I’ve been a massive fan of Jonathan Cainer’s stuff forever, you know? Not just the Pisces sections, which is my sign, but the whole vibe of his writing. It was the only thing I seriously looked forward to reading every week. It felt like someone was actually talking to you, not just giving you some generic, canned horoscope. It was the routine, the feeling of getting that personal nudge.
When I heard he passed away, man, that hit me hard. It was like a little piece of my weekly routine just got completely ripped out. The real panic, though, wasn’t about the next prediction. It was about all the old ones. All that insight, all that specific phrasing—I realized it was all just floating out there, scattered across a million different dark corners of the internet. Some on old newspaper archives, some on weird fan sites, some just gone because the original site shut down. I hated the thought of that specific, comforting voice just vanishing into the digital abyss.
That realization immediately kicked off this whole messy project. It wasn’t about predicting the future anymore; it was about archiving the past. I decided I needed to pull every single one of his Pisces predictions I could find, going back as far as possible, and lock it down in my own system. I didn’t trust the internet to hold onto it.
The Scramble to Gather the Words
My initial approach was exactly what you’d expect: just smashing different keywords into search engines and hitting every link. The results were a disaster. I spent weeks just clicking through ancient, slow-loading pages with ugly fonts. I found stuff in PDF format, stuff tucked into forum posts from 2005, and a bunch of broken links. It was frustrating as hell, like trying to gather sand with a colander.
I started with the easiest bits. I kept a simple text document open, and whenever I found a full week’s prediction, I’d just copy the entire block of text and paste it in. No formatting, no checking—just a raw dump. I focused strictly on the Pisces stuff, because if I tried to do all twelve signs, I’d be dead before I finished. My plain text file quickly swelled to something like sixty pages of continuous rambling text.
I realized I couldn’t search that mess easily. I needed some structure. That’s when I pivoted to the actual technical practice. I fired up a basic spreadsheet program—nothing fancy, you don’t need a massive database for this—and started the cleaning process. This was the most tedious part.
- I went through the massive text document, line by line.
- I physically cut and pasted each prediction into its own cell.
- The critical step: I had to manually identify the exact date range for that prediction (e.g., “Sept 1st to Sept 7th, 2012”). I’d search the surrounding page text for the date, then type it in the next column.
- I standardized the format. Everything had to be the same: YYYY-MM-DD to YYYY-MM-DD. Took ages, man.
After about three months of chipping away at this, mostly late at night after work, I had this massive CSV file. It had thousands of rows, and in the last column was the pure, unadulterated Cainer text. It wasn’t perfect—I know I missed some weeks—but it felt solid. It was mine.
Building My Access Tool
Having the data in a spreadsheet was okay, but I wanted to be able to instantly go back and say, “What did Cainer say about my week back in 2017?” You know? The original sites did that, and I missed it.
So I just whipped up a super simple script. I used one of those basic programming languages—doesn’t matter which one, just a quick tool that could read the spreadsheet. I didn’t care about a nice interface. I just needed something functional. All the tool did was:
1. Ask me for a specific date (like 2015-04-12).
2. Scan the first two columns (the date ranges).
3. Print the text from the matching prediction column.
It was clunky. It just shot the text out onto a black screen. But damn, did it work. Now, if I was having a rough day, or just felt nostalgic, I could pop open my little tool, type in a random date from years ago, and instantly get that old comforting voice back. It was like I had my own personal time machine, built out of scattered forum posts and text files.
Why did I bother with all this work? It wasn’t just for the Pisces predictions. Like the time I got totally screwed over by a boss, and ended up having to pivot my entire career path on the fly—you realize that stuff you hold onto for comfort is fragile. The process of building this archive was the real practice. It taught me that if you want something to stick around, you can’t rely on anybody else to keep it safe. You have to physically roll up your sleeves and build the damn thing yourself. Now I’ve got my Cainer library locked down. It’s safe. And it’s ready whenever I need a look back.
