop it in the toilet, you just get a new iPhone and everything in a few hours magically comes back the way you left it.
That's the promise of "the cloud" we keep hearing about from the marketing departments. This artist, being an artist not a tech guy, believed it.
But this is actually par for the course for Google. I moved all of my clients off of Blogger about five years ago after one of their Blogger blogs simply disappeared without a trace and no recourse. After a little digging, I turned up HUNDREDS of similar cases of people's Blogger accounts vanishing into thin air with zero help from Google. This has been going on for years, and Google is silent about it.
After all, you get what you pay for.
Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Funny)
How the heck do you even back up a site like that?
Hmmm, maybe using a web page scraper tool like HTTrack or perhaps the built-in export/backup function on the blog site...
Perhaps Google has a help page that describes how to do this... Nah, that would be too easy....
https://support.google.com/blo... [google.com]
http://techproblems.org/how-to... [techproblems.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Google Takeout. That's where the tools to im- and export data to and from Google services can be found.
Free (Score:2, Insightful)
It's almost like he used a free service with no expectation of availability or warranty, to do all of his work.
He sounds Millenial.
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Oh fuck off.
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It's almost like he used a free service with no expectation of availability or warranty, to do all of his work.
He sounds Millenial.
Oooh, daaaaaang, [artforum.com] he looks so young! I guess aging creams are all the rage these days. Kids, eh, always being hip, stylin', funkaaaay freshhhh!
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Wow, I'd love to see the statistics that back that up. My personal experience says that GenX, Boomers, Millennials and everyone else only get clueful about backups after they've lost data. And sometimes not even then.
Au Contraire (Score:2)
Re:Free (Score:5, Insightful)
Free? No, the implicit agreement you have with Google is your privacy for its services. Google didn't uphold its end of the deal, so he should ask for his privacy back.
Re:Free (Score:5, Funny)
Millenials, I think.
Re:Free (Score:5, Insightful)
Where does all this hate for millenials comes from?
Gen Xer's who are stuck between the Baby Boomers who got everything and the millennials who whine about everything.
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Where does all this hate for millenials comes from?
Gen Xer's who are stuck between the Baby Boomers who got everything and the millennials who whine about everything.
Fucking straight....I'm one of those pissed off Gen-Xers....
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Like Sartre said, hell is other people.
Need to blame 'greatest generation' too. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a gen Xer and I sympathise with the millennials. The boomers screwed everything up, broke the economy, dragged me it if the EU, and have a massive sense of entitlement. If I hear "I've worked hard all my life" one more time I thought it was bad when I had to pay for the education that the boomers got for free. But then I look at the deal the millennials have, and realise they are even worse off.
Hate to break it to you but blame the 'greatest generation' as well. They developed many of the stupid business practices that led to the downfall of U.S. industry. They only seemed to know what they were doing in the 50s/60s because they effectively had no competition, literally blew it all up in the 40s, so many a foolish idea was allowed to persist and become entrenched. They started to push the costs onto future generations, for example the countering a demand for higher wages with increased retirement
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Their level of insouciance, arrogance, narcissism and stupidity?
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Contact Google? (Score:2, Informative)
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"Contact Google," that's hilarious.
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Sure you can. I contacted them because some dispshit was operating an online pharmacy targeting transsexuals in Canada. Aside from the stupidity of paying more than they would cost with a prescription, and the fact that doctors would do the necessary blood tests every 4 months to check for risks, it's illegal to operate an online pharmacy with a .ca domain.
The site was gone within hours, and all the spam posts they had done all over the place were dead.
"Experimental artwork" can be a euphemism for anythin
Re: (Score:3)
Not all trans people can get hormones through their doctor. They might live in an area with only shitty doctors who refuse to treat them, be unable to afford the doctor's visits, or be frustrated by the long lines for cheaper care.
Also, I know you say they were targeting Canadians, but it's also pretty popular to target USA citizens with pharmaceuticals "from Canada" (not from some scary overseas place).
I do recommend going through the "official" pipeline if it works for you, but a lot of people don't have
Re: (Score:2)
Contact Google? If you think it's actually possible to contact someone at Google who gives a shit, you must have just started using the Internet yesterday.
Re: Contact Google? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it's trivial. When I had my GMail account pwned, I emailed them, and a human helpfully verified my identity, the suspicious activity, and restored my access. Don't just assume it's impossible without trying. And if it doesn't work, just be more persistent. The squeaky wheel, and all that.
While it won't help him recover his art (Score:2)
This should serve as a reminder that backups are important.
If you don't pay for it ... (Score:2)
you can't rely on it to do anything in particular; you are entirely dependent on the whims of whoever provides you with a free service.
Everyone on slashdot should know that, I tell my friends to backup things from ''the cloud'' to some physical media that they can hold in their hand (preferably 2 copies), but I know that most ignore me ... 'Oh, that is just Alain sounding off again, I will be all right ...'
Experiment over (Score:3)
Now the experimental author knows the outcome of the experiment. That artistic work will disappear if you don't take efforts to preserve it.
If we repeat the experiment we would be doing science. (would that make you a scientific author instead of an experimental one?)
Re: (Score:3)
Sadly, 25 years in IT tells me that the experiment has been repeated a number of times, and that its results have been reproduced frequently.
"Hey, I stuck this floppy to my filing cabinet with a big ol magnet and now it doesn't work, can you fix it? It has my only copy of my thesis on it"
Min
"... consider suing ..." (Score:5, Informative)
"Cooper, who lives in France, told Artforum he’s consulted a French lawyer specializing in intellectual property. He told me he’s considering suing Google"
Blogger TOS:
"OTHER THAN AS EXPRESSLY SET OUT IN THESE TERMS OR ADDITIONAL TERMS, NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE SERVICES. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DON’T MAKE ANY COMMITMENTS ABOUT THE CONTENT WITHIN THE SERVICES, THE SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS OF THE SERVICES, OR THEIR RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS. WE PROVIDE THE SERVICES “AS IS”."
Oh would you look at that ...
Re: (Score:2)
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TOS are not above the law, you know.
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You are right. I am sure he is entitled to a full refund.
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On the other hand, disclaimers in a TOS can sometimes be found unenforceable depending on the laws governing the country you're in. In the US for example if Google deleted the content because the artist was a minority, Google could be sued even though it didn't promise not to delete anyone's data. Yes, Google wouldn't have broken contract law, but it'd have violated civil rights law.
It's significant that this action is being brought in France, which takes the preservation of cultural objects and artists
Another Reminder (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that "on the cloud" just means "on somebody else's server". They may say you'll never lose it, but they have been known to lie, or go under, or change their service. Remember the Sidekick which advertised all your phone data would be in the cloud and backed up so you'd never risk losing it?
Probably the FBI (Score:2)
D. Cooper you say? Maybe the FBI commandeered his Google account years ago and shut it down when they closed their investigation into the famed hijacker.
Wayback machine? (Score:2)
He'd need the URL of a publicly accessible page(s). And then only maybe.
archive.is (Score:5, Interesting)
http://archive.is/3tNs
Backup. (Score:2)
"is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?"
Yes. Restore from backup in his backup software.
Whoops. You didn't do the thing that EVERYONE talks about every time they lose something, that schoolkids are taught to do, that everyone needs to use at some time in their digital lives?
Shame.
Call it "temporal art", forget it existed and move on. The rest of the world already has. The only people who thought it important didn't think it important enough to save BEFORE it wa
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It's a shame that this guy didn't learn sooner....
Single copy (Score:2)
A single copy is an accident waiting to happen, whether that copy is on Google, OneDrive, or your 10 y/o laptop.
Right to be forgotten? (Score:2)
Cloud != Guaranteed Service (Score:2)
This should not be a surprise to anyone here, but it's a very good example that, unless you have a specific document signed by both parties promising some level of service, you don't have that service.
I'm in the middle of a "cloud conversion" for one of our core applications. I get incredulous looks and blank stares when I ask application developers how they've planned for redundancy and potential data loss. The other day, I actually had a senior application architect tell me "the cloud takes care of that."
One Flash drive (Score:2)
Probably one flash drive could have held the contents of his art and blog. Who doesn't keep the original sources, though? I create games, and the assets I create always have source in the form of Illustrator, Photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint or Corel Draw files - all religiously uploaded to several destinations as backups. House fire? I have cloud backups and off-site discs at another location. Cloud goes offline? I have several backup drives locally.
It's dumb and tempting fate to put all your eggs, as they say,
real reason for this story? (Score:2)
"Quote"Check your email to see if you got a message from support@blogger.com. If your blog was deleted by Google, the email will explain what happened."End Quote"
didn't the author/blog owner of this do any kinda research? why is this story on slashdot really....
Try Resurrect Pages plugin (Score:5, Interesting)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/ [mozilla.org]
NSA backup service (Score:2)
Ask Slashdot (Score:2)
A Delorean (Score:2)
Uncle Al says "Save early, save often".
And this is why... (Score:3)
... it's unwise to entrust anything of value to "the cloud". Put your work and your intellectual property on Google - and it may vanish, leaving you with nothing except the dusty prospect of sueing one of the world's biggest and most powerful corporations. Buy books from Amazon in Kindle format, and one day they may simply vanish too - as, with supreme irony, copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" vanished in 2009. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
Keep what is important to you under your own eye and your own control, and of course back it up judiciously and perhaps store copies in a few other places. But blithely assuming that your intellectual property is safe on computers owned and controlled by people whom you do not know, and who have fundamentally no obligation to you, is risky.
If you enjoy thrillers and would appreciate a dramatic fictional presentation of these ideas, try Michael Connelly's novel "The Scarecrow". https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scare... [amazon.co.uk] You will probably never feel the same about "the cloud" again.
Same problem with an ultra-niche blog (Score:4, Informative)
I had been using a blog to record my pond over a period of a year. I specifically wanted to have a timeline record of pictures and notes. I knew no one would be reading it for a while until I completed the year and used it essentially as a notebook that I could easily upload to using my phone. I got about 10 months in and Wordpress deleted it all. Greeeeat. I still have the photos on my phone, but not the notes I took.
Get off my lawn! (Score:5, Informative)
This is just a case of someone that doesn't know how the Internet works, and maybe can't read. It's documented elsewhere that his account was disabled because of a violation of Google's terms, and when that happens, after you try to log into google there's a prominent message saying as much with instructions on how to get more info, etc.
Nothing has been deleted. Nothing is gone. He just needs to take care of whatever violation he triggered with Google.
And, as stated elsewhere by everybody and their mothers, back your stuff up someplace else in the physical world. Hard to believe it took this guy 63 years to learn that lesson.
Don't use Google for anything (Score:3)
Account locked for abuse? (Score:3)
If both his blog and his e-mail have stopped working, it sounds to me like his entire account has been shut down. AFAIK, that's only done in cases of pretty egregious abuse... kiddie porn and the like. It's possible he didn't do the abuse, though, so he should contact Google to go through the account recovery process. This [google.com] seems like a good place to start, then click "Another error or problem".
Re: (Score:3)
As mentioned above in a link to the guardian his blog featured "he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities. Cooper’s work often depicts sexuality and violence in graphic terms, and some of the writing and images dealt with similar themes"
So yes. Stock standard breach of terms of service, which include no advertising of such services, and the general knowledge that by doing anything depicted above you're skating on thin ice of having breached the terms of service but having the
There is more on WayBackMachine (Score:3)
WayBackMachine has some of the pages from his blog
If you try the Blogspot's localized domains, there is more content saved there
.com [archive.org]
.co.uk [archive.org]
.ca [archive.org]
.com.es [archive.org]
.com.br [archive.org]
...and so on
It's a sign of the times.. (Score:3)
Re:Backups (Score:5, Insightful)
If you dont have a backup, then it must not have been important to you...
Actually, if you haven't successfully tested a restore of your backup, you don't have a backup (and it must not be that important to you.)
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I was doing IT support many years ago as an undergrad. I was called to someone's office because their hard drive had failed. When I arrived, she had already purchased a new hard drive, and was quite pleased with herself for having made backups. She had a tape backup drive and multiple tapes that she swapped on a schedule so they'd wear evenly, stored the tapes in different locations, and so on. So all she needed me to do was install the new hardware and restore the backup onto it.
I put the new HDD in,
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You must be new here. To paraphrase Qui-Gon Jinn, "there's always a bigger asshole."
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Predictably, "experimental art" are trigger words for most of the crowd here. Wannabe programmers have a perfect target in artists against whom to direct their own insecurities regarding social acceptance and worth.
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Quite. People are actually gloating over this guy's loss. His only crime is not to not be as computer savvy, or to put it another way, his only crime is not to be a basement dwelling neckbeard.
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MY EYES! THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING!
The quote is "My eyes! The googles do nothing!".
Further reading: http://www.urbandictionary.com... [urbandictionary.com]
Re:Ahem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.
No backup, artist must consider it unimportant too (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.
Important enough to back up?
The artist's "experiment" has made a "discovery". Its important to back up your data regardless of who your online storage "partner" is.
Re: No backup, artist must consider it unimportant (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly, Google was under no SLA to ensure the datas integrity. It was the artists personal responsibility to backup all of his data. Now it's curious why the person's account was removed and no answer was offered by Google.
Re: (Score:3)
Better! The artist's experiment with a new medium has revealed that it is ephemeral, as are all things in life. While you might think you are working digital marble, like the sculptors of the ancients, the cyber medium is more akin to shifting sand.
I threw up in my mouth a little writing that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been on the other side of this (in a previous job), and have had some insight into what's happening in these situations. Yes, accidents do happen and data occasionally gets lost. That's why you always should keep backups. And unlike other providers, Google does make that relatively easy with its "Takeout" service. Also, if you do contact Google as soon as the problem happens (preferably, within the first month), data will usually be restored. Admittedly, Google doesn't make it easy to contact them. S
Re:Ahem. (Score:4, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised if a DMCA complaint made by a 3rd party (and likely one hired on behalf of him) is behind this.
Re: Ahem. (Score:3)
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Re:Ahem. (Score:5, Informative)
The blog was taken down for repeated violations of the TOS. The Guardian [theguardian.com] can offer you some insight: If you scroll down a bit, you'll see this:
He had a featured post, twice a month, where he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities. Cooper’s work often depicts sexuality and violence in graphic terms, and some of the writing and images dealt with similar themes.
He has no reason to whine.
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You are missing the point.
This isn't really about the content. This is about the fact that he violated (possibly knowingly) the TOS for the platform he was using.
Even if he didn't know he was violating the TOS he should have backed up his stuff.
14+ years on the Interwebs... he has no excuse for remaining ignorant about backups.
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His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.
And nothing of value was lost.
GIF novel. I have several of them I think. All at 25 fps. Some call them movies.
Re:Ahem. (Score:5, Funny)
No, this has nothing to do with Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me tell you a story..
An experimental artist did some work, pinned it up to the public noticeboard at the load library.
He notice some people looking at it, so made more, kept pinning it up. Never kept any copies, just pinned the originals up.
The noticeboard had plenty of empty space, and he was enjoying this.
Some people even pinned up notes making comments on his work
After a few years, the noticeboard was taken down, because the library had been been reorganising, and there were now bookshelves there.
The artist stood in front of the library, complaining to everyone who walked past 'they took down my artwork!!! its not fair!!'
Perhaps he should have gone to librarian and asked very nicely if they still had the old noticeboard content, because he had been foolish enough to
not keep any copies, and would really like to actually have kept some of it.
But no, he just kept complaining to random passers by, hoping that would somehow help.
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