Kind of a small deal

Lailah (previously Alice). This'll probably be an inconsistent mix of video games, Touhou stuff, writing, language stuff, history, myths, and whatever awful jokes pop into my head. Unlikely to do this whole blog-following business unless requested; feels a bit too much like poking around in other people's stuff. Stories are under #Storytime, worldbuilding material etc. under #Worldbuilding, Touhou opinions under #Analysis.

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“I need a break” is about the highest class of praise I can offer a certain type of game, so good job, Subnautica.

But stop that.

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The essential new game experience: Game opens into full screen, and spends five minutes on unskippable (on the first time) intros while refusing to tab out. I am left fidgeting awkwardly until it lets me set this to windowed mode, because I was in the middle of a conversation a moment ago.

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Steam’s casting the net a little wide today.

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Been about six years since I first came across it, maybe a hair more, but this is still my favourite Touhou arrangement.

Also the fuel to much of my Parsee writing.

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Just saw cakes purportedly made with (translating from Japanese here) ‘crow bone eggs’.

I later found out that ‘crow bone’ is an obscure breed of chicken in southern Japan. Barely less weird.

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Update: Outside Japan they are known as Silkies. I guess it’s not hard to tell where ‘crow bone’ came from?

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Just saw cakes purportedly made with (translating from Japanese here) ‘crow bone eggs’.

I later found out that ‘crow bone’ is an obscure breed of chicken in southern Japan. Barely less weird.

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Recent game choices have reminded me of one of my favourite cases of oblivious tabletop players in recent years, so here goes. It involves a character in a modern urban fantasy game I was running (no, not World of Darkness, it was my own thing). The character in question was…

1) Named Wendy.

2) Tall, alarmingly skinny (gangly, really), and despite all of this, bizarrely strong.

3) Always eating something. No, seriously. Always. 

4) Working in one of those freezer warehouses, but didn’t seem to mind it at all, and was always strangely cold to the touch (or even to be near) elsewhere.

Despite this, the game taking place in North America, and the use of some aspects of Native American folklore, players suspected nothing. Once the various glamour spells came off (you know, to disguise the whole ‘horrific decay’ thing), they finally realised that, yes, they are talking to a wendigo spirit with a weird sense of humour. Though, fortunately, she was a somewhat mellowed out one: It turns out that a hunter-gatherer society’s idea of “insatiable hunger” isn’t that hard to deal with in a modern major city.

Conversations with her later down the line: “…Don’t you think the Pac-Man hoodie is in poor taste, considering?” “Is it? Well, I’ve done worse.”

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So @moominpappa drew her, and apparently these are just rough drafts and not the finished product? Incredible.

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So I finally went and bought some speakers.

Pros: No need to rely entirely on extremely fragile headphones or equally shoddy earphones.

Cons: What will people think? Am I being a bad neighbour if I give off any sound or the smallest sign of life and habitation, even when everyone else is out to work? Will someone call the police? Better leave it in the box.

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Flavoured tea: For when you want tea that tastes exactly the same in every way but oh well at least it smells lovely.

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I just remembered that whole triangle McDonald’s chart as applied to Touhou characters, and would like to propose a fourth point.

Miko turns the car around, and goes to Burger King. Later she puts the crown on her head while declaring ‘I am the state’.

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Pretty sure most of the world doesn’t have shiso, and honestly, I pity all of you.

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Now that I’ve finished moving and such, I have some more time to provide mediocre content, so here’s some historical trivia for everyone. Namely, the origins of fish and chips, pretty much the most iconic UK dish.

The fish comes from the 1800s, when Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe were frying up fish before friday and eating it during the Sabbath; being Jewish means a lot of preparation like this, because you’re not allowed to work on the holidays, which includes cooking or indeed lighting a fire. The practice is not unique to eastern Europe, and was done at minimum in Portugal, India (mostly vegetables there, though) and Belgium, but I don’t know if it was a Jewish thing there.

Anyway, this goes far back enough to be mentioned in Oliver Twist in the late 1830s, namely the warehouses these were stored in. Starting in... depends who you ask, but about 1860 probably, they started selling this to everyone. A few enterprising non-Jews also sold it as fish cooked ‘in the Jewish style’. How this could possibly be a selling point in 1800s England escapes me.

So that’s the fish covered, sure. This in turn dovetails nicely with England’s fish consumption, especially cod, as a product of not being allowed to eat meat on certain days (this need for fish led to, among other things, the borderline-unintentional colonisation of what is now Canada). The potato? Well, for one, potato in Europe can only go so far back because it’s a North American import, but beyond that...

Frying in general was taking off in northern England since that was very much mill country at the time. This meant lots of oil from pressed cotton seeds, which was used for frying; I’m going to take a moment here to tell anyone reading this that as far as cooking oil goes, cotton oil is probably the worst kind you can put in your mouth this side of diesel, so uh, don’t do that.

Anyway, this in conjunction with the new ubiquity of potato as a cheap food crop in the UK resulted in a ton of potato being fried ‘in the French style’. It’s not actually French, but I imagine they either got it through France, or if the reason is anything like ‘French fries’ in the US, they got it from Belgium (the actual originator), namely the parts of it that spoke French. It took a while longer for the two to be combined into one dish.

So one of the most iconic pieces of British cuisine is actually a fusion of a Belgian import (using NA ingredients), and a Jewish dish that could’ve come from many places but in this particular case arrived from eastern Europe. This is in stark contrast to other, actually completely English delicacies, such as green (later black) tea, or curry and awkward silence.

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Gratuitous Japanese

Level 1: Adding superfluous Japanse honourifics.

Level 2: Replacing English words with Japanese words that mean the same, just to make it more Japanese.

Level 3: Take an English word or words, translate it into katakana (incorrectly at that), then romanise that back into English. Then, since this is incomprehensible, add the original English in parentheses next to it.

I’m currently proofreading for the first case of level 3 I have ever witnessed, which arrived at オタダンサ instead of ウォーターダンサー (never mind you shouldn’t be doing this to begin with), and so we have a sentence containing “the Otadansa (Water Dancer)”. 

I’m not allowed to correct this, by the way.

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As the resident cranky old person, I reject the term ‘isekai’ for being altogether too anime.

Instead, I suggest we all adopt ‘Narnialike’.

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Just saw someone forget Minoriko’s name and compromise on “what’s-her-fructose”.

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Bartholomew (Original) Bartholomewtwo (The sequel) Bartholonya (The anime adaptation)