Lament…
It’s kind of sad, but i can always pinpoint the general time period where I first started using the internet. It was August 1998, right before school. I soon switched from Internet Explorer to Netscape and it was around that time that i managed to secure some web space on a friend’s account (hi ben :P), and started working on my own web pages.
It was in the early 1990s that the internet started to creep into our lives and became the place where many of us live out a significant portion of our existence. For a long time i kinda felt cheated — What i would have done to have the Internet when i was in middle or high school. I had always felt rather isolated living and working where i did and the internet gave me a kind of social life that i’d never really had before.
It’s been interesting to watch just how much the internet has effected the lives of young people over the past 18 years. As with anything, there’s been a lot of good, a lot of bad, and a lot of “we don’t really know if its good or bad.” The biggest problem with the internet is that it really doesn’t forget. Even when i first got online and was posting to rec.arts.anime and other newsgroups, the main thing people always told you to keep in mind is that whatever you send off into the ether is going to be there forever, if anyone cares to look for it. I’ve looked myself, i’ve found old newsgroup postings i had done that make my teeth ache (god, i was such a newbie back then. A classic newbie :P) and a lof of the website stuff i did was pretty lame (”Kyle’s Totally Awesome Jell-o web pages?” good god, what kind of moron was i?) Nothing to really be ashamed of, just that it can be embarrassing to read or look at what a younger you had done.
I feel sorry for young people today who are making all of their mistakes and fumbles online in ways that will forever be there for people to find. In retrospect, i’m glad I was older when the net came into my life. I didn’t have things like Live Journal or Deviant Art or Myspace or Youtube or any of those kinds of places to spill myself out to the world to get attention. Back then, the best way to make friends in the anime net culture was to build a website for an anime that didn’t have one yet. I built a fairly decent (but never completed) website. Sure, if you dig around you can find my old sites and pages, but i certainly have never seen any reason to keep them alive. In fact, in many cases I don’t even have copies of the sites myself. I started to focus on KyleTech, and then The Coldwood Studios came along, and that’s what i’ve been keeping myself busy on.
So why am i bringing this up now? Well, because recently a small group of people who seem to dislike me and Megatokyo for some reason, out of what must be an extreme case of boredom (you’d hardly think i was really worth the bother) have been trying to use these drawings against me. For some reason they got it into thier heads that this site was some kind of porn doujinshi that I had gone to great lengths to eradicate off the net. When they eventually did manage to dig up the 6 drawings i’m guessing they were pretty disappointed by how tame they were. Perhaps that is why they have been trying to make more of these drawings than there really is to them. They even went so far as to try to show them to people standing in line at Anime Central last month. They also tried to get a rise out of me by approaching me and having me sign copies of the drawings, or by leaving copies of them at the booth when i wasn’t there. (i won’t comment more on the lameness of this).
They say that the worst thing you can do when people are bullying you is to give them the satisfaction of reacting to them. I’m not really reacting here. I’m not mad, or upset, or embarrassed, or even worried (like for some reason they think i’d be) what would happen if my readers ever saw these drawings. My fans have been finding these drawings for years, and my reaction is the same as it always has been - I laugh a little and ask them where they found them. This is really the first time anyone has ever tried to use them to upset me though. I never expected that. It’s an odd twist to the whole thing that is kinda sad, really.
For some reason some people think i have some high moralist platform from which i don’t approve of doujishi or art with sexual content. This is not true. What i abhor are doujinshi that are nothing more than rape fantasies about beloved characters from our favorite series. A lot of adult doujinshi focuses on either laughable fetishes and ridiculous sexual escapades in which the girls in them are laughably unrealistic, or a the level of brutality towards the characters that is so debasing and vile that the creators should be ashamed to call themselves fans. Not all doujinshi is like this. There are doujinshi out there that can be subtle, loving, sensual, caring. Some of it reflects a painful honesty and sensitivity that the creators inadvertently put into their work. I have no problem with adult material that doesnt debase the characters in it. If having that stipulation makes me a moralist prig, then fine, i’ll accept the label.
I think over the years i’ve been pretty consistent about who i am, and i have no real worries about character assassination attempts against me. In the end, who really cares? You like the site, you read it. If you don’t, there’s plenty of other things out there to read. If knowing about this old website causes you to stop reading my site, that’s not something i’m worried about.
I may apologize about a lot of things… i apologize about the quality of the work i produce or the failure of it to live up to my own expectations, but i do not now nor ever will apologize for what i produce. Crappy as it may be, i’m proud of it all.