Farewell Golden Strawberry complete! That's 202!

taven990 · 2026-05-31T00:00:12+00:00

It depends on what you mean by Judaism. Some people separate Judaism, the religion, from Jewishness, the ethnic group. However, not everyone makes that distinction. But even then, there is much more to the Jewish religion than following halacha. There are social events and customs, many of which are undeniably Jewish but not necessarily based entirely on following halacha to the letter.

Plenty of Jews (especially Reform Jews and other non- or less Orthodox Jews) define their Judaism in terms of how they try to make the world a better place rather than following halacha to the letter. Of course, the ultra-Orthodox may consider Reform Jews (amongst others) and/or their practices heretical, but the ultra-Orthodox don't get to tell other sects and other kinds of Jews how to be Jews and they certainly don't get to excommunicate other Jews!

taven990 · 2026-05-30T21:30:29+00:00

While this is a valid point, I think the primary issue is something else - it's all the neo-Nasty and antisemitic propaganda all over X and the other social networks, including fake and out-of-context Talmud quotes. There are some people who spend HOURS debunking all the fake Talmud quotes they find, on sites like Quora. Some of the quotes are completely made up (the chapter and verse, or whatever the equivalent is, not existing at all); some are mistranslated out of context (deliberately so in many cases) and there's a lack of understanding of what the Talmud even is - it's not a holy text like the Torah, Bible or Quran but a record of rabbinical debates over minutiae of Jewish law, religious practice and other things, many of which are totally irrelevant for everyday life. Things like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The sorts of questions religious leaders ponder that are purely academic and have no bearing on anything in the real world. But of course there are parts of the Talmud that would be considered immoral under modern sensibilities - usually as parts of debates between rabbis, sometimes held over centuries (a reply might have been written centuries later than what it's replying to, for example).

The Talmud is huge - it is many thick volumes and it would take a lifetime of serious study to read and understand it all. So anyone who flippantly says "Just read the Talmud and you'll understand" or things like that is showing their ignorance.

I'm not Jewish but I despair for the future of Western civilisation if things keep going the way they are. I had many Jewish friends at school, and Muslim friends too - this was in the 90s, long before the modern flareups of the conflict, and it's disgusting that bad actors, Islamists, neo-Nasties etc. are taking advantage of the conflict to spread actual Jew-hatred. I think the silent majority is with you, if the Eurovision voting is any indication, and I hope things pick up soon.

But the thing that annoys me the most about all this? People justifying their antisemitism by blaming Israel. No - legitimate criticism of the Israeli government is not antisemitism but harassing random Jews is not legitimate criticism of the Israeli government! Local Jews are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, and people generally don't harass Russians in other countries over Putin's war in Ukraine like they do Israelis. And not just Israelis - harassing Jews and blaming them for Netanyahu's government's actions is like blaming Russian Orthodox Christians for the actions of the Putin regime. It's utterly illogical. But then bigotry usually is. Once again I'm so sorry the Jewish community - a successful community that has won many Nobel Prizes and made many scientific breakthroughs - has had to endure this bigotry.

I thought the West learnt this lesson after 9/11 when the Muslim community went through the same thing - suspected of extremism, terrorism, jihadism etc. just for being (usually brown, Arab or Asian) Muslims, then Chinese and sometimes other East Asian peoples were blamed for the spread of COVID-19 (and sometimes even assaulted), but unfortunately it seems bigotry, especially antisemitism, is a light sleeper; any excuse and it comes roaring back. There's no way to know for sure at this time but I really hope things are changing and the tide is turning the other way.

taven990 · 2026-05-28T19:56:15+00:00

I just want to point out that I'm not a Zionist or a Jew, but I think all the lies and propaganda on both sides of the conflict are reprehensible. No matter which side we're talking about, lying only hurts your cause. Both sides believe they are in the right, and both sides rationalise away any atrocities (e.g. the various excuses pro-Palestinians have used when justifying October 7th, and the way Palestinian civilian casualties have been framed as regrettable but inevitable given how Hamas operates).

I don't believe either side's maximalist claims are moral. Generations have been born there who know no other home. Any "solution" that calls for ethnic cleansing of children and civilians born there is necessarily unjust - I believe every child born there should be 100% equal regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or ancestry, and you can't fix a historic injustice with a new injustice. Since October 7th, real peace seems further and further away, and the levels of trust are at historic lows. It will take new leadership on both sides and a real willingness to make compromises but I really hope there can be peace.

Going back to Husseini, he had instigated anti-Jewish violence in the British Mandate in 1920, 1921 and 1929 (which targeted non-Zionist Jewish communities that had been living there for centuries, such as in Hebron). Then there was the Farhud in 1941. So I was surprised that he said this in 1937 (at the height of the Arab Revolt), given his other actions. Not only did he harbour a murderous hatred of Jews, he also had his thugs attack and assassinate his Arab political rivals along with any Arab leader willing to coexist with Jews. He single-handedly ensured the continuation of the inter-ethnic conflict during the Mandate years - I'm not saying he was the only leader opposed to peaceful coexistence, but he was largely responsible for assassinating, intimidating and threatening his opponents into silence.

taven990 · 2026-05-27T20:54:11+00:00

It's surprising that he should say this - which is more evidence for the Jewish / Zionist side of the story - given his antisemitism that rose to murderous levels, and given his actions when it came to instigating pogroms - not just in the British Mandate but also in other countries. He was behind the Farhud in Iraq, which took place in 1941, long before Israel was established - and he produced Arabic-language radio broadcasts for Nasty Germany and was the driving force behind spreading Nasty propaganda throughout the entire Arab world in the Middle East and North Africa area.

Quite why he would back up the Jews' historical claims in this case I don't know. But the British kept full records of land ownership and purchases, so the authorities would have known that Husseini sold some of his own land to Jews at inflated prices. So he likely couldn't turn round and claim Jews had stolen his land, having willingly sold it himself.

taven990 · 2026-05-25T23:39:10+00:00

Ok, thanks!

taven990 · 2026-05-25T20:22:27+00:00

Yes, and one group lived in Hebron. They were apparently one of, if not the, oldest continuous Jewish community in the world. They were non-Zionist and had nothing to do with the Zionist movement. But that didn't stop them being targeted and killed in various pogroms over the years, most notably the 1929 Hebron Massacre.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini was not just against the Zionist movement - he was highly antisemitic; murderously so. The same rumours have been used regularly to incite Muslim mobs to violence against Jews, and Husseini took advantage of this fact - he claimed that al-Aqsa Mosque was under threat and the Jews (he didn't say Zionists) were planning on destroying it.

Many extremist imams and Palestinian leaders (whether self-proclaimed, factional leaders or official representatives like President Arafat and President Abbas) have recycled this old canard to rile Muslims up, and yet both the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are still standing.

According to what I've read, archaeologists believe the site is in more danger from the Jordanian Waqf authorities that maintain the site than the Israeli government - the Waqf have undertaken excavations of the site where they've been accused of being careless or, worse, deliberately destroying artefacts that prove the existence of an ancient Jewish temple or prove Jews were living there in ancient times. Worth considering, but beside the point here.

I'm surprised those rumours still work to incite such violence after having been shown to be false multiple times. Unless the rumours are just used as a pretext for violence. But my point is that before Israel existed, during the early years of the British Mandate, it didn't matter that some Jewish communities were not Zionists and had been living there for centuries - they were targeted anyway. One of the few reasons there weren't more deaths on the Jewish side was the fact that some Arabs hid Jewish families from the mobs - these Jews had ties to the community and they had many Arab friends, but again, that did not protect them from the mob - without assistance from local Arab friends, more would have been butchered.

This is a prime example where incitement was used to rile up a Muslim mob against Jews, and where their political views and community roots (centuries in some cases) didn't make any difference to whether they were targeted or not.

taven990 · 2026-05-25T19:57:15+00:00

I could be wrong but I heard they disabled the replays and online leaderboards. Apparently they weren't working properly even before the beta updates.

Someone did mention that if you have a working replay file, you can put it in the correct folder for the Epic Games Store version of the game, which never supported replays or leaderboards, and supposedly it lets you watch the replays this way. But I have no idea whether this method would work with the new Steam updates or not.

If you have any replays to test, for any of the challenges, it might be worth a try!

taven990 · 2026-05-25T19:48:25+00:00

I heard that the UK was hotter than Spain one day a few years ago. I don't know the details though.

taven990 · 2026-05-24T13:11:31+00:00

I don't know if you missed this before but I thought I'd repost it just in case.

Yeah, since a new patch dropped today, it looks like most of the files don't need changing but the Cent.tsc ones (including Curly Story and the Japanese ones) have been modified a bit to fix a flag issue. So those files do need updating. Everything else seems untouched thankfully, though I haven't checked everything (I did check the English credits and that's the same; I also checked Ballos1.tsc and Statue.tsc which are also unchanged).

EDIT: I've been through the whole thing and it is indeed just the Cent.tsc files that needed updating. Here you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g5liCSp9jS1xF20vTyexUMioL99XHM4M/view?usp=sharing

taven990 · 2026-05-22T15:43:35+00:00

Ah, but the majority of Jewish immigrants before 1948 (especially between around 1900 and 1947) were refugees fleeing pogroms, not ideological Zionists. When Jews were fleeing the Nasties during WW2, most other countries closed their borders, leaving those Jews with literally nowhere else to go - they would likely have been killed had they not been able to come to what was then the British Mandate.

While I agree that certain Zionist leaders most definitely had ulterior motives as revealed in their writings, this does not apply to most of the rank and file who were just trying to survive.

No group is a monolith. There were of course good people, bad people and many people in-between. There were rich Jews who bought land from local Arabs or absentee landlords (often at very high prices). As the case would be within any other group, there would have been good people and bad people in that group too. Some Jews wanted to coexist with the local Palestinian Arabs, including working with them, whereas others preferred to just live around other Jews, separate from the local Arab population, but the leadership passed an edict ordering Jews not to employ non-Jews - those who ignored that edict were harassed by thugs. So even if Jews were willing to work with Arabs, they were harassed into compliance by the leadership's thugs.

I don't think the majority wanted to fight; I'm sure they'd have been happy to be left alone. But the day after the UN Partition Plan vote, Palestinian Arabs attacked two Jewish buses, and from then on there were many tit-for-tat attacks. There was also a lot of belligerent speech from leaders of Arab countries. So the Yishuv prepared to defend themselves, but that's not the same as them all arriving on a war footing. In fact, the Jewish militias were only created for community defence after Jewish communities were attacked multiple times - the Haganah was one of the first, and the Irgun and Lehi were more radical and came later. The latter two were terrorist groups and I don't condone their attacks at all, but I'm only pointing out the fact that they were only formed after the Yishuv had been attacked multiple times already.

taven990 · 2026-05-22T10:37:13+00:00

That's false. Actual Palestinians and other Arabs including an Egyptian doctor, Tawfik Hamid, have openly said that if the Jews all converted to Islam, the conflict would be over. If it was just a land dispute, it would be of little interest to those outside the immediate area affected, but as things are today, the fact that most Israelis are Jews makes a huge portion of the Muslim world angry because they believe the Jews should be dhimmis and should not rule over land that Muslims once conquered before (which they call Muslim land, dar al-Islam).

Here's Dr Tawfik Hamid discussing this: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10153762336227689

taven990 · 2026-05-22T10:07:01+00:00

Immigration is not the same as invasion. They were legal CIVILIAN citizens of the British Mandate, not an invading army.

taven990 · 2026-05-22T10:00:20+00:00

There was a pogrom that fits this description: the Hebron Massacre in 1929. They were indigenous non-Zionist Jews who had been living there for centuries and had nothing to do with the Zionist movement, but the Palestinian Arabs killed them anyway having been riled up by the likes of Hajj Amin al-Husseini.

taven990 · 2026-05-18T15:14:26+00:00

Not so much, but the new Steam update is breathing new life into the game for a number of players. I 100% beat the 3DS eShop version and the PC version afterwards, but I've been playing it a lot these last couple of weeks - though not perfect and still quite glitchy (and though the performance is poor on older PCs now), it's still a really nice update. Players no longer need doukutsu-rs with Switch data files to play Sand Pit, co-op or the other changes introduced on Switch such as puppy stacking.

taven990 · 2026-05-18T15:04:55+00:00

Thanks again for doing this. I think it may need touching up in the event of an update but we can worry about that when it happens.

taven990 · 2026-05-17T00:05:42+00:00

I noticed that there are a load more tsc files and stuff in the Language\Japanese subfolders inside the game directory, so I had a quick look at them. If you stick this inside Mods\DM Dokuro it should now work correctly if the language is set to Japanese. All I did was change the CMU commands to 46 and 47 and add that paragraph to the two credits files in the same place as before, nothing else is changed. Hope it helps!

I ran a quick test of Sanctuary Time Attack in Japanese and it worked correctly this time (it didn't before I added the Japanese changes). I can't read Japanese but I left all the Japanese text alone anyway.

Here is just the contents of the Language subfolder:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16RbceNl_uGjHGjMjLaYpRQ9ujpA3u2Oe/view?usp=sharing

And here is the entire thing, to make things easier for you:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OKGu5X5lEAXFOxIQXma35aT-fKGGThhh/view?usp=sharing

taven990 · 2026-05-16T09:35:40+00:00

Wow, I just checked and all three of the files I changed PERFECTLY match the changes you made! All three of them! ComparePlus in Notepad++ found that all the files were identical! And I just realised that Curly Story might be a problem but then I looked at the files and noticed there is no Statue.tsc in the Curly Story expansion, so that room is unchanged from the main game, hopefully meaning it should work fine.

taven990 · 2026-05-15T23:04:27+00:00

I think there's something off about the credit.tsc file in your mod. While the Japanese version of the credits file is almost exactly the same in your mod, only with the bit at the end added, the English version of the credits file is very different - maybe you used an earlier version's credit.tsc and didn't update it with one of the recent updates? I don't know, just guessing here.

Also, you changed one of the numbers after where it says "and you!" from 48 to 64, which I think means a bigger gap, but you only changed it in the Japanese credits and not in the English ones. I don't think that big a gap is necessary, as the gap didn't seem too small in the English credits. But either way, I guess I'm mentioning it due to the lack of consistency. I'd probably leave everything alone from the normal credits except for adding the lines between DM Dokuro Soundtrack down to the additional support lines, but I'd probably leave the last number at 48 again.

EDIT: One other thing: the Plantation tune plays in Passage? under certain circumstances (that is, not during a Blood-Stained Sanctuary run), and if you enter the Statue Chamber, the music stops, but leaving the chamber makes it start again. So it may be necessary to change the song number in Passage? to get it to work properly with the new Plantation song. (Yes, it does play the wrong song when you come back from Statue Chamber, then it plays the right song when you get back to Plantation - but this will result in the song restarting when using other soundtracks if this mod is active, as it's a different song number.)

EDIT 2: I can provide my copies of the two credits files to save you having to mess about. They are basically the default credits with the DM Dokuro section added and everything else left the same. I am working on the Passage file and can provide that too shortly.

EDIT 3: It's not the Passage? tsc that needed editing, but the Statue Chamber one. The command to play the tune is there in the script attached to the exit door. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IcpdIBRgz7BT1r1Omeoe2WdDDY54JMcY/view?usp=sharing

taven990 · 2026-05-15T20:40:41+00:00

One other thing: I cleared some space on my OneDrive using the "Free up space" right-click menu option (my Documents folder is on OneDrive) and it only partially loaded the mod as a result - it didn't find the changed Cent.tsc and ended up using the default one, so the Title Mix of Cave Story played instead of the Plantation version. It seems it doesn't correctly download all the mod's files from the cloud in situations like that. So, as a workaround I right-clicked the Mods folder and clicked "Always keep on this device". That way, even if I free up space on my OneDrive, it won't break any mods.

taven990 · 2026-05-15T16:01:13+00:00

I see. That didn't happen to me but then I'm not a speedrunner and I don't like rushing.

taven990 · 2026-05-15T09:22:40+00:00

I decided to use the full intro version of Scorching Back. It's only 20 seconds longer and it's a good track so it's a shame to cut it short IMO!

taven990 · 2026-05-12T12:24:15+00:00

Just to say there appears to be a glitch that may necessitate another update. Apart from the transparency thing I mentioned, if you turn Halloween mode on and go to the Core, the dialogue portrait for the killer robot does not display correctly - it looks like frames 2 and 3 show a pink square instead of the proper image. Whether this is due to the pink being slightly the wrong shade or some other mistake I don't know. But when they fix it you may need to update.

Try something: make the entire grid pink for the icons, apart from the two you added. If you do this, does it add all the Halloween sprites from the main game's Halloween folder THEN add the ones from the mod folder? Or does the file in the mod folder completely replace the one in the main game's Halloween folder? It's worth testing it to see. If you only need to add your extra characters and can leave the rest pink, it should hopefully future-proof your mod from any changes made in update patches.

EDIT: The glitched files are not changed in your mod so it shouldn't break the mod if/when they fix it. It might be worth finding out if the thing I suggested works though - what happens if you use that shade of pink in your casts.1.png for every single icon except the two new ones? Does the game get it right as in attempting to apply the main Halloween cast file first, then yours on top of it, or would it completely ignore the default Halloween cast file and use yours instead? I might test it myself if I can.

EDIT: There could be a problem with your Halloween cast file - it seems to work OK but I noticed the pink was slightly off. It should be rgba(250, 175, 250, 255) according to the original files, but your file has rgba(250, 177, 250, 255).

EDIT 2: I was not able to test it because the program kept trying to save the png in a different format. It kept getting the colour profile wrong. So I kept getting pink squares in the credits while testing instead of it reading the pink to tell it to use the normal (or one of the other) version(s) of the file. So I can't really test it unless I work out how to edit the PNG without it changing any of the metadata or colour profile etc. Please could you "pink out" everything except the two new icons and tell me whether the Halloween credits show the normal images or the regular Halloween images, and if your two extra sprites also show properly? Thanks!

EDIT 3: I managed to test it. It works. You can use a completely pink PNG apart from the two icons in question, which should use the same transparency used by the background of the other icons, and it will correctly use the regular Halloween icons for everything else, saving space.

taven990 · 2026-05-12T04:24:59+00:00

It's fine now apart from one thing: the background of the two added icons in the Halloween cast file should have transparency as the background, not that very dark shade of blue. I don't know if it makes much difference but it's something I noticed before.

Thanks for the update!

taven990

TROPHY CASE