20th April 2009
This
video from College Humor really remind of the days when interest mailing lists (not to mention webrings - how's that for blast from the past) were all the rave. The mailing list that I personally got the most involved with was the
Yu Yu Hakusho Mailing List, which someone actually built a homepage for on (OMG) Geocities. If you go there, you'd see my first ever email address - on AOL :O - and also a small dose of Aka from pre-college days.
My name Aka actually originated from my old Aol account. It means red in Japanese. At that time, I did *not* know that "Aka-Chan" means "baby" in Japanese... and when I found it, it was already too late. About half the people I knew started calling me Aka already and most of them didn't even know my real name. >_<
But I digress. Now, at that time, about 98% of the list was "KH believers" (if you don't know what that means, you don't want to know), and of course, I'm of the measly 2% that is "non-believers". And I was one of 3 people actually vocal about our beliefs (2 girls and 1 guy... mostly because none of the guys on the list liked to talk). So every time a newbie came onto the list (which was rather frequently) and asked the inevitable question: are Hiei and Kurama a couple - a flame war would immediately break out, with about 40 on one side and 3 (later it became just 2; the guy dropped out = =+) on the other... but most of the emails would border on academic expositions dissecting every scene (yes, that's when I learned to type real fast) from the Anime and Manga to prove their own pov's. Needless to say, now thinking back to how passionate I was, I am endless amused. There's a strong sense of nostalgia. I actually miss the flame wars. At least they were well thought out and logical (in their own twisted ways). We actually tried to line up evidence and did analysis on all the characters and the psyche of the author... ok... nerdy and silly... but really, what's more lovely than sheer passion that's non destructive? Even though we felt strongly about our viewpoints, we NEVER had any personal attacks. Feelings were hurt for the fact that people are against/for certain ideas, but we never thought it was necessary to attack another human being over any physical attributes or political orientations. It just wasn't the proper way. But it got to a point where the list moderators had to ban anyone from mentioning the "tabooed" question (s). It was to avoid hurting anyone. Just in case.
We have so much to learn from the past...
I miss my old passionate and innocent self, I miss people to argue simple philosophical points with, just for a deep personal satisfaction and no other material purposes... but most of all, I miss the pieces of simple humanity that's contained with in these little scenes of "flaming"...
歸去，也無風雨也無晴。
