About the Shrine

My name is Brandon Ditto. I'm a 35-year old man that has resided in Ohio his entire life. I have a simple life that mostly revolves around interests and simple hobbies. Video games are definitely my biggest hobby. I have a rarely updated Dreamcast site called It's Still Thinking. Dragon Ball is also one of my longest running interests. I'm happy to say that I've felt it necessary in recent time to bring back my website that brought me so much joy in the earlier part of my life.

The Ultimate Shrine to Tenshinhan was originally created on July 13th, 2000 with Angelfire’s free web hosting. I was 13 years old at the time and had maybe a year or 2 of self-taught experience on website making (I had a general DBZ website that I don't remember the name of--or the URL, haha!). I think I may have deleted it long ago since it had a lot of copied text from other websites. As I became a teenager, I wanted to really to create something unique that set myself apart from the typical fan sites of the time. I found it strange nobody really had much Tenshinhan content at the time. He was by far the coolest character on the show and it's always amazed me how little attention he was given. The greatest accomplishment I had with the site was when I was accepted to be on PlanetNamek.com's link page. It was surreal! I mean that was THE Dragon Ball fan site at the time. I was getting 1000+ unique hits a day. I was actually quite overwhelmed with all the e-mails I was getting.

I remember the word ultimate was used quite frequently in DB websites at the time. My intent was to truly be the ultimate Tenshinhan website though. I later changed the name to the Tenshinhan Ichidou. One way or another I thought ichidou meant shrine in Japanese. That doesn't seem to be the case. I realized this when I used google translate years later (I found it was actually jinja). At that point, I wanted to recreate the site with my own domain. That's when I created Tenshinhan Jinja. I no longer have the TenshinhanJina.com domain but the website can still be accessed within the links to the left. I severely neglected the Tenshinhan Jinja and never accomplished what I set out to do; rewrite all the content and provide all-original multimedia. Video games probably preoccupied me and I simply lost the drive to finish it.

Fast forward to more recent years: My love of Dragon Ball was rekindled with the 2 DBZ sequel films and the anime/manga, Dragon Ball Super. I was delighted to have Tenshinhan in such a prominent role. I really thought he would be neglected at this point. Revival of 'F' film was quite the shock for me to find Tenshinhan back in legitimate action. And when word of the 10-person team for the Tournament of Power arrived, it was like I was little kid again anticipating my dreams of Tenshinhan being apart of that group (I was so worried he wouldn't be as well). When I found out he was, my fanboy excitement was at a level I'm not sure it had ever been at! I'm not the biggest fan of Dragon Ball Super overall, but it has at the very least had me gleefully anticipating what was to come of Tenshinhan.

With all that's occurred with Tenshinhan's character since I stopped working on the site, I felt it was necessary to come back and create the shrine he deserves! I have gone back to my origins with a web site title that encapsulates the original goal; to be The Ultimate Shrine to Tenshinhan. I also decided to go with a nostalgic look and feel. I was inspired by my very original main banner (only piece of the original site that remains):

I’ve obviously updated the styling a little, but I want this website to have that late 90’s to early 2000’s spirit that pervaded the absolutely massive amount of Dragon Ball fan sites of that era. I have even purposely limited the amount of colors of the site’s layout images to give that late 90’s dithered GIF aesthetic. So here it is. It's back and I think it's going to truly be the best it's ever been. I hope it also brings you a feeling of nostalgia for what felt like such a exciting time of the internet and Dragon Ball craze. Thank you for visiting!