Dov Sherman
Please Link To Us

Before we go any further, let me quickly clear up something: this is just my bio page. This is not my main welcome page for all my anime and manga web pages. If you want quick access to all my nifty anime and manga web pages, go straight to the front door of Otaku World.

Guess what, kids! I'm through with school for now. App State is a nice school and it does have a Computer Science department but I've taken all the classes I want to there. At this point, I'd just be taking classes I don't care about in order to get the degree. I'd rather wait until I can take classes at some other university so I can learn something new.

When I was really little, my favorite toys were blocks. Later, I moved up to Legos and I'd spend hours and hours making intricate little Lego contraptions, pistons and levers and ships and so on. Sometimes, I just put together the kits but mostly I liked to just make things up.

When I was eight, I won a Kellogg's contest for drawing Dig'Em eating a balanced breakfast. I think the contest people liked my drawing because, instead of drawing him sitting at a table, I drew him standing up with a bowl of cereal in one hand, a glass of milk in the other, some toast in one pocket, a glass of orange juice in another. They probably thought it was a very unique approach but, the truth was, I just couldn't draw people sitting down well enough. On the other hand, maybe they just picked me at random. Anyway, the prize was an Atari 2600 (which was brand, new at that time) and it really cheered me up because I was in the hospital with two broken legs at the time. (I got run over at the schoolbus stop by the parent whose turn it was to watch the kids to make sure no one got hurt. To be honest, I don't remember who she was. I don't think I even knew who her kid was. But I feel kind of sorry for her. I can't imagine how horrible she must have felt about it. At the time, it never even occured to me to be resentful. I still don't see any reason to be.)

So, anyway, the years go on and I got more and more into cartooning and video games. Then a few years later, the TRS-80 computers came to our school. They taught us how to program stuff like PRINT and INPUT and LET and I stayed after school and taught myself IF and GOTO and GOSUB. I still remember being mesmerized by the Dancing Demon program that let you choreograph the dance movements of a blocky, animated demon on the screen.

A few years later, I got my very own home computer, a TI-99/4A. It had 16 colors and a 24-column screen and, when you wanted to make graphics, you had to draw them out on graph paper, translate them to binary, then to hexadecimal, then input the hexadecimal. There was no such thing as a paint program, yet. Still, I made lots of fun little programs, like my own version of Q-Bert and a sort of Santa-Claus-themed version of Defender.

Then I moved up to a Commodore 64 and I played around with that for a while but, mostly, I just played video games. The very first game I bought was Pinball Construction Set and I still think that some of the best games are the construction set games that let you build new stuff.

But, as I entered high school, my interest in computers started to wane. I became more involved in the arts. I studied drawing more intently and became involved in stage acting. By the time I reached college, I had decided to go into either acting, drawing, or writing.

But then I took an elective course in Chaos Theory and was introduced to fractal geometry. I dragged my old C-64 out of the closet and started programming again. Then I found the Internet, IRC, and MUDs. At LambdaMOO, I took the name APHiD and became a very successful developer of generic objects.

Finally, I got a proper PC-compatible computer and started learning raytraced imaging. Then, one day, a mailing list conversation mentioned an imported comic book called Ranma 1/2. I went out and bought the first couple of issues and was instantly hooked. Eventually, I started looking into other works by the same artist, Rumiko Takahashi, and later, lots of other anime and manga.

Then, on one of the anime newsgroups, someone mentioned KiSS, the computer paper doll system with anime dolls, it was a year or two before I had a system that could support it but, once I did, I immediately started collecting KiSS dolls. The problem was, there were so many dolls and it was hard to tell what they were from the filenames. No one had done much organizing. So I made a web page to list a couple dozen dolls with little preview images. Eventually, the list started to get pretty big and people kept asking me where to get the program, so I revamped the pages and called them Dov's KiSS Page. But later I changed the name to The Big KiSS Page because I didn't want the title to have my name in it (because it sounded pretentious to me) and because I didn't want people to think it was a page about kissing me.

Later, I made my Futaba-kun Change Homepage and met Kurt Kohler who was also an FKC fan and wanted to do manga translations.

Then, I met Jennifer "Jenniko" Diane Reitz. At the time, Jenniko-chan was working on Happy Puppy, the once-great gaming website which she founded along with the other members of her polyamoury. She'd set up a special page there focussing on KiSS dolls with a highlight for my Two Ranmas animated KiSS doll. Jenniko-chan also turned out to be a fan of Futaba-kun Change and, since she and her partners would be leaving Happy Puppy soon, she offered to let me have server space on her next project. Eventually, the situation changed and we launched our pages as the next project: Otaku World.

Unfortunately, the Internet has taken a turn for the worse. Advertising is drying up. You can expect to see most of the free sites disappear. We never wanted to become a pay site but we're having to consider that possibility now as our only means to keep from disappearing ourselves.

Unexpected Facts about Dov

Dov is not a witch.

These are the Pages that Dov Made

Anime and Manga Theme Guide: Info on more than 400 titles. The definitive guide. (My magnum opus, which means "big penguin".)

Anime Desktop Themes: The largest archive of Anime-style desktop themes for Window 95 and Microsoft Plus!

The Big KiSS Page: Anime and manga computer paper dolls!

Futaba-kun Change Homepage: Info, translations, and pictures for Hiroshi Aro's gender-bending manga.

Sketchbook: If you like the artwork you've been seeing around Otaku World, you might enjoy this little sketchbook of my anime-style doodlings.

Dove's Modelling Agency: New video game character models created by me.

Ranma Jijou: A Ranma 1/2 Fan-fic.

Anime ASCii Art: An early form of Internet fan-art. Much harder to create than one might imagine.

Sylia's Furcadia Goodies: Fun, fun add-ons and utilities for Furcadia, a dazzling on-line world.

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Quotes from Dov

"You can't push people to change, but you can lure them."

"Lots of people search for a needle in a haystack, but it takes a special sort of person to find the hay."

"Consider the phrase like rats deserting a sinking ship. Don't misjudge rats. Rats are smart. Watch 'em running a maze sometime. What kind of idiot would stay on a sinking ship anyway?"

"Who came up with the phrase Surfing the Information Super Highway? Who surfs on a highway? You surf in the ocean. You drive on a highway. Surfing on the highway... where's the sense in that?"

"Rebel in little ways. Eat spaghetti using only a spoon. Eat steak with your hands. Hold the door open for manly men. Sing on the elevator."

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