A Pursuit of Internet Archaeology

[fh14]

So most of the blog content from livejournal has officially been moved over here, and it's got me thinking about how much content and research myself and others have saved from being permanently lost over the years. Being a part of lonelygirl15 fandom for a number of years helped me practice digging up obscure information from web pages that weren't necessarily still there. For Hetalia specificially, megalodon.jp and the Internet Archive were where we were able to dig up a lot of really neat, obscure stuff.

On one hand, there's this... I don't want to say "thrill"?.. to finding information previously thought lost. On the other hand it can be despressing because you know there's so much that is gone for good. Case in point: Circa early 2011, megalodon crashed and a lot of pages from the old kitayume sites were lost forever - the ones for Kitakou Pure in particular. I have this need now to try and save everything I come across in some way, shape, or form. For example, I just happened to save the elements of the Chibisan Date flash website on my computer before it was taken down, so we still have access to all those materials. jammerlea  and sammich  have also been instrumental in making sure a lot of stuff isn't lost for good through hetarchive and other means.

Scouring parts of Japanese fandom has been good for finding stuff previously thought lost as well. I have all the Notosama games because of this, and I should probably check back in soon to see if I can find anything else. It's a treasure map created by site maintainers getting rid of content in order to streamline their sites or put forth a different image. Personally, I can't really blame Himaruya for deleting or hiding the materials he did, even though it can be frustrating for people like me. Just today, in fact, I managed to get into my old livejournal account and port over my old journal entries from high school for safe keeping, and to my dismay I discovered that there were a couple of entries from middle school that I had blanked because I wanted to clean up the blog for a high school format. At the time I didn't think anything of it, but now I wish it was something that I had held on to.

Who knows. Maybe someday the creators of that old thing we love will look back on their creations and think, hey, maybe today I'll show this thing to the world again. Someone might really like it.

Watch Status Roundup:
Star Wars Rebels - All Caught Up!
Digimon Tamers - 12/51
Cardcaptor Sakura - 10/75
The X-Files - 74/210

Comments

[jammerlea]

I've been partaking in fandoms for pretty much 20 years and there's definitely a handful that I got pretty involved in, but Hetalia is the one that I've really done the most archiving on. There's still sooo much I wish I had saved, but it was shared during a time when I only used Hetarchive to sort posts on LJ, so I didn't even think about it. And then I know I lost a few Hetalia things (and soooo many personal files) when my old external drive died, but I can't afford to have someone try to fix it. I keep hoping maybe there'll be a day I could get it looked at, but...

But yeah, even just going through some of the old LJ posts I'm trying to keep my eyes open for old material. Super sad that a lot of the pictures people uploaded on tinypic and similar sites are no longer available (though tinypic apparently recycled some files names, making a few old posts laughable). It is pretty exciting whenever I come across something "new"!

You need to share some more old obscure stuff with me sometime!

[fh14]

A lot of the really *old obscure stuff* is stuff that's non-hetalia material. One of the most surreal things I stumbled across was bits of that first manga Himaruya made back in 2003 where he was a finalist for an award. A lot of the big ticket stuff has either been compiled by me in kitayumeraws or by vysnia_cerasus in the kitayumeverse comm.

[jammerlea]

Ahhhh I really love that old stuff, just to see how much Himaruya has grown as an artist. It's pretty amazing!