Shrinky Dinks at the Asian Culture Club

At our last Asian Culture Club, we colored in some anime style Shrinky Dinks, because hey, Shrinky Dinks are always cool! Below is a picture of the finished, shrunken forms, and they came out really good! We should be getting in the first issue of Otaku USA Magazine soon, we just recently subscribed, and I could see using their huge picture layouts for future art projects.

Vocaloid Day at Asian Culture Club!

The Asian Culture Club met Wednesday with a celebration of all things vocaloid! For those that may not know, vocaloids are programs that allow users to make a voice sing in whatever words you want in any pitch you'd like to make music! The voices are each given names and characters to supply them with personality, the most famous of which has to be Hatsune Miku. Below is a video of Hatsune Miku singing a medley of her songs at a live concert in Japan:

For the Asian Culture Club meeting, we compiled YouTube videos into a playlist ahead of time to watch at the meeting. I had my laptop hooked up to a projector and speakers so we could all see and hear it clearly. While the vocaloid songs were playing, I brought a stack of papercraft sheets to construct of various vocaloids and other anime-related characters (and some not so anime-related, but I really really wanted to make a Companion Cube!). In addition, I brought in my PSP with a Japanese import copy of a Hatsune Miku game I happened to own, a music game called Hatsune Miku Project Diva. I had speakers hooked up to it, plus a large pair of headphones if it was too hard to hear (it being a rhythm game, hearing clearly is important!).

The meeting was a lot of fun, papercrafts were made, and Pocky was eaten. At first I was afraid we wouldn't have enough vocaloid clips to fill an entire hour and a half meeting, so I had also invited people to send their favorite anime music videos (AMVs) to append to the list. That turned out to be unnecessary, as we had enough music to last three meetings I think. Perhaps a showing of favorite AMVs can be its own meeting theme another time. The PSP game also got some play time, so that was good (the headphones were used exclusively, as the game couldn't be heard over the music playing).

There were some opportunities for improvement next time however. With such a huge list of vocaloid clips, I was concerned about the fact that not everyone would be able to get their submitted clips shown. Mixing up the playlist to make sure there were submissions from various people throughout could have helped that. The other big problem was the wifi occasionally deciding to quit while playing a clip. I brought in my own laptop hoping it would avoid that problem, as it's done that with the library's laptop before. This wasn't a huge issue, as usually just telling YouTube to go one lower in the video quality would have it reloading just fine. I don't really know what else to do with this issue anyway, so it's most likely one that we'd just have to live with.

The issue of getting more members was brought up, and that's certainly something we need to consider. Our group of regular members is reliable, yet very small, and it would be great to get more people involved. Obviously this is something we'll need to discuss in the near future. Overall the meeting was a lot of fun, and I'm already looking forward to the next one!

Asian Culture Club--6/6/12

For our last meeting of ACC for the year, we made candy sushi and listened to K-pop and J-pop.  Several members had dedicated their Random-A-Thon funds for this group, and we hadn't used much of the money during the spring.  So we decided to blow it all on candy! Using basic junk food like Twinkies, gummy worms, Fruit Rollups, Nerds, and marshmallows, we created some pretty good-looking sushi.  Of course, we ate it with chopsticks!  

Paul, our new Young Adult Librarian, is planning the return of some kind of anime group in the fall, so look for that on the schedule!

Asian Culture Club--2/8/12

The Asian Culture Club has fallen into a pattern of having one anime meeting and one activity meeting per month.  While watching anime this month, we also had a drawing contest on the topic of "school doodles."  I had everyone draw their entries on notebook paper, just like you would when wasting time in actual school!

Asian Culture Club 11/23/11

The day before Thanksgiving, 21 teens came by to watch the amazing anime movie Howl's Moving Castle.  Thirteen of them were regular Asian Culture Club members and eight were visitors, including some college students home on break!  We finished off 14 bags of microwave popcorn during the movie, and also had a drawing contest on the theme of "buildings."  Here are some drawings that won prizes:

by Christine

by Tracey

by Alvin

by ?

Asian Culture Club 11/9/11

Today at our Asian Culture Club meeting, we:

• Hooked people's phones and mp3 players up to the speakers to listen to J-pop and K-pop. 
• Had a ramen bar, where we made our own recipies for different combinations of things to add and tried them out.
• Learned about the classic Japanese anime character Doraemon and had a coloring contest to win a Doraemon crayon set.
• Watched some anime clips, courtesy of Laurel

What did we put in our ramen?  I made chicken-flavored ramen and added extra chicken.  Then, people selected from:  rainbow bell peppers, mushrooms, tomato, onion, carrot, peas, cheddar cheese, mozzarella cheese, and a variety of spices.  Everyone's turned out differently, but no one was unhappy with their choices.  We had enough ramen and supplies for everyone to have seconds, and even thirds!  Want more ramen ideas?  Laurel found a great list of recipes.

Want more Doraemon?  Here is a coloring sheet, and there's also a nice papercraft version of Doraemon available online.

Join us for our next meeting on Wednesday, November 23, from 3:00 to 5:00.  We are starting early so that we can watch Howl's Moving Castle (PG)!  We will have snacks and free drawing time during the movie.