mood: nostalgic

While I usually lurk on web discussion & Usenet groups, I do occasionally post stuff to them as well. If you see the name “cybernezumi” online, odds are its me. Here are some links to find what I’ve written elsewhere…

I first started reading Usenet back in 1992 and it was probably responsible for at least a half point drop in my GPA during college. ^_^;; I mostly hung out in the astronomy, computer, animation, anime, furry & rocketry groups back then. Generally a waste of time, but it was fun then — back before spam flooded the net and the signal-to-noise ratio became intolerable. I haven’t actively read it in many years, but Google Groups has done a wonderful job of archiving and making it possible to sift through the dross for gems. I frequently use Google Groups to search for answers to computer problems (because its rare to be the first person to have a problem). Its been invaluable at work as a result. As for my inane and occasionally embarrassing posts, you can find them here

Anime has been my most consuming mania of recent years, and I’ve always been a bit of a videophile. Unfortunately I was rather late at getting into laserdisc (I got my player originally so I could watch the Kimagure Orange Road box set, probably the last anime released on LD here in the US), so DVD was the only successor with the quality I desired. While now DVD’s, especially anime DVD’s, are numerous & easily available, several years ago that was not the case. Animeondvd.com was and still is the best source of information on what’s available, what’s coming out & other news of the sort. It’s also always had a lively and interesting set of discussion forums. The place has a bit of a reputation of being hyper-critical & picky, and yes that is true of some of the the participants. But with the industry observation & participation in the forums, I think this criticism has resulted in better anime DVD’s for everyone. Heck, even a couple things I’ve ranted about (like player default language settings not being used) have been fixed. Unfortunately the forums have been moved and reset many times, so most of my posts have went to the big bit bucket in the sky, but here are a few of my more recent.

The center of the anime side of my life for the past five years has been the Tucson Animation Screening Society, University of Arizona’s resident anime club. In fact I was foolish & gullible enough to be its president & chairman for a couple years — and I still am involved with it despite vain attempts by myself to find a real life elsewhere. Anyways, that’s meant that I’ve frequently posted (and about as frequently been flamed) on TASS’s web board.

Finally, I often read several computer & technology sites, and on rare occasion overcome my laziness and post to their forums as well. As any other self respecting geek does, I hit slashdot regularly (meaning check it a dozen or more times a day…). I have only posted a couple times, though. Largely because the transitory nature of slashdot doesn’t make it a very good discussion forum — its mostly one-shot pontification on the topic at hand. Ars-Technica boards are usually more useful for discussions, at least if you’re interested in computer hardware & operating systems. Here’s my two cents. And recently I’ve gotten a new 12″ Apple Powerbook, fallen under Steve Job’s “Reality Distortion Field”, and been reading a lot of Mac sites like MacNN. They’ve got a useful bunch of folks posting on their boards. You can find my posts detailing some of the problems I had with my Powerbook early on and other stuff there.

In the years B.I. (Before Internet), I started out on some of Tucson’s local dial-up BBS’s, but I imagine even the fidonet posts from that era are random bits now. After that, I used to be active on the forums of CompuServe (as 71650,471) & GEnie (as W.MORGAN12) back in their heyday (mainly CIS’s SCI-FI forum & GEnie’s Comics Roundtable, if anyone remembers those friendly virtual watering-holes…).

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