No way!!! I live in land of the buckeye as well! It’s nice to meet another fan from the same state. It’s really interesting to hear you’re head creator of the Umineko Online project. Seriously, that’s really impressive stuff.
As I’m sure you are aware, there are plenty of fun things to do here on Rokkenjima! If you want to get into the Higurashi VN, I recommend following along with our tea parties! Aspi (and others) have hosted them all the way from Onikakushi to our current tea party, Meakashi! Once the tea parties are over there are podcasts that you can listen to (you can participate in!) that sum up the overall discussion during the tea parties. Please participate in them, as you can win cool prizes! I’ve also watched the Higurashi anime, and I can tell you that reading the VN is so much better.
I should also mention that if you want to talk about the stuff that happens later on in the anime, there are various spoiler threads where you can freely talk about stuff without worry of spoiling people.
Oh! Higurashi’s not all that’s on this site. We have Umineko too. Both places for those new to the story, and those returning to it. These are also tea parties (and have their own podcasts), and future ones will come as soon as Chiru is rereleased on Steam! I’m certain that these future tea parties will also have a lot of fun prizes to look forward to. Speaking of stuff to look forward to, we also have a hype train thread with all of the current information we know about the next WTC.
There’s a lot to do here on Rokkenjima, so I recommend you look around and get a feel for the place. Welcome to Rokkenjima!