in conversation about white people who go to Japan and expect their knowledge of anime to culturally carry them, I was once posed with âitâs like if there was a Japanese guy who was obsessed with spongebob and came over here and thought he could get by just communicating in spongebob quotes.â This is a false equivalence because if such a man existed we would crown him king. Weâd love him. Americans would fucking love that. sometimes I get sad that this isnât a real guy I can invite to a party.
It's been just over a year since Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 released! I did the 3D work, which mostly means Tenna đş I figured it's been long enough to share some "behind the scenes" stuff, starting with a look at the Maya file for his static poses...
I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ⨠Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!
I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!
(lots more after the Read More cut...!)
Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative đ
There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses⌠Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.
When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two⌠Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't� Well. Don't worry about it.
These ones are cute⌠Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.
Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legsâŚ
Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.
Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic đ
I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in⌠I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?
After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.
As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"âŚ! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this âŹď¸
This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.
Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah⌠Just like this.
Say it with him, folks!!
For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.
Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.
I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute⌠Huh, I already said that�
Phew!! That's a lot of Tenna. I hope it was fun to look through my posts! Oh, one more thing - the Fangamer Mr. Tenna Figurine just straight up uses the 3D model I made, which I think is really funny and cool and nice. Check it out if you want! Thanks for reading!
wow dude jts so awesome that your car is loud as fuck and smells worse when it drives past. thags fucking epic man. i really like how it hurts to listen to you drive past and it scares people. thats awesome man. i really like your car that makes a loud as fuck fart sound. fucking epic dude
Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):
Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business â search â richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click.
"Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said.
Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers â perhaps even those they have requested â but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from.
"If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."
And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):
While Google already has âAI Mode,â the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.Â
Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what youâre searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questionsâsimilar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.
And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:
When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of âcatastrophicâ impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.Â
Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.Â
Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers. Â
Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Googleâs planned changes to search are âgoing to have a devastating impact on the Internet.âÂ
âIt will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,â she told Technology Magazine. Â
The funniest part of Hata no Kokoro is that youâd think sheâs emotionless with all that entails, like sweetening up and desfrosting, except this is Touhou and ZUN famously likes thug, brash girls in pretty clothes, so the deal with Kokoro is that she is expressionless, not emotionless, she is actually very emotional and temperamental, and her first instinct is to throw hands with whoever she suspects took her mask (one of 66, which she needs to exist, since sheâs a menreiki, ghosts born from masks). She spends the first few storylines picking fights just in case. She looks like this:
So youâre like awww cute pink onion, I wonder if sheâs nice! Rookie mistake, she already bashed your brains in with a steel chair. When she finds out who took her mask (Komeiji Koishi), her first instinct is âOh! Ok, I will kill herâ.
Of note, she canonically got beat up by every playable character in her origin game, but after Mamizou beats her, she gives Kokoro a pep talk that amounts to âKokoro, you are fighting tirelessly because you are desperate to get something back⌠Thatâs wrong, you should just fight because itâs FUN. I could see how much you liked it! Do it for fun! Attack! Do spin attacks!â and Kokoro says âactually yeah I LOVE fightingâ.
She proceeds to canonically beat Reimu, who also was being assisted by Byakuren and Miko.
Kokoro likes fighting (and dancing, which to her are very alike) SO much that ragdolling Reimu gave her the emotion she was missing: Hope. She didnât need the Mask of Hope anymore, because attacking girls made her develop the emotion without needing its physical anchor any longer.
Imagine needing a kidney transplant urgently or youâll die. Imagine your doctor saying âwell, actually, if you go and fight lots of girls, and enjoy it, you donât need the transplant!â and then imagine it actually working out, you donât need a vital organ anymore because you love fighting girls so much it makes up for its biological functions.
Of note, Miko actually offered Kokoro a new Mask of Hope (Miko was the one that originally ordered for the creation of the masks that would eventually become Kokoro), and she made one for Kokoro. The problem was, it was TOO good, and it filled Kokoro with so much hope it threatened to make her TOO content, thus âkillingâ her by letting go of attachment to the world and exorcising her. Imagine your doctor gives you a kidney SO good it shuts down the rest of your body. Kokoro almost died. This new Mask of Hope looks like this:
Kokoro doesnât need the mask anymore as stated, so she doesnât want to kill Koishi anymore. But, when she sees Koishi, itâs on sight and she will start doing spin kicks at her anyways. Touhou lore rocks.
