I’m including myself in this statement, but I’ve been busy trying to make sure everything is ready for AWA and trying to find a job so I can afford AWA.  It also doesn’t help that the new expansion for City of Heroes came out, so I’ve been living in Paragon City for the past week or two.

Yeah I know, excuses excuses.  What’s kind of caught me off guard is I am not alone.

Either way, while I’ve been gone, Anime Kanarazu has come to an interesting crossroad.

We had an incident at a prior meeting that I won’t go into because its better left alone, but it was what got this ball rolling, and I honestly have to say that it’s a good thing.  But here’s where the crossroad comes in, we put a lot of work into each meeting trying to make it fun and its apparently coming to no real end.  I’ll be the first to say that both of my panels have ended up in the junk heap because they didn’t flesh out the way I had hoped.  Brandon has said himself that his panel is impossible to come up with material for due to the nature of the medium and time constraints.  So far, Allan is the only one to keep a panel worth being there for, and he handles two of them, but even then its not as interactive as we would like.

So, the problem is, we do all this work and nothing comes of it it seems.  Not to say that any of us really mind doing the work, just that if its pointless its pointless.

One of our members put it best after the last meeting, we just want everyone to “take ownership” in their club.  Even though three of us are “administrative members” all that means is that we get to do the paperwork essentially.  So, how do we go about this?  That’s where we’re stuck.

Now, on another perspective, a problem we’re also having is that the “business” part of the meeting seems to bring the meeting down, not to mention that it goes on forever and because some people can only come every so often I end up repeating the same things every meeting it seems (holy run-on sentence Batman!).  Our solution to this is that we would like to start handling all the business through the website and the forums.  This in itself poses another problem where getting people to post on serious posts (aside from AWA) is like pulling teeth.

At the mention of AWA, a third problem we’ve reached is that we’re becoming what appears to be an AWA club with randomness and amusing profanity thrown in.  This is not what we want by any means, so from here on out I will be doing my best to avoid talking about AWA anywhere besides the forums.

Either way, all this has me needlessly frustrated and I can’t seem to come up with a solution.

Blah~

–Ace - wishing he could find his “Haruhi Frustrated” avatar

I’ve been doing this panel for about 4 months now, although usually I toss it out the window and save any material I had if we have a low turn-out for whatever reason.  I’ll be honest, this panel has not gone in the direction I wanted it to at all.  My initial idea was to watch an episode of a series that I had pre-selected before each meeting, then formulate a group review of that episode to post on our website.  So far, out of several times that we’ve completed this panel, only once has a group review come out of it, and there wasn’t nearly enough information for me to attempt to write an article.

This is not for lack of trying on my or my club member’s parts, but it seems that there is a fundamental flaw in the thought of group reviews.  Yes, people do them all the time on blogs, but those tend to be a round table discussion amongst two or three people, not trying to formulate an opinion based on 15 people.

The other thing I’ve noticed is, its hard to get people to talk about an anime after watching it sometimes.  This is primarily my fault.  I’ve realized I have no idea what questions I should be asking aside from “So, what did you all think of that?”  and obviously that yields little to no results.

That being said, I’m reaching another bump in the road.  I’m running out of DVDs to use.  Yes, I could start showing fansubs but I don’t feel it would be morally fit to show a fansub at a public showing (not to mention that the last time we did, it was a fansubbed trailer and someone began telling everyone in the area that we were pirating anime).

So my thoughts at this moment are this.  I’ve been thinking for a month or longer on what to do about this stale presentation, and I’m pretty much at a loss.  If I can come up with something new, this coming meeting (May 10th) will be the final use of Ace’s Anime, simply because I’m not sure where to take it, nor do I have any ideas on how to fix the seemingly inherent problems with the design of it.

Until I return, think on this; One day, the entire world will Hare Hare Yukai and on that day, true world piece will be achieved.