betsuni

Gore Screaming Show[EN]

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I have a weird relationship with horror. When I was young, I went to see the live-action Flinstones movie in theaters. That same night I saw a horror show on TV. I don’t remember what it was called, but the premise of that episode had something to do with people being turned into marionettes (with strings that physically cut into the bodies and made them bleed) It made me sob uncontrollably.

I thought I just hated horror, but I loved Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark. Later, I figured it must just be gore I’m weak against. Several years later however (late 90s early 2000s) I got a hold of the visual novel Divi-Dead, and despite that having gore worse than what I cried over, I loved it. It became my one of my favorite VNs at the time.

Spoiler

Despite that though, I didn’t embrace horror. I actually kept away from games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil because I

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My best guess is that I actually like stories with somewhat darker themes, but I don’t like stories that needlessly try to scare by incorporating excessive gore. I also think the medium comes into play as letting you control what happens makes things like horror a bit easier to digest.

Writing in progress

Site restructuring/redesign

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Previously betsuni.moe had been in a state of disrepair. No new posts, a very basic/dull appearance, and all around not very interesting/engaging. Since my recommitment to maintaining it, I’ve wanted to give everything a fresh coat of paint (so to speak) This page is for documenting stuff as I do them (most recent to least)

November 16 2022

I’ve actually been working on this project for a couple of weeks now at this point. However it was only today that I came up with the idea to do a projects category and to make a post about my progress on the site. Thus, I didn’t keep track of every single thing I had done up to this moment, and I will be going off my faulty memory.

The first thing I wanted to do was to change the theme. Previously, I couldn’t be fucked due to how cumbersome WordPress themes could be, and went for something that felt like a 2000s era Livejournal. If you can’t picture it, I would say don’t worry about it.

The problem with finding good WordPress themes is that there’s thousands of them and they’re all trying to make money off of you. Google is infested with tons of garbage results from people manipulating their search engine placement. Similarly WordPress’ own search system is a nightmare to try and sift through.

I developed a bit of a lifehack to deal with this and similar other situations where Google gives you a bunch of sites trying to sell you shit (like when you’re looking to make big purchases) Simply change your search on Google to include Reddit. That way you’re more likely to get subreddits where people are actually talking about their opinions on things instead of some generic “the 10 best wordpress themes”

It was through a sub I can’t remember that I saw a lot of people recommending GeneratePress. I got it and it’s been a dream to work with. Normally I have to spend days hacking a WP theme in order to get it to behave how I want, but there’s been very little I’ve had to do outside of the normal configuration settings.

Once I got some suitable colors picked out, I decided the site logo at the top could use something and I ended up finding this Apple-esque image of an anime girl with straight cut bangs that fit my motif.

Next was changing how the site functioned.

I wanted to write more without having to write more. Which might sound a bit contradictory, but it’ll make sense when I explain it.

Before when I would make a blog post, I would spend hours writing.

Rewrite+ [JP]

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Before official localizations started happening with Key games and way before I knew Japanese, I played Ixrec’s fan translation of Rewrite. While I enjoyed the game, I have to be honest when I say that there was a lot I didn’t understand about the true route. Given numerous criticisms of Ixrec’s translation ability and the fact that I’ve forgotten most of what happened in the game, I earmarked it for a possible replay one day.

Why I decided to pick it up now is due to the fact that I recently been taking advantage of the low yen exchange rate to get copies of various games I wanted to own. In order to not feel like I was buying a bunch of stuff I’d never get around to, I made a vow to play something. Rewrite+ just happened to win out over the rest.

Right now I’m still in the common route. I read a guide that suggested Kotori -> Chihaya -> Shizuru -> Lucia -> Akane, so I’ll probably go with that. Thus far it’s been pretty entertaining. A bit harder to read, Japanese wise, than Summer Pockets which kind of surprised me (I suppose that’s the effect of different writers)

I would like to finish it before the New Year, but we’ll see.

The Most Forbidden Love in the World -aka Damekoi [EN]

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I bought this game from MangaGamer the day it came out. The reason was simple: I had heard JP readers (at the time I still wasn’t very proficient with JP) praising the author Maruto Fumiaki all over, and I wanted to experience something that he wrote. Damekoi was the first of his works to ever get an English translation (later White Album 2 would be fan translated) Thus, I jumped on it rather quickly.

That was May of 2019. The reason I haven’t finished it by now is because I stalled it once I started getting serious about reading things in Japanese. At the time, I was subscribed to the idea of AJATT (all Japanese all the time) which constantly preached abandoning doing things in English in favor of Japanese. Something I stuck with for several months to half a year at best.

While using Japanese all the time is effective, it’s unfortunately very tiring. It’s fine early on when you’re starting to learn a lot and are mostly focused on simple things like saying おはようございます！ or お元気ですか？However when you reach the cusp of intermediacy, it starts to feel frustrating because you want to engage with actual native material but all you can really do is beat your head against it. Things start to feel less enjoyable which has a negative effect on your ability to retain stuff. Ultimately leading to burning out and then losing a lot of that progress.

This was my own experience with it, at least. The concept of doing something Japanese every day is a good one, and will help foster good language learning habits. You just can’t expect yourself to be a machine.

Somewhere along the way, I gave up on AJATT and just focused on being consistent with my studies while allowing myself to enjoy things in English from time to time. Unfortunately, Damekoi, at that time, rested on a different computer and every time I thought of playing it, I felt like it would be a hassle to recover the save/get back to where I was.

[More to come]w