This post was originally published on November 22, 2013 as the second part of the XfireSystems story. This 2026 version keeps the heart of the original article but has been rebuilt, cleaned up, and expanded to better explain the darker middle chapter between XfireSystems, Anime-Ent.com, and the next major rebuild.
Part 1 was about building something, losing it, and learning the hard way that control matters. Part 2 is different. This is the part of the story where the site was gone, the direction was gone, and I was trying to figure out if I was even good at this anymore.
Reading this now, what stands out is not just the website history. It is the person I was back then. I was frustrated, impatient, ambitious, angry, and still trying to turn a messy pile of fandom ideas into something real.
The funny thing is that I forgot some of the details, but I clearly never lost the lesson. Even now, I still do not trust people with my site, my hosting, my accounts, or the foundation of anything I build online. That did not come from nowhere. It came from this era.
Part 2 picks up after the original XfireSystems era fell apart. The domain was gone, XfireCollector had failed before it ever really started, and the old Xtreme Network was basically dead.
This chapter is not about success. It is about the messy reset that happened before success. It is about trying to start over, trying to learn again, and trying to build a cleaner version of something that had already collapsed once.
After the first version of XfireSystems ended, I was in a strange place.
The site was gone. The direction was gone. The old domain was gone. XfireCollector had become a mess before it ever really had a chance to become anything. The old Xtreme Network, which had once been filled with Dragon Ball, Pokémon, Gundam, anime, games, reviews, and whatever else I was into, was basically over.
At the time, I looked at that era as the dark ages of XfireSystems.
Some people might say the real dark part was what happened near the end, when the site was lost because someone else changed it into something it was never supposed to be. But for me, the darker part was what came after.
Because when something ends, I have always felt like it should end right.
XfireSystems did not end right.
Trying to Understand What Went Wrong
Looking back, the problem with XfireSystems was not just one bad decision.
It was a pile of problems all stacked on top of each other. The site had no real focus. It had no clear goal. It had no real fan base. It had no control over what it was supposed to be. It was loaded with too many ideas, too many sections, too many ad banners, and not enough direction.
It was a website, but it was not really a plan.
That is one of the biggest lessons I carried out of that era. There is no point in running a site if you do not know what the site is trying to do.
“I want to be the best” is not a goal.
“I want to make a lot of money” is not a goal.
Those are wants. They are not structure. They do not tell you what to make, who it is for, why it matters, or how you are going to keep it alive.
Back then, I did not fully understand that. I just knew something had gone wrong.
The Internet Was Always Changing
One of the things I understood even then was that the web never sat still.
The internet was like a giant box full of random stuff. Every time you reached in, you found something new. A new tool. A new style. A new script. A new site. A new trend. A new way people were building pages.
That was exciting, but it was also frustrating.
You could spend months learning how to do something, and then suddenly it felt like the whole web had moved on. What you knew today could feel outdated tomorrow. The more I looked around, the more I realized that I did not actually know as much as I thought I did.
That was not easy to admit.
I had been building websites in some form since the late 90s. I had enough experience to feel like I knew something, but not enough discipline or direction to turn that experience into something stable.
That gap bothered me.
Starting Over Online
One of the strange things about the internet is that starting over online is easier than starting over in real life.
You can change your email. You can change your screen name. You can make a new site. You can buy a new domain. You can close one project and open another one before most people even notice.
Every day, somewhere online, a website starts and another website disappears.
That was the mindset I had after XfireSystems fell apart. If the old thing was gone, maybe the answer was to start over. New name. New project. New direction. New rules.
The problem was that I did not know what that new direction was supposed to be.
I had quit my job for the second time. I had no real future in sight. I did not know what I wanted to do. For a while, I was basically doing nothing but playing cards, sleeping, and trying not to think too hard about where things were going.
Then, strangely enough, an online career test pushed me back toward the web.
The Test That Pointed Me Back to Web Design
At some point, while looking around online, I found one of those “what do you want to be” tests.
Normally, I would not have taken something like that too seriously. But this one was long enough and detailed enough that I could not easily tell which answers were leading where. It felt like maybe there was something real behind it.
The result said I should be a computer programmer.
At first, I thought that was wrong.
I hated programming. At least, I thought I did. I had not done much with it in years, and the idea of being a software programmer did not sound like me at all.
So I ignored it.
Then, a few weeks later, I started picking up web design books.
I did not have much else going on, and part of me wondered if maybe I needed to relearn everything from the ground up. Not just keep doing what I had always done, but actually go back and learn HTML, design, structure, and the basics the way I probably should have in the first place.
Relearning HTML
I started reading web design books, and something stood out to me.
Several of them talked about HTML like it was a kind of programming. Not always in the same words, and not exactly the way people might argue about it now, but the idea was there. HTML was not software programming, but it was still a language used to build something.
That made me think about the test again.
Maybe “computer programmer” did not have to mean software. Maybe it could mean the web. Maybe what I was actually good at was building websites.
I had learned with older HTML, but now I was reading more, practicing more, and starting to understand where web design was going. CSS was becoming more important. Layouts were changing. The old way I had been making pages was not going to be enough forever.
When I read HTML 4 for Dummies, things started to click.
For the first time in a while, I felt like maybe I had a direction again.
Project Xfire Anime
By mid-2003, after months of drifting and relearning, I decided that the only thing I really knew how to do was make a website.
That did not mean I knew how to run one.
That difference matters.
Making a website and running a website are not the same thing. I could build pages. I could make sections. I could come up with ideas. I could design a structure. But running a site meant something else. It meant planning, updating, organizing, leading, and making sure the thing did not collapse the second life got busy or people failed to do what they said they would do.
At that point, I still had not learned that part.
But I wanted to try again.
Before I bought a new domain, I started with a project name: XFIREAnime.
I made a list of the things I liked to talk about and the things I did not want to talk about. Then I tried to narrow it down. Instead of building another giant network with every interest I had, I wanted to focus on one or two things.
Eventually, it came down to movies and anime.
After thinking about it for a few days, I picked anime.
That was the beginning of the next rebuild.
Building the Foundation
I spent that summer working on the new site.
Most of what I finished was groundwork. I worked out how the site would run, how updates would work, what kind of content would be on it, how the layout would function, and how everything would fit together.
This was also around the time I started looking more seriously into PHP.
I kept seeing websites with strange-looking URLs full of question marks and variables, and I wanted to know what was going on. Eventually, I found out about PHP and template systems.
That was exactly the kind of thing I wanted.
I did not want to update the same menu or layout piece by piece across every single page. I wanted a system. I wanted something cleaner than the way I had built sites before.
I probably went through around ten different template systems, trying to find one that worked the way I needed.
That part mattered because it showed a change in how I was thinking. I was no longer just making pages. I was trying to build a system.
Anime-Ent.com
After testing free hosts and running into too many limits, I decided I needed paid hosting again.
The only host I really trusted at the time was my old host, DellHost, so that was where I looked.
I also started joining boards and forums again. Back then, there was a difference between the two, and those communities were a major part of how people found help, staff, traffic, and other webmasters.
Eventually, I settled on the name Anime Entertainment.
I wanted a short domain name, so it became Anime-Ent.com.
This was supposed to be the cleaner version. A more focused site. A fresh start. A chance to avoid the mistakes I had made with XfireSystems.
At least, that was the plan.
The Staff Problem Came Back
Around the time Anime-Ent.com was getting ready to open, I started looking for staff.
That might sound strange after what happened with XfireCollector, but I thought I had learned from the last staff mistake. This time, nobody would get access to the server but me. Nobody would be able to touch the hosting. Nobody would be able to destroy the foundation.
I still did not trust anyone with that information.
And honestly, I still understand why.
But I made a different mistake. I trusted people to actually do the work.
I wanted content. Loads and loads of content. I thought if I could find a few people who shared the same dream, we could build a killer anime site. I would handle the structure, the layout, and the foundation, while other people helped fill the site with reviews and updates.
That sounded good in theory.
In reality, almost nothing got done.
This is the part that feels painfully familiar even now. I had learned not to give people server access, but I had not learned that help is only useful when people actually follow through.
There is a big difference between someone liking the idea of being part of a project and someone being willing to do the boring, consistent work that keeps a project alive.
That lesson still matters. The site can have community, comments, members, and people around it, but the foundation has to stay in my hands.
The Anime-Ent.com Launch
When the site opened, I had a small staff lined up.
Some were in college. One was in high school. Another was younger. On paper, it looked like I had people who could help make the site feel alive.
But almost right away, things started falling apart.
The youngest staff member was almost never online, and when he was, he said he was busy with homework. The high school staff member told me upfront that he could not do much, but said he could at least send something once a month. After the first month passed and nothing came in, I emailed him and got no response.
Two weeks later, I saw him online. He told me he had a girlfriend and was not into anime anymore.
That was the end of that.
The college staff members were supposed to send reviews too, but after two months, nothing had come in. One left after a disagreement. The other told me she was dealing with problems in her life and could not help anymore.
At least she told me directly, so I was not really mad at her.
But by that point, the site was already in trouble.
Waiting on People Instead of Doing the Work
The biggest mistake I made with Anime-Ent.com was waiting.
I spent too much time waiting for staff members to send content when I could have been making the content myself. I had built the site. I had the structure. I had the topic. I had the ability to write reviews. But instead of pushing forward, I sat around expecting other people to help turn the site into what I wanted it to be.
That was on me.
By early December, I was angry. The site was open, but it had almost nothing. The layout was not where I wanted it to be. The content was not there. The staff had not delivered. What was supposed to be a focused rebuild had become another failed project.
It was not XfireSystems all over again in the exact same way, but it carried the same problem.
The vision was bigger than the execution.
The End of Anime-Ent.com
Around December 18, I closed Anime-Ent.com.
At the same time, Gundam Unlimited crashed for good. That was basically the end of my Gundam site. Dragonball Millennium was still there in some form, but it did not feel like people saw it or cared about it anymore.
After a few days, I closed that too, or at least abandoned it.
That was the end of what remained from the old XfireSystems Xtreme Network.
Dragonball Millennium and Gundam Unlimited were not just random sites to me. They were pieces of the old era. They were some of the last surviving parts of what I had tried to build from 1999 to 2002.
And then I let the domains expire.
The Domains I Wish I Kept
One of the things I regretted later was letting gundam-unlimited.com and dragonball-millennium.com expire in late December 2003.
At the time, I was done.
For real this time.
I was angry, burned out, and tired of watching everything fail. Letting the domains go probably felt like closing the door. But looking back now, those domains were part of my history. They were proof that those projects existed. They were names connected to an era of work, ambition, and mistakes.
I understand why I let them go.
But I still wish I had kept them.
Why This Chapter Matters
This part of the story is not the fun success chapter.
It is the reset chapter.
This is the period where I learned that starting over is easy, but starting over smarter is hard. I had already learned not to hand people access to the foundation. Now I had to learn that depending on other people for the content itself could also stop a project cold.
I was still chasing the idea of building something bigger than myself, but I did not yet understand how much of the early work had to come from me.
I wanted a staff.
I wanted a team.
I wanted people who shared the dream.
But most people do not share the dream the same way the person building it does.
That is not always evil. Sometimes people are busy. Sometimes they lose interest. Sometimes life happens. Sometimes they like the idea more than the responsibility.
But when you are the one paying for the site, building the pages, carrying the name, and trying to keep it alive, you cannot build the whole thing around people maybe showing up.
This is why I still move the way I move with Majin Planet. I can take feedback. I can build community. I can let people be part of the world around the site. But the keys stay with me.
That might sound stubborn, but it came from experience. XfireSystems taught me what happens when someone else can touch the foundation. Anime-Ent.com taught me what happens when the project depends on people who are not as invested as you are.
Those two lessons shaped almost everything that came after.
The Road to 2004
When I wrote the original version of this post, I said the next part would be about 2004, the rise of Dragonball Final, and the first time I really tasted success in web design.
That is important because this chapter ends in failure, but it does not end the story.
Anime-Ent.com failed. Gundam Unlimited was gone. Dragonball Millennium was abandoned. The old domains expired. The remains of the XfireSystems Xtreme Network were basically lost.
But something was still there.
I was still there.
I had learned more HTML. I had started learning CSS. I had looked into PHP and template systems. I had begun thinking less like someone making random pages and more like someone trying to build an actual site structure.
I had failed again, but I was not in the same place I had been before.
That is the strange thing about failure. Sometimes it looks like you are back at zero, but you are not. You are carrying lessons you did not have the last time.
That is what this era was.
It was not the end.
It was the ugly middle.
Looking Back at the Dark Ages
When I look back at this version of myself, I can see someone who was angry, tired, and frustrated, but also someone who still cared.
I cared enough to keep starting over.
I cared enough to buy books and relearn things.
I cared enough to try building systems instead of just pages.
I cared enough to keep looking for the version of the site that might finally work.
That does not make the mistakes disappear. I still made them. I trusted the wrong people in Part 1. I waited on the wrong people in Part 2. I let domains expire that I wish I had kept. I closed projects that might have meant more later as archives than they did at the time as active sites.
But I also understand why it happened.
I was still figuring out who I was online.
I was still learning what kind of webmaster I wanted to be.
I was still learning that the site could not just be built on anger, ambition, or the hope that other people would show up.
It needed direction.
It needed structure.
It needed ownership.
Those lessons stayed with me.
