Gyokuyoutama

Waiting half an hour and manually changing discs four times to install KOTOR while poring over the box and manual.

Downloading it in 5 minutes on gog/steam doesn't feel quite the same.

Reading the manual for a game several times before playing it because you didn't have enough time to install it (or worse, you needed to wait for an upgrade to be able to play it) is a magical experience that can't really be replicated in the modern world.

Manuals were so cool. I only was around for the tail end of them but even the Halo 1 manual had all this cool lore and weapon and enemy descriptions that I would come back to and read and reread.

Now you just get a single printed page with a QR code telling you to install Origin or something

You'd be surprised how little survival instinct rabbits have. I've come close to hitting so many just in train yards alone.

On one hand, hey I can finally get some of those weird emoji really easily　(；ﾟДﾟ)

On the other hand, wow that is pretty wacky

You can also use it to get emojis, which is where I found this out from (though emojis are banned on SPUF for some reason.)  Sometimes you get characters that aren't technically emojis like ☆ from "hoshi", ♪ from "ongaku," or ♀ from "mesu."

But man when looking into this I have found a bunch of weird stuff.  Here's some websites archiving and giving tips for kaomoji use:

https://kaomojinavi.net/index.htm

https://kaomoji.ru/en/

http://www.nekoguchi.com/2007/10/24/japanese_emoticons/comment-page-2/ (unfortunately the kaomoji dictionary links are broken)

https://nihonshock.com/2010/04/12-japanese-ime-tips/

I also discovered that the emoji feature in Windows 10+ also has a kaomoji page.  (Access by WIN + ;)   Though I think the IME option is better once you know what words correspond to which kaomoji.

a small addition: I was pleasantly surprised to see that typing "nya" has one of the predictions "nyanpasu." it's not too surprising if it really was copied from 2ch users but still fun

That last link blew my mind with the "type english sentence by starting with a capital letter" though, that's a genius feature

Thanks. We still on for Friday?

I really thought "You're gonna go far kid" was just an MLP fandom song when I first heard the sped up version.

I had heard the Offspring version before I heard variations, but I've now listened to the eurobeat version so many times that the normal version now feels off tempo to me especially in the chorus. I also expect an extended instrumental section after the first chorus.

This song has also replaced the lyrics to RHCP's Don't Stop in my head:

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.

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.

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.

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.

e3 died so SPUF could live

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

"e3 is kill"

"no"

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

Winston Churchill?

OHHH....Nov 5th. Now I getchya.

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".

Conclusion: Very yes.

For me it's

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

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

Sweet, free mp3 player!

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.

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

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

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.

nyeh...

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!

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

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

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"

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.

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".
 

Star Wars fans: "First time?"

This isn't in response to any specific development.  I am against the idea that rights holders can change canon, period.

Suppose that Sherlock Holmes was not in the public domain, and that the best mystery author in the world bought up the rights and wrote a book which had an amazing mystery and perfectly extended the character arcs of Holmes, Watson, etc.  It would still be idiotic to say that this author used his legal rights to add to the Holmes canon.

I think you're good enough at articulating stuff that you could talk about anything here tbh (though those aforementioned topics are generally fun to discuss so I ain't complaining)

No. You must conform to my preconceived notions and ideas of your entire existence, or you will perish.

I'll meet you both half way.  I'll talk about something else, but include an unnecessary reference to Sailor Moon.

the site died when it became an official furry porn hosting area thanks to Gold Standard

Half of TIAM 2 and all of 3 were after 2013, so there was still a lot of activity.

It's still weird that the current TIAM started in 2015. I hadn't even graduated high school yet.

That would be a disarmed reverse trap.

I think cube's onto something