by Ryan Mathews

Well, here I am again, ready to take you on yet another guided tour of the Anime Web Turnpike! It's usually my habit to use this first page of the column as a soapbox, but I don't really have anything to gripe, rave, or preach about this month. I do, however, have a few news items.

Remember my March/April column? It was about fan-fiction sites. I mentioned the site of a organization that produced "radioplays" of various anime. I also mentioned that I'd written such an audioplay myself and would love to have someone perform it. Since then, not one, but two organizations have come forth with interest in performing my 'fic. It's good to have a column.

Operation "Watch Fushigi Yuugi" continues, in which this self-proclaimed non-fan agreed to watch the entire 52 episodes before he passed judgement on the series. I've watched up to episode 40, and should have it finished by the next column. I'll give the show credit: it took a curious, unpredicatable turn around episode 35, really grabbing my interest for the first time. I remember asking a reader "How many episodes do I have to watch before I'm allowed to say I don't like it?" I guess the answer is "nine month's worth". I'll give my final opinion on Fushigi Yuugi next month, once I've finished the series. It will be interesting to see how closely the ending matches my predictions.

Those few people who have checked out I'm always plugging might want to visit the site again. I'm about to upload the manga version of College Is Hell, an original manga-style story of mine that's been getting good response since the website began giving it exposure. The manga version is ten pages of art drawn by my good friend and artistic partner Larry Mann back in 1994. This is the manga that was scheduled to run in three different small-press magazines, none of which saw print. I'm hoping my infamous "publishing curse" doesn't cause the entire Internet to crash.

And actually, I would like to briefly gripe and preach about something. One of the few complaints Jei receives from frequent users of the Anime Web Turnpike is the problem of broken links. It used to be that broken links could easily be caught by automated programs that check all the links for "404 Not Found" messages. Jei does use such a program, but these days, many, perhaps most, of the sites are on commercial webservers that never return such a message, instead throwing you to a generic "apology" page that is different for each service. It makes it impossible to weed out all the dead sites without manually checking each one. This month, I've begun to do something that I should have been doing for the last year: providing Jei with a list of all the dead sites I encountered during my research. But really, the 'Pike needs help from the site maintainers themselves. If your site goes down, changes address, or purpose, please let Jei know. It will help the 'Pike be a better resource for all of us.

Without further ado, let's move on to this month's topic. This month, I planned to do "Miscellaneous Sites", more specifically, those sites found in the black hole of the AniPike, the "Miscellaneous Miscellaneous" section, where only the very, very curious dare to enter. What happened was that I found so very many damned cool sites that I've decided to do two columns on the topic. I'll begin this month and finish in my July column.

Let's go!