Gyokuyoutama

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.

Every time one of these images pops up I always think about how much I miss print gaming ads:

 
They just have a much different feel to them, and honestly do a much better job of actually selling the product than modern video ads. Like showing me the PS5 logo with a bunch of 1 second long clips of various games with no title attached to them doesn't sell me on the PS5, especially assuming I'm a random consumer who doesn't know what those games are already.

I think that might be it honestly; modern gaming advertisement just makes the assumption that everybody ALREADY KNOWS what their product is, so they have no reason to actually try to...sell it.

I have a confession to make:
 
I was Zecora the whole time.  Big Macintosh too.

I have a confession to make:
 
I was Zecora the whole time.  Big Macintosh too.

I finished playing the Castillo Duology, Castillo - Shattered Mirrors and Castillo - Nine Circles, and I found them really interesting.
I actually played the first one last year, but the sequel Nine Circles came out in October.
 
Out of the gate, both games attempt to be something quite rare in the FPS space, they are trying to be a hybrid of collect-a-thons and FPS.
 
The first game, Shattered Mirrors, takes heavy inspiration from Mario64.

Rambling Overview
 
So in summary, the first game is a weird experience that mostly functions.
It's this combination of ideas from Mario64 and FPS games made by someone who clearly doesn't understand FPS games.
In a world of polished FPS gems and bland clones which miss the point, Castillo is neither of these.
It's a FPS collect-a-thon made with a clear vision and a lot of heart, but is really rough all over.
 
So let's get into the sequel which came out bit over a year later.
The second game, Nine Circles, follows something closer to Banjo Kazooie.
 
Rambling Overview
 
So I'm fascinated by the Castillo games, because I'd say they achieve being collect-a-thons, but fail at being engaging FPS games.
The FPS mechanics are incredibly basic at best and enemy damage, both taking and receiving, is incredibly unintutive.
 
There are interesting worlds to explore, but the level geometry is all slipshod and janky.
The story, while basic, is taken seriously and has stuff going on, but is plagued with audio issues.
There's a lot of heart and design intent, but polish is nonexistent.
 
It's like playing someone's college term-project, but they had money and time to make it a decently long experience.
Polish is nonexistent, but a lot of ambition and positive energy went into building the game.

Why I do not regret spending an average of 30 minutes studying Kanji, grammar and general reading for 3 years straight:
 
Because people like this get paid to localize anime and manga:
 

 
"Lame translation" = "it's not a hip wacky translation so no one gives me back pats."
 
"You are already dead" is legitimately a great translation for that line, especially since Kenshiro means that literally.

Everyone needs an automobile, even those with many tails. This was the largest auto I could afford. Should I therefore be made the target of fun?

Everyone needs an automobile, even those with many tails. This was the largest auto I could afford. Should I therefore be made the target of fun?

https://twitter.com/mollyyncy1/status/1732382047581446282/photo/1

Watched a couple made-for-TV movies with the gimmick being they're made to look like breaking news broadcasts (so for the original TV viewers it would look indistinguishable from actual newscasts). They're neat for that reason alone, especially if you're old enough to remember watching actual broadcast television.
 
 
I really like the climax on this one, at about 1:25:00,
 

Retro is and always will be stuff from before the 90's. Vintage is from before the 50's.
 
Old is anything from 5 years ago or more.

Time wise I don't actually have an issue with that classification.  Pong machines certainly would have been "retro" at the time of the NES, the Atari 2600 would have been "retro" at the time of the SNES, the NES was "retro" at the time of the N64, etc.
 
Of course, in all of those cases the new consoles worked completely differently from the "retro" ones.  An NES user looking back at pong machines could say "Wow, they only play one game, it's in black and white, and you don't even have a d-pad or a button to push!"  An SNES user looking back at the 2600 could say "The sound effects are just beeps and boops, most games just have a couple of screens in them and you can only have a couple of moving sprites on the screen before the flicker gets our of control."  An N64 looking back at the NES could say "The color palettes are incredibly limited, the sounds are all bitcrushed, and there isn't even a hint of 3D."  etc.
 
When you are using the PS5 and you look back to the PS3 what can you really say?  "The processor isn't as good and the textures aren't quite as detailed?"  Who cares?
 
There's not a huge distinction in the games either.  I looked up the best rated PS3 games on metacritic and it included a lot of things like GTA 4/5, The Last of Us, Uncharted 2, etc.  That is, games from franchises where the modern version is not that different from the PS3 version and in some cases (GTA 5, The Last of Us) is still something that people literally play to this day (maybe through a "remaster" that is barely different from the original.)
 
It'd be like if Gamecube just got an updated version of Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask didn't come out until the Wii, but people playing the Wii said "Ocarina of Time on N64? So retro!"

But a lot of culture is like that.  Someone in 2000 could look back at First Blood II: Rambo and think "man, this really is a movie from another time."  That style of 80's action movie had vanished by the turn of the millennium, and the fact that it's so tied into the Cold War also makes it feel ancient.  Back to the Future, Rocky IV, The Goonies, etc. from the same year are similarly firmly "80's movies" and couldn't have come out in 2000.
 
Someone from 2023 doing the same thing and looking back to 2008 is going to be watching Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones 4 or Madagascar 2.  Instead of the current round of capeshit, the new new Indiana Jones reboot, or whatever Dreamworks vomited out this year.

Finished Yakuza 7. Great game, fun and all that, but I still like 0 and Kiwami 1 better.
For a JRPG, I would put on my top list along Dragon Quest 8. Its basically the Saints Row 4 to Kiwami's Saints Row 2.
 
 
Overall, great game. Can't wait for 8.

Here's a fun way to mess with ChatGPT and test boundary cases.
 
Make up a language name and some gibberish to act as an initial sentence.
 
Ask Chat GPT to translate it to English.
 
Do this for a few sentences accepting the "translations" as accurate.
 
Then start saying that it fucked up.  "You used 'kralu' in both sentences but it needs to be conjugated differently the second time because the subject is animate plural instead of semi-animate singular."
 
It has pretty decent memory, but what this demonstrates is that what it is really optimized for is making up excuses for giving you the "wrong" answers.  In a way, it's a perfect representation of a college student.

I still want to get a CRT to hook up my PS1, Mega Drive and Master System.
 
Before we moved to the era of flat screens, we had 2 TVs, a 14 Inch Philco-Hitachi and a 29 Inch Gradiente.
 
 
The 14 inch one didn't had AV ports, only those old screws where you had to place the video forks and that single big antenna plug you had to screw. We needed an adapter to connect the PS1.
 

 
We eventually bought a flat 29 inch CRT and moved the old 29" to my room, but after 15 years of use, it started to fail and eventually stopped working. We bought a 32 inch plasma screen that we used a bit more than a decade, in fact, it stopped working a month ago.
 
No idea what happened to the 14 inch one. I still hope that one day I can get one.

I think I looked for a solution for that years ago, and everything I could find was "get fucked".

Outlook question:
 
I end up using the web client fairly often for work stuff, mainly when I have to answer something on my personal computer.  I also deal with a lot of mathematics, and in particular geometry, which means that I write stuff like d(A,B) frequently.  The problem is that Outlook autocorrects B) to .  (Augh, SPUF does it too! In a worse way than Outlook, since at least there if you backspace it undoes the autocorrect.)  This is a pain in the ass, and there's never once been a situation where I would be remotely interested in putting the picture version of emoticons in work e-mails.  But I can't find any way to turn it off.
 
If you look this up online the only "fix" that people talk about is pressing backspace immediately after the correction is made, but you have to do that every time.  Worse, if you do any keystroke in between the autocorrect and the backspace you no longer can turn the smiley back into text and so have to retype.  There are people talking on forums circa 2017 about going into various options menus to disable autocorrect, but none of these menus seem to exist on the current version.
 
So, does anyone know how to actually disable this behavior?
 
(This also makes me wonder if the predictive text features that I was able to disable will eventually become mandatory in the future.)

So anyway, obviously I picked up Touhou 19.
 
It kind of answers my question from above: No, there aren't just three games in the Twinkle Star Sprites genre.  Now there are four games in that genre, since Touhou 19 is one of them (despite not having "Phantasmagoria" in its title, annoyingly.)
 
The basics of this genre is that you have a split screen where both players separately play a danmaku game.  The goal is usually for your opponent to die first.  You don't directly attack each other, but you do indirectly attack each other in many ways.  In Twinkle Star Sprites this is primarily done by chaining combos of enemies, which then will send fireballs and character specific effects to the other screen.  This results in extremely fast attacks coming your way, but without a huge bullet density. 
 
The Touhou versions of course tend to fill up your screen.  I'll describe how it works in Touhou 19, though I recall 9 being similar.  Each player gets the same patterns of "standard" enemies like fairies.  There's eight or so patterns in total and you'll very quickly memorize them.  Killing these enemies sends more bullets to your opponent, for example killing a fairy sends a tiny spherical bullet.  Eventually advanced enemies will be sent over, which I think has to do with how you chain your combos.  These are largely animal spirits, since you are in the Buddhist realm of animal existence (畜生) though Touhou reimagines this as part of hell rather than Earth.  Killing these either advanced enemies to your opponent or character specific attacks.  For example Reimu will send a bouncing yin-yang ball over, Marisa will shoot a mini-master spark from the side of the screen, Nazrin makes a giant diamond appear, etc.
 
On top of these you have a power meter which can be charged.  (This is another thing borrowed from Twinkle Star Sprites, since no other Touhou has a similar mechanic.)  You gain mana from killing enemies, which lets you charge to do more.  You always have a level zero attack available which takes a little to charge up and does a temporary burst attack.  Next you have a special skill that is usually a more powerful attack. (For example, Ran will double her stationary cannons for a time, in addition to getting burst damage.)  But you usually focus on levels 2 and 3.  Level 2 is an EX attack, which is dependent on the player.  For example, Marisa does a laser barrage, most of the kings of animal hell send a bunch of animal spirits after you, etc.  Level 3 is a boss attack.  This is a straight up spell card style attack like you'd see in a normal Touhou game.  Every time you do one of these attacks its power increases for the next time you use it.  On the EX attack this largely means greater projectile/summon density.  For the boss attack you'll go through different spell cards, though each character only has four or so variations with higher power attacks either combining difficult spell cards together or increasing density of attacks on previously used ones.  When you die this also increases the power of your attacks, as a catch up mechanism.  Where things can get particularly nasty is that you can launch EX attacks while the enemy is dealing with your boss attack, and you can also kill a bunch of enemies to throw those at the enemy at the same time.  You can't stack boss attacks, but if you save your mana you can launch a boss attack immediately after the last one ended.  There are a bunch of other mechanics, but that's the gist of it.
 
This one is pretty controversial because the Story mode is essentially "on rails."  Rather than having the computer do its attacks normally, it will do its attacks at set intervals.  For example, the stage 1 boss on normal will do (IIRC) EX 1, EX 2, Boss 1, EX 3, Boss 2 in that order.  When the computer runs through the last attack in its set list (which is always a boss attack) it dies regardless of how many lives and bombs it has.  You technically can kill the computer in story mode by exhausting all of its lives, but this almost never happens.
 
This fact pissed a lot of people off, but I'm basically okay with it.  You can play the computer in vs. mode and as far as I can tell it plays 100% fair there.  No automatic attacks, and it only dies when you kill it legitimately.  So it's not like you lose the experience entirely.  I think there are two reasons why ZUN did this.  The first is that he wanted story mode to work more like a traditional Touhou game: fight bosses, exhaust their spell cards, win.  The second is that VS mode is actually pretty grueling.  The default time limit on round length is 10 minutes, and I've had most rounds against the CPU go over five minutes.  That's only going through two lives, while you have five in story mode (and so does the computer.)  That would mean something like 15 minutes per level, or 90 minutes across the whole story, which is too long for a Touhou game.  Remember, you're doing it all in one go.  There's also 19 playable characters, and ZUN expects you to play through all of them.   I think that this current set up is fine.  The only thing that I don't like is that I'm not sure how much doing boss attacks and the like against the computer actually helps in story mode, since you're unlikely to kill them that way.  It does seem to limit their ability to kill enemies (and thus increase your bullets) and your attacks do clear some space, so it's definitely not completely worthless, but I always wonder if I shouldn't prioritize boss attacks as much as in vs.
 
The characters are nicely varied.  When playing against them the biggest difference will be their EX attacks and spell cards.  However, you can't really pay attention to that stuff in game.  Unlike Twinkle Star sprites, if you look at your opponents screen for even an instant to plan out an attack, you're probably dead.  Playing variety comes from a few different sources:
 
Movement speed. Marisa is still speedier than Reimu and Nazrin is so fast that she's actually tricky to control when not in focus mode. Shot patterns.  Most characters have a stream of bullets that shoot forward plus some supplementary attack.  For example, Marisa shoots a weak laser that penetrates across the whole screen. Sanae shoots snakes that will turn sideways to hit enemies.  Ran has three forward streams, but two of these are from turrets that will remain stationary while you're in focus mode (allowing you to continue hitting the boss while you are dodging elsewhere.)  Some are more fanciful, like Mamizou's very wide spread which she will bring together in focus mode, or Nazrin's bullets which change directions to target enemies. The special skill mentioned above (i.e. Level 1 charge.) A "Magic Circle" which appears while charging.  This will slow down bullets within it, outright stun animal spirits (including after they leave the circle), and I believe that you also get more mana the more stuff that is in it.  For the basic characters this really is just a circle, but the shape varies widely.  Ran has a large cross, Aunn's circle starts big but quickly becomes a very narrow sidewise ellipse, Mamizou has three circles focused in front of her, and Nazrin's circle will wander around the screen in search of enemies rather than staying with you. All of this makes each character play pretty differently, and of course they fight different people in the story mode.  Even when two people fight the same character, it will generally happen on different stages which changes up the difficulty significantly.  The main exception to this is the final boss, where a certain character shows up more often (though not everyone gets that boss.)
 
Haven't tried online play yet.  I'm kind of terrified about the skill of the average opponent.  You have to beat the game several times before Online Play is even available, so it's not like there's any chance of playing against total noobies.
 
And for the record this being the first game where Ran is playable is only 20% of why I bought it.  The primary reason is that I just really like the Twinkle Star Sprites format and am glad to play any game in that genre.  I do wish that someone other than ZUN would make one though.  Not because I dislike Touhou 9 or 19, but rather because I'd like to see a modern take on this that isn't married to the spell card format in particular.

Sonic Symphony cool
 
Started as a symphony
 
Intermission
 
Crush 40 concert
 
Shame the lead was sick, but the backup singer did really well