I am browsing the Internet right now from an Internet Cafe in Japan and I have to say that the way they do Net Cafes over here is excellent.

I have sampled about 5 different Net Cafes, but the one I am in now is far and away the best: Manboo.

Despite its unfortunate name, for 200 Yen an hour you get a private cubicle, a nice leather chair, headphones, a high speed internet connection, and a big screen TV. You can check out mangas and DVDs to browse in your cubicle just like in a library.

One of the better things in Japan is that is has a lively arcade community. The layout of the arcades seems to be near identical, with "UFO Catcher" games on the first floor, more current 3-D fighters and gun games on the second floor, and retro games on the top floors (some arcades here are 5-6 stories, but the floorspace tends to be crammed).

Here are a few arcade games in Japan I have enjoyed:

Much like Mark, I will be on holiday soon, but it won't be in Egypt. From May 18th to June 20th, I will be in Japan. While I don't have a laptop, I will have access to Internet Cafes, though due to my tight budget, it won't be as often as I would like.

It's great how far the site has come along, especially in the past few months. It's very exciting to see we are near the relaunch period.

Attached is an image of a new profile I worked on for my website. Although it is tough to tell with its small resolution, I did a lot of Photoshop layers to give it a nice textured sketch feel.

Obviously this is way too minimalist, but this is an idea of how the finished site could look.

I apologize for my lack of drawing abilities in advance.

When AA Neo gets launched, I think it would behoove us to organize the different Editor positions a bit better instead of having everyone be an "Editor."

At the very least, the positions we would need would be:

-- News Editor (Responsible for writing 1-3 updates to the News Blog/Section per day with commentary)

-- Editor (Copyedits articles for AA Neo-- Editing is an important part of the article writing process, both for correcting grammar errors and general logic flaws in the article itself)

-- Video/Podcast Editor (Not even sure if we want a Podcast on this site or not, but more video reviews would be fun-- Readers enjoyed our takes on classic games last time around)

Just was thinking about the current layout of the site and was thinking on how we could make it a bit easier to use. If we took the Recent Comments column and shifted it to the far right side, it would free up space for the Syndicate and Menu options to be on top of the left column.

The minimalism thus far of this new layout is quite nice, but coming to the main page and seeing a large list of the most recent comments is not the most inviting thing. A splash page might be nice-- I'm not talking about anything silly like having the AA mascot rap about the good old C64 days, but it would seem a bit more welcoming.