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I wasn't really aware of anime until about the mid 90's. I knew about Voltron and Speed Racer, but I didn't realize that Japanese cartoons were a thing until a friend showed me an episode of Sailor Moon as received through his family's gargantuan satellite dish. I didn't remember the actual plot of the episode, I only knew that the visual style and characters were unlike anything I was familiar with in my cartoon-watching habits up to that point.

After buying a few VHS tapes of Robotech from Suncoast Movies (RIP never forget) in a mall, I tried to consume any anime I could come across. That wasn't much given that I had a modest allowance and no means of transportation, but I would watch or tape SciFi Channel's Saturday Anime block and soon became hooked on Toonami when it came into being. Dragonball Z, Robotech, Gundam Wing, Sailor Moon, Tenchi Muyo, and just about anything else on at the time found its way into my viewing habits. With high school came a driver's license and a part time job, so I was able to make regular trips into the city to feed my habit and increase my DVD collection. That Suncoast was my go to source for discovering new anime (I didn't really rely on internet reviews back then), and it was there that I acquired some of my more definitive favorites, like Evangelion and Trigun.

When I went to college I joined an anime club, got introduced to fansubs, and started looking more actively on the internet for stuff that never came out in the US, both old and new. I was pretty big into Gundam and other mecha shows, I was pretty big into shonen manga for a while (though I rarely finished a title I started due to the frequency with which they were released), and had brief bouts with scanlated manga and tokusatsu fansubs. After a while I started getting back into Western comics until preoccupation with graduating college and finding a job made me lose interest in both those and animango.

I recently got back into anime thanks to Netflix Instant Streaming on my PS3. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was really the first title that reignited my interest in the medium, and I've been watching full runs of shows on a pretty regular basis since. I buy stuff on DVD and Blu-Ray every now and then, and I've even watched a few fansubs recently like Mahou Shojou Madoka Magica and Macross Frontier. I still consider my viewing pretty casual, if only skewed toward anime thanks to a lack of interest in any other TV programming lately.