There is no easy way to describe this game.

Okay, so it’s about pigeons.  And it’s a dating game, of the otome variety, if you know the term.  In a high school setting.  Yes, it really is an actual game; someone thought of this.  And then made it.

And then it garnered enough attention on this side of the ocean to warrant a translation of the full version of the game in English.

It was released last night, and you can download it right here, a marvelously appropriate Valentine’s Day gift indeed.

What do you mean you don’t want to play the absurd dating game about schoolgoing pigeons??  OF COURSE YOU DO.

Okay, so let me level with you on some things about this game.  It isn’t some slapped-together April Fool’s joke.  There is a legitimate backstory behind the concept of the game’s premise, and it’s more intriguing than you think.  Furthermore, no matter which bird you decide to pursue romantically, you are guaranteed an entertaining and fleshed-out story.

So, let’s check out this game I’m playing, Hatoful Boyfriend.

I know what you’re thinking.  This looks ridiculous!  Okay, so it is ridiculous.  But it’s also really fun!  It’s crazy and fun!  Crazy-fun!  And I can promise you that before you’re halfway through your story, you will entirely forget that the characters are pigeons.  Really!  Okay.  I’m done trying to convince you of Hatoful Boyfriend’s legitimacy.  Let’s just play.

Bunny Bani.  That’s me.

Hmmm…

And then our friend, Ryouta Kawara, shows up:

Hey!  That’s not a bird, that’s a boy!  No, no, it’s just an image that’s simulated for you so you can attribute a human face to your birdie friend.  You’ll never see his cute Shotaro face again after this introduction.

The first term begins.  Bunny Bani goes about her first day of school, meeting all kinds of new birdie friends!

There’s Nanaki Kazuaki, our homeroom teacher.  Tends to doze off in mid-sentence.

The transfer student, Sakuya Le Bel Shirogane.  Bani-chan is optimistic, but he just sounds like a snob to me!

A trip to the library introduces us to this shy fellow, Nageki Fujishiro.

A commotion in the hallway just after that brings us face-to-face with Yuuya Sakazaki, the kind of birdie everybirdie should know.

Oh, dear.  Most players should want to avoid the intimidating doctor, Shuu Iwamine, after hearing Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy playing so ominously in the background of this introduction…

and then there’s Oko San.

That’s all of the birds that will be introduced for now.  If you happen to scope out the Demo Version of the game (along with the English Patch) because you’re not committed enough to drop ~$5 on the Full Version, these are all of the birds that you’ll see.  However, now that the full version is out, there is one… special… additional… character.

I’ll try to scope him out as best as I can, but the truth is I’ve already played through this once (last night, just after I finished downloading it), and went through the whole game without so much as a glimpse at the new guy!  Looks like you’ll just have to sit tight and read along with my adventures if you want to see if I can find him this time. :3

Now, before we end this introduction to our pigeony adventure, let’s see the first set of options we’ll get to choose from.  Let’s choose what Bunny Bani will spend most of her time doing after class!

Oh, oh??  What is this?  ‘Infirmary Staff’?  This is especially interesting, because remember that I said I already played through this once last night?  Well, that fourth option was not there that time!  There is an absurd amount of replay value packaged up inside Hatoful Boyfriend, not only due to the branches and branches of stories, but because of stuff like this – options that aren’t even available to you unless you’ve cleared the game a certain number of times.

And thus ends part one!  Which after-school task will Bani-chan choose??  Which bird will capture her romantic affections, and will she survive the ordeals ahead??  The implications are more grave than you even know…

One last time, here’s the link to download Hatoful Boyfriend for yourself.

Next: Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Ending

Hey everyone! 😀

I know I haven’t been blogging here as much as I keep saying I’d like to, but I have a reason! I have so many cool ideas planned for this site this year, and they’re all being worked on EVERY DAY! We’re still only just getting started in 2012 and I can’t wait to see what kinds of other developments occur through this year, besides the neat things I have planned~

Here’s something exciting: What with January ending and February beginning, payments and checks have all been sent out by all the online affiliate networks I’ve joined and made a secondary income out of. And while I first started getting tiny trickles of payments in November (I started affiliate marketing in October), this past January marks an important landmark: I made my first $100 entirely from commission-based revenue!!

Now, I read up a lot about affiliate marketing before and as I first started monetizing my Web site and blogs. And so many of them stated that your first goal to work toward is that first $100. That first $100 is your sign that you’ve done it – you’ve got a blog with traffic coming in to it, some regular readers, and now it’s just a matter of keeping it going with more products and promotions, and soon you’ll have another $100, then $500, and even $1000 is an eventual certainty as long as you keep at it – and those higher numbers are so much easier to attain now that that uphill climb towards your first $100 is reached.

If you’re a little confused and find yourself asking, “Wait, what’s affiliate marketing? What blogs are we talking about?” that’s okay! I’ll give you some quick background info. There are a toooooon of informative articles you can read about affiliate marketing itself so I won’t go hugely into it here, but basically affiliate marketing is advertising products and linking to them using a code that is unique to you. When someone else clicks that link and looks at that product, or any other products from that site you linked them to, there’s a cookie there that remembers that YOUR LINK is the one that led them there. If they purchase something, a percentage of that sale gets paid to you! You can basically think of affiliate marketing as getting paid by commission to advertise products. The two blogs I have monetized to specifically work as affiliate blogs are both on Tumblr – Kawaii Shopping and The Finer Fashion Shopper.

And here’s the very best part – my sales in January were so good, I actually reached WAY over $100! My total cumulative earnings from all of my affiliate programs across these few months actually totals to closer to $200! Remember how I mentioned I first started getting payments in November? My first paycheck (it was from my favorite affiliate program so far, LinkShare!) was for only $34. And I’d previously received a $50 payment for referring someone to use my Web hosting provider, Hostgator. I was already at $84! So close to $100 after only one month of affiliate marketing!

My sales seemed to decline in December, and I barely made any sales. I think I stayed teetering at that $80-90 range that month. But that was fine, as the holidays were very busy and I didn’t have a huge amount of time to dedicate to my blogs. When January came around, I became aware of something I had seriously neglected to address – I hadn’t implemented any SEO techniques to my two Tumblr blogs! Was it even possible to optimize Tumblr blogs for search engines? All I had to do was Google “Tumblr SEO tips” and there were my answers! I’m thankful I’m already so familiar with HTML and a small bit of the SEO I’d worked on for my own personal site (the one you’re reading from right now!), because that knowledge made it easy to implement H1 headers and turn post tags into meta keywords, and those kinds of things.

Well, immediately after implementing those SEO techniques, I witnessed a significant spike in the traffic my blogs were getting, which in turn led to a DRASTIC increase in clicks through to all of the products I was promoting there. My sales through LinkShare jumped from $20 that month to nearly $40, and then finally reached $50 right before January ended. Holy cow! From that program alone, I’d MORE than reached my first $100 earned online!! 😯 And as if that weren’t enough, on the very last day of January, I received a surprise e-mail from Amazon Associates stating that my payment for the month had been processed. Since I haven’t promoted products from Amazon as much as I have from other sites, I’d nearly forgotten all about them! When I logged into my Amazon Associates panel, I was beyond ecstatic to find that I’d accumulated $55 in sales there – all from links I’d created back in November. The SEO techniques I’d only implemented in January had even brought traffic to some of my much older posts!

So those two payments from LinkShare and Amazon alone would have gotten me to my $100 goal, but don’t forget that I had nearly reached $100 beforehand! I absolutely owe this spike of success to search engine optimization. If this past month’s increase of traffic and sales are a reliable indicator, it isn’t unreasonable to anticipate making at least $100 a month from these blogs, regularly. And if traffic and sales continue to increase, well then… I am certainly incredibly hopeful for the future! And what’s even more – I also spent some time in January joining even more affiliate programs! I also have tricklings of earnings from Share-A-Sale and Google Affiliate Network, and I’m hopeful that those will blossom into larger earnings in the coming months, just like LinkShare and Amazon Associates did after only a few months. c:

I can’t complain at all about my experience with affiliate marketing and encourage others to use their blogs for the same. If you want to get started just like I did, join LinkShare and search through their categories of merchants to find some online retailers that fit your niche. Other programs to check out are Share-A-Sale, Amazon Associates, and Google Affiliate Network.

In the future I might post a bit about the techniques I use and precise strategies that I implement in each of my Tumblr blogs when I make posts about products. c:

Thanks for reading!

January 5, 2012

Hello once again, all of you lovely persons!! I hope that all of you had fantastic holidays and a wonderful New Year, and haven’t broken any resolutions yet!

I posted a small announcement on my commission page that I was going to be on break for a couple of weeks there, and had every intention of writing a full blog post announcing my absence as well, but then an INCREDIBLY-POORLY-TIMED INCIDENT OCCURRED: the charger for my laptop shorted out and so I had no power and could not access anything. D8 So, I am terribly and deeply sorry if anyone tried to contact me and I could not get back to you.

Right now, however, it’s time to go through all of my messages and comments and get back to everyone!! And then it’s back to work on sewing up everyone’s ponies!!

FURTHERMORE, what with it being a new year and all, it’s time to pave a new path for myself and really offer some substantial things to this blog. I know I keep talking and talking about this Boutique idea of mine, and it was my resolution last year to get it going. I still wanna do that, but we’ll likely see some other immediate things I can offer here before then. c: I’m thinking of downloadable packages of icons and desktop themes, some with licenses included so you can use the graphics in your own design endeavors – Web design of your own, independent games, and the like.

Would you believe that I intend to publish a book soon, too?? I’ll self-publish a physical copy through Lulu but also have a downloadable PDF ebook available on this site (cheaper alternative). It will be on the subject of sewing cute, tiny things.

Other thing I need to do on this site: post the photos of finished ponies that I’ve already submitted to DeviantArt.

*cracks knuckles*

Gemdas is an OC Pony by Roundrockb!

I like the colors a lot. @3@ Like chocolate with vanilla frosting… I am told by Roundrockb that the colors are inspired by the Pokémon Eevee.

Please respect the artist and do not use this image for any purposes (forum avatar, signature, Web graphics, banners, any personal use or commercial gain). (Exceptions?)
Do not trace, copy, or alter in any way. Do not remove signatures or watermarks.
Do not save and/or upload elsewhere (Photobucket, Flickr, Tumblr, etc.).

November 2011

Sometimes I open up Corel Painter and I’m like “Man, why don’t I use this more often?! It’s great!” and then I’m like “why do these colors turn white when they try to blend with each other” and “why do the edges look awful when I paint on the layer below this” and “why aren’t any of the shortcut keys NORMAL” and other technical things that are annoying…

So here, finally, is my Thundercats fan art. I don’t think Tygra looks quite smug enough. He also has the weirdest hair ever.

Thundercats belongs to Studio 4C I think
Please respect the artist and do not use this image for any purposes (forum avatar, signature, Web graphics, banners, any personal use or commercial gain). (Exceptions?)
Do not trace, copy, or alter in any way. Do not remove signatures or watermarks.
Do not save and/or upload elsewhere (Photobucket, Flickr, Tumblr, etc.).