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Back in 2002 I decided to take my love of anime further, by creating a place where I could share some of the things I loved about the genre with other people. At the time I was learning how to do image manipulation and began creating anime themed wallpapers for my computer. So I thought a website would be a good place to showcase and share them with other people that may enjoy them. From that Studiotaku was born.
It was a lot of fun and as time went by the site became somewhat popular, mainly because many of the wallpapers I created featured the art work of Satoshi Urushihara. For those that aren’t familiar with Mr. Urushihara’s style, I suggest conducting a search at your favorite image repository. Be warned that his work is Not Safe For Work (NSFW)! I’m sure you can gather why I enjoyed making wallpapers from his artwork. I mean, I was a hot-blooded young man with raging hormones at the time ^^; And like I said, it made my site a bit popular. I will say that still a fan of Urushihara’s style, though his work has become a bit more graphic than when I first discovered him.
Studiotaku had another purpose besides serving up my [provocative] creations ^^, it was also a place for me to play around with web design and development. This was of course back before the beauty that is CSS, PHP, and MySQL…in the days when sites were made up of tables and content and layout were inter-mingled in a mess that would instantly cause concern by today’s standards. But it was nice to have a place where I could experiment and learn. It was by working on Studiotaku that I learned HTML, CSS, and a little Javascript. All of which were self taught using books I bought and online tutorials.
It was during my junior year of college that a heated rivalry between another site owner and I drove me to continue to develop my abilities in web design and technology. I will say that competition can be good to push your limits, but do try to keep it friendly. I can honestly say that this rivalry did get ugly and for all the wrong reasons.
Apart from the wallpapers, I also attempted adding additional content to Studiotaku. My main focus was on “features” where I talked about other things that interested me about anime. These were usually articles about a series or character I liked. Sadly, I did not make many of these type of features at the time. Even sadder is that I did not save the ones I did write up. All I have of them now are scraps of notes I found in an old folder.
As the technology of the internet began to change, I began learning a little about MySQL and PHP though the adoption of the phpBB forum platform. It appealed to me because it was free and customizable. Free appealed to my low income, college student status and customizable meant I could adapt it to the overall layout of my site. It also gave me a way to interact with the people that were visiting my site, which was something I wanted to do more. In fact, the interaction aspect really appealed to me. Up until that moment, my site was very static with little interaction between my audience and me. That forum gave them a medium to communicate with me and vice versa.
It was this desire to create interaction that inspired me to create Ultima-i; plus I felt that Studiotaku had went as far as I could take it creatively (at least at that time). I talk more about my reasons for creating Ultima-i here. So in 2004 I took Studiotaku offline.
Studiotaku represented everything I learned and experienced in my journey to that point, so I continue to keep the domain active. Plus I have a few ideas about possible revivals I could do with it in the near future.
