Animethon and ASAPA:

An outsider’s perspective on Animethon 18 and things to come.

As many of you have heard or suspect Animethon is a fair ways behind schedule, as compared with previous years. In addition to this the lack of information made available from ASAPA and the Animethon Committee for the community and event attendees has been severely lacking in the recent months. At one point there were even rumours the event may be postponed till 2012 or cancelled entirely. More recently progress has been made in establishing channels of communication with the launch of the ASAPA and Animethon websites which went live early last week. While still lacking a fair amount of information this is a huge step in the right direction, making ready areas for guest information and other panels and such that will be taking place at the event. The preregistration section is currently under development as they are making a system for online preregistration to simplify the process and cut down on paper use. As of last weekend the estimated time for the preregistration forms to go live for attendees was the end of the month, but that may be subject to delays based on development and testing. The vendors package information has already been made available for those interested in booking tables in the vendors hall. The site is quickly coming together and will soon be fully functional. New forums are under development that will replace the old phpBB forums that are currently in use, and in a terrible state of disrepair. With the vast improvements to their websites and forums, communication with the community and attendees should improve, and con-goers will have an easier go of finding information, registering and the like in the future. This will be a huge boon for future Animethons, as the systems being developed now will be available and fully developed for future events. Along with improvements to the web presence and information distribution channels, some potential organizational changes to help make the event more sustainable and stable between Animethon events may be in the works for the Animethon Committee. More on the organizational and policy changes will be discussed in the future as information becomes available.

The rushed schedule for this year may result in a slightly rushed convention, but if it improves future events will the sacrifice for one year be worthwhile and benefit the community? If everything gets followed through and implemented properly, yes. I remain optimistic for the potential improvements to Animethon; however, only time will show us how things turn out.

Matthew Cockle

President, MacEwan MangAnime Club

So I hope everyone had fun at SobaBowl, it was nice to see so many of you actually show up. I had the opportunity to speak with some people from ASAPA while I was there which was nice, hopefully we can work things out so we can participate in Animethon this year and promote the club. I was invited to attend the board of directors meeting for Animethon Planning which should be interesting and informative, as up till now I have had a hard time contacting anyone or gathering any information. We are looking into getting the club executives in to a course that would allow them to rate shows with the Alberta Film Board which would allow us to rate shows for public viewings and allow us to function outside of an educational capacity for such events and conventions by rating our shows with the film board. Still working on figuring out the club’s financial situation, it was a back burner issue for a while but hopefully I will understand more about the club’s current account balance, how we earn/procure funding via the SA, what sorts of fundraisers/donations we are allowed to do/recieve, etc. Once that is resolved we will look into getting a sign with the club logo (once the logo is finished of course) for future use, a web domain for the website and of course we will look into either better prizes for draws or doing draws more often.

As for weekly meetings, I posted this weeks anime today and the next three weeks, including this Thursday have been decided by requests. Please by all means continue to request shows, however please understand if it takes a while to get to them once in a while. Lastly while on the topic of weekly meetings, last week there was a lot of rather raucus discussion throughout the shows and I received a couple complaints about it. I don’t mind a little quiet discussion or laughter, or a witty comment here and there but in the future if it becomes an issue I will ask people to step outside and finish their conversation. Please try to keep your voices down during shows and be tactful and mindful of the atmosphere, just because you don’t appreciate a show doesn’t mean a few people might not want to watch it. It is one thing to laugh and shoot jokes about Hapxiel in Wasshoi episode 5 where everyone is laughing and another thing entirely to be talking loudly during a show like Haibane Renmei or Mushishi which have a more sombre and serious air about them. Off with the serious business hat and back to the fun stuff; I look forward to seeing you all this week on Thursday and please remember that if you would like to and are able to attend meetings on Monday from 6-9 at U of A you are more than welcome to come (or come for part of it if you need to show up late or leave early.)

We postponed a couple of the Anime till this week as the turn out was rather small, and the requestees of certain shows were not present. We ended up watching Gosick and Bakemonogatari, should anyone who wasn’t able to attend be interested in either just bring a flash drive and we can get you some/all of either (well not all of Gosick cus it’s still airing but you get the idea). This week we will watch Ikki Tousen and Bounen no Xam’d, we were going to watch Nyankoi but the download is really slow so we will save it for another week (episode 1 is the only one not finished and it’s been going for like two weeks now). Also there will be a draw for a Manga and some random Garcher Surprise that he picked up at  AToA or something.

Finally we have a site seperate from OrgSync, which is awesome. Next we will work on getting that logo done, as well as getting some forums up and running.