What are you currently feeling nostalgic about?

[Storm Earth and Fire]

Around the 2000s and early 2010s people made anime and video game wallpapers with a particular look that makes them look aged whenever they come up on my computer. It's usually official or fan art with elaborate effects applied, edited onto a background, and/or with cool text added. Another popular category was vectors, where characters were reduced to colorful silhouettes, which I think people still make every so often. If you want to see some examples, minitokyo.net and animewallpapers.com are still up and full of this era of wallpapers. I dunno if there are still people out there making desktop anime wallpapers like this. Most of the old websites are dead, unsurprisingly, with dead DeviantArt pages.

I have a big folder of wallpapers I don't use anymore (I didn't have a HD monitor for a very long time) that's preserved a lot of old ones from dead sites. I haven't looked inside of there in so long it feels like I forgot about this era.

I suppose most wallpapers now would be portrait to fit onto phone screens. Something about them doesn't seem as cool to me though. Wide aspect ratios gave artists a lot of room to play around with the original art or fit more detail into original works. The screen on a phone feels so limited I feel like I'm getting a relatively basic portrait.

 

[Murkrow]

The type of desktop backgrounds that look good change along with the UI design of the operating systems they were made for/on. I remember having a windows vista PC and I had a Wind Waker wallpaper that went well with the aero aesthetic of that OS. But it wouldn't look as good on a windows 11 computer. I use Linux now so I could probably customise my desktop to look however I like, but I prefer to find background that match the UI rather than the other way around.

The style I'm looking for now is hard to describe, but it should be something noisy (like film grain) so that there isn't one spot on the screen what draws all of your attention, but it shouldn't be so abstract so as to not depict anything at all.

 

[Storm Earth and Fire]

Found this video in a tweet lamenting that young anime fans wouldn't be into it. It's an interview with a guy who started one of the first anime licensing companies in the US, part of a long series of interviews with people who were big figures in the US anime industry. I always love hearing from these super early anime people and seeing some of the others made me nostalgic for the pre-pandemic era of fandom again. It's discourse that comes up every so often that inevitably leads to the sentiment that your fandom can become too big and once the normies come in it's over. To be honest there's some truth to it but if you go out and meet people, you'll be pleasantly surprised that the fandom they're talking about still exists, albeit smaller in scale.
What's interesting about this company is that they picked up some big titles (Bubblegum Crisis is the biggest one) way back then but they've only really done titles that the owner is personally interested in. Basically it was run as a personal project that happened to make money, which is a crazy position to be in.
It's really hard to imagine the era he talks about, where people only passed anime around in VHS tapes raw. Nowadays I don't think I really think about the industry because almost everything can get subtitles and be aired the same time it comes out in Japan. When I was getting into anime 25 years ago, these companies were pretty small operations. At conventions I think they had a more personal presence and you could sense how much work went into releases. Nowadays it feels too easy in a way. I'm sure there's still plenty of work going into it but Crunchyroll and such are also huge enterprises that have way more resources than the old companies could dream of.