Oh hey Okuu

The thing says that you have not talked for 14 days. Where have you been? On vacation? Was it nice? Or were you abducted by aliens? Was it nice?

Sometimes I miss the old meta.

I was at journeying within a labyrinth, @Sid

Was it nice?

Up until the point a giant penguin exploded for three times the maximum possible HP in damage.

That is unfair.

Well, in his defense, I did blast him for thrice that much damage.

Good nuclear raven

Well, as a wise lady once said, danmaku is all about power.

Danmaku has never been about power. It's about grace and elegance.

The age of strength and dexterity being exclusive is long past.

These days, people are powerful and graceful

The elegance of a beautiful pattern of destruction outweighs the even most powerful laser. Of what use is power if you cannot flaunt it with flourish?

Of what use is flourishing flaunts when your opponent is smoked?

You must not destroy your opponent in such an utter fashion that she cannot stand in awe of your beautiful destructive force.

But nobody can withstand the ultimate energy

Also, what the krutz happened to the Touhou Wiki?

Wikia changed its themes because they hate users more than Jeff does.

So instead of looking like every other wikimedia site and not being confusing, it uses its own theme.

I'm still waiting for someone to translate Buta Otome's Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke arrange.

Maybe if it was a functional theme, I could accept it being different

But this is miserable. What is with this horrendously wasted space on both sides? Why would you do that?

Because they hate users.

welbog.homeip.net/glue/16/Web_design_theory

A fixed-width wiki makes no sense at all.

Fixed-width anything-that-isn't-a-webapp makes no sense at all.

And even for webapps it's not good.

It's more understandable but not necessary.

Mmm

On that note JEFF, UNFIX STACK OVERFLOW'S WIDTH YOU LAZY BUM

Today I was making teriyaki pineapple and I dropped the pineapple from too high and I burned my arm with peanut oil. Do you think it will give me super peanut powers?

I should read more of your blog, one of these days. It's very insightful

I wasn't aware that teriyaki and pineapple went together that well

HAHAHA I got you to say that after I said something stupid! pwnt

Teriyaki is basically just garlic, ginger, soya sauce and some source of sugar.

You can make teriyaki sauce with pineapple as your source of sugar.

Which is what I did, since I made it from base materials.

I'm like a miniature version of shog9.

Soya sauce? There are way too many sauces in the world to keep track of.

It could be a typo, but knowing the world of sauces it's entirely possible as its own sauce.

No it's a typo

Oh. Darn.

Well I think it's a synonym.

When I buy it the bottle says "soya sauce"

It might be. I think I have seen "soya sauce" written on bottles here as well

My arm is covered in pink spots.

I should have been using my cooking chopsticks so that I would have had more control over how far the pineapple was dropping.

Part of the problem is this new stove of mine gets hotter than my last one.

I'm still getting used to it.

But that means faster cooking, aye?

Depends

For what I was doing, yes. I was trying to sear the outside of the pineapple to give it a good carbon coat.

For things like stew or curry, no. You want those to cook for a long time without letting it get too hot.

I succeeded with my pineapple, by the way. It was fantastic.

That's good. I haven't had pineapple for too long. But my doorbell is shaped like a pineapple.

What's the theory behind letting stew/curry cook for a long time?

The store across the street has a constant supply of pineapple and therefore so do I.

Pineapple and grapefruit are my favourite plants.

I cook it a long time to get the meat to soften, as well as any of the more fibrous plants.

I love pineapple as probably my favorite fruit, but mostly do not like the bitterness of grapefruit.

Well you can't taste the wonder that is sour so I don't really blame you.

But the bitterness of grapefruit is part of why I like it.

Cantaloupe comes as a close second for favorite, though. Very, very sweet and delicious.

I'm not a fan of melons in general. I don't like their texture.

Too mushy.

Honeydew is usually much crunchier

I've had all kinds of melons. I have never had one that I would specifically seek out.

It's got a lot more resistance, which has its own charm. But pretty much every other melon is very soft.

Not like pineapple. If I see pineapple on a tray of fruit slices oh man I'm gonna eat the fuck out of that.

Kindred spirits in that regard, we are.

In fact this happened at the wedding I was at this weekend.

Oooooh, you were at a wedding this weekend?

And the weekend before. I am all weddinged out.

I'm at the age where everyone I know is getting married, I guess.

Aw. I wish I had a sequence of weddings to attend. It kinda saddens me that, to my recollection, I've only ever been to one

Weddings aren't really that amazing.

Although, one of my best friends did recently get engaged to his long-time girlfriend.

What do you think is so great about weddings?

Light spirits, happiness (usually), and wedding gowns.

I think that if you're doing things right you get the first two from everyday life.

If I didn't have a measure of self-control, I'd probably crash weddings all the time just to see the gorgeous dresses

Wedding gowns, admittedly, are pretty impressive.

They're pretty much at the top of any "Things I like" list. I actually own more bridal magazines than any other kind of magazine.

I don't usually give a damn about that kind of thing but a tailor-made dress that was designed specially for someone is amazing.

It's something I look forward to with high excitement.

Well I don't care about that nearly as much as you do.

You're planning on getting married, or just looking forward to dresses in general?

I tend to think of weddings as unnecessarily elaborate.

You've never planned a dream wedding, I take it?

I'm a boy, see.

Point.

In every case of weddings I've attended, they're just an elaborate way of celebrating something that has been happening for several years already.

The state of affairs before and after it is the same.

I mean sure it's nice to have a bigass party where can all celebrate the happiness of the couple and that's nice but I'm someone who finds this kind of thing arbitrary.

I can understand that perspective. In many cases, it's basically a whole lot of celebration, but then everything is back to normal.

I can generalize even more. I find the idea of defining specific days to celebrate things to be arbitrary and strange.

Sort of making a relationship "official" to the highest degree, sometimes it does seem a bit unnecessary. Especially with the separation of church and state being not so separate in the US when it comes to this.

Such as celebrating life on a birthday. I do that every day.

Or a day to celebrate your mother or father. That, too, shouldn't just happen once per year.

I don't know. I'm obviously the strange one with respect to these traditions. Sanity is defined by the majority.

Do you get that statement? Have you read Ringworld?

Do you read sci-fi?

When it comes to things like birthdays and all that, I think of it as accomodating for the fact that a lot of people take each other for granted. And while I comprehend that statement, I haven't read Ringworld.

I don't really read sci-fi. I have a few books from when I was younger.

But the last sci-fi book I looked at, while idling with the club's libraryman, was "Dinosaur Samurai"

Do you enjoy forms of entertainment other than video games?

I read fantasy more often. Webcomics occupy my mornings. TV shows occupy part of my evenings. P&P games are a strong hobby. The rest of my entertainment comes from a mixture of playing video games, doing game design, and hanging out with my family.

I used to watch a lot more stuff. Was very big on the anime scene, but since graduation I haven't really made time to watch anything, despite having a humongous backlog.

I've never liked fantasy. Something about it rubs me the wrong way. But if you took any fantasy setting and kept everything the same but told me that it was scientific somehow I would like it. I don't know why but I just can't get into something unless there's some good solid pseudoscience behind it.

Mint Berry Crunch!

Frogs carrying guitars!

That didn't make any sense.

Neither did what you said.

It's a bit strange that I never got into sci-fi, but I think it's because the sci-fi in most books tends to be more contemporary future than the ridiculous present in giant mecha (which is one of my preferred genre)

You need to watch more of the same shows I watch so you don't embarrass yourself so much

You need to be less dumb.

I love archers, but I love artillery tanks as well.

GIANT BATTLING ROBOTS

I prefer things with mystery and/or comedy when it comes to television. For books I just like things that make me think.

Why would you want to think?

It's strange that I like Touhou.

It's probably because the characters I like the most are pseudoscientific.

The moon is a rational place in that mythos.

But actually I think I like it because the characters are well defined enough that they make me think. Or I should say they are enjoyable to think about.

There is just enough detail to give you an idea of what is really going on and the lack of detail allows you to theorize and wonder about how things work and how they came to be and how they will progress.

If you haven't noticed I like speculating.

I like the level of characterization in the series. That last statement is actually pretty accurate

It's enough to be very solid and memorable characters, but enough to give a lot of people freedom in interpretation and thus work for a wider audience.

That is ZUN's genius.

That is my theory on what makes Touhou so popular.

You might be surprised that I've had trouble getting that across to other fans.

I'm not that surprised

So you say!

Mostly because a lot of people's interpretation of the Touhou series is shallow because they were introduced in a shallow fashion.

> So I got Touhou 7.5: Immaterial and Missing Power, but suddenly I've been thrust into a world where 12-year old girls wearing strange outfits and wielding dangerous weapons scream japanese at each other before firing off gratuitous amounts of magical projectiles in all directions. What's going on here? What is the plotline of these games?

This summary here is basically the interpretation of far too many people who get into the series without actually knowing what makes it excellent.

I'd say my introduction was even more shallow. But FFFFFFFFFFFFF to the 12-year-old girls thing. Most of them in IaMP are a couple hundred years old at least. Let me think.

IaMP had Reimu, Marisa, Sakuya and Youmu for humans ("humans")

Of course, Youmu is 60 years old

Something like that. It's not like we know for sure.

I think it's generally agreed that Marisa is the youngest game Touhou, right? And Akyuu is the youngest overall.

Yes, roughly that

Anyway, my introduction to the series was an Iosys Flash animation.

I got into it because my brother heard about it from Stick Guy Dom.

(Was it Marisa Stole The Precious Thing?)

(Of course it was. :( )

I actually got to see Castle of Cagliostro recently. I had to chuckle when seeing that scene.

But in actuality it was the Overdrive one that got me interested.

Marisa Stole My Precious Thing was just a weird video that I didn't get.

Overdrive was bizarre to the point that it interested me.

And then my friend started talking about how there were two characters that hated each other.

They both killed each other on a regular basis because they hated each other so much.

But neither of them could ever die.

He told me the names of the characters and I looked them up, found Touhouwiki, got even more interested. Started downloading some of the fan music, saw some of the fan art.

I was hooked when I heard Iosys's "My body wishes that you burn to the moon".

Ah, so the Kaguya/Mokou relationship is actually what got you into it

It did. I went for a long loop, though.

It was that that got me interested, but then I moved away and became more interested in other characters like Yukari, Ran and Suika 'cause they're really strong.

Well, the full extent of my intro starts off with dobu usagi

Then as I got into it more I realized that all of my favourite stories involved Mokou and to some extent Kaguya.

I first heard Touhou because this one fellow who did an amusing parody called "Sega Fantasy VI" did a SRW-style console videos. One of them was set to dBu's Final Master Spark.

This prompted my brother to look into it, for how awesome it were, and eventually run into the post by Stick Guy Dom on Megatokyo. He ended up finding a place to pick up all the music. It almost all ended there with us quietly enjoying the music.

But then I picked up a demo of Phantasmagoria of Flower View. And among other things, saw an awesome ice fairy whose wings were made of crystal. Loving the concept, I did more research into the character designs.

But I think picking up the IN demo and both enjoying it a lot and recognizing a lot of the music from the dBu arranges, I think that's what really kicked it into love. That, and the awesomeness of a HALF GHOST

Half ghost has never made sense to me.

It's like a strange kind of undead, but it's not that. It's not alive, it's not dead, it's not undead. It's half ghost.

That's the brilliance of it.

With a living half and a dead half, both required in order to exist.

Also, trying to explain the concept of "eating history" to people who need to rationalize everything is fun to see them squirm.

Oh man

The powers people have in those games are a big part of why I came to like it.

Especially Yukari

Her power really comes down to "can you phrase this using boundaries?" If you can, she can do it.

Manipulating time and space, manipulating fate, holding the shape of an object in your palm, manipulating boundaries, manipulating density, summoning gods, love-coloured magic, eating history, creating any chemical, being winter itself, gods of earth and air, gods of fall and curses, so many amazing things

Indeed. I love the varieties of abilities.

Taking the ability to float to the extreme by being able to float above reality.

And then there's Yuuka, who just has the ability to make flowers bloom.

And yet, soon you'll become a mist of atoms~

How dare you step foot in her wonderful sunflower field?

Your life is forfeit, puny human.

A doll that came to life because it was surrounded with poison.

The judge of all living things that die.

The lazy shinigami that manipulates distance

A witch who never uses her own hands to do anything but create dolls that do her work for her.

A math fox

I've liked Ran more than Yukari for a long time now.

The hell-raven who swallowed the three-legged birdgod of the sun, attaining the power to split and fuse atoms.

Figures you'd bring Okuu into this.

Well, as much as she is positively adorable and awesome, she also has one of the most amusing stories.

Actually, the whole SA crew is pretty neat

Well, it was a good chat we had but my arm's burn spots need to go to sleep. They have work tomorrow.

I'm actually falling asleep, too. But aye, it was fun. I really should pop into chat more often

Motoko Kusanagi can kick my ass but I am OK with that.