#since I have been watching anime since fansub tapes were the only way to get anything that wasn't

[blazehedgehog]

Thoughts on One Piece?

I've told this story, but since Tumblr search is so awful, I'll tell it again.

The short of it is: I really wanted to get into One Piece. When One Piece started, pirates weren't really a subject you saw a whole lot of in anime. I thought Oda's art style was fresh and cool, too.

I did not like dealing with fansubs. They were kind of difficult to acquire (relatively), and at the time, I had a router that would absolutely crap its pants if I left a torrent running (it would have a firmware crash and all internet traffic would die until you power cycled the device). So the Kaizoku stuff was right out for me from the start.

I forget which came first, the 4Kids dub or Viz launching American Shonen Jump with their version One Piece. I think the 4Kids dub was first, because I remember being angry at Viz for adopting "Zolo" instead of "Zoro." Either way, I was angry about the 4Kids dub, but I was lucky enough to pick up the entire first 12 months of Shonen Jump, and figured that's where I'd start with One Piece.

Didn't have the money to keep buying new Jumps past that first year, so I figured I'd have to slum it with scanlations at least. I believe I left off in the back half of Baratie, and the only scanlations I could find from that part of the manga were like, truly awful quality. I have described them as "third generation Yahoo Groups quality scans." They were dark, blurry, heavily compressed, and the dialog was barely a step above an automated machine translation. I almost wish I could find them again, because it was nasty.

Around this time I think Funimation announced they wrestled the rights to One Piece away from the decaying hands of 4Kids, so I was happy to wait for that. We subscribed to Netflix in those days, the original DVD-by-mail service, so I'd rent each new set as they came out. Got all the way up through Baratie, up through Arlong Park, up to where they visit and prepare to leave Loguetown.

I think by the time the DVDs hit the fifth set, I ran into a problem: physical rental locations like Blockbuster had hard rental deadlines. You had to bring the disc (or tape) back in a day or two. Netflix, famously, had no rental deadlines. Keep things as long as you like.

While I had no trouble getting 1-4, some clown got set 5 before I could, and sat on it. For over a year. I complained to Netflix, and Netflix just shrugged at me.

Within a year or two of that, Funimation officially launched a One Piece website, like my memory is saying it was onepiece.com or something (which it isn't, that's a clothing store), but the point was they were announcing they were going to simulcast subs of the anime, for free, on this site. They were also adding dub episodes to this site, again, to stream for free. Back then, this was pretty unprecedented. Hulu was only a few years old at this point.

I figured: wow! Now's my chance! Go to check the website and...

The free episodes ended at the exact same point I left off at with the Netflix DVDs. Episode 53. It went from Dub Episode 53 straight to Sub Episode 230, which is where the simulcast began. Looking at Funimation's current site, this is what they consider "Season 1."

So I earmarked it. "Maybe I can finish it some day."

Some day never came. One Piece is over 1000 chapters (100 volumes) and 1000 episodes. There is over 430 hours of One Piece available to watch. The manga is so big people have talked about it taking up an entire shelving unit. I even saw photos once of somebody who had their shelf break because their One Piece collection was so heavy.

It took me over a year to read 16 volumes of the original Dragon Ball. There are almost ten times as many volumes of One Piece.

I have given up. I will never read it. Never watch it. Never see it. It's great that it's this amazing thing, truly this long journey, but even at 500 chapters it would have been too much.

Even if I wanted to, it's grown to be such a thing that when something happens in the anime or the manga, there are instantly spoilers for it all over the entire internet. 107 volumes of that is pretty disheartening.

I know about One Pace. One Pace is still too long. Some of those videos are over 20 hours. For a single video. And One Pace still has gaps in their coverage anyway.

It's just not happening.

[humangerbil]

do you know where i can read/download the light novels? i can only find individual chapters or sketchy sites that want me to sign up and uhh i don't trust those. i am short on money so i can't pay for them :(

Disclaimer: I am in the US and all the information below this point is from an US perceptive about what happens in the US.  

Oh, Anon! I, in no way, have intimate knowledge of how one may acquire media on the internet. I do suggest CDisplay Ex for Windows to read CBZ and other files that digital content such as light novels and manga typically comes in.

There is no way I would suggest downloading a program like utorrent. No way I would say to go to nyaa dot si for all your anime needs. No, I do not suggest typing “Hero Academia School Briefs” into the search bar. Never. 

Okay, but in all seriousness. Do buy them if you can. If you can’t, check your local library, it is amazing how a lot of libraries these days have a good manga and light novel section.

I do not fault people for acquiring media. Especially younger fans who don’t have jobs. This is better than you sitting in the book store and reading copies that should be bought by people as new but are now really used. And you aren’t using the sketchy virus filled sites that make tons of money with ads. Money that doesn’t go to anyone involved in the industry. We get so much anime officially translated these days because people buy it. So support that if/when/how you can.

nyaa and media acquired this way is pretty safe for a lot of reason but a big one is that your internet provider is not owned by/hasn’t been paid by the Japanese companies to yell at you if you acquire their media. The big american companies have! HBO, Disney, all that stuff is not safe and I will not go into detail on how to acquire it because it is involved, requires invites to private trackers, ect. ect. I honestly don’t know if I could point someone in the right direction these days without sending invites myself and sorry, I will not be enabling you that much.

If you do happen to make a mistake and download something from an american company at most you will get a very angry letter in the mail. That is it. 

Comcast used to, and may still, have a three strikes policy. You get caught three times and they cancel your service. If you don’t have alternatives for internet in your area, well...obviously you need to be careful.

I highly suggest that if you are going to this route to get a VPN. The big ones that you see promoted in youtube videos are not ones I would suggest. I am not going to go into great detail about this, some google searching on what you should look for in a VPN will make that pretty clear. I use Private Internet Access and have never had an issue with them. When using a VPN your internet provider can no longer see what you are downloading. They can just see you are on a VPN and that is it.

Lastly, anyone who is downloading media from unknown sources should have virus software. I have always had good luck with MalwareBytes but I know there are a lot of good ones out there. 

[alexeiadrae]

Nostalgia Trip: My Story of Watching The Slayers, Day 1

I’ve been noticing that people have been nostalgic for old series and sharing stories about watching those shows, and Slayers has been brought up. Combined with the variety of ways people saw The Slayers (cable or fan subs, or something else?), I realized there are a lot of stories about actually watching it. So I’m creating a 30 Day Challenge about our personal experiences of watching The Slayers!

Day 1: How did you start watching The Slayers?

I had just started college and was hanging out with two friends from my calculus class, Jenny and Jerry. Jenny and Jerry were talking about various animes, and I had no interest in anime at that time but I was listening politely, and The Slayers came up. They started talking about Lina and how I would love Lina, and I was skeptical, but then Jerry offered to go and get his VHS tapes from his place and bring them to mine so we could watch them. I wasn’t too sure, I mean I was in college, and I was also high and mighty and didn’t want to watch cartoons, but I was too polite to decline, so Jerry went and got the VHS tapes (he only had the first 13 episodes). I maintained my skepticism until Lina’s fight to win speech and then the dam broke, I fell in love with Lina, the show and have been a fan ever since.

2.       How easy was it for you to collect the series to watch it?

3.       What stage of your life were you in when you watched The Slayers? 

4.      Have you met anyone involved in any way with the creation of the show? Hajime Kanzaka, a voice actor be they Japanese, American, Spanish, Elvin, etc? A janitor who worked in the animation studio? What were they like?

5.      Do you have a precious collectible from the show? What is it, and how did you get it?

6.      What inside jokes do you have about The Slayers with friends/family you watched it with?

7.       What lengths did you go to to get access to Slayers VHS/DVSs/fansubs, etc?

8.        This one favors our English speaking fans, but it’s too great a story in the history of watching Slayers to leave out. Do you remember the Great Slayers Disc Exchange (I think that’s what it was called)? Do you have a story involving your participation in it? And are you still mad at Software Sculptors? If English isn’t your first language, what stories do you have about the studios bungling the release of Slayers DVDs in your primary language?

9.        What is your memory of experiencing your favorite funny moment in The Slayers?

10.       What is your memory of experiencing your favorite moment of your favorite Slayers character?

11.       What moment in The Slayers surprised you the most?

12.      When did The Slayers exceed your expectations?

13.      When did The Slayers disappoint you?

14.      What do you remember about experiencing the moment when Phibrizzo kidnapped Gourry?

15.       What was your memory of experiencing your favorite moment of your favorite Slayers ship?

16.       What is your memory of watching your favorite dramatic Slayers moment?

17.       What is your favorite memory of watching The Slayers?

18.       What was your strangest memory of something that happened when you were watching The Slayers?

19.       Which character dying at the hands of Phibrizzo affected you the most?

20.       What was your reaction to the end of Slayers NEXT?

21.       What was your experience with tracking down the novels?

22.       When did you fall in love with Lina? Or if you didn’t fall in love with her, how did your feelings about her evolve through the series?

23.      How did your feelings about Gourry evolve through the series?

24.      How did your feelings about Zelgadis evolve through the series?

25.     How did your feelings about Amelia evolve through the series?

26.     How did your feelings about Sylphiel evolve through the series?

27.     How did your feelings about Xellos evolve through the series?

28.     What moments from the show do you use to motivate you?

29.     What impact has the show had on your life?

30.      Why do you believe this show has had such a lasting impact in people’s hearts?

[megareviews]

Spring 2019 First Impressions

The Spring list is late as usual (is it usual if it’s only the second instance?), but at least I’m closer to the beginning than last year. I’ve reached 50% completion on the doing this for an entire year consistently, so nice.

Aikatsu Friends!: Kagayaki no Jewel (Aikatsu Friends!: Jewel of Radiance): Aikatsu is relatively low on my priority list of magical girl megaseries.

Bakugan Battle Planet: This show actually premiered last semester, but in English, and this season is when the Japanese dub started. Either way it’s somewhere deep in the Bakugan series, which is based off of what are probably my least played children’s toys.

BAKUMATSU Crisis: Second season of an otome game adaption that looked okay when I started it, but I still haven’t watched past the first episode.

Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai (Bokuben / We Never Learn): The main show that I know the source material of, and it is just about meeting my expectations. An average guy who has to study rigorously to maintain his average grades is put in charge of tutoring the two smartest people in his school. This might not make sense until it’s explained that he has to tutor them in their worst subjects, because those subjects are the ones they want to major in for college. It’s a nice theme of working hard for what you enjoy situated in a rom-com with some haremy aspects and an unusually high density of goofy faces, so watch it if you like those aspects.

Bungou Stray Dogs 3: I still need to see what they did with HP Lovecraft in season 2

Carole & Tuesday: What happens when a runaway rich girl and a poor orphan girl meet up on Mars? They form a band of course. A tale of two lonely souls finding each other and become a little less lonely in a big world, making music together. It looks great and it sounds amazing, so this is definitely a priority watch.

Chou Kadou Girl 1/6 (Amazing Stranger): Imagine Buzz Lightyear from the original Toy Story except in a 20 -something guy’s house and then failing the don’t move when humans are around rule almost immediately. That’s what this show is.

Cinderella Girls Gekijou CLIMAX SEASON (Cinderella Girls Theater CLIMAX SEASON): For somebody who doesn’t watch idol shows, the theater shorts are pretty fun, though I’m not nearly caught up in this one to say how this season is going.

Diamond no Ace Act II: Oh boy there’s so much baseball this season and a lot of it is sequels.

Fairy Gone: There’s a lot of things going on in this show but I think I can simplify it to military use of fairies to give soldiers super powers. The protagonist has been taking jobs as a mercenary to find her sister who was split from her after their village was burnt down. Then at an auction that she works as a guard, things start going wrong and the thief who appears is none other than that sister. The first episode ends with the end of a three way fight between security and the girls, so I’m not sure where the show’s going at all. Maybe if the show didn’t flash back to the protagonist’s village burning down three times, there would be a little more time to give direction.

Fruits Basket (2019): I never know how to deal with reboots for shows that I can remember, but haven’t seen the original. I know there’s people who turn into animals and a “do the carpets match the drapes” joke, and that’s about it from the 2001 anime.

Gunjou no Magmel (Magmel of the Blue Sea): After a new continent appears in the world, explorers flock to it, not always as prepared as they should be for venturing into the unknown. The main character works at a company to rescue explorers from mishaps along with a few others. The worldbuilding is interesting and the main character’s black lightning is pretty cool looking, but his attitude and decision making abilities kinda put me off for now. That and the comprehensibility of the subtitles I was watching fell off a cliff halfway through the episode.

Hachigatsu no Cinderella Nine (Cinderella Nine in August): So far it looks like a pretty standard club building show based around women’s baseball. It looks nice and we have 4 club members as of the first episode, so they should make it to at least full team of nine pretty quickly. It looks nice outside of an odd montage near the end of the episode when the club plays a game with some local kids, and the character designs are a bit more memorable than the usual baseball cast. I appreciate the fact that they’re playing hardball, but I’m not the type of person to watch anything sports ever.

Hangyaku-sei Million Arthur 2 (Operation Han-Gyaku-Sei Million Arthur): All I know about this show is that there’s a bunch of characters named Arthur and that it’s a sequel.

Hitoribocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu (Hitori Bocchi's ○○ Lifestyle): When one of the most socially anxious kids in elementary school gets separated by her only friend when they go to different middle schools, her friend gives her a quest: to become friends with everybody in her new class. She’s got a real go-getter attitude, but from feeling physical pain from trying to talk to a stranger to fainting when somebody actually responds to her, she’s got a rough path ahead of her. It’s a really fun show that gets you rooting for the main character in her attempts of communicating with others in a normal manner.

Isekai Quartet: Four of the biggest isekai series in one short mash-up is a recipe for confusion. Especially since they’re all put together in a school setting where no fighting is allowed, even if there are holy gods and undead abominations in the same class. Anything can happen with all these people taken from their original normal lives, tossed into various fantasy worlds, and then slam dunked back into a relatively normal setting.

Jimoto ga Japan (I’m From Japan): I cannot find a trace of the anime anywhere online and I am glad of this having read the manga. It is just a really dumb comedy about Japanese prefectures that I struggled to read a few chapters of before giving up.

Joushikausei: A silent anime, as in there’s no spoken words, about a few high school girls. It’s an interesting concept, but I found it a bit uncomfortable to watch, mostly due to the whimpering and other nonverbal noises the girls were making.

Kedama no Gonjirou (Gonjiro the Yarn Ball): A children’s show that hasn’t been licensed and no group is fansubbing it, how unusual… It actually looks interesting though so I might search for the raws to check it out.

Kenja no Mago (The Magi’s Grandson): A child raised by a powerful wizard in the country reaches an age where he can move out to the city and attend a magical high school. Unfortunately for him, his parental figures only taught him combat and magic, so he doesn’t really know how to sustain himself in the reals world. It is a decent concept but there’s a 50/50 chance of any scene looking nice or looking awful, and the scene transitions all look like they were made in Powerpoint.

Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slaying Blade): A happy family of coal sellers is destroyed in a night when a demon strikes. The eldest son was out due to a combination of work and a blizzard, and when he returns he finds all but one of his family members completely cold and covered in blood. This last member is rushed down the mountainside for medical aid, only to turn into a demon on the way down. A meeting with a demon slayer turns tricky as he tries to protect his demonized sister who’s fighting between killing instincts and her love of her brother. The opening promises some beautiful animations and the overall show isn’t slacking either, so overall it’s a very promising show.

KING OF PRISM -Shiny Seven Stars-: It’s the TV version of a boy band movie tetralogy which is also a sequel I think?

Kiratto Pri☆chan Season 2: A sequel to a idol anime that I reviewed last year. I think this is one of the first times a sequel has shown up that I also reviewed the first season of, though unfortunately it was for  a show that I didn’t watch fully.

Kono Oto Tomare! (Stop this Sound!): One more club building show for this season, this one about a Japanese instrument called a koto. After all the upperclassmen of the club graduated in the previous year, only the main character is left in the club, and needs more members before the club gets closed, the usual. The first new member is a seemingly delinquent 1st year who is surprisingly diligent. There wasn’t too much interesting or unique other than the topic of the club, so music fans might find this more watchable than I.

Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO (YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World): The first episode for this kind of front-loaded introducing characters and pulled out its premise of parallel dimensions and a device to navigate them towards the end, which means I’d probably have to watch another episode to figure out how I feel about it. It’s nice to not have a giant exposition dump take up the first episode of a show, especially since it will have two cours to tell a story, but I didn’t feel any particular gravitation towards the characters by this point, so I won’t be prioritizing any follow-up on it.

Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin (Midnight Occult Civil Servants): With a job at a place called the Nocturnal Community Relations Division, the first thought of the type of people dealt with is most likely not going to be fairies. Our main character is taken from a world of the ordinary to being able to see and talk to the supernatural creatures that live locally, called Anothers. His co-workers are equipped with magically enchanted police tape and other trinkets to help solve issues that occasionally arise between Anothers. I like the modern fantasy setting, and the fairly low level fights with the supernatural so far, so there’s promise in where the show goes.

Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai (Ao Can’t Study): While the name Ao is usually blue, or sometimes even moth, in this case, it stands for Adult Only, the 18+ rating in Japan. This is due to her father’s profession, an erotic writer, and surprisingly, the main character hates her father for naming her that and spends her entire life studying to get into a college far enough away from him. This is thwarted by a guy confessing to her and filling her mind with romance and lewder thoughts, with the help of her father. I hate this as a concept and don’t watch this.

Mix: A semi-sequel baseball anime. I say semi, because from what I’ve gathered it is recommended but not necessary to watch the original first.

Nande Koko ni Sensei ga!? (Why is my Teacher Here!?): It’s about a male student and his teacher, ending up in awkward situations together, like being trapped together in a men’s bathroom stall. A show of pure fanservice through and through, so there’s not much else to say.

Namu Amida Butsu!: Rendai Utena: What started out as an action about cleansing impurities from the world gives us a quick bait ‘n switch to a slice of life about gods bumbling about in the human world attempting to be competent humans. I found it irritating to watch, and it was very clearly based off of a gacha game, which do not have a good track record of making good shows.

Nobunaga-sensei no Osanazuma (Nobunaga’s Young Bride): A modern age middle school teacher way down the ancestral tree of Oda Nobunaga meets the bride of the man himself, who traveled to the present from the day of the original Nobunaga’s death. She’s no older than when she left her original time, which leaves her at 14 years old, with no knowledge of modern day Japan so she’s stuck with the main character’s family and decides to be the new Nobunaga’s bride anyways, which… is weird.

One Punch Man 2: A big sequel of the season, and one where people have been waiting with wary anticipation due to the change in animation studio and director. It definitely looks a lot stiffer than the first season, for action and non-fight scenes, but the story is a bit more interesting in my opinion, as the show starts working on fleshing out other heroes and why they fight.

RobiHachi: the first episode of this really is a springboard for setting up what the plot and cast will be, just about starting right at the very end.  We’ve got an ultra gullible man in debt, a genius teen with no sense of purpose, a robot rabbit helper, and their spaceship that blares its own theme song when it transforms into a mech. They set off to find a legendary planet that grants happiness after a couple of hijinks on their starting planet. It’s a very busy show, both visually and plot wise, but still an enjoyable experience if you can keep up.

Sarazanmai: 50% connecting with other people through oversharing with them, 50% kappas stealing souls from other people’s butts. It’s hard to describe the show but I’m having a good time, and the art is gorgeous, and special care is taken with little details in the show. I’d say watch the first episode definitely, and then decide whether or not to follow up on the rest of the show.

Senryuu Shoujo (Senryuu Girl): The focus of the show is on the Japanese poetry type of Senryuu, mostly because the main character can only communicate with others through writing these poems. Thankfully, she’s got some good friends and is in her school’s Literature Club, so she has plenty of practice and is around people who appreciate her work.

Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san (Meddlesome Fox Senko): The fox gods of the world have a duty to protect humans, and are becoming more proactive in seeking out humans with negative emotions before those emotions go out of control. In comes the male lead of the show, an overworked businessman who has basically just been going through the motions of life by this point. One of the fox gods appears in his house, doing the cooking, cleaning, and other tasks to help relieve the main guy’s stress. It’s comfy and there’s some funny moments, but I feel like the show would be better off as a more episodic show featuring various humans rather than just the one that it looks like the show will focus on. I’m also worried about the romance genre tag that the show has.

Shingeki no Kyojin 3 Part 2 (Attack on Titan 3 Part 2): I’m still on episode 5 of the original series, with no particular motivation to make it any further. More people die in bloody explosions probably.

Shoumetsu Toshi (Lost City): As the title of the show would imply there is a city that has been lost to humanity, as in, it just disappeared one day. The main female character is the only one who survived the city disappearing, and is targeted by a mysterious group due to that, and she tries to return to where the lost city used to be due to a message by her father who went missing with the city. In addition there was a monk with super powers who was standing on a motorcycle’s handlebars facing off against the main girl who could summon her Lost bodyguard with a bunch of guns but that was kinda just thrown in at the end.

Strike Witches 501 Butai Hasshin Shimasu! (Strike Witches 501st Join Fighter Wing Takes Off!): Oh god it’s been so long since I’ve consumed Strike Witches content. This is a slice of life spin off of the original series, so the context is recommended, but not necessary. The animation is also very much on the rough side for a ten minute long short. 

Yatogame-chan Kansatsu Nikki (Yatogame’s Observation Diary): After briefly being disappointed in the lack of heavy Nagoya dialects encountered in Nagoya, the main character runs into a classmate who happens to have one. In addition, all of her favorite foods and animals are popular or famous in Nagoya, so he sticks around with her for meeting his ideals of what a Nagoyan should be. They then travel the city as part of the photography club to see all the sights of the city.

Youkai Watch!: Despite what it looks like from the title, this is pretty deep in a line of sequels of Youkai Watch.

[hyenafu]

Hey chu. Have you ever watched Neon Genesis Evangelion or at least heard about it? Because i have some peculiar question between Sdamned and Evangelion.

Evangelion has been a big deal for as long as I can remember anime being a thing. I first saw parts of it when I was literally in elementary school in the 90s. My brothers were in high school and would sometimes bring home VHS tapes with fansubbed anime recorded on them. Sometimes the tracking would be so bad on those tapes that the static would obscure the subtitles, making the shows difficult or impossible to understand. This is how I got introduced to Dragonball Z, Vision of Escaflowne, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and a whole lot of other, mostly trashy or forgettable shows.

When I was in high school, a group of anime fans from the local community college would record fan parodies and screen them at the local anime convention. Think of them as parodies like Dragonball Z Abridged, but in movie format as opposed to series-length, and often making original narratives rather than just recapping the anime the footage was taken from. Since this was before the age of Youtube, and due to the creators’ wishes, the only way to see these parodies was to see them at the local convention. However, one of my friends managed to get a copy of one of the parodies on a VHS, which we circulated and shared among our friends. This is how I saw Studio Sokodei’s “Evangelion Re:Death”, a very ridiculous (and now, a hopelessly outdated) parody of Evangelion that, at the time, I thought was one of the best things in existence.

...oh, right, you wanted me to talk about Evangelion. Uh, well, I have seen the whole original series and both the movies. And I have to say, while I understand WHY people love it and why it’s so influential and popular, my personal opinion is that I don’t like it very much. One of my housemates/oldest friends is a fan of it, and I even bought her some cool Evangelion x Godzilla merchandise the last time I went to Japan, but her wife and I tease her for liking Evangelion all the time. Bangin’ theme song, though.

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: Hacker News)

It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving cost-performance ratios and gradually dropping costs and new material and… etc. All of these gradually drop the cost, drop the price, improve the quality at the same price, remove irritations or limits not explicitly noticed, or so on.

It all adds up.

So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late ’80s/early ’90s (as far back as I can clearly remember these things—I am sure the list of someone growing up in the 1940s would include many hassles I’ve never known at all).

When I think back, so many hassles have simply disappeared. I remember my desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil sharpener, but between smartphones & computers, most of my desk space is now dedicated to cats. Ordinary life had a lot of hassles too, I remembered once I started thinking about it. These things rarely come up because so many of them are about removing irritations or creating new possibilities—dogs that do not bark, and ‘the seen and the unseen’—and how quickly we forget that the status quo was not always so. Limiting myself to my earliest relatively clear memories of everyday life in the 1990s, I still wound up making a decent-sized list. Now, imagine if I could have extended this back another decade. Then another decade. Then another few decades…

(For broader metrics of increase in well-being such as life expectancy, income, pollution, slavery, poverty etc, see Our World in Data, the Performance Curve Database, the work of Hans Rosling like Gapminder, Human Progress.org etc.)

Roughly divided by topic:

the Internet/human genetics/AI/VR are now actually things

electric cars will be ordinary things in 5–10 years; self-driving cars not long after that

not rewinding VHS tapes

not watching crummy VHS tapes, period

not making a dozen phone calls playing phone tag, to set up something as simple as a play date

hotels and restaurants provide public Internet access by default, without nickel-and-diming customers or travelers; this access is usually via WiFi

satellite Internet & TV are affordable & common for rural people

not worrying about running out of AOL hours

not being yelled at for tying up the phone line

USB cables mean that for connecting or recharging, we now only need to figure out ~10 different plugs instead of 1000+ (one for every pairwise device combo)

programmers able to assume users have 4GB RAM rather than 4MB RAM

not needing to know the difference between PLIP, SLIP, IRQ, TCP/IP, or PPP to get online

Linux X, WiFi, and laptops usually work

no longer needing to clean computer mice weekly thanks to laser mice

electronics prices keep falling to the point where people whine endlessly online if a top-end VR headset or smartphone costs less in real terms than a Nintendo NES did in 1983 ($1003071983) or a Sony Walkman cassette player in 1979 ($1504831979), and kids couldn’t even imagine having to pay $501131990 for a new copy of Super Mario Bros. 31—a far cry from paying $5 these days for a great PC game during a Steam sale.

hearing aids are a small fraction the size, have gone digital with multiple directional microphones (higher-quality, customizable, noise-reduction), halved or more in price, become water-resistant, and even do tricks like Bluetooth

wheeled luggage no longer expensive or rare, but cheap & ubiquitous

not getting lost while frantically driving down a freeway; or anywhere else, for that matter

most books and scientific papers can be downloaded conveniently and for free

search engines typically turn up the desired result in the first page, even if it’s a book or scientific paper; one doesn’t need to resort to ‘meta-search engines’ or enormous 20-clause Boolean queries

smartphones: far too much to list… (eg careless smartphone photographs are higher-quality than most film cameras from a few decades ago, particularly in niches like dark scenes)

spaced repetition has escaped the cognitive psychology labs

nuisance software patents have been expiring (eg GIF, arithmetic encoding, MP3)

catching the tail end of a cartoon on TV and being able to look it up instead of wondering for the rest of one’s life what it was about

having fansubs available for all anime (no longer do anime clubs watch raw anime and have to debate afterwards what the plot was! Yes, that’s actually how they’d watch anime back in the 1970s–1990s when fansubs were often unavailable)

everything is available subtitled, not just TV

most programs have a usable FLOSS equivalent and in some areas FLOSS is taken so for granted that new programmers are unaware they used to have to pay for even text editors/compilers or that Linux is Communism

we no longer need to strategize which emails to delete to save space

not worrying about Blockbuster or library fines

houses which are insulated and uniformly comfortably warm, rather than leaky and using heaters running constantly creating drafts and hot/cold spots

hot water heaters increasingly heat water on demand, and do not run out while shocking the bather

stoves which are increasingly induction-based and safe rather than fire hazards burners/gas

riding lawn mowers are affordable & common for rural people

power tools (such as drills, leaf blowers, or lawn mowers) are increasingly battery-powered, making them more reliable & quieter & less air-polluting

speaking of batteries: batteries are built-in—remember how advertisements always had to say “no batteries included”?—so no more mad scrambles at Christmas for AA or AAA batteries to power all the presents (which could easily add $5111990–$10231990 to the total cost!)

cars last longer and get better mileage

airplane flights no longer cost an appreciable fraction of your annual income2, and people can afford multiple trips a year.

coats are thinner, more comfortable, and warmer thanks to better forms of synthetic fiber and insulation

laser pointers are no longer exotic executive toys or for planetariums, they’re things you buy off eBay for $1 for your cat

LED lights are more energy-efficient, heat rooms less & are safer, smaller, turn on faster, and are brighter than incandescents or fluorescents

movie theater seats have become far more comfortable as movie theaters competed with DVDs/home-theaters & Internet & video games (and concession prices seem like they’ve increased less than inflation)

the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive

we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our radios, or our GPSes

car security alarms no longer go off endlessly in parking lots

all cars have electrified power windows; I don’t remember the last time I had to physically crank down a car window

radio stations have minimal static

TVs no longer have rabbit ears that require regular adjustment

LASIK surgery has gone from an expensive questionable novelty to a cheap, routine, safe cosmetic surgery

teddy bears & other toys are much more cuddly and silky

clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”; the idea of, say, darning socks is completely alien3, clothing companies routinely burn millions of pounds of clothes because it’s cheaper than the cost of selling them, and Africa is flooded by discards.

materials science has produced constant visible-yet-invisible improvements in textiles yielding, among other things, far better insulated (and cheaper) winter jackets: instead of choosing between winter coats which make you look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or freezing (and if you get wet, freezing anyway) or exotic ultra-expensive garments aimed at mountain climbers, you can now buy ordinary (and much cheaper) winter coats which are amazingly thin and work even better to keep you warm—so much so that you have to be careful to not buy too well-insulated a coat, lest you swelter at the slightest exertion and be placed between the Scylla of overheating & the Charybdis of opening your coat to the freezing air to cool.

it is now reasonably safe and feasible to live in a big city like NYC, Chicago, or DC

crime, violence, teen pregnancy, and abuse drug use in general kept falling, benefiting everyone (even those not prone to such things) through externalities

Nicotine gum & patches no longer require a doctor’s prescription to buy (although moral panics have produced retrogression on nicotine vaping fluid)

marijuana has been medicalized or legalized in many states

air quality in most places has continued to improve, forest cover has increased, and more rivers are safe to fish in

copyright terms have not been indefinitely extended again

board games have been revolutionized by the influx of German/European-style games, liberating us from the monopoly of Monopoly

shipping/logistics has become cheaper, faster, more reliable, and more convenient in every way:

USPS introduced self-adhesive stamps in the early 1990s, and by 2010, licking stamps was almost nonexistent

most people recognize rebates/coupons are scams, and the rise of discounters/warehouse stores/Internet shopping has largely obviated them

you can avoid ripoff mattress stores by ordering online, thanks to compact vacuum-compressed foam mattresses which can be shipped easily

the cost of shipping goods has plummeted

shipping speeds have dramatically improved for lower-cost tiers: consider Christmas shopping from a mail-order company or website in 1999 vs 2019—you used to have to order in early December to hope to get something by Christmas (25 December) without spending $30511999 extra on fast shipping, but now you can get free shipping as late as 19 December!

coffee/tea/alcohol:

decent loose-leaf tea widely available

microbrews/craft beers have revolutionized beer varieties & availability (similar things could be said of wine, cider, and mead)

McDonald’s coffee which doesn’t explode in one’s lap while trapped in a car and causing disfiguring third-degree burns

McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts coffee, and mass market coffee in general, no longer taste like ‘instant char-fee’

Keurig & other coffee machines which heat the water separately from the coffee-making are increasingly common, especially in hotels; this means that tea drinkers (like myself) can make tea which doesn’t taste hopelessly like coffee due to ineradicable coffee contamination

fast food in general has gotten much better: much tastier, and we don’t worry about getting salmonella or E. coli from our burgers

even mass-market grocery stories like Walmart increasingly routinely stock an enormous variety of exotic foods, from sushi to goat cheese to kefir

‘meat’ is an accepted fad diet

sous vide cooker have gone from devices bought only by professional European chefs for thousands of dollars to a popular $70 kitchen gadget

restaurants have gone from smoking, to smoking sections, to non-smoking entirely; and smoking in public has become rare

fresh guacamole can be easily bought due to pressure pasteurization (“Pascalization”), avoiding the inexorable spoilage of regular guacamole and buying fresh guacamole from the supermarket only to forget about it for a day and discovering it’s ruined

tasteless mealy bitter-skinned “Red Delicious” apples are still dismayingly common, but now one can buy (in most supermarkets) far superior varieties of apples, such as Honeycrisp apples (beginning 1991) or SweeTango apples (beginning 2009)

you no longer need to cook sausages to death because trichinosis is now rare.

Brussels sprouts no longer taste quite so bad

Part of why I never got an SNES or Super Mario Bros 3, despite enjoying it a lot whenever I could play it with my friends.↩︎

Where do you think all the money came from for those pretty stewardesses & elaborate meals in those glamorous Pan Am flights? Even much more recently, that $2896561990 average airfare in 1990 is not quite so amusing when you inflation-adjust it to today.↩︎

Have you ever noticed how much time even ‘middle class’ mothers used to spend sewing up pants or darning socks or organizing family clothes banks even as recently as the 1970s or 1980s? Somewhere around then, mothers stopped teaching their daughters how to sew or make clothes—I think less because of any feminism and more because it no longer seems like a particularly worthwhile skill to learn, especially given pressure from other uses of time like sports or homework. My grandmother in the 1950s routinely made whole outfits—dresses and pants and socks—for her family, while my mother only sewed under considerable duress, and my sisters couldn’t use a sewing machine at all (until one of them took up jewelry as a hobby as an adult). When I’ve asked about other families, this has been a common pattern.↩︎

[enbywerewolftemp]

spoopmastermaggs replied to your post “after all these years, i’m still obsessed with rurouni kenshin”

There's no escaping this fandom.

I have a story.  when i first got into kenshin, it was 1998.  I was in college.  I had been religiously playing pokemon since it came out less than two years before, but the anime hadn’t been released in the US yet, so I wasn’t yet rushing home every day to watch new episodes.  Another student saw my interest in the game and said he was was in the anime club and took me to the basement of the students union building to watch a few eps of some of his favorite new fansubs.  One of which was Rurouni Kenshin.

I never got involved in any kenshin fandoms back then.  There was no easy way to find other fans on the internet.  no google.  no wikis.  Like, there were newsgroups where people talked about their favorite stuff, but the only anime that had their own newsgroups were pokemon and dragonball z.  I joined a final fantasy VII newsgroup because they were pretty open to talking about lots of anime.  they also introduced me to hentai, and fucking traumatized me with a particular story about a chocobo.

I desperately sought out people who would get me kenshin fansubs on tape so I could watch it all, I tried to learn japanese so i could read the manga (i gave up when i got to kanji so i didn’t get to read the manga until it was officially printed in english).  I bought the first couple of kenshin video games and got my game system fixed so i could play them.  I didn’t understand or enjoy the games at all.  i was hella obsessed.

but i never found fandom?  I know that at least in some sense, fandoms have always been around, but without the internet to help us find the other people with the same hyper specific interests, did we just not have fandoms for every single anime back then? 

Did i escape the kenshin fandom by cultivating my obsession and burning out before our current understanding of fandoms even came into existance?

what happens now?  Now I’m watching the live action movies, rewatching the anime, searching for new sources of content to slake my kenshin thirst.  am i doomed to finally become a part of this fandom?  Almost twenty years and I never met another kenshin fan, but now the fandom is coming for me.

what have i done?

[alexeiadrae]

Nostalgia Trip: My Story of Watching The Slayers, Day 25

yDay 25:  How did your feelings about Amelia evolve through the series?

At first, I hated Amelia. Admittedly, my friends predisposed me to dislike her because when they were talking about how awesome Lina was they were also talking about how annoying Amelia was. But I think I would have been annoyed regardless. As Slayers was my first anime I didn’t understand the tropes she was honoring and was wondering what on earth she was on. She also interrupted the adventures of Lina and Gourry vibe of Prime that I enjoyed and really pushed her way into their duo even though neither or them were that keen on letting her join their party, and I was resentful of that a bit. With Shabranigdo destroyed I was hoping for Lina and Gourry to travel on their own for a bit, but in came Amelia! And I didn’t feel as though she added much to the group. 

What made this worse was the English dub. There are things I like about the dub, but Joani Baker’s portrayal of Amelia was not one of them. Her voice somehow managed to be this hideous mixture of old crone and sickly sweet little girl and every time she spoke I cringed. I absolutely hated her. 

Keep in mind, her first 3 introductory episodes were all I saw of her for the longest time before we got additional box sets in, and I watched those tapes over and over again, so it was a lasting first impression. 

We eventually got the rest of Prime, and Veronica Taylor took over voicing for Amelia, and it was a marked improvement because I would no longer cringe every time she talked. But given that Amelia was the character who was in over her head and needed help and protecting, it didn’t do much to change my opinions on her. It wasn’t until I saw NEXT and saw that she was maturing, becoming a stronger fighter, and saw the friendship moments that she had with Lina that I started to like her. The episode with the hot springs where Martina returns was a huge turning point.

At that time, there was a lot of vitriol in fandom directed towards her. While I understood where it was coming from given that I did hate her at first, given how her character did mature and grow I felt it was undeserved. So I fell into a pro-Amelia camp as a result of it and swung in this direction of how awesome she was and shipped Zel and Amelia, but not as strongly as I did Lina and Gourry.

With time, the fandom settled down and the haters went on to other things, and the novels were translated, and between the fact that I’m no longer defending her and some of the insights from the novels, my feelings about her have changed again to a sort of, meh. I’m at this point now where I think some of the contradictions of her character are interesting, such as how she clings so fiercely to a concept like justice given what happened to her mother. I mean, if there’s one person in the world who should know that justice doesn’t always triumph it should be someone whose mother was assassinated. I also appreciate her strengths and her friendship with Lina, but I also realize that if I knew her in real life she would likely drive me up the wall. There’s a firm wall between realizing this and still appreciating her as a character even if she’s not high on my list of favorite character anymore, pretty much because I think she’s gotten enough hate to last a lifetime. And given how strongly I relate to Zel, this has sort of dampened my enthusiasm for Zel and Amelia as a ship. (Note, I’ve never been a a one of those fans who had a crush on Zel type thing, it would have felt narcissistic to do so since I always related to him in a platonic, kindred spirit type way, so it’s this genuine I can’t see Zel and Amelia working out thing now, not a jealousy towards her character that some fans had type thing. Of course, these things aren’t always logical and rational so I could be very wrong here).

So Amelia is the character who I’ve had the most topsy turvey relationship with. From absolutely hating her to absolutely adoring her, to a sort of mellowing sort of, “she’s ok” type thing. Only one thing has remained consistent. While re-watching the first season with my daughter I was so glad to be done with her three intro episodes so I wouldn’t have to hear Joani Baker anymore! I usually watch those episodes with Japanese audio now, but my 6 year old’s reading skills aren’t good enough yet for subtitles, so I had to suck it up. They really need to re-dub those episodes with Veronica Taylor!

1.       How did you start watching The Slayers?

2.       How easy was it for you to collect the series to watch it?

3.       What stage of your life were you in when you watched The Slayers?

4.      Have you met anyone involved in any way with the creation of the show? Hajime Kanzaka, a voice actor be they Japanese, American, Spanish, Elvin, etc? A janitor who worked in the animation studio? What were they like?

5.      Do you have a precious collectible from the show? What is it, and how did you get it?

6.      What inside jokes do you have about The Slayers with friends/family you watched it with?

7.       What lengths did you go to to get access to Slayers VHS/DVSs/fansubs, etc?

8.        This one favors our English speaking fans, but it’s too great a story in the history of watching Slayers to leave out. Do you remember the Great Slayers Disc Exchange (I think that’s what it was called)? Do you have a story involving your participation in it? And are you still mad at Software Sculptors? If English isn’t your first language, what stories do you have about the studios bungling the release of Slayers DVDs in your primary language?

9.        What is your memory of experiencing your favorite funny moment in The Slayers?

10.       What is your memory of experiencing your favorite moment of your favorite Slayers character?

11.       What moment in The Slayers surprised you the most?

12.      When did The Slayers exceed your expectations?

13.      When did The Slayers disappoint you?

14.      What do you remember about experiencing the moment when Phibrizzo kidnapped Gourry?

15.       What was your memory of experiencing your favorite moment of your favorite Slayers ship?

16.       What is your memory of watching your favorite dramatic Slayers moment?

17.       What is your favorite memory of watching The Slayers?

18.       What was your strangest memory of something that happened when you were watching The Slayers?

19.       Which character dying at the hands of Phibrizzo affected you the most?

20.       What was your reaction to the end of Slayers NEXT?

21.       What was your experience with tracking down the novels?

22.       When did you fall in love with Lina? Or if you didn’t fall in love with her, how did your feelings about her evolve through the series?

23.      How did your feelings about Gourry evolve through the series?

24.      How did your feelings about Zelgadis evolve through the series?

25.     How did your feelings about Amelia evolve through the series?

26.     How did your feelings about Sylphiel evolve through the series?

27.     How did your feelings about Xellos evolve through the series?

28.     What moments from the show do you use to motivate you?

29.     What impact has the show had on your life?

30.      Why do you believe this show has had such a lasting impact in people’s hearts?