This Time of Year is Always Filled with Nostalgia
Revisiting an old friend using the Wayback Machine
Many years ago, I ran an internet forum dedicated to Princess Ayeka from Tenchi Universe. The site was fairly successful, albeit, a small site, but it had a decently tight-knit community that grew from 2003 through it’s ultimate demise in 2012. In 2006, I began a virtual role playing campaign, called Destiny’s Fear. It would be the first role playing game that I would host as a Game Master, and I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing. It was a fun little distraction, and I would eagerly check the forum at all hours during the day.
It was actually, this first forum that I administered that lead to the creation of my most recent forum community, well, lack of community as of right now, if we’re being honest. Anime RPGs was created as a space for people to come together and discuss anime and role play as anime characters, cannon or originally created. The goal was to simply have fun, and have many options for games to be run simultaneously.
As I was writing another article for my other Publication here on SubStack, I got to thinking, there were some excellent examples of good role play on that old site. So, I ended up doing the same thing I did in 2023. I paid a visit to the Wayback Machine, and searched up my old site. Reviewing the many revisions that I had painstakingly administered during the height of that site’s life brought back feelings of longing and joy. After rooting though the archives for what seemed hours, I had finally found a date with some actual forum data that I could harvest. I found the second version of my original role playing game (a data corruption unfortunately wiped out the original game). And luckily for me, it was only 90 posts long. I copied each post, had to create a few ghost members, and I reconstructed the posts on my new forum.
But why would I do that? First, the Wayback Machine is very slow. And I’m sure that one could argue that I spent more time resurrecting and harvesting the old posts than I would have spent just poking around for what specifically I was in need of. The problem is, I’m not sure at this point what exactly I am going to need. And I’m sure some bozo is going to criticize me for padding my member count on my new forum. Newsflash: I’m the only person who actively participates on the forum, and has for over a year now. In essence, my forum is dead. But that doesn’t kill the dream that I have of one day rebuilding a glorious community of like-minded role playing fanatics! Yeah, I’m delusional. To answer the question of why, all I know is that I’m going to take my time to study that game, so that I can write an excellent article about how to play by post. And fear not, that board that the game is residing in is currently hidden, and only accessible to me, the Admin. Who knows, maybe after I draft my article I’m seeing in my head, I’ll give a solo game a chance. I was pretty fond of that character I played so many years ago.