I was still on the verge of deciding whether follow this series, and episode 3 officially seals the deal for me. The more I watch this anime, the more I see myself in the closet otaku Haruka. She constantly reminds me of my past, present, and probably my would-be future otaku self. Her bitter experience of being shunned for her otaku hobby might have been portrayed to be a little extreme, but it really happens. I’d say it actually happened to me, in a less dramatic the entire school shuns me for being an otaku way, and more of the subtle ‘shunning’ treatment stereotyping ways.

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Partial view of the crapload of mangas I bought

So yesterday I went to Manga Kissa, a local manga cafe in our area which is now closing down because their contract in the Philippines has ended (or so said the lady in the counter, or was she the manager?), whose existence I never really knew about until I heard about it from Zeroblade orz. I’m not really up-to-date with the local anime/manga scene so it’s not surprising that I never knew about this .___.;;;

In line with this, they put all their mangas and magazines for sale, a clearance sale of some sort, from 50 pesos (roughly 1.10 USD) when they first announced this closing down news in this year’s ToyCon, to 20-30 pesos a piece (roughly 0.5 cents (usd)). I wasn’t really expecting anything when I headed out for my little manga-shopping adventure, so imagine my surprise and shock when I saw the piles of mangas there. It felt like I was in a mini Mandarake!!

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Rumors of my identity have been greatly exagerrated, such as being this Reisen bunny of the game Touhou

The comments I’ve read in my Shugo Chara DS game post reminded me of the time I was in the same boat as them. When I was a Nihongo n00b, yet filled with the desire to play Japanese games, and become a weeaboo On my part, it became a prerequisite that I memorize the Japanese alphabet first, at least, before anything else. Though my original intent in memorizing hiragana and katakana way back elementary grade 5 was no other than to impress my crush and to follow anime songs LOL.

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A hamster once told me that I remind her of Kona-chan’s otakuness.

Ok, it’s been weeks since I started writing this post, and now it’s finally out of my “queue of planned posts” list. By now, other bloggers are reminiscing their blogging nostalgia, and I’m reminiscing something else lol.

Let’s begin this post with a question, shall we? (to those who have been anime fans ever since the 90s…) Do you remember the time when there was no other way to watch animes but through local or cable television, betamax, VHS, or laser discs? Way back the dial-up age when you used the internet primarily for surfing, and/or communicating with fellow fans through mailing lists and forums?

I’ve been thinking about these good ol days, the time of the 90s which I’d call the analog otaku days. Hinano’s post about the absence of fansites weeks back made those memories even more vivid, compared to when I was first writing this post. Allow me to share some tidbits about my “analog otaku life” experiences, specifically before the dawn of the broadband internet…

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