#j

[r-i]

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click and zoom. challenge: use hairstyle / effect / palette / costume details to identify these without checking eico’s pixiv.

[r-i]

[sleepysmiles]

sorry to interrupt i just wanted to say that this is a good thread. this is my kinda thread

also that im super happy someone else here reads awful hospital

ok carry on

[r-i]

on one hand, I’m disappointed at the lack of challenges for the first post. on the other hand, I’m disappointed I didn’t have much more than comics and/or touhou-

[…]

[haley]

this is now one of like two or three threads i have set to Watching c:

[Iacus]

Are those Touhou manga good?

Besides the drawing quality, I mean. Are they interesting to read or is it just fan nonsense?

[aggie]

wow first post is the sickest touhous

[r-i]

The first post with a Touhou panel is canon! Wild and Horned Hermit is fun as a character study with someone subtly relevant who isn’t stuck with firm faction blocs, alongside a few regular protagonists, through a wide number of little vignettes. Took a bit of a long while to actually start going anywhere as it did recently, though.

The second post with Yuuka is just a clever interpretation in a doujin I’m fond of. It’s sort of nice in that doesn’t just ignore the severe flattening / infantalizing of omnipresent memetic fan depictions but remembers unique canon aspects- that Marisa isn’t just a charismatic thief but also an underdog researcher, that Yuuka was only in PC98 and a Phantasmagoria game without any modern normal placements. I don’t remember much of the rest of the Relation Valley doujins it’s in, I’ll admit, though it doesn’t present much horniness or yuri fluff either.

I scanned through a lot of non-porn Touhou doujins years ago and meant to come up with a list of non “fan nonsense” lists per character, in trying to value the actual premises and whatever here, but what I remember that isn’t Jizeru or Zounose or Karaagetarou is very slim, unfortunately.

[CourierRice]

god I love MonHun’s worldbuilding

[r-i]

@r-i

One can play the above level (and provide feedback?), meant to be in the middle of a difficult-yet-reasonable and unusual micro-episode, by taking this, inserting it into a SMBX 2.0 Beta download’s “worlds” folder, and then selecting said “Practice Minisode”. I thirst for level design practice with end results that can actually stand by itself, somewhat. Still, I can’t shake the feeling this first level is the cleanest and most coherent concept of the planned five…

…

[r-i]

FELLOW STUDENT: Explain this behaviour.

YOU: It’s called drinking alcohol. All us college students do it. And some high schoolers, but only the cooler ones.

FELLOW STUDENT: And what is the purpose of the drinking alcohol activity?

It makes you sick.

YOU: Well, you drink it and it tastes awful and then you get really drunk where like you can’t walk and stuff. Then you throw up and feel bad.

FELLOW STUDENT: So the purpose of this behaviour, and by extension this entire institution, is to become sick and vomit.

YOU: Basically.

FELLOW STUDENT: Quite perplexing.

It makes you look cool.

YOU: It makes you look super cool. So like when you start drinking around people they know you’re very grown up and interesting.

FELLOW STUDENT: A social gesture, then. What about the liquid conveys this meaning?

YOU: I don’t know. Probably the part where it tastes bad.

FELLOW STUDENT: Most curious.

It makes you look sexy.

YOU: It makes you really sexy. Like if you’re walking along with someone you know and they start drinking there’s a good chance it’ll make you think about how attractive they look in that moment and how comfortable they make you feel and how much you like being around them, and then you’ll start thinking like no seriously you really like being around this person, and then after that you’ll probably be thinking of them non-stop for the rest of the night, and you’ll have a hard time even falling asleep because you’ll just be picturing their hair and the way their voice sounds and that look they get when they’re figuring something out and how cute they are when they laugh even though they try not to laugh that much, and like your heart will be beating really really fast and you’ll be full of energy and you’ll want to just get up and pace around but you won’t be able to because it’s lights out and everyone would notice so instead you’ll just lie perfectly still in bed feeling like you’re about to explode.

FELLOW STUDENT: Ah, so the consumption of alcohol is a means of attracting other members of the human species.

YOU: Huh? Oh yeah, that. Right.

Birdland is: excellent subtle worldplay as a title, ideally fuzzy and self-coherent as a setting, delectable and genuine teen queerness as a text, precise flexing and accommodation of the medium as a Twine.

Also I hate this inconsistent details tag.

[nettle]

i hate most twine games, but this was good, thanks

[Bee]

Me irl:

[haley]

fernanda maya

thought u would like

[CourierRice]

mama warned me about these kinds of gals

she didn’t warn me hard enough

[haley]

@r-i

i have died

[r-i]

I can’t post about it in the reconsiderations thread because I lack pictures, but the most recent Touhou artbook / lorebook being all about modern social criticms is… peculiar.

Hecatia has a big interview in the Alternative Facts. Which is strangely and specifically political. Summary below, lots of paraphrasing.

First Hecatia gives a brief history of Hell: It’s usually thought of a prison-like world for sinners to be punished in after they die, but originally it was just a world created by and for incredibly selfish people who valued true freedom above all else (ie: Chaotic Neutral/Evil). They didn’t give a flip about humanity one way or another: the seas of fire were just there to cook their meat, and the seas of blood were just in case they ever got thirsty. However, at some point there was a social movement to create order, and the Yama and Kishin took things over for the whole “afterlife” thing. The older residents, like Hecatia, all have their own opinions, but she doesn’t especially mind. Some of the people who still value personal freedom have left to create their own new hells, but they aren’t really relevant.

Next, Hecatia talks about immigration. Specifically, Aya brings up the fear that immigrants from Hell will see the relatively prosperous Gensokyo as a feeding grounds and bring chaos and disorder. Hecatia points out that a birdcage with no holes for air to pass through is nothing more than a death trap. A steady influx of new ideas is necessary for the long-term survival of a society. And even if you think the people of Hell are too inherently destructive, excluding them entirely will merely piss off the people already inside who sympathize with them. It’s fundamentally impossible to preserve the social order merely by excluding people. At best it’s an illusion. And doesn’t Gensokyo take pride in accepting anyone? That’s its whole appeal.

Which naturally leads us to the Lunar Capital, that most obvious example of “order by exclusion”. Of all the worlds, they are literally the worst. They exclude everyone to construct a false paradise for themselves. They love insulting people, but have the thinnest skin of anyone. And more to the point, they don’t respect other ways of living. Hell and Gensokyo have their differences, but ultimately they can get along, but the Lunarians can’t get along with anyone. One of them has the power to twist the truth to serve their own ends, using lazy reporters like Aya to spread falsehoods (“hey!” says Aya) and change the perception of what “truth” even is. She goes on to insult the magazine.

Changing the subject, Clownpiece. Hecatia basically sent her to Gensokyo as a reward for completing a big job (the siege of the moon). Aya is skeptical, saying it’s clearly an aggressive move by Hell. Hecatia emphasizes that she only sees the moon as the enemy, and would like to get along with Gensokyo. Going back to Clownpiece, Aya notes that fairies are basically just background noise on the surface. In Hell though, they truly believe in the strongest rising to the top, so there are irrelevant Kishin and super-important fairies. Clownpiece is strong for a fairy, so Hecatia values her highly. Aya wishes tengu society were like that, because no matter how hard she works she’ll never move beyond her caste. Naturally, Hecatia invites her to come live in Hell, but points out that it’s not all good. At least Aya is guaranteed a position: in Hell people who fail even once usually sink to the bottom and can’t ever climb out of it. And those who aren’t blessed from the beginning would probably be happier dead. It is, after all, Hell.

Hecatia personally would like to have peaceful relations with Gensokyo, but Hell is all about freedom so everyone has different ideas. Some want to conquer it, some want to destroy the entire universe, etc etc. It’s Hell. But as long as she’s attaching herself to Gensokyo it’ll be difficult for anyone to make a move on it. Not because she has any control over their society—she describes herself as an “outlaw"—but because she’s super-strong and no one wants to mess with her. The absolute freedom of absolute power. "Goddess” is just a title given to such absolute powers.

She ends the interview with a summary of her points: you can’t isolate any society completely, so building a wall or excluding others is pointless. Just think of them as neighbors. Just some advice from a goddess.

[r-i]

Finally, a(nother) pokemon that can fit in this thread.

Before I run off on this next tangent, let’s actually review Necrozma as a Pokemon design. At first, it just looks like some kind of nondescript, crystalline robot with a holographic face, but take a closer look, and you’ll spot some majorly peculiar anatomical quirks; namely the fact that its “torso” is actually an inverted, dragon-like head, even referred to as such in this concept art, while its own “head” resembles a lopped-off neck, or apparently a “tail” according to this. You can definitely rearrange Necrozma’s pieces into at least part of a more traditional looking, armor plated dragonoid.

In its idle animation, the poor thing even stops periodically to clutch at itself in pain…and wouldn’t you, if your body was nothing but the scrambled remains of something else entirely? Something from some other world that tried desperately to reconstruct itself in an alien environment?

Popplio, Mimikyu, Dhelmise, Necrozma. The incidental resonance in this generation is incredible.

[r-i]

burnout as standard consumption of media

(12:33 AM) -jinxed: I sort of feel
(12:33 AM) -jinxed: like crawl is to me as dark souls is to selectbutton.
(12:34 AM) -jinxed: (in that I’ll defend it and hate it and think it’s better than the pack and loathe its deficiencies and rarely agree with others on where it goes wrong)
(12:41 AM) DracoOmega: Heh
(12:42 AM) DracoOmega: Well, it IS better than the pack =P
(12:42 AM) DracoOmega: That’s just fact =P
(12:42 AM) -jinxed: this is accurate to both.
(12:42 AM) DracoOmega: Yeah
(12:43 AM) -jinxed: (of course, I don’t have the context to talk about which dynamics or which tones are excessive or excellent, but I can see the exhaustion in their words over what they’ve spent too much time with)
(12:46 AM) -jinxed: …
(12:46 AM) -jinxed: somehow
(12:46 AM) -jinxed: you don’t get that sort of exhaustion
(12:47 AM) -jinxed: and you dropped out of crawl because it was a shitty place more than anything else
(12:47 AM) DracoOmega: Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t sick of the GAME, as such
(12:47 AM) DracoOmega: And maybe it’s just because I actually stop playing things when I’m no longer enjoying them?
(12:48 AM) DracoOmega: Rather than keep playing them in a sort of love/hate relationship
(12:48 AM) -jinxed: and then don’t critically linger on them for months afterwards =P
(12:49 AM) DracoOmega: I recall some PvP stuff in WoW that I was grinding for a while until it occured to me “If I wasn’t trying to earn points to reach some goal, would I actually still be playing this?” and realized the answer was “No”
(12:49 AM) DracoOmega: So I stopped
(12:49 AM) -jinxed: a key emotional intelligence
(12:49 AM) DracoOmega: So maybe I already went through that a few times before and have learned my lesson
(12:50 AM) DracoOmega: (Though I guess I never got annoyed at the GAME, even then. That’s just never been part of the way I relate to things, I guess)
(12:51 AM) -jinxed: sb seems to be full of people who have not learned this lesson with many of their own investments in media and mediums (though readily re-assessing things from memory and discussion just as much as actually partaking of a work)
(12:51 AM) -jinxed: creating a sort of learnt bitterness
(12:51 AM) DracoOmega: Yeah, it’s a problem a lot of people seem to have
(12:51 AM) -jinxed: that I naturally align with >_>
(12:51 AM) DracoOmega: I mean, MMOs are particularly bad for it
(12:51 AM) DracoOmega: With the endless treadmills and numerical progression and shared persistant
(12:52 AM) DracoOmega: Which seems to draw a lot of people in and keep them there, and I was certainly one of them at a point
(12:52 AM) DracoOmega: Where I spent plenty of time grinding towards things without really noticing that I was no longer enjoying the process
(12:53 AM) DracoOmega: But these days, if I’m starting to feel resentful towards a game, that’s a giant cue to put it aside
(12:53 AM) -jinxed: I feel this creeping in with necrodancer leaderboard chasing myself
(12:53 AM) DracoOmega: Yeah, I did a little, too, at one point, I think
(12:53 AM) -jinxed: but there’s still some satisfaction in the execution of the game!
(12:53 AM) DracoOmega: It created a fair bit of frustration when so much of the time I spent with it felt like just a whole lot of failure and near-misses
(12:54 AM) DracoOmega: Yeah, I mean some milder forms of frustration or exhaustion are sort of inevitable sometimes, even when one has a healthy relationship with a game, but it’s something to exercise a little watchful caution about
(12:55 AM) DracoOmega: Try to ensure that enjoying the experience remains more important than ‘accomplishing something’ and particularly that the former doesn’t become almost all the reason one is still going
(12:55 AM) DracoOmega: I mean, accomplishing something is great so long as one IS enjoying the experience =P
(12:55 AM) -jinxed: hehehe.
(12:55 AM) -jinxed: hrm.
(12:56 AM) DracoOmega: For some reason I’m reminded of some of those completionist challenges that people in ##crawl were doing and resenting
(12:56 AM) -jinxed: internally, I note that “accomplishing something” in other contexts becomes “consume everything until you are beyond full”
(12:56 AM) -jinxed: also works
(12:56 AM) DracoOmega: Like, ‘Win all of this long list of combos’ when they clearly were long since tired of it
(12:56 AM) DracoOmega: And just wanted it to be over
(12:56 AM) DracoOmega: But wouldn’t stop
(12:57 AM) DracoOmega: (Okay, I did seriously get annoyed with some combos on my own completionism lists, but not to THAT degree, I think)
(12:57 AM) DracoOmega: Spriggan priest of Zin was really painful back when Zin was also bad
(12:58 AM) DracoOmega: “Use your speed to get lots of chances to recite ineffectually at things. Also you can hit things with a dull stick.”
(12:58 AM) ***-jinxed grins.
(12:59 AM) DracoOmega: I mean, I don’t think Zin ever became GOOD while I was playing, but he definitely got meaningful buffs after this (some of which I gave him myself! =P)
(1:00 AM) -jinxed: the indefinite horizon is much easier to let go for a single work than a series or a franchise or whatever, though
(1:00 AM) -jinxed: (well, “easier”)
(1:00 AM) DracoOmega: I wonder if some of it is a sort of sense of entitlement to things being more the way you want them to be?
(1:00 AM) DracoOmega: I mean, that was certainly some of it for ##crawl
(1:01 AM) DracoOmega: Less ‘accepting things as they are’ and more ‘yelling about what they should have been’
(1:01 AM) -jinxed: we were devs
(1:01 AM) -jinxed: and we still couldn’t change how things should have been
(1:01 AM) DracoOmega: Heh
(1:01 AM) DracoOmega: Yeah
(1:01 AM) DracoOmega: It’s really hard, as it turns out
(1:02 AM) DracoOmega: I mean, even when there isn’t tons of dysfunctional politics involved, good design is really hard
(1:02 AM) DracoOmega: (Also, sometimes the devs just have different design aims than we’d prefer, and they’re entitled to them)

[r-i]

the inevitable! it happened!

forbidden scrollery was always the most fun of the official doujins for actually emphasizing some of the seedier aspects of the setting. episodic ghost story mysteries sketch out the monster preserve’s politics around its human preserve, and let its guardians grow bold as they bickered against one another and asserted their dominance of the sole secure source of belief. a central target was a bookstore owned by a protagonist human who could read the writings of demons, regularly toyed with by loose youkai as the main human protectors couldn’t admit their friendliness with the mythical zookeepers. after nearly fifty issues of the powers that be handling minor nascent wraiths, and years after the reveal that any humans who tried to transcend past humanity would be executed… that protagonist has enough of outside forces, directly asks about the political circumstances from most authorities, and decides she’ll snap open the strongest scroll she has.