This year I decided to forego the usual western customs in favor of following a more Japanese approach to celebrating the New Year. Fortunately for me, the Japanese community in Los Angeles puts on quite a celebration on the first few days of the year, with traditional food, music, and dancing.

After enjoying the first sunrise of the year (hatsuhinode), I headed down to Little Tokyo to catch the festivities (and buy some manga, of course). They had stages set up for various performances at both Weller Court in front of the Kinokuniya bookstore, as well in the Japanese Village Plaza, pictured below. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy 2008! Here’s hoping your year goes “just as planned!”

Yes yes, I know; we’re waaay behind the rest of the world on this “New Year” thing. Everyone else is already sooo over 2008 by now.

Nevertheless, allow us to wish you a Happy New Year! Read the rest of this entry »

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal!

メリークリスマス!

¡Feliz Navidad!

Joyeux Noël!

Fröhliche Weihnachten! Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right, I said “winners”. Since we ended up having so many responses to our contest, I felt bad only giving away one prize.

To make up for it, in addition to the $30 Amazon online gift certificate grand prize, we decided to also throw in a $15 second place prize! Read the rest of this entry »

Our Christmas Contest is still ongoing. I will be drawing names from those who commented to select a winner tomorrow, exactly one week after the contest began, so for those who haven’t left a comment yet, this is a friendly reminder to answer the four questions so that you have a shot at the $30 Amazon gift certificate we’re giving away.

And of course, if you’d rather not enter in the contest for whatever reason, please still do go ahead and leave us any suggestions you may have. Just make a note in your comment that you’d rather not be included in the drawing.

In addition, I’m pleased to announce the winner of the other $30 gift certificate, which goes to the person who made the 500th comment on the site. Read the rest of this entry »

Yatta! It’s our very first contest / prize giveaway here at Epic Win!

No, it’s not a Santa-suited Haruhi. I wish I had that to give away. >_>

It’s been a lot of fun blogging for you guys, I have to say. We hope you all have been enjoying what we write about, as well. Since it’s the Christmas season and all, we thought it would be nice way to celebrate with you all by giving away some cash monies.

We’re always thinking about ways we can improve the quality of the site for you guys, so I thought it might be nice to get opinions from you all on what you think of Epic Win so far, and what you would like to see more of.

I’m especially interested to know what you think of the stuff we’ve blogged about so far. We try to maintain some variety in our content, everything from episode reviews to Japanese news, including some random anime rants, some season reviews and (completely biased) rankings, some tongue-in-cheek satire, some photoblog style tales from Japan, and even a little metablogging. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right, in addition to all our other benefits, we now offer full RSS feeds.

Guff’s busy working on a film, so I’ve taken advantage of the down time to do some Epic housecleaning. As you may have noticed, there have been a number of minor changes across the site.

I’ve received several requests for full articles in our RSS, as well as requests to be able to subscribe to comments, so both of those features are now available. I’ve finally gotten around to updating our blogroll, as well, which now includes the obligatory witty (or not) comments in the alt text.

If you run across anything broken while browsing the site, please let me know.

An Open Letter to Our Former Hosting Provider:

Dear Our Former Hosting Provider,

Why must you eat babies for sustenance, even though they provide little if any nutritional value? Why must you outsource all your technical support (and I use that term very loosely) to India, where they are all named James and yet cannot speak a single sentence of intelligible English?

Why, even though you promised 9,999.99% uptime, must your servers crash and burn harder than Michael Vick’s NFL career? Why do you force memes? And why is yo momma so fat?

Sincerely,

Epic Win

*sigh* My apologies to everybody who experienced problems trying to browse our site in the last few days. Our old host’s uptime proved worse than Itou Makoto’s long term relationship prospects, and I wasn’t about to pull a Katsura and stick around for more abuse. The DNS records should all be pointing over to our new server, and everything seems to be in working order.

If you have any problems surfing the site or trying to post comments, please let me know.

~0rion