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68 Heather A. Horst, Becky Herr-Stephenson, and Laura Robinsonforums surrounding Japanese popular culture in both Japan and the UnitedStates. I had the good fortune of having zalas, a digital-information virtuoso,as a key informant in my study of anime fans.After immigrating with his family to the United States from mainlandChina when he was a child, zalas grew up in a technology-rich household,with two parents who worked with computers. “I got introduced to computersearly on. And, also, I just tend to be better at science and math than thearts and English and things like that. I was sort of just drawn to [the computer]because it was like this super, über toy, you know.” Both his parentswere in graduate school at the time, and he had online access to their VAXmachine. Ever since, he kept up with the latest online technologies, movingfrom AOL Instant Messenger, to Internet relay chat (IRC), and eventually toBitTorrent. He discovered the online anime and fansub scene through hiscontacts in IRC.He participates in a wide range of fan activities. He has been involved in avariety of fansub groups and activities, including projects for fansub gamesand electronic visual novels. He also makes anime music videos (AMVs), isan officer at his university’s anime club, and is a frequent speaker at his localanime convention. I have seen zalas give talks on topics as varied as Japaneseanime and game-remix videos, fansubbing, and visual novel subtitling. Hedescribes himself as something of an elder in the online anime scene, despitethe fact that he is still in his early twenties.In my interview with zalas, he guided me through some of what was behindthe curtain of his information magic. He explains that he is constantly onIRC, logged into multiple channels populated by the information elite of theonline anime fandom.I used to have just one copy of mIRC running that simultaneously connected to all thesechannels, and every once in a while just scroll through to see which ones have newmessages, go to them, see if it’s important, if it’s not, go to the next one and things likethat. But right now I actually have a text-only IRC client that’s running on my friend’sweb server, and I’m connected to about twenty channels on that one. It’s actually downfrom what I’m usually connected to. And that one lights up a little number near thebottom of the screen indicating which channels have new activity, and I’ll switch to itand see if it’s worthwhile or something.He has four computers at home: a Windows computer, a Linux computer,a Macintosh desktop computer, and a Macintosh laptop.So, my Windows computer is there so I can play games. It’s—most of my desktop processingstuff and all my video editing and things like that are on [my] Windows computer.My Linux computer is there because I need—sometimes I need a Linux compiler,and it’s also there as a server. So, it’s serving my source code repositories, and it’s—it hasa IRC file server on there as well and IRC bot on that or something like that, whichcontrols some channel. And my OS10 one is actually my laptop, which I bring with me.It’s kind of like my portable computer . . . I bought it because I wanted to be able to work