I enjoy long walks in the anime stores, smelling the new ink of a freshly unwrapped manga, taking in the sights of charred bodies in online combat, and generally having fun. Now, Im off to do something potentially destructive if it werent contained within a virtual universe.
All right, silliness aside, heres a bit of my history.
I was born in Argentina and lived there until I was eight. I lived in the capital, Buenos Aires, a very big and busy city. My family lives very close to where I used to live and I went to the same elementary school as my cousins. This is important later on, so just hold on. :D
I was introduced to anime when I was very young by my cousins. I think I was baout three or so. My older cousin who is about four years older than I, was very much into a new series they were passing on TV called Knights of the Zodiac (in Spanish), but also known as Saint Seiya (to those who knew anything about anime back then, meaning not me) and since he watched it, and his brother, whos about my age, watched it, I decided to watch it too. So, I started watching Saint Seiya and became a HUGE fan overnight. When Saint Seiya started getting very popular, all sorts of merchandise started to be released. Figurines, trading cards, collectable stickers and sticker albums (I have two of them completed and many extra spare stickers... :D), you name it, there was a Saint Seiya merchandise of it. This helped anime to become known and soon a few other series started coming out. I watched Dragonball around this time, too. It was OK, but I prefer Saint Seiya, then and now.
Eventually I moved to the United States where I currently live. Saint Seiya wasnt known at all here. Sailor Moon was on TV along with Dragonball Z (no Dragonball, though...), and I watched those shows too, but I still didnt know what anime was. I kept my Saint Seiya figurines, though, and continually hunted the stores and channels for any sign of the show, but alas, Knights of the Zodiac wouldnt arrive in the US for about eight years and by then Id have the full series on DVD.
We got the first computer a few months after moving here. We had a PC in Argentina but it was my dad's and he kept it (divorced) since he uses it for work (hes a programmer) but he encouraged my mother to get a computer for me and my brother to use. So, I got a computer and Dial-Up. Aside from playing Command and Conquer Red Alert on it, I didnt do much else for a while. Eventually I got into ROMs and that drew me into computers more. I mastered the basics quickly and started learning more and more. This eventually led to me being glued to my computer all day, though I dont really do anything productive (to others) on it... anyway, moving on. Downloading ROMs on a 56k connection was annoying but, though I knew faster speeds existed, I had never experienced them so it didnt hurt as much as if I got stuck with that connection now (Id choke... breathing takes bandwidth.)
Later on, I got my own computer with help from my dad and soon after got a broadband connection. 364kbps is the speed I got. Thats a huge improvement over Dial-Up. With that, I was able to access more sites. This is the computer Im currently using, BTW, though I plan on replacing it this summer.
By the time I got the broadband connection, I knew what anime was, had learned some of the history, had seen some of it on TV, and was also into RPGs (what with all those SNES and GB/C ROMs and the SNES, PS1, and PS2 I had by then) so I joined an anime club in High school. This was during 10th grade. It was the first year it opened. One of the series we watched that year was Excel Saga. I loved that series so much that I decided to look it up and download it. I finally found it on ani-misu.com (now long gone) as RMVB files. They were small and I was able to just about watch one episode as the next downloaded. By the time we finished the series in the club a week later, I had long since watched the whole thing on my computer. That is when I really got into downloading anime. I learned things about what codecs to use and all the other basic anime knowledge on the ani-misu forums and made friends I keep in touch with today. About a year later, I think, Gundam Seed Destiny started coming out with episodes coming a few hours to a day after the raw and I started using bittorrent files. After this, I started downloading a LOT of anime and from then on till now have been watching anime mostly on my computer.
So, Ive always been attracted to anime since I was little and watched Cardcaptor Sakura when it came out on TV in the US (I dont remember much which is why Im watching it again) among other series.
Oh, and the computer thing, I am enrolled in college right now and will be taking my first Computer Science classes in a few months.
So, that is my history. I figured my About Me section should actually be about me. So, there.
