Time to vote on shows for and build our Winter schedule.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: We started with voting, and came out of that with a few questions about some shows. Some folks didn't remember the first episode of Clevatess, so we re-sampled that. Then we watched Shy Hero and the Assassin Princesses ep 2.
We took break then (just after Arthur made it on the call). After break we re-sampled Dark Gathering, then switched to VLC and watched the Undead Unluck Winter Arc, followed by sampling/re-sampling Dagashi Kashi episode 1. We had some time left after that, so based on Adam's request we re-sampled Scavenger's Reign (HBO Max).
Attendance:
Notes: We started with schedule-building, but didn't spend too much time on that. By 7:10 we were ready to actually start watching shows. Alan had previously suggested watching Porco Rosso tonight, but Adam had voted for it and he didn't expect to make it tonight so we were inclined to fit it into the season later.
Instead, we started by sampling Tamon's B-side. Victor made it just a few minutes into the episode. We followed up withJack-of-all-Trades, Party of None. Then we watched Fate/Strange Fake episode 1 (we'd sampled episode 0 shortly after it debuted...over a year ago).
After intermission, we watched the Kaguya-sama: Love is War -Stairway to Adulthood- special. We finished out the night by sampling the hour-long premiere of Sentenced to Be a Hero.
Our Winter planning looked a bit like this:
Last week we put together our Winter 2026 schedule. This week we start it, but not quite with the full, normal schedule since Anime Los Angeles takes place this Thursday, January 8 - Sunday, January 11 at the Long Beach Convention Center (details available on Guidebook's site as well as in the app) and Alan is attending multiple days - that's why he can't host showings at his house (or online) this Friday. Other club members may be attending one or more days as well.
Attendance:
Notes: David streamed up until intermission. Alan arrived then, and because we had a very long intermission we decided to watch only 1 episode of Dagashi Kashi...but then ended up watching 2 episodes after all.
The club bailed on the sampler partway through.
Attendance:
Notes: Alan, David, and Brian all made it to Anime LA; only Alan stayed late enough to be late to showings, arriving maybe 3/4 of the way through Catch Me at the Ballpark!
The club made it through both of the night's samplers, albeit without any particular enthusiasm.
Studio 4C's anime film All You Need Is Kill - Studio 4C's anime film adaptation of the novel of the same name - is in theaters this week. You may have seen some version of this before, either via the manga adaptation or the live-action movie featuring Tom Cruise: Edge of Tomorrow (perhaps better known by its tagline "Live. Die. Repeat"). In any case, it's in a pretty fair number of theaters in the area, mostly in the AMC chain.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: David told us he couldn't host showings in person this Saturday and couldn't guarantee he'd be able to stream shows, either.
Attendance:
Notes: 1st paragraph sample notes.
Last week we were unable to hold Saturday showings at David's, so we held them on Discord. In case the same situation comes up this week, Saturday showings can use Alan's as a backup location (for those willing to make the longer drive), or we can remain online-only that night.
Jeapordy had an Anime category recently, which I find interesting both as a sign that anime is now seen as popular enough in America that Jeapordy contestants at least should know it (I imagine Family Feud anime categories are still a couple dacdes away), and also for exactly what questions contestants were able to answer right away and which ones stopped them in their tracks. The ANN article I linked to embeds a Youtube clip, and it gives an idea of roughly what era of anime these folks are familiar with.
A couple days ago, the Crunchyroll Store delisted over 100 Discotek releases out of nowhere. Some were out of print, but a majority weren't - it seems likely someone decided to cull a bunch of titles which were seen as slow sellers. At any rate, MediaOCD/AnimEigo will start carrying Discotek's entire back catalog
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: David joined remotely tonight, but expected he would be able to host this Saturday.
We had Shiboyugi scheduled as the sampler, but it's double-length. We swapped for the sampler planned for next Saturday In the Clear Moonlit Dusk (CR).
Attendance:
Notes: David was able to host this Saturday. Also, he had cake.
Lunar New Year is in a couple of weeks, but as usual Monterey Park is celebrating a couple weeks early. In other words, this weekend.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: Shiboyugi is well-produced but something we pretty clearly do not care to watch.
Attendance:
Notes: Dark Moon: the Blood Altar is pretty dumb, but possibly dumb enough to be very entertaining (though not as promising from episode 1 as Phantom in the Twilight, let alone Dances with Devils). In contrast, Oedo Fire Slayer just isn't very good - it looks quite bad, and it isn't written well enough to make up for other shortcomings.
Samplers this weekend are both remakes of older shows. "Both" because we're only watching 1 each night - we need the extra time Saturday so we can start Ergo Proxy; we'll be transitioning from the front to back half of our season over the next couple weeks.
Crunchyroll followed up on delisting over 100 150 titles from their store over the last week or two with another bold strategy: increasing their subscription prices.
Events this weekend:
Long Valentine's Day weekend. Maybe rainy. And we're still transitioning between front and back halves of our season, finishing off Clevatess and City on Friday, and the 1st half of Dirty Pair TV, Catch Me at the Ballpark!, and SANDA on Saturday. We aren't starting ost of the new shows until next week, but we got going on Ergo Proxy last Saturday and we'll kick off Slayers Revolution this Saturday.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: 1st paragraph sample notes
Attendance:
Notes: ...
This Friday we start Frieren season 2, May I Ask for One Final Thing, and Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider - quite a bit of violence, when you come down to it. On Saturday we start the final season of My Hero Academia and make a bit of time to squeeze in Porco Rosso.
MediaOCD has put up their next set of Discotek Deep Dive titles for order.
Attendance:
Notes: Adam is back in the US for the indefinite future, but at least for this week he wasn't up for the travel time required to get to and from showings.
Attendance:
Notes: Guy isn't sure if he'll be around next week or if he'll be busy packing more stuff to move to his new place. Brian opted to leave early - we moved Ergo Proxy before Porco Rosso to accommodate - because he needed time to recover from needing to be up early the last couple weekends.
Saturday showings this week will be remote-only.
Crunchyroll has a clearance sale going on through midnight Pacific Time (think of it as ending Friday 2/27 at 23:59) with what look like significant discounts. Why would they go into a clearance sale at the end of February when they don't have a holiday to market around? Hard to say, but perhaps it has to do with news this week that the RightStuf warehouse in Iowa is up for sale - apparently Sony/CR never acquired it during the sale and have been renting it for around half a million dollars per year.
You Will [not] Believe This, but they're making more Evangelion. No, not animation for pachinko machines - I'm pretty sure they don't bother to announce that. Not more Rebuild movies either. A whole new series, with a completely different director, plus writing from someone you've heard of but haven't seen associated with Eva before.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: David wasn't feeling well this week, so he decided to stay and avoid hosting Saturday showings.
Attendance:
Notes: Guy didn't get the notification about remote-only showings in time, so he showed up at David's. He left before we started showings, didn't make it back online until the 2nd episdoe of Slayers Revolution, but dropped off shortly afterward.
The first sampler for tonight (Dead Account) was a pretty generic shonen series, distinguished only by its (very superficial) schtick. The 2nd sampler (The Villainness is Adored...) was even more generic, or at least more frustrating in its genericity - the public denouncement scene is something the club almost always finds galling (much like the "getting kicked out of the party" scenes in that sub-genre), but somehow this time it seemed almost frustrating in its blandness.
Daylight Saving Time begins this Sunday, which means we all lose an hour of weekend time. Also this Sunday: OceanVeil starts streaming Cream Lemon. Yes, that Cream Lemon, the 80s hentai OVA anthology series whose influence led not only to early (USENET-era) English-speaking fandom calling certain types of fanfiction "lemons", but also the creation of Project A-ko, which was originally meant to be part of Cream Lemon. I don't know that people familiar with this would necessarily recommend people watch any of the OVA episodes (except maybe Pop Chaser?), but it's interesting to see titles so important in early fandom get picked up.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: I don't expect we'll be in a big hurry to watch The Darwin Incident, but it is interesting to see anime which is so clearly set in America even if the awful high school kids have an extraordinarily philosophical bent to their bullying.
Attendance:
Notes: Guy showed up partway into the 1st episode of Slayers, Victor right at the end of it.
Wash It All Away seemed like it had some potential. There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party might also have some potential, but probably only enough for half-length episodes.
AnimEigo is retiring their members' program - they're doing well enough these days that they don't need it anymore. This means a bunch of their bonus episodes of The Anime Business which were previously members-only are now available on YouTube for everyone. It's funny to think how much of their present success may result from Crunchyroll behaving self-destructively: did you know that in addition to CR facing a class action lawsuit alleging they illegally disclosed user information to a 3rd-party company they're apparently in the middle of another wave of layoffs, less than 6 months from the last. AnimEigo's owner Justin Sevakis mentioned that this round CR laid off everyone at the Crunchyroll store that AnimEigo interfaces with.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: David was interested in sampling something different after the first episode of Champignon Witch and - since nobody else expressed an opinion - we moved on to Love Through a Prism.
Between that and us planning for 11 episodes of Frieren when it appears this season only has 10 and some other miscalculations, we probably have time for three additional episodes of samplers or features on our remaining Fridays. We can swap in some Dagashi Kashi, but we might also want to watch an episode of the secret prequel to Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider, and maybe early samplers of shows which are listed for Spring season but are scheduled to be available mid-March.
Attendance:
Notes: David mentioned he'll be out of town two weeks from now (week 12); based on discussion at a later date, he expects to be busy both days that weekend, so he's unlikely to join week 12 showings remotely, at least not for any length of time.
David won't be available next weekend, in-person or online (well, maybe briefly), so our Girls und Panzer feature has been moved up to this week. That does create a bit of a scheduling challenge though - I was hoping to have us sample Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run since it hit Netflix just the day before, and this lets us minimize being spoiled on at least the first episode (yes, Netflix is airing episodes weekly instead of in big 12-episode drops). However, I got spoiled on a single detail of the first episode: it's double-length. So that presents a scheduling challenge.
My proposed schedule involves us doing dropping to 1 episode each of May I Ask For One Final Thing and Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider this week: David didn't vote for either of them, and they're on Crunchyroll so he can easily catch up if desired. We can watch 3 of each of those shows next Friday when our only other ongoing will be the final episode of Frieren for this season.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: We decided to go ahead with sampling Steel Ball Run’s first (double-length) episode after Girls und Panzer and the break.
Attendance:
Notes: There was a lot of competition for parking spots, just like last Saturday (because the nearby baseball diamond was in use).
It's the last week of our Winter showings and we're finishing out most of our series with a few exceptions: Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider, Slayers Revolution (which continues as Slayers Evolution-R), Ergo Proxy, and Dagashi Kashi (which we barely had time for this season - we're only hitting episode 4 this week). Also, as mentioned previously David is unavailable this weekend so (among other things) this Saturday showings will be online-only.
Events this weekend:
Attendance:
Notes: This season of Frieren really did wrap up after 10 episodes. And this "season" of Jojo - at least the current release - really did take a break after 1 double-length episode.
Attendance:
Notes: Tonight's samplers were two back-to-back isekai shows, and both were...not awful, or even bad? Not especially deep or novel, but not objectionable or even particularly rote. It was kind of refreshing.