Anime Club Continues in 2025!

For the month of October, the screening will be on Saturday 10/18 at 5:30pst!

Last year we met once a month to watch through Katanagatari, Samurai Champloo, and Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran together, in keeping with the original broadcast schema of Katanagatari. People seemed to like this, so I have prepared a new slate of shows for 2025!

Headlining is a harebrained chronological screening of Hidamari Sketch! We'll be checking in with Yunocchi and friends throughout her first year of high school to see what they've been up to that month.

Over the course of the series' four season run, we're treated to a front row seat to both the personal growth of Yuno and friends as they develop their senses of identity, as well as the growth of Studio SHAFT itself, as they developed and refined aspects of their house style they would go on to employ to great effect in later works such as Bakemonogatari, Madoka Magica, and many others.

Backing that up, I've picked out a few other shows to accompany it, following a theme of highly stylized slice of life and teen drama shows:

Kare Kano is a personal favorite that I think showcases a lot of what makes both Anno-era and post-Anno Gainax great.
SoreMachi shares the talent of director Akiyuki Shinbo and studio SHAFT with Hidamari, and has been on my personal to-watch list for quite a while. It features maids! We love maids, right?
Super Gals! is a frenetic dash through youth subculture in early 2000s Shibuya, featuring lots of highly era specific language, fashion, and tech, wrapped up in a psychedelic scrapbook-esque presentation.

Dates will be decided on social media at the beginning of each month (or by my command decision if the schedule is tight) and a flyer will be created about a week in advance. Expect it to happen on a Weekend night around 4:30pst. You can tune in here if you're interested.

We hope to see you there!

haruhi dressed as kyo kusanagi breaks out of an activity page about meat and the politics thereof to demand you fill out some paper slips with your wishes to orihime and hikoboshi. the activity page is largely obscured.

flyer contianing event info. two butterflies rendered in half tone perch atop a scribbly peony flower, like from hanafuda.

a crossword puzzle sits in the center of a posterized screencap of rakka's cocoon from haibane renmei. along the bottom are clues relating to various kinds of larva and pupa. along the top, obscured text reads: Does the pupa remember being a caterpillar? What does it know of the imago it will one day become? All it knows is endless, tumultuous change. In some vague way, it knows the flavor of its favorite leaves, but no longer has a mouth with which to eat them. It knows it once heaved its body along on stubby pseudopods, but finds itself now imprisoned. The experience of its worldly life fades and becomes alien, dreamlike. The outside world becomes unreal. As the flesh changes, it too loses its reality. Dreams within dreams, hallucinating bodies it may once have had. And what of this new form? Could these spindly new legs really carry it anywhere? With this long tube on its face, will it ever enjoy a proper meal of tender roughage again? And these garishly colored protrusions from its back, won’t that just make it an easy target for predators, visible by birds leagues away? In time the roaring chaos of its body will end. The pain and uncertainty of transformation will be forgotten. In time she will certainly look back upon this period as foolishness. Or maybe she will forget as easily as she forgets what it was like to be a caterpillar. Soon, the only life she will have known is one of soaring, one of travel across vast distances, unimaginable to her old self. She will learn the taste of honeydew and wonder how she ever did without.

page 1 is a vector illustration of one of the eight plank bridges surrounded by irises from tales of ise featured on the may hanafuda cards, as seen from above. text explaining event details follows the path of the bridge. a processed photo of an anchor, representing the guilty gear character may rests among the flowers.

page 2 features a word search with critters known for sequential hermaphroditism (a process where an animal naturally changes its sex) superimposed over a black and white processed photo of a clownfish in an anemone. the anemone obscures a panel of kanade and keiichirou from the doujin natsu no takenawa. behind them is a transcription of kanade's monologue about clownfish. it reads: keiichirou: Did you find anything interesting? Ooh, these are those fish from that movie! kanade: …Did you know that clownfish are sequential hermaphrodites keiichirou: Sequential wha? Kanade: Sequential hermaphrodites. Because a fish with a larger body can make more eggs, the one with a bigger body in a clownfish pair turns female. There are a lot of fish that have a fuzzy boundary between the sexes, actually. keiichirou: …Oh. kanade: It’s a pretty handy system, right? Being able to change sex based on the situation gives you an advantage as an organism. But... They say that organisms like humans have genitals that are too complex, so they can’t do that.

side 1 is a take on the cuckoo with crescent moon hanafuda card, where the cuckoo is replaced with an f-117 nighthawk sporting fire sisters fried egg livery.

side 2 features a fresnel lens from a lighthouse and a word search. Text within the lens is obscured and reads: Stop! Freeze! Don’t move a muscle! The lurid gaze of the spotlight shines on you, furtive creature of the dark. Its blinding rays paint over you, it shows them what they want to see. You’re the prop-devil they’ve been looking for. Foul creature! Unclean thing! Basilisk! Deafening, disorienting alarm bell clangs and klaxon howls follow you as you dart through the woods, away from their sweeping lights. The cover of night, your oldest tool, is being stripped away. The shelter the dense foliage and thick canopy used to provide is useless when the spotlight is trained directly on you. You run and you run and you run and you run. Delirious, exhausted, a warped sense of nostalgia twists the desperate, hungry days of your youth clawing for scraps in the underbrush into a comforting dream. It casts those reaching timidly towards the warmth of daylight as fools entranced by a siren-like call. It papers over the quiet violence of a life spent out of sight. You think: I wish I could go back. You think: At least it was never like this. Search-lights pry you from your cynical navel gazing. You’re at a dead end. The incandescent beams pin you to the wall, unable to move. You attempt to cry out, but your voiceless screams reach no one over the cacophony of light. Your world is on fire as the rays sear your flesh. Nothing else can exist. No sensation except blinding, livid burning. Every nerve ending calls out in unison, extinguished one by one. Your mind dredges up one final, gasping fulmination before your grey matter melts and dribbles out your brain-pan and it’s all over. You thought: What good is visibility anyway?

2 page spread. page 1 contains event details and contrasts an angular cherry blossom design against a wavy festival banner in the foreground and a photograph of cherry trees in the background.

page 2. photos of a video camera lens and a cardcaptor sakura figure placed in opposition to each other. a circle is placed behind sakura to imply that the camera is looking at her. between the photos, text reads: Try not to panic. You’re being watched. Every second of every day, night, and morning, the camera is pointed at you. Its gaze is unrelenting and unforgiving. Your every micro-movement, micro-expression and micro-thought captured in the immortal medium of silicon and disseminated to the world in nano-zepto-yocto-seconds. You’ve felt it, haven’t you? In the chit-chatter when you return to a room, the dead fish eyed gaze on the bus, in the water-closet, the work-place. That piercing stare of glass and electronics, perceiving, ever perceiving. In time you even learned to see the feed yourself. To see your self through the uncaring, unfeeling, unempathizing eyes around you. Perceiving from outside became easier than from inside. And what is inside? Is there anything left, or is there only the camera? A recursive view, mirror to mirror, reflections of reflections stretching out into infinity in all directions…

2 page spread. page 1 contains event details and contrasts highly stylized plum blossoms against a processed photograph of a warbling white-eye bird.

page 2 features a photo of one of my dad's watches and a crossword, and also a lot of pseudointellectual filler text mainly hidden behind screengrabs of sae and hiro

A series of simple geometric shapes forming a pinecone, contrasted against a posterized photo of pine needles. A photograph of a y2k era flip phone draws the eye. Event information is displayed: Hidamari Sketch, Kareshi Kanojyo no Jijyo, Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru, and Super Gals! Kotobuki Ran. Sunday January twenty-sixth, at Cytu.be/r/onthismonthandthisevening. The journey begins anew!

A crossword puzzle. Black and grey shapes continue contours from the pinecone on the previous page. The crossword itself is positioned at a right angle to said shapes. Between the hints and the crossword is a connect the dots using a photo of a figure of Yuno from Hidamari, and behind that is a pseudointellectual ramble about the Heisei era. Gaps in the crossword are filled with posterized photos and flavor text.