The New York Times brings us the story of Tokyo resident “Nisan” (not his real name), who has finally found true love at the age of 37. Nothing unusual in that, per se; people fall in love all the time. But stop us if this starts to sound weird: the object of Nisan’s affections isn’t, well, real. She’s not even 3D, in fact, but a 2D game character. Oh yeah, and she’s ten years old.

The lady child in question is Nemu, a leading character in a PC/PlayStation 2 game called Da Capo. Nisan regularly takes his collection of Nemu body-pillow covers to karaoke or to restaurants, and generally spoils her rotten. It’s a mighty strange tale, but also kind of sad.

Nisan did have a real girlfriend once, though he says that she dumped him. Now, however, he’s found a new, slightly flatter object for his affections, and has big plans for their future together:

“I have real feelings for her. [...] When I die, I want to be buried with her in my arms.”

And they say romance is dead.

[NY Times, via Destructoid]

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Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today.

I’m just as guilty here at The Inquisitr. The template doesn’t really allow for a old fashioned blogroll, and I’ve not tried to create one. And yet I miss the comradeship a blogroll use to offer, a way of sharing links to sites and people you liked or were friends with, and if you were lucky, you’d get a link back.

Google is at least partly to blame. The hysteria surrounding link=nofollow and blogs being punished for paid links made many would-be blogroll owners particularly shy of blogrolls.

Unlike other areas of blogging, where today we see great new services (such as in the commenting space) nothing has seemingly popped up to replace blogrolls. Outbrain offers contextual links across sites, which is a handy feature, but it’s not a blogroll replacement. Something like Regator, but offered white-label could be another possible alternative. Inquisitir iQ wasn’t created as a blogroll alternative, but it’s the closest way I’ve got today to sharing links to content and people I like (and I’ll be adding some new pages next week).

So what happened to the blogroll? Is there any alternatives you’re aware of? Or am I being overly sentimental? Leave a comment below or reply via video in the Seesmic embed with your thoughts.

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