Me ranting! Yay!

Even if you don't know Touhou, chances are you know Cirno. I did! And I thought Touhou was a vocaloid fan-game (yes, I was a total idiot back then)! I knew her for being a total idiot, a "baka". That's because I had never played the games. Actually playing the games gave me a new perspective on all of the Touhou characters, Cirno being one of them. When I played the games, I realized that for a fairy, Cirno is pretty strong. All the default enemies are fairies, so you can shoot those guys down easy, usually with one danmaku and they're gone, y'know? So then I thought about it, and... Cirno's a fairy too. A strong fairy. REALLY strong. No wonder she calls herself "the strongest"! She is, for what she knows of. Plus, she's territorial. That's why she always attacks. She's not the brightest bulb out there, but she's not a flat-out idiot, either. All the other characters make fun of her. THAT'S why we think she's dumb. Plus, "Cirno's Perfect Math Class"? GIMME A BREAK. THAT SONG IS SO OFFENSIVE I HAVE WANTED TO PUNCH MY COMPUTER EVERY TIME I HEAR IT.

Tamako Market-o!

   Hello! Today I am going to talk about an adorable anime I just started watching: Tamako Market! (Before you get confused, I go to a catholic school and yesterday was my last day.) Tamako Market is just about the cutest anime ever! It's by the same people who did K-ON! but it doesn't really have a "real" story line.
   Tamako is the daughter of a mochi maker, and she lives with her father (otousan) grandfather (ojiisan) and little sister (imouto), Anko-chan (she likes to be called An in stead of Anko) at her mochi shop in a market. Her best friends are Midori-chan and Kana-chan, and her friend who lives across the street is Mochizou. These are the main characters in the anime so far, along with a strange bird named Dera (Dela).
   Tamako is going about her daily actions at the market after school when she sees some flowers at the flower shop in the market. There's a bird in the flowers! She accidentally sneezes and the bird takes this as a... sign of love? Apparently where he comes from sneezing in the face is some pretty intense courtship. This bird starts acting all manly and romantic around Tamako and sits on her head as she walks home. Apparently he was sent from his land to find a bride for his prince.
   Dera is a total weirdo! He looks in the girls' bathhouse multiple times. He flirts with everyone who sneezes on him. He gets extremely fat; so much that he can't fly and has to stay with Tamako. Too bad they don't share those romantic feelings that he feels! This bird also talks. It speaks perfect Japanese. Luckily, everyone seems to like him...
   That's it for this post! Hope you enjoy watching Tamako Market!

-Shiny
PS: I've left out ANY AND ALL SPOILERS.
PPS: Have a funny Dera image.
PPPS: This isn't a spoiler!

Finally Posting! Paper Child Artwork

   Hello! It's Shiny! If you saw the post I made earlier, sort of a spam post of links for myself, you probably won't care will be happy to find out that I actually found a use for them! I said in that post that I was doing some research on the paper child art form... Which I was! I don't lie! So here's that post on how to make a paper child that I promised (did I?) to write... On the left, you can see two really nice examples of paper child art. The first one is by a well-known paper child artist who goes by the username "Pimmy" and the other is by some unknown net person who was (un)lucky enough to get their stuff featured on fanpop. I seriously love Pimmy's work, it's adorable. I hope that they can make a worthwhile tutorial on how they come up with random characters. But anyway, I'll now tell you about the things you look for in a paper child:

1)A cute character. This is like, the most important one. Your character should be extremely cute, or seriously cool but still cute, but it should not be scary, and definitely not purposefully ugly either.

2)An interaction. The other most important thing, which can make or break a picture, is the interaction. Pimmy's work shows excellent interactions, which is why they're featured here. The easiest one to create is shown to the left, where your character is dangling by a shirt/jacket/skirt/tail/anything that is being held by you, the artist. 

3) Good shading/ a nice color scheme. Although the majority of paper children are monochrome, like a manga drawing, you can also do a colored one. I'd recommend coloring yours with either any type of colored pencils or Prismacolor or COPIC sketch markers.
4) The camera angle being perfect. If your camera angle for the picture isn't perfect, like if the character looks obviously cut out/drawn/actually fake because it's slanted. You have to keep your paper child and your camera at the same angle!
3) A thin white edge. Don't ask me why, just do it. They always look better with one.

-Shiny

PS: BONUS GIF!

Homestuck and Baby Alpacas

Hello, Shiny here again! I've come to announce that I've finally started being part of the Homestuck fandom. It's a pretty good webcomic/game (not sure what to call it exactly). I like the characters, and I have to admit Rose is pre-tty cool; she can youth-roll out a door. Except that she has an encounter with her mother and has to retreat. John, the first character we meet, is also cool, considering his neighborhood gets hit by a meteor and he gets teleported into an empty black space by sburb (the video game he receives on his birthday). Rose helps him battle the imps and he suddenly has to prevent the... apocalypse? You'd have to read/play it. Dave and Jade are awesome too~!

 It's all at mspaintadventures.com.

 Well, that aside, I'd like to help you learn how to get your own baby alpaca figurines. They're fun to keep around and also fun to draw, like I did over there in the third (bottom) picture. I named mine Arupaca, the Japanese pronunciation of the word alpaca.

 I got my adorable baby alpaca figurine at Hobby Lobby. It was just five dollars! It's so cute! It's super realistic, too. The cameroid picture doesn't really do it justice though. Also, the pictures are reversed, so my little baby alpaca doesn't really look totally like that.

Once you get one, it'd probably be fun to make a mold of it like I am hopefully going to end up doing... And make an army of neon alpacas. If anyone can't find alpaca baby figurines at their local hobby lobby, I'll be pretty tempted to sell neon alpacas with cutie marks and bows on etsy. No, really.

-Shiny

Links for me lol

Some things about the Paperchild art form. I'll do a good post about that tomorrow, when I'll have a normal amount of 'net time.

http://freezepopmorality.hubpages.com/hub/Paper-Child-A-New-Art
http://naldzgraphics.net/inspirations/30-cute-and-clever-anime-paper-child-art/
http://fav.me/d1ed4nr
http://www.moeside.net/weblog/2008/07/27/anime-paperchild/
http://papercraft-corner.deviantart.com/gallery/26678511 ALL PAGES
http://pettyartist.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-Rigging-Paperchildren-161537884

ASMR? (Though I don't have it, it sure is relaxing)

So I was asleep in my dad's bed after having recovered from being treated for a nasty throat infection today, and woke up and was all alone in the house. The radio/alarm/clock was still on as always and it was about 6:50 PM. The radio was just starting a program about dis-enrollment and casinos in tribes from California, and I listened to that for about twenty minutes. Then afterwards up came the program I had heard about in the car on the way to the doctor's office: something about a woman who had a tingling sensation in her head whenever she heard things like whispering or blocks moving, stirring paint or et cetera. She would have this sensation when the "boring" old librarian from a library read books out load to her and other six to seven-year-olds when she watched a certain TV program, and, when she was an adult and could watch as much television as she wanted, she began to be obsessed with home shopping shows and watched makeup and jewelry videos on youtube. Once she had watched so many videos she couldn't find any more, she spelled jewelry with two 'l's and found a video at the top of the list with "ASMR" at the top. The person was whispering; showing off her grandmother(who had passed away)'s old jewelry. She was whispering. She began to wonder if ASMR was a medical condition, and when googling it found the following description: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a term used to describe a sensory experience characterized by a tingling sensation in the head and scalp, which can be triggered by sounds like whispering or brushing, and visual stimulus like painting or drawing. On YouTube, the phenomenon inspired the creation of “whisperer” videos, in which people attempt to trigger the viewer’s ASMR by speaking in a soft voice and making various sounds with inanimate objects.

So after coming back from my dad's room I searched up ASMR on Youtube. I found this video of someone moving wooden blocks around and whispering in dutch to trigger ASMR. I do not personally have ASMR but I find this rather relaxing. Me having asperger's syndrome, I am fascinated by these sounds and could watch a person moving blocks for a long time. If you have asperger's you should check this out as well as if you are fascinated by these things and/or need relaxation.

MoF: First Thoughts

MoF's first boss for Reimu, Shizuka Aki

  So I finally got to downloading Touhou 10: Mountain of Faith, also known as MoF. I downloaded it from a nifty Touhou site called Moriya Shrine (moriyashrine.weebly.com), which is funny, because MoF actually features the inhabitants of that particular shrine, Suwako Moriya, Sanae Kochiya, and Kanako Yasaka. Before I start playing and tell you all about my thoughts about the game, I'd like to establish the storyline for all of you who don't know it already:
   The Hakurei Shrine is slowly losing followers and is getting visited less and less often. Reimu is upset and angry when a voice tells her she should just pack up and leave. She looks around and finds a new shrine with it's own lake, called the Moriya Shrine. Their official deity is Kanako Yasaka. Reimu believes the person who told her to give up was belonging to this shrine.

So now I am going to try MoF. I'll tell you how far I get on my first try! (Before I started I had to install a font)...

   So I only got to the Stage 1 Boss and died shortly after. But I'm out of practice. Now, I'll say what I liked about this game and any faults I encountered:
Great Things: Shizuka was an adorable, kind, funny first boss. I liked her a lot, especially since she was a god and gods are cool. Her back story as being the harvest god and smelling good and yummy since she always took care with her odor was interesting, and I liked her design. I also liked the difficulty level, much easier than EoSD. I'd recommend it to newbies if you had more lives. Also the music was nice. I think ZUN's art was beautiful in this game and had really improved since EoSD and even PoFV.

Faults: You don't see stats for charcters

Basically I love it.

Let's Play Videos are AWESOME

   So I've been watching more Let's Play Videos from that NakaTeeli guy on youtube... They are seriously hilarious..... I finished watching Let's Play (Try) Eryi's Action two days ago, and am watching Let's Try Magical Drop V (Five; 5). I'm pretty disapointed that they made it harder in the patch... I could never play it now... ^_^; So they fixed Death (Who was so broken she could out-quota Fortune, on hard, and out-combo her in only a few moves) and made it hard. I've had a hard enough time playing touhou, thank you very much. Anyway, on to Eryi's Action and my thoughts on that game.... 
   I liked Eryi's character design a lot!! And Farta, despite her name. Though she is a jerk. She stole Eryi's delicious melon that Eryi had ben waiting to eat! But on with the post... I liked the negetive lives. Really torments the player.(Laughs nervously) I don't know if I'd be up for that. Also the many ways to die is very interesting. I like the vases. They just kill you in the most interesting, stupid, epic, and/or surprising ways. I also like how you have to glitch the wall to get through that last level.

So, after all this talking, I really enjoyed the videos and thought the games looked fun.

Shiny OUT!

Quick Touhou-related post

   So I've been playing Touhou for a while now and am still not clear on all the residents of the Scarlet Devil Mansion... I kind of suck at this ^_^;... Anyway I am looking on the wiki because oh my god I do not know who that red-haired chick with devil wings is. Lol.
   Oh my lord how much harder could that have gotten?! I had to check wikipedia because that wiki had like no info on her... It didn't mention her in the page of the SDM.... Really? Since I couldn't find a gif of her I had to do one of Sakuya... Oh well... Anyway, I discovered some new "useful" knowledge about the Touhou Danmaku game series.... Her name is Koakuma! I searched up her theme on YouTube but all I could find was her theme from Pocket Wars 2... Which, by the way, was kinda gross. It was a remix(?!) of her theme, apparently.
   But currently I have no intention of beating Koakuma in a battle to see for myself what her theme music is... Although my copy of EoSD isn't broken like PoFV, I can't get through Stage 3 (Meilein's) and that music is making me want to kill my computer. Which wouldn't be a good idea. In other words, I have been taking a break from EoSD and am currently wondering if I'll ever have a chance of beating the game, not including Flandre. Flandre is scary, I would die in a flaming death flame of flamingly deathness within  the first like two seconds of playing. Spellcards. They scare me.