#i also really associate love live and danganronpa with this period of time but i guess that was like immediately after this

[kirbys-pop-culture-junk]

Japanese copy of Danganronpa for the PSP that I bought on the SomethingAwful forums back in like 2013 or so.

I feel like a lot of people my age went through a 4chan phase of their life as almost a rite of passage where they spent at the least a little bit of time on the site, especially in the late 2000s/early 2010s era. As someone who has always been a bit of an old soul, for some reason for me I had a SomethingAwful phase.

I had always been a fan of the weird stuff on the site, especially Photoshop Phriday, the kinds of stuff that a 13/14 year old in 2003/04 probably should not have been looking at. But the forums themselves were always paywalled and something that I never really had much of an interest in going to anyway. All of my forums were retro video game and wrestling message boards and I didn’t feel the need to branch out that badly. It wasn’t until I got a bit older and hit that specific weirdo cynic phase of my life when I was like 18 when boards like SomethingAwful appealed to me.

I became a longtime lurker of the place, including a fan of Retsupurae, the YouTube SA-based series that is now a relic of early YouTube history, before finally purchasing an account, as well as Archives access (for an extra fee you were able to access the entire forum archive, which for a person like me who loves history it meant I could access stuff like posts that got weirdos like TotalBiscuit banned on the site) and started to post, mostly in the Let’s Play, Games, and Food boards. I’m sure you’ve heard about the drama associated with SA and I can safely tell you that yes, even the board that just talked about food and cooking had drama with members and it was honestly always absurdly hilarious. As an internet-lonely early 20s doofus, it was a place to make friends. The last community I was involved with (Detective Conan) had things end on extremely sour notes with some friends while other friends kinda just drifted away, which meant that a lot of the time that I spent online, I was extremely lonely. Using SomethingAwful around the same time that I started heavily using Tumblr meant that I got to see both sides of the infamous Danganronpa Let’s Play Paywall situation. I’m not gonna lie, all the posts getting upset that Lowtax would put the LP Paywall back up whenever a new chapter of the Let’s Play for the game came out used to crack me up, as did seeing all the ways people would circumvent it by even posting god damned screenshots of posts in the thread. I was even there for when slowbeef infamously banned someone for using the phrase “intriguingly moe” to describe a character and let’s be real here, slowbeef was completely in the right.

Being like 23 and having what I thought was disposable income, as a gag I figured I’d buy a copy of the game from the SA Mart from a fellow goon for like $15. It was the only time I ever used the SA Mart to buy anything. I didn’t even have a way to play it, I just thought it was a funny gag as someone who liked the series and characters while also seeing the fandom in the early days of Tumblr Fandoms being a thing go bananas for everything possible about it. I hung out on SA until about early 2015, when a lot of us realized that after having corners of the site that were a dedicated safe haven for people like us, it was getting overtaken by garbage again, so most all of us abandoned ship for the hangout future of Twitch streams, Skype group chats, and of course, Twitter.

When Lowtax committed suicide a few years back, there were a lot of people making self-reflective posts about their own lives on SomethingAwful, and I completely understood why, and even had my own little taken aback moment over being reminded of that period of me life. Lowtax was a genuinely reprehensible human being and even when I was an active user of SA a lot of the forum regulars were well past tired of him and his antics. But people used the site and turned it into something that I don’t think Lowtax had ever wanted it to be. For a large chunk of people now-a-days Online, especially leftist/progressives in their late 20s to mid-to-late 30s, that was where a lot of friends were made. I made some of my longest lasting internet friends on that site, including people that I talk to to this day. I learned *a lot* from the people I met on there, including people who helped me gain new perspectives on things in life. Before becoming a SA Goon, back when I was a lonely post-college dropout living in an entirely new town away from home and away from all my friends I grew up with, I was almost a reclusive outcast, a college liberal dirtbag leftist who watched Bill Maher. People on SA that I met got me to knock all that obnoxious shit off and I don’t even think they realized it.

Even though SomethingAwful was only a footnote of a few years or so of my life, it was definitely one of the biggest moments of my internet life, and maybe one of the times where I went through the most changes as a human being. As a website, it was an awful, awful place full of stupidity (never forget the guy who peed “LET’S PLAY” into the snow) but I can’t ignore the fact that I also made some friends with some very cool people who helped mold me into the person that I am today. And as a shoutout to those people, much love to FutureFriend, TheJayofSpade, DeviousVacuum (you’ll always be DVac to me), Danzel Glovington (maybe the first friend I made on SA. Haven’t spoken to you in years but hope all is well), DazzlynReed (an absolute sweetheart), Metroixer, FreezingInferno, Captain_Duck (one of the first people to give me a chance by having me guest on streams), Color Printer, and ChorpSaway.

Also a funny thing about SomethingAwful is how many new people I meet that as it turns out were on the site at the same time as me despite our paths never crossing. One of my best friends and someone very important to me now is something who was hilariously on the cusp of interacting with me on SA for years and years due to the both of us sharing a lot of the same friends, before we finally began talking barely a few years ago. I constantly kick myself over how I could’ve known her even almost a decade ago and it just never happened!!

This was a lot more than I had anticipated writing and I don’t think I properly conveyed all my thoughts about this period of my life the way I wanted to but I think you will at the least get the gist of it.

[01tsubomi]

okay after some digging i found a list deep in my drive so here are the first 10 anime i watched and if i still stand by them: 

haruhi - haruhi was soooo influential to me and like my tastes in stories and storytelling styles and i still consider it my favorite anime and think the direction is fantastic. that being said. i have never been able to get more than like 10 episodes into a rewatch. i don’t know why but it just like can’t hold my attention even though i consider it a 10/10 

ouran - obviously it’s a product of its time (which is part of why i don’t. Want a season 2) but yeah ofc i still stand by ouran. ouran’s gotten like a new wave of life in these past 2 years because now everyone considers it their comfort anime. i’ve watched ouran twice this year

madoka - after getting way into magical girl anime (and watching the genre devolve into Edgy Shock Factor Series Of The Month and Also Precure) i have mixed feelings on madoka. i never got into the spinoffs and barely watched rebellion so idk if this is like incorrect but my lasting impression is that madoka is mostly about having hope and that the people blaming girls for wanting things are the ones in the wrong, and then every anime studio ever for the next 10 years looked at that and said “okay but what if they ARE in the wrong. and what if they die”. i don’t think shaft could’ve known the wave of garbage they were about to inspire but it still taints my thoughts 

fruits basket - i would never ever in a million years rewatch fruits basket (2001) but literally fruits basket is one of the best anime of all time. to clarify what i’m saying is that last year i rewatched what i know was my favorite episode of fruits basket (2001) when i was 13 and found it like borderline unwatchable because of everything from the visuals to the sound direction to the just general way it felt. not saying things that are goofy are inherently bad but the reboot is waaaaaay more what the manga demands. furuba was always great in concept but it’s finally also great in anime execution

sailor moon - this like shouldn’t even be on this list because who would i be to renounce Sailor Moon. but also like yeah of course sailor moon’s still good. the things that were bad about sailor moon were things that we already called bad back in 2014, and honestly, if i were to rewatch it, i probably would spring for the goofy old dic dub. sailor moon being zany and dated adds to its charm because it’s such a classic. there’s nothing to ridicule it’s just the blueprint for monster of the week magical girl anime

k-on - hell fucking yeah i still stand by k-on!! honestly i think i like k-on MORE now than i did back then!! i just rewatched it last month and i don’t even know what else i could say. top 5 anime ever made

mekakucity actors - i mean like. it should be obvious that 1) yes and 2) no. but also like at this point in my kagepro phase i’m not mad at mekakucity actors for existing. when it comes down to it i think kagepro as just a series of music videos and a vocaloid creator’s passion project is absolutely incredible and the fact that they’re hard to approach doesn’t really take away from that. in theory yeah a really incredible kagepro anime that anyone could understand without any prior knowledge that would also condense all the other bits and pieces from the different mediums into one would be incredible. but you know what you can do with mekakucity actors? laugh at it. and look at a scene of your favorite characters, then laugh more, and go watch otsukimi recital again. i love mekakucity actors the worst anime ever 

baka and test - honestly i think i mostly watched this because it was one of the few on netflix at the time and i think the last time i actually rewatched it was like 2016? with maybe like two episodes in the past year. but i do have fond memories even if most of those fond memories are of being 13 and making bad jokes w my 2 friends who liked it. i’m not against a rewatch bc i do remember there being kind of a lot of heart behind the generic anime stereotype jokes (tsundere girl yandere girl boy who gets a nosebleed every 2 minutes) but it’s not high on the list

black butler - full disclosure i’m pretty sure i only made myself get into this one bc it was one of the 5 anime hot topic carried merch of so i thought i had to if i was an anime fan. i don’t really remember liking this one much and the only plotlines i can remember are where lizzie gets turned into a doll and sebastian invents curry pan. also i feel like there’s a lot of stuff that’d be called problematic that only slides under our radar bc it’s old genre anime (and the genre is yaoi). no i would not watch this again

princess tutu - yo i haven’t watched princess tutu since two thousand and fourteen and i would still recommend it to anyone in a heartbeat. i just have such fond memories of it and i remember really loving that it was a darker magical girl anime that didn’t seem to hate magical girl anime (not that madoka did, but that became a defining feature of the Edgy Magical Girl Anime genre). i really should give it a rewatch it’s been way too long