12 Days of Xmas – Day 5: Signing Up for Nico Nico Douga

December 18, 2007 in Specials by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 2 comments

The fifth thing from 2007 that had an impact on me as a fan of anime was creating an account on Nico Nico Douga. I had first heard of Nico Nico Douga in bits and places before May but I got my first true dose of Nico during the Damn You Internets panel at Fanime. Thus on June 1st I signed up for an account on Nico so I could see a swath of random Japanese videos with a bunch of comments streaming across them, some of them cleverly timed to flood over the actual video. At first I was able to watch videos from 1900-0200 JST (2-9am PST) since I was member 1,213,569 and the cutoff point for all-the-time access was 888,888. A couple weeks later, that line was expanded to about 1,100,000 and then a month or so after that, I had no time-of-day viewing restrictions.

The stuff I’ve been watching over the past six months has been mainly MADs and anime openings/endings, although I did find a TV episode of baseball bloopers split into three parts and earlier this month I watched a couple men with paper masks play their way through Wii Fit’s different mini games. The next step will be to begin watching the “raw” anime episodes that are on the service (especially the older ones like Lupin III), which now that I think about might be an interesting way to checking out series without downloading a couple episodes or, if licensed, buying the first disc or the first couple episodes digitally.

And remember, you can turn the comments off and just watch the original video if they become too overwhelming.