Previously on isoul.uk: Why I Self-Host — a technical curiosity became a practical choice about ownership, privacy, learning and keeping data in systems I control.
It is slightly ridiculous that one line can connect watching anime on Veoh around 2007 with running Docker containers on a mini PC in my house today.
But there is a line.
Back then, I was interested in one thing: finding something I wanted to watch.
Previously on isoul.uk: How Toonami Changed What I Watched — television opened the door before the internet showed me how much anime existed beyond the British schedules.
That next phase began with Naruto.
Toonami had taught me to recognise anime as something distinct, but Naruto was the point when somebody effectively said to me, “This is anime. Watch this.”
That somebody was my brother. We started watching it online, beyond whatever British television happened to schedule, and I fell in properly.
Previously on isoul.uk: When Renting a Movie Was an Event — the ritual, artwork and scarcity of rented VHS tapes made individual films matter in a way that streaming has made difficult to remember.
I watched anime before I really knew what anime was.
Like a lot of children growing up in the 1990s, Pokémon was simply a cartoon on television. Sailor Moon was another show. I wasn’t thinking about where they came from, how they were produced or whether they belonged to a separate medium.
Major spoilers for Mushoku Tensei Season 3, Part 1 follow.
Mushoku Tensei has trained me to fear two words: Turning Point.
The moment they appear, I know something has changed. The consequences may not arrive immediately, and I may not understand what has shifted until much later, but Rudeus’s life will not continue in quite the same direction.
Season 3’s first part might be the strongest example of that so far, partly because it spends so much time on quieter lives before showing how badly they can be broken.
In 2011, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said something about piracy that has stuck with me:
“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”1
His point was fairly simple. If an unauthorised service is easier to use than the one selling the product, the seller has a problem.
At the time, that could mean waiting months for something to reach your country, dealing with region locks or restrictive DRM, or hunting down a physical copy while an unauthorised version was already online.