The Old School Otaku Lounge

What websites did you use back then?

As a huge BGCtard, these are the pages I checked out the most regularly, and they're happily still up even until now:

http://www.ravensgarage.com/index.html
http://members.tripod.com/~Sylia_Stingray/

This site was also very nice for reviews and such, although it has sadly not updated since 2004 ;_;

http://www.abcb.com/index.htm

There's others I'd post, but I'd have to check the various geocities archives, and don't have time right now.

What sites/pages did you like or have fond memories of, my friends?

Oh wow, that Raven's Garage page is pretty cool! Strange how I've never encountered it before. It's good to see pages like that still around, even though they don't get updated as much.

Oh man, I used to visit The Anime Cafe's page often! I didn't even know it was still online. Kind of a shame they haven't updated it in a decade, though.

I used the anipike like crazy.

And I also remember the Save Our Sailors webring back in the late 90s/early 00s.

ParaParaJMo wrote:And I also remember the Save Our Sailors webring back in the late 90s/early 00s.

Yeah! That was started by Ming. I started a thread for the memory of Ming's anime pages, but nobody responded to that. I was introduced to the Sakura Taisen games on the Sega Saturn through his pages.

I remember SOS back in the day, too. My sister and I were big Sailor Moon fans, so I remember us reading through it extensively. But I don't ever remember really making the leap back to Ming's. I also used to be a huge Dragonball Z fan, so I had quite the collection of sites I would visit a lot.

Probably the one I spent the most time on started as Wuken's Dragonball Z Homepage but later became Suu-Shin-Chu. I remember it having one of the more exhaustive image galleries and lots of MP2 music - mostly, themes, image songs, etc. Through there, I got to place's like Capsule Corp. HW (still available, capcorphq.com) Saiyajin's Pride, Another Dimension (which I am only finding broken links to) and "popular fanfic author" Nora Jamieson's page, where I began reading her epic Full Circle and being completely enthralled (and tainting my view of fanfiction as something that can be "good" or "quality"). As I spent a lot of time on the Internet as a teen, there were probably tons of other sites I'm forgetting - and other series, too - but that's sort of what Anipike was for. I remember more about specific sites as to why I went there, rather than the actual names or, more importantly, the URLs.

I have found some pages I used to follow still active - which is kind of weird. Back in 1998, Mike LeBrie started "VegettoEX's Home Page" and over time, he's continued, maintained and upgraded it to what is now [url=htpp://kanzenshuu.com]Kanzenshuu[/url], which has it's own DBZ podcast he hosts with some other folks. Great quality all around and he's able to keep it pretty fresh despite being a single-franchise focus. When I first started trying to track down seiyuu information - Hitoshi Doi's site was indispensible as it had all sorts of seiyuu info that seemed (to me, at the time) completely discarded. I remember stumbling across it again when I was researching the anime Touch before I started watching it and came across his USENET script translation of the first film; read through it, spoiled the whole movie and then said I had to watch it. I also often joked about trying to get him as a convention guest. Talk about promoters booking only what they want to see, audience be damned!

Drew, you're really giving me that nostalgic feeling with those sites you listed; thanks for posting the links! Sometimes I miss the days of browsing through all of the new anime sites, it really was an exciting time to be an anime fan. Unfortunately, many of the sites have completely vanished, but it's great that some have survived and/or been archived.

Kanzenshuu is certainly a great resource for DragonBall fans, I visit it frequently. Both the website and the podcast are very well-done, and it's extremely impressive that they have been able to keep it up and continue to evolve after all these years.

Early 2000's I was apart of AnimeNation's Anime forums, I was a pretty regular member, under J-RockGurl, then Gitaru~chan later on. I made my first online anime friends there and RPed pretty frequently.

Primarily I loved saving images and seeing fanart. I had more fun searching Japanese websites, than English ones, so I used to use a search engine for fansites called "SurPara" or Surfer's Paradise. I don't think they are around anymore though.

ryoran wrote:Early 2000's I was apart of AnimeNation's Anime forums, I was a pretty regular member, under J-RockGurl, then Gitaru~chan later on. I made my first online anime friends there and RPed pretty frequently.

Ah, another AN alum! greg recruited Daishikaze and I from there. I don't know how often either of them read or post there anymore; I still read through it but post very rarely. Seems I was most active there from when I first showed up to about the start of the burst. I don't know if there was just enough traffic to keep things fresh and new and thus more active or if the bust+burn out+changing community affected me going less and less. I think I remember both of those user names, the second one more than the first. I post under the handle "Suiko Eiji" and have for the past 14 (!) years there.

Man, wasn't AnimeNation owned by ADV or whatever?