"Where's the meeting this week?"

The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
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mbanu
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"Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by mbanu »

One aspect of old-school community clubs that I find interesting today is the variety of meeting places that the clubs had when they weren't connected to a school. Union halls, apartment building rec-rooms, shop back-rooms... so I thought maybe a thread for cataloging these would be fun. :D
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
George W
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by George W »

Our "club" met in the chat section of Compu$erve. They called it a "CB simulator" which was an attempt to link to a known technology, which was not the right way to go, since the chat section was so much better.

We didn't have physical locations (or problems with people being new, or women, or anything) because it was all text - no video, no pictures.

Much like Alice Bradley Sheldon went under James Tiptree Jr as a SF author, we were all blind and oblivious as to who was who, until people showed up at conventions at parties that I'd throw for SIG members.

Okay, this is lame as all heck, but it's all I have to contribute. In high school, we didn't even know what Anime was back in the late 70's.
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mbanu
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by mbanu »

In the flyer that AnEccentricArchivist posted, for instance, the C/FO New York chapter was meeting Saturday afternoons at Club 57 in Manhattan. That was a surprise to me, as Club 57 was a nightclub! Apparently it was quite the happening place -- maybe just at night? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/arts ... n-art.html What was the connection, I wonder? Did earnest anime fans just go door-to-door to nightclubs that might be willing to open a bit early, was C/FO New York connected to the East Village art scene, or was there some other connection?
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
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mbanu
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by mbanu »

George W wrote: Tue Dec 07, 2021 5:49 am Our "club" met in the chat section of Compu$erve. They called it a "CB simulator" which was an attempt to link to a known technology, which was not the right way to go, since the chat section was so much better.

We didn't have physical locations (or problems with people being new, or women, or anything) because it was all text - no video, no pictures.

Much like Alice Bradley Sheldon went under James Tiptree Jr as a SF author, we were all blind and oblivious as to who was who, until people showed up at conventions at parties that I'd throw for SIG members.

Okay, this is lame as all heck, but it's all I have to contribute. In high school, we didn't even know what Anime was back in the late 70's.
A CB connection again! That's pretty interesting, I think. I was wowed by chatrooms when I first encountered them using telnet on my library's computer. Someone suggested I connect to a place called "LambdaMOO" which connected a bunch of different chatrooms together as rooms in a large house. They had guest accounts that allowed tourists like young-me to visit, and it really struck me how they had built a digital space that was able to imitate a physical space in many ways, building a house out of bytes rather than bricks.

By the time I became involved in anime fandom, the areas I lived were too expensive for a hobby-club to just buy a clubhouse for it to exist in -- the only examples locally were older ones like fraternal organizations that had done just that decades ago. So clubs were perpetually hopping from place to place unless they were connected to some stable organization like a school that owned its own building.
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
George W
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by George W »

Lamba Mu (moo) was from Revenge of the Nerds. LOL.

That was a nice play on words.

Still, where is the meeting this week? Do we need to bring back a Chat System so we can dish on anime?
davemerrill
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by davemerrill »

The various iterations of my local anime club met in:

1. the community meeting room in a bank branch on Clairmont Rd in Decatur (they had a TV, we brought everything else)
2. the Virginia-Highlands branch of the Atlanta Public Library, until they kicked us out for being noisy in the parking lot after meetings (they had a TV, we brought everything else)
3. the downstairs party room at "Sgt. Singer's Pizza Palace" on Memorial Drive (they had a big three-lens projection TV
4. the Little Five Points branch of the APL (we had to bring our own TV and VCR)
5. the community meeting room in a bank branch on Buford Highway, in a building that is now a restaurant called "Shaking Crawfish" (we had to bring our own TV and VCR)
6. my parents' rec room
7. a conference room in the United Way building in downtown Atlanta (they had a TV, we brought everything else)
8. the Arts Center branch of the Atlanta Public Library (they had a TV, we brought everything else)
9. a meeting room in the North Dekalb Cultural Arts Center (we had to bring our own AV), until they kicked us out for being noisy in the parking lot after meetings because a lot of the members would have rather been shooting Nerf darts at each other
10. one meeting in a lecture hall in White Hall at Emory University (this room had a video projector and screen)
11. Chamblee branch of the Dekalb Public Library (this room had a built in video projector and screen). This was the last meeting place the club had until it disbanded. I'd quit attending club meetings, but for some reason my name was still listed as the contact, so I was the one getting phone calls about club members hanging out in the parking lot after the library had closed so they could shoot darts at each other. Sigh.

There was an anime club at Georgia Tech but I didn't attend, an anime club at Georgia State University that I didn't attend, and the anime club at Emory used the same room we used for our one meeting there (we were looking for a new meeting location and they suggested we merge our two clubs, they suggested we help pay the $100 or so it cost to rent that meeting hall every month, and they suggested we use the anime convention's profits to both pay for their meeting space and to fly in Japanese guests for their events, and we suggested leaving immediately, which we did). There was another anime club that met in a comic book store near North Dekalb Mall, and I believe yet another anime club in the Gwinnett area.

So yeah, a lot of loading tapes and vcrs and TVs into the car, picking up friends who didn't have cars, and driving all over the map of Atlanta to load into various community meeting rooms to watch anime. I don't think we ever went west of I-75 or south of I-20 for a meeting. The North Dekalb Arts Center meeting space was the longest time we spent in one place, I believe. One of our main considerations when picking a meeting space was that it be accessible by public transit, which eliminated a big chunk of the west and north side of the metro Atlanta area.
davemerrill
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by davemerrill »

BTW, "Sgt. Singer's Pizza Palace" was a Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese knock-off that had an expansive downstairs "party room" with the video projector and a few video games. There was a local gaming group that used their room for meetings and they suggested we try it out in a combined meeting - we'd screen anime in one part and they'd game in another. It was terrible; they didn't care what we were doing, we didn't care what they were doing, and it was so noisy nobody could follow what anybody was doing.

The local gaming group was run by the guy who would later go on to found Dragoncon and even later be arrested for child molestation, which might explain why he was having his club meetings in a children's pizza restaurant.
davemerrill
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by davemerrill »

CORRECTION!!! The name of the restaurant was "Sgt. Singer's Pizza CIRCUS". Not Palace. Circus. Based out of Pasadena there were four of these restaurants, only one of which was in Georgia. https://arcadepreservation.fandom.com/w ... zza_Circus
George W
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by George W »

Okay, but I still don't know where OUR meeting is this week.
davemerrill
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Re: "Where's the meeting this week?"

Post by davemerrill »

dang it, I forgot to mention our solution to the question posed by this topic - "Where's the meeting this week?"

One of our members had a second phone line in his apartment, and he hooked an answering machine up to that phone line. That number became our club's "Info Line," and every month there would be a new message about the time and place of our next meeting.

This really made getting the word out about our club easy. We just put the phone number on our flyers and interested people could just call in. Getting this information out to our earlier club required a monthly mailing, postage, labels, up to date addresses, dues, and all the attendant hassle. With the "Info-Line" our club dues became a one-time fee, our print publications could come out whenever we had enough material to fill a fanzine, and nobody had to print and mail anything.

Of course computer BBS systems were around at this time, but not everybody had a computer or a modem. Everybody had a phone.
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