My history: The web, sports, and anime

Since these last three sections are all smaller than the others, I've decided to combine them into one post and get it all out of the way at once.

The web: My dad bought our first PC in the early-mid '90s. At that time, there was no home internet service, at least not where we lived. My time "online" was spent connecting to local BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems. For those of you who don't remember or are too young, these were basically like websites, except you hosted them on your own computer and each individual visitor had to dial in to you to access them. This meant most BBSes could only have one user at a time. But while there you could exchange files with the owner (called a SysOp, or Systems Operator), post on the message board, play text or ANSI graphics based games, or chat on bigger BBSes that had more than one dial in line. I used to really love those old text based games. Especially one called Legend of the Red Dragon. A lot of different people played it together, though usually only one person could play at a time, and you fought monsters and gained experience and such, and fought each other too. It was an MMORPG way before such a thing even existed.

Eventually we signed up for the CompuServe online service, which was basically one gigantic, nationwide BBS, but with graphics and images. It, like its main competitor America Online, was the precursor to the modern internet in the home. I used to do a lot of chatting there. It was good times. I still think of some of my old chat buddies from those days. I haven't heard from any of them in more than ten years. I know one of them died. Very sad, he was a good dude. RIP, The X Guy.

Of course, online services eventually went the way of the dinosaur, and straight up internet service became commonplace in the home. The days of ICQ and Napster had arrived, followed by YouTube and blogging, and here we are now.

Sports: I hated most sports growing up. Baseball I loved. Everyone in Cincinnati loves baseball. You have to. It's in your blood if you grew up here. No one from Cincinnati could possibly complain about listening to Marty Brennaman call Reds games on the radio. But I used to hate football. Mainly because when I was very young, I didn't have a TV of my own, and when football was on I couldn't play any video games. This meant every Sunday, all Sunday, all winter long. But I eventually came to love football. The Bengals making the Superbowl in the '88-'89 season probably helped a lot.

I've since come to enjoy watching most sports, though I only actively follow sports that I have a home team in. That means just MLB, NFL, and NCAA basketball (I would follow college football too, but I think the BCS is absolutely stupid). Living in Indiana as I do now, I sometimes try to follow the NBA, but my transplant home team the Pacers just don't mean as much to me as a Cincinnati team would.

Aside from mainstream team sports, I also like to watch the occasional MMA fight, as well as the Olympics and action sports events like the X Games.

Anime: I had seen some anime shows growing up without actually realizing that they were anything different from normal, American cartoons. I'm talking about Voltron and Dragon Ball. I got my first real taste of anime while at a Star Trek convention. At one of the vendor booths, some guy had a TV set up and was playing Record of Lodoss War. I remember seeing it and thinking it looked like Final Fantasy come to life, and being severely impressed by the animation and art style. I started trying to track down whatever anime I could, which in those days was not easy. The only luck I got came from the occasional anime movie on the Sci-fi Channel (which was rare) and a weekly anime broadcast on a low-power local TV station. This station wasn't on our cable, so I had to watch it over the air, and I only barely picked it up. But every Saturday night I tuned in and put up with the static to get my anime fix.

Of course, you probably know what happened next. Cartoon Network started playing Dragon Ball Z, and it blew up. They capitalized on its popularity by airing more and more anime shows (some of which, like Tenchi Muyo, became some of my very favorite anime shows ever). Anime became readily available, if still a bit expensive. And then American cartoon makers started using anime-influenced art styles in their shows, and hundreds of anime lookalike kids shows started popping up, and anime became a huge trend. And all of us who had worked our tails off in the '90s to find anime to watch became kind of disenfranchised by the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I still love anime, but I'm never happy when something I really love becomes so mainstream.