Fred the Barber

Confession: Having lived the VN scenario, I can confirm that sharing an umbrella on a date is actually pretty lousy. Holding the umbrella was awkward; I was constantly worried that I was holding it in a way that was dripping on her; and she was clearly concerned about the whole scenario as well. On top of that, it was raining, which is decidedly less pleasant when you're actually outside in the wet and cold and wind, as opposed to when you're reading about it in a VN. Bottom line, if you want to be a thoughtful umbrella-bearing date, I suggest just keeping two umbrellas with you, and, rather than the part where you both feel miserable, looking forward to the part where you get inside and warm up together. I know that feel bro Nah just kidding I get replies from the girl I like constantly Ice cold.

The second half of that anime is extremely good. The first half was good, but the second half blew me away. Also, the ending is yanaginagi, she's just stupendous at singing I'm through 8 episodes now, and it's starting to get much more interesting. After the last episode I watched, I flipped through the art book briefly until I came to an older version of a character, and then I slammed it shut, thinking "Spoilers!". I'm much more excited now; it seems like the very idea of a big time gap in any story is very, very appealing to me, especially when I feel attached to those characters (it almost certainly helps that Chisaki was that character, and that she's the one I'm most attached to right now). There's something intriguing about seeing well-established, interesting characters set on a path to change, and then also getting to see those changes fully-realized, while still allowing a large enough passage of time to make it believable. The words aren't coming out quite right, but maybe someone else feels the same way and can say it better. Edit: In my rush to finish before leaving my place for a week, I watched the remaining 18 episodes in the last 24 hours. It was fantastic, and Ceris, you're totally right that while the first half was good, the second half was absolutely amazing. The feels here are real.

I don't promise to at least come visit you in jail and laugh at you.

U can only do this using "cleared" save file. I stand corrected. Funya, I can modify the difficulty in the configuration without any need for restarting. But you can't.

Started watching A Lull in the Sea. It's very pretty, and interesting enough to keep me watching. I'm only 3 episodes in so I haven't formed any particularly strong opinions yet, except that the first ED is particularly lovely (both the music and the video).

Funya, for Persona 4, I could easily be wrong, but I believe you can modify the difficulty in the configuration (at least to lower it), without any need for restarting.

Agreed. For me there is very little satisfaction or joy to be had in the Persona combat. It's all about the characters. Persona 3 has a better solid story than Persona 4, but Persona 4 probably wins out on characters. Also, Funya, if you just beat Shadow Chie you're still really early in the game (it starts super slow), so the story has a long way to go. It'll get somewhat better. It just won't get as good as P3.

The Clannad anime was what really got me into otaku culture in the first place, and is still a favorite (along with many other Key animes, and more recently Key VNs), so I'm very excited about the release. It's timed coincidentally with a nice two-week vacation from work, so right now I'm figuratively counting the hours until I can start playing. I previously tried playing the fan TL but had some technical problems with it and gave up, so I'm happy to be much less worried about that class of problem, with an official release.

I'm waiting impatiently for the Clannad Steam release on Monday. I might try to pick Narcissu back up first, if I can summon the motivation this weekend, but otherwise I'll shelve that and go straight to Clannad; I definitely have nothing against Narcissu, but it just didn't grab me yet. By coincidence (yes, really) I'm taking two weeks of vacation starting Monday, including some long plane rides, so I'm looking forward to spending a lot of quality time with Clannad... except that I'm traveling with my parents, so I might get judged a bit if I read a VN the whole time on the plane. Well, whatever.

That's the same team I mostly kept, although Odelia is also a lot of fun to have around. I recently started playing Atelier Rorona Plus, but I'm having trouble getting into it because the clock feels even more restrictive than the Ayesha clock. I feel like if I don't spend all my game-time days doing tasks directly focused on the term goal, I can't get a 10-star rating (at least for the first term), which is frustrating; I like to have a lot of freedom to explore (and get over-leveled) in my JRPGs.

Just got a pretty surprising update on the Narcissu Kickstarter via email announcement - apparently they have Hiroki Kikuta (composer for Secret of Mana) on board as a guest composer for the project. I still don't fully understand what exactly the Kickstarter is going to do, but it certainly seems like it is going to be interesting.

Finished up Chihayafuru. It was damn good, and easily earned a spot as a new favorite. I can't believe there are only two seasons of this, especially given where Season 2 leaves you; I need Season 3 right now. I'm seriously considering picking up reading manga (which I've never done before) just to continue the story, except there's obviously regret at the end of that road, since the manga is still ongoing; and it seems only the first two volumes are licensed for English release. It's possible that part of my appreciation is that I actually like sports anime and haven't realized it yet. I did rather like Oofuri when I watched it sometime back, and that's the only other sports anime I've ever watched. However, that show was certainly nowhere near this level. Chihayafuru delivers on a lot of fronts, with the overall sports vehicle being only a single part of the overall picture. Great characters, strong focus on romance and romantic tension (including a fantastic love triangle), excellent steadily-progressing plot, good pacing within episodes, gorgeous art (reminiscent of Kimi Ni Todoke; maybe this is just a thing for josei manga adaptations?), solid soundtrack... it's really hitting on all cylinders. I suspect the only reason this show isn't more popular, especially in the US, is the unusual sport it focuses on - I admit I found it a bit weird when I was reading summaries about the show. If the subject sounds boring, well, give it a couple episodes anyway - I guarantee you'll get hooked like I did.

I'm a sucker for blushing, and several weeks later, I'm still hung up on Fal from Symphonic Rain, so I did this:

Confession: Before today, if I had to name one topic that would never be discussed on Fuwanovel, I might very well have picked keming. Now, thanks to Darbury's blog, apparently I would have been wrong. I give up.

The blog post makes some great points that I hadn't considered before, especially the importance of setting for this decision. And the presence or lack of voice acting is also clearly important - when I can hear the honorifics, it's probably going to bother me a little bit if they're not there (though just a very little bit). If it's not voiced, I really won't care at all. However, one thought: you can, in theory, avoid the choice altogether by providing both options and a configuration switch. If I recall correctly, the US MariMite DVD release subtitles actually have exactly this choice (subtitles with honorifics, or without). You're still left choosing a default, but there is an obvious answer there: optimize for the people who don't even understand the concept by stripping honorifics out, and to satisfy the people who will know and be upset if honorifics aren't there, tell them they can enable it. That said, I'm well aware that this idea is likely to be laughed out of the room due to the high costs it incurs (I expect, to some extent, you'd end up editing and QAing two scripts, which would obviously suck), but nonetheless, you do have the option to make both sides happy by providing a choice. This is somewhat of a false dilemma.

I read the first section today using the Agilis translation, but I might start over with gp32 to see the difference. Just from what I can hear of the Japanese, Agilis is very literal, and I'm still trying to form an opinion about whether I like that or not, for voiced VN translations. I've only just started, but so far, I'm rather liking the VN. It has a very different atmosphere from any of my usual fare, and change is good.

The Sky Raker episode in Accel World was surprisingly good, and has me thinking a little bit better about the show. We'll see if they carry on that momentum, although I still feel any moment it'll be boarding the failtrain to Predictable Cackling Villain #2 and Lessons In Monologuing. Marathoned ~8 episodes of Chihayafuru, so I'm somewhere around episode 20 now, I think. The arc right now isn't giving me awesome chills or anything, like the very first few episodes did, but there's a different kind of joy to it right now, watching Chihaya learn things from her team and her opponents. One of my favorite things about Chihayafuru is the way it mixes together so many different character types which aren't often seen together, and not only makes them play off each other, but also really learn and benefit from each other. While I guess most of that is standard for any sort of sports-related anime, or even shounen action shows, that last element usually isn't there to anything like this degree. Somewhat as a result of this, to my surprise, I think my favorite character is Mashima; I don't usually think of the spoiled pretty-boy rich kid as the underdog, but that's exactly how this show makes me feel about him.

Just FYI, although it sounds like it is probably not the best option in this case, you can still buy VNs (or whatever) from Amazon.co.jp even if they won't ship the item you're buying outside the country. There are third-party "reshipper" services (I use https://www.tenso.com/) that give you an in-country address, and then forward the parcel on to you. Never had any problems with it, and the additional cost is very little.

For me it was a very gradual progression over about a decade: - periodically watched anime, after a high school friend introduced me to Cowboy Bebop. Mostly watched popular-in-the-US shounen stuff - Netflix put up this thing called "Angel Beats!" - looks like what I'm used to, so I try it. - Holy crap, I cried from an anime. I need more of this. I ask around for advice, and someone points me to Clannad. - Clannad gets me well and truly hooked on anime in general, and romance in particular, but I still haven't figured out the VN thing. I rabidly watch anything whose source is a Key game that I can get my hands on, and I'm aware that they're originally games, but the "too weeb for me" bias keeps me from trying the games. - I watch Little Busters!, but the season ends with a monstrous cliffhanger. I mentally struggle with myself for about a month, before I land at a 2-week vacation where I have no real plans (I just desperately needed to get away from the office). I caved, and probably spent 5 or 6 hours a day reading Little Busters!, my first and still my favorite. I fell for VNs, and seem to still be falling.

With Kickstarter, I personally tend to take more of the donation/support mindset, rather than the "buying stuff" mindset, which is certainly Kickstarter's own intention. I remember well when they first posted this: https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store. I have a tendency to throw money into a project much more based on how much I like and want to support it, rather than based on what reward I'll get out of it. However, I have to concede that I'm almost certainly in the minority there, and that most people are treating Kickstarter like a strangely unreliable store that sometimes takes your money, and of the times when it takes your money, sometimes doesn't even give you the stuff you asked for, and certainly not on any kind of predictable timeline. I'm rather surprised such people continue to use it at all... And while on the one hand, I can just say all those people are doing it wrong and have nobody to blame but themselves for their consternation when things don't go the way they expect, on the other hand I don't think most of the VN-related projects I've been supporting would actually have been funded without exactly those people. It's a tough situation. Anyway, I threw a bit of money at the Narcissu Kickstarter today, but I have to admit I'm not sanguine about its chances at this rate. I imagine part of the problem is that people are having trouble rationalizing funding what is, to them, a translation of the third game in a series of which they haven't played the first two, even though those two are already freely available on Steam.

How does this even work Photic Sneeze Reflex. For some reason, some people (like me and Kiriririri) have a sneezing fit that triggers when we step into bright sunlight. Yay, now I know the name for this! I have it too. Confession: I'm doing a bit of work this weekend, and even worse I see other coworkers working this weekend, and that always makes me feel like we've failed as a team... (alternatively please inform us of the circumstances surrounding these confessions) The first two are surprisingly boring job-related things. The then-governor of Hawaii thought an ad campaign I worked on had made a mockery of the people and traditions of his state, so he made a big announcement that the team and I were persona non grata there. Just trying to score a few political points, really. Same goes for the second one: a random senator atracked a different campaign I'd directed, and said a few choice words about what an awful person I must be. I do a lot of work for regulated industries — alcohol, tobacco, pharma, finance, etc — if that explains anything. The last one is still a mystery to me. First year of college, there was a late-evening Student Council meeting. (I was VP of the incoming class.) There were about a dozen of us, and we were the last people in the Student Union. At some point, someone says, "Um, do you smell smoke?" And yes, yes we did. Another person heads down the hall to see what's up, then comes back two minutes later, white as a sheet. "Guys, we have to get out now. Go now." We ran downstairs, saw the situation I described — burning building, blocked exits, cut fire hoses — and started looking for a way out. Eventually, we found a back door that was unblocked and only kinda sorta on fire. Someone got that open, we jumped over the flames, and out into safety. The police never figured out who did it or why they targeted us. I suspect a yandere. So, basically, you're the main character of the upcoming anime adaptation of Thank You For Smoking.

I don't think it's a time period problem, the characters in the anime had so many problems and the romantic plot got pretty ridiculous in the end, mostly due to the awful pacing with most of the episodes amounting to nothing and then the last couple episodes just going "here's everything being solved". The manga had a much more successful and well paced story, but overall Love Hina is still a very cliché riddled harem romcom. It certainly has a lot of problems, but I think the biggest things holding it back from being better are: - Unwillingness to let any problem go beyond a single episode. - Picking arbitrary focus characters for an episode. While certainly some people can manage it, these writers clearly weren't capable of telling an interesting story in a 20-minute episode, most of the time. Maybe if they'd done multi-episode arcs they could've gotten a little more interesting depth for the characters. As it is, everything ends up being rather shallow. I guess the age is mostly a problem for the art, though it isn't terrible (and the dub, if that matters to you; it is intolerable, so I quickly switched to the sub). However, although this is probably just my ignorance, I don't know of any good romcoms as old as Love Hina; I kind of had the impression this was the one to watch, which is a big part of why I picked it up in the first place. So I'm inclined to give them a small pass if the problem was that people just hadn't figured out how to make a decent romcom anime at the time.

I'm about 50% of the way through reading Updraft, a well-received debut fantasy novel. It's a little bit heavy-handed at times, and it started off a little bit slow, but the world it builds is unique and fascinating, and the plot and characters have all really pulled me in. From where I am so far, I'd definitely recommend it. After that, I'll probably dig into Jim Butcher's recent release, The Aeronaut's Windlass. I'm a big fan of The Dresden Files (which is kind of growing long in the tooth, and not too far from wrapping up now) and the Codex Alera (which is done), so I'm pretty excited to see Butcher starting up a whole new series. I have really high hopes for this one.

Dunno how far you've gotten with Darker Than Black by now, but IMO it's one of those shows you should watch twice. The first time through, try to absorb as much as you can, and the second time through, it'll all make a whole lot of sense. Also, while the second season is nowhere near as good as the first (not IMO - this is objective truth), it is still worth watching. I really like this show overall - the first season is a great mix of action and psychology, with a tiny pinch of romance. There's also an OVA which bridges the first two seasons, but which is even more confusing than either of those. Also, I'm honestly still not sure exactly what the state of the world is at the end of season two. But that's fine. Darker Than Black is, at least, never dull. I just wrapped up Love Hina. This is going to sound more negative than I actually feel about it, but my strongest emotion towards it is "Well, I'm glad that's done". I'm glad I watched it, but by today's standards it wasn't all that great; which is totally unfair to it. I imagine if I'd watched this 15 years ago when it came out, I would've absolutely loved it; now, it's probably mostly of historic interest. Naru is best girl, but Shinobu is a very close second. And while I normally like genki, Kaolla is proof that you can go too far in that direction and is just annoying. Currently, I'm watching session two of Accel World (it's only ok; mostly I'm watching it because I started it and I want to see how the story wraps up) and periodically binge-watching a few episodes of Chihayafuru (which is approximately the best thing ever).

They are not doing a remake of any of the narcissu games just new stuff like side stories or the epilogue for narccissu 2nd. The 3rd game (which never got translated) they are going to translate it but only the story that takaoka wrote not the complete game. Hmmm. Are you sure? The Kickstarter is a little bit unclear on this, admittedly, but I do see this quotation in the Kickstarter: It's certainly very light on details; supporting what you say, I definitely don't see anything clearly saying new art for Narcissu itself... but with that quotation it certainly seems possible that's what they're aiming for.