tenk u so much :) I'm glad someone's enjoying my first draft written in the middle of the night in a haze before going to bed posts.

tenk u so much :) Touhou's kind of difficult to apply to that. 6 and 7 are basically the bedrock of the entire series, having stood out in an era of Windows doujin games being mostly pornographic in nature and becoming mind bogglingly popular for the time. The Touhou series as a whole can have its success attributed to these two titles, even if Touhou 6 has a broken framerate without being patched that effectively makes the game 100x harder for no reason. The two games are just the first things people think of when they think 'Touhou', the characters there came to define what the overarching story would be and have appeared consistently in title after title. Being around longer and being main characters in the core of the franchise makes them, the events surrounding them, and their music stand out a lot more. There just wasn't much of an idea what a 'Touhou' should be when their games were made, making them very fresh as concepts, and that contributed to them getting so much attention which only feeds into them getting more attention. Compare that to say Chimata or Keiki, they're newer and have to compete in popularity with basically the entire series up to that point. ZUN being a panderer or a sellout is something I see a lot, cause he greenlit a gacha game, but I can't really agree. The core direction he takes the works is always the result of his own whim, and actively ignores the ideas the fanbase throws out. Touhou never really stopped being a doujin series, even after all this time and growth. At this point he could easily sell Touhou off to Sony or whoever for probably the same amount of money Notch sold Minecraft for, on top of getting to be a 'consultant' or some other cushy position where he wouldn't have to do shit. There's a greater respect ZUN has for doujin culture which is why he keeps Touhou in his own hands so that community can thrive. He might still sell it off, might eventually wash his hands of Touhou but if he does it'd probably be because he thought it was the best for his family and that's something you can't really hate him for. It's easy to forget that Touhou is popular enough to have its own version of comiket. Blue Archive might've overtaken Touhou in comiket but that's with all of the corporate advertising and it still doesn't really have an equivalent to that. On the 'experience' of Touhou in general, I'd say across most of the games people have a pretty similar experience. Touhou attracts shmup beginners who have trouble keeping up with the patterns, like me, and probably think it's a pretty tense game. Or at least this is the consensus I get reading both what people feel about bullet hell shmups in general and how the greater shmup community feels about Touhou, which is very mixed, mostly just because it's popular and because of that people don't wanna talk about Ikaruga or whatever the fuck. Touhou's fine on this front I feel, my ideas for 'story vs. experience' were mostly levied as criticisms to gameplay-sparse games that studios like Ubisoft make. As for comments, some of the design of the newer layout went into experimenting with some methods that'd make people comment on the guestbook more or follow on Nekoweb/RSS more so I was a little surprised seeing that it didn't really do anything. I'm gonna get into using Tailwind pretty soon so I've got some more ideas that might find their way into free-use layouts. If I ever change layouts again it's definetly not gonna be a total reboot of the site like last time, or even announced.

tenk yew so much :) One thing I've considered is experimetning with the layout styles I'm not going to use and put them in a section for free use, so maybe I could toss the old green one in there. In hindsight green's not bad but I chose a pretty bad palette for it. If nothing else it'd serve as a good reference point for babby's first grid layout, which is exactly what it was.

tenk yew so much :) VERY black and white for readability. Or more like really light grey on really dark grey because straight black on white is hard to read. The former color palette's greens had problems with this that weren't easily fixed by just picking more differenter greens.

tenk yew so much :)

tenk yew so much :) Regrettably the 東方 elements are going bye bye when I next update.

tenk yew so much :)

tenk u so much :) Yes my post on Nekoweb followers became irrelevant almost immediately. In fact the timing was so suspect I feel as if I had something to do with it, but such problems would be handled through the Discord server. Either way followers work now so ( ・∀・)ｲｲ!!

I should change it knowing it goes off on links now but every time I've tried it's thrown up some random error message at me.

tenk yew so much :) Worst part about giving people the raw power to put whatever they want on a webpage is the high number of scams that crop up. I remember seeing that shit all over Neocities. Good to see that the bookmarks are sorted by last-edited now since that makes more sense for 'following' sites. I am going to assume I am 100% responsible for this to feed my ego. I like having thing on website. I made a dedicated effort to have thing on website after seeing all of the websites that don't have things that were very lame. I had a few ideas thrown around like building a personal wiki that was entirely based on just being a notes section but that was a little complicated and annoying to make so I just went with a typical blog setup.

I guess that'd be some purpose as awkward as it is but I wish it'd do more.

tenk yew so much :) PC98 Touhou wasn't something that came up much for me until relatively recently. My interest in the series began at the popularity peak of the Windows era so nobody ever cared much for anything before that but it seems there's a growing popularity, probably because it seems strange in hindsight with how Touhou as a series ended up evolving. That or people just like it because it looks retro and was the jankiest ZUN's artstyle ever got. As for the games themselves, it was an experimental time for Touhou so some are a lot better than others. Touhou only really got its identity properly defined with the release of 6 so you get a lot of ideas thrown around. Some are a lot better than others. Touhou 1seems like a genuinely interesting concept that probably just wasn't handled well. I never bothered to 1cc it but if I was a developer I'd probably make a game in the same vein as it. Touhou 2 is the worst the series ever got as a whole. RNG patterns, extremely poor visual clarity, terrible difficulty balancing and one of the worst bosses in the entire series who, ironically enough, was Marisa, a boss I'm pretty sure has virtually undodgeable patterns because she's purely RNG. 1cc'd it once and never looked back. Trash. Its only saving graces is that it has some of the more interesting PC98 characters and it's only 5 stages long so it ends faster. Touhou 3 is Twinkle Star Sprites done by ZUN. There's not much to say about it, it's very similar to his other two attempts to do it. As interesting of a concept as a competitive STG is nobody ever seems to bother with titles like these. Touhou 4/5 were actually good and where you can see modern Touhou start to take form. The more 'danmaku' nature shows up, focus mode, multiple characters with their own shot types (aside from 3 which had multiple characters by its nature), a semi-spellcard like staging system for bosses, and an attempt at a unique scoring system which would be tried by pretty much every following Touhou. The big problems are a result of the technical limitations of the PC-98, like too much information on screen glitching out the graphics or sound limitations. You could play 4/5 and come out thinking they were genuinely good games, even without the context of them being Touhou. That being said, pretty much the entire PC-98 catalogue pales in comparison to even weaker Windows titles. It's obviously unfair because as I've said before the biggest problem was the PC-98 limitations but it's still true. They could probably all stand up with remakes, assuming ZUN felt free to change whatever about them but at that point why not just make an entirely new game? This is all about the games of course. The aesthetics are unique because the PC-98 was a unique beast when it came to graphics. You can find way better fidelity as far as PC-98 goes but the charm of the games these days probably comes from the amateurish quality, something I find more and more people these days enjoying or actively attempting to ape. Maybe it's because it's easy and relatable. It was also at a time when ZUN felt very brazen about plagarizing other people's works. Protip: if you see something that looks even vaguely anatomically accurate in the PC-98 games then ZUN probably traced it from some manga. I don't know he was probably drunk when he did it. Then again he's drunk when he does anything. tl;dr 2 > 1 > 3 > 4 = 5 > windows

tenk yew so much :)

tenk yew so much ;) I wasn't really planning on making it look like a terminal, in fact it was supposed to look the opposite at one point: very image heavy and pointlessly hyperstylized like a 2000s era website. I ended up growing a bit of a distaste for some of those layouts since they have a lot of cruft even given their age, like monitor-long images that you have to scroll past every time you click on a new page, and I had started to feel as if they didn't really fit the direction I had for the site. In the end I spent a lot more time tinkering with Hugo so the layout is pretty basic. Above being minimalist but still simple and readable (i hope). I'll inevitably go around to giving it another shot, hopefully it'll be something with some more flair to it. One thing I'll definetly be adamant on is always trying to make vertical phone layouts, hopefully to have more responsive websites that aren't boring Stripe-inspired flat minimalism.

My word filter went off. At first, I was going to make it so that saying a censored word would say every censored word at once, i.e. "fuck nigger nigga bitch fag" because it sounded funny to me but then I just turned it off. I guess putting (_ _) in a post makes it so that the word filter gets set off over a false positive? Who knows.