Previously on isoul.uk: Why I Self-Host — a technical curiosity became a practical choice about ownership, privacy, learning and keeping data in systems I control.
It is slightly ridiculous that one line can connect watching anime on Veoh around 2007 with running Docker containers on a mini PC in my house today.
But there is a line.
Back then, I was interested in one thing: finding something I wanted to watch.
Previously on isoul.uk: Discovering Anime on the Wild Internet of 2007 — the internet stopped being a reference tool and became the place we went to find what to watch next.
I don’t think the old internet was necessarily better.
It was slower, less reliable, full of broken links and often much harder to use.
But it did feel different.
The easiest way I can describe it is that I used to feel as though I was moving through the internet. Today it often feels as though the internet moves through a handful of feeds towards me.
Previously on isoul.uk: How Toonami Changed What I Watched — television opened the door before the internet showed me how much anime existed beyond the British schedules.
That next phase began with Naruto.
Toonami had taught me to recognise anime as something distinct, but Naruto was the point when somebody effectively said to me, “This is anime. Watch this.”
That somebody was my brother. We started watching it online, beyond whatever British television happened to schedule, and I fell in properly.
Previously on isoul.uk: When Renting a Movie Was an Event — the ritual, artwork and scarcity of rented VHS tapes made individual films matter in a way that streaming has made difficult to remember.
I watched anime before I really knew what anime was.
Like a lot of children growing up in the 1990s, Pokémon was simply a cartoon on television. Sailor Moon was another show. I wasn’t thinking about where they came from, how they were produced or whether they belonged to a separate medium.
Previously on isoul.uk: It Only Took Me Twenty-Odd Years to Listen to Harry Potter — a Year 6 recommendation I ignored finally found me through audiobooks more than twenty years later.
There was a time when watching a particular film began with somebody leaving the house.
My brothers would go to Blockbuster or one of the local video shops and return carrying whatever the household would be watching. I was younger and not always part of the choice, but that only made their return more interesting. A film did not simply appear in a menu. It arrived through the front door.
Sometime in the late 1990s, my Year 6 teacher recommended that our class read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I ignored her.
It wasn’t a protest against Harry Potter. I wasn’t taking a principled stand against wizards, boarding schools or popular books. I simply wasn’t a reader. A teacher telling the class that a book was worth reading was not enough to make eleven-year-old me pick it up.
More than twenty years later, I have just finished listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Previously on isoul.uk: We grew up in a house where the television was always on — older siblings, wrestling tapes, sci-fi reruns and films brought back from the video shop. Television wasn’t background noise. It was the recommendation engine.
There is a slightly odd thing about my childhood relationship with science fiction: I remember Star Trek far more clearly than I remember Star Wars.
That isn’t because Star Wars was obscure. It obviously wasn’t. It just wasn’t the centre of science fiction in our house.
I grew up in a house where the television always seemed to be on.
There were a lot of us at home: older siblings, a younger brother, my parents, and me somewhere in the middle of all of it. Looking back, that probably explains why so many of my memories are tied to screens. There was nearly always somebody watching something, playing something, recording something or arguing over what was going on next.