Gyokuyoutama

Sometimes I think I'm just getting overly cynical as I get older and that the internet wasn't any better than it is now.
 
Then I go on Gopher and find some guy's personal webpage and I legitimately feel happy just browsing through it.  Can't chalk it down to nostalgia either, since my first experiences with the internet were on the world wide web.  I can get a similar experience browsing sites off of Curlie or Wiby.
 
I think there's a few reasons for the distinction:
 
1.) Personalization - In most modern sites, like Twitter or Reddit or Youtube, 90% of the design is already done for you.  Beyond that, there is a strong centralized culture pushing you to post certain things in a certain way.  The chase after "the algorithm."  As a result even when people are being passionate, they all end up sounding pretty similar.  On an actual personal website way off the mainstream you can literally find anything.  The layout, topics, files available, etc. are a whole new experience every time you find something new.  Even on Gopher, which is basically text only (you can post images, but only on links) you see a lot of variation.  Some people put ASCII art, some people litter pages with quotes, others just have things as no-nonsense as possible.  This leads into:
 
2.) Lack of Bots - Yeah, a bot could make any of these pages.  But there is so little benefit in doing so that they do not.  The webpages they make are more along the lines of "How to fix **** causing high CPU" with the same 8 suggestions and links to sketchy "anti-malware" scans.  If you find some guy's homepage from 2009 talking about Sailor Moon or playing D&D solo or cataloging Finnish folktales or whatever, the chances of it not being made by a human are pretty slim.  But beyond that, on modern social media there's always the threat of getting a bunch of bot replies, even when you are initially interacting with real people.  This is always annoying to me because it's just a reminder of how dead the internet currently is.  You don't get that on classic homepages.
 
3.) Exploration - There's actually a sense of finding something new and cool.  It's hard to feel that on a centralized site when everything looks 90% the same, since even if you do actually find something neat it will look nearly identical to everything else you've seen.  There's also the limited tools for exploring sites.  Search engines are pretty borked as a rule, to the point that even if you search for the exact title of a video or the exact quote occurring in a post it still might not come up.  General topic searches are even more useless.  And you usually don't have much in the way of tools outside of those things, other than relying on "the algorithm" allowing you to see something.  When it comes to classic homepages you also often don't have search; they're either too old or too small to implement such things.  But because people were aware of this being an issue, you'll find a lot more links to other pages, which allows you to actually go exploring.  On top of that, when you actually do follow a link it could go literally anywhere, not just to a single post or video that was sort of interesting.
 
Webrings are the best for this, but unfortunately most classic homepages ended up using external webring services which have since went under.  Let this be a lesson to anyone making a webring now: just do hardcoded HTML linked lists, because these are more likely to last through time.

I think I've mentioned once that I accidentally complimented a novice/indie music maker back in my CS:GO days when I complimented the person's music on their Tumblr page (they were like "i made that ty so much").
 
But another similar story is that when they first added the emotes to steam, I saw and joined the "emote art" steam group where people were making art with emotes on their profiles. I saw this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/emoticonart/discussions/0/666827974867330650/) and I had to get those guncraft emotes for myself.
 
I've had this Mario on my page since the week it was posted, 2013

 
I know a lotta people here were victim to my "hey can I send u a Link" and then I'd post an Emote-Link (from legend of zelda) afterward.
 
Anyways, come 2019 I find a thread of some person making a bunch of fixes for L4D2 maps using pretty advanced techniques with the hope that one day Valve will add them to the game (https://steamcommunity.com/app/550/discussions/1/1651043320659915818/?tscn=1598588468). 2020 hits and The Last Stand update gets announced for L4D2 and I was like "wow those map changes listed on the announcement video... I bet I know who did those!"
So I added him after making a post.

 
It was then that he complimented my Mario ascii art on my profile... then we both realized that he had made that same pixel art 7 years earlier. A shame he didn't know I did L4D2 mapping stuff cuz I would've been on the community update team and had my name on the update page/in the game (and I would've been able to work on the update - damn!)...
 
At least I'm on that same community update team now, but even we must abide by Valve time. Most of the map-related bullet points on this update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/L4D2/announcements/detail/3646280012042428637?snr=2___ were done by me!!!

Hopefully we get a new community update, at some point.

This is the part of the 90's that you'll never see in "90's nostalgia" media:
 
 

Finished playing Mischief Makers recently and it was lots of fun. Very solid game, I dunno why you don't hear more talk about it. Probably ancient persisting stigma of a 2D platforming game on a 3D console.
 
General
 
The whole game is about grabbing things. You can grab things, shake them, and throw them. This takes quite a logical progression throughout the game. You can grab objects, people, projectiles, the bosses, even lasers of pure energy, and toss them around or shake them to some effect. You can even "grab" to parry certain moves which feels great. Combined with the fact that the direction you grab in sort of matters depending on where the thing is coming from, it actually creates a lot of fun depth to the mechanic, which the boss battles spare no expense in highlighting, from parrying giant fists to shaking rockets to charge them up before tossing them back.
 
I've heard some bellyaching over the controls for this game, but I honestly thought they were fine, and even interesting. It doesn't use the stick at all, it's all D-pad and buttons, which I guess is input overload for some people cause of the C-buttons, but I found it fine. The platforming mechanics have a lot of nuance which I love in platformers and I wish I saw more of in games. For instance, you can boost in all 4 directions by using the C-buttons or tapping the D-pad. But C-boosting has a high acceleration and low top speed, while D-boosting has a low acceleration but high top speed. Or, if you hold up on the D-pad while you jump, you will actually jump even higher. These are the types of tiny micro-mechanics I love to see in platformers.
 
Story
 
The presentation is very much like a Saturday morning cartoon or anime and it's quite endearing, following "chapters" of the game's story. The story, however, is frankly kind of...scatterbrained. Which did eventually grow on me and create a sort of charm in itself, but man it's just so bizarre. You play as Marina, a super-strong robot maid on a vacation or some sort with her inventor, Professor Theo, to the planet Clancer, which is inhabited by Clancers, who kidnap him. Later you learn the Clancers are kind of in a civil war between an evil emperor and their exiled king, but it's never really explained what the Clancers are...they look kind of like machines, but I'm pretty sure they're organic somehow? I think they might be made of clay or something based on their death animations? Everything on planet Clancer has the Clancer face, from the animals to the buildings (even the planet itself), which are constructed out of geometric shapes with glowing Clancer faces. It's a really bizarre aesthetic choice.
 
Anyway, the game constantly introduces new major plot points as though they are completely normal and you should already understand them, and the levels sometimes feel disconnected from each other or the overall plot, like stuff is just "happening". One level has you riding on an ostrich for no reason whatsoever, while the next has you riding on a bee miniboss that you defeated multiple chapters prior. One random guy sort of off-hand mentions to you that another guy you met a few levels ago passed away the other day. These events and others like them are never ever explained, they just happen. I am not joking when I say that the game continues throwing random plot points out of nowhere right up until the credits roll. The story really is just so bizarre and pieced together, it almost feels like they made it up as they went along, or a large amount of it was lost in translation, but the translation seems fairly solid, certainly not so rough so as to make me think that it would be any more comprehensible in its original Japanese. It's honestly hard to say if they went absurd with the story on purpose, or if it just seems that way because they had a larger vision that was simply constrained by having to make a game, which I think the anime-esque presentation may suggest.
 
Levels
 
The levels have a lot of variety to them, which I enjoyed, but I felt also led to some inconsistency. The levels range from full and fleshed out, to brief and simple. From platform gauntlets, to puzzle boxes, to minibosses, heck, some of them basically only exist for exposition purposes. It doesn't feel like there's an overall complexity or difficulty curve from start to finish, it all varies pretty starkly, it's very much a big collection of ideas. One of the stand-out levels to me is probably this one where they have you compete in a sports festival, where you literally have to play multiple events and score well for your team in order to win the level. Though honestly if I could change one thing about this game, it would be the general level aesthetic. I really don't know why they went with the look of having almost all artificial level geometry consist solely of multi-colored blocks with glowing red Clancer faces. Maybe because it's easier to design and work with? But there are actually a decent amount of levels which use a greater abundance of more natural terrain tiles, which I thought looked beautiful in isolation especially combined with the game's gorgeous backgrounds, and created a more immersive environment. I would have loved to see more of that.
 
The boss battles in this game are definitely a highlight, and are visually impressive even still, with some amazing effects and animation. They are seriously just insane and intense. The one sour note to them is the 3rd boss fight, Sasquatch Beta. The fight is very slow and unimpressive, and its 2nd phase is sorely unintuitive. The boss fights recover after that though. Many of the bosses have multiple ways you can damage them through various grabbing and shaking actions as well, which is cool. My favorite boss is probably the 1st one, Migen, which has you parrying and grabbing his giant fists to send back at him. I think it's a rare example of a background boss done right; it's so engaging and thrilling, his attack patterns are unpredictable but you're given juuust enough time to react to them and grab-parry in the direction he's swinging from. He can also throw in mixups by shooting fireballs (which you can also parry) in-between punches, switching which fist he uses, or just straight up faking you out. This game probably has some of the best 2D platformer bosses I've ever fought, owing to its unique and inventive mechanics.
 
Final and Etc.
 
Finally, each level also has 1 golden gem to find. The condition ranges from level to level, sometimes you just have to find it, other times you have to shake something specific...and for the bosses you have to beat them without getting hit even once. Yeah, if you're just trying to "beat the game" then it doesn't really expect much from you, but you won't walk away satisfied...because how much of the game's ending you're allowed to see is directly tied to how many golden gems you collect. Now you don't need ALL of them to see the normal ending sequence, but there is a bonus scene afterward, and so to see the full ending you do need every single one. I did it though, and it was honestly worth it. There's even a bonus secret golden gem you can get if you A-rank every level, but it doesn't do anything and the time requirements for the levels in this game are actually fucking insane (even just S-ranking the tutorial level is ridiculous), so I didn't do it. Honestly getting them all was not too bad, but only because I could look them up now. I cannot imagine trying to get some of these gems back when this game first came out; one of them is pure RNG for instance, requiring you to shake a miniboss at a 1/64 chance of making the gem appear. Mischief Makers is not exactly Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time; I doubt kids were sharing many schoolyard secrets about this game, so in-context some of them are definitely a bit brutal.
 
Overall, I'd give Mischief Makers a 7.8/10. It's a little on the shorter side, is a big box of ideas rather than a smooth curve of level progression, the aesthetic is weird, and the story feels like a mishmash of stuff. But it's got heaps of charm and character, the levels are rarely boring or uninteresting, the boss fights are spectacular and make you feel so cool, and it has lots of mechanical depth for players who decide to seek it out, which it has a way of nudging you into. The grabbing, throwing, and shaking is such a novel idea to centralize the game around and it just works, it feels like a truly unique platformer in that regard.

The insight was remembering "if it's from that era, someone probably put .wmv after it ironically."

The insight was remembering "if it's from that era, someone probably put .wmv after it ironically."

Took me forever to find this video again, so I am preserving this important bit of TF2 history:
 
 

Took me forever to find this video again, so I am preserving this important bit of TF2 history:
 
 

Took me forever to find this video again, so I am preserving this important bit of TF2 history:
 
 

Took me forever to find this video again, so I am preserving this important bit of TF2 history:
 
 

Here we go:
 

Happy New Year subspuffers! I wish y'all a nice 2024

Here we go:
 

Here we go:
 

I had a dream that I've already forgotten most of the details about.  Something about a relative going crazy and being barricaded in a room.
 
But I do clearly remember someone telling me at the end: "If you learn nothing else from this, it's that you should always keep a really big knife next to your bed."  Then I woke up and since it was around 3 AM I went back to sleep.
 
But I guess this dream convinced me since apparently I set an alarm titled "BUY KNIFE" before going back to sleep.

I had a dream that I've already forgotten most of the details about.  Something about a relative going crazy and being barricaded in a room.
 
But I do clearly remember someone telling me at the end: "If you learn nothing else from this, it's that you should always keep a really big knife next to your bed."  Then I woke up and since it was around 3 AM I went back to sleep.
 
But I guess this dream convinced me since apparently I set an alarm titled "BUY KNIFE" before going back to sleep.

The only non-streamer game/non hyped AAA game that won any category was Dave the Diver (unless I missed something.)
 
I'm not angry, it's about what I expected.  It's like expecting to get quality out of the Oscars or the Hugo Awards or something; that's not what they are about.

A game that didn't receive any updates for the last 3 years.
A game that is just Fallout 4 with less features, which already had less features than New Vegas, with most of the new gameplay copied from No Man's Sky.
 
Fuck off.

I came across a old copy of Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and watched the end of season 3.

In retrospect this show was pretty damned lame and embodied the "mystery box" style of storytelling even more than stuff like Lost.  The show absolutely relies on leading the audience along with mysterious mysteries which the writers obviously hadn't thought of.  But more annoyingly when some of their revelations caused obvious contradictions, rather than exploring what these revelations would actually mean, they just doubled down on their solutions.  One of the most obvious examples of this is
 
 
What's more annoying is that even when it is pointed out that some of their choices don't make sense, the creators are still doubling down on their choices.  The most glaring example of this comes with
 
 
I had to put most of this in spoilers since I've spoiled some of the biggest reveals in the show.  But honestly if the show were good it would survive being spoiled in this way.  You cannot watch the show again without being annoyed at how obviously forced later story moves were, and how little they make sense overall.  The show really drags them out too.  When they reveal four of the cylons at the end of season 3 they drag it on for several minutes before they finally say that they are cylons (though none of the characters are really clear on how they came to that conclusion.)  It's obviously designed to increase the hype of initial viewings since that particular reveal is so far out of left field that you probably guessed something else was going on.  But when you rewatch it it's just annoying; you know what's coming and there's nothing interesting about having it dragged out.  It's like watching a jumpscare heavy horror movie when you know where all the jumpscares are, but they take too long to get there while not doing anything interesting.
 
I don't mind shows being written as they go, or the writers changing their minds as they write the show.  Probably 95% of what happens in the third season of Twin Peaks was never even dreamed of during the first season, and a lot of it would have seemed contradictory to what they were doing back then.  But none of it actually contradicts the first season, because David Lynch takes his work seriously.  He doesn't view the show as a mystery box that he should be praised for crafting, where the point is to be amazed at the plot twists.  He views it more like a dream that he is having and is figuring out at the same time that the audience is.  Thus Twin Peaks is heightened on every rewatch, (same thing with his movies) while you really can only watch something like Battlestar Galactica once.

This video is a more accurate representation of Legacy of Kain than anything I could possibly say about it.
 
 

I present to you the greatest anime opening ever made:
 
 
I guess to appreciate this you have to have both played Snatcher and watched Patlabor, so maybe the audience here is just me.
 
But the rest of you may be interested to know that this was literally drawn in MS paint.  No seriously, that's what the description of the video says.

The big part of why I love tired dog so much is that he worked perfectly for listening training.
 
-Reasonable conversation Japanese.
-Japanese subtitles to clear up ambiguities/allow using dictionaries.
-No English translations when I found them, meaning I couldn't cheat.
 
Now he's gotten big enough that he hard encodes English subs above the Japanese subs.  All the more power to him since I like it when any independent animator grows, but it kind of sucks for my intentions.
 
With all that being said, how did I find him?  I literally do not remember.  I vaguely remember seeing one of his videos come up in a Japanese twitter feed, but I do not remember whose it was or why I was reading it.  Probably I started at some vtuber and then got off course? Who knows.
 
So I guess tip 1 is if you just randomly go through as much content as you can, sometimes you stumble onto stuff.
 
As for non-vtuber videos, you can pretty reliably find yukkuri videos anywhere, and sometimes they work for listening practice.  If the computer voice isn't so fast you can avoid problems with people slurring words (obviously you want to know how to listen to that eventually, but in the early stages I think it's okay to not worry about it and just focus on the words.)  But in my experience yukkuri videos tend to intentionally go fast and use poor synthetization to the point that even Japanese people can't understand them without subtitles.

There's a lot of skit style channels like totally not-Kaguya Luna's:
 
 
But I don't know any reliable way to find these either, I just stumble upon them or have them recommended sometimes.
 
Sometimes I thought it would be fun to find a video of some Japanese people reacting to American movies, since then at least you'd know the context.  But I've been able to find maybe 10 of these, ever.  I don't know if Japanese people just don't make them, don't post them in places I know about, or if they are buried by the algorithm (most searches EVEN USING JAPANESE tend to turn up American or Koreans instead), but they practically don't exist.
 
Now obviously you can get a ton of Japanese video content by going to Nico Nico, but in my experience that's a quick trip straight into the deep end.  Once you get past vtuber content and anime clips Nico Nico Douga tends to be extremely dense meme content.  I have a feeling that even if I spent a year researching nothing but it, I still wouldn't understand most of cookie ☆.
 
So my main answer is: I dunno.  Sometimes you find stuff.

I present to you the greatest anime opening ever made:
 
 
I guess to appreciate this you have to have both played Snatcher and watched Patlabor, so maybe the audience here is just me.
 
But the rest of you may be interested to know that this was literally drawn in MS paint.  No seriously, that's what the description of the video says.