What are you currently feeling nostalgic about?

[Storm Earth and Fire]

Probably gonna continuously drop some thoughts here that I'm too shy to post on socials about (hey a callback to an earlier post)

A long time ago I watched hazel's video about America's Greatest Otaku, Tokyopop's goofy reality show. It's great, I recommend it (the actual show maybe less so). One point stuck out to me though. It's a snapshot of an era of anime fandom that's kinda gone. She says that in the late 2000s-early 2010s when the show existed, anime was still a very niche thing and the fandom was small enough that everyone stuck together, no matter what kind of shows you watched. The fandom has since grown a ton and growth will only accelerate since now anime has dedicated streaming services that are cheap or free, and episodes can now be simulcast with their Japanese broadcast with English subtitles. 15 years ago it was buy expensive DVDs or wait a day for fansubs you had to torrent yourself.
Now what has me feeling weird is how disconnected I feel from maybe half the people I end up talking to about anime because we have no overlap in shows. This isn't a bad thing at all, the fandom naturally has to splinter when it hits a certain level of mainstream appeal, but it feels like I don't have meaningful conversations about anime with many people I meet now. I know that it's growing more popular but I don't feel like I have more people to talk at length about it with.
A lot of it is probably just me not consuming multiple shows per season anymore and getting old, but still.

World of Warships just closed their official forums and told everyone to go to the Discord server. It sucks and the best part is they just clear wiped it so the server is now full of Wayback Machine lines.

I apologize in advance for the OT with this, but it always weirds me out how late the US has been with importing anime, so much that it had to wait until the 2010s to get out of the "niche" period. Europe and especially Italy started importing them in the earliest of 80s (to be precise, our first anime broadcast in Italy was in 1979, imagine) and from then on watching japanese cartoons was a norm for so many people (granted if you were completely obsessed with them you still got weird looks, but many were fans anyway and at least knew what you were talking about).

We used to import a great deal of different genres and do a good job with translations and localization without recurring to censorship until the very late 90s/early 2000s when channels decided it was easier and quicker to translate them from the american versions, which came in already cut and revisioned. Before that all the violence or inappropriate jokes were totally fine :U

To give some "measuring unit" on how different the situation here is, I have some friends who are now in their 30s whose names are inspired by Hokuto No Ken characters because their parents used to watch the show; or, when YouTube was going through their Dragon Ball AMV phase, we were all asking ourselves why all the clips used were from Z when the most famous Dragon Ball series, for us, was the very first one with small Goku and a general comedic/slapstick feel. At the time we even considered it a spinoff of Dr. Slump, which was a tiny bit more famous before DB really took off.

There's probably a lot of peculiar reasons the American market just went differently. I was born in 1991, I can't say for sure aside from what I hear from older people.

For one, when you're a cultural juggernaut yourself I can imagine it being harder to bring in foreign shows. We have Disney already delivering a lot of heavy hitters as far as movies go. Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera were pumping out iconic TV cartoons (which incidentally used limited animation influenced by Japanese animators). I think there's a relatively simplistic view of what people want and are able to understand here, so your TV cartoons really didn't do anything crazy. It changed in the 1990s with the rise of adult animated series (The Simpsons, Family Guy, Beavis and Butthead, and everything after that). Given the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, we weren't gonna get anime aimed at younger audiences without mangling the heck out of them.

DBZ did air way earlier than the original Dragonball here, and I think that's also due to assumptions about what Americans want. They would've wanted to bring the more action packed show rather than the more light hearted adventure. Card Captor Sakura's original American dub also, believe it or not, also tried to lean the show in this direction. There's also the attempts at toning down any Japanese cultural references in some shows to try and make them more understandable to American children (see the jelly donut, Persona 1, the original Tokyo Mew Mew dub). I imagine this led to a reluctance to bring more anime over.

Anime actually showed up in the US in the 1980s, but in a really weird way. Voltron and Robotech are incredibly iconic series that a lot of people in their 30s and up will recognize even if they aren't anime fans. Both of these shows were actually multiple other animes rewritten and mashed together. Robotech vs. Macross is a bit of a sticking point in America, because Robotech is Macross with another show mixed in, and it was really well received. Macross itself is a very long, epic universe that's great too.

Other early animes brought over in the 1980s-early 90s were mostly trashy OVAs on VHS. Otherwise you had to go to a local anime club and copy very early fansubs (or fandubs) from their VHS.

Then in the mid 90s we got Speed Racer, Sailor Moon, and Dragonball Z. The latter two are probably the most popular shows after Cowboy Bebop, but at least in my experience they didn't register as anime, they were just another cartoon. Pokemon and Digimon broadened the horizon a little but I don't think most people were specifically chasing anime until a TV block called Adult Swim started in 2001, airing Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Inuyasha, and expanding from there. Shoutout to Toonami (nominally a more kid-friendly block) airing the Tenchi shows too. I think that's when people first saw shows that showcased the broadness of anime (as opposed to just kids shows about magical girls, fighting, and monsters) and weren't changed up by the licensing companies.

When I say going mainstream and getting out of it's niche period though, I mean the current situation of streaming services picking it up, pushing out tons of shows, and normalizing subtitles. While we were late to the party, I think we did kinda normalize watching Japanese cartoons, just in a weird and roundabout way that hampered getting a variety of shows here.

Latin America actually had a similar situation to Europe of getting a decent variety of shows before the US did, all dubbed in Spanish and Portuguese. Latinos in the US knew about all sorts of shows. Saint Seiya (aka Knights of the Zodiac) was a cultural phenomenon in Latin America but only got a limited airing on US TV like 30 years later. As far as I know Captain Tsubasa has never come out in the US.

There's a 21+ convention near me that's filled with people in their 40s who can tell you all about what it was like in the dark ages.

 

[Murkrow]

I woke up with build music from the sims 2 in my head today. Which is strange because whenever I play any sims game I replace the create-a-sim music with sims 2 music but the build/buy mode music I use is always from the sims 1.

 

[Storm Earth and Fire]

A MtG cosplayer asked for 5 video games that changed your life on Twitter, and aside from my other 4 (RollerCoaster Tycoon, Football Manager, Dance Dance Revolution, and Street Fighter IV), I wasn't sure if I wanted to list Pokemon Blue or Pokemon Silver. It's like, yeah Blue launched me on a path, but I feel like Silver had some more formative energy behind it, as that's when I kinda struck out on my own instead of relying on friends? I dunno.

The big thing was I looked up when Pokemon Crater started. It was right before Gen II launched in North America. That's what led me to putting Silver down. If it passed and I just chewed up Silver and moved on as a child might, I wouldn't be here, but instead that game was so compelling (I took my copy with me on a trip to Vietnam and hung out with a kid playing it, unforgettable stuff if you're a 5th grader who doesn't speak the local language) that I just had to put it down. Was anyone else here on Pokemon Crater? I'm honestly only here because Crater shut down their forums and I needed somewhere else to scratch the forum itch, especially with regards to roleplaying.

 

[Kung Fu Ferret]

I remember Pokémon crater!

Also I'm feeling nostalgic about Power Rangers

 

[Storm Earth and Fire]

Okay so some of my friends and some people on Facebook started talking about it recently so I'd like to see if anyone here has some thoughts. There's was a great Facebook post last month after E3 died. Here's a screenshot of it.
There's definitely something missing about games culture nowadays. Games themselves are fun (well, they can be) but the industry just doesn't seem fun anymore, at least when we view it from the outside. Everything is very clean, nobody seems to do anything wild anymore, and while we have all sorts of avenues for games coverage now (lots of fly-by-night websites alongside the major ones, and YouTubers), I dunno, it's just not as cool. I'm afraid the attitude either found it's way into AAA development or come from modern AAA development, that is, the desire for video games to be taken seriously as a medium, from adopting the pageantry of the EGOT awards shows to trying to increasingly "tell cinematic stories"

 

[Murkrow]

I think I agree. Especially the bit about it being a shared experience rather than categorised. For example I had never heard of The Elder Scrolls before I was watching an E3 stream and they revealed Skyrim. I thought there and then that it looked cool and I wanted to play it. When a game today is announced, the main people who see it would be people who follow that company or series specifically, if I'd never heard of it before, I'd probably never hear of it now.

And the fact that everyone was doing it at once make it feel communitylike. Even people not involved with the industry could watch it. Indies could maybe announce their own games at the same time even if they weren't there personally. But now, the industry feels more closed, like if you want to be a part of it, you have to be a big corporation. Not to mention moments like "PEGGLE TWO!!" have been replaced with tweets that are nothing but a screenshot of text on a brand-coloured background making their announcement.


As for what I'm feeling nostalgic about recently: it should be no surprise that my answer is more or less the same as it has been before. Flash games and the Old Internet.

 

[Storm Earth and Fire]

This video came across my Twitter feed, more good stuff that makes you pine for the old internet

It was weird to watch because my old roommate did some games journalism and wrote for some Gamurs Group sites, most notably Destructoid. Well, he eventually got laid off from Gamurs after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, then got a gig with Destructoid which didn't last long either, and I'm afraid he just ended up being one of those people chewed up and spit out by content mills.

Top comment is absolutely the mood though, "i miss when the internet was mostly niche forums. my hope for this year is we (as collective individuals) can bring back some of the softer, more human sides of the internet, but better this time"