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Gyokuyoutama

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Gyokuyoutama last won the day on March 2

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About Gyokuyoutama

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  • Birthday 11/15/1891

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  1. In "The Marriage of Mrs. Fox" (Die Hochzeit der Frau Füchsin) Mrs. Fox's husband has nine tails and is quite proud of this fact.  You can see this in this Brothers Grimm cartoon from way back:

     

     

    I guess this is technically an anime even though I think it was primarily made for European audiences.  But the detail appears in the original fairy tale, as the very first line goes: "Es war einmal ein alter Fuchs mit neun Schwänzen" i.e. "there once was an old fox with nine tails."

     

    Anyway, this is literally the only time I've seen references to foxes having multiple tails in a western, non-influenced by Japan work.  The fact that there are nine tails specifically is stranger still, as just having multiple would be enough for the story to work.

     

    The story is basically about worrying about getting cucked and faking his death to see what happens only for his wife to be faithful to him... until she finds another fox with nine tails and then immediately decides to marry him.  The story could have had Mr. Fox get beat out with the new suitor having ten tails, but it stops at nine, like that's the max.

     

    Anyway, I'm posting this for two reasons.  One is just I thought it was an interesting tidbit.  Second, I'm curious if anyone has encountered any western stories with foxes having multiple tails, discounting stuff influenced by anime.  The closest thing I can think of outside of this is when Samson burns down a vineyard by tying pairs of foxes together by their tails.

    1. Show previous comments  1 more
    2. Gyokuyoutama

      Gyokuyoutama

      Foxfire (i.e. Will o' the Wisps) being associated with foxes is pretty universal, unlike the multiple tails thing.

       

      It's also common consensus that the tip of a fox's tail is white because it got burned and/or produces fire.

    3. Gyokuyoutama

      Gyokuyoutama

      Discotek just announced that they're no longer pressing new discs for Grimm's Fairy Tales, so if you want the above episode and more in a pro-physical version you'll have to buy soon.

       

      Don't miss out like you all did for Joshiraku.  (Holy shit, it's going for $160 on ebay.)

       

      What am I saying all of you guys just pirate everything anyway.

    4. hugthebed2

      hugthebed2

      I have someone who works as a sound engineer for the western anime companies occasionally. I've been tempted to buy some BDs for some old shows from Discotek but I simply buy nothing period.

  2. 9/33, never forget.

  3. We need a good quick term for ChatGPT and StableDifussion style algorithms other than AI.

     

    Seeing people talk about "AI" as if no one ever used the term before two years ago feels like being gas lit.  I've even seen someone say "I want to be one of the first people to make games that use AI."

    1. Idiot Cube

      Idiot Cube

      I propose "strainer", as in spaghetti strainer! It takes in a large amalgamation of material, then kinda shakes it around until only the desired portion remains. 

       

      ChatGPT is a "sentence strainer", stable diffusion is an "image strainer", etc.

  4. Merry last hours of Christmas.

  5. where were you when e3 dies?

    1. Show previous comments  1 more
    2. A 1970 Corvette

      A 1970 Corvette

      e3 died so SPUF could live

    3. Gyokuyoutama

      Gyokuyoutama

      i was sat at home playing bulit hel game when news site pop up

      "e3 is kill"

      "no"

    4. Idiot Cube

      Idiot Cube

      Planning to not go this year but maybe next year for the 16th year in a row.

  6. Let's all remember the only man to walk into parliament with honorable intentions.

  7. Is Moby the Duck a reference to Moby Dick?

     

    If so, am I retarded for taking this long to notice?

    1. Moby

      Moby

      Yes. At first it was just "Moby Duck" when I began using the nickname on my first Ragnarok Online character.

       

      Specifically, the idea came from this episode of Fairly Odd Parents with Tom Sawyer where he changes the "i" in Moby Dick to an "u".

      image.png.3da9ed0bb824b5861bb8c469605ee4b3.png

       

      Conclusion: Very yes.

  8. I swear you can find Blue's Traveller's "Four" in every single used record store in the world, and it used to be played all the time, but the songs on it have gotten pretty obscure now.

  9. If I needed to explain to someone what the 00's era internet was like, I would link them to this ZZT World:

     

    https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/9elation/

  10. If you watch this video ten times in a row you can almost believe that old SPUF still exists.

     

     

    1. A 1970 Corvette

      A 1970 Corvette

      I recently went out of my way to find the skyward sword saxton hale cutscene edit where he's falling after Link and that channel is like a portal back to 2011 SPUF as well

    2. Raison d'être

      Raison d'être

      It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

  11. I was fiddling around with an old mp3 player of my brother's that he had left at my parents years ago.  All the buttons on the outside are busted, but I thought maybe I could get it working.  I couldn't get it to play music, but I did get into the file structure and saw names that both resembled my humor far more than his and referenced stuff that he wouldn't have been interested in (like Big O and Aura Battler Dunbine.)

     

    I hooked it up to my computer and apparently I used it as a makeshift external hard drive backup of my first personal computer.  In addition to a gig of the first music I downloaded from the internet, there were also about 60 books in .txt format, lots of various school assignments, some old java programs I made, and Hello! style archives of the very first forum I was active on.  I only vaguely remember making the decision to transfer this stuff over to the mp3 player, and as far as I remember I never transferred them to any other device before now.

    1. Show previous comments  1 more
    2. Raison d'être

      Raison d'être

      Sweet, free mp3 player!

    3. Gyokuyoutama

      Gyokuyoutama

      Now it's pretty much only an external harddrive.  Most buttons on the mp3 player are broken, including the play button and most of the navigation buttons.  (Notably once you go into a folder the only way to go back is to reboot the whole system.)  It has a remote that might work, though the battery in it is almost certainly dead.

       

      On another note I had ignored it for a while since when you boot it up you get random garbage characters so I had assumed the hard drive was fried.  Turns out that these are just music files from the Dunbine soundtrack that had Japanese names that the display wasn't set up to show properly.

    4. A 1970 Corvette

      A 1970 Corvette

      My car has a USB port that you can put a flash drive with music files on and it will play them, and unfortunately it just cannot handle japanese characters which is extremely unfortunate for my love live mixtape

  12. Pros and cons of becoming known as "that guy who still watches VHS tapes":

     

    Pros: People will randomly give you free VHS tapes.

     

    Cons: People will randomly give you free VHS tapes.

    1. A 1970 Corvette

      A 1970 Corvette

      Hey I have a stack of religious kids' programming on VHS, I'm sure you want all of it right?

    2. Gyokuyoutama

      Gyokuyoutama

      Honestly I find that stuff less annoying than "hey, here's a copy of Back to the Future that I've watched fifty times."

       

      At least weird religious kids' programming is unlikely to be available on DVD or bluray.

  13. Well Amazon I managed to find the product, despite your search engine and recommendations.

    1. Show previous comments  1 more
    2. Gyokuyoutama
    3. Gyokuyoutama

      Gyokuyoutama

      Oh yegads! The DVD is out of stock! But what if... I were to take a region 2 DVD and disguise it as a region 1 DVD.  Oh ho ho ho! Delightfully devilish, Amazon!

    4. Raison d'être

      Raison d'être

      Why is there a PAL disc coming out of your warehouse, Amazon?

  14. 旅行は良好だった 

     

    Understanding this dumbass joke feels like one of the biggest steps I have taken towards fluency.

    1. A 1970 Corvette

      A 1970 Corvette

      I feel like a pleb upon breaking out jisho cuz I should have known it just from the prompt that it was a joke

  15. There needs to be some separate term for modern Isekai.

     

    I've previously talked about "Western Isekai" (ex. Narnia, Three Hearts and Three Lions, John Carter, The Dragon and the George, etc.) But even in Japan if you look at classic anime like Dunbine, Escaflowne, Those Who Hunt Elves and so on and you see very little resemblance in terms of plot structure and cliches used when compared to the modern form of the genre.

     

    (Though I'm not even sure if "modern" is the right term here. I haven't seen it, but from what I've heard about the Tanya show it doesn't seem to hit the same notes as other "isekai" shows.)

     

    So there needs to be some new term that refers to specifically this subgenre.  This is important because "other world" fiction has a long and rich history, with much of it being very creative.  But the modern subgenre allows only the most minor ("gimmick based") innovation.

    1. Show previous comments  3 more
    2. A 1970 Corvette

      A 1970 Corvette

      Honestly I think you're right on the mark about how they treat the setting. A recent isekai that I think actually does take the world seriously is honzuki no gekkokujou. Not a super serious story and it has a lot of levity in it but it generally takes the world it's set in seriously* which I think gives it a different feel from the more boilerplate isekai shows.

       

      *There's like ONE gag sort of but the thing is that it's both plausible for an alternate universe to have that kind of weird coincidence with the "real" world and also the main character/setting overall rolls with it and doesn't really keep pointing at it and saying "ha ha isn't this so wacky"

    3. Gyokuyoutama

      Gyokuyoutama

      On further reflection, I wonder how much of this is due to genre being a spook.

       

      What I mean is that way back in the 30's or so there wasn't really set "genres" in the way that we think about them today.  There were "types" of stories but it was more like "moods": adventure, romance, mystery, wonder, strangeness, etc.  If you look at a pulp like "Weird Tales" the stories have a particular "flavor" to them but don't fit particularly well in any modern genre.  Some would be called fantasy, some horror, some science fiction, some might be "magical realism," etc.  It's not until much later that you get a hard divide between science fiction and fantasy, modulo some people mixing the two and thinking that they are doing something unprecedented.

       

      But even after the initial definition of the genres, they just got more and more specialized.  Take fantasy: after Tolkien it got dominated by "high fantasy" or "epic fantasy"; think stuff like Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist or the prolific Weiss and Hickman duo.  Always lots of discussions of alternate cultures and worlds, the world is always doomed in some way or other, etc.  Something like an old Conan story where Conan simply robs some ruins or fights pirates or something no longer fits, even though you'd have to call that "fantasy" if you're going to give it a genre at all.

       

      And of course the same thing happened in anime.  In both the east and the west a lot of the driving force was ultimately video games, with usually the pipeline being future author plays RPG tie in game -> future author makes pnp RPG campaign -> author now sells works based on campaign world.  (This is also why D&D gets considerably more "video-gamey" with every edition, even in the 1st to 2nd edition transition.)  As a result of all of this popular works narrow the field more and more and more.  It's not "wonder" stories anymore, they have to be "fantasy" storeis in magical kingdoms.  And you have to have a certain type of epic scale to them.  And that epic scale has to be realized basically in a Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy way.  And it's only after you do all that that writers even think about filling in their own details.  So naturally everything becomes the same.

       

      It's not like Japan is forced to do this; Spice and Wolf is a great example of how to write a story in the same broad "genre" that barely follows any of the conventions, but also isn't trying to destroy them (it's just telling a story with a different mood and focus.)  But we've hit a critical mass where aspiring authors only see video games, books, and TV shows that are all in this very narrow subgenre, so they have a difficult time even comprehending that they could do something else.

       

      But as much as I hate Isekai, they're still probably in the better situation, since over here it's the same basic problem but with capeshit instead.

    4. Rynjin

      Rynjin

      I think you have things a bit backwards; traditionally "western isekai" were known as "portal fantasy" works, if they were referred to as a separate genre at all. Much like "anime" is distinct from "cartoon" only in the language used from a technical sense, so is "isekai" separated from "portal fantasy" or "other world fiction".
       

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