We are happy to announce the official launch of arisuchan.jp.
arisuchan is an anonymous imageboard where artists, programmers, tech enthusiasts, outsiders, and the paranoid and disillusioned meet to discuss cyberpunk literature and culture, privacy and security, science and technology, art and design, drugs and dreams, and personal experiences. Our goal is to provide a venue for new ideas to emerge as we explore the strange territories of the present and the near-future.
arisuchan is a joint effort on behalf of the lainchan.jp, systemspace, and chaos.fm communities, and our staff includes former administrators, moderators, and members of each of these groups. We are united by our passion for cyberpunk culture and literature and we are building a community that encompasses our shared interests and experiences, exemplifying the overlap between our distinctive boards.
lainchan.jp was in crisis. Our site activity was no longer self-sustaining and the number of visitors and posts was trending downward. This situation left lainchan.jp vulnerable to collapse. Our ability to grow and thrive as a community was inherently limited by our association with lainchan and all of the drama surrounding it. In light of this we decided it was in the best interest of the community to change our name and try and build something new.
Sharing a name with another board was inherently political. As long as we continued calling ourselves lainchan, we could never fully realize our potential. We want to be what Lainchan should have been but couldn’t be.
We chose arisuchan because it allows us to remain attached to the Serial Experiments Lain universe and Lain-oriented sites and services. At the same time, it allows us to explore the inspiration for Arisu's name, Alice in Cyberland, which itself was inspired by Alice in Wonderland. The story of Alice in Wonderland plays with logic and dreams, altered states of consciousness, abstract imagery and psychoactive substances; these are all concepts explored in cyberpunk media, and there are many direct references to Alice in Wonderland in works in the genre.
The point is not to make the board about Arisu, just as applechan wasn’t necessarily about Lain. By naming our board after a supporting character in Serial Experiments Lain, we choose a nam
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