Anime Club and Nintendo Night this week!

Tomorrow is Anime Club at Sellers Library, and we'll be watching the very entertaining and very weird Assassination Classroom! It's at 3:30 and open to all teens in grades 6-12, so stop on by!

Stop by Sellers #Library tomorrow for #Anime Club at 3:30! We'll be screening Assassination Classroom!

A video posted by @sellerslibraryteens on Feb 16, 2016 at 11:49am PST

And this Friday night we'll be hosting a Super Smash Bros. Wii U tournament during Nintendo Night! There's still room, so come in to the library to sign up, and get a permission slip (which will be required to enter the tournament).

Don't miss the upcoming Anime Club meeting!

I'll be posting the schedule for the next few  months here tomorrow, but in the meantime, I wanted to let everyone know that tomorrow is Anime Club! From 3:30 to 5:00 We'll be watching the comedy The Devil Is A Part-Timer! We'll also have a trivia contest of Who's That Pokemon!

#Anime Club tomorrow at Sellers #Library! We'll be screening the comedy The Devil Is A Part-Timer! Don't miss it!

A video posted by @sellerslibraryteens on Jan 19, 2016 at 8:23am PST

Random-A-Thon and other upcoming programs!

Our big fundraiser for Sellers Library teen programs, the Random-A-Thon, is just a week away! Next Saturday from 10 to 3 we'll be hosting all sorts of events, from anime to Connect 4, from papercrafts to Super Smash Bros, there's something for everyone to check out! It's a $10 minimum donation to enter.

On Wednesday, March 5, we'll be doing temporary tattoo crafts at 3:30. I'll have some designs on hand for anyone to use, such as the Deathly Hallows symbol and the Hunger Games Mockingjay, but you're welcome to bring in your own or just freehand it if you're feeling brave!

On Wednesday, March 12 we'll be making 6-second book trailers for Teen Tech Week! We'll have some iPads on hand to use, or if you've got a Vine-enabled device you can use that too. We'll plan out and make some 6-second book trailers, then at the end we'll show them on the projector for a mini-marathon! Come with a book in mind, and if you have any props you'd like to use, feel free to bring them too.

March 19th is the third Wednesday of the month, and that means it's the Anime Club! Each month we vote on a title to watch while we hang out and talk manga, anime and anything else!

Pokemon Night will be Friday, March 21 from 6 to 8. We'll be having a tournament for the X and Y Pokemon games, as well as free play on older console Pokemon titles. Come in costume for a chance at a prize!

March 26 will be the Tabletop Gaming event, a personal favorite of mine, where for two hours we'll be offering a ton of board games to choose from! From classics to new titles, we'll have a little of everything. You're welcome to bring your own games as well!

I hope to see lots of you at all these upcoming events! And if you're around Saturday, make sure to stop by the Random-A-Thon fundraiser, which helps us raise money to do all these teen programs!

Upcoming November events

This Wednesday will be our Explosion Box craft at Sellers Library from 3:30 to 5:00! I've started an example box, which you can see below. The outside is blackout poetry, the inside is cut up manga!

Next week on Wednesday from 3:30 to 5:00 will be our Anime Club meeting! We'll have snacks and vote on an anime to watch and play some anime bingo!

Friday the 29th will be our Hunger Games Night! From 6:00 to 8:00 we'll be playing Hunger Games related ...well, games, as well as trivia and crafts! Signups are currently open for the Explosion Boxes and Hunger Games Night. The Anime Club does not require registration. 

Anime Club! Candy sushi! Anime Jeopardy!

Last Wednesday, 13 teens showed up for our first Anime Club meeting of the fall! We started things off with making some yummy candy sushi, then we broke off into four teams to play a few rounds of Anime Jeopardy! The winning team each got a box of Pocky to enjoy while watching the day's selected anime. The group voted from five choices, and Sword Art Online juuuuust won, making it by one vote! We watched the first two episodes before we ran out of time. It was a fun afternoon that was over much too quickly! Also, I was kicking myself for forgetting my phone, so I don't have any pictures of the event! Boo! For anyone that wants to play the home version of Anime Jeopardy, click the link below! It'll let you enter teams, and keep track of the score. You can even edit it to make your own custom game!
Click here to play!

Anime Jeopardy!

Candy sushi! Fruit Roll-Up "nori" wrapped around Rice Krispy treats and gummy worms!

The next Anime Club meeting isn't until November, and I hope to see everyone there again! We'll have more snacks, more trivia and more anime watching!

Otaku USA Magazine now in the teen section!

I'm happy to announce that we now carry the magazine Otaku USA at Sellers! The magazine covers "manga, anime, videogames and Japanese pop culture from an American point of view". It also includes preview chapters of upcoming manga in each issue. The magazine is bi-monthly, so look forward to new issues every other month. I've always thought it was a shame that Shonen Jump made the move to digital-only and have been looking for a magazine to fill the void. While not offering the same type of content, I hope that Otaku USA will cater to the same audience and beyond, with the inclusion of videogame and movie news and reviews. Our first issue is currently on the teen graphic novel shelf, and will be shelved next to the Shonen Jump magazines in the future.

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 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.