I feel that there’s no reason for birthday cakes to get more boring as you get older. If anything, they should get exponentially more absurd. I’m planning for my 40th birthday cake will be a 3-D goomba. This year, I received two awesome and fattening treats.

My friend Jessica, knowing that my favorite type of chocolate is “lots”, made a chocolate-chocolate-chocolate-chocolate cake (that’s a chocolate cake with chocolate chips, chocolate icing, and chocolate sprinkles). Sadly I did not have any chocolate milk on hand, but there’s always next year.

The second confectionery delight was made by aspiring pastry chef Frank Blakemore. Frank knows that the safest way to date my little sister is to distract me and my brothers with food – preferably the kind that will prevent us from moving for several hours.

The cake was inspired by Alex’s NNFB ninja star T-Shirt design and was the most delicious fanart we’ve ever received. Yes, that ninja star was edible.

Speaking of fanart. We have a wonderful creation by MiGo-Go who makes the Webcomic Gant. It’s not your typical Ina portrait. Check MiGo-Go’s Deviant art page for the whole story.

The Comic Creators Alliance Donations Drive is up and running! For the next two weeks, the donations gathered by CCA will be sent to Love146 and Gracehaven House – two organizations dedicated to the prevention of human trafficking and the rehabilitation of those victimized by it.

Donators will receive an awesome desktop featuring characters drawn by 85 webcomic artist, including a drawing of Ina by Alex!

Hikaru No Go is one of my favorite animes of all time. If you’ve never heard of it, the story is, get this, about a boy learning how to play Go, a seemingly simple board game. That’s pretty much it. The fate of the universe doesn’t hang in the balance over a victory or a defeat. There’s no mortal peril (I think there’s 1 sword in the whole show, and it’s a visual metaphor). It isn’t even a game that the average Westerner knows how to play. But when I first saw it, 5ish years ago, I was completely drawn in by the story.

The anime left a large impression on NNFB. At every opportunity Ina’s uncle, Yukizane, is depicted playing Go (he originally played Xiangqi – Chinese Chess). And we’ve made Go an integral part of Ina’s training as a strategist.

I know a lot of our readers already play Go (a fact that is made painfully clear every time it is depicted in the comic with less than 100% accuracy), So I was thrilled when I saw we were advertising VIZ Media / VIZ Anime, which offers online streaming of several anime series including Hikaru No Go.

If you’ve never watched it before, now is a great opportunity to check it out. In fact, I’ll make it even easier for ya:

Enjoy!

We’re taking off NNFB this week partly due to the busy holiday and partly due to some major moving work going on behind the scenes. NNFB will be going independent from Keenspot on January 1st, 2010!

We had planned to graduate out of Keenspot in the next year or two but recent, well publicized, events at Keenspot have moved up our commencement ceremony.

Basically, 2010 will be a very interesting year for NNFB.

Scott Sava of The Dreamland Chronicles is auctioning off sketch cards from an amazing assortment of comic makers for the charity First Book, which provides new books to children in need. Alex contributed a sketch of Ken! That makes this the nicest cause Ken was ever remotely involved in. 100% of the proceeds go to First Book, so please bid this up. And check out all the other amazing cards!

Penny Arcade’s mega-charity event Child’s Play is up and running. Child’s Play provides toys and games to over 60 hospitals worldwide. This event is just mind boggling. Last year Child’s Play collected 1.4 MILLION dollars and it looks like they’re going to pass that again this year. Please consider donating!

It’s time to put a fresh coat of paint on the old site. While I was at it, I tore down the entire house and rebuilt it from the ground up. We’re now running on Wordpress using the WebComic Plugin, which is extremely awesome. Most of the improvements are in the comic management end of things, but a few new features you might notice are an improved RSS feed, archive navigation using your keyboard’s arrow keys, and nicer image galleries (soon to be used for fanart, fanmixes, sketches, etc.)

Because this was a complete site overhaul, the old comic comments couldn’t be moved over from our old archive. We’re still using DISQUS, though, so if you had a comment account before, it’ll still work.

The site is a little on the empty side right now, but I’ll have all the various extra stuff up later this week. For now enjoy watching tiny (hopefully unimportant) pieces of the site break as I mess with the HTML.

For the first time ever, you can now buy NNFB shirts, buttons, posters, and other stuff online! We’ve joined forces with Zap! and White Noise to create the Webcomic Bucket Store! Check out the Featured section for stuff on sale!