Once upon a time, there was a club called CAS (Caltech Anime Society), which as you can imagine was associated with Caltech. That worked out pretty well from its founding in 1992 until December 2011, at which point there were some issues with the club having too many non-students and not enough students at certain meetings. Not that Caltech minded, except for the fact that campus meeting space and other resources were being used.
The Caltech Anime Society page used to be located at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~anime. It is now archived here as well as on the Internet Archive. We also still have some of the posters made to advertise our showings and special events from when current PCAS members were CAS officers in charge of such things:
Thus, the Power Puff Girls were born! Err, sorry, PCAS (Pasadena Cartoon and Anime Society, or if you prefer just Previously CAS), which is a club for us to continue showing anime and maybe the occasional Venture Brothers episode or something, only not on campus. That doesn't mean we want to exclude Caltech folks - quite the opposite! If you're interested in attending let us know - our showings were always free and open to the public, and so far we're looking to continue that tradition.
We arguably started meeting the weekend of December 9, 2011. Our first regularly-scheduled showings take place January 27, 2012.
After PCAS split off from Caltech, we got in contact with a few students still on the mailing list in an attempt to return what we had of the club library to them (VHS fansubs ripped/converted to burned DVDs; the legitimate DVDs owned by CAS had been kept on campus the whole time). This didn't end up going anywhere, but a group of students did restart CAS and keep it going, at least until they graduated a few years later. They had replaced the classic webpage with a more modern design, but after some years of the club being moribund, even that went away.
We spent time holding showings at various member's homes: Gene's, Guy's (transitioning to David's when Guy moved out of the area), and sometimes Arthur's. That lasted right up until, I don't know, March 2020.
This is the COVID lockdown era. Our last weekend of in-person showings for quite a while was March 13-14, 2020. After that we were able to quickly get set up for online showings on Discord thanks to very timely advice from Steve (that is, Steve Racer; we've sometimes needed to distinguish between up to 4 attendees named Steve). We continued holding showings via Discord - with no shortage of technical issues - until mid-May 2021, when everyone had received both doses of their COVID vaccines.
Once everyone was fully vaccinated, we started meeting in-person again, first at David's on Saturdays, then a couple weeks later at Gene's on Fridays. This time was different than before, however - we kept Discord in the mix, holding hybrid online/in-person showings. This allowed people who had various scheduling challenges to still attend and participate socially, at least in part and notably included members who were living out of the state or even out of the country, such as Adam.
In December 2021, both of our regular in-person hosts moved. Gene relocated to Indiana, so Alan took up Friday showings. David moved...maybe 4 blocks south, from an apartment that could be a bit cramped on Saturday night showings to a much larger condo, so he continued to host Saturdays, except for a 1-week hiatus covered at Alan's.
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