Shinmaryuu is one of my oldest internet friends. The concept of “internet friends” was weird for me to wrap my head around at first, but is almost second nature to me now. I met Shinmaryuu online in 2006. It’s scary to think about that when you cut right down to it. Most of the people I talk to every day are those who I’ve met in the last two years, but internet ties are strong for some reason. There’s always a connection. There is always some web presence that you can hunt for if you master your search engines and old stomping grounds. There’s a beauty to that kind of interaction, but always the fear that it might one day be supplanted with an email from a long lost address bouncing back to your account

Shinmaryuu and myself were both regulars of the Hak.5 community and quickly became friends. We shared a general love of technology, in one form or another, as well as independent media. Back when I was just figuring out what an internet television show was, Shinmaryuu was deep into the scene and even developing his own audio/video content under the banner Random Acts of Anarchy (The video episode of which I still have).

Over the years, we’ve always had each others’  backs. Shinmaryuu contributed an article to the first issue of the Analog.5 ezine I cobbled together (painfully) in 2006. When Stage6 went under and The IPTV Archive went down with it, Shinmaryuu offered a helping hand and even gave the idea of hosting videos on blip.tv where they are to this day. He featured my video show Obsoleet on his Library of Geekdom website, and even ended up contributing a show segment to it (in episode four to be precise). We may not talk as much these days as we used to, but we still go back and forth through twitter and some other channels of communication here and there, talking of the good old days and what’s on the horizon. In all, we’re very similar. We are both content creators, but focused on community and creativity instead of the draw of money and power. You can track Shinmaryuu’s efforts from sXe 13 to Torn Red Sweatpants to Wicked 13 Productions, and in all those years he is still standing for producing the best content that he can. You can’t say the same for most people.

With my newest project on saving Revision3, Shinmaryuu and I have been chatting casually on a few topics, and a few days ago I inquired about some of the content he had collected in the past. I was sure that most of the stuff he initially saved had long since been lost to the troubles of unresponsive hard drives and disc rot, but I was pleasantly proven wrong. We got to talking, and he was kind enough to send me over a little care package of indie content spanning years and dating back to before I was putting bits in proverbial buckets.

What am I going to do with all these lovely discs? Archive them of course, and share them with everyone. Share them with you. All in good time, and all in proper form with disc images and cover/insert scans. Anarchivism.org will feature the Shinmaryuu Collection (working name, haha ) provided the discs are all out of print to the point that you can’t get your hands on them anymore (though I’ll link back to all the content creators I can find). The discs in general are not only beautiful in their physical nature, but by what they represent. Every hand cut booklet and labeled disc reflect the hard work of content creators before. They were here, and now their work has been shared with me.

So to Shinmaryuu, I offer the deepest thank you. Some things I thought I would never see have fallen gracefully into my lap, and I couldn’t be happier.

These days, Shinmaryuu is still going on strong. You can check out his website, Wicked 13 Productions, or head right to his youtube profile to see all the great videos he is putting out. Check out his content and leave him a comment, or send over a friendly shout on Twitter.

Tell him Fami sent ya.