Post by Anfang on Mar 11, 2022 6:01:10 GMT
This story starts with a sheer coincidence. I had a link to something completely different and decided to plug cache.avex.jp into the Wayback Machine to see what other kind of content was hosted on the website. What I came across was a set of mp3s, some of which had “HealingPrincess” in their file name; this caught my eye merely due to being on the top of the list. I clicked and had a listen, understanding nothing that the Japanese woman was saying. At this point I had zero information with regards to what I was looking at besides a list of files that was obviously incomplete. So off I went to find the missing files.
The main method that guided the first part of my quest was brute force guessing. I was driven to this by necessity as search engines do not index .mp3 links. I was quite fortunate that somebody had archived a few episodes in 2016 as it provided me with a place to start. The files had numbers in their name and it was quite easy to figure out some of the episodes by simply replacing the episode numbers. This method bore immediate fruit as the list of missing episodes dwindled quickly. But gaps remained and I was dumbfounded as to why I was unable to proceed further. I turned again to the url list from the Wayback Machine and studied some of the naming patterns from the other files and was able to nab a few more. But this method had its limits.
I turned to my trusty search engine to try to find more information regarding what I was working with and to see if I could find any links to these files on the surface-web. What had become clear to me from the beautiful voice of the Japanese woman in the background, punctuated with the occasional song, was that I was working with a radio broadcast of some sort. Windwave Radio turned out to be the Internet radio that hosted these programs. I came to learn that it broadcast four different programs, the aforementioned Healing Princess being one of the four, alongside Hit on Grove, Mukaikaze, and Queen&Elizabeth. But these were not just your typical broadcasts, these were associated with Kamen
Rider. I had never heard of Kamen Rider before this but it’s a live-action superhero drama like Power Rangers. In particular, these four programs were associate with Kamen Rider W which aired in 2009-2010; they all terminated at the end of the show.
I also attempted to find any information on these programs on the web. Most of what I found was in Japanese and I struggled to put the fragmented pieces together. At this point I didn’t know whether I was working with media that was completely lost or only lost to us. The original website for Windwave (windwave.jp) was long gone but thankfully it was archived. But checking the website only showed posts and no links. The links were there, I would eventually come to discover, but I had no reason to think that they had survived. After all, the links were all hosted on cache.avex.jp and did not show up on the various posts on Windwave. Had they been hosted on Windwave, we would not have these programs anymore. At any rate, I turned back to the only method I could think of given what I knew at the time.
One of the things that caught my eye was that two programs had what seemed to be their final episodes named in a similar way, with only two letters abbreviating the program name followed by the episode number and “Final” at the end. So I quickly created every two letter combination possible. After dosing the server and getting Firefox to close 651 tabs, I came out empty handed. I was particularly bummed out as Queen&Elizabeth had no episodes archived and I was unable to guess the file names. I also wasn’t sure whether Healing Princess had those final episodes like the other two. At this point, I was still missing episodes 15 and 20 of Healing Princess, episode 21 of Hit on Groove, and all of Queen&Elizabeth. After more time spent brute forcing and whole lot of failure, nothing came about but vexation. I decided to email Avex in a last ditch effort to see if I could get any sort of response. But alas, I’m still waiting on them to get back to me and I’m quite curious if they will even know what I’m talking about. I doubt anyone there remembers a decade-old radio program that has been completely ignored all this time.
And then it hit me, check the page source! And everything was there! All the links were preserved in the archived page of windwave.jp. As to why they were not visible on the website, I’m not sure. But they were all there! And so I proceeded to archive every single episode I found. There was no way I was ever going to brute force the ones I missed as the names were all completely different from the usual patterns. For a while I though that episodes 15 and 20 of Healing Princess were completely lost given that there are no episodes with those numbers. But there is an episode between 14 and 16 which must be 15 and an older archive has an episode between 19 and 21 which seems like a special episode. The quest was finally over and these episodes which were at risk of becoming lost will now be preserved for future generations that will surely ignore them to the same extent that we did. But at least we have them.
Here are the results. Healing Princess: 34 episodes; Hit on Groove: 46 regular episodes and 5 final episodes; Mukaikaze: 46 regular episodes, an extra episode, and 8 final episodes; Queen&Elizabeth: 4 regular episodes and a non-numbered episode. I also archived some other radio material from other Kamen Rider seasons but they are outside the scope of this essay and I have no information about them. If you want to see a full list of the Avex stuff I have archived, see here (all the stuff dated March was me): web.archive.org/web/*/https://cache.avex.jp/avexmovie*
Thank you for reading this needlessly lengthy essay. Beyond the story presented, I wish to bring into mind the theoretical complexity of lost media. Windwave was lost without being lost, buried and forgotten but clearly there for anyone willing to look. But for all these years, nobody did. Preservation is as much a part of lost media as speculation about stuff that we do not have. At the end of the day, if we do not have it, whether it be due to accidents of history or our own negligence, it is lost. Whatever the philosophers say about the tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to witness it, the media that falls into the digital abyss is completely gone. That tree might be found some hundred years later by your great-grandson but whatever born-digital media is lost to time is lost forever.
The main method that guided the first part of my quest was brute force guessing. I was driven to this by necessity as search engines do not index .mp3 links. I was quite fortunate that somebody had archived a few episodes in 2016 as it provided me with a place to start. The files had numbers in their name and it was quite easy to figure out some of the episodes by simply replacing the episode numbers. This method bore immediate fruit as the list of missing episodes dwindled quickly. But gaps remained and I was dumbfounded as to why I was unable to proceed further. I turned again to the url list from the Wayback Machine and studied some of the naming patterns from the other files and was able to nab a few more. But this method had its limits.
I turned to my trusty search engine to try to find more information regarding what I was working with and to see if I could find any links to these files on the surface-web. What had become clear to me from the beautiful voice of the Japanese woman in the background, punctuated with the occasional song, was that I was working with a radio broadcast of some sort. Windwave Radio turned out to be the Internet radio that hosted these programs. I came to learn that it broadcast four different programs, the aforementioned Healing Princess being one of the four, alongside Hit on Grove, Mukaikaze, and Queen&Elizabeth. But these were not just your typical broadcasts, these were associated with Kamen
Rider. I had never heard of Kamen Rider before this but it’s a live-action superhero drama like Power Rangers. In particular, these four programs were associate with Kamen Rider W which aired in 2009-2010; they all terminated at the end of the show.
I also attempted to find any information on these programs on the web. Most of what I found was in Japanese and I struggled to put the fragmented pieces together. At this point I didn’t know whether I was working with media that was completely lost or only lost to us. The original website for Windwave (windwave.jp) was long gone but thankfully it was archived. But checking the website only showed posts and no links. The links were there, I would eventually come to discover, but I had no reason to think that they had survived. After all, the links were all hosted on cache.avex.jp and did not show up on the various posts on Windwave. Had they been hosted on Windwave, we would not have these programs anymore. At any rate, I turned back to the only method I could think of given what I knew at the time.
One of the things that caught my eye was that two programs had what seemed to be their final episodes named in a similar way, with only two letters abbreviating the program name followed by the episode number and “Final” at the end. So I quickly created every two letter combination possible. After dosing the server and getting Firefox to close 651 tabs, I came out empty handed. I was particularly bummed out as Queen&Elizabeth had no episodes archived and I was unable to guess the file names. I also wasn’t sure whether Healing Princess had those final episodes like the other two. At this point, I was still missing episodes 15 and 20 of Healing Princess, episode 21 of Hit on Groove, and all of Queen&Elizabeth. After more time spent brute forcing and whole lot of failure, nothing came about but vexation. I decided to email Avex in a last ditch effort to see if I could get any sort of response. But alas, I’m still waiting on them to get back to me and I’m quite curious if they will even know what I’m talking about. I doubt anyone there remembers a decade-old radio program that has been completely ignored all this time.
And then it hit me, check the page source! And everything was there! All the links were preserved in the archived page of windwave.jp. As to why they were not visible on the website, I’m not sure. But they were all there! And so I proceeded to archive every single episode I found. There was no way I was ever going to brute force the ones I missed as the names were all completely different from the usual patterns. For a while I though that episodes 15 and 20 of Healing Princess were completely lost given that there are no episodes with those numbers. But there is an episode between 14 and 16 which must be 15 and an older archive has an episode between 19 and 21 which seems like a special episode. The quest was finally over and these episodes which were at risk of becoming lost will now be preserved for future generations that will surely ignore them to the same extent that we did. But at least we have them.
Here are the results. Healing Princess: 34 episodes; Hit on Groove: 46 regular episodes and 5 final episodes; Mukaikaze: 46 regular episodes, an extra episode, and 8 final episodes; Queen&Elizabeth: 4 regular episodes and a non-numbered episode. I also archived some other radio material from other Kamen Rider seasons but they are outside the scope of this essay and I have no information about them. If you want to see a full list of the Avex stuff I have archived, see here (all the stuff dated March was me): web.archive.org/web/*/https://cache.avex.jp/avexmovie*
Thank you for reading this needlessly lengthy essay. Beyond the story presented, I wish to bring into mind the theoretical complexity of lost media. Windwave was lost without being lost, buried and forgotten but clearly there for anyone willing to look. But for all these years, nobody did. Preservation is as much a part of lost media as speculation about stuff that we do not have. At the end of the day, if we do not have it, whether it be due to accidents of history or our own negligence, it is lost. Whatever the philosophers say about the tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to witness it, the media that falls into the digital abyss is completely gone. That tree might be found some hundred years later by your great-grandson but whatever born-digital media is lost to time is lost forever.
