The Old School Otaku Lounge

www.anipike.com

Well, I figure this is the place where people might have at one point actively used this site. Back in late elementary through high school, I ALWAYS used this as an anime resource. Today, I go to other anime forums like myanimelist, animeforum, and anime-planet and only like one or two other people vaguely remember it. I used to find other VHS fansubbers on this site and learned so much about anime in general through this once great web of information. I am glad that the site in general is still up but many of the links that exposed me to some of my favorite titles back in the day such as Rurouni Kenshin are long gone.

Yes, we were discussing the Anipike in the Time Capsule subforum in this thread. The Anime Turnpike was pretty great for its time. I guess it just takes a lot of effort to maintain a manual site like that which catalogs various websites. Come to think of it, Yahoo.com used to be a manually-maintained catalog of websites before it became powered by Altavista. Dedicated websites just decreased once the new social media became popular.

I did use it, but you're stretching my memories here. I believe I only stuck to news sites for a brief period until I became a member of animeondvd.com (now Mania.com, though the original webmaster has now moved to fandompost.com), and I found that people on that forum were more than good enough to keep my updated on news. Heck, even now most of my anime news comes from fandompost.com.

I've completely stopped reading ANN now also. The posters there are either too young, too stupid (I completely lost respect for many posters there when so many of them were afraid Fantagraphics would **** up Moto Hagio's manga because they were (in their words) a "new" company they'd never heard of before... ) or they take criticisms of their favorite anime too personally. And other than a few writers there, the jaded tone of many of their regular columnists and reviewers gets tiresome to read. Am also tired of how the anime boom between 1998-2004 is seen by many as so much better than any other period of anime.

I also posted on rec.arts.anime.misc for a period between 1998 and 2004-ish and that was good for news as well.

I knew the guy who built the Turnpike, J Harvey. He also headed the Akron Animation Assoc (TRI-A) while I was in college at nearby Kent. That group managed shows year round, some at the large student center and others at the Akron Library. Running a club and a growing web site can turn you into a perpetual student (to take advantage of facilities) or force you to give one up to pay rent. Many fellow fans that graduated college in the early 90's had to break from the hobby to scramble for (post 80s recession) work.
/couldn't just pull out your $300 laptop and start blogging

llj wrote:I did use it, but you're stretching my memories here. I believe I only stuck to news sites for a brief period until I became a member of animeondvd.com (now Mania.com, though the original webmaster has now moved to fandompost.com), and I found that people on that forum were more than good enough to keep my updated on news. Heck, even now most of my anime news comes from fandompost.com.

I've completely stopped reading ANN now also. The posters there are either too young, too stupid (I completely lost respect for many posters there when so many of them were afraid Fantagraphics would **** up Moto Hagio's manga because they were (in their words) a "new" company they'd never heard of before... ) or they take criticisms of their favorite anime too personally. And other than a few writers there, the jaded tone of many of their regular columnists and reviewers gets tiresome to read. Am also tired of how the anime boom between 1998-2004 is seen by many as so much better than any other period of anime.

I also posted on rec.arts.anime.misc for a period between 1998 and 2004-ish and that was good for news as well.

It's also funny, most especially on myanimelist, that the youngins believe that anything before 2004 is considered "old."

I knew the guy who built the Turnpike, J Harvey. He also headed the Akron Animation Assoc (TRI-A) while I was in college at nearby Kent. That group managed shows year round, some at the large student center and others at the Akron Library. Running a club and a growing web site can turn you into a perpetual student (to take advantage of facilities) or force you to give one up to pay rent. Many fellow fans that graduated college in the early 90's had to break from the hobby to scramble for (post 80s recession) work.
/couldn't just pull out your $300 laptop and start blogging

Hah hah. I know the feeling when I took a brief break from the hobby because I happened to have found work in Japan of all places.

On second thought, I believe I am mixing up anipike with animenewsservice.com in the above post. Anipike was a web link page from the comments I see here, and yes, I do recall using it very occasionally. Told ya'll my memories were hazy.

llj wrote:On second thought, I believe I am mixing up anipike with animenewsservice.com in the above post. Anipike was a web link page from the comments I see here, and yes, I do recall using it very occasionally. Told ya'll my memories were hazy.

I know Greg already linked the other thread, but I just thought I would mention that I'm really glad another Anipike fan is on here. I used to be pretty active on their bulletin board (the old one, not the one after the site redesign), people mainly remember it as a links page now, but it was a very popular community hub as well. It was really hard to find good quality bulletin boards in those days, most were series specific and on generic board maker sites like ezboard, it is the one I remember the most for sure. I also got most of my news from there, in the form of the news posts on the main anipike site, and then people would post stuff in the forum too. It's a real shame it doesn't get mentioned or remembered much these days.

If I remember correctly, it was one of the top used sites in its day as well. Not only does it get mentioned, the younger generation has no idea what it is.

I spent a lot of time on Anipike in the middle 1990s to early 2000s. It was one of the best directory resources around, especially when you didn't want to go through multiple search engines to find stuff. It seemed like if you were linked on Anipike, you made it. Whatever the hell that was really supposed to mean.

One thing that I always talk about when I'm discussing Days Of Fandom Yore was an eventual need for communication. For someone like me, who never thought about organized clubs where you could get together with other fans and watch anime, Anipike helped me get in touch with other fans and fansubbers so I could watch more and expand my collection. It's weird now how so many anime fans have a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr but are so asocial in comparison.

ParaParaJMo wrote: Today, I go to other anime forums like myanimelist, animeforum, and anime-planet and only like one or two other people vaguely remember it.

I've admittedly never been to animeforum or anime-planet, but if you're lumping them in with myanimelist, then no doubt they are some sort of cesspool like MAL. I like MAL's listing features and I was intrigued with the social aspect of it but I've shied away from a lot of it because the conversation seems to cater to lowest common denominator and blind fanaticism (or youthful idiocy) is "more respected" than any sort of thoughtful criticism.

I used to be on ANN's forums a lot, and I'd like to say that it was different back in the mid-2000s ... but I'm not so sure. The players have changed but the game is the same, I think.

greg wrote:Come to think of it, Yahoo.com used to be a manually-maintained catalog of websites before it became powered by Altavista.

To be fair (time for my own hazy memory moment), weren't most search engines of this time leaning towards a more manual process as opposed to math/statistics-based machine learning (which was Google's biggest competitive advantage)?

greg wrote:Dedicated websites just decreased once the new social media became popular.

These are two sides of the same coin though; rather than drawing a direct comparison to social media (which I think of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ specifically) versus the multitude of blogging platforms out there? As I drew in the other thread, building your own site from scratch has been passed over for WYSIWYG editors and blogging platforms. While I remember people making page(s) of a specific anime they were interested, there were also a huge abundance of pages that were "I like these cartoons". To me, it's not so different than having a dedicated anime blog.

Drew_Sutton wrote:
To be fair (time for my own hazy memory moment), weren't most search engines of this time leaning towards a more manual process as opposed to math/statistics-based machine learning (which was Google's biggest competitive advantage)?

greg wrote:Dedicated websites just decreased once the new social media became popular.

These are two sides of the same coin though; rather than drawing a direct comparison to social media (which I think of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ specifically) versus the multitude of blogging platforms out there? As I drew in the other thread, building your own site from scratch has been passed over for WYSIWYG editors and blogging platforms. While I remember people making page(s) of a specific anime they were interested, there were also a huge abundance of pages that were "I like these cartoons". To me, it's not so different than having a dedicated anime blog.

Just picking up on both of your points there, Drew, you are dead right about the search engines in those days. It was really like the wild west, you had Web Crawler, Excite, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Lycos all jockeying for position. Yahoo! itself originally started as a links page and became so large a modern search engine approach was needed, and the rest is history. But in the early days, you are correct, the manual engines were superior (and still not very good). I actually had better luck using webrings or typing stuff in as a url a lot of the time (i.e. pets.com or something like that), not that you would want to do that now! I remember the first time I used the Internet at school, I typed in http://www.anime.com after a brief explanation from my teacher on how to use Netscape, only to be greeted with a chibi character holding a work in progress sign. That was my introduction to the Internet. But you're right, Google's algoritims were what changed the game in the search world, and the inability to catch up killed all of those early search engines as well as dedicated links pages.

Also, I don't know that "blogs'" are anything new. I mentioned this in another thread, but therossman.com has been around for almost 20 years, and is probably the earliest anime "blog" type of site I can think of it, it just wasn't labeled as such and of course was written from scratch. I think that the basic content has staid the same, the delivery vehicle has just been altered a bit. Really, is Tumblr that different from an old image gallery, or a WordPress blog that different from a character shrine/personal page? Or were the little blurbs on the anipike.com front page that different from a short tweet? The decline of IRC, mailing lists and Newsgroups/Usenet are the bigger shift in Internet culture, not just anime culture, I think.