4 - Weekly Clubs at The Watercooler:

This wouldn’t sit so high on the list if not for the fact that they have such strong, dedicated followings.

The Watercooler was originally created by Timechaser as a means to house the spam of the podcast posts. It went on to mutate into more of a random dump for weird internet news and videos. It’s a bit of a mutt now… but, it still has its regular features of The Anime Club and The Movie Sign.

Both were formed after the arrival of chat, where suddenly members had a very straight-forward means to communicate with each other in real time. It didn’t take long after that to branch into places where people could hang out together and watch anime… well, more or less. True, while everyone coming out for The Anime Club would be watching from home, true, but they’d all be watching anime together at the same time, talking about it all the while. It’s been popular and has been maintained by some good people. Be sure to check it out some time if you can, now.

So the next natural progression, then, would be from watching shows together, laughing about them, to watching shows about people watching shows and laughing about them… well, at them, anyway. With The Movie Sign, members meet weekly to watch old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 – if westerners were using the word “otaku” back in the day, fans of MST3K certainly would have been among them.

Again, the important point about these two particular weekly events is that they are all 100% user-created and maintained. Aside from the one or two forum moderators who also happen to help run them, theOtaku.com’s staff don’t have to do squat to help them along. They’re fully autonomous, using Worlds as the publishing platforms Adam had been hoping to see.

But just because the site staff have nothing to do with The Movie Sign or The Anime Club doesn’t mean we can’t show a good time either…