TheShinje

Damn, I keep missing these mini revivals like ships in the night.

Anyway, I often get nostalgic and look back at my time on OB very fondly, so every now and again I have to come back and at least browse the forum and dig up some old posts I had a blast with, to read how I wrote back then and remind myself of the colourful cast of characters that were once part of my daily life.  OB was what Facebook is to me now, only with the added bonus of not being tied to my real identity and a persona, based on my passions in anime and video gaming.  It's hard to believe that from my signup date to today is just over half my life knowing OtakuBoards is/was a thing.  Not bad for signing up on a whim because I searched for Dragonball Z pictures.

I found this in an archive about a year ago and I can't believe I burned through 4 names in one year. O_O;


 

I couldn't believe it, after so many iterations of OtakuBoards, I thought for sure the attachment in the original thread was gone, and the original files, because I was so bad at backing things up then, were long gone.
Then I saw it, in my attached files, still there. A movie I made about OtakuBoards life set to a parody of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the daftly titled Moderator and Otaku: The Short Side of TheOtaku.
 
 
Back in the day It had little fanfare and was watched by about 5 people. I think this was due to the need to zip the file in an attachment as there was no YouTube or anything like it back in the day and image hosting websites had their limits. You did have to jump through a couple of hoops and then have a flash player installed on your pc to watch it, after all. 
Besides being a parody of Master and Commander, the film references several notable events and the crazy characters of OtakuBoards at the time and was heavily influenced by Dragon Warrior's Daily Comic series. The cop-out ending was hastily thrown together simply because I got bored with the project as the frames piled up and Flash became less stable on me, computers of the time, eh.
I thought this might be interesting to some as a throwback very much of it's time and it certainly did bring back a few good memories. ?

I don't keep up with OB very often, I check back from time to time and to hear of Desbreko's passing is heartbreaking. I knew he was going through treatment, I thought that he'd make it. Like everyone here I have very fond memories of his presence here. Cancer sucks. RIP Des. 

Starting things off with a classic:

Okay, so it took some digging but I found backups of the original Otakupedia's as well as what should be a complete database backup. I'll see what I can do about getting it all online and put up a link when it's ready.
Edit:
Seems to be working now: http://www.otakuboards.com/otakupedia/

I'm importing this idea from another forum I frequent. The idea is to take a picture from the manga of a character that has yet to appear in colour, and paint up a prediction of what colour scheme you think that character will end up having. You can do this in programs such as Photoshop, the Gimp or even MS Paint. This thread is for the manga One Piece but it can work with any of the major weekly manga that get adapted into a TV series or get colour spreads from time to time. It can be fun to see how close or how far away you are with predicting a character's colour scheme.

Here are a few of the predictions I have made so far:

[img]http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/3565/threeeue.jpg[/img]

As yet unnamed three-eye girl from Big Mom's crew

[img]http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/899/pekoms.jpg[/img]

Pekoms from Big Mom's crew

[img]http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/1418/punkhazard.jpg[/img]

Punk Hazard island colour scheme prediction


[img]http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/4450/dragonprediction.jpg[/img]

"Punk Hazard Dragon" and Straw Hat clothing

Well, I keep coming back here to check up on things, sometimes I can have a quick burst of activity but I never end up staying because the forums are so quiet now.  OB has sentimental value for me, as the first online community I ever signed up for, and I'm all for any ideas that'll jolt the senses and give OB a new lease of life.
So when I saw this thread adressing the issue,. I knew I had to try and remember my password and contribute a few ideas...
For your consideration.
 
Gear the forums toward fan art. :3
The Otaku community has been focused on fan art for a long time now, while the boards are now more centered around general discussion. I suggest taking a dual-media apporach encouraging the fan art community to both discuss the series and share their art works with the community. You could spin this as a way for artists to get noticed and get a wider audience. OB then benefits from the large fan art base on TheOtaku, streamlining the memembership so their existing TheO account also works here might, already have been done, but if it hasn't, my idea! :tongue:
 
Kill. The. Padded. Room. Party. >.>
 
Why? To encourage new threads and discussions on the topics that won't just fade as pages pass and other discussion vie for space. The lounge has not been the same since that thread opened, it's the all-encompassing behemoth that takes in almost all areas of discussion and it leaves no room for other discussions, why start a new thread when you can just PRP it?  It's exactly the same reason I have not discussed much anime series after the one-thread-per-anime thing came into being. Which segues perfectly into my next idea,
 
Opening separate anime forums again. ^_^
The goal of the move was a good one, cut down on maintenance, but in the end, I think, a lot of the more nuanced discussion about a particular series was lost to a general thread of 'I like it' and 'the latest episode was so cool.' Those examples are paraprhased but that was the general feeling I got. We lost those insane but enjoyably fun conspiracy threads and those threads on a specific topic that woudl spiral into a whole new arena of discussion and take on a new life of it's own, or maybe that was only the Digimon thread about the pink Power Ranger toy. This works well with the idea to incorporate fan art, as each series can then have it's own little hub. The art forum can then be used as a place for all non-specific art works, the graphics worms, the banner requests etc.
 
Bright large logo and logo competitions O_IO
This ties into the fan art focus idea. How about having a big logo at the top like we used to have, with the graphic links and intergrated anime characers? You could hold regular competitions to design them. There were some good logos that came out of those competitions, Syk3's was awesome and who knows? Perhaps something big bright and cheerful would be more inviting to some people as well. :)
 
These are things I believe can help stimulate the OB community and bring in the new membership base.
What are your thoughts?

Well, I keep coming back here to check up on things, sometimes I can have a quick burst of activity but I never end up staying because the forums are so quiet now.  OB has sentimental value for me, as the first online community I ever signed up for, and I'm all for any ideas that'll jolt the senses and give OB a new lease of life.
So when I saw this thread adressing the issue,. I knew I had to try and remember my password and contribute a few ideas...
For your consideration.
 
Gear the forums toward fan art. :3
The Otaku community has been focused on fan art for a long time now, while the boards are now more centered around general discussion. I suggest taking a dual-media apporach encouraging the fan art community to both discuss the series and share their art works with the community. You could spin this as a way for artists to get noticed and get a wider audience. OB then benefits from the large fan art base on TheOtaku, streamlining the memembership so their existing TheO account also works here might, already have been done, but if it hasn't, my idea! :tongue:
 
Kill. The. Padded. Room. Party. >.>
 
Why? To encourage new threads and discussions on the topics that won't just fade as pages pass and other discussion vie for space. The lounge has not been the same since that thread opened, it's the all-encompassing behemoth that takes in almost all areas of discussion and it leaves no room for other discussions, why start a new thread when you can just PRP it?  It's exactly the same reason I have not discussed much anime series after the one-thread-per-anime thing came into being. Which segues perfectly into my next idea,
 
Opening separate anime forums again. ^_^
The goal of the move was a good one, cut down on maintenance, but in the end, I think, a lot of the more nuanced discussion about a particular series was lost to a general thread of 'I like it' and 'the latest episode was so cool.' Those examples are paraprhased but that was the general feeling I got. We lost those insane but enjoyably fun conspiracy threads and those threads on a specific topic that woudl spiral into a whole new arena of discussion and take on a new life of it's own, or maybe that was only the Digimon thread about the pink Power Ranger toy. This works well with the idea to incorporate fan art, as each series can then have it's own little hub. The art forum can then be used as a place for all non-specific art works, the graphics worms, the banner requests etc.
 
Bright large logo and logo competitions O_IO
This ties into the fan art focus idea. How about having a big logo at the top like we used to have, with the graphic links and intergrated anime characers? You could hold regular competitions to design them. There were some good logos that came out of those competitions, Syk3's was awesome and who knows? Perhaps something big bright and cheerful would be more inviting to some people as well. :)
 
These are things I believe can help stimulate the OB community and bring in the new membership base.
What are your thoughts?