I enjoy computer programming and anime. I used to program professionally in a corporate environment, but, now I tinker a bit. I've been watching and collecting anime for many years. I'm a firm believer in physical media. I used to have a couple thousand VHS tapes. I still have thousands of DVDs and even a handful of Laserdiscs. I'm not a fan of streaming, but, that's the way the industry is at the moment. I don't foresee the industry changing anytime soon. Although physical media is making a comeback, as people begin to realize that owning your media is a good thing, the market share of consumers willing to buy physical media just isn't large enough at this time.
I prefer my anime subtitled, but, I do occasionally listen to my anime dubbed in English. Over the years, I've found that I lean toward comedy, adventure and science fiction in my anime. I'm not really into giant robots, but, I enjoyed
Neon Genesis Evangelion and
Patlabor. By the same token, I'm not really into ninjas, but, I thoroughly enjoyed
Ninja Scroll,
Kotetsu,
Kabuto and
Samurai Champloo. I really like Rumiko Takahashi's body of work, but, her anime series tend to have very long runs. The only series of hers that I seriously collected was
Urusei Yatsura -- 62 DVDs and, before I got rid of my VHS tapes, 37 tapes -- 6 movies, 6 OVAs and 25 of the 50 TV volumes.
My taste in music is a bit all over the place. I have some
Elvis and
Johnny Cash. I have some
Madonna,
Michael Jackson and even one
Janet Jackson CD. I have some
Evanescence and
Bjork. I also have a lot of movie soundtracks and, of course, a lot of anime soundtracks. I even have some classical music:
Orff: Carmina Burana - O Fortuna aka the music from
Excalibur and
Boléro aka the music from
Allegro Non Troppo. I was a fan of classic
WinAmp back in the day, but, I migrated to
iTunes for the modern era. I switched to
Groove Music for a while and after some fits and starts when
Groove Music became
Windows Media, I ended up back with an updated version of
WinAmp.
I've collected a few manga over the years. I was heavily into
Urusei Yatsura and had a number of the translated English volumes. A while ago, I took the opportunity to track down the manga version of
Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind and noticed, at the time, that there were differences in the tone of the manga versus the anime. When I bought
Dears, the boxed set came with a manga volume. Sometime ago, I was really enamored with
Genshiken and tracked down a manga volume of that series. My latest infatuation is with
Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid and I obtained a few volumes from the series. Since the latest round of
Ultimate Otaku Cleanup, I've paired down my holdings to just a handful of items that can fit within the available confines.
I have a few books as well. I have hardcover editions of the
Hobbit and
Lord Of The Rings. Also, I have hardcover editions of the four books in the
Chanur saga by author
C.J. Cherryh. Believe it or not, I have the collected works of
Edgar Allen Poe and
H.P. Lovecraft in hardcover editions. And, last but not least, I have a hardcover edition of
The Keep by author
F. Paul Wilson. Way back in the misty dawn of time, when I was in elementary school, the class was tasked with reading a book of our own choosing and writing a book report. My Mom suggested
The Keep and I remember enjoying the book. I got a good grade for my book report and I still have the book. As for less wordy reading material, I have hardcover collections of
Family Circus,
Andy Capp and
Hagar The Horrible.
My Interest In Anime
I've been an anime fan for many years. But, before I was an anime fan, I was a comic book fan. I started out with DC, but, as I got older my tastes in comic books changed and I moved on to Marvel. Eventually, my tastes in comic books would change again and I moved on to independent releases. After a while, I started to lose interest in comic books altogether. I liked certain comic book characters, but, I always seemed to be drawn to series that no one else liked. I struggled to find a series that would hang around long enough to really satisfy me, but, in the end, it was a losing proposition. Finally, when anime in the form we all know and love, exploded onto the scene, I was hooked.
A History of the Anime Rating Guide
I was poking around the net one day and came across a site that had a nice timeline of web page screen shots showing the evolution of their web site over the past decade. I've spent the last few hours researching the history of AARG (the Anime Ratings site) to create something similar here. It's not much to look at, but, it's very interesting (at least for me) to see how far my web design skills have come. Long ago, I signed up with
GeoCities. At the time,
GeoCities had a concept known as "neighborhoods". You would pick a community of like-minded cyber-residents to move in with and
GeoCities would assign you to a neighborhood within that community. As it happens, I wound up in
Area 51.
Confessions of a Pascal Programmer
My pride and joy is programming. I started programming in the early 80's in elementary school with Basic on Apple II's and later I studied the Pascal programming language. At home, I tinkered with assembly language and Basic on early home computers. With my first DOS PC, I got my hands on Borland's Turbo Pascal and wrote my own software. Much later, as a professional programmer, I used C, C# and Visual Basic. I used the .Net framework and wrote some snazzy corporate code. Nothing that anyone would be able to look at in this day and age, but, I accomplished something nonetheless.
My Escapades With Microsoft Access
I've been collecting movies for many years and managed to amass thousands of DVDs. I kept a spreadsheet with the various titles in my collection and used to produce printed books with a list of movies, but, after the movie list began to exceed 200 pages of printed text, I moved to presenting the list in electronic format. Eventually, the simple spreadsheet that held my movie list became a bit too unwieldy, so, I migrated the movie list to an
Access database. This had immediate advantages as I could now generate reports with the movie list data rather than having to manually manipulate a spreadsheet in
PowerPoint to present the movie list in an appropriate format for printing.
The Anime List Gets An Upgrade
The
Anime List has been an integral part of the
Anime Rating Guide since its inception over twenty years ago. My latest adventure being a geek involved upgrading the
Anime List. Previously, I used
MS Access to generate lists for two static pages -- a list of anime sorted by title and a second list of anime sorted by rating. I really wanted to combine these two pages into one page that would allow filtering and sorting on demand. So, taking inspiration from Stuart Langridge's
Sortable, I used
MS Access to generate one list of anime sorted by title, and let the Sortable gadget work its magic. Then, I wrote some custom code to handle filtering on-the-fly and viola, the new
Anime List was born.
The 20th Anniversary of the Anime Rating Guide
My passions are anime and computer programming. I've been sharing with the world since 1998. A long time ago, when
GeoCities was relatively new and before
Yahoo! killed it to death, I had already been a devout anime fan for a while and had amassed a rather large collection of anime on VHS tape. This collection of anime would eventually form a pile, in the aftermath of the
Ultimate Otaku Fall Cleanup, five feet tall, three feet wide and a foot deep! With so much source material to start with, I began writing about anime and on occasion, computer programming.
A Year With The Contempo Template
In 2017,
Blogger launched new templates. After selecting the
Contempo Template and living with it for a while, it's been a wild year, but, I managed to settle in reasonably well. Over the past year, several updates were made to
Angel's Anime Rating Guide. The first change I made was to disable the featured post feature as in the case of my content, since the cover art that I use is not high resolution, the featured post image often appeared fuzzy. Among the other changes over the past year, were the addition of several new gadgets.
Ultimate Otaku Fall Cleanup
After reading a report on the
Anime News Network about a contest to show off our otaku pride, I realized that my comfy little corner of the universe needed a bit of attention. I've got about 1,700 VHS tapes stacked on shelves that go floor to ceiling on three and a half walls. I've got about 1,600 DVDs that share shelf space with the VHS tapes. I've also got another 300-400 VHS tapes in storage boxes. As if that weren't enough, I have another 1,000 DVDs in another room. The numbers are approximate. I stopped counting in 2002 at about 2000 VHS tapes and 200 DVDs. About 20 years ago, I implemented an inventory control system to keep track of the VHS tapes in my library. All of the VHS tapes in my library have a unique four-digit number. I seriously considered entering the contest, but, my collection really isn't in the kind of shape that I'd like to show off to the whole world. I did have a few small pics out on the web, but, that was more of the general video collection, rather than just the anime.
My Experience With iTunes
I decided to gather up all of the CDs in my collection and get them organized into a library. My first choice was iTunes -- it is easy to use and has a very useful service for finding the song names and in some cases even the album cover art. My collection of CDs ranges from a handful of 70's and 80's classics to a few more recent items. A significant number of items in between these two extremes are imported anime-themed CDs. So, I really gave the iTunes software a workout trying to find song names, but, in all, but, one instance, iTunes came though with flying colors -- the one instance iTunes couldn't identify was one obscure domestic release. With so many imported anime-themed CDs, the only major difficulty was translating the song names from Japanese into English. The album cover search proved to be less than impressive with regard to almost everything in my collection. Out of my initial batch of 170 CDs, iTunes managed to find 25 album covers, which works out to about 14.7%.
Fun With Old-School Gaming
I've been an old-school Dos gamer since I had a 286 PC running actual store-bought
MS-DOS. I even wrote my own Dos-based game launcher program (in the Pascal programming language) to make my life easier back in the day. Now, I'm running
Windows, but, I still like to play the old DOS-based classics. Using
DosBox makes resolving compatibility issues relatively easy, but, there's a process involved to get everything working correctly. There's probably a
DosBox launcher out there that could run my Dos games without all of the hoops that I currently jump through, but, I prefer this. It speaks to the programmer in me and also allows me to express my artistic side by making custom icons. I have 36 Dos games and 3 Dos demos.
Hanging Out At The Gates Of Hell
As a fan of the DOS-era video game
Doom, and after my previous experience getting the classic first-person shooter,
Doom to run on a Windows PC, I decided to try my hand at installing
GZDoom -- an enhanced port of the
Doom engine for modern operating systems with new features not found in the games as originally published by
id Software. After getting
Doom up and running in its shiny new environment, I began tinkering with mods like
Brutal Doom,
Brutal Hellfest and
Hunter's Moon. Of course, I'm hooked. Although, I still love classic
Doom and
Doom 2, I really appreciate them a lot more with a fresh coat of paint and modern conveniences.
