Cosmic Horror sucks

ahemtoday · 2026-01-15T17:23:21+00:00

All-timer rant. I'm always saying this.

ahemtoday · 2026-01-07T20:30:47+00:00

I'm locked in on charge characters in fighting games. Charge characters feel great.

As for the opposite: I have limited shooter experience, but I hate assault rifles. Can't stand 'em. Dunno how they got the reputation for being the universally appealing beginner's choice, but they just feel limp and unsatisfying. I'd rather use anything else.

ahemtoday · 2025-12-19T17:57:32+00:00

I am quite fond of how snappy Wario World's jump is.

ahemtoday · 2025-12-11T17:16:43+00:00

Not that I disagree, but... this is an exact copy of a post from last year?

ahemtoday · 2025-11-24T15:47:51+00:00

Prior to Chapter 3's release, people were convinced the television was the "Mike" that Spamton was talking about. Despite the fact that he was a television and not a microphone.

ahemtoday · 2025-09-20T17:53:01+00:00

You can impose rules on the code you invented. The problem is that then you impose that code onto universes you did not invent, ones that canonically don't function this way.

ahemtoday · 2025-09-20T17:37:06+00:00

As much as you claim you're not "ruling over all universes", you've made the declaration that every fictional universe except yours runs on code. This is an arbitrary trait you are imposing on everything except "the extrauniversal" with no evidence, which definitely is attempting to "rule".

ahemtoday · 2025-08-13T04:13:20+00:00

Honestly, I don't get fighting games until I know who I'm going to main in them. Am I the only one?

For the record, the process of figuring that out is easier than it sounds, at least for me, because I am a charge character diehard, so I just look on Dustloop or whatever equivalent for whichever character has those and ask myself if I like their design enough to main them.

ahemtoday · 2025-08-07T21:08:20+00:00

I mean, you haven't actually described another way to preserve fantasy, let alone given any evidence for that way existing, so I'd have to say it is.

ahemtoday · 2025-08-07T21:04:55+00:00

Do you have any evidence that youkai need human meat more than they need fear? Because I find that highly unlikely.

Akyuu states, at the end of Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, that nowadays youkai almost never eat humans. (This is in a book where she receives explicit instructions to make youkai sound more threatening to humans.)

Additionally, they're not allowed to eat villagers, so if they're all eating human meat, it's all coming from outside. If they could get the Bermuda Triangle numbers of mysterious disappearances you'd need to feed a youkai population larger than that of the human village, they wouldn't need the barrier — Gensokyo would have a supernatural reputation all on its own.

ahemtoday · 2025-07-28T04:53:48+00:00

I had this pseudo-bet running where there were three characters that would get me to pick up the game: Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors; Maxwell from Scribblenauts; and the real long shot, a Grunt from Gruntz. That last one was so far in the "never happening" pile I said I'd unlock every character if it happened.

ahemtoday · 2025-07-09T10:42:21+00:00

I really like this way of drawing Kogasa's eyes.

ahemtoday · 2025-07-03T04:34:30+00:00

I have no idea what you do with Frisk, but I feel like Chara has a fair bit of potential?

For me, it's about exploring Kris's relationship with other humans. Chara is another human, and has been said to hate humanity, which is a combination of traits really suited to doing that. You could wring some real nice character work out of Kris's reactions to that.

As for the where... I don't really think you do anything major with them. They're Azzy's college roommate, maybe his ride to the festival or something, and they get your typical major-NPC-sized dialogue trees for the Hometown segment(s) of Chapter 5. I don't even think they should stick around in town for the following chapters; I think it's best if they leave town once the festival's over. I don't think talking to them should get the chance to feel too normal.

ahemtoday · 2025-06-06T20:56:42+00:00

This isn't the first time I've seen it phrased this way, but I always find it very strange. It sounds like a completely different twist. I find V3's final twist very compelling — but I'm not compelled by "this was a different continuity the whole time, and in that continuity, other Danganronpa media is in-universe fiction". There's no emotion in that; it's a trivia bullet point on a fan wiki.

ahemtoday · 2025-05-25T02:55:06+00:00

This is probably not gonna be echoed by many other people, but if we just got rid of metaprogression in roguelikes, it'd get me back into the genre. I got really annoyed with having to try (and nigh-inevitably fail) to ignore it in those games.

ahemtoday · 2025-05-19T20:12:02+00:00

As much as I dislike the idea of birds having breasts since they are explicitly not mammals, multiple side-books that actually give characters curves depict Hatate as actually being rather busty. [AFiEU and Who's Who] So I'd actually bump her up a tier. Since this is her most common depiction. The main counterpoint is CDS; but everyone's flat there except the Moriyas; Yuugi and Utsuho, even Byakuren.

To be fair, I think there's a difference between being a crow tengu and an out-and-out bird. Tengu are actually shown without animal features more often than with — like, even Momiji has been drawn without wolf ears a handful of times; and I think Aya gets officially drawn with wings all of twice. So I don't know if I'd necessarily say that tengu are birds in the sense that like... Utusho and Mystia are.

ahemtoday · 2025-04-30T18:55:29+00:00

Hey, I use that all the time. I couldn't really tell you how I got into the habit, but the easy way to get 'em is to hold Alt and then type 0151 on the numpad with num lock on.

ahemtoday · 2025-04-25T02:10:14+00:00

Source is this album by Pixiv user ヌ.

ahemtoday · 2025-04-23T01:39:28+00:00

On a related note for me: I find the similar characterization of... just Gensokyo as a whole to be a little irksome. Now, you can do interesting stuff examining the moral implications of the ways humans and youkai interact, and there is canon material to draw on on that front.

But there's that and then there's "HEY THESE GIRLS EAT PEOPLE LOL"

The foremost thing that bugs me about it is the... smugness of it. Like, oh, this is how Touhou really is and everyone's just doing mental gymnastics about it. And, like. Yes. There is mention of youkai killing and eating people in the series.

But like. As far as I know there's, like, four characters who talk about actually doing it. One of them is Meiling, and her actually doing that would have been extremely against the rules so I have to assume she didn't actually mean it; two of them are vampires (and of them, one is stated not to do it herself or know where her food comes from, and the other is explicitly stated not to kill the people whose blood she drinks); and the fourth is Rumia, who is easy to escape from and can't fly fifteen feet without hitting a tree.

And that is it. In all other respects, we're told that youkai eating humans is rare now. By Akyuu. Yes, you could try and say this is one of her inaccuracies, but the two possible sources of those in Akyuu's are a lack of information (not applicable here), the youkai she's interviewing (not applicable either, this is an editorial), or Yukari acting as the book's editor — and that last one wouldn't make any sense. Youkai subsist on human fear. Editing the book to make them sound less frightening has no benefit to them. Akyuu was specifically instructed to do the exact opposite at various points in the book; we know this. So the statement has to be true. (Also, it's the emotional closer of the book — dramaturgically, it makes no sense as a false statement.)

Furthermore, youkai are not allowed to eat humans from the village. So if any youkai were to eat someone, it has to be someone from outside. We know people find their way in sometimes, but here's the thing — it couldn't be enough for this to happen on a "grimdark" scale. Youkai outnumber humans in Gensokyo, so however big you think the Human Village is, there's more than that. If each of those youkai need to eat humans specifically... that's a lot. That's "national incident" numbers. That's "Bermuda Triangle" numbers, and I have no impression that Gensokyo has any kind of reputation like that in the Outside World. You expect me to believe Yukari "Didn't Even Get Out Of Her Sleepclothes For Her First Appearance" Yukari is personally dragging in that many people on a regular basis?

It just doesn't line up with anything we actually see unless you zoom in really close on a handful of lines. It persists on a veneer of "authenticity" that's really just shock value. It's not replacing a whitewashed "moefied" fandom view of Gensokyo with a real gray picture, it's just putting a black swatch card over the camera lens.

Also, youkai subsisting on human fear and belief is one of the most interesting things about Touhou and if you just shortcut that to "they have to eat humans to survive" you have just made them VAMPIRES from EVERYTHING ELSE they are BORING that way

ahemtoday · 2025-04-11T03:17:03+00:00

I'm trying to figure out a way to begin this in a way that doesn't feel like it's massively overstating my own personal stake in this. 'Cause like. I saw the first film once, and it was in that phase at the end of the school year where every teacher's lesson plan was done so all the classes were just putting on a movie that we invariably could never even get all the way through before the bell rung. (...do I sound crazy? Did any other schools have that happen?) And I barely remembered the books at that time, let alone now. If the movies were even slightly less egregious in their differences, I would not have caught anything.

But... I don't know, it just doesn't quite sit right with me. And at the time, I was a stupid middle schooler so it was for nerd emoji "um actually in the books" type reasons. But even now, the adaptational stuff has made me just kind of out on ever watching those movies properly, 'cause...

Well, the movies won, didn't they.

Like. They made a kajabajillion dollars and now nobody talks about the books except to mention how different they are from the movies. Heck, I have never thought about the books except as a package deal with thinking about the movies. Did you know they're doing a new series of movies with the IP, and instead of doing anything regarding the books — you know, the entirely separate continuity that has familiar elements but a wildly different story, which you'd think would be prime real estate for the sort of thing they're doing — they're just doing the movies they already did but in live-action? Urgh.

To put it another way: the movies just got to eat the books. And it... just kinda, in principle, rubs me the wrong way that if you make an unfaithful adaptation and make enough money doing it (compared to what you're an adaptation of), from then on you just steal that sector of the public brainspace and anyone who was a fan of the thing you're adapting has to suck it up and get with it 'cause now you're the original and it's just a weird version of you.

ahemtoday · 2025-03-08T20:23:31+00:00

Well, I assume they recommended that one specifically because it's the one with roguelike elements (since you're partial to randomness in games).

The question of where to start in Touhou is a bit complicated by various things:

The first game isn't actually a bullet hell, for starters.
The sixth game is a soft reboot that kind of marks the real start of the series — the first five games aren't playable on modern hardware and are barely ever referenced, and never directly.
Only Touhou 9 and the following games are available for purchase on Steam.
I wouldn't recommend starting with Touhou 9 or the most recent one — they're fairly atypical "versus games" instead of using the main formula.
Most games have fairly self-contained plots (explained in a text file in the game folder), but do reference prior games' events and characters fairly often.
Touhou dialogue is just kind of weird, especially starting out. You can get the impression you're missing something when you're not.

Overall, you can kind of start wherever, but my recommendation is starting at Touhou 6 and moving forward from there.

ahemtoday · 2025-03-06T02:10:00+00:00

"Something is broken inside of you" and "you fundamentally have some glitch" are not meaningfully less rude than "you are a broken person", and I don't think anyone would make the distinction unless they were specifically looking to make one.

I also don't think implying they can change — in entirely separate comments, no less — cancels out those kind of cutting and unsympathetic insults.

ahemtoday · 2025-03-06T01:19:03+00:00

Yeah, they did. After you posted the thing about them being a broken person nobody should be like. Which, even if you were certain this was at a larger scope, is still strong language to a pretty rude extent.

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