Notice the lack of “Happy” in the title? Good. If you have a girlfriend/wife, it’s that time of the year where you buy candy and flowers at greatly inflated prices. Hooray economics. Meanwhile, the singles out there will stay at home and watch hentai or play video games. If you want to show your gamer pride to your valentine, you must be out of your mind. If you’re not going to let a little thing like reason stop you, here are a couple links. Picture barrage after the jump.

VG Cats Valentines
N&B
4 Color Rebellion

I’ve recently been exploring Front Mission, the original one, the turn-based mecha sim released for the Super NES in Japan, but never in America. I’ve had a copy for some time now, acquired through…surreptitious means. As is my habit, I’ll return to a classic Super Nintendo title years after I last played it mostly because I’ve forgotten how it plays. Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and Earthbound are examples that I re-explored this past summer, and I suppose it was only a matter of time before I returned to Front Mission. After all, I love mecha titles, and I’m fond of turn-based strategy titles as well.

Burn, baby, burn! Not literally of course, because I don’t condone random acts of arson. It’s been quite a hiatus, so I have a ton of stuff to get through. Marathoning a variety of anime on the weekend is always fun. Synopses will come throughout the week as I also tackle a couple essays that have deadlines on the horizon.

With that out of the way, it might finally be time for me to cave and buy a PS3. This means no more figures (or food for that matter) in the foreseeable future unless a Shiori gets announced. The dilemma is choosing between the lower-end and higher-end model. I’ll probably have to settle on the more expensive model in the end, because it makes marginally more sense.

The search for a web host continues as well, but this is a lower priority than the PS3. WordPress has been pretty good to me, so there’s no rush. Balancing price, features, and reliability is really boring. Since I’ve got bandwidth to spare, the idea of a home server actually doesn’t sound too bad and might end up being a better solution in the long run.

FNDF, you say? Bound, have you gone mad? Are you making up acronyms simply to generate confusion and bring this fine blog into ruin? The answer may surprise you.

Maybe.

Or possibly I’ve just started a little tradition for myself: a tradition of a Friday-night double-feature! That’s right, years old films or at least nothing recent, rented on DVD (or, heaven forbid, VHS) and viewed with a company of comrades. Each week will purportedly have a theme, and this past one was “robots run amok.”

Trailer at Youtube. It looks like Bandai is placing their bets on Lucky Star’s success on this side of the ocean. With all the blatant Haruhi references in the show, as well as Haruhi’s massive success over here, it looks like money in the bank.

Let’s talk about the trailer though. I do try to give dubs the benefit of the doubt, but it doesn’t sound good. Based on the preliminary viewing, Konata and Kagami are way off. The dub voices for Konata and Kagami are so far out of the ballpark that they somehow ended up in a soccer field. Miyuki and Tsukusa are pretty decent, but the show is still predominantly a Konata-Kagami comedy act. I dread having to imagine the VAs do the karaoke bits at the end of each episode.

As an aside, how is Bandai going to handle all the cultural jokes and obscure references that will no doubt fly over the heads of most mainstream anime watchers? If Bandai doesn’t pack any liner notes as extras, half of the experience is already lost. As an aside to an aside, how will the Minoru Shiraishi ending “songs” play out? I’m not exactly holding my breath, but I’ll put LS on the Netflix queue when it gets released.

Source: Bandai

Pre-preview begin! Here’s the list of new shows slated for this spring courtesy of Fansub Wiki. Some big hitters are coming, including the likes of Code Geass R2, To Love-Ru, xxxHolic season 2, and Vampire Knight. There are also a lot of unknowns entering the fray too, so it looks to be an exciting season. Will there be a full preview if I can compile some pictures and synopses? Maybe…

Edit: Moetron has a list of anime with thumbnail pics here. Be sure to mark your calendars, kids.

Here’s my obligatory Chinese New Year post. Hope everyone out there has a good one. May you usher in the Lunar New Year with many red envelopes and illegal fireworks.

I don’t know what this is really about, but for $20 I’ll probably get it. Apparently it’s a puzzle game involving octopuses or something. Double wallet whammy because the release date coincides with Brawl. If anyone else is thinking about getting Octomania, maybe we could have a match when it comes out.

Source: Kotaku

This post was semi-inspired from a recent Riuva post. I’ve been incubating this post for a while and it looks ready to hatch. Readers are 40% more likely to stalk visit a blog that has daily posts. With that said 80% of all statistics are made up. Anyway, daily blog posting is much easier said than done. If you’re an editorial writer, you’ll soon find yourself running on empty as the old idea well eventually runs dry. So what can you do to draw in more readers with daily posts? Here are a few ideas…

I’ve just been silently updating things here and there. The most noticeable changes are the new layout and the article archive page for anyone interested in the backlog. Aside from that, all the other stuff has just been trivial housekeeping. I’m thinking of getting my own domain and web hosting in the near to distant future. The dreaded research to find the perfect compromise between functionality and price begins.