To get things started, let me borrow a few lines from Jd's ice breaker topic.
Name: Michael (tenike1)
Age: 22 (as of 10/13/2010) Birthdate is 11/24/1987.
Location: USA, Southern California
Future Career: Engineer, Refrigeration Technician
Conan Fan Since: 2005
Favorite Conan Movie: Movie 6 (The Phantom of Baker Street)
Favorite Conan Case: The episode in which Agasa Hakase and the Detective Boys are waiting in line for a pre-screening of the latest chapter of a successful movie franchise that has spanned over the course of a few decades. A suspicious photographer approaches Conan and the gang and offers to take their photograph free of charge, but what are his real intentions? (Sorry, the episode # and title escapes me, and I'm certain it was an anime original.)
Favorite Conan Opening Theme: Kimi to Yakusoku Shita Yasashii Ano Basho Made by Yuuka Saegusa
Favorite Conan Ending Theme: Overture by Inaba Koushi
Favorite Conan Movie Theme: Everlasting by the B'z
With that being said, I hope some posters here might recall seeing my screen name from a few years ago. Back in 2004, 2005 and 2006 the main sub group for Detective Conan was Anime-Conan. At that time there was no website for us fans to congregate like there is now. Let's not forget that sub groups generally declare that they are non-profit entities, so the cost to maintain a website and servers to distribute their releases would have come straight out of the group's own pocket. As you can imagine, that wasn't flying. Luckily for those of us who started watching in the stone ages, IRC and bittorrent existed. Through everybody's collected efforts, distributing large files, especially back then, became a reality and we all got to enjoy anime. Cable and high-speed internet have come so far in the past couple of years that those 170-megabyte episodes and 1-gigabyte movies look like child's play. The cost of having an IRC channel was free, but it was more than just a "channel". The channel functioned like a non-crappy chat box that everybody used to communicate with one another. The channel also allowed people to send and share files with one another. Thinking about it now is very nostalgic. I made a lot of friends through watching Detective Conan and being an active supporter of Anime-Conan.
So that was then and this is now. Truthfully, I had stopped watching Detective Conan for a few years. In 2007 when Kudo-kun announced he was retiring from fansubbing, it was a huge blow to me. At that time, groups like Kaze no Koe and Neg were taking the torch away from Anime-Conan, which was slowly dying. I know this sounds overly-dramatic and ridiculous, but I lost the will to continue watching. Watching another group's release felt like mental cheating, if I had to come up with words to describe my feelings. That's no disrespect to those other groups, but it was just my desire to stay loyal to Anime-Conan, just like how any respectable man or woman would want to stay loyal to their girlfriend or boyfriend.
Much like a real break-up, it took a few years for the realization to sink in that Anime-Conan isn't coming back. I put the faction bias behind me and turned toward the anime itself. I left off at two movies and 107 episodes only a few months ago. Currently I am at 567 episodes, 13 movies, as well as all of the specials and OVAs. It was a great experience honestly, being able to watch episodes from many, many different groups. It wasn't until later that I found out DCTP consisted of the groups that were starting right as I quit watching. Detective Conan is in great hands with the DCTP staff, so I suppose I just want to express my apologizes and gratitude.
Phew. That's a whole lot of tl;dr that nobody cares about, but I hope by being here, I can get in contact with some of my old friends from IRC, like Reaper Hakase and Ms. Kitsune. It would be great to reminisce. Hope those that cared to read this actually enjoyed it. I really hope my perception of the events of the last few years is historically accurate.
