CountVonNumenor

It's been a long time since I have last been truly active on this forum, but I am greatly impressed to see again big threads, with a lot of interesting stuff to read and research put into it. This thread actually reminds me of something I wrote at the end of 2022, when I was a about halfway into my journey for getting into Touhou (link below, along with some bonuses). I would like to reply to multiple of the points made, but that would take me about an hour, so I will try get back to this later (it's already late in the night for me). However, you have earned my respect. The thread I originally mentioned: Bonus threads of potential interest (chronologically, by release date): (a personal topic of interest back then) (from the era of "Count reviews stuff") (another topic of personal interest back then; oh, how the fate has turned since...) (and a thread that is still going, albeit by me reviving it every once in a while; provides good example of evolving perception on a topic by regularly covering it and noticing patterns of approach and way to present the issue) Alright, I will try to come back eventually with the promised reply. Until then, enjoy the lecture =) Edit: I forgot to add one thread that did waves back in the day, both here on the Moriya Shrine forum and on r/touhou, due to how dense I used to be in trying to understand why something was as appealing and prevalent as it is (and I still do not fully know too, especially as I dropped the consumption of such stuff for good, and for my own good)

I was not expecting to see this thread resurge, but uts nice to see some of my older posts alive again

Touhou LostWord is dead [Well, the game is still going, but I stopped played about a couple weeks ago] I have stopped playing the game about a couple weeks ago. The process of parting ways started three weeks ago, with the receival of a new phone, on which I have decided not to install LostWord. I did continue not playing a little bit on emulator, but then I stopped for good. And one of the reasons for doing so, outside sheer boredom and repetitive nature of the game, was due to the fact I have been playing it in parallel with another game - Azur Lane. In the following bit, I will answer a number of questions/criteria based on my experience playing that game until now: 1) "15 minutes maximum on dailies. If you take more than this, I will drop you so fast" Daily missions are very fast. Once you 3-star clean a stage, you can auto-play skip it next time, getting the rewards directly. 2) "at least decent writing. Bad writing puts me off a lot" I am not very familiar with the game writing, as I have skipped every cutscene until now. Therefore, I have no idea how good it is. However, I know a few things: the main campaign is just a retelling of the Pacific War from American perspective, except with ship-girs instead of the actual warships Operation Siren is the second campaign, which I guess is supposed to be the war against the alien invasion events - I have skipped the lore for pretty much all of them, but apparently some tend to be more serious, while others are silly miscellaneous (Secretary quests, campaign missions, etc) - still, I do not know how well they are written, although some of the Quests end up with the involved character getting some personality development character personalities - kind of bland, usually characters represent a type of personality, to which the writers are trying to add some references to the history of that warship to make it more appealing to the history nerds playing (such as myself...) 3) "challenge content must be optional or not intensely grindy. I’m no pro" There is not too much challenge content in the game, as far as I am aware. Meta Showdown exists, but it is completely optional, and it still offers you the same amount of points whether you won or lost. Events may have special stages once you finish the main story, but those are optional as well (the only thing you may play them for is to get some shiny decoration) 4) "gacha system with good rates. I shouldn’t feel like a max rare character is unobtainable without whaling" I would call the gacha here generous enough. To be fair, given the huge number of characters and the fact I am unfamiliar with most of them or how good they are on some supposed Tier List, I am just happy to get whatever. Especially during event banners, it is actually very easy to get different kinds of interesting units (after all, in full honesty, I am playing Azur Lane more as a waifu collection game rather than something very serious; whatever comes, very well). Plus, it is interesting that you can get units from outside the gacha as well - such as from cleaning levels/"dungeons". They may not be good units, but even weak units have their use as enhancement fodder or method to get exchange currency. 5) "no overtly sexualized designs that I constantly have to see. A couple is okay, but I don’t wanna shoulder check every time I open it" Yeah, this is where Azur Lane utterly fails. Personally, I am ok with a number of designs in this game, but I can perfectly see why some people are completely put off. I do have my own limit, don't get me wrong. And definitely prefer when characters are not having exaggerated proportions, barely wear any clothes, or are nothing but fapping-bait. Probably one of the weaker aspects of the game if that's not your cup of tea. Combined with shallow personalities/personalities made to be more fanservice rather than acting like a realistic person... yeah Quick-fire round of notes: I see that the animal theme seems to be mostly, if not exclusively applied on the design of Japanese warships as for other "assets", that is rather universal; increased assets usually go to the bigger displacement warships (the bigger/heavier the warship class, the larger the proportions), despite there being some exceptions both ways big booba/hips/thighs usually go to sometimes heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers (of course, with exceptions - looking at you, Nagato...) smaller/loli proportions are usually allocated to small warships - submarines, torpedo boats, destroyers and light cruisers (of course, with exceptions here as well - looking at you, whole Dido-class light cruisers and others...) some ships do stay in medium proportions/lack of exaggerations, but those tend to be more rare I still like Ise though. Ise is fine as she is, at medium premium (image from the anime adaptations) 6) "good gameplay. I like team building and strategy mainly" I am not very familiar with what means "good gameplay" in such games, but from experience until now, I really did not have any issue right now with team building. I can still win any stage until now with whatever combination of units, and I like that the game actually encourages you to build a full 6 characters party (compared to LW, where you an still nuke with just 1 unit in the pasty). As for harder content, the game usually gives you a "Recommended" function, in which it auto-assigns the strongest units you have. Which is pretty useful, to be honest.

Oh no, looks like I promised something again, yet did not come to actually fulfill that promise...

EPILOGUE: It's been almost a year since the opening post. It looks like Blue Archive has scored again the highest at the Comiket in terms of content creator panels, at over 1700 (compared to the 766 Touhou had). I guess more power to them, especially if they are apparently as liberal with fan-made content as I may have heard. It does not make me want to try out that series, but it's interesting how things evolve. On a different note, it's impressive how Touhou can still have hundreds of panels even now, at over 20 years since the series came to be.

Oh shit, it's been a long time since I posted something here. As I am in that part of the year when my hype for Amagami gets back to high charts, I might be doing something for Christmas. I am not sure yet if it will be a more substantial comment part of this thread, or if I will write a new, special thread in which to put things into perspective (like a "Retrospective: Amagami"). That could be easily helped if I am also watching SS+ Plus, just to wrap up things nicely and have the whole series completed...

Looks like I am back at the Shrine, but not with something I would have liked to talk to as one of the "rare instance of CvN coming back to the Moriya Shrine". However, as I do not think this will be visible anywhere else, I will just do it here: I have been using Pinterest for many years now (probably at least since 2019), but in recent times the platform started to have a lot of issues with the filtering of content. I wanted to express my own point of view on the situation on the dedicate subreddit, but surprise, surprise, my thread has been automatically removed the second I clicked "Post". And since no moderator actually answered since my original attempt at trying to contact them, I guess my second best option was to post in a place I am familiar with and perhaps would have helped make the situation a little more visible. Therefore, buckle in, this is going to be an experience of all times... (the original thread can be found here) I am a monster... ..at least in the eyes of Pinterest. A bit over a couple week ago, another user was talking about the issue of Pinterest reporting art for being... well, art. (second attempt at posting this thread; first time it was automatically removed, and I am still trying to figure out why) In the past month, I have started my own collection of art. Paintings that are usually found in museums, art galleries and the sort. But as I was adding new content to the gallery (either saved from other users of the platform or uploaded from Wikipedia), I ended up getting drowned in content violation reports. To be fair, it is partially my fault, as about half the collection represents nude paintings, and Pinterest really has been on the offensive recently against such content. However, if checking out the content guidelines posted by the guys themselves, it says very clearly that "[...] nudity in paintings and sculptures and in science and historical contexts is OK".* I did get quite a of reports, but the account is still running. For each violation report I got, I sent an appeal. In about 80-85% of the cases, Pinterest changed the status from "adult content" to safe. At some point, the whole board in itself was put under Limited Distribution, but following an appeal, it became perfectly safe somehow... The closest thing to that kind of content I have put was a painting by Courbet, and that was AFTER the reports started flowing just so I could take a piss on this whole situation. And it's not like I was posting outright porn images/videos and/or hentai like other users used to do (speaking of which, why did there use to be so many accounts with seemingly Indian-sounding names that were done solely for that kind of content?). I remember that, among the people who decided to follow my content, one of them was a gateway towards all the content to the kind as he was subscribed to thousands of accounts posting porn. My rule of thumb on Pinterest has been, at least until earlier this year, that "you are always 2-3 accounts away from finding porn". Recently, I have not received any new content violation report, so I guess they might have just given up? Or at least gave me a break. At least the attacks on classical art have ceased for now, but I still do understand why would they go after something anyone could see if they went to an art museum/gallery. That EU transparency report sure must have scared the shit out them... And since still on the topic of content rating, following all those reports, I have a single question: how did "La perle" by William-Adolphe Bouguereau end up being rated safe, while "The night accompanied by the geniuses of study and love" by Pedro Américo remains "adult content", I have no idea... (on a similar note to other people that got stupid repots, I also had a few for stuff like a painting depicting the battle of Dybbøl as "graphic violence" - and which Pinterest refuses to put back even now after appeals, and an the image of two tank miniature figurine kits, also blocked for "graphic content" - this time however, they did have at least one neuron left and put it back) UPDATE since the original attempt at posting: the period of calm is over. Reports are coming in again, and I am facing more and more the situation of a post having been reinstate after appeal, but getting reported again not long after. tl;dr - not even art is safe anymore With this in mind, I am not very sure what to say about the use of the platform. I am not really going to get out of it due to the sunken cost, and the fact I have worked for 3 years to build a Touhou fanart archive worth of over 26K images at the time of writing this thread. But in case the platform might decide to go more harsh and outright ban me, I am preparing contingency plans: mass download of all images, along with backups of the website through Internet Archive/Wayback Machine. I hope next time I can come back with something more positive. *Directly quoted from the community guidelines, "Content safety" section

As time goes on, I am honestly feeling like I am getting closer to ending my deals with Touhou and moving further as I am losing more and more interest for it and what is going on. One of the few things that still keeps me on is the time and intensity of emotions spent for 3 years already. And yet, I am still saving images, and talking about it with people (despite being much more interested in other series right now)...

I really wish to reactivate this thread. Unfortunately, I did not get the chance to read the recommended book, as I could not find it. Now though, I do not even remember its name...

Oh, I think I should have posted this some time ago. The 2023 take on Catherine:

Well, this did not age well.... Due to a series of allegations and a sentence he needs to serve, Stringstorm will not be up for quite a while. And probably his reputation will be on tatters as well. The story of what happened... is not very nice. Therefore, I am not sure of that song will be coming at any point. An Utsuho song, as well as one about Shinmyoumaru did come out before the accusations, and there was still a project related to PCB. Meanwhile though, there are lots of random one-off animations coming from western creators. Usually short, but still very good and fun. Similarly, I really wonder what Touhou reference will Sr. Pelo's yearly Spooky Month come up with this time around...

Oh god, its becoming ever so clear that I a either completely losing touch with this series, or at the very least suffer from a bit of a burnout. And what better sign of goin through a burnout than the fact that I am barely active on this forum anymore. I think I have mentioned that already as one of the points in the opening post, but now I really do feel like a mere shadow of what I used to be (known for) on this forum, and no longer live up to my reputation... I really need to get some time to reply on everything you guys have written here.

As I have already mentioned, I feel like recently I have lost touch with the music group's works. Following the Sekibanki song, I have not listened to anything new from them. Therefore, I have lost (or rather decided not to check out) over half a year of music...

Oh wow, it's been a while. Only now I saw how much I actually wrote in the last reply...