by Ryan Mathews

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February 1998

Ah, the glorious excitement of new technology! As I write this, I sit at my brand-new computer, a sexy tower model with a 233MHz Pentium II under the hood, along with 32 Megs RAM, a 6.5 Gig hard drive and a 24X CD-ROM drive, plus lots of other goodies. I have all sorts of neato 32-bit apps installed, yet I'm composing this page with Notepad. But hey, it's the Windows 95 32 bit Notepad. That's progress!

Seriously, though, my new system is making this column-writing business a little easier. Netscape 4.0, which was a constantly crashing buggy behemoth under Windows 3.1, loads quickly and works like a charm under Windows 95. My ISP's connection isn't any faster, but the faster processor is noticeably reducing web page-loading times.

So here we are in February, a month closely associated with romance. I've never quite understood that. In most of the United States, February weather is the last thing you'd think of as romantic, unless you count huddling together to prevent frostbite. It's the spring months, with their flowers budding and animals mating, that make more sense as a time of romance. But somehow St. Valentine drew February 14th as his day, so we have to be romantic during snow and ice and gray skies. The Valentine's Day crap went up in the stores just as soon as the Christmas crap came down.

Of course, to be obligated to be romantic you have to have someone to be romantic with, so I'm safe. My reputation as a fanfic writer and a minor Internet celebrity has never carried much weight with the ladies. Go figure. Still, I have my hopes. Perhaps one day at a con, at one of the fanfic or on-line panels on which I always seem to be sitting, I'll be cornered by a lovely young woman who "just had to meet me". She'll say something sweet and endearing ("You're not nearly as annoying in person!"), then she'll take me to her room to show me sketches she drew to accompany my latest work. And then... And then I'll wake up and return to my pathetic life.

Oh, well. Perhaps the lack of romance in the average anime fan's life accounts for the popularity of anime with romantic themes. Each year I run the "Favorites Poll" on the rec.arts.anime newsgroups (in progress right now) and each year anime with strong romances finish near the top.

So, along these lines, I give you this month's topic.