INTP, father, hiker, board games, linux, computer geek
My first exposure to anime was Akira way back in the day, which I thought was kind of lame and overhyped. Then one day I started watching anime on Netflix Watch Instantly, and enjoyed the shows I found there, stuff like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Kurau: Phantom Memory, Utawarerumono, and Paprika. I'd also seen a few Miyazaki films in indie theaters locally.
What really made me stand up and become a serious anime fan was Death Note. I watched that on Hulu and I was very impressed. That was the first step in a long road of downloading insane amounts of fansubs and researching anime.
I also vet anime for my preteen daughter. She loves romance, and so I try and find appropriate titles for her to watch, and I've come to enjoy the genre on it's own merits as well. So I've probably watched an abnormal amount of romance anime for a guy. I'm not talking Eureka Seven romance, I'm talking Lamune and Hana Yori Dango romance. Of course, I've watched a fair amount of rom/com and harem anime as well.
I enjoy a fairly wide variety of shows, from NANA to Sword of the Stranger to Lamune to Paprika. I try and steer clear of titles too heavily oriented on ecchi content or truly disturbing content (I have not seen Higurashi at the time of this writing).
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I use:
http://myanimelist.net - good central hub, character profiles and pictures, mature clubs, finding good sub groups, finding recommendations
http://anidb.net - excellent tag info for vetting, tracking my collection, advanced category search features
http://bakabt.com - getting fansub series
http://tokyotosho.info - getting currently released fansubs
http://imeem.com - listening to OP/ED that are in my head; keeping a playlist there
I also use uTorrent,
http://cccp-project.net, and Media Portal with
http://code.google.com/p/animeplugin2/.
There's also:
http://jisho.org/ - japanese dictionary
http://www.animeseason.com/ (amongst others, I don't often use this due to quality issues) - streaming video
http://forums.animesuki.com/ - might be the largest anime forum I've found
http://netflix.com - Netflix has a good amount of dubs on stream, good quality
http://hulu.com - some good shows here in the anime section
I'd also like to add
http://diigo.com, as the functionality it provides makes my life so much easier. Aside from bookmarking, highlighting the web, and commenting, it has this awesome feature that lets you select some text on the page and do a custom search on it. So if I see an anime listed on here and I want to look at it, I simply highlight the name of the anime and I get a context window like when you right click on something. I have "Search Anime" > "Anime" > "MyAnimeList" plus others like bakabt and tokyotosho. To set it up, all you have to do is take the search string from the address bar of the site after a search, and replace what you searched for with "diigosearch". Then when you use it, it replaces "diigosearch" with whatever is highlighted. It is one of the great conveniences I've found on the internet. It's almost like everything is hyperlinked, just for me, to my favorite sites.
