Valmore

The world needs more lewdness.
 
But only when I'm actually feeling lewd.  Because when I'm not I'm probably trying to write and then I feel guilty because I feel like I should be interested but I'm not.

Confession: I am the worst friend ever.  I just supported my friend buying computer parts on sale with the justification that he can return it within 15 days, and that tomorrow we can talk about the decisions we just made tonight.
He asked me to talk him out of it, and all I could come up with was "how much do you really want it?".  The parts in question were a motherboard and the i7 4790k, which is the best upgrade he can get for his computer at the moment without buying entirely new parts.  Knowing this, I couldn't come up with a good reason for him not to buy it when it is on sale.
Moral of the story: only ask me to talk you out of something if I actually am against it, otherwise I'm more liable to support you instead.

As last year, I'm in the mood to spread holiday cheer to everyone, so y'all better put a damn Santa hat either on your avatars or up your arses, because I'll ensure one of the two.
"But it's still November!" Shut up, it's December in China and India right now, and hella people live there who'd be grateful if their avatars had Santa hats.
 
With that out of the way, here's how shizzle works:
Choose from the image below a hat that you believe would go well on your avatar; they have corresponding numbers for convenience. I'll put it on your avatar with my super advanced magical MS Paint etc. skills. You go on your merry way and spread the holiday cheer all over, mercilessly impregnating the masses with your thick load of Christmas.
Notate Bene:
If my Santa hats aren't cool enough for you and you found a better one in your Google Images porn searches, then I can do that one as well, but make sure it's as simple as those above. Santa hats often don't fit perfectly into one's avatar because the heads of characters tend to be around the very top, causing the hat to be cut off, as in mine. If you think your avatar will be problematic in that regard, I suggest choosing a hat that looks more likely to fit. For example, you may choose 2 instead of 11 in the above image. .gif avatars are hard to do, so I'll only accommodate to those people if you write a 10-haiku poem about cantaloupe. The full-blown Santa outfit in my avatar took quite a while, and I can't really do it for everyone. Ain't nobody got time for that. However, if you have a reasonable special request, then go ahead. Also, feel free to put the above Santa hats on your avatars yourself if you feel like it; I ain't got a copyright claim on them. And I hope nobody else does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Eaz_e1iSE
 
 
 

I've heard of these mythical things called friends... somewhere...

Politics sucks anyway. All it does is make you angry and sad and feeling powerless and dreaming of the apocalyptic end we'll reach in a few decades. And that comes from an optimistic person who trusts the good-hearted nature of human beings.

Additionally there are nuances of meaning b/w left and right depending on the countries. And you can have a conservative left. Or a liberal right.
For example from a french point of view, american democrats would be the right and republicans so far extreme right they're kinda off the spectrum.

You can't separate them - the characters drive the story, and the story is about the characters. If either is lacking your enjoyment will lack as well. If your story is weak, then you can't really do a good job of connecting the characters to the reader, as your medium for doing that is the story itself. If your characters are weak, they won't convey your story very well, and there's no need for the reader to care about them. Hence, you have to have both the story and characters have a certain amount of strength to them.

This reminds me of Clerks the Animated Series where Dante and Randal are reading viewer mail asking them if they're afraid of women and they keep blowing it off, until a letter pops up asking if there aren't any black people in New Jersey and they hop all over that by introducing a black character on the spot.

Throw some dirt on it. Walk it off.

Coming Soon - the second bail OriginalRen out of poverty flash sale! 

Buy one at a store and not have to do anything crazy. It's the most logical solution.

Because we all have a need for speed? 

http://www.writingexcuses.com/
 
You're going to need this.
 
All of it.

So I sea, I hope we can remain friends, I'd hate to make anemone of you.

So I sea, I hope we can remain friends, I'd hate to make anemone of you.

So I sea, I hope we can remain friends, I'd hate to make anemone of you.

So I sea, I hope we can remain friends, I'd hate to make anemone of you.

as mdz called it: 'A smile that could mobilize armies'

If all else fails there's always the time-honoured tradition of privateering.

But that's precisely the problem with Japanese visual novels in the West: the market is super niche.
If you can't appeal to a wider audience, you're bound to not sell very well, and this could potentially make developers like Key back off from localizations if they can't turn in a good profit margin.
The problem with the price point being this high is that it'll heavily restrict the amount of people who will actually want to buy it to simply anime/visual novel fans, and probably only the hardcore ones that are willing to pay $50 for it knowing it's going to be that good.
The Western market expects a game's price point to be related to the amount, or at least quality, of gameplay, not just the story itself, so you'll find it very hard to convince people to pay $50 for literally no gameplay over here.
Japan understands the value of things like good art and good voice acting and the target audience over there is way bigger, that's why price points like this are something much more acceptable there, but over here that type of stuff won't fly very well, that's just the reality of it.
I'd love it if people bought Clannad en masse, but I'm very skeptical it will happen like this.

Honestly, here's your problem with it, and why visual novels just aren't ported as much. Taking the technical aspects into account with localization and everything else, $50 seems to be a pretty fair price. It's comparable to typical costs for PS4 and X-Box games out there, so it's not like gamers don't drop that kind of cash on something.
The problem lies in that it's not really a game. As a visual novel, you're asking people to drop $50 for a digital Choose Your Own Adventure novel that likely consists of repeating backgrounds and character images and mostly reading text with a few choices here and there to set a path to an ending. It has some replay value in choosing a few different paths, but in the end, it's a digital book, which makes it hard to justify asking someone to drop $50 on it. Considering most typical books run $10 to $30, depending on what it is and who the author is, etc. $50 is steep even for cool sprites and voices. Your typical gamer is not going drop that sort of cash on that sort of thing unless they're already into the format.
Concurrent development of Japanese and English versions of a visual novel would be a better method, but without any guarantee it'll sell in the West (or should we say East, I mean, technically the USA is more East of Japan than West) it would be hard to convince a company it's worth their time.

Well, that would be Amane's route that I've finished. To be honest, it didn't do that much for me. The feels are there, but it feels hollow as well.