Unicorn Archives?

Monday, February 24, 2025 - 12:51 PM

My continued adventures of re-reading through Abbey Kumquatwriter's blog while my mates have been out of town at MagicCon Chicago this week spiraled off into checking out my old LiveJournal...which ultimately led into a deep dive in to archive everything with the idea of ultimately crossposting those old posts up here.

First thing I Did Not Remember: I had 3 LiveJournal accounts, as my identity grew and changed through my high school and college years...I'd only remembered about the 1! So that was a hilarious thing to bash my head into. Especially since I know I read through my old archives in 2012 with Robin, and would've been reminded of the other two accounts then! Wild.

Fun fact, back in 2003 when the account was created, I didn't know how to create an account myself and was too afraid to try and figure it out, so my buddy Anai made it for me! It also was a SHOCKINGLY difficult learning curve for me to learn how to upload and reference images so they could show up in posts. (Any images in posts are long gone, the old Photobucket account I'd used has since been auto-nuked for lack of use to clear server space)

Elsewise, it's been SOOO cool to have some of the things I posted archived up there! Old writings, mostly, but also I'd archived some old emails in privated posts, AND, the fuckin' gold mine, I stumbled on the conversation logs I'd (apparently possibly painstakingly transcribed by hand from my AIM account's archive? IDK, maybe copypaste was being a bitch, or I was missing something, it's a 50/50 shot either way. That IS, something baby me would do, though. Do waaaay too much work for just a little archival) archived from the incident mentioned where the Outside unicorn was apparently all, "Yo, you guys are in a cult, you know that?"

Which absolutely had not been my firsthand (firsthoof?) experience with the guy, and NOW I HAVE THE TRANSCRIPTS! So excite! I also have a post from the old forum of Emshir's handling of this dude contacting us, and my response to it. I only archived my own answer, since, yanno, private forum. It was one thing to archive my own private interactions with someone, but I wasn't gonna risk my glory's trust.

Good on baby me, but also, I wish I had saved more--there is so little of old Always Believe and nothing of To Be Unicorn left over in the Wayback Machine, and None Alicorn River (our old forum). There's a couple archives of the subject lines of threads etc in the first iteration of the Alicorn River, but the crawler didn't get the clickthrough links. The Always Believe domain name was later bought by a christian organization, but is currently inactive.

That might be a fun project. Do some archiving and history preserving of that old, niche, community. I've started doing some of it...I was originally looking to post a "Watch out for this guy" on Emshir, but...it really sucks to carry that anger all the time, and the receipts for what he did are so thin on the ground and circumstantial. Also, I super don't want to hear, "Oh, he shut down a forum you really liked when you were 16? Grow up." I can't prove he isolated us, he never personally victimized me, and I don't have the stories from those I suspect he did victimize.

But archiving the unicorn Otherkin community of that time? Expanding to Unicorns United? Hell, I have printouts of a lot of it, from when printing out websites you liked to carry around with you was the autistic kid (who didn't know you were autistic) way. I have a copy of Roy's book, Are You a Unicorn? The Mission and Meaning of Unicorns. I have a copy of the Robert Vavra photo book that so many pages took photos from. I grabbed some other Wayback Machine archives of other unicorn sites...

Hell, that might be really fun. How would I want to organize it? Not sure. Organization is...well, I'm a tidy boy, but I also tend to live my life in organized piles. "And here is my section of this. Make with it what you will." Some level of editorial is inevitable, and I wouldn't be inclined to pretend elsewise. I'm a biased source, but also I Was There. Skittish, as always, but There.

I guess maybe I'll hop in and just do it!