Fred the Barber

What more important thing could you possibly have to do than watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya? Except maybe watching Zoolander, that'd give you a pass for a couple hours at least. Are rhetorical questions allowed?

9/10. Yours didn't have to grow on me; I liked it when I first saw it. Even if Tohsaka is best girl.

Not even once in my whole life, but not out of any particular aversion or desire not to. I just... haven't. Next person abhors using cash to pay for anything.

I'll be upgrading all my computers as soon as the upgrade becomes available for them (I guess they're rolling out the free upgrade thing in waves right now?). I'm the early adopter type. I don't really expect any problems, but I guess we'll see. If anything, they'll probably be the kind of problems that can be resolved by dropping a local copy of version.dll into the game EXE folder

Hmm. Well, none of these was at the front of my mental "to play" list, but that's probably just a sign that I need more exposure to things outside my comfort zone. Voted for Tsukihime, because I need to play more Type-Moon games, but whatever we land on is cool with me.

Nah, I'm chill. It's been a long time (years) since that last happened. Though I can get a bit petulant every now and then, only with family and close friends who I know will forgive me. Next person likes being buried in sand.

What are your feelings on capitalism?

9/10 Cute steampunk critter is the confluence of too many awesome things to rate any lower.

Confession: I frequently find myself wanting to use Fuwa emoticons on an email discussion list at work. Always this one:

6/10. Not Ageha.

Ayaka doesn't appear for a little while, so you probably haven't seen her yet. The one that hates you is Mitsuki. They do look pretty similar at first glance. That's pretty much how I feel about PE as well. I blame it largely on the lack of any long-running themes, which reduced the impact of the drama to the point where I wasn't emotionally invested. Also, the soundtrack was crap. I'd compare/contrast it with KonoSora, which I don't see people talk about too much (although admittedly I wasn't even reading VNs yet when the translation came out, so maybe I just missed the boat on that one). Both are very light in tone, typical setting, etc., but KonoSora had a unique theme that lasted through the whole story and provided a nice framework for the rest of the story to build on. "Only guy at a girls' school" is a lot weaker for a theme like that than "flying gliders". As a result, each arc fit better and had a lot more emotional impact, even overcoming the godawful translation. Of course, KonoSora also looks better (IMO, though that's pretty subjective, so I won't be surprised if people disagree on that one) and has a far, far, far better soundtrack (which is straight-up, unarguably true).

8/10. Maybe the firing-the-megabuster sprite would get a 10/10.

False. Next person has changed the batteries in a device recently.

Confession: I haven't done any creative writing in over ten years. If I did, I'm sure it'd be terribad, though.

I enjoyed that one quite a bit, but I always find Murakami's work to be simultaneously easy-to-read, emotionally impactful, and thought-provoking. He's one of my favorite authors as well.

I think the way things shook out for me, Konomi, Ruriko, and even Mitsuki are all higher on my list of characters from this VN who I want to have routes, vs. all the characters that actually had routes, aside from Chiho. I only ever finished the Ayaka route, but I'll probably get the fandisk anyway and play the Konomi and Ruriko routes (and continue to not play any others, either in the main game or the fandisk).

Don't you think you should?

Confession: I rather like cemeteries. It's no kind of morbid interest, but rather that because they're so quiet and calm, I find them relaxing. I used to walk by one quite a lot at my last residence, and after I got over the initial creepy feeling, that became my favorite part of my usual walking route.

... yeah, to be honest, my reaction to the Gjallarhorn nerf is, "Cry me a fucking river." The Black Hammer one kind of sucks since it's just a regular old sniper rifle, but G'Horn is brokenly overpowered and, as they pointed out in their blog post, has been visibly harmful to the health of the player community. It's about time they nerfed it.

Have you seen Zoolander?

Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 were both great, but I voted Bravely Default, no question. That game is just too fun.

Do you mean the upcoming nerfs, or something in the past? The upcoming ones do sound rough, but not "quit the game" rough, for me at least. At this point, I want to at least play all the new sub-classes in Taken King, but I'm also finally starting to get a bit tired of the game. With other, cooler things coming out, I probably will drop it soon. Meanwhile, I'm still super excited about the Blast Corps re-release coming up as part of the Rare Replay, on August 4th. That's going to be some serious nostalgia gaming.

The amount the publisher chooses to charge is basically an optimization problem of maximizing profit. Determining whether it's even worth it to sell a book in the first place is certainly going to require considering production costs, but once you're committed to selling it, the price is just an optimization question of number of purchasers and price, and some less tangible outcomes like reputation (if you become "the guy that charges $500 for a book", it'll negatively impact your future sales just because people get pissed off), but that's not really carrying that much weight unless you go way outside the norms. So, I don't see why production cost would enter into that calculation at all, except maybe in those side effects like reputation. Let me put it this way: why do you care about what a publisher's profit is for a book, as long as you get the book you want at a price at or below its value to you?