Don’t know the exact instant it happened but that bad apple video is now the #1 all time most viewed video on niconico!  If you somehow haven’t seen it check it out here.

If you don’t have a niconico account here’s a youtube version:

While we’re at it, here’s some other tribute’s I’ve come across as the madness unfolded.  If you’re familiar with the characters and the themes, this medley is really awesome (niconico).  It takes the theme for each character as they appear on screen and somehow mashes it into one awesome song with the bad apple beat in the background.

For those that like source material, here’s the original video request that the awesome one was made to fulfill (niconico).  There’s actually a bunch of other videos that people made (some quite good), but I guess none of ‘em were able to snatch up those 8 million views like the silhouette one ^^;  The title loosely translates to [the uploader wants to see] Bad Apple PV [someone draw it!].

If you’d rather not dig up all of those other videos, someone combined a bunch of them into one ^^ (niconico). (fun starts around :40)

Or if you want the direct comparison of the silhouette vid to the original request, we’ve got that too :P (niconico).

And of course don’t forget the video that got onto CNN (niconico).

…or the one carved out of real apples (niconico).

Or if you’re tired of song being taken too seriously he’s a contribution that takes things another way ^^ (niconico).  Best enjoyed if you can understand the Japanese but I’m sure those familiar with the characters will be able to understand it just fine ^^

Anyhow that’s all today.  Alstroemeria Records ftw.

以上！

click for gelbooru

touhou chireiden – subterranean animism – th11 – sa… whatever ya wanna call it, it’s generally considered to be one of, if not the hardest touhou shooter… and i finally 1cc’d it on normal!  Warning: for the uninitiated, this is just one of my self indulgent touhou achievement posts ^^;

I’m sure it’s not a particularly interesting feat for anyone who plays on hard or lunatic but for me it marks the end of 3 months of practice ^^;

…and i must say, it’s a pretty anti-climatic end to all of my practice ^^;  The run is very sloppy, starting with deaths in stage 3… as I mention in the video notes, nearly rage quit in disgust with my mistakes ^^;

Little by little I recovered after that… no deaths on either satori or orin had me feeling good about my chances (though I did have a stupid death in each of those stages ^^;)

There’s a death by death recount of my mistakes in each video’s notes… to repeat a bit of that here though… i basically have a pretty sloppy run but by managing no deaths on stage 4 & 5′s bosses I reach the final boss with 6 lives in reserve.  Then I proceed to die THREE times on utsuho’s first card.  I couldn’t believe how terribly I was playing.  Reminiscent of my first eosd clear it comes down to the wire as I tackle the last card with a single life in stock.  When that’s gone I bomb and I bomb and I bomb and nearly eat it as utsuho’s gravity increases during her death animation.  Thankfully I was prepared for that by my easy clear ^^;

Do you like graphs?  I like graphs.  Sorry, I’m a total geek.  If you enlarge the above image you’ll see it’s a plot of my touhou completions over time with the number of days represented by the bars.  Since I’m 1cc’ing in order it’s eosd, pcb, in, pofv, mof, sa.  I was surprised to see IN took me the second longest to beat, despite it’s status as one of the easiest touhou’s ^^;  and it was amazing how quickily mof fell after pofv… though i had been practicing it off and on while working on the other games… same was true for everything else so not sure what was different ^^;

click for gelbooru

Anyhow it looks like I may complete my touhou normal 1cc project within a year!  Now why does it feel like I’ve been playing all my life… ^^;

以上！

Quick touhou post:  I noticed lately that when I went back to play some eosd or pcb the controls felt strangely laggy.  My computer hasn’t really changed so it was really puzzling and frustrating to have reimu so unresponsive.  Then I stumbled upon this thread!

Wholy crap.  eosd and pcb are like totally different games.  I always felt like I didn’t have very good control for picking up power ups and this must’ve been why (well, I’m still no good, just a little less bad).  I started my touhou experience with eosd and went in game order, so I think I just got acclimated to the crappy controls from the start.  If you had told me eosd and pcb had laggy controls I would’ve wondered what you were talking about ^^;  My practice with chireiden must’ve finally awakened some appreciation for responsive controls ^^;;

So yeah, prolly old news for some, but for those still unaware… soooooo awesome!  vsync patch ftw!  Mebbe after chireiden I’ll take a break from my sequential 1cc quest to try and clear flan ^_^  If you did actually mention this patch to me before, sorry, it’s like I said above… having started out with eosd I got used to those controls immediately and didn’t notice anything wrong ^^;

Read through the thread if you’re having trouble getting it to work.  So far I’ve tried it on eosd and pcb (original installations) with no problems.  Some had issues due to renamed executables (I’m guessing from english patches perhaps?) and such…

以上！

Tried something new (or old?) for this mini-review.  All the previous shots I’ve taken with ambient room light were usually against boring walls and improperly white balanced… those problems I finally know how to solve so I got out my grey card and put some proper distance between cirno and the bg… woo!  Colored bg that’s not terrible looking! ^^;

This cirno is #1 of toranoana’s vinyl series, first released almost two years ago I believe.  Had kinda given up on obtaining her (after getting reimu semi-recently) but while I was in Japan I happened upon her at the toranoana in akiba.  ^__^

Reimu has her yin-yang base, cirno gets ⑨ ^^;

Something about her hair seems slightly different than daioki’s illustrations but overall I’m very satisfied ^^

Shadows are a bit weird because I have 4 ceiling lights in my room ^^;

She doesn’t have her icicle wings but that’s the way daioki draws her :P

b+w for the heck of it :P  I did read a little on b+w photography since last time and one thing that I found interesting was that shooting in low contrast situations can work well for black and white photos.  Which is awesome because that’s what cloudy days give ya.  So rather than thinking, oh, it’s a crappy day for photos, it’s b+w experimentation time!  …not really sure that helps the above pic any ^^;;

There’s a little ring of imperfection on the underside of her head which you can see above… I assume it’s from the manufacturing process.  Tilt her head down just a bit or just don’t look up at her and you won’t notice.  Unfortunately I didn’t notice this until I was reviewing the pics on my computer -_-

Cirno with reimu ^^  Points if you recognize the gals in the bokeh :P

I got the little phone charm sized cirno earlier as a consolation… thought I’d never get the full sized one ^^;  Ah well.  Afraid to put her on my phone though ‘cuz she’ll prolly break…

As promised, today’s review is short ^^;

was surprised that yes, foobarbaz reviewed her awhile back.  Also includes a look at udonge ^^

以上！

click for gelbooru

1cc on normal! woooooo!  4 touhou’s down, 3 to go ^^  東方花映塚 (tôhô kaêzuka (kunrei-shiki)) is the ninth game in the series and very very different from the previous ones.  In pofv you battle against an opponent split-screen as faeries, spirits, and bullets randomly spawn and attack you.

The white bullets get sent over to your opponents screen if you can destroy them by killing a nearby fairy or activated spirit.  Other features include powering up your spell gauge which lets you unleash more powerful attacks (while also clearing your screen of enemies).

If you charge up your gauge all the way and unleash your level 4 spell, a copy of your character will appear on your opponent’s screen and start attacking.  Not quite the same as a boss battle in the other touhou games, but it still makes things more hectic due to the randomly generated clutter that’s already attacking you.  You can read more about the gameplay here if you’re interested.

click for gelbooru

Chose to unlock and use aya after reading this thread on the character strengths and weaknesses.  Not sure how credible the original thread author is but it worked out for me ^^  Reimu’s 360 field wasn’t working out for me as I’d activate spirits all around me and not destroy them in time (which spawns 3 red bullets aimed at you).

click for gelbooru

Now I’m on to Mountain of Faith.  Ironically aya is kicking my butt in stage 4 orz  Keep trying to capture her last 3 cards and getting caught off guard.  Think I just need to get back in my bombing groove and I’ll churn out that next 1cc fairly easily ^^

quick update on figures, just got an e-mail from hobby search:

“Also, please note that order recombination is not possible any longer,
since the shipment process of the item(s) is already underway.”

3 alter releases in 1 month!  Can’t wait ^__^

以上！

IN was actually the one and only touhou I’ve ever 1-shot… kind of.  Back in August I had played a couple times on normal I believe, decided to give easy a try, 1cc’d it on my first attempt.  So technically it wasn’t the first time I had played IN but it was the first time I had played it on easy (and the first time I had ever seen lots of the later stages/cards).  Here’s the replay for that run:

As I continued to pound away at eosd and pcb I would often come back to easy IN to indulge in a low stress 1cc ^^;  Guess I partook in that more than I thought… got enough practice in to do a no-death run ^^;

Back to the normal run – I actually first 1cc’d normal with a ludicrously generous 7 lives… don’t have that run recorded yet though (and I’m sure you’re all dying to watch it start to finish, na? na? :P)

IN is the only touhou to feature spell card practice so I was happy to actually capture at least one of kaguya’s cards ^^;

Sadly I think my performance during the normal parts of the stage and non-card attacks is worse than usual ^^;

I believe a bunch of touhou goodies I ordered are in the mail now so hopefully I’ll have a post ready soon after Christmas.

To recap I’m going through the touhou’s in order (only the integer numbered games atm), 1cc’ing them on normal.  That means pofv is next… not especially looking forward to that one ^^;  On a mission though, hopefully it’ll be over quick.

Barely on topic… anyone planning to pick up that gift reimu?

以上！

First is just a 1cc of Touhou 10 – Mountain of Faith, easy difficulty.  Did that a couple months ago but only recently got it uploaded.  Mountain of Faith has a different approach to bombs – instead of having a separate stock, using a bomb decreases your power by 1.  As such if you know where/when you’re gonna get some power items, you can bomb away.  Other than that I guess it’s standard touhou fare.

Second thing is some blog news.  I’ve finally finish Dragon Age (though I’m actually playing it again ^^;;;) but Thanksgiving is upon us.  That means more down time since I’ll be out of town.  You would think then I’d have some time to get more posts up… but then it looks like I’m going to be making a trip to Taiwan + Singapore for work.  Hopefully will know more details on that in the coming days.  But at any rate, that’s another two weeks I probably won’t be posting much.

So then, all told I may not be posting regularly until mid-December ^^;;;;  Ah well.  しょうがないよね  Can’t be helped, right?  I do hope to perhaps get Fate’s review up (assuming she ships :P) in a timely manner, but it’ll depend on when she arrives.  According to Alter’s site it looks like they got her out the door on the 21st.  Hopefully I get her this week!

以上！

I’m addicted to playing on easy now for the false sense of skill it provides ^^;;; On my first play through on easy (had been playing on normal up ’til now), got all the way up to utsuho’s 2nd to last card or so. Frustrated at being so close, played a few more times and this is the result ^^

As you can see on my progress page I’ve gotten all but UFO 1cc’d on easy… currently working on spell practice in IN to hopefully but a normal 1cc under my belt soon…

feito-chan is in the mail.  slightly apprehensive because of how her face looked in the pics i’ve seen but nevertheless, nanoha needs company :P

期待しててね！

以上！

Now I admit the Alstroemeria Records version of Bad Apple!! is one of my favorite (if not my favorite) touhou mixes, and I’m already a touhou fanboy… but the above video is jaw droppingly awesome, regardless. Touhou fans, definitely check it out ^^ (niconico link)

Oh, and if you’ve never bothered to look up the lyrics, part of the cool thing about many bad apple pv’s is the black and white imagery — verses end alternately with, “become/turn black” or “become/turn white”. A translation is at the touhou wiki.

Half my fascination with touhou is the amount and quality of fanwork out there… this is a perfect example ^^

以上！

Figures after I put up my whine post I go and 1cc pcb a few days later ^^;;

You may have noticed I added another top level page – 東方プロジェクト (touhou project).  It’s just a list of all the “regular” touhou games and my progress through each.  By regular, I just mean the touhou games that got an integer number, i.e. th6, th7, etc. through th12 but not including th7.5, 9.5 etc.  (though I am curious why potfv was given a regular integer number since it’s not much like the games before or after it).  Once I get my hands on the other games, I’ll add ‘em to the list.

Kinda sucks that my run was ~32 minutes long.  Didn’t divide up into youtubable chunks nicely at all.  Ended up with stages 1 & 2 in the first vid, then each stage after that having to go to a separate segment.

Been practicing stages 4, 5 and 6 almost daily, yet I put out one of my worst performances on each -_-

My yuyuko fight was particularly bad, where i fail to capture a single card.  (for non-touhou’ers, the ‘cards’ are the special attacks that follow when you see the character portrait appear on the screen.  to ‘capture’ you must survive without dying or bombing)

Think I’m going to try and repeat the miracle with a regular 3 life clear then move on to IN.  My extra stage queue is building but I get brutalized so bad I think I’m gonna wait for the IN extra (IN features a spell card practice mode) before making a serious attempt.

Relieved to get this one under my belt!  2 down, 5 to go!

以上！