 I think it's about time to start. We can start. We can start for real now. I'm Scott. I'm Rym. We're the host of Geek Nights. It's a podcast that you should listen to. You should listen to. But you can if you really want to. As our website, QR codes are a thing, I guess. So when you go to an anime convention, you tend to implicitly trust the people who are up on stage. She's like, oh, they're on a stage. There must be some reason they're on that stage. You have to understand that at most fan conventions, people are on the stage either by luck or because they emailed someone. We are up here because we emailed someone in 2002 and they kept on emailing right up to 2016. So who the hell are we? Who are we to tell you how to run an anime club? You can true that. That's a fan art someone drew in our forum in 2010 that I found recently. Okay, too many. That makes sense. I kind of want to make the new Geek Nights t-shirt be that. We have to find that person to ask them. I'm trying to track that person down. They didn't put an email address in our forum. The problem is I don't have hair anymore. We can make a bald one. So we are just some guys here, but we did run the largest anime club in America for five years, the RIT anime club in Rochester. That was like 11 years ago. Things have surely changed in the world of anime club running in the past 11 years. And in fact, things have changed, but I've stayed in touch with RIT anime and I found through continuous contact with their presidents that the techniques we're about to talk about really do work still. Now the only reason that works is because we took over that club right at a huge turning point in what anime clubs were. That was before digital fansubs. That was before most people even knew they could find anime on the internet. That was before DVD. We had a tape library. So the club's purpose was very different and the purpose became modern anime fandom right as we took over. We like ushered in the new era. We got rid of the guys who showed nothing but Sailor Moon over and over and over again. Anime clubs originally existed because the supply of anime was low in the 80s, 90s and early, even up to the early 2000s, you just couldn't get it. It wasn't like you just go to the store and there's a whole rack of DVDs. You were lucky if there was some VHS tapes, right? So there was fansubs and they were rare and you couldn't get that many copies of them. So anime clubs existed for one, copying tapes. They would line up VCRs in a row and put one, the master tape in one and everyone would bring a blank tape and put it in one row. And depending on how cool you were, if you were the first VCR in the row, that means that you were like a serious big person in the anime community. You got a much better copy. If you're on the fifth VCR, your copy is gonna suck, but it's watchable, all right? Yeah, sometimes. You're happy to get anything in those days, right? So you had an anime club so that you could just play the tape and have a whole bunch of people watch it. Because there wasn't any other way to watch the anime. T'Nami didn't exist with the animes on it really until like late 90s-ish. Yeah, I mean the only anime at American TV was when I was eight years old. The sci-fi channel showed Vampire Hunter D, Project Aco, Robot Carnival, and a whole bunch of ultra-violent nonsense. And my mom forced me and my little brother to watch it because quote, it's about vampires, it's like that Castlevania thing you guys like, and the rest is history. Right, I mean you might have been able to see Robotech or like Star Blazers on TV at some point, but you had to live in a certain place at a certain time, right? And watching TV at the right exact moment to see any of that stuff. So most people couldn't see anime. That's why an anime club existed. Now, anyone who wants anime can get anime. You can even go and crunch your roll for free and just watch everything, right? So why in the year 2016 should an anime club exist? So, we have been keeping track of that and we're also, we travel to a lot of conventions together. And we also run the Panels and Workshops Department for a moderately large con in Connecticut. Connecticut, we get like 12,000 people. It's pretty big con. So I also do professionals- You guys sit down. Yeah, there's plenty of seats, come on in. The chairs are cool. We also, I am a professional event manager in Wall Street Finance stuff and we- You're not an event manager, you're a product manager. I'm also an event manager. Okay, what events do you manage? I'd manage several things. It's roundtables and events, social things. I set up these bar nights, it's all crap. But, we have a lot of experience with this stuff and our IT anime was huge. Oh, the mural. Oh man. Yeah, that mural got thrown away. What's up? So, our IT anime, let me give you a sense. This was an anime club. We joined it in the year 2000. I eventually became the president of it and we left in 2005. It continued after us. Our average meeting, like an average meeting- Yeah, that bottom left picture is average meeting, not like a special meeting. No, that's an average meeting in like earlier days, I think. That looks pretty small. This would be a small, this would be a meeting on like the summer when no one's on campus, this room right here. We had way more people than this coming to our screenings. We had three or 400 members given on the year. And the picture in the bottom right, that's not a meeting. That's after the meeting, people coming to check out tapes from the library. And socialize. Sometimes we'd set up a rare Japanese-imported game like Dance Dance Revolution or some non-fighting game. We'd set it up and people would play it. So, our IT anime, it was actually the biggest club on our IT's campus with one exception. There was a fake club that was basically, everyone who's a member of a club is a member of the club club. I'm not even joking, that was a thing. Other than that, we were the biggest club on campus. We got the most money, it was weird. If you're nerdy and you haven't gone to college yet, go to RIT, it's like the nerdiest school in the world. The only thing wrong with it is it's freezing cold and really expensive. So, a lot of people will tell you how to run an anime club and there's all these, but honestly, the way you really need to run an anime club, there's some not-pretty things you might have to do. There's some things that'll make you uncomfortable and we're going to tell you the real deal. We're not gonna mince words. We're gonna tell you exactly how to run an anime club and if you still have the stomach for it after this, then maybe you can run your anime club. So, what is a club? And Scott was living that before. You have to really think about why you want to run an anime club, because almost every reason that anyone ever had to run an anime club literally no longer exists in the modern era. You don't need gatekeepers to tell people what to watch. Also, you don't need to watch gatekeepers, it wasn't that good. Right, and if you just wanna watch anime with cool anime people, you can just watch it with your friends, you don't need to make a club. Club is a public thing, you're gonna let strangers into some place or your home or who knows where to watch anime or do anime related activities with. So, if you just wanna be with your friends, you don't need to make a club, you can just have anime night. So, what would compel you to make an anime club where you need to get strangers who like anime together in one place? Now, we'll talk about some of those reasons later and we will take questions at the end because a lot of you probably have very specific anime club drama problems that you wanna ask us about. There's some uncomfortable laughter out there. So, generally, when we're talking about an anime club, there's some things that make it a club as opposed to just nothing. You've gotta have a regular meeting time, like weekly, monthly, if it's less than monthly, it's probably not actually a club. You gotta at least have like 20 or so members, otherwise it's just a bunch of friends in a room. You gotta have a venue that isn't your house. If it's in your house, it's not really an anime club unless you live in a mansion. And more importantly, formal governance and a stated purpose. If you're running an anime club as opposed to just hanging out with your friends, the only reason to do that ever is if you want that club to exist after you are gone. If you don't care what happens to the club when you stop running it, you don't need to do any of these things because you're just doing it for what, just do it. Just do whatever you want, who cares, when you quit, it's gone. Right, if it's just your thing personally, like you own it, it's just like your meetup. It's like the Scott anime hangout or whatever, right? To create a club, to create this institution, right? For example, it's like creating a convention, like anime Boston, right? If the chair people of anime Boston just bail, it would probably be problematic for anime Boston. But anime Boston would and could continue to exist. It's like a legal entity, right? It's like a company even though it's like nonprofit and such. So, you know, if you make an anime club, you don't need to incorporate and create a legal existence, but you still need to create a informal structured thing so that if, you know, you people leave, the club will still be around and there's a reason for it to still be around. So when we took over RIT anime, our basic purpose, the purpose of the club before we joined it was basically give people access to anime because it's hard to get. And also the purpose was we will be the gatekeepers of anime for all these anime fans so we can be the cool kids. Also, you know, this is a college campus, right? We wanted to educate people about anime, Japanese cultures, right? And also spread anime across the campus, right? And make, you know, there's plenty of nerds here, right? We can help them, right? Enjoy anime more. And also the people who are nerds on this campus, it's like, oh, we'll give them a way to come together so they can more easily meet each other instead of just all hiding in their drama playing counter strike. Yep, so we had a lot of purposes. When we took over the club, we shifted that. We tried to get away from that gatekeeper thing because there was an old anime con, anime club culture of there'd be a few people who had a lot of anime and they would be drunk with power and be super jerks to everyone around them. You'd see anime clubs, even anime cons, that would have a screening and then they'd have a private screening of a show that they'd fan sub themselves and they'd only let like people, they'd feel like, you can see it, but you can. You can see it, but you can't. And that way they could dole out their power over time. So we tried to get rid of all that crap and we realized that giving people anime was not a useful purpose for a club anymore because we saw the writing on the wall, the digital fan subs existed. So we said, let's instead, the club should really focus on giving people a variety of anime experiences and exposing them to as much anime as possible so they can decide what they'd like. So they could be a better informed consumer of anime. And to give anime fans on campus some reason to get together. So we'd have like anime dodgeball nights and all sorts of other- It was at once and it wasn't at night. We did it twice. We did anime dances a lot. Yeah, we did music nights where we would DJ, anime music. Like anime con dances used to be in the 2000s before they became what they are now. So, none of these things are clubs. If it's just you and your family, don't need any of this advice. If it is not formally governed, like if you don't have rules, if you don't write some sort of charter, if you don't vote or anything, none of these things are clubs. Seriously don't bother with anything we're about to talk about. So there are different kinds of anime clubs and some of the things you need to do are very different. College clubs are the easiest. It's baby mode. College anime clubs just happen almost by accident. How many of you want to run a college anime club? Or run a college anime club? Yeah, all right. You're gonna have a good time. Yeah, one, you have a constant influx of people. Most of whom are on a campus don't know that many people. It's a captive audience, right? We've got thousands of people at this school depending on the size of the school, right? And there's gonna be some nerds here. It's pretty easy to get them all together just by putting up some signs saying anime club this way. Yup, you have access to a venue. They're probably gonna give you a budget. You have screening rooms. We had giant auditoriums to show anime. Yeah, you don't have to buy projectors or anything, right? You know, the school might even give you money if you like establish a club at the school and they say, oh look, does people like to go into your club? Here's free money. So these are the easiest clubs to run. They're gonna be the biggest clubs. Like if you want a really big anime club, it's pretty much gotta be a college campus club or at least it has to be affiliated with a college campus of some kind. It's almost impossible to make a very large anime club that is not on a campus associated with the university or at least a college. Community clubs are often really sad. They're the hardest anime clubs to run. Even in New York City where we live, like the biggest most important city on the entire earth, it is very hard to have a community anime club. I think there was like a metro anime thing for a while. It was like a sad thing that met and then like the back of a taco bar with like a TV in the top corner or something. It was not a good time. Yeah, community clubs are tough because one, most people who are fans of anime, they watch anime because they like anime. They don't necessarily have any need to seek out other anime fans in their locality to do things. They'll have friends already, they have a life, they have whatever. It's not like a college where you're some freshman and you need some friends. So why don't I go over to those anime kids? Because I like anime. Maybe there's someone over there or I can be friends with. But not as many people do that when they're in their 40s at the local library. Right, someone who's like in their 40s and is willing to spend their free time watching anime at the local library might be a sad-ish person, right? You know, it's like, don't they have something better to be doing? They can't get anime themselves at home. There are successful community clubs, but usually they are associated with an anime convention. Usually they are an anime club that runs an anime convention, but the people who run the convention or at least are affiliated with the convention also meet at the club regularly. Right, for example, like, so we're the heads of panels at Kineticon. I know that Kineticon, they do a lot of gaming at Kineticon. That's not purely an anime convention, but they have like game meetups during the year that aren't, you know, the convention itself, right? It's like, so I don't anime Boston, I don't know if they do that, but they could, they can have like anime Boston, anime night, like in the winter or something, right? Or whatever if they wanted to. And that sort of makes sense because there's a bunch of people in this area who already have an association here who might want to meet up again and not just once a year. Yeah, now the real problem with community clubs, what makes it so hard to run these is that here in the college, you have your governance, so there's people running the club and there's probably elections or something to choose the new board year after year. And it's free money. No one can run the anime club at the college for more than four or five or maybe six years, usually. These clubs tend to have people to run them for 10, 20 years. So once there's a that guy, now that guy is a gender neutral term, that guy means that guy, it could be a man, it could be, it doesn't matter, just that guy is a that guy. Once one of them poisons a community club, that poison will never go away. That guy has to fail out or graduate. So community clubs will have the most drama. They'll have the most people trying to like literally make politicking happen and take over your club, hostile takeovers. All that nonsense happens here. Schools have term limits built in, right? There's no, you can't legislate the term limits away or anything like that, right? It's like they're there no matter what because you're gonna graduate and move away and there's nothing that can be done about it. Now we have an example of a college club. There was a gaming club at RIT which was similarly huge to the anime club but because of the way the charter of that club was, you didn't have to be a student to be associated with it. And let me tell you, there were people there who were older than I am today, effectively running that club. That club had more drama than anything I've ever experienced in my life. High school clubs, these are, how many of you are trying to run a high school club? All right, all right. So high school's a little harder than college, right? You still have the same situation with the captive audience and the students and I'm sure there's some percentage of nerds at your school depending on what school it is, right? But the problem is, is because you're so young, you have a lot less freedom and a lot more restrictions, right? You'll have an executive board, you'll have your governance. The reality is nothing you do actually matters. The teachers are really in charge, right? The principal or whoever's in charge of your school is really gonna be the one calling the shots, right? If they don't like the anime you show, you're in big trouble. So the successor failure of your high school club depends 99% on who your faculty advisor is, like whatever teacher took interest in your club and how much they're willing to work to make that club awesome. If they suck, the club sucks. If they're awesome, the club's awesome. There's really no middle ground there. Because you're not legally adults, even though you may be mentally adults. I was 18. Yeah, perfectly capable of handling the anime club, right? You're going to need some legal adults to support your club and defend it because there's gonna be some kind of trouble in some way. It just takes one jerk person to come and give you all sorts of nightmares. But take heart. It is way easier today to run a high school club than it was 10 years ago. Because 10, 20- But anime is way more popular. When I was in high school, if I had tried to run an anime club, there might have been like five kids in it, right? Yeah. Sure, an anime club today in a high school is gonna have a lot more than five. My high school banned anime clubs and gaming clubs because they're Satanists or whatever. This was a public school. It's just Midwest. That sounds like it's an old story, but that still happens. We're lucky to live in the Northeast. If you lived in Alabama, that shit would be like today. That does happen. There are anime clubs that get shut down because the content material in the anime that no reasonable person would think would be offensive and is perfectly age-appropriate is seen as offensive by one parent and that's the end. Yeah, you watch Grave of the Fireflies. One of the best anime's ever. It's like, oh, there's naked kids in it. It's like, yeah, it's like a kid's butt in the bathtub, whatever, right? But it's like, they'll shut you down to be done forever. So you also have to think really hard independent of the reason you have your club. Do you want your club to be large or not? Is the goal of your club something where you need a stable membership that goes on forever, like 50, 60 people? Or do you actually want to grow it big enough to run a convention? Do you want to grow it to where this would be a small meeting? Do you want to have a tiny empire of anime fans doing what you say? There's a gun taped to the bottom of your chair. Today is the day. Do you want, like, you, of course you're thinking, of course I want my club to be big. Might not. The bigger your club is, the way more problems you have to deal with, the more you have to fake that democracy we keep talking about to make sure that it's still run effectively. The venues become a problem. In New York City, even though there are probably tens of thousands of anime fans who would join an anime club, even in New York City. Very often in New York, like, anime, because it's New York, anime movies will get screened in movie theaters. Like, you know, for example, they were running Ghibli movies at the IFC, like the whole beginning of the year, starting in New Year's, right? And you went to these screens, you bought tickets, and they were full of anime fans, going to pay to see anime in the theater, but they're not part of any club or anything. They're just normal people going to buy a movie ticket. We see every anime movie. It's awesome. The moral is live in New York, and everything's great, except you can't run an anime club in New York. There is nowhere to meet unless you're on a campus. Yeah, if you, a room like this, right, in New York City, to rent a room this size, like an hour a week or an hour a month, is like thousands of dollars. You can't possibly afford it. Does everyone here want to pay a hundred bucks just to sit in this room for like two hours watching anime? So, also large clubs, if your goal is to be a large club, your goal is to keep growing. If your goal is to keep growing, you will have to make decisions that might reduce the quality in your mind of the things you're doing in the club in order to attract a wider audience. And that will itself cause drama, and it might also dilute your club. I mean, to make a giant, giant, giant anime club, just call it an anime club, but actually it's about football, and you literally just watch football, and you go to football games, and you probably get more members. So let's get back to that purpose. What is the goal of your anime club? So I hopefully you've thought about this a little bit. Some good examples of goals. To get people to watch shows that they wouldn't otherwise watch. That's a really good goal for an anime club. These are already anime fans. I want them to watch this Beyblade show because it's amazing and no one knows how great it is. To get anime fans who happen to live near each other, but aren't friends with each other, to come to the same place and then become friends with each other to make a nice social group because you're lonely. That's a really good goal. A goal could be be big enough to be able to pool your resources and rent the local movie theater once a month and show an anime movie. That is a great goal for an anime club. To make anime things happen that wouldn't otherwise happen in your community. Run an anime convention. That is actually a great goal except you're gonna have to be comfortable with the fact that your first few anime conventions from your club are gonna have 40 or 50 people at them. I mean, look at how tiny anime Boston was when it started and look what it grew into today. You have to go through those tiny years before you can get big. It could be to promote anime, to get people who aren't anime fans, don't know what anime is or don't care about it or have preconceived notions about it, to become anime fans. You could be doing that. You'd be helping out all the anime companies a whole lot by doing their work for them. Whatever it is, you have to come up with this goal and you have to make sure that every single thing you do, every decision you make, you have to all ask the question, does this further our goal? If not, why are we doing it? So if you want a club that has enough money to be able to rent out the local theater once a month and you're deciding maybe you vote to start running a little convention or something, is that convention gonna make money to be able to fund the screenings or is that convention going to take your resources away from the screenings? You've got to, don't lose your way. Format, a lot of anime clubs really mess this up. If your club just takes an anime and starts showing that anime episode by episode, week by week, you'll basically never have more people show up to a meeting than showed up to any previous meeting. Yeah, I see this happen a lot where it's like, so especially back in our day, it was like there would be clubs that were like Naruto and they would start off, okay, the very first anime club meeting they could show Naruto one through four and at meeting two they show five through eight. It's like, well, if I missed meeting one, I'm not going to meeting two, I didn't see one through four, right? And now you never come to any meeting ever until Naruto is done. So the only times any new people can come to your club or when you happen to be starting a new show and that's it. What we did in our anime club was we always showed the first four episodes of something new every time or a movie. So any meeting you showed up to, any human being could watch what we were shown. So our goal was to get as many anime fans as we could to join the club. We wanted to grow as big as we could from the students of RIT anime and we wanted to expose people to a bunch of different anime. So that's actually a photo from one of our meetings. There's me fricking some sort of all black Steve Jobsy kind of, I don't know what I was thinking. And that safety cone is wearing a, and the humans are wearing safety cone cosplays. So this guy's dressed up as a safety cone and then he got inside of the safety cone and it was dressed up as Naruto. I was very proud of that kid. So our format was thus, we would start the meeting once a week on Thursday. We had a weekly meeting. We wanted people to come to every meeting even if they didn't want to watch the shows we were showing. So we would start the meeting, it's like seven, but we wouldn't actually start the meeting till eight and we would encourage people to come early. So the executive board would, like the people who ran the club, we'd all be standing up on stage, like socializing, being friendly, and we'd have a full hour of people talking and hanging out. Why? One, they see the people who run the club all the time, they remember who we are. So when the elections happened at the end of the year, they saw us all the time and they vote for us because they don't care or know. Two, everybody talks and gets all their socialization out of the way so they'll be quiet during the anime. That is real important. So after all that, we get everyone together and we'd have a ritual. Rituals are real important if you wanna have a club. This is all a real practical advice. If you want people to buy into your club's mission, you need rituals. Like in sporting events, at the end of the National Anthem in a hockey game, they yell the name of the team, they do something. This is Boston, right? So the Patriots blow that stupid annoying horn on third down all the time, right? Stuff like that, right? So I would walk up, I was the president, and I would just be like, hi everybody, and the whole crowd would go, hi rim, the freshmen wouldn't know who the hell I was. But now they do. And also everyone else around them yelled it out. So they immediately buy into this and I can tell you what, they're gonna yell hi rim at the next meeting. For sure. You really wanna have these rituals, these continuance. People feel immediately like they're joining something. This might sound really sinister. It's like a cult. Because it is. This is what cults do. This is what political parties do. That is what anime parties need to do. And as long as you're not doing cultish things like making people drink Kool-Aid, it's as you know, if you're using evil techniques for good purposes, what's the problem? Right? You know? Just don't actually do anything evil and you're okay. Then we'd have all the e-board come out and we'd make sure that every member of our board says something to remind everyone that they're the ones who run the club. Halfway through the year, so the person who's in charge of the library, they'll come out and they'll have next to them their assistant. The assistant that they have chosen in advance to win the election to take over that post for them. There's gonna be an election, but not really. Because now that person is up on stage giving the updates next to the person who everyone knows and that everyone just votes for that person. And the updates are there. So, while our weirdo comes up and tries to run for librarian, you're competing against someone who's everyone has seen every week for a whole year and you're an unknown person. How are you possibly gonna win this election no matter how good your speech is or how much you try to campaign? It's not gonna matter. Why do you think the incumbency rate in the US Congress and the House of Representatives is like 95%? And we don't even rig the election, we just count the votes legitimately. Yeah, we never rigged an election in all those years. We had to debate as to whether or not we would have in one instance, but luckily it didn't matter. So, but the important thing too is it's not just this like political shenanigans. We give real announcements. We have news like, hey guys, we're doing an anime music night two weeks from now, like save the date. Hey, the librarian says, we got four more tapes in the library. We got four more things we're doing. We're all gonna buy group badges to animate Boston next week. Whatever announcements. The announcements are a reason for people who don't care that you're showing Naruto this week to at least come to the first half of the meeting. So that way when someone new comes to your club, they see 400 people sitting there. They don't see the four people who want to see Naruto in 2016. Right, it's the thing you're doing at your anime club, even if it's not watching anime, right? It still might be something that not every anime fan is interested in every single thing, right? Maybe you have an anime club meeting where you're gonna build Gundams this week, right? Well, that's a good meeting, that's awesome, but not everyone wants to build Gundams, but you still want the person who doesn't want to build Gundams to come to the meeting anyway. So you need to have that beginning part, that it's like, come no matter what for this beginning part and then you can skip the second half. We do this on our podcast too, right? In our podcast, we always start with an opening bit and a news bit and then we have a main bit and a lot of people just turn off our podcast right before the main bit and it's like, all right, that's fine. But we did that beginning ritual part every single episode to get people to listen every time. So then we would have a raffle and we'll talk about that later when we talk about legal stuff and money, but we do this special format raffle. If you need to raise money, that's the way to do it. And also people would come whenever the raffles happen and then we would show four anime music videos. There was someone's job in the executive board. Their main job was to every week find four good anime music videos, maybe with the theme, maybe just four different shows, to one, further our goal of exposing people to a bunch of different anime. I think it was like trailers for anime that they might want to watch. Like I think no one remembers Utenna. I'm gonna pick a really good Utenna AMV and put it in there and maybe one kid in the audience would be like, oh man, what's that anime? This might be harder or easier to do nowadays, versus when we did it. There's a lot more anime music videos. A lot more bad anime music videos. So finding four new good ones every week could be tough. Man, if you could find the list of all the AMVs we showed over those five or six years in RIT anime and just go through that list today. It doesn't have to be AMVs, right? You could also find really short animes, right? Like Damako Dobutsu is a really short anime. It's only like the opener and closer or longer than the show. Yup. Like RISKY's Safety, one of those films. You could show something like that or you could just go on YouTube and find some anime related thing. You could find a video of a panel at an anime con that's short or something like that. You don't know. There's plenty of stuff to find on YouTube to show before something else, right? That anyone can watch. And then finally, after all that, we would dim the lights and we would show the anime after introducing it and telling everyone a little bit about it. That's the one thing I feel like anime cons need to do better. Screening rooms are almost pointless in the modern era. Unless you have an emcee who maybe knows something about that anime and comes out for five minutes and says, hey, we're about to watch Dominion Tank Police. This was based on a manga written by the same guy who did Ghost in the Shell. Holy crap. Here's a bunch of stories about how it was made. Let's watch it. Keep an eye out for these special balloons. Two thirds of the way through. Yeah, someone talking about the anime before you watch it, right? Can offer something more than what you would get watching at home, right? You wanna, if you're just gonna be showing anime, you need a reason for someone to watch anime with you guys instead of at their own house. You need to basically enhance the experience somehow. So the easiest way to enhance the experience besides it's a giant screen, it looks better than your house and sounds better than your house is add something extra, right? Explain the anime, teach someone about the anime, maybe have a discussion after or before like a book club or something kind of action, right? Do something extra that adds to that experience in some way. So then the anime would start playing and the whole executive board, except for one person who had the baby, he said, would leave and go to our club space. We had a, there's a separate area where people would sort of hang out publicly and we would hang out there and all the people who didn't wanna watch the actual anime would come and hang out there. So we would give them a place to go socialize if they wanted to keep the club cohesive without being forced to watch the anime they didn't wanna see. So we did a bunch of other stuff beyond that but honestly that stuff is not relevant anymore. You don't need the tape library to check out DVDs anymore. No, you don't need that. So all the way, we used to do this panel where we tell you about how to run a tape library, how to run a DVD, that's all gone. Just forget about that stuff. You don't need that. So in terms of what we would show, we would always show either the first four episodes of one show or the first episode of four shows or one movie. That is the- Or an O.A.V. Yeah, yeah, you know. Basically that is the best format unless you have a really good reason to use a different format. I also bet it's a tiny guy, right? Yeah, you might show two episodes, whatever it is you do. But that way there was always something new and we made sure that we swung widely between what we would show. We'd always have a reason why we're showing Hex as opposed to why. We spent a lot of time fighting our you about what we were gonna show. Right, and a lot of the arguments would be things like this, aha, this show is the hot new thing, all right, it's the hot new thing, we'll show it. Oh, but wait, it's a magical girl thing. We just showed magical girl things like already twice in the past like, you know, five weeks, even though it's hot and new, maybe we should wait a few more weeks and throw in some mechas or some, you know, horror stuff before we go back to magical girls again. People think we're like the magical girl club or something. Here's a show that we know is really good and we were convinced people would like if we could just trick them into watching it. Let's have the big raffle on the day that we showed that show. And let's do the raffle at the end of the meeting. Or, hey, we, you know, this thing is really hot right now. I've been seeing it a lot on my Twitter feed, right? People don't know that it's based on this old thing. Let's just show the old thing now while it's relevant. So the other events that we did format-wise was every Friday in a different room, we would do that format of show and anime all the way to the end. But even there, the way we did it, we'd show two episodes of show A and two episodes of show B. And the next week, it's two episodes of show A and two episodes of show B. And we'd always make sure that the show that was in the second half was the more popular and well-known show because very few people were willing to risk showing up at a weird time. They'd watch the weird show that we're trying to show them first. Yeah. Don't show Hentai. Yeah, pretty much. Remember, if you have a club, it's because it's a public thing, right? If it's not public, it's not a club. So if it's public, don't show anything that's not appropriate for the public. So governance, actually running your club. You know, we talked about the executive board. You need to, even if this sounds like it's way too much, write a constitution for your club. It doesn't have to be long. It doesn't have to be super serious, right? It just needs to exist. Yup. You need to find roles for what everyone who's running the club is responsible for. You need a way to override them as a group if someone is being bad. And the main reason you wanna do this is not so much to actually get things done because smart people can get things done without a lot of structure. You need the structure so that when there's drama, you can remove the problematic person or remove the problematic person's influence without making them take it personally. Sorry, man. Sorry, man, we're just following the rules. We don't really hate you or anything. Yes, we do. But no, it's because a good way to do this nowadays is codes of conduct are really popular, right? I'm sure anime Boston has one. It's in the book. I hope you read it. Otherwise, you might be misbehaving, right? You know, you can be like, look, you broke the code of conduct. We gotta kick you out of the meeting. I'm sorry, that guy. Yup. No, I'm not sorry. You're that guy. But you need the veneer of democracy. You need to have elections. The people are members of the club, especially if they're paying dudes, need to feel like they have some input in how the club runs, but you probably don't want to actually give them a lot of input. If you let clubs vote on what to show every week, those clubs almost always fail. If you let the club vote in open, honest elections that are not, you know, don't rig them, but if they're not controlled via shenanigans, you will eventually descend into drama. So the way we structured the club, the executive board, we had a librarian, which you don't need anymore. We had a facilities coordinator. Their job was to literally find us the venues, get us space, make sure we have projectors, all that physical plant type stuff. We had a president whose job was just to basically oversee everything. We had a secretary who did all the actual work. We had, oh God, it's been so long. The publicist who promotes everything. Yeah, the publicist would run the Twitter nowadays. Twitter didn't exist back then, but they would run the Twitter. They'd sign up on the walls. Yeah, run the mailing list. You should definitely have an email mailing list. Those may sound like an old man thing to run. Email mailing list still works. Especially for clubs. But in that governing board, the way we structured it, and I highly recommend you use a structure like this, it was not consensus for everything. If you were the treasurer, you were 100% in charge of your domain. The only time you overrule someone who's in charge of their domain is if they are messing it up and then you need a majority executive board vote to override them with a consensus. Because if you cannot trust every person on your executive board, either you put that person in a role that can't actually do any harm, or your club is going to fail, it's only a matter of time. Right, like you can't trust the treasurer to handle the money on their own without like everyone else telling them what to do, what are they there for? So we had a rule, we would vote on any decision or if there was a consensus, no vote was required. And if there was a tie, because someone abstained, the president broke all ties and had a vote. That was real important. So whenever there was drama, we would, again, we could remove the personalized anger. We could say, guys, we can't come to a decision, let's follow the constitution and have a vote. And then we do the vote. But we only did that if we had to overrule someone who's doing something stupid. We tried to rule by consensus. We would debate until we all agreed this is what we're doing. 90% of the time, you're sitting around like, yeah, what should we show this week? I don't know, what's really hot right now? Tokyo Mew Mew. I don't know about that. Tokyo Mew Mew. I was at Anime Boston last week. I saw a lot of cosplays for this show. Let's watch that. Oh, this show, let's watch that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay. All right, consensus. There hasn't really been a cosplay I've seen more than that. Oh, the one with the snake tail I've seen a lot. Monster Musume? Yeah, we shouldn't watch that. Anime club doesn't play. That is not hentai, but it is literally skimming the lake of Hentai. Yeah, don't show that in Anime club. It's not a squirrel. Oh my gosh. Oh no. So basically, you need a very well-defined structure which includes how to kick people off the executive board, how to kick people out of the club, all those uncomfortable things. You need to write the procedures for all that stuff, but you don't need to use them the vast majority of the time. Like, our rules said that the executive board meetings are governed by Robert's rule of order, which you should all know. However, we never ran the meetings by a Robert's rule of order. The first motion in every meeting was to suspend Robert's rules of order and then we would just have the meeting. We only ever invoked Robert's rules of order if someone was being kicked out and we had to kick them out and we needed a depersonalized way to tell them to shut up while we kicked them out. It happened a couple times. Dude cried, like it was a real tough thing to do. And it's not just tough for the person you're kicking out, it's tough for you. Can you really look at someone that you know that you're pretend friends with or at least an acquaintance with and look them in the eye and say, we are kicking you? Don't call the anime club ever again. We are kicking you out. If you come back, there'll be a restraining order. That's hard to do. But at least if you have this veneer of the rules, you can follow the procedure and you can say, sorry, man, nothing personal and go through the motions. It feels clinical. And you might think this is like some crazy ridiculous thing. This won't happen, right? But look around at anime conventions and I've seen like other conventions that are nerdy. Don't tell us why. Laws also, and they don't do things like this and they fall into ruin. Has anyone in this room seen an anime club or a fan club dissolve into disaster because of drama? Yeah, okay. Yeah, don't tell us about the drama. We know, we've seen it all. Yeah, we don't have to hear more stories, okay. So if drama happens, you have to deal with it as fast as possible. Do not let it fester. Yeah, don't let the fire burn your whole house down before you call the fire department, right? When there's a small fire in the trash can, like put that shit out right away. So here's an example. Our club, our rule was be quiet during the showings. But occasionally someone would yell something really funny at an opportune moment, like Shinji's on screen and someone makes that like perfect joke like MST3K style at the perfect time and they're probably going crazy, it's really funny. But then there's the not funny person in the audience emboldened by the fact that we didn't yell at the person who did the funny thing who starts doing this every five minutes. You need to take them aside and tell them to cut it out immediately. Never let anything annoying, anything dramatic continue. Nip it in the bud. And usually it's caused by one person. Usually there is one person that is causing your problems. That is the reality. If it is many people, if everyone's getting rowdy you can be like, guys, guys, guys, guys, guys. Do you really want the club to be everyone yelling and screaming during the show so you can't actually hear what's going on? And they'll be like, no, we don't really want that. Like, then be quiet and you can be chill about it. And there's that guy. There was a guy, no names, no names, because the stuff happened. We had to do that guys. But think about it, so we have a huge anime club, right? You saw the picture, how big it was. But just one or two that guys show up, right? And if you don't make them go away or hide them or mitigate their damage, right? You have tons of normal people sitting in the back who are like, I'm really uncomfortable because that guy is here. Now, you let one guy in and 30 people leave because they don't want to be in the same room as that guy. This is probably the most uncomfortable talk. I'm gonna tell you about the techniques we use at RIT Anime because we had conflicting goals. We want to be as inclusive as possible, which is a very good goal. But at the same time, you cannot abide in toxic behavior. So there's that guys, and again, gender neutral term, who are just socially awkward. There are ways to deal with that. There are that guys who are actively, aggressively sexist, racist, misogynist, creepy, whatever. You have to just kick them out. You have to kick them out and make sure that they would be uncomfortable ever coming back. So with stepping back from the people who go over that line, the regular old kind of creepy, but they haven't done anything specific and creepy. You've probably seen them in the hallways around here. You know who we're talking about. So we did a panel long ago at a PAX, Penny or Kate Expo, called Why No One Will Game With You. And in that panel, we brought up the topic of that guy. And there's a group of people sitting in like the second row, like they'd all come in together. And we have all of the slide about that guy. All of them, except Juan, literally turned and looked at one of their friends, who was himself looking at the screen entirely oblivious. That guy doesn't know he's that guy. No, that guy will ever, in fact, and some of you in this audience might now be worried, like, wait a minute, what if I'm that guy to my friend? Did all your friends just look at you while you were looking at the screen? That guy will never even be worried that he or she is that guy. So if you're worried right now that you're that guy, you are probably not. So rest it is. So first, we had Stooges, plants in the audience, people who were not on the executive board and had no official title, but they had a job. And their job was to be at the entrance to the meetings, to be the first person that any new member meets. They shake their hand. They say hello, welcome to the anime club. Like when you go to Walmart, they have a person there whose job is to say hello. Same deal. Before we instituted that policy, the creepers would hang out by the entrance and scare people away. Like that happened. So we had to make sure that the first person any new member meets is a chill person, someone we can trust, but not someone who's running the club. It has to be a member. Gotta be a little bit surreptitious about this. If that guy came over and started causing problems by the entrance, we had someone else. Two other people. Scott was one of those people, but he did it as a volunteer effort. This was not something that we officially condoned. So basically this person's job is basically like a magnet for that guy, right? It's like what does that guy like to talk about? You know what he likes to talk about. Not good stuff, right? But you can get maybe your military fanboy or like your hentai fanboy or something who's not that guy, but like can talk about those things. Like I know a lot about hentai, but I'm not a creepy guy. Like that kind of person. Right, like someone comes in and they just really, like does that guy just can't stop talking about monster moose or may or whatever, right? You get someone who knows something about it, just talk to him. Like, oh, hey man, yeah, what's your name? It's the best girl. Yeah, let's go, let's go, let's go. Yeah, let's just go in the corner somewhere and now no one else is interacting with that guy and you sort of like trapped him in this, you know, conversation and he's so happy. Someone, he's actually a human contact, right? And someone's engaging with him, right? He's thrilled. Now look what we did. Now we didn't have to kick him out of the club. We didn't have to hurt his feelings. Nobody's unhappy. Everyone's happy, right? That guy's happy and the normal people are happy. Now the techniques for this, like this is real specific. The person who engaged, so you know, when people are in a circle talking and there's someone they're trying to avoid, there's the social signal of kind of cutting the shoulders to cut them out of the conversation. The greeter would sort of very aggressively and actively cut just as the magnet came over and started to engage with directly pointed shoulders. This was by design. In fact, I wish if we still ran an anime club, like I would blank out faces and make a montage. I'll buy a can, like showing you the shoulder. The shoulder is like this. Just remember, the magnet directs shoulders, direct eye contact. Hey, the cake is a lie. Whatever shibboleth you need to convince the guy that you know about that thing. Meanwhile, the greeter uses the shoulders to slowly cut them out of the other conversation. So then there's the people that this doesn't work on. And those are the people where you have to be a little more clever. And usually those people, you kind of have to wait for them to step over the line and then kick them out. Because these are the people- It sucks waiting for them to step over the line because you want to avoid that incident altogether, right? It's like, why do we have to have this bad incident that we could see coming, right? Before we could do anything about it. But at the same time, you don't want to be jerks. You can't just kick people out of your club because you don't like to look in their gym. You've got to at least give people a chance. So there was a person years and years ago, we were in the RIT anime club. We were in an anime convention, I think it was Otacon. And this other anime club was like, oh, you guys were in RIT anime. Like, yeah, there were another big club. And they were like, listen, there's this guy. He just transferred from our school to your school. And they gave him us his name. We're like, well, whatever. We got that guy's name. Like we- We have three of that guys. Yeah, we're good. We're experts at that guy. But it was one of those moments like in a show where they like grab your shoulder and look it in the eye and they're like, no. It's like we had three of that guys. What's a fourth of that guy gonna do? No big deal. So I kid you not, we're running our meeting. Like it's the first meeting of the year and there's a couple hundred people in the crowd and they don't look good. And this dude comes in from the top and we see him coming. We all look at each other and we're like, there's no way that's not the guy. So the greeter comes over and he's like, hey. And he's like, yeah, I'm gonna just transfer here from name of university. And we were like, oh, crap. And we had a meeting to figure out what to do. He didn't do anything yet, but we knew. We did five seconds. You can just tell he's that guy. So it's like the secret service. They're watching the crowd. There's one really shady guy in a trench coat with his hand like this. Like, that's not illegal. But at the same time, you wanna keep an eye on that guy. So there's a middle ground between kicking someone out and very cleverly redirecting them. And this is very hard to do. You need to find someone who has the ability to take someone aside and say the words, listen man, I don't wanna offend you, but you smell real bad and you're welcome to come back to the club but I'd like you to leave today and please shower before you come next time. Could you say that to someone's face if you can't find someone who can and put them in your club, not on the executive board because they're going to be hated by some people in the club, but they have to have an official position like you're secure, you're allowed to have it. So it's a really intimidating person. Yes. But you don't want to shame people who have these problems at your club. What you want to do is take them aside and give them the personal private warning like, look, please, you're really scaring those people over there. Just calm it down a notch. And that works sometimes. Like it actually does work sometimes. But that other guy did not work out. We took him aside once and we had a thing where we would literally, our person would kind of walk up to someone and shake their hand and hand them a bar of soap. We got a random bar of box of promotional bar of soap. We got four 40 pound boxes of soap that we did not steal, technically. They were free promotional giveaway items, right? So it was like we just had the soap, we used it. Yeah, we walked up, we were in the anime club, we walked into this room and there's all these boxes of soap and they're like, hey, it's free for students. And we're like, how much can we take? And they said, as much as what you want. We looked at each other and we said, really, as much as we want. And he looked at us and said, as much as you want and we took it all. There was the R&D anime club soap for like four years. I saved about, I mean, how many bars of soap did I use in the shower in those years? A lot, right? I saved a lot of money. But it actually worked because it was kind of funny. And then the first is like, so you know why I brought you aside. And then like a lot of times the guy would be like, yeah, I'm sorry. And like it worked out. Like they'd come back cleaner and it was fine. The guy we were warned about, literally, this is what happened. Oh, thanks. It was funnier. Yeah, but I guess you didn't know that you're just doing soap and deodorant, which explains a lot of things. So for the tiny percentage of the that guys that you cannot gracefully redirect and you either cannot or don't have the stomach to take them aside and say, listen, I'm sorry, but seriously, please, please. You've pretty much got to just watch them like a hawk, wait for them to do something actually bad. Like the moment they're racist, sexist, the moment they creep on someone, anything like that, you have to go through the formal procedures to kick them out and that's the end of it. If you have to get a restraining order. This might sound like it's way too much for a small anime club. This happens way more often than you would expect. It's an anime club. It's a thing open to the public and nerdy and it just happens to be some sort of reason that nerdy people tend to be more often that guys or that guys are more often found among nerdy things and that guy's unlikely to have friends so any public nerdy thing is a magnet for that guy to come. If you don't do anything about them, then the drama will fester, people will start leaving your club and you'll be shocked at how suddenly a club can collapse and then it'll only be that guy. Also imagine how awesome a club would be if there were zero that guys there like, aw, that'd be the best. You're like the best thing in your life. You cannot charge money for people to come to your meetings and see anime. Do you know how many people I've seen at anime conventions doing a panel like this saying, yeah, charge like five bucks to come into a screening. That is illegal, you will get in trouble. Do not charge money. That's the FBI warning at the beginning of the movie, that's what it's telling you, you can't do that. Also, once you get above a pretty small threshold of 10 or 20 people, you do actually need legal permission to show anime. It's no longer a private screening, but a public screening. So you need to ask the people who own the rights to whatever it is you're showing, if you can show it. So this is actually pretty easy nowadays, like from the start- It's way easier than it used to be. You used to have to fax people forms. We had a lawyer from the campus draft us some stuff. It used to be way hard. Nowadays, you can ask Crunchyroll, sponsor of anime in Boston, or any other, right? And they'll just talk to them and they'll hook you up and you just watch stuff on their website. Yeah, a lot of studios, a lot of publishers, they'll have anime club things, like they'll have a thing on their website like, hey, are you an anime club? Want to show? They'll send you prizes, they'll send you DVDs, they'll send you all sorts of crap. You're living in a golden age of the companies giving you almost everything you need to run a club. They used to give you more crap in 2004 days. Yeah, well, there was the early 2000s anime boom. That was the era when the Expo Hall and the dealers room at anime clubs or anime cons looked like the Penny Arcade Expo's Expo Hall. Those days are long gone. But you can get stuff. In terms of any other things, like there used to be a lot of worries about fan subs. You really can't show fan subs, but at the same time, it's very rare that there's a show you want to show at an anime club that either isn't legitimately available in the US or is so obscure that it'll never be licensed and fan subs is the only thing that's there. If there's some show you want to show and it hasn't been licensed for distribution in the United States and there's a fan sub of it, right? It's like, yeah, you can probably watch that fan sub because no one's ever gonna release it in the US.