A 1970 Corvette

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.

Aaaand it's finished!

 
I'm so so happy with how this turned out! I feel like I'm really getting better, looking at this. I think I have my sketching process to thank. It's very thorough, for better or for worse.

When you ask "what kind of touhou fanart do you want to see?" there are two types of people: The ones that say "mo' miji" and the ones that call you a "mo'ran"

Not been in the mood to draw recently, paying a bit more attention to my online classes, but I found this oldass drawing I did when I was like 14 or so? It was when I used to draw very often.
 
 
Some things never change, even 16 years later, I still love maid uniforms and android/cyborg vibes. I wish I could recapture her expression, I never manage to get that serious look when I try.
 
Also, I decided to make my own Minecraft skin for some reason. Decided to base it on a character from my old programing class project.
 
I think it turned out pretty good! Maybe I could make the gray parts a bit lighter, but I feel I managed to get the knight vibe into the skin. The "color noise" from the tool did help add texture to it.
 
And I also found this
 
What the fuck IS this? WHY did I make this? @Idiot Cube WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

I was there since the dawn of time.
 
I will be there to put the chairs up and turn off the lights when its closing time.

Yeah I think there's no reason it won't be able to work out the current kinks, a lot of the things that people meme about (hands) aren't probably much more than a minor speedbump in the improvement process. As an enjoyer of fanart I think that at least part of the appeal is lost if there isn't someone behind the work itself, but at the same time if it's impossible to discern can I really say shit?
 
I don't really know how to feel about where it's headed tbh, like most things it'll probably end up being something lame and pervasive as hell and I really just want to bunker down and ignore it in its entirety

To put things another way, remember way back on bigSPUF when I made those 2hu comments using the walfas program?  I didn't draw a damn thing for those; I just used premade characters and models.  But I did compose shots, create dialogue, craft jokes, etc.  That's how I see AI being used down the line; it will be good at making the "elements" of your comic, but you'll still have to put them together.  Or if you want art of something very specific with many parts you'll have to take a lot of AI pictures and merge them together.  (I know some indie authors are already doing that to get cheap cover art.)

Nice little rabbit hole youtube channel if you are interested in that sort of thing:
 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChjOucyoXowoqMJ6L_hs3NA/videos
 
Uploads videos with names of messes of characters, several times an hour, and has been doing so for three months.  Uploads vary in length from a few seconds to over an hour.
 
Mainly looks to be podcasts.  Sometimes the URL for an archive site and the name of the podcast is in the title.  Titles always end in a date shortly before the upload date; this might be the time that the podcast was retrieved.  Some of it sounds more like radio, including political talk radio and music, though it is possible that this was retrieved from an online upload of a show or an internet stream of the content.  Very occasionally you will get static, which almost sounds like it came from an actual broadcast.  But I suspect that in those cases what was recorded was an internet stream of some guy's radio rather than the radio directly.  Everything else just has too high of sound quality and things almost always start right at the beginning of the program, which wouldn't happen if it was recording off the air.
 
Doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to what is put on there.  I haven't even seen the same show uploaded twice, though obviously there's a lot of uploads and I'm not going to look through all of them.  Some of its in English, some is in other languages (French seems to be the second most common.)  Some of it is nerd podcasts, some Christian inspiration type stuff, some music (both from online and recorded off radio stations), some talk radio, some sports, etc.
 
So it's something made by an AI pulling content from a lot of online audio sources.  The rabbit hole comes from if you feel like answering the following questions:
Most obviously, why?  Usually the answer is some sort of content farm but these videos have been getting next to no views; the most popular video on the channel is still under 500 views. Is there any meaning to the titles, or are they randomly generated?  Certainly you can see a date at the end, and often a URL and sometimes a title.  But there's a number at the front (which is usually similar to previous numbers but does not increase sequentially from video to video) and sometimes a whole mess of letters and numbers (which seem to be hex, since you never see anything in the alphabet past f.) Is there any reasoning behind the sources?  That is, are they all available through a common pirate site or something?  Or is the AI just crawling the web and posting whatever sound files it can find?

Still funny how quickly the previous tiams filled and how long this one's persisted
 
And I actually do mean funny, I think at this point I don't really feel that sad about it. Honestly just glad we've got posters still kickin' at all

So I've been fiddling with Civilization 2 for a while.  I mean, really I've been doing a lot of retro gaming for a variety of reasons, but that one always hits me hard for some reason.  I particularly like making my own scenarios and messing around in them, even if they aren't as polished as the published scenarios.  The Fantastic Worlds expansion gives in game editors that are quite helpful in setting up new units, changing technologies, changing improvements, and doing some minor other fiddling (though there's a memory overflow error that sometimes happens when using them, watch out!)  But you'll quickly find that other scenarios have tweaks that you can't do in game.  The most obvious is the civlopedia, i.e. the list of all the units, techs, etc.  When you make a scenario it will go to the default one (which is probably irrelevant) but the published scenarios have a simplified version of it which accurately reflects the new units, techs, and so on.
 
I've done a lot of reverse engineering and figured out a bunch of this on my own.  A big thing is that Civ 2 stores all text used in the game in various text files, and if you have one of these in your scenario folder it will use that file instead of the default.  If you replace the civlopedia text it will even create a new menu for the information.  By copying and pasting the modified versions from another scenario you can get a pretty good idea pretty quickly on how to handle things.  Similarly there are a lot of graphics files which you can't change using the in game editors (ex. the barbarian leader unit, the pops faces in cities) but these can be changed by copying the relevant .bmp files into your folder and then editing them.
 
But you'll find that there are some things done in scenarios which are not as easy to crack.  Most notably, some scenarios (like the Midgard scenario) have either partially or wholly different tech trees for different factions.  There's no way to set techs as just for one tribe in the rules text files, and looking through the text files for the relevant scenarios shows no obvious differences.
 
Eventually I gave up and started looking for resources explaining this.  I wasn't expecting to find anything, but came across this book on archive.org:
 
https://archive.org/details/civ-ii-scenario-guide/page/244/mode/2up
 
It's a book written by the scenario designers where they go into great detail about how exactly the Civ2 rules work, what you can change and what is hard coded into the game, what will cause mysterious errors, how to do various tricks (such as having "exclusive" units; turns out this is done with some shenanigans involving dummy techs that the computer sees as inaccessible but which lead to usable techs), comments on each specific published scenario, and just general advice for how to design and polish scenarios.  They even go into how you can convert scenarios made in later versions of the game to be compatible with earlier versions and they discuss how viable each scenario is for multiplayer, even though they were designed when there was no multiplayer for Civilization 2.
 
It's kind of insane that something like this exists, but really this sort of thing was more common before 2005 or so.  I mean, manuals for older games are often hundreds of pages to begin with, so fan supplements being that long isn't so weird.  But then they started doing less and less documentation.  Now we are in the age of "it's probably on a wiki" or "check out a discord" even though you're not likely to find information even equivalent to a tenth of this book.
 
EDIT: Looks like some of the pages are scattered around in this scan, which is too bad.

EDIT: I have no idea where the image in the card came from, it's just the first image result for "furry execution."  If a furry actually was executed by a fat ninja somewhere, I'm sorry.

>Gog posts an announcement hyping up a platformer with "unique size-changing mechanics"
>Furry artwork, and it gives off a specific vibe, if you get my drift
>One of the features is "you can eat your enemies to increase your fullness meter"
>Talks about the benefits of having a "bouncy full body"
>Warns about the dangers "piercing" attacks when having a full body
>Not even hiding the inflation fetish nature of this game
>Says that bosses may have "unusual" ways to defeat them
>I literally do not want to know what that means

Eventually people got so quick to figure out hidden pony stuff that I started doing that for non-pony stuff, at which point SPUF would assume I was talking about ponies anyway.

Yeah, I thought it was funny that 10 years on, people are apparently still referencing a random shockfic lol.

Soooo I decided to go ahead and flesh out that sketch from last night. And I'm so happy with how it turned out!

 
I feel like I'm starting to better develop my style and understand light and shading more. Very happy with this!

There is one time I really feel this meme:
 
 
It's when I'm in a command prompt in say drive c:, and I have to type
 
d:
cd\games\rolypoly\
 
rather than simply:
 
d:\games\rolypoly\

Protip for anyone (like me) who is still playing Civ 2 with the expansions.  (I mean probably no one on this board, but someone made a Game of Thrones scenario in 2019 so I'm not alone here.)
 
One cool thing about Civ2 is that the scenarios let you change pretty much everything, from the graphics to gamerules, pretty easily.  As such there's tons of scenarios that completely change the game, from setting it on Mars, or having you play as dinosaurs, or having multiple different Norse myths battle.  The Fantastic Worlds expansion even added "Jr." versions of Master of Magic, Master of Orion and XCOM with pretty much as close of facsimiles as you could get while still using the core Civilization rules.
 
But there's a downside.  Civ2 scenarios were designed for historical conflicts, like WWII or the Civil War, and as such always have the exact same maps and starting conditions for players.  This is cool when everything is setup with care, but lots of scenarios are essentially ones where you start from scratch on a random world with different units and technologies.  But that gets lame quick when the map is always identical.  This really hurts the "Jr" games.

But here's what you can do: make a normal civilization game with a random map.  Then open the cheat menu and save the game as a scenario in the folder for whatever units and such you want to use.  Quit, then begin the scenario using the new scenario file.  You won't get the intro (since that's tied to the map name) but all the changes to rules, graphics, sounds, etc. are tied to files in the folder itself, not the scenario, so those all get updated for your new random map.  (Be warned that some scenarios used terrains in non-standard ways and can get fucked up if you use a random map.  This doesn't work well at all for maps where you have different races, since all the units will be mixed.  Sometimes techs are changed so that the normal basic techs are actually way down the tech tree.  If this is a problem simply use the cheat menu to clear all technologies from all players before saving the scenario file.)

I carry a package mailed from Yokohama containing a "Meet The Tenchi Muyo!" CD."  I am back from my office, where I had been listening to a Steve Winwood Casette tape, on a newly purchased player.  On the drive I listened to an Astrophysics album burned on an ancient CD-R.  On walking through the front door, I put the CD down in the rack and I sit down in front of the computer and fiddle with the settings on my emulated copy of Windows 3.1 so that the Civilization II will function better with the Fantastic Worlds expansion.  Afterwards I watch a documentary on VHS and then a Bluray of a recent anime.  Then I continue comparing distinct editions of Dungeons and Dragons to track just when certain concepts left the gaming zeitgeist.
 
Only at this point does it strike me that I have fallen so far down a nerdy hole as to be beyond hope of escape.

There are still a shocking number of people who buy the fanciest TVs and turn around and buy DVDs or stream in 480.
Like, they're not even getting 1080p on their 4K tv, and companies think they can convince these people to buy 8k movies.

I have done what many have spoken of doing, but only a chosen few have actually accomplished:
 
I have played Monopoly with the rules as printed.
 
Some thoughts:
 
-I thought that auctions would be the huge deciding factor, but in practice most properties actually sold without them and in most auctions the price ended up higher than the right of first refusal cost.  If someone goes bankrupt and the player who bankrupted him can't pay mortgage interest then those properties are all sold on auction simultaneously, but in practice most of the time when this happens the player who bankrupted the other one will have enough cash on hand to pay the interest or at least be willing to sell houses/mortgage property to raise the cash.  That being said, it seems like there are always a few huge auction plays that enhance the game.
 
-Free parking is an even bigger offender than I thought.  If you play with Free Parking just being a blank space, the total amount of cash available goes way, way, down.  The only reliable way to add cash to the pool is by passing go, but people go to jail more often than you'd think.  And buying property, mortgaging, paying fines, buying houses, etc. all effectively remove cash from the pool.  This makes the game much more tense and makes it so that it's pretty much impossible to last longer than two hours.  I think most games would last an hour tops if you have people playing to win and people willing to concede when it is obvious who is going to win.
 
-That being said, free parking is still a great space.  In the end game people will build up the second and third sides of the board, since they are the ones that you are most likely to get to after going to jail (which, as I said, happens more frequently than you'd think.)  With the smaller total pool of cash this often creates a terrifying situation where a wrong roll out of jail could either bankrupt you or else handicap you so much that you will have a very hard time coming back.  Landing on free parking is always a relief at that point.
 
-The most important rule is the ability to trade, build houses, sell houses, and mortgage/demortgage at any time.  This both basically removes downtime and adds a lot of strategy.  You will effectively never build on your turn since you want to have cash to pay people off, and so there ends up being a lot of "I will build here to specifically try to screw the player who is rolling."  This is great.  It's also fun if you have players who are flexible in their trades.  Protip: if someone refuses to let you complete a monopoly no matter what you offer, offer that player the other two parts of the monopoly in exchange for a lot of other stuff.  You can also do fun deals where you get something from player A simply to sweeten the deal for what you really want from player B.
 
Having played by the rules I can safely say it is a much better game than how most people play it.  Not my favorite by any means, but still enjoyable.  Maybe a 7 or 8 out of 10.  I really only have two complaints:
 
1.) There's a lot of dumb math for no real good reason.  You have to pay a 10% interest to demortgage a property and there are a few fines of the form of "10% of your cash on hand."  So you'll be splitting things up into 1's quite a lot and if you have a lot of cash or a lot of properties to deal with there can be some real downtime calculating things out.  You might want to have a calculator on hand, or at the very least have a banker who you trust and who can do figures quickly.
 
2.) There is usually a point where it is really obvious who is going to win but the game doesn't end for a bit.  Ex. someone controls half the board and the other players have mortgaged everything to stay alive.  At that point the only way anyone but the leader can win is to pass go or get money from cards enough to demortgage their stuff, then have the leader land on their spaces, all before they land on half the board (which will probably be an instant bankruptcy.)  It's possible, but exceptionally unlikely.  However since there are so many mortgaged properties you can go several turns where you neither pay money nor gain money.  I would advise playing with people willing to concede in this situation, or just setting a time limit after which you total up all assets to determine a winner.

Oh god yes, I remember asking my mom for peripherals like a mouse or a headset... and she would go to Target or something and buy the first thing she saw because she didn't know anything about tech and the stuff always ended up being horrible garbage. The headset was so legendarily bad my friends and I still joke about it, since they could hear everything I could hear.
 
I guess if you wouldn't trust them to install a program on your PC, don't ask them for tech gifts. Probably a good rule of thumb.

EDIT: Found a big blind spot
 

Did an update on this particular favorite of mine. There is still room for improvement.
 

I thought of this video was just something random being sent to me, but from the comments it looks like it was recommended pretty widely in the last couple of days.
 
Since there is no translation available I will do my best.  I can't make out what the interviewer is saying precisely in the middle, but I think I get the gist of it.  Stuff I'm not sure of I'll put in [].
 
Interviewer: It (i.e. the costume) is unbelievably ugly. [How do you look underneath the costume?]
Guy in Costume: Even uglier.
 
EDIT: Found the full video, which conveniently has an English segment immediately before "der Legende Typ" that lets you know what kind of interviews these are: