About
Autumn 2020 - New York and Pittsburgh
You may be asking yourself what you're looking at. Congratulations, you've stumbled on a yet another strange corner of the Rusyn internet.
Way back in 2003, the first World Forum of Rusyn Youth was held in Prešov. This was about 10 years after the World Congress of Rusyns was established, and the grownups decided that there should be some sort of related event for the youths.
The only real model for the international Carpatho-Rusyn movement back in those days was one grassroots organization, per country, with membership. So some of us then-youths from all over the Rusyn world were identified and encouraged to develop organizations for the 18-30 crowd, a process that had already begun in Poland, Slovakia, and Serbia.
We came back from Prešov (it was an unusually eventful time, by all accounts and in retrospect), and Rusyn Outpost: North America began. The name was meant to convey the distance we felt in many ways from our friends and colleagues in Europe, where we knew the center of Carpatho-Rusyn culture was and is. Ultimately, it was an affinity group with some support from the Carpatho-Rusyn Society and we tried to replicate their Boomer organizational paid-membership model for the Millennials (spoiler alert: it didn't work, it probably never would have worked, we were too inexperienced at the time to know that). The first thing we did, especially because Brian was doing a lot of work with media journalism and studies at the time and also we had the great model of the New Rusyn Times, back when our friend Rich Custer was editing it, was to make a newsletter: Outpost Dispatch. The other huge inspiration (and source of content!) was the Rusyn-language youth magazine from Serbia, Mak.
What follows is a graveyard of very early Internet 2.0 technology: Brian and Maria communicated on AOL Instant Messenger to put issues together. We had a members-only Yahoo! Groups group and a social network on Ning. If you remember what any of those things are and/or were ever an active user of them, you should probably be at least considering taking a baby aspirin in the morning. The 12-page issues were laid out by Brian in Microsoft Word (12 pages because print was still a thing), then emailed to Maria, who was able to convert them into a PDF (that functionality wasn't yet native in Word), and then sent to folks via a BCC'd email. At the time, the content, format, and methods were all extremely exciting and cutting edge. Now, it just dates us. Had we held on a few more months, maybe things would have been a bit different. Blogging was just taking off, and Facebook was literally brand new - it happened in Maria's first year at university, immediately after we stopped making the Dispatch, which is also when Brian was on his Fulbright in Slovenia. We were just ahead of the social media revolution, and all of this was said and done well before the iPhone debuted. But Rusyn Outpost: North America and Outpost Dispatch weren't just about the Millennials: regardless of age, it quickly became the forum for those in the Rusyn community who were seeking an outlet for experimentation and alternatives to the more traditional expressions of Rusyn culture we had grown up with.
If the technology and methodology has become archaic, a lot of content certainly has not. We can boast of discussing Rusyn erotica in-depth and suggesting going to Svidník on Spring Break. One of those two things even got editor-in-chief Brian some snail mailed, handwritten hate mail. Alas, times were simpler back then at the turn of the century.
Some of the articles and content from back then is still fresh, some of it shows the passage of time acutely, some of the articles were translated into English exclusively for Outpost Dispatch and have never appeared anywhere else since, and some of it is stuff we still don't see anyone else doing. So we're sharing our favorites from it now, hoping that it'll inspire our community to make being Carpatho-Rusyn their own, on their own terms, like we did back then and still do.
