Gyokuyoutama

When I was a wee lad I thought that there really wasn't any difference between "normies" (not that I called them that then) and people like me.  Nothing beyond a difference in hobbies.  I.e. I liked weird sci-fi stuff, RPGs, superheroes, etc. and normal people did not and it was only this difference in hobbies that made us seem different.
 
Now that every historically "nerd" hobby has been mainstreamed, I can be certain that no, the normies are intrinsically different.  What's more, it's also clear in retrospect that there were normies in nerd hobbies even back then, but not in large enough numbers to ruin them.
 
This kind of ties into the missing SPUF thing too, since SPUF's obsolesce made it anti-normie, which can never be achieved with Discussions.

Yeah I've been missing the old forum experience myself. I also hate the lobby system every game ahs now for the same reason. Old inaccessible games, forums, and other nerd communities just felt different. 
 
Fuck the only forum I've been posting on lately was a wargaming/warhammer forum. That's like... the last vestige of old nerd gaming culture that hasn't gone mainstream and not for lack of trying on the part of wargaming companies, just hard to make spending absurdish cash on high quality army men to paint and assemble widely accessible. Even tabletop gaming in general is widespread now and kinda weird due to it.

I'm pretty sure you were in the first dumb 2hu walfas comic I made back way back in the Hello! thread, but I can't find the image or the notes on my old computer.
 
EDIT: Oh wait, I made a pastebin tracking this stuff.  Here:
 

 
You are represented by Mokou, since literally at the time all I knew about you was the "silver" in your name (silver hair, silver comment.)

When I was a wee lad I thought that there really wasn't any difference between "normies" (not that I called them that then) and people like me.  Nothing beyond a difference in hobbies.  I.e. I liked weird sci-fi stuff, RPGs, superheroes, etc. and normal people did not and it was only this difference in hobbies that made us seem different.
 
Now that every historically "nerd" hobby has been mainstreamed, I can be certain that no, the normies are intrinsically different.  What's more, it's also clear in retrospect that there were normies in nerd hobbies even back then, but not in large enough numbers to ruin them.
 
This kind of ties into the missing SPUF thing too, since SPUF's obsolesce made it anti-normie, which can never be achieved with Discussions.

So I'm not sure I count as a new user, but I made this account when spuf died and then never used it. Just got nostalgic about old spuf and remembered this existed so decided to come give it a shot. Not sure who all is here these days and who might remember me but hello whoever is still around!

When I was a wee lad I thought that there really wasn't any difference between "normies" (not that I called them that then) and people like me.  Nothing beyond a difference in hobbies.  I.e. I liked weird sci-fi stuff, RPGs, superheroes, etc. and normal people did not and it was only this difference in hobbies that made us seem different.
 
Now that every historically "nerd" hobby has been mainstreamed, I can be certain that no, the normies are intrinsically different.  What's more, it's also clear in retrospect that there were normies in nerd hobbies even back then, but not in large enough numbers to ruin them.
 
This kind of ties into the missing SPUF thing too, since SPUF's obsolesce made it anti-normie, which can never be achieved with Discussions.

I'll take the meme tanuki, please

Merry Christmas! I don't really have anything festive prepared, but I do have these:
 
Elemental Spirits doodle

 
Harpy Archer

 
She fletches her arrows with her own feathers.
 
I'm not ashamed to admit that I stood up several times mid-drawing to stretch my arms out and lift my knee up to understand her pose better, lol.

Short chapter this time.
 

 
The text in the third speech bubble is smaller in the originally so it's okay that I had to shrink it to fit it in.
 

 
I've been blasé about translating onomatopoeia, but this time it was primarily due to the difficulty of covering and replacing the original sound effects.  On panel 2 I would definitely have put "HOWWWL" since it's the sound of the wind blowing.  But with something going across that many differently colored areas it'd be a mess to try to replace while looking at all nice.  The one in the third panel is trickier.  I could have replaced it more easily, but I'm not sure what to replace it with.  ペラッ is the sound of something flipping, in this case Kotoha's shirt flipping up and revealing her tail, and I'm not sure what would be the English equivalent other than to use the "unsound effect" of "flip."
 
Shihiro's statement in the last panel literally means "your tail came out!" but that sounds awkward in English (even though this type of statement is common in Japanese.)
 

 
The shortest translation possible.  There is literally one syllable here, "so" (そっ) with a glottal stop to indicate that it wasn't even fully said.  I'm assuming that this is the beginning of the word そっち which means something like "over there."  I think in this situation it can be used in the same way as it is in English here, i.e. to indicate that something was done "there" (i.e. fixing the shirt around Kotoha's waist.)
 
Incidentally, I love how you can see hints of Kotoha's tail pushing up against the shirt, as well as a sliver of it visible between her legs.  It shows that it's still there, just hidden.  The art style is simple but there is still attention paid to details.
 
Anyway, that's all for this chapter.  Next one is longer and finally introduces characters beyond Kotoha and Shihiro.

I am a developer for Microsoft Teams because I sold my soul for a paycheck a long time ago.

The pants saga:
 

 
I don't have a title here, but that's consistent with the title itself.
 
Also I went back and checked: in every previous panel we haven't seen Kotoha from the waist down so presumably she hasn't been wearing pants the whole time.  The outfit she is wearing in the character introduction is something she picks up in a later strip.
 

 
Conveniently the "before" and "after" were already in English.  Incidentally the verb used for putting on pants is 穿く which Jisho lists as a rarely used alternative to 履く. I have no idea if this is meant to mean something in terms of the story, especially as it's not clear whether the text in boxes is meant to be Shihiro talking or a generic narrator.  Maybe that's just how Kotoan writes things.  The kanji 穿 is used in terms relating to puncturing so perhaps this is meant to have a double meaning of "her tail can't go through."
 

 
I'm slowly learning the hell that scanlators go through.  The speech bubbles in the middle panel are broken up into two parts, and I tried to copy that to make a four step process (specifically: 1. open hole, 2. put tail through, 3. tie up belt, 4. tail problem solved) but no matter how I did it things became awkward to read in English.  Fitting "embarrassed" into the last bubble was also a pain and I had to make the text smaller, which is generally a no-no.  But every synonym didn't work especially since I wanted to link it up to Shihiro's statement on the first page. I like to imagine that her thoughts are quieter because she's embarrassed.
 

 
The text pointing to Kotoha just means "satisfied" but that didn't look right there so I changed it a bit.  She's acting like she's in a changing room so it's fine.  This panel is also a good example of why I'm doing this.  Shihiro says で済んだのは in regards to a skirt which is a phrase that means something like "would have been sufficient."  Such a phrase has never come up in my lessons but in order to have a decent translation at all I had to research it.  I've been told that this sort of thing is the key to reaching true fluency.
 
Anyway the next chapter is the longest one in the entire manga so there's probably going to be a much longer delay before the next part.

And this is where we get the headphone story:
 



 
A couple of comments. From this set of pages and the last one, I think that Kotoha is meant to have a rustic or old-fashioned way of speaking, but I wasn't sure and when I tried to render that it just looked ridiculous, so I went with more straightforward translations.
 
In the last panel of the second page the strip does something that manga do where they have two things said simultaneously.  The Kanji expression is 獣耳かー！ meaning "the beast ears?!" or "the kemonomimi?!" (if you want to be especially weebish.)  But these are given furigana そっちかー！ meaning "there?!" Usually furigana is used for explainig how the Kanji is read (it is used for that purpose in this manga to introduce character names and for the unfamiliar verb 憑かれた.) But here that's clearly not what's going on, instead we have two expressions happening simultaneously with one being what is "said" and one what is "meant."  I tried to get as close as I could by putting one in parentheses (and said "fox ears" instead of "beast ears" because "beast ears" sounds dumb in English when you're not at furcon.)
 
EDIT: That's all for now, but next time you get to see the eternal struggle of tail vs. pants.

I don't know if this is the right forum as none of this art is mine, but it seemed like it would work.
 
Anyway, I decided to start scanlating the manga series "Kitsune ni Tsuki" by Kotoan (琴庵) on Pixiv.
 
https://www.pixiv.net/user/9952021/series/31325
 
Basically it was something I randomly stumbled across and noticed that I could read 90% of it. So I thought it'd be fun to translated it. But of course when I started reading it for myself only I eventually started skimming through it and not really getting a lot of what was going on, so doing a formal translation project would keep me honest.  And then why not scanlate. Of course I am learning that making things look even remotely nice is a pain in the ass (keep in mind that I've never used any art program outside of paint before) but that's part of the fun I guess.
 
On your end I'm pretty sure that this series has never been translated before, so it's a SPUF exclusive.  You can follow the actual series at the above link if want to look ahead or check my work.  I'll post translators notes outside of the pages.
 
Each post will cover one chapter and the schedule will be whenever the hell I feel like it, which means that it is likely that the whole thing will never be translated.

And this is where we get the headphone story:
 



 
A couple of comments. From this set of pages and the last one, I think that Kotoha is meant to have a rustic or old-fashioned way of speaking, but I wasn't sure and when I tried to render that it just looked ridiculous, so I went with more straightforward translations.
 
In the last panel of the second page the strip does something that manga do where they have two things said simultaneously.  The Kanji expression is 獣耳かー！ meaning "the beast ears?!" or "the kemonomimi?!" (if you want to be especially weebish.)  But these are given furigana そっちかー！ meaning "there?!" Usually furigana is used for explainig how the Kanji is read (it is used for that purpose in this manga to introduce character names and for the unfamiliar verb 憑かれた.) But here that's clearly not what's going on, instead we have two expressions happening simultaneously with one being what is "said" and one what is "meant."  I tried to get as close as I could by putting one in parentheses (and said "fox ears" instead of "beast ears" because "beast ears" sounds dumb in English when you're not at furcon.)
 
EDIT: That's all for now, but next time you get to see the eternal struggle of tail vs. pants.

I don't know if this is the right forum as none of this art is mine, but it seemed like it would work.
 
Anyway, I decided to start scanlating the manga series "Kitsune ni Tsuki" by Kotoan (琴庵) on Pixiv.
 
https://www.pixiv.net/user/9952021/series/31325
 
Basically it was something I randomly stumbled across and noticed that I could read 90% of it. So I thought it'd be fun to translated it. But of course when I started reading it for myself only I eventually started skimming through it and not really getting a lot of what was going on, so doing a formal translation project would keep me honest.  And then why not scanlate. Of course I am learning that making things look even remotely nice is a pain in the ass (keep in mind that I've never used any art program outside of paint before) but that's part of the fun I guess.
 
On your end I'm pretty sure that this series has never been translated before, so it's a SPUF exclusive.  You can follow the actual series at the above link if want to look ahead or check my work.  I'll post translators notes outside of the pages.
 
Each post will cover one chapter and the schedule will be whenever the hell I feel like it, which means that it is likely that the whole thing will never be translated.

Waking up these days:

Evolution of a trend.
 
Got sent this video, which got me thinking about its antecedents.
 
 
I'm fairly certain that the immediate reference is to a series of Kizuna AI videos, since these are vtubers.  The earliest I could find was this one (going back three years):
 
 
But this came from a trend of MMD videos, particularly involving Touhou characters, for example this one (four years further in the past):
 
 
The earliest variation of this I could find was this one (two years earlier, though it could have been before that on NND):
 
 
This in turn was a reference to the following video (from two years earlier):
 
 
But that's still 11 years after the release of the original Backstreet Boys song so it's very possible that this video was a riff on something else.  Unfortunately at this point we get into the pre-video streaming days so any viral videos that might be being referenced likely only exist on various personal hard drives or in a low quality format on some forgotten personal homepage.

Clean-up of some anatomy study, heavy use of references. Messed up and made the legs twice as large, had to do some surgery.
 

I really like this one in particular though I enjoy most of Noita's OST. Unfortunately in game most of the time you're deafened from the sound of rapid fire explosions, fire, and splashing toxic sludge in every direction

It's over.

Yeah, Google translation isn't great here.  I'm not going to pretend that I'm fluent enough to understand every detail, but the title breaks down as such:
 
わたモテキャラの元ネタ一覧: わたモテ is just "Watamote", キャラ means character, の is the genitive/possessive particle (you know what I mean or don't), 元 means original, I'm not sure what ネタ means but other searches have 元ネタ mean something like "source for",  一覧 is something like "a look through." So the title means "A look at the original inspirations for Watamote characters"
 
The first line of the description is: わたモテの登場人物の元ネタとなったプロ野球選手をまとめてみました。I won't break this down piece by piece but it means something like "I saw a complete list of the professional baseball players who became inspirations for the characters in Watamote."  (To be honest I don't understand what となった means and JPTL sensei lists it as N1 grammar so it's definitely beyond my level, but taking what I do understand in the rest the gist is something like that.) The rest of the description is a link to a character popularity poll and a reminder to buy more volumes of Watamote, so that doesn't help.
 
Next note that in the video itself the surnames of all of the Watamote characters match all the surnames of the baseball players on the bottom.  This even results in Tomoko and Tomoki being linked to the same player.  All the baseball players are also in the Chiba Lotte Marines (as noted by the tag.)
 
Next I did a search for the first player in Japanese. (This was actually a bitch to do since I can't just copy and paste kanji from a video.  The surname is obviously Kuroki since that's what matches Tomoko and I can just type that in an IME.  But the first name, 知宏 "Tomohiro," uses a weird reading for the character for Wisdom (知) and an archaic version of the character for wide (宏, normally it'd be 広).  Fucking Japanese names, man.)  Anyway, that gets us to this Wikipedia page which verifies that we are indeed talking about a real Marines player.  I noticed that not only did the last name line up, but so did the reading for the beginning of Tomoko and Tomoki's name (even if they use a different kanji with the same reading.) So I looked up the player corresponding to Komiyama (just because I at least recognized the kanji in the corresponding player's name, even if I had no clue as the reading in this context) and got this page which does have a corresponding English page, since apparently he played for the Mets too.  First name's reading is Satoru which is nothing like Kotomi, either in the reading or the kanji used, so apparently the rule is that only the surnames of baseball players are used for the characters.  I ain't looking up every player because it's a bitch to search names, but I'm assuming the remainder are real baseball players with the same surnames as Watamote characters.
 
Now I vaguely recall hearing that Watamote had some promotional events with the Marines.  This is actually detailed in the afterword to Volume 10.  In that they have an autograph session during a Marine's game.  One of the authors comments that with the Watamote anime out now, maybe the viewers are confused and they express gratitude towards the team because "they approved the manga with hardly any revisions."  I never knew what was being referenced there, but if all the characters take their surname from Marines players it makes more sense.
 
This does feel like forbidden knowledge since I've never seen this referenced in English.  Even this ANN article about the collaboration event doesn't mention the surname connection, and all of the forum posts linked to the article are about how a baseball game is so bizarre and "out of character" for the series.  (EDIT: One guy right at the end does mention the surname connection.) But apparently the Japanese fans are all aware of this connection.

Had a dream where I went out with a group of friends that were people I never saw before.
First I drove from a house from a street near mine, through a city that wasn't mine, until I reached a shopping center that looked like a massive casino/amusement park. There was a guy with me I don't know, had a coat and a beanie.
 
We went to this shopping to meet this girl first, she had short black hair, some heavy eyeliner and was dressed in this goth/rocker attire (black short tank top, dark slashed jeans, fishnet socks, biker boots).
Then we went into the market and started to get some snacks (soda, meat, chips, some weird cheese bread things I never seen).
 
Later we met another guy, big dude with a crew cut, polo shirt, baggy shorts. We all got in the car and I woke up as we were driving back.

Had a dream where I was in a foreign place, the signs were in chinese, english, and cyrillic,, and the architecture looked soviet, so I assume it is somewhere near the china/russia border.
 
There was this convention going on, about model kits/RC and the like, and I got a bunch of goodies, saw some weird looking gunpla, (supposedly) top secret planes, and similar unreleased stuff, when I went out for a smoke break (don't smoke IRL, so no idea why), I saw on a jumbotron near the center that some country got nuked.
I started walking back to my hotel, and the area was a pig plain, with mountains in the distance, and a bunch of russian/slavic refugees was wandering all over the place, now increasingly worried about WWIII, I grabbed a moped and raced to the hotel, which had hot spring facilities built in.
The hotel was also built of bizarre architecture, kinda like a mashup of the whole liminal spaces thing.
even with the prospect of nuclear war looming, I decided to go for a dip in the hot spring, the water felt fantastic, so I fell asleep, then woke up IRL afterwards.

Not exactly sure what is being calculated on the board.  On the third line I definitely see a calculation for Chistoffel symbols of the first kind, so this is some sort of differential geometry and/or physics tensor analysis problem.  The fact that this is all done in terms of local coordinates and the capital gamma symbols for the Christoffel symbols do not appear makes me suspect some sort of physics calculation.  The books on the table would probably enlighten the situation, but I can't see the kanji clearly. It's too bad, because it means that I can't sneak this into differential geometry lectures.
 

On the other hand this is very clearly the Urysohn metrization theorem and could be slipped into a topology class quite easily.
 

 
I think this a proof that the angle bisector of the top angle of an isosceles triangle will be perpendicular to the opposite side.
 

 
Ran's blocking too much to really know, but something about angle sums.  I suspect from the third line that this has something to do with cyclic quadrilaterals, perhaps the result that opposite angles of a cyclic quadrilateral are supplementary.