Gunso's intro

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Gunso
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2012 12:55 am
Anime Fan Since: 1993
Location: Misawa, Japan
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Gunso's intro

Post by Gunso »

Hi, Gunso here. I just stumbled across this board looking for other old anime information and thought it looked like an interesting place to hang out. I have been full on otaku for close to two decades now, but wish I had sooner.

Going back as far as I can recall, I remember thinking there was something different about some of the "cartoons" I liked more than others like _Mysterious Cities of Gold_ and _Noozles_. I don’t recall any other such instances of American TV releases, so I now leave the 80s behind and jump into the 90s. In 1993, I was in high school and wandered into a computer lab to find one of my friends playing with a device on one of them that did something amazing -- it could actually take input from a VCR and do things such as take snapshots or very small, choppy video clips. Anyway, ignoring my geeky instincts to drool over the amazing technology, I was more curious as to what the video was - a girl animated in a very intriguing way. I asked about it and learned about this anime thing for the first time. After he finished taking snapshots of this girl, he let me borrow the tape of Project A-ko, which I watched in amazement.

I returned the tape to him, after making a copy, so he gave me some more to try out. The next ones were Bubblegum Crisis, Akira, and Wicked City. BGC was my favorite then and remains my most re-watched of all time. I still have my original copies of his tapes somewhere (themselves copies of those he rented), my own legit VHS releases, and the DVDs.

Around this time I made the leap from text-only Internet with email, telnet, gopher and archie into a full dialup connection and a web browser... So first thing I did was go to Yahoo (when it was really an index site - there weren’t search engines as we know them today) and search for "anime".. Hundreds of hours and megabytes were consumed with downloading pictures and any possible information.

This is before the dot-com boom, so the way I obtained some of my first real purchased tapes was by emailing AnimEigo (they were still operating from a CompuServe email address at the time) and requesting their price list. What a world that was, no web-based catalogs.

I should mention that I had been living my whole life in a small coastal town in Oregon. The only retail locations with anime were a good 5-hour drive away until an On Cue music/video chain store opened there around '98 or '99.

I also got on the ANIME echo on FidoNet and proceeded to read every single one of those 300+ messages a day that came through it; absorbing anime knowledge by osmosis. FidoNet was still very active at the time, even with the rising popularity of the Internet - though the two had yet to meld into one. FidoNet was also easier to find people to trade fansub tapes.

Sailor Moon was then in its first run on American network TV, so I set my VCR to record it every morning. I did get up to watch while recording the first handful of episodes, but in the end my sleepiness overcame my otakuness (my friends know me more for sleeping than anything else) and I just started setting the timer to watch later. So, there I was, my afterschool routine was to start my FidoNet point mailer, rewind Sailor Moon, watch it, then go read the day’s ramblings from the rest of the world’s English-speaking otaku.

Continuing on into college, we setup the first anime club at our community college. We did the things such clubs always do, sit around watching and/or talking about anime, recruiting (unsuccessfully) at club day, etc. It was basically the same small group of us that had been together since high school.

I ended up joining the military (Air Force) at the tail end of 1999. I, naturally, put down all the bases in Japan for where I’d like to be stationed. We call it a "dream sheet" because that’s all it is - they try to accommodate, if possible, but no guarantees at all. So, during my time stationed in Virginia, I spent loads of money on anime DVDs, going to conventions, etc. Ah, good ol’ DVDs, some good and some bad came from those things - first to come to mind, though, is the end of overpricing the subtitled releases, since sub and dub were now in one retail unit.

Long story short (why do people always say that after the story has gone on for a long while?) I am still in the Air Force, just starting my second tour in Japan (also been stationed in Korea twice, Texas once, and deployed to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iraq twice) with my partner joining me in a couple months, who I met on my previous tour here - another otaku with whom I can complain about what the kids these days watch and how they shouldn’t complain about their fansubs being a couple days "late" when we used to have to wait YEARS for them.

So that's my story and how I ended up living in Misawa, Japan, home to almost nothing anime-related. That's why Genshiken's Ogiue moved to Tokyo from here.
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greg
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Anime Fan Since: 1989 (consciously)
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Re: Gunso's intro

Post by greg »

Nice to see you joining the forum! I'm a BGC fan too, and a veteran of the FidoNet Anime Echo too. Did your BBS also carry AnimeNet? I was most active on the BGC subforum of AnimeNet. Nice avatar choice, BTW!

Do you remember if we went by handles on FidoNet, or did we use our real names? I seem to remember using our full names.

It's interesting how many forum members here are people living in Japan. My friend used to be stationed in Misawa about four years or so ago, but he's now in Hawaii (he's in the Navy). He goes by Ganalef on this forum, but he seems to mainly just lurk because he's too busy.
My presence on the Net, with plenty of random geekiness:
My homepage
My YouTube channel
My Flickr photostream
My Tumblr page
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Gunso
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2012 12:55 am
Anime Fan Since: 1993
Location: Misawa, Japan
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Re: Gunso's intro

Post by Gunso »

BikeLover wrote:Welcome to the forum.

Misawa does have a nice base though. Was turned down when I applied for a Job at Yokota Airbase.
Yep, lots going on at Misawa Airbase, but Yokota being in the Tokyo area, it's harder to get stationed there since it's more popular. All the people with connections get there first and extend their tour as long as they can. I don't mind this area, Misawa city is a nice place and pretty tolerant of foreigners, when they aren't causing incidents like running their cars into stuff while extremely intoxicated.

There's "old man" Minoru with his model shop "Sarubia", a great place to get gundam kits and modeling supplies. There's a shop with all sorts of old and new games, books, figures, porn, and more porn.. Down the road in the closest "big city" of Hachinohe is Animate, loads of used book stores, and a place called "Yorozuya" (萬屋, presumably a play on 万屋 meaning a merchant of all kinds of things) which bought the location from a smaller chain of Game Souko, but has both signs up and only the latter is romanized, so the americans call it that - another shop of all kinds of used anything, including anime goods. It's no Akihabara, but it's better than nothing.
greg wrote:Nice to see you joining the forum! I'm a BGC fan too, and a veteran of the FidoNet Anime Echo too. Did your BBS also carry AnimeNet? I was most active on the BGC subforum of AnimeNet. Nice avatar choice, BTW!

Do you remember if we went by handles on FidoNet, or did we use our real names? I seem to remember using our full names.

It's interesting how many forum members here are people living in Japan. My friend used to be stationed in Misawa about four years or so ago, but he's now in Hawaii (he's in the Navy). He goes by Ganalef on this forum, but he seems to mainly just lurk because he's too busy.
I have always loved Nene. All the more reason to absolutely HATE that abomination that was BGC: Tokyo 2040, as if I wouldn't have had a ton of other gripes about what was wrong with it.

We used full real names on Fido Anime. What's interesting about that is when you occasionally see a name you remember from there in the credits of something as a professional translator. My BBS didn't carry AnimeNet, though I mentioned it to my sysop, but being the only subscriber to Fido's Anime echo, I'd be the only one using it and he didn't add it. There were two FidoNet-connected BBSes in my local dialing area and they were both run by the same guy - all the others were pretty much just for file-sharing.

The Navy has really expanded at this base, seems like they have more aircraft than the USAF now. Of course, there's also JASDF, they have their F-4EJ Kai fighters and CH-47J helicopters. I like to hang out with them at their dining facility - for 500 yen, you can get the biggest curry rice set you've ever seen. Would be 2000 yen or more downtown.
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Heibi
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Anime Fan Since: 1976
Location: Kansas
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Re: Gunso's intro

Post by Heibi »

Welcome, fellow airman, from a retired one.
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Daniel
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Re: Gunso's intro

Post by Daniel »

Hey Roland,

Glad to have you here! Please be my guest and enjoy the forum.

Daniel
raiderfan99
Posts: 46
Joined: Sat Apr 21, 2012 5:51 am
Anime Fan Since: 1993

Re: Gunso's intro

Post by raiderfan99 »

Welcome to the forum.

I too remember those old nickolodeon "anime" shows such as mysterious cities of gold, noozles, maya the bee, etc.

I actully just re-watched all of cities of gold on youtube recently.
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