The Old School Otaku Lounge

Greetings.

My name is Ken Wolfe and I have been an anime fan since 1985. My introduction was when my good friend Doug ran anime videos out of his hotel room at Keycon in Winnipeg. I soon started trading tapes with a penpal in Japan and also with many other clubs and fans across Canada and the US. I collected laser discs, art books and original manga. I was a member of many anime clubs at the time, including the C/FO and Anime Hasshin. My first anime convention was AnimeCon in San Jose in 1991. Over the years I went to conventions in California several times, and took two trips to Japan. I ran the video programming at the 52nd World SF Convention here in Winnipeg. For a couple of years I also ran Anime In Manitoba, a small local anime club that ran videos in the St. Boniface Library. Later in the '90s as more fan activity gravitated to the Internet I started getting involved in anime fan fiction, mostly writing El Hazard and Sailor Moon stories. At Anime North I won the Grand Prize in the fan fiction contest in 2000 and in the Iron Author contest in 2001. I am still an anime fan, though both my collecting and my fan activities have been scaled back in recent years. Lately I collect mostly domestically released DVDs and translated manga. Weekly I meet with friends to watch fansubs of the latest TV series. I am also an SF fan, my favorite authors are S.M. Stirling (whom I have met several times at conventions) and Greg Egan (whom nobody has ever met at a convention to my knowledge). I work for IBM, my specialty is IMS, a mainframe database system originally created to do the parts inventory for the Apollo moon rocket (though that was long before my time). I also collect some indie comics, my current favorite is Girl Genius.

Anime series I have particularly enjoyed are Hokuto No Ken, many of the Mobile Suit Gundam series, Maison Ikkoku, Kimagure Orange Road, Macross, El Hazard, Fushigi No Umi No Nadia, Tenchi Muyou, Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Evangelion, Crest of the Stars, Giant Robo and Noir. The main thing that I lament about the current crop of anime is a lack of any shows that I could really call epic. Most series now last just 13 or fewer episodes, which is not enough to really tell an extended story and fully develop a large cast of characters, never mind gather a large fan base. The handful of recent series that have gone for multiple seasons have just not interested me much. Code Geass had its moments, and I am looking forward to seeing more of Yamato 2199.

Ken,

Glad to have you on board!

Please make yourself right at home.

Daniel

Hi Ken! Your name sounds familiar to me... perhaps from rec.arts.anime or perhaps FidoNet or AnimeNet from the BBS days? I love Crest of the Stars myself. Since you enjoy SF novels, did you read the translated Crest of the Stars novels published by TokyoPop? I really enjoyed the author's explanation of superluminal space travel.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

greg wrote:Hi Ken! Your name sounds familiar to me... perhaps from rec.arts.anime or perhaps FidoNet or AnimeNet from the BBS days? I love Crest of the Stars myself. Since you enjoy SF novels, did you read the translated Crest of the Stars novels published by TokyoPop? I really enjoyed the author's explanation of superluminal space travel.

I was on a number of pre-WWW anime boards, including CompuServe, GEnie and some of the rec.arts usenet groups. Most of my activity was on rec.arts.anime.creative.

Yes, I was on the Amazon waiting list when TokyoPop released the CotS novels.

Hi Ken,
I just looked at your homepage that you've provided the link to on this site. I must say that it was fun reading it, especially because it's so rare to find personal homepages like this anymore. I've never seen your homepage before, but it felt nostalgic just looking at it because this is how people used to announce themselves to the world. Congratulations for keeping it around for so long! I have people bugging me with "Why aren't you on Facebook yet?" Well, before then it was "Why don't you use Myspace?" I have my homepage that I've had since 1995, so if people want to "connect" to me, all they have to do is bookmark my page.

greg wrote:Hi Ken,
I just looked at your homepage that you've provided the link to on this site. I must say that it was fun reading it, especially because it's so rare to find personal homepages like this anymore. I've never seen your homepage before, but it felt nostalgic just looking at it because this is how people used to announce themselves to the world. Congratulations for keeping it around for so long! I have people bugging me with "Why aren't you on Facebook yet?" Well, before then it was "Why don't you use Myspace?" I have my homepage that I've had since 1995, so if people want to "connect" to me, all they have to do is bookmark my page.

Hi Greg.

My T-shirt from Despair Inc (home of demotivators) pretty much sums up my attitude towards social media.

http://www.despair.com/somevedi.html

I expect to outlive Facebook, Myspace and Twitter but nobody will outlive html and email, they will be standards of communication pretty much forever. Far from being the Final Online Society, Facebook is actually losing membership in its saturated markets. Weep for anyone who bought into the IPO.

My web page is lucky to get an update from me once a year, if that. Usually when I post a new story or there's some major change in my profile. I had to code up the html in a text editor, that's why I kept it simple.

I had a look at your model gallery. Some pretty nice ones you put together. I particularly liked the Dendrobium. The episode that appeared in 0083 is one of my all-time favorite Gundam moments.

C/FO O.G. REPRESENT! Welcome to the board, and let me know if you make it out to Anime North next year; we can do a panel on the early days of Canadian anime fandom.

davemerrill wrote:C/FO O.G. REPRESENT! Welcome to the board, and let me know if you make it out to Anime North next year; we can do a panel on the early days of Canadian anime fandom.

It's been about ten years since I was at Anime North. I really don't get out to TO area any more but if I do happen to go I'll drop a note here.

Winnipeg was pretty much "out of it" in terms of Canadian anime fandom. Most of my activities were long-distance through remote conventions, 'zines, clubs, tape traders and penpals. I can't tell you how many boxes of tractor-feed paper I went through printing tape lists and letters, I pretty much wore out a high-end dot-matrix printer. I pretty much had to hop on a plane for FTF meetings. I was really a thousand miles from nowhere back then.