I'm sorry that I haven't been writing many rants lately. One of the big problems with having all encompassing projects (like putting a book together) is that for a period of time you put a significant chunk of your life on hold. Once you finish the project, everything that you've been putting aside suddenly needs to be dealt with. :) I've dealt with this before, so I'm not really surprised that the tail end of December has been just like that for me.

Rather than trying to dig out all the loose ends of things in my head that I've wanted to talk about over the past few weeks, I think that, for the moment, I'll just take a moment here to say Thank You to the MT community for all the support you have given Me and Sarah over the past year. Looking back, it was a rough year in many respects, but it was also a very good year. Most of all, it is looking like 2004 is going to be a very good year for Megatokyo, and I just hope that I can live up to it.

I always worry about letting everyone down - for example, the amount of missed comics this month was very high. Most of you are used to that, and the fact that it does happen sometimes. It doesn't change the fact that the person it annoys more than anyone is me :) Every year I promise to try harder, and I'll make the same promise again this year.

I'm quite happy with the way book 2 came together. I don't think I'll be letting anyone down with that. Well, there isn't as much under-comic commentary as there was in book 1 - that's a function of the size of the comics. Hopefully the other stuff I did for the book will make up for it. We'll see.

You probably have noticed that we upgraded the forum software recently, and moved all the existing content of the forums to the new forum. There are always hiccups and problems with a move of this size, but I think in the long run this will (and already has) work out and serve the community better.

In the next few months I will be working with some people to rebuild the backend of the Megatokyo site itself. The site itself has outgrown itself and is quite outdated - just the dropbox alone is a huge inefficiency. My goal is to not change the look and feel of the site too much - more to tweak it, and to make it easier to find things and to navigate the site. I'll provide more info on this as the project starts up next month.

Sarah and I will be traveling a lot next year, but my first trip is to Tokyo to go to AX Japan. Part of this trip will be a side trip to Sendai, where I plan to take a lot of pictures, get a good feel for the place, and determine some specific things about the 'warmth' story that I need to visit there to determine. I've been putting time into writing 'warmth' from start to finish and do the development that it needed.

Sarah and I have a lot going on the end of December, and our update schedule might have some hiccups, but I'll try to get as many comics done as I can and try to get in a few more rants before the start of the new year.

Happy holidays everyone!