Your Entry into Touhou (Read 1,492 times)

[lazulum]

I appreciate your kind words. I'll have a little time to catch up on sleep on Sunday I think. The church I go to is still closed due to Corona, so I don't have to wake up haha

I'm surprised that a channel could last for seven years just doing yo mama videos
Guess they ran out of material and went with "yo daddy" haha

Which Touhou wiki out of curiosity? There's some old lore behind a schism that led to there being two wikis back in the day. One of them had a fun podcast led by a guy named VS2035, although that podcast has long since ceased, and that wiki is probably dead too.

Yeah before I checked this place out however many days ago that was most forums I used to post on back in the day are not just dead but wiped off of the internet now. This one is hosted through proboards so unless Proboards tanks the forum will remain, one of the latent benefits of not have a domain I guess haha

[spongelevator]

lol the yo mama channel began doing pretty much anything it could to stay alive
with yo mama fortnite and yo mama thanos and all that type stuff
I mean it kinda managed to live purely off the fact that people despise it actually

the newer touhou wiki's the one I saw that stuff on
I actually saw people using the touhou wikia vs wiki thing as an example of what not to do lol
like on two or three completely different websites not related to touhou I saw people talking about how bad it was
I read through a lot of the wikia profile comments and it seems people were very displeased with everything
I saw the one podcast he uploaded in 2019 but I didn't get around to seeing the older ones, though it would be nice to see what it was like back then
also I expected the wikia to be pretty dead but it seems that wikia has assigned some people to work on it so that it doesn't become outdated so uuh not very pleasant

yeah there was another forum I saw on the wiki called scarlet devil mansion forums and it's still alive because it's hosted through tapatalk
the admins and mods haven't been online since 2014 and the last post was in like 2017 or something
I didn't take much a look at it yet though but it's probably like here anyway

[Aeon]

the fact that there's two touhou active touhou wikis in english alone is kinda crazy, especially with how good en.touhouwiki.net/ is. i don't really go on the wikia one but i think it has a *tiny* bit of info that the other one lacks

things getting wiped from the internet sucks, but at least there's always the wayback machine. it may be read-only, but i've yet to find a dead site that isn't recorded on there

for active forums, i think there's maidens of the kaleidoscope that recently got rebooted at www.shrinemaiden.com/index.php, i made an account a while ago but haven't posted anything. it looks like they have some pretty cool stuff going on, but also one of the most active threads is about fate/grand order so uh
make of that what you will

[lazulum]

spongelevator
That's a funny story for a channel, living off of people despising it haha
Reminds me a bit of that DSP fellow.

Had no idea the tales of that schism were proliferated so widely. Yeah it was a disaster, and quite messy, definitely an example of what not to do.
I'm surprised that the wikia is still alive actually.
Yeah VS came back in 2019 for a single podcast after years of inactivity, and promptly returned to inactivity. Was a fun listen but mostly for those who listened to the original podcast.

I'm aware of those guys over at the SDM forums too, was originally on Lefora then that got bought out. They survive now as a Discord channel, but I rarely use Discord (not too keen on it) so I couldn't tell you much about how it is over there. Could point you in the direction if you'd like though.

There was a SDM.com (I think it was) too, which was its own domain, so those got nuked too naturally. Another strange domain that was around for a while was one called "Remlet" which was something of a standalone wiki page for Remilia Scarlett, that seemed to hint at some lore behind it. Never knew what that was about haha

Aeon
Yeah I remained with wikia for a bit during that divide, but en.touhouwiki.net was always the better one in terms of functionality, content, etc.

Yeah that wayback machine is an important archive for the internet, difficult to conceive of just how much is preserved by it. I'll have to figure out how to use that thing better, having some difficulty with it, may just be my internet or browser (Brave).

I remember those forums, they were always the most active, organized some good translation efforts back in the day however. Never posted too much there myself though, if they rebooted my account probably got wiped though.

That reminds me, before a lot of forums died the miscellaneous discussions were the last areas of activity. Either discussion of the main topic was stimulated, or activity dwindled in the miscellaneous areas too, resulting in the death of the forum.

[Aeon]

forums dying is kinda lame, and it seems some topics get it worse than others. i think it's about how easy it is to get into with younger audiences, mostly. 12 and under have much less reservations about hopping in a conversation about something they like (in my experience), but later than that, a lot of people start to get more reserved. the only other forums i frequent now is the cave story forums (99% lurking) but it's been active since like 2002 or something because cave story is an easy to play, standalone, free game with remakes on any platform you can ask for, so it's easy for kids to pick it up and join the forums. new users mean that there's more new conversations, more reason for new and old users alike to talk. touhou is a big convoluted series that sometimes starts at six, sometimes starts at one, the ones on steam start at ten, and it requires no small amount of piracy to get into it if you're not in japan. plus, i'd say it's not nearly as easy to understand fully as a normal game where you can just do good in your platforming, fighting, and exploring to get all the info. it's no fate/ level of annoying to play, but it's not something you'll run into while browsing nintendo's stores for the biggest hits

that's just a theory though, main reason is probably stuff like discord getting popular

also i've gotta respect you for using brave, i've been stuck on chrome because all my stuff is there but slowly trying to move to firefox

[lazulum]

Yeah the demise of forums is a marker for a new paradigm of the internet in a sense. Part of that also includes the move away from anonymity too, increasingly the preference is moving towards attaching identities to profiles it seems. That last bit is a little theory of my own -- just a contributing factor to the decline of forums.

I don't know how much that is the case in the States, but in Japan anonymity seems scarcely cherished these days. I could never really come to terms with attaching my face to one of my pseudonyms online, not that I'm reclusive or anything, I've appeared in local newspapers, met ambassadors (briefly and in small capacity, don't want to make myself sound important), and have even sung for my mayor in a choir once. I just keep personal life and online stuff separated with a fine line, relaxing to speak without that connection. Perhaps it is that a good many want fame through their online presence?

Yeah Touhou is a bit unusual for something to get into. I remember running into a bit of difficulty myself some ten years ago when I first got interested in Touhou. I think there's some reflection of reality with that theory of yours.

Yeah the rise of apps such as Discord have become quite popular these days. I could never really get into it, not my sort of thing. I still have one though (with the same name as this profile), although I rarely use it.

I appreciate that, I try to avoid Google products if I can. I use Qwant and Duckduckgo for searches too. It's a long story and maybe I'll go into that sometime, but for now I'll leave it at: there are a lot of outside influences that want to change Japan from the outside, Disney is another one, I'm very averse to that sort of thing.

[spongelevator]

yeah I remember hearing that pretty much anyone who translated stuff went to the touhou wiki after the split and when I saw people being assigned by wikia to the touhou wikia because the last people assigned there were inactive it pretty much shows which is the better one today

I heard the old shrinemaiden was closing and then like a week later they ended up making the third one already lol
I made an account as well but eh I like this place better because it's like the third most active english touhou forum technically

lol I remember the dsp how not to play MGS series on youtube
and man he's like living proof that even negative publicity is good publicity

public discords aren't a thing I really like
because I can see myself accidentally sending something in there when I just want to read it and that is not fun
it makes it so that instead of just being able to browse a site without an account I've gotta make an account or log in and then join a public server just to see anything at all

also I don't remember if it was shrinemaiden that I'm thinking of but I think you can either just log in with the same stuff as the old account on the new one
or something about being able to request your old username or something

I think another reason forums may be dying in general is because on discord it's a lot easier to just talk about whatever
but in forums you usually have to stay on-topic
I think that's why misc sections usually are the last to stay alive
well that and because nowadays when everyone's checking them iphones all the time they're gonna want to be able to see everything at the same time and forums are individual and require logins
I just leave the tab open though lol so I don't have a problem with it on laptop
as you said touhou is difficult to get into because $15 each game which is not easy to afford and also there's a ton of characters and stories and stuff I don't recognize at all
like in the popularity poll MMD videos there's always some weird eyeball wheel thing and like four of the sailor girl from UFO and five red characters in a row and stuff

I do see people wanting fame or fortune through online personalities though it seems to be harmful for them as well because they've got one chance and if they mess up it's all over
I remember hearing some stuff about people always trying to stay anonymous because some kid on 2chan was being pretty terrible and then they doxxed him and his actions came back to him tenfold and pretty much the entire situation was very bad
I never had any of those social medias because I heard that employers will look people up to see what they do on their accounts and I'd rather avoid that trouble entirely
that's probably the one best thing about not having phone because it seems social media always has a lot of turmoil and drama around every corner

I do not know if this is my longest post so far but I pretty much did not exist for 18 hours today

[Aeon]

i think it varies between people if anonymity is a big deal. i don't have any reason to talk about info like that, but i won't be particularly bothered if my online pals use my first name instead of aeon (although aeon is cooler). i do like how a search of my full name returns zero relevant results, though.

i use discord pretty often for things like talking to pals and hanging out in gamedev servers (the one that hosts the touhou jams is pretty cool), and it's pretty decent for organizing projects. highlight has gotta be when you set up a webhook and can get updates whenever somebody pushes to a git repo. not sure if you're into programming or not, that's really convenient
still, it's got its problems as both a platform and concept, and it has done a lot to kill forums. i wish it was easy to have activity on both, but i haven't seen that done successfully yet

i am not a fan of google and disney-like guys, don't know about what they do in japan, but i just think they own too much stuff. monopoly sort of thing when there are cooler alternatives, but people go with them because they are popular

edit: bruh sniped again so i will respond to new post below

public discords? i will lurk, might talk sometimes if its something relevant like aforementioned touhou fangame server, but most of mine are smaller groups. you're right discord is good because topics don't need to be strict, and even if there's not really a topic in a thread, it seems kinda dumb to post walking putin seven times consecutively on a forum where the casualness of discord makes it work
social media can be a massive pain especially if employers get a hold of it (or so i hear), and the benefits? friends, maybe. most people can't get monetized or anything so it is a bit of a risk just for fun. i've got a couple social media but i'm not active on like any of them except posting art or a joke i thought was very funny once every month or so

[spongelevator]

I think being anonymous or not wouldn't make much of a difference if all people were decent when using the internet but I always feel slightly concerned about such things because I've seen bad stuff happen
though it seems people act far worse when anonymous so it's a difficult thing which is why eh I just don't use pretty much anything
the other however many people on the facebook with the same name will cover for me lol

discord seems good for that type of thing though yeah I dunno much about it
my dad keeps trying to make me do the python but I still do not know how to type
I got like 75 wpm with two fingers from those unblocked typing games in middle school though lol except I also make a spelling error every sentence
I think the only non-direct message discord I ever used had like 6 people in there except half of them went online once a week or less so it was pretty much just a public private chat
I'd be pretty alright with it taking over most forums if it still had a lot of the pros of forums but I can't see the people doing the weird stuff or talking about some obscure inside jokes without joining a server first and that is very sad

also about that google stuff I have heard people say it's basically malware and it's especially bad when I click on a youtube video of how to cook the eggs with the onions and then google says "hey uuh you wanna know about some of those eggs and onions?"
it would be good to use not google especially because chrome uses 7gb of ram sometimes and the laptop just freezes though the only alternatives I know are that one web explorer or whatever the windows one is called, firefox, and netscape navigator


ha I shall edit as well then
public things like that always seemed pretty frightening because there's like 100 people who I don't know anything about and then I have no idea if I'll do something wrong without realizing
forums are cool because if I don't intend on posting I can be guest instead of member and I can still see the weird stuff from like 5 years ago instead of it being lost to time
that is, if the forum doesn't get nuked before that lol
also yeah discord allows some unique crusty moments like that one gif of the entire bee movie or being able to summon random images by telling a bot to search a phrase lol

some of the people I know use social media with friends and it seems pretty good though it's only like half of them so it ends up being kinda strange 
it's pretty funny seeing what beastly usernames they have brought upon this world though
I only see that stuff when they use the phone in real life though otherwise they just talk about how a group of kids did the instagram where someone licked mustard off someone else's foot

[Aeon]

trying to do programming without a specific goal is utterly useless in my experience so only pick it up if you've got something you want to do. i have little experience with python but it is pretty versatile. i mostly use fake language gml and half-real language lua because that's what works with what i'm trying to make

google is very funny and does a lot of not-so-great data collection, i've just been splitting things up between a bunch of accounts and slapping on a vpn sometimes, hopefully that's enough. also have to disable a ton of things on my phone because android is owned by google and carrying a tracker around doesn't sound like fun. i especially don't touch stuff like voice recognition or face id at all though, that's my least favorite kind of thing
unfortunately i can't take that logic too far or i would end up not using anything that could connect to the internet lol
anonymity is great if nobody is being lame though, yeah. unfortunately people are lame and now stuff like twitter requires mobile verification to even make an account, apple id requires place of residence, it sucks. one guy cheats on a test and the whole class is punished

chrome hurts computers, yeah. no idea why it runs so poorly compared to even opera, which was built off of chrome. actually, a lot of popular sites as a whole just run like garbage. could it be because of circular, minimalist, antiskeuomorphic design that makes literally everything look like garbage and both runs and displays poorly on computers because they were made for mobile? yes, but if i talked in full about how much i hate 2020 graphic design proboards would run out of storage space

[spongelevator]

haha in 9th grade my friends and I made a full story and enemies for a game which would be pretty much entirely an inside joke
but then none of us knew how to program in any way so then it pretty much all went into the archives
that would be pretty much the only reason I'd have though so if one day I suddenly want to see such a creation then I'll know what to do

my internet blocks many websites that might have something that is pirated or labeled not secure and also google happily presents me with my location any time I go onto a website that shows that at the bottom
I could do with a vpn but apparently the free ones are worthless so I'll have to wait with that
I have made I think 13 or so emails over the past eight years so lol at least google does not know how many hairs are on my head or what I'm thinking at the moment
I just put duct tape over the webcam and the rest of my technology is too outdated to have that kinda stuff otherwise so in the end it's pretty good lol
maybe netscape navigator is truly the most superior web browser
also lol just wait for like a 50tb hard drive to come out and download like 20 websites and then throw the internet box in the garbage
google hates him... learn how this man lives without the internet in 2050!

oh yeah I remember imgur required a phone number to use even though it's literally just imgur
not good and the most dedicated trolls probably have 40 phones anyway lol
at least there is still small places like this without a whole lot of funky stuff

haha remember when firefox logo had an actual fox and now it's an almost fox-looking orange guy
also youtube changing its format every month because if it aint broke then break it
websites from like 20 years ago like the space jam one were really nasty but the ones today are so much worse than before that we're going back to the 90's anyway
I can't even tell which ones are the ones messing stuff up either because I open task manager and I just see one section taking 80% memory while the others are just normal
and then fifteen minutes later chrome stops responding and RIP laptop
if the cycle continues then at least 2035'll have some bomb ass websites

[lazulum]

spongelevator
Yeah there's no question which is the better one today. Little wikia held out while it could, but it was always doomed. I remember adding edits for Wild and Horned Hermit as the new volumes came out back in the day; never made any contributions to the wiki though, not that I ever had anything against it (although VS probably did haha). Different times, brings back memories.

Yeah, that's one of the few things that hasn't changed about me since all that time ago. I always preferred smaller forums. It was the same with streamers back before Twitch got bought out and became a terrible place. Would stick around smaller places until they either died or got popular.

Yeah, that's very true haha
Despite everything, DSP still manages to be around. The amount of things that guy has managed to survive is astounding. I don't dislike him being around though, his presence always finds a way to bring me some laughter at the most unexpected of places and times.

Yeah, not so keen on Discords either, no worries.

I actually don't even remember what my old username for Shrinemaiden was. Don't use Lazulum for everywhere, although it's probably my favorite-- beautiful medieval Latin.

About the forums, that's an excellent point, if there were any mods or jannies around the'd probably get on our cases. I always preferred lighter moderation, but you don't always get that unfortunately. That's a different fun topic, the different kinds of forum moderators out there (although maybe not so much these days haha)

Yeah, the individual logins can be tedious too. There aren't dedicated apps for specific forums either. I don't mind it though, have more pseudonyms than I can remember haha. I used Lazulum the most, but I have at least a dozen that I've used throughout the years.

On your point about wanting fame being harmful, yeah I agree. I've seen it take its toll on guys and gals here in Japan.
Yeah there've been some crazy stories to come out of that 2chan, never been there. Young folks in Japan don't really try to stay anonymous from my experience, maybe at most they refrain from using their own photo (as was the case with my ex), but their names are usually attached still. On Line very few use anonymous accounts, Instagram is very popular in Japan too. Perhaps blogs see some anonymity, but the younger folks aren't publishing blogs so much these days.

I do have social media, but I am very careful to never state any of my political opinions on them. I limit myself to very innocuous statements and such. Although I do not post much at all. Mostly have it to keep in touch with people across the globe, and to organize academic groups, and to follow my church (they're doing live streams because of Corona), among a few other things.

It's rare to meet someone who doesn't have a phone these days. Just got mine a few months ago, just in time it seems. Went a long time without it to save money, but in hindsight it caused a lot of issues that could have been prevented.

No worries haha
Welcome back from the 18 hour hiatus

Aeon
Just taking a break from work to type a bit gotta get back though, almost 3 AM here, will get back to you before long I hope haha

[lazulum]

Aeon
Ended up tumbling onto the floor and falling asleep haha
Will reply to a bit, have to head out and finish up some materials preparations soon

i think it varies between people if anonymity is a big deal. i don't have any reason to talk about info like that, but i won't be particularly bothered if my online pals use my first name instead of aeon (although aeon is cooler). i do like how a search of my full name returns zero relevant results, though.
I think you are right that it varies per person, although I think an increasing majority tends not to think much of it. I've taught classes where the consensus among my students was banning anonymity altogether in order to stifle some social issues.

For me, I don't mind sharing stories and such about myself, just nothing that would have me identified outside of those in close circles. I have a lot of funny and interesting stories that I've accrued over the past few years, don't mind sharing them.

I pick pseudonyms if I think they're cool too haha. Although I am proud of my actual name too, history of it goes back to the mid-19th century. A part of Europe mired in hopelessly complicated political circumstances and subjugated irresistibly for well over a hundred years. Another story for another time.

Yeah that Discord seems to offer a lot of functionality, no doubts there. Never thought of it for organizing projects, seems cool. Never heard of Touhou jams but I'll bet a lot of cool projects come out of it.

I'll share what they do in Japan at another time. Disney levied its presence to make itself exempt from a constitutional restriction that most everywhere else is bound by is one of many things. Glad that we both share a wary eye on those conglomerates.

[spongelevator]

oi that don't sound too good
you alright?

well I return from my next long hiatus now sorry about that

yeah smaller things are always nice other than when they just stagnate and everyone becomes very irritated and it spirals into madness
also watching DSP always kinda felt like those cheesy horror movies
where you're thinking "no, no, don't do that! why would you ever do that?" but you can't actually do anything to stop him from dying in the tutorial

yeah though D3 hasn't been here in years it would be a pretty difficult situation if he returned because we probably need to be on topic lol
we're the only ones here but we're also talking about very unrelated things to the main topic
I don't know if threads usually end up this way but eh I would rather have this than needing to stay on one subject
in this thread each one of us could post maybe 1-2 things about how we got into touhou and then the rest would have to be something weird like trying to make an essay longer by adding in unnecessary words

I never wanted to go on any of those chan sites because anyone I met who did was always more aggressive than the rest
though I found out about the story from when some twitter artist deleted their entire account due to making some joke that others didn't like
the original story was something like a kid on 2chan was acting badly and then I think they doxxed him and he lawyered up
and then it kept escalating and they all made memes of the kid and the lawyer because he was incompetent or something and they ended up targeting him in real life
well I don't remember it well but it was a really long story and definitely not a happy one

I was told I'd have to get a phone in college so I'll probably just have the email and the messaging application or whatever
because I'd like to avoid a habit of checking the twitter or whatever every hour
I used to have an angry birds flip phone or maybe it just had stickers on it I forgot
anyway it took like 5 minutes to send a text saying "when do I come home" and so I basically didn't use it and I was able to avoid phones for pretty much up until now
definitely something I appreciate because I can sit in a room for 20 minutes without being incredibly bored and that is a skill I wouldn't have otherwise lol

banning anonymity sounds like a strange thing to me because whenever teachers had us take surveys and such it was always anonymous so that we'd be truthful
in a larger setting like websites it definitely doesn't work as well though I'd say most things are best if balanced
I'm kinda pseudo-anonymous in some classes because my name is too generic
I've been in more than one class with three or more people sharing my name so I just lay low and the teacher sometimes forgets about me so I can just do whatever I want lol

is that disney thing like when people use a loophole in the law or is it like them using their popularity and size to get away with things? either way, doesn't sound good
only movies I've seen in the past five years are fight club, emoji movie, killer bean and pitch perfect 3 so I probably avoided disney pretty well that way lol

[Aeon]

spongelevator
the inside joke game man, i've got one of those as well. i was just learning code so i made a mockup, but never further than that
free vpn isn't the most reliable, but in my experience it is pretty decent, i recommend psiphon or one of the ones you can just get in browser if you don't want to spare the resources to have another thing running

it looks like all of us are "no phone until recently" guys. well, i did have a phone for 9 years, but it was also a phone that i had for 9 years. hasn't run well or been able to do modern things like social media in a long time. i got a new one that has a physical keyboard so i can do code on the go, or so i thought until quarantine started right after i got it. oops
but i, too, appreciate the ability to just not have a phone and sit around while waiting

dude that is a crazy movie list. i wish i didn't see as many movies as i did, but family is marvel fans. only good ones i can think of recently are f/sn heavens feel II, the good 3d animation spider man one, and sonic movie was cool if you ignore the fact that its supposed to be sonic

lazulum
latin username gang. aeon is kind of an english word, but my backup usernames are some more esoteric stuff. they simply had some great words, nothing else to say
also no worries about you taking a bit to respond, you can tell i was kinda late as well. i hope i'm not taking you out of work or making you rush
banning anonymity? i can see how that could help some people have a more comfortable experience, but i can't imagine how many it would damn. plus then you don't get cool usernames and profile pictures and all your accounts are connected and then all the companies know all the data all the time and- well a lot of things, you get what i'm sayin.

but man, disney getting around something constitutional? guess they just do what they want