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(Attention: This story is written solely from MY point of view. If some of the things didn't happen the way I'm presenting them here, it's because my view on the whole affair was only a limited one from the very start. If there's anything wrong with the facts I'm presenting here, it's my old brain slowly failing.)
This text might be interesting to those who are fairly new to my LJ and didn't know me from like, 2003 on or something. Not only does it recount the saddest April Fool's Prank I've ever been participating in, it also presents some of the reasons why I'm even her and where I came from, internet-wise. So, here I go. Goiung far, far back first ;)
Jessy's Story, featuring anime, anime music and OASK
In 1998, I ventured forth into the scary depths of the internet for the first time. ...Not. For back then, the only things I knew were official sites and stuff like that. Needless to say, things were kinda boring Also, we only had a 56K modem back then, so I didn't really spend a lot of time online.
However, things changed when I got into the anime fandom. They changed a lot. This was the first time I had things to look for beyond written information. Those thing were pictures (didn't stop collecting 'em to this very day) and most importantly - music. Japanese music is still pretty hard to get in an analogue way, and during 1999/2000 it was even worse.
Fortunately, the whole "downloading is illegal" issue was still far away back then, and the web hosting situation was very, very different as well. Anyone remember the craploads of storage space and traffic you could get for free, even without pop ups and stuff? That might sound like a sick fantasy to some of the younger people, but there were times when things were like this.
Needless to say, the web was full of anime music sites, some of them hosting hundreds of songs and it took me months to grab all that stuff, pushing both our poor, old modem and our internet plan to the maximum. Another thing that soon occurred to me was that apart from the cool music those sites offered, most of their web masters seemed to be cool people.
Soon, my point of view shifted. Being a visitor to those sites was all nice and well, but wouldn't it be even cooler to actually OWN a page like this? Sadly, the hosting situation shifted as well, meaning that the traffic and storage space you could get for free got steadily smaller, and things like advertising and popups took over everywhere.
The only alternative was to buy my very own domain, but only in early 2003 I managed to find a company that offered the stuff I wanted at a reasonable price (compared to the US and other countries, the prices for web hosting in Germany have always been ridiculously low. But that's an entirely different story.). Well, that company turned out to have ripped me off even with prices that low, but anyway.
So there I was, owning my own domain for the very first time. BTW - that was takaraMONO which I still own and adore today. Couldn't think of a cooler domain name =) I gathered all the HTML I knew back then and built a very weird-looking page out of it, called it "anime mp3 request site", uploaded a few songs and waited.
But alas, nothing happened. I only got very few visits and almost no mp3 requests (which should change drastically, but you'll see). Now, I didn't really care about the tiny bunch of people showing up on my page. The problem was that you cannot run a request site without requests. What to do?
After signing up to a couple of suspicious search engines and traffic boosting programs (One word: Never again. Okay, maybe two words *lol*) I stumbled upon something very interesting.
There was this community called OASK (short for "Otaku Aishouka Shinsei Kamei" meaning "Otaku Music Request Affiliation") which was basically a network of anime music sites plus message board. I looked around their page, read there rules and then I gathered the little courage I have and sent them an email requesting to join their affiliation. Back came a very friendly answer telling me that that they were considering me and put me on probation (when you became member of the affiliation they also made you a mod on the forum) so they could see what kind of person I was.
I thought "Cool, I'm game" and participated on the message board as much as I could. Somehow, I liked the place from the very beginning, not having been part of a community like that before. Well, the probation went by without a problem, and soon I became a real "Goddess" (that's how they called the mp3 site owners/mods as they were all female ^^).
Stuff happened, we even planned an OASK audio drama (for which I actually recorded my lines, but nothing came out of it), and my site got tons of visitors and requests. It soon became too much, actually, so that I could no longer fulfil every request (even German web hosting plans have their limits, y'know?). I had to revert to the "first come - first serve" method cause I hate building up backlogs of requests and uploading them months later.
Well, it looked like that system was utterly despised by a lot of visitors as some of them started to ignore my rules, tried to sneak in their request by all means (and sometimes succeeded), and a small number of them even went as far as to use psychological warfare and to try to talk me into giving them the songs they wanted. Not nice, not pleasant and certainly not good for your nerves.
Believe me, if you want to see into the dark depths of peoples' hearts and witness what some of those around you might be able to do once they really WANT something from someone else - try and run a mp3 request site. Just do it for a month or so, you'll be fed up with it faster than you think.
I finally closed down my site in mid-2005. Before that, it changed its name twice (from "takaraMONO" to "Genki" and finally to "Kokoro no Ongaku"). Which means that I can look back on two years of anime music site business. Most of it was fun while it lasted, I guess, and I also made a number of friends through my site.
But back to OASK.
In the end of March 2004 (I'd been a member of OASK for almost a year) one of us had an idea for a big April Fool's prank. BTW, we had a sub-forum where only the mods and admins could talk so we could freely speak about this idea without anyone noticing.
We were supposed to act like the affiliation has been caught by the RIAA. Of course, this included staging fights between the Goddesses as to who might've tipped them off, me ranting about how I'm relatively safe, being German and all that, etc. As soon as the ruckus was complete, one of us would step up and reveal that all was just a big joke.
Looking back at what happened afterwards and at how this affair kinda marked the beginning to the end of OASK, this whole idea was completely dumb, but just believe me that, back then, this sounded like a funny thing to do.
If I remember correctly, we actually started the "fun" like, half a day early so as not to make it look too obvious. First thing was an official announcement in the "news" sub forum and then hell opened up.
At first, all went as planned, but some peoples' reactions were maybe a little bit heavier than what we'de expected. Also, not everyone was like "Woah, you got us, hahaha" when we finally cleared the thing up. Long-lasting friendships broke up that very day or had been scarred forever. Some people never really came back. Of course, people also held the inevitable debates on who was to blame for the whole deal.
Afterwards, the message board never became quite the same again. As I said, a few people had left because of what had happened, most of the Goddesses rarely showed up at all, and the most action took place in the music request sub forum which was mainly managed by me, seeing how I was basically the only regular left.
OASK itself was closed down in July 2005. Most people from there, I have never seen again. Some former members, however, are still to be found online and can be seen on my LJ friends list.
That is the whole story, really. And not only did it teach me that April Fool's pranks can be fun but should not be overdone, it also changed my view on online communities and how to think about...
No, wait. It didn't.
The real problem is that the OASK incident didn't change ANYTHING about my view on the people I meet online. I'm still naive and optimistic and just love to feel liked by people, even though I have never met them.
Is that a bad thing?
Somehow, I like to think it's not. For there are enough people around me who mistrust everybody except for themselves and can only see the negative aspects of life, other people and... anything, really.
I don't want to be like that.
And besides, I wouldn't be engaged to Teh Greatest Guy In Teh Universe(TM) today if I were like that ^_~
~Fin~
This text might be interesting to those who are fairly new to my LJ and didn't know me from like, 2003 on or something. Not only does it recount the saddest April Fool's Prank I've ever been participating in, it also presents some of the reasons why I'm even her and where I came from, internet-wise. So, here I go. Goiung far, far back first ;)
Jessy's Story, featuring anime, anime music and OASK
In 1998, I ventured forth into the scary depths of the internet for the first time. ...Not. For back then, the only things I knew were official sites and stuff like that. Needless to say, things were kinda boring Also, we only had a 56K modem back then, so I didn't really spend a lot of time online.
However, things changed when I got into the anime fandom. They changed a lot. This was the first time I had things to look for beyond written information. Those thing were pictures (didn't stop collecting 'em to this very day) and most importantly - music. Japanese music is still pretty hard to get in an analogue way, and during 1999/2000 it was even worse.
Fortunately, the whole "downloading is illegal" issue was still far away back then, and the web hosting situation was very, very different as well. Anyone remember the craploads of storage space and traffic you could get for free, even without pop ups and stuff? That might sound like a sick fantasy to some of the younger people, but there were times when things were like this.
Needless to say, the web was full of anime music sites, some of them hosting hundreds of songs and it took me months to grab all that stuff, pushing both our poor, old modem and our internet plan to the maximum. Another thing that soon occurred to me was that apart from the cool music those sites offered, most of their web masters seemed to be cool people.
Soon, my point of view shifted. Being a visitor to those sites was all nice and well, but wouldn't it be even cooler to actually OWN a page like this? Sadly, the hosting situation shifted as well, meaning that the traffic and storage space you could get for free got steadily smaller, and things like advertising and popups took over everywhere.
The only alternative was to buy my very own domain, but only in early 2003 I managed to find a company that offered the stuff I wanted at a reasonable price (compared to the US and other countries, the prices for web hosting in Germany have always been ridiculously low. But that's an entirely different story.). Well, that company turned out to have ripped me off even with prices that low, but anyway.
So there I was, owning my own domain for the very first time. BTW - that was takaraMONO which I still own and adore today. Couldn't think of a cooler domain name =) I gathered all the HTML I knew back then and built a very weird-looking page out of it, called it "anime mp3 request site", uploaded a few songs and waited.
But alas, nothing happened. I only got very few visits and almost no mp3 requests (which should change drastically, but you'll see). Now, I didn't really care about the tiny bunch of people showing up on my page. The problem was that you cannot run a request site without requests. What to do?
After signing up to a couple of suspicious search engines and traffic boosting programs (One word: Never again. Okay, maybe two words *lol*) I stumbled upon something very interesting.
There was this community called OASK (short for "Otaku Aishouka Shinsei Kamei" meaning "Otaku Music Request Affiliation") which was basically a network of anime music sites plus message board. I looked around their page, read there rules and then I gathered the little courage I have and sent them an email requesting to join their affiliation. Back came a very friendly answer telling me that that they were considering me and put me on probation (when you became member of the affiliation they also made you a mod on the forum) so they could see what kind of person I was.
I thought "Cool, I'm game" and participated on the message board as much as I could. Somehow, I liked the place from the very beginning, not having been part of a community like that before. Well, the probation went by without a problem, and soon I became a real "Goddess" (that's how they called the mp3 site owners/mods as they were all female ^^).
Stuff happened, we even planned an OASK audio drama (for which I actually recorded my lines, but nothing came out of it), and my site got tons of visitors and requests. It soon became too much, actually, so that I could no longer fulfil every request (even German web hosting plans have their limits, y'know?). I had to revert to the "first come - first serve" method cause I hate building up backlogs of requests and uploading them months later.
Well, it looked like that system was utterly despised by a lot of visitors as some of them started to ignore my rules, tried to sneak in their request by all means (and sometimes succeeded), and a small number of them even went as far as to use psychological warfare and to try to talk me into giving them the songs they wanted. Not nice, not pleasant and certainly not good for your nerves.
Believe me, if you want to see into the dark depths of peoples' hearts and witness what some of those around you might be able to do once they really WANT something from someone else - try and run a mp3 request site. Just do it for a month or so, you'll be fed up with it faster than you think.
I finally closed down my site in mid-2005. Before that, it changed its name twice (from "takaraMONO" to "Genki" and finally to "Kokoro no Ongaku"). Which means that I can look back on two years of anime music site business. Most of it was fun while it lasted, I guess, and I also made a number of friends through my site.
But back to OASK.
In the end of March 2004 (I'd been a member of OASK for almost a year) one of us had an idea for a big April Fool's prank. BTW, we had a sub-forum where only the mods and admins could talk so we could freely speak about this idea without anyone noticing.
We were supposed to act like the affiliation has been caught by the RIAA. Of course, this included staging fights between the Goddesses as to who might've tipped them off, me ranting about how I'm relatively safe, being German and all that, etc. As soon as the ruckus was complete, one of us would step up and reveal that all was just a big joke.
Looking back at what happened afterwards and at how this affair kinda marked the beginning to the end of OASK, this whole idea was completely dumb, but just believe me that, back then, this sounded like a funny thing to do.
If I remember correctly, we actually started the "fun" like, half a day early so as not to make it look too obvious. First thing was an official announcement in the "news" sub forum and then hell opened up.
At first, all went as planned, but some peoples' reactions were maybe a little bit heavier than what we'de expected. Also, not everyone was like "Woah, you got us, hahaha" when we finally cleared the thing up. Long-lasting friendships broke up that very day or had been scarred forever. Some people never really came back. Of course, people also held the inevitable debates on who was to blame for the whole deal.
Afterwards, the message board never became quite the same again. As I said, a few people had left because of what had happened, most of the Goddesses rarely showed up at all, and the most action took place in the music request sub forum which was mainly managed by me, seeing how I was basically the only regular left.
OASK itself was closed down in July 2005. Most people from there, I have never seen again. Some former members, however, are still to be found online and can be seen on my LJ friends list.
That is the whole story, really. And not only did it teach me that April Fool's pranks can be fun but should not be overdone, it also changed my view on online communities and how to think about...
No, wait. It didn't.
The real problem is that the OASK incident didn't change ANYTHING about my view on the people I meet online. I'm still naive and optimistic and just love to feel liked by people, even though I have never met them.
Is that a bad thing?
Somehow, I like to think it's not. For there are enough people around me who mistrust everybody except for themselves and can only see the negative aspects of life, other people and... anything, really.
I don't want to be like that.
And besides, I wouldn't be engaged to Teh Greatest Guy In Teh Universe(TM) today if I were like that ^_~
~Fin~
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