Unexpected Christmas gifts: THE IDOLM@ASTER

Sometimes Christmas presents are really unexpected, and today I found out I was given one such gift: the limited edition of THE IDOLM@STER 2, PS3 version. It was quite a bulky box, showing all the main characters from the game (and from the recently-ended anime) (click to enlarge):

Side showing Chihaya, Hibiki and Azusa
Of course, having such a box means that there’s a lot of stuff inside. In fact, once opened, there are two game BDs (one being the actual game, the second being the first volume of Gravure for you! starring Haruka), a soundtrack (no songs, though), a booklet, a number of postcards (mine were showing Iori’s ending from episode 2 of the TV series), a booklet and also the first BD of the anime version:
It turns out the BD is also one of the limited editions, with a nice cover and more goodies, including a small booklet and a CD with the songs heard in the episodes:
And here are the postcards:
What about the game itself? Well, I have played it only briefly so far: I know it will be a bit painful to translate since the text is timed (having it stop, like in Neptume mk.2 is quite handy if you don’t catch something at first) and well, kind of different than the games I played so far. Still, in my opinion the various characters make it a worthwhile challenge.

I’m honestly surprised…

By browsing through sites, I noticed that the Spanish site Akihabara Denno Gumi Universe has posted a translation of an interview the webmaster had with me through email. 

Here it is (Spanish language). It feels nice to recall some memories of the past once in a while, especially since I couldn’t still believe that dennogumi.org had been such a resource back in the days…

Moving hosts!

After many years of (good) service, I’m in the process of moving from Dreamhost web hosting to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) service hosted by the folks at Linode. It’s definitely more pricey but I like the control and freedom that I have at my disposal. Thanks to a number of guides and some help, I was able to set up lighttpd and php-fpm to serve web pages, and Postfix+dovecot+amavisd-new for email.

I haven’t moved off a few services yet (including my primary mail), but I’m rather satisfied at the moment.
Let me know if you encounter any issues with this blog, although it should have moved painlessly (hopefully!).

Holidays

Like every year, it’s finally time for me to go away and enjoy some hard-earned holidays. I’ll be spending next week traveling around France, then going to the sea.
As such, my online presence will be reduced to the minimum: reports from the trip and some photos when I’m in France.

See you on August 30th!