Maudlin
If you know something is going to depress you...don't do it, right? I wish I followed my own advice.
I've been sick all week. I had a lot of free time on my hands, especially this past weekend. There really isn't a lot you can do when you're sick. You can't hang out with your friends for fear you'll infect them with whatever dread disease you have. I missed out on the birthday of one of my closest friends last week because of the flu. You can't go out, because there isn't any desire to move from your current position. You can't do most of the things that give you joy or pleasure when you're well—and yes, that includes the Horizontal Mambo. Your body aches, your sex drive is in the toilet, et cetera. Mostly, you just don't feel particularly sexy when you're sick. Someone explain that to my husband, please.
Okay, fine. So what do I do with tons of free time on my hands? I had my computer. I had the Internet. I had (and still have) a monstrous hard drive about three-quarters empty. I was a little high because I fought off the NyQuil coma to stay awake. Here I was, aimlessly surfing around, when I came across a link to one of my late Nineties haunts.
Starting around 1998 or so, I had a dedicated IE3 tab open to The Anime Web Turnpike at all times. The Anipike was (and still is) a symbol of my early Twenty-something years, when it wasn't a sin to be Otaku. I was an anime fan of the highest caliber back in the mid to late Eighties, from when I first entered high school in 1988, to just before I was married in 2001. I still have a soft spot for anime. There isn't a day that goes by when my husband and I don't watch some sort of anime on television.
Most times, people at worst thought you were slightly...odd, for watching cartoons in your mid-twenties. Even if the cartoons were from Japan, where they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was fifteen gallons of blood in the human body, all under high pressure. Back in the Nineties, 'Weeaboo' was a silly sound you made when playing 'Peek Baby' with a toddler. The word 'Animu' was a typographical error. 'Otaku' wasn't an epithet back in 1998. In fact, most anime fans didn't even consider themselves Otaku. They were simply anime fans. In further fact, half of us still called anime 'Japanimation'. Shudder.
Things were different back then, when the whole Internet was purportedly only ten Terabytes. I sit before my brand-new, built-from-scratch, high-end gaming computer, and smile when I think of the old days.
Back in 1998, my first computer was my one-year anniversary gift from my future husband. The computer had a two gigabyte hard drive, and 128 megabytes of RAM. It ran off of Windows 95. We had a 26k modem, and a long, pirated list of obscure phone numbers in which to hook up to the Internet with. If you used the numbers that AOL offered, you either hooked up at three in the afternoon and left it on all day, or you sat there cursing at your computer when the lines were busy and stayed busy until 1am.
In 1998, with my slow-as-molasses modem, it took three hours to download a four minute song off WinMX or KaZaA. If you wanted to download a Quicktime movie, you hooked up to an FTP or found a BBS with what you needed. When you found what you needed, you left your computer on for days while your single episode of Ranma ½ downloaded. On days like that, you had to revisit your computer regularly to initiate a tiny bit of activity, otherwise AOL 3.0 booted your ass for inactivity. When that happened, you had to start the whole process all over again. If you were lucky, you hit up the friend who had a thousand Zip disks. Each of those disks had just enough room for one bloated twenty-minute episode of anime. Each of those damned disks cost twenty clams in 1998; your CD-R-less buddy that had every Tenchi Muyo episode on an Iomega disk was either a computer geek, a pirate, or had a trust fund.
1998 for me was the year of: click-of-death Zip drives; webrings; my first pirated copy of a subtitled Akira; Star Blazers message boards; the beginning of my love affair with Slayers; sci-fi conventions that finally gave in and offered an anime track; my introduction to real doujinshi. It was the year I moved in with my future husband, and our nights were filled with love and plans for the future and Gunnm 銃夢 or Galaxy Express 999 on Saturday Morning Anime when it ran on the Sci-Fi Channel at three am. 1998 was a good year.
But yeah, the Anipike.
I clicked on the link for the Anipike, and wasn't surprised to see a new Anipike in the place where the old one once resided. It was good that fans like me were willing to carry on and help give birth to the new Anipike from the old Anipike's ashes. It did surprise me, however, to find a link to the old Anipike on the new page. Intrigued, I clicked on it.
There it was, the last bastion of everything good and pure from my fledgling days on the Internet. My heart pounding with excitement, I clicked on the first link. That excitement faded when the link proved to be broken. Well, why would it still be there? It's old...no one watches Ranma ½ anymore, I thought to myself. I surfed to the Final Fantasy section, where I was sure to find some live links.
Imagine my shock when I realized the old Anipike's Final Fantasy section consisted mostly of FFVII through FFIX links. It occurred to me then that FFX came out just before the old Anipike was abandoned. I found six FFX fan site links, all of them broken.
Faster and faster I clicked on links to my youth. Sailor Moon's section was a necropolis, as was Dragonball and Ranma and Slayers and Gundam and Tenchi. One out of every twenty or so links I clicked was still viable, but just barely so. The rest of the pages shown informed me that Hometown and Geocities had gone tits-up, or I got a cold, stark 403, 404, or 410, or—the very worst of all—the sites I loved and remembered had become porn sites.
A thought formed in my muddled head (I was still riding high on the NyQuil souse, mind). I had the room on my HD...let's see how much of the old Anipike is left! At that point, I had gone through about ten percent of the old Anipike's links. I gathered together the few links I found that were still (at least marginally) viable, and hit the Multimedia sections.
I actually had more fun than I wish to admit to. It was a blast digging up those old relics, but it felt too much like grave-robbing for comfort. I didn't even bother looking at what was going into the folder I had named 'Anipike Remnants' on my Desktop. Whatever I found that was still downloadable, I downloaded it. Ancient, blurry galleries of screencaps went in that folder; MIDIs and WAVs and Quicktime movie clips were not overlooked. Forgotten thirteen year old fanart and fanfiction were swiftly downloaded. Entire armies of Winamp skins were tossed into the folder too. I didn't think twice about it. I wasn't going to keep anything I found, anyway. It was a nice little diversion from my clogged lungs and sore throat, nothing more.
I spent six hours going through old archives and finding buried treasure. When I was finished with my paltry, tiny list of viable links, I went in for more. After those six hours were done, I had gone through about one-quarter of the links on the old Anipike. I gave up, then; it was beginning to become a chore searching through the bag of bones the old Anipike had become.
Finally I right-clicked on the Anipike Remnants folder. My fast-as-lightning computer promptly told me that the folder was 197Mb in size.
One hundred and ninety seven megabytes. When I crunched the numbers in my head, reason told me that if I did the same thing for the rest of the site and dug for treasure, I'd find about eight hundred Mb of data on the entire site. That's all that would be left of my once-shining safe haven. The news crashed into me, and it was like the end of all things. The site was irrevocably dead.
I don't know why I sat before my state-of-the-art computer and wept for a years-dead site. I couldn't chalk it up to the NyQuil haze, or my period, or the flu, or anything like that. It was more than that...it was like being present at the deathbed of my youth.
I did manage to finish trawling the old Anipike, and I did find some more buried treasure—it was a lot less than I had originally thought I'd find, and it took a lot longer than I thought. I still have the Anipike Remnants folder, too. I went through it when I felt a little better, and sorted everything I found. It wasn't nearly as fun as trawling, but I found myself smiling at pictures and WAVs I hadn't seen in over ten years.
The folder is sitting, encrypted, on my hard drive. I'm keeping the folder of ancient multimedia to remind myself to leave the old bones of my long-dead youth unmolested.
Not all is gone, thankfully. Some of my old haunts still exist...these are the ones I still go and visit occasionally, and so were spared my mad, thick-headed dig for ancient treasure. Twoflower's Codex is still around, as is Daizenshuu and The Madhouse, Aimo's Ink Soup (which is now no longer called that as far as I can tell, the site evolved with its webmistress), and Meri and Dot Warner and (if you dig deeply enough) Katchan.
This, too, made me feel a bit maudlin. A scant few of the sites may be still around, but the dust is thick on most of them. The Wayback Machine is an indispensable tool, but it is too easy to dig up bodies that should otherwise be left undisturbed. I couldn't go back to the old Anipike anymore after this. I felt like a hyena gnawing on the moldering bones of a long-dead corpse.
As for the new Anipike, I will not use it. Ever. I can see myself ten years from now, weeping over the death of another beloved haunt, and I just can't do it again. Best to leave well enough alone. If I ever do get the urge to immerse myself to the chin again, all I have to do is look at the odd little encrypted folder on my hard drive, and the urge will pass.
There will come a time when I'll forget what's in the folder now simply labeled 'Remnants', only that I can't ever get rid of it. Because it's there to remind me of the fleeting power and beauty of my youth, and how nothing lasts forever.
I've already forgotten the encryption password. I think that's for the best.
I've been sick all week. I had a lot of free time on my hands, especially this past weekend. There really isn't a lot you can do when you're sick. You can't hang out with your friends for fear you'll infect them with whatever dread disease you have. I missed out on the birthday of one of my closest friends last week because of the flu. You can't go out, because there isn't any desire to move from your current position. You can't do most of the things that give you joy or pleasure when you're well—and yes, that includes the Horizontal Mambo. Your body aches, your sex drive is in the toilet, et cetera. Mostly, you just don't feel particularly sexy when you're sick. Someone explain that to my husband, please.
Okay, fine. So what do I do with tons of free time on my hands? I had my computer. I had the Internet. I had (and still have) a monstrous hard drive about three-quarters empty. I was a little high because I fought off the NyQuil coma to stay awake. Here I was, aimlessly surfing around, when I came across a link to one of my late Nineties haunts.
Starting around 1998 or so, I had a dedicated IE3 tab open to The Anime Web Turnpike at all times. The Anipike was (and still is) a symbol of my early Twenty-something years, when it wasn't a sin to be Otaku. I was an anime fan of the highest caliber back in the mid to late Eighties, from when I first entered high school in 1988, to just before I was married in 2001. I still have a soft spot for anime. There isn't a day that goes by when my husband and I don't watch some sort of anime on television.
Most times, people at worst thought you were slightly...odd, for watching cartoons in your mid-twenties. Even if the cartoons were from Japan, where they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was fifteen gallons of blood in the human body, all under high pressure. Back in the Nineties, 'Weeaboo' was a silly sound you made when playing 'Peek Baby' with a toddler. The word 'Animu' was a typographical error. 'Otaku' wasn't an epithet back in 1998. In fact, most anime fans didn't even consider themselves Otaku. They were simply anime fans. In further fact, half of us still called anime 'Japanimation'. Shudder.
Things were different back then, when the whole Internet was purportedly only ten Terabytes. I sit before my brand-new, built-from-scratch, high-end gaming computer, and smile when I think of the old days.
Back in 1998, my first computer was my one-year anniversary gift from my future husband. The computer had a two gigabyte hard drive, and 128 megabytes of RAM. It ran off of Windows 95. We had a 26k modem, and a long, pirated list of obscure phone numbers in which to hook up to the Internet with. If you used the numbers that AOL offered, you either hooked up at three in the afternoon and left it on all day, or you sat there cursing at your computer when the lines were busy and stayed busy until 1am.
In 1998, with my slow-as-molasses modem, it took three hours to download a four minute song off WinMX or KaZaA. If you wanted to download a Quicktime movie, you hooked up to an FTP or found a BBS with what you needed. When you found what you needed, you left your computer on for days while your single episode of Ranma ½ downloaded. On days like that, you had to revisit your computer regularly to initiate a tiny bit of activity, otherwise AOL 3.0 booted your ass for inactivity. When that happened, you had to start the whole process all over again. If you were lucky, you hit up the friend who had a thousand Zip disks. Each of those disks had just enough room for one bloated twenty-minute episode of anime. Each of those damned disks cost twenty clams in 1998; your CD-R-less buddy that had every Tenchi Muyo episode on an Iomega disk was either a computer geek, a pirate, or had a trust fund.
1998 for me was the year of: click-of-death Zip drives; webrings; my first pirated copy of a subtitled Akira; Star Blazers message boards; the beginning of my love affair with Slayers; sci-fi conventions that finally gave in and offered an anime track; my introduction to real doujinshi. It was the year I moved in with my future husband, and our nights were filled with love and plans for the future and Gunnm 銃夢 or Galaxy Express 999 on Saturday Morning Anime when it ran on the Sci-Fi Channel at three am. 1998 was a good year.
But yeah, the Anipike.
I clicked on the link for the Anipike, and wasn't surprised to see a new Anipike in the place where the old one once resided. It was good that fans like me were willing to carry on and help give birth to the new Anipike from the old Anipike's ashes. It did surprise me, however, to find a link to the old Anipike on the new page. Intrigued, I clicked on it.
There it was, the last bastion of everything good and pure from my fledgling days on the Internet. My heart pounding with excitement, I clicked on the first link. That excitement faded when the link proved to be broken. Well, why would it still be there? It's old...no one watches Ranma ½ anymore, I thought to myself. I surfed to the Final Fantasy section, where I was sure to find some live links.
Imagine my shock when I realized the old Anipike's Final Fantasy section consisted mostly of FFVII through FFIX links. It occurred to me then that FFX came out just before the old Anipike was abandoned. I found six FFX fan site links, all of them broken.
Faster and faster I clicked on links to my youth. Sailor Moon's section was a necropolis, as was Dragonball and Ranma and Slayers and Gundam and Tenchi. One out of every twenty or so links I clicked was still viable, but just barely so. The rest of the pages shown informed me that Hometown and Geocities had gone tits-up, or I got a cold, stark 403, 404, or 410, or—the very worst of all—the sites I loved and remembered had become porn sites.
A thought formed in my muddled head (I was still riding high on the NyQuil souse, mind). I had the room on my HD...let's see how much of the old Anipike is left! At that point, I had gone through about ten percent of the old Anipike's links. I gathered together the few links I found that were still (at least marginally) viable, and hit the Multimedia sections.
I actually had more fun than I wish to admit to. It was a blast digging up those old relics, but it felt too much like grave-robbing for comfort. I didn't even bother looking at what was going into the folder I had named 'Anipike Remnants' on my Desktop. Whatever I found that was still downloadable, I downloaded it. Ancient, blurry galleries of screencaps went in that folder; MIDIs and WAVs and Quicktime movie clips were not overlooked. Forgotten thirteen year old fanart and fanfiction were swiftly downloaded. Entire armies of Winamp skins were tossed into the folder too. I didn't think twice about it. I wasn't going to keep anything I found, anyway. It was a nice little diversion from my clogged lungs and sore throat, nothing more.
I spent six hours going through old archives and finding buried treasure. When I was finished with my paltry, tiny list of viable links, I went in for more. After those six hours were done, I had gone through about one-quarter of the links on the old Anipike. I gave up, then; it was beginning to become a chore searching through the bag of bones the old Anipike had become.
Finally I right-clicked on the Anipike Remnants folder. My fast-as-lightning computer promptly told me that the folder was 197Mb in size.
One hundred and ninety seven megabytes. When I crunched the numbers in my head, reason told me that if I did the same thing for the rest of the site and dug for treasure, I'd find about eight hundred Mb of data on the entire site. That's all that would be left of my once-shining safe haven. The news crashed into me, and it was like the end of all things. The site was irrevocably dead.
I don't know why I sat before my state-of-the-art computer and wept for a years-dead site. I couldn't chalk it up to the NyQuil haze, or my period, or the flu, or anything like that. It was more than that...it was like being present at the deathbed of my youth.
I did manage to finish trawling the old Anipike, and I did find some more buried treasure—it was a lot less than I had originally thought I'd find, and it took a lot longer than I thought. I still have the Anipike Remnants folder, too. I went through it when I felt a little better, and sorted everything I found. It wasn't nearly as fun as trawling, but I found myself smiling at pictures and WAVs I hadn't seen in over ten years.
The folder is sitting, encrypted, on my hard drive. I'm keeping the folder of ancient multimedia to remind myself to leave the old bones of my long-dead youth unmolested.
Not all is gone, thankfully. Some of my old haunts still exist...these are the ones I still go and visit occasionally, and so were spared my mad, thick-headed dig for ancient treasure. Twoflower's Codex is still around, as is Daizenshuu and The Madhouse, Aimo's Ink Soup (which is now no longer called that as far as I can tell, the site evolved with its webmistress), and Meri and Dot Warner and (if you dig deeply enough) Katchan.
This, too, made me feel a bit maudlin. A scant few of the sites may be still around, but the dust is thick on most of them. The Wayback Machine is an indispensable tool, but it is too easy to dig up bodies that should otherwise be left undisturbed. I couldn't go back to the old Anipike anymore after this. I felt like a hyena gnawing on the moldering bones of a long-dead corpse.
As for the new Anipike, I will not use it. Ever. I can see myself ten years from now, weeping over the death of another beloved haunt, and I just can't do it again. Best to leave well enough alone. If I ever do get the urge to immerse myself to the chin again, all I have to do is look at the odd little encrypted folder on my hard drive, and the urge will pass.
There will come a time when I'll forget what's in the folder now simply labeled 'Remnants', only that I can't ever get rid of it. Because it's there to remind me of the fleeting power and beauty of my youth, and how nothing lasts forever.
I've already forgotten the encryption password. I think that's for the best.