Blissful Silence

I had a local manga artist come to my anime club last week. Now I have to explain a couple of things about my anime club. I love these kids but these kids are hyperactive maniacs. They are so revved up that they run around and scream and jump up and down every time someone mentions their favorite anime character or squeal and hug each other five times every hour. In other words, they are typical energetic teenagers just let out of school.

I warned the manga artist that these teens are a little "excitable" and that she should just talk over them and not be offended if they don't pay attention. Yet I was shocked with their reaction to her presentation. They sat...and listened...and were quiet...and even TOOK NOTES. I had never seen them so quiet...EVER! They were so into her instructions on making manga characters and they asked questions too. Of course near the end of it chaos resumed but for 30 brief shining moments, I sat down and relaxed peacefully in blissful silence as for the first time the teens actually shut up.

Teen Hackers

A couple of weeks ago we discovered a group of teens looking at porn on our catalog computers. The thing is, there should be no way they can access the internet on those computers. We clicked around the catalog and tried to figure out how they did it. Finally, we discovered that someone ELSE had figured out how to get on the internet and if you clicked on this arrow it would give up a page history. On this page history was a porn site that had been accessed by the original hackers and the word had apparently spread among the teens that this particular catalog computer had a direct line to this porn site. We still don't know how they originally got on the site. Our tech guys haven't figured it out.

I was telling my husband about this the other day and I said that no filters, banning, rules, punishments or anything will keep a teen away from porn if they truly want to get to it. This is just another example of that. In some sense you have to admire their cleverness and fortitude. If only they would apply it somewhere else.

Felt Mascots Part Deux

I just recently added some more pictures to the slideshow. My anime club made felt mascots again a few weeks ago. Felt mascots are these cute stuffed animals made of felt and cotton batting that are very popular in Japan. They are fairly simple to make but do take some time and patience.

The first time I had the anime club make felt mascots they made goth ones. They didn't disappoint me this time either. One was created with only one leg and had blood dripping from its mouth. Another had stitches drawn upon it with sharpies. They were not the cute lovable felt mascots shown in The Cute Book by Aranzi Aronzo. But although not as lovable looking, they are sure to be loved.