The Internet Archive Saved a Part of Opus

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to retrieve a bunch of movie reviews that I’d written 20+ years ago.

I’ve always been thankful that the Internet Archive exists and applaud its archival mission. However, I’ve never really used it. Sure, I’ve tracked down releases from now-defunct netlabels like Autoplate and perused its vast book library (which is how I rediscovered Charles L. Harness’s The Paradox Men), but it’s never figured much into my actual work. That is, until it helped me recover a part of Opus.

Earlier this week, I was trying to find my review of Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China, a 1991 martial arts classic starring Jet Li, Yuen Biao, and Rosamund Kwan. I knew I’d written a review of the movie — I distinctly remembered portions of it as well as all the time I spent getting screencaps — but it was nowhere to be found in the Opus archives. On a whim, I searched the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a snapshot of Opus taken in 2003, and sure enough, there was my review from 2000, just as I remembered it.

As it turns out, though, that wasn’t the only review missing from Opus’s archives. As I’ve migrated Opus from one content management system to another over the years, some of its content has fallen through the cracks (which explains the months-wide gaps in the site’s archives circa 2000 and before). But thanks to the Internet Archive, I’ve been able to recover over 35 reviews, including a bunch of kung fu and martial arts movie reviews that I wrote back in the early ’00s.

Here’s a small sampling of what’s now back on the site:

I had to clean many of these reviews up a bit — my grammar could be surprisingly bad 20+ years ago — but it was fun to revisit some of my earliest reviews for the site and see how I’ve grown and evolved as a writer. (For starters, I’m far less prone to snark now than I was back in the ’00s.) Also, these older reviews made it clear just how much I relied on the local video rental store as well as Netflix, when they were still just a DVD service, to support my movie-watching habit.

On a related note, it was also delightfully nostalgic to see some of the site’s older designs, which revealed a definite infatuation with the styles of K10k, Pixelsurgeon, and Surfstation. I now wish I’d done a better job of archiving Opus’s designs, similar to what Jason Kottke’s done for his site. But maybe that’ll be the next project I tackle with the help of the Internet Archive.

As a way of saying “Thanks,” I made a donation to the Internet Archive to support their ongoing work. Along with Wikipedia, the Internet Archive is doing the Lord’s work in preserving the web from blatant corporate interests, an effort that’s increasingly important as AI and tech giants continue to consume and twist the web to their own ends. If you’re at all concerned about the current state of affairs, in which human creativity is denigrated and more and more content is locked up in a walled garden, then you might consider making a donation, too.

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