We've done the "old man" rant.
Kids today don't know how good they have it. I got on this train of thought again after thinking about Ranma 1/2. Mentioned briefly on my Twitter, I had been waiting to get on a plane and in the bright departure gate lounge there was an exciting mood lift that came over me. For some odd reason it took me back to the early years of university where I had first knowingly been exposed to anime. It was a series of coincidences and happenstance where we'd got on to some topic of conversation - sadly I cannot recall what - but it came to one of us mentioning how they remember one show where the main character was playing cards against somebody dressed as something like the King of Hearts and they were trying to trick each other but just as bad as each other at doing it. The focus of the scene came to the fact the King had a [bad] Scottish accent, which he then promptly performed, and that the show was funny and pretty good. University being the time for open-mindedness and trying new things, and that we had more than enough time to kill being our first year, finding this show was a new goal. Being 2000 there were no torrents, just a mix of IRC, public FTP servers, and even some direct download sites (which is where 2 years later I'd be one of the first to discover the show .hack//Sign). These were not really feasible but one of us had heard of a funky sharing program called LimeWire and it was there where we had great fortune in finding many episodes.
For those who may not be aware of the old days, to put some perspective on what we had to work with, the university had a standard of using Zip disks - chunky floppy disks which had limits of 100MB - and all the computers had these installed in the front. Home CD-burning drives were around though and soon the switch from ZIP disks to CDs would come, but for getting the files we downloaded over to a computer in our Halls we were stuck using these 100MB storage disks and while I sat in the library and collected the files, two others would take one of the two full disks, run over to the Halls, transfer the files off, and then come back for more, crossing over in the middle. "But 100MB is too small to fit the 250MB-350MB .avi files!" you cry out. That's right. But you'd almost be lucky to have a computer that could play such a file, let along storage to transport it. No, no, back then the format which was commonly used by fansubbers, as well as people who'd rip and share Western shows like Family Guy, was a little something called Real Media.
It might be a little akin to how people would trade VHS tapes, with poor quality image, distorted sounds, and sometimes quality corruption compounded even more by tapes being a copy of a copy of a copy. These Real Media files were pretty commonly of a fairly poor quality, glitching sound that might cut out of you tried to jump forward/back, and corruption elements being something that you just got used to and accepted. But when a 25 minute episode came in at around 30MB then you get an idea of what to perhaps expect.
Over the space of a couple weekends we managed to collect a fair chunk of the show, and we were happy enough with the English dub as it was (a) all that there was out there, and (b) we'd not really had experience with anything other than dubs. I was a newcomer to this, as were most of our group, and even our fairly experienced member had a 50/50 mix of subs and dubs under his belt. Stores in the town did have a small anime section tucked away quietly - one had it sharing shelves with what looked to be C-grade martial arts movies and softcore porn - where they would carry a few sparse VHS tapes of the few shows which made it to UK domestic release. At the time this would pretty much be Bubblegum Crisis 2040 and Martian Successor Nadesico, with an occasional 3X3 Eyes or Akira. Releases of these were still coming out with a new tape every 2-3 months and it wouldn't even be until the next year when we'd finally complete BGC2040 and Nadesico, after the majority of our circle had finished and left. English dub, glaring English language overlays (Nadesico being a regularly frequent offender), sound distortion (Nadesico only an occasional offender with low base engine sounds drowning out a line), you'd take what you could get. And it was still better than Real Media files.
After the move to the house for what would be the following 3 years, we were reduced to dial-up Internet. I guess it's no wonder the weekly trips to look through the VHS tapes were so common. Sometimes even more than once a week. However it was not too long until we heard word of the city getting read to bring in ADSL Internet and we were down in their offices asking about early sign-up the first moment we could get. Our time away from being able to explore the Internet to any large degree had given it time to advance and the arrival of DIVX was seeing the .avi file starting to take over as the format of choice. We were still with having to use IRC, FTP servers and the very rare direct download, but soon word came of a peer-to-peer tool known as Direct Connect. It worked like the others but was a little more friendly and easy to use and soon we were all set up. Then the ISP announced they were putting a download cap on. I can't remember if it was weekly or monthly, but it was only a couple days before we had hit the limit, had our service cut, and when going right to their offices was told we'd get it back if we wrote a letter promising not to go over the cap again. I think we had this happen twice, actually, but it's been a little over eleven years and I have trouble remembering what I did even last month.
Direct Connect was interesting where in, like IRC, the rooms would have a community and soon I'd become part of one of these and have some fun times with people there. We'd get to play some Neverwinter Nights a couple times, we even ran a god damned radio station using ShoutCast where I'd jump in and host for a couple hours every other night, and even got into CD trading with two others in our channel whom were also in the UK. I must still have a little under 100 empty double-CD cases boxed up in the house. For one of these people I burned around 40 discs, boxed them up and sent off then in return was given...all of Card Captor Sakura. It was pretty much all they had but I'm more than open to trying new things. One early morning in the summer I had been awake all night and had gone off very early in the morning to the 24 hour supermarket that was about 6 miles away and had walked back in the bright 7am sun, I was feeling pretty cool, upbeat, relaxed and I dare to say almost spiritual. I was at peace with the world. I saw the CDs in the rack and decided it was time. I think I got about 6 episodes in before something shiny came along and distracted me. I think it was one of my housemates coming down and starting coffee.
I made an Anime Music Video back then. It was in a small depression during a Christmas party at a local pub, I decided to leave a little early and just started tinkering around. It was using TV rips of Love Hina, had the subtitles showing in parts, and when it was done there was no YouTube to post it. It was for personal amusement. AMVs were only known to exist because of listings on "database" websites such as AnimeMusicVideos.org and some of the more famous ones were only known because they'd be shown at conventions. Even to me that's an odd thought.
A few years later I'd update it with DVD rips and footage from the OVAs that later came. I'll link it at the bottom because why not.
Skip forward 10 years and we have high-def widescreen 1080p surround sound with 10bit encoding, softsubs in multiple languages, and connections where we can not only download the 500MB file in under a week but even stream it while we wait. Sites like CrunchyRoll have become official and have releases available alongside the broadcasts, Netflix and Hulu have anime categories, and Blu-Ray releases are out a few months after broadcast instead of almost a year (admittedly Japan releases, not Western, but kind people usually have these up on the Internetiverse a day or two after out) a little like how the home release of movies will be 3-4 months after they have been in theatres instead of what was almost a year back in VHS times. You can even get box set collections from main retailers rather than having to know of some smaller retailer whose stock if half imported from America (the DVD player I bought back in 2000 was specifically because it was one of the first which was affordable and still easy to hack into being region free).
Which is where the "old man" rants will arise. If a DVD rip from some fansub group has some slight artifacting or colour bleeding then somebody will flip a table and decry about how terrible they are. If something is a day late in coming out there are flocks of people to jump over to another group who put theirs out, and then complain about how now things like the font used doesn't match up. Myself, I'm more than okay with waiting 6 months for the Blu-Ray version to show up, get the 720 instead of the 1080 and be as happy as pie. Of course, finding the Blu-Ray versions is a whole new thing as people will focus on the TV broadcasts while the show's hot and then perhaps, perhaps, look to home release rip should there be any heavy censoring. I think most people would only look to those if they were after an uncensored version as well and are fine enough with the TV rips for most shows.
I doubt may of these people know there was a time before the Internet, that CDs were once too expensive for home use and if they heard the sound of dial-up would think it was the intro to a new Skrillex track.
They don't know how good they have it. I don't know how good *I* have it, even with all this context. And it's going to happen to you, too. You will have your own "old man" rant. Maybe it'll be a while, perhaps about how we used to have to sit still for up to 2 hours while watching a movie with our eyes instead of neural interfaces that let you beam the experiences into your head. And where you had other people play the part of the main character instead of it being yourself transposed into the role. But it will happen.
Enjoy it. Savour it. Run with it, make it your own and if you have to cope by turning it into self-aware parody then so be it. But let it happen. It's good for you, both for letting out some of the frustration, but also for allowing you to explore a little nostalgia and memories of things that you used to do. You can even do as I do and use it as therapy and post it on the Internet.
