Delusion Diary

Here you will find the trifling, delusional ramblings of the webmaster about whatever she's fixated on at the time of writing, and the occasional good opinion. No fixed update schedule.

I feel like one of the things that made vocaloid really popular back in the day, not just in Japan but overseas too is the idea of the characters. Like, Meiko and Kaito didn't perform very well despite having anime mascots because those mascots weren't really intended to be characters, but Miku, in addition to being the first vocaloid released for Vocaloid 2 and therefore having improved software, was also the first vocaloid in the "character vocal" series. The girl on Miku's box wasn't just intended as a visual representation of the voice bank, it was intended to be an actual character that could be featured in MVs, fanart, cosplays, merchandise, etc. Same goes for Rin, Len, Luka and most other vocaloids too. I'm convinced it's why there are so many cutesy female voice banks, because they're a pretty safe bet when your primary audience is otaku. - 12/8/23

I feel like the reason why there aren’t a bunch of really skilled anime artists in the west, or more specifically America is because there really isn’t a market for anime styled art in the USA. Plenty of Americans like anime, but not enough to really make money from it. Like, not just in Japan but in other East Asian countries, being really good at drawing anime-styled art could get you a job as a light novel illustrator, or a video game artist. In the USA, despite anime being pretty much mainstream, otaku stuff i.e moe/bishojo media, joseimuke stuff, is still very niche. It’s niche in those countries too but that niche is much bigger and more profitable. That, and most westerners don’t understand the motivation/appeal behind certain anime and anime adjacent aesthetics, it’s why you have people making redesigns of anime girls but taking away all the cuteness. I’m not saying that westerners can’t make good anime styled art, I’m just saying that it’s not super common. - 12/8/23

Even Though My Song Has No Form by Doriko feat. Hatsune Miku sounds oddly like a beautiful piano song I heard in a Chinese restaurant years ago… maybe it was an instrumental version. - 12/8/23

My Personal Yu-Gi-Oh! Anime Ranking (originally posted in the community tab of my YouTube channel several months ago but I still stand by this.)

Duel Monsters - I'm not just putting this one first because it's the original but because despite the controversial filler arcs it's probably the most consistent Yu-Gi-Oh anime, as well as probably making the most sense in-universe. I only actually got into Yu-Gi-Oh from the funny dub clips and decided to actually watch the full show because of the interesting concepts and influences like Egyptian mythology and gaming, the theme of using your past to unlock your future all with 2000s anime aesthetics.

Zexal - My second favorite not only because of it's similarities to the original plot wise, but also because of it's interesting characters, plot consistency, and probably the best animation out of all the animes. When I started the series I honestly didn't expect to like it as much as I did, but over the course of the series the characters really grew on me. I also really like the character designs. When compared to GX I actually prefer zexal's brand of eccentricity due to most of it being less "lolrandom" and making sense in universe. Zexal also has alot of rewatch value in my opinion and I appreciate the first two episodes alot more after watching the entire series.

5Ds - CARD GAMES ON MOTORCYCLES!! Okay seriously, I liked this one alot and even considered placing it before zexal. I liked the overall look and feel of the series, especially in the Japanese version (Art style, animation, color pallet, character design, music, voice acting, etc...) as well as the characters and interesting concepts used, like the blend of the distant past and the distant future in it's lore and the character's conflicting philosophies showcased not only through the dialogue, but thought the duels themselves.

GX - Dubbed memes aside, this show is pretty good despite the tons of random filler episodes (especially at the beginning). Although I did like some of the episodes during season three's pivot to grimdark, I didn't like how nearly none of that had ANY foreshadowing. Although lack of foreshadowing outside of a story arc, questionable writing choices that make me question if the writers were sniffing glue, and mediocre animation are my biggest problems with GX, the lovable characters make it heartwarming in an adorkable, cheesy 2000's comedy kind of way.

VRAINS - Honestly this Yu-Gi-Oh was just good. I didn't really feel like the characters were as easy to connect to compared to the other series. It had some moments that really made it shine, but I feel like similar things were done better in the prior series. The pacing in season 2 felt weird to me for some reason so it took awhile for me to get through it. That said, I'm placing Vrains above ARC-V just because it managed to be pretty good the entire show through. The ending was well done despite that "surprising" turn taken in season 3. I do really like it for what it is and aside from the aforementioned pacing gripe it's very well executed.

ARC-V - *insert Tyler Sisters joke here* I honestly liked this show, don't get me wrong, but I feel like at some point during the Friendship Cup arc it shot itself in the foot and never fully recovered. Although some episodes after that point were really good I feel like the show really dropped off after that point. However, I did really like the characters and alot of the episodes before that point. I really like the manga and it's albeit reworked, utilization of the characters. Also all the music for this series goes hard.

I'm watching SEVENS and although I'm watching Go Rush!! it's still airing so I don't want to rate it prematurely. I didn't include Season 0 since it's structured differently. - 12/8/23

I like reading obscure old books (19th - early 20th century teen/YA literature), but I hate REALLY enjoying a book and wanting to discuss it with people online and draw fanart of the characters etc. but can't because of unknown they are nowadays. So few people have read or even heard of these books, even if they'd probably really enjoy reading them, just because of sheer obscurity many of them have fallen into. That's actually part of the motivation behind my Book Log, trying to drag unknown hidden gems somewhat out of obscurity. - 12/9/23

I've never been interested in drawing for money. If a friend wanted a drawing from me I'd just do it for free, and if I wanted/needed the money I'd just sell prints, buttons, keychains etc. I used to be really invested in what was "trendy" in art communities some years ago... I'd watch popular art YouTubers, and save "Draw Your OC in This:" memes and those sorts of things, but now I'm sort of disillusioned with most online art communities. I mainly post my art on my site here and a couple of oekaki boards with small communities and like-minded users because every other site is seemingly too corporate (the art side of Twitter & Instagram), too much drama (Toyhou.se) and/or too like mainstream social media (Artfol). I kind of wish that there was some sort of art site with an atmosphere similar to old-school DeviantArt and personal art sites of yore. I suppose that this is closest I'll get for the time being. - 12/9/23

I feel like traditional illustrations aren't very popular online anymore. If you go to the popular/trending section of pretty much any art website or search for art on social media, you'll notice that there's a great disparity between the attention that traditional pieces get versus digitally drawn pieces. It didn't always used to be this way, but at some point during the early 2010s it seems like digital art got significantly more popular than digital art, perhaps due to technological advances. In fact you see very few younger artists online who post traditional stuff at all. It makes me sad because although traditional art doesn't look as flashy as digital, it is in many cases harder because of the lack of conveniences available to you. However I personally find making traditional art more rewarding and I hope that some other people do too. - 12/9/23

I find it interesting when media gets interpreted in a completely different way by a completely different audience than the intended one. Take for example caramelldansen, a Swedish eurodance song from the 90s that in the late 2000s some Japanese otaku decided to make an animation of the characters from Popotan, an anime, dancing to a pitched and sped up version of it. From there it spread like wildfire across the Internet reaching outside of Japanese anime circles and is now most closely associated with 2000s and early 2010s anime fandom culture than 1990s Swedish dance music. - 12/11/2023

I love doujin media. There's something oddly pure in high-quality works made by people purely out of passion for a specific thing, whether it be an anime, video game, or a certain archetype (e.g. Victorian style anime maid girls), the dedication of many doujinka inspires me, and really shows that hobby/fandom activities can be considered a valid form of art. In fact, this very site is inspired by Japanese personal art sites from the early 2000s. - 12/12/23

There are some things that I'm not interested in in real life, but like fictitiously. Not like things that are necessarily bad irl, but rather things that I'm simply disinterested in in real life. - 12/12/23

I miss fan forums. While they still exist nowadays few of them are nearly as active as they were during the 2000s and early 2010s. I'm pretty sure that social media displaced them as /the/ place to discuss media that you like, and in my opinion it was for the worst. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram aren't designed for fandoms, infact they aren't designed for discussion in general. Although you can pretty much post about anything you want on popular social media sites, that's exactly the issue in the case of fannish actives; there's nothing to keep individuals on-topic or to really prevent people from seeing content that they don't want to (NOTPS, squick-y content), leading to tons of petty drama & discourse, even though this DEFINITELY existed on forums in the past it tended to be self contained to a specific site and you didn't have chronically online teenagers doxxing each other over the pronouns of video game characters, or unsubstantiated headcanons that they treat as fact. Due to forums being separated into different subforums or "boards", it's a lot easier for people to avoid stuff that they don't like, and therefore avoid conflict with people who do like those things. Additionally, each board typically has it's own rules as to what is and isn't on-topic, which prevents extreme derails that lead to flame wars and other foolishness. - 12/14/23

I've never really been into fanfiction. I've been looking at fanarts and reading and engaging in online discussions of works that I like for years, but I've never really gotten into reading or writing fanfiction (despite having a lot of secondhand exposure to it + a familiarity with it's culture). I have actually written one fanfiction that I posted to Quotev over a year ago, but it was more for a meme than anything. Maybe when it comes to reading fanfiction I'm not all that interested because of how rare in-character, genfics (non-shippy fics) are. Personally never been super into shipping (especially the associated culture), though I can see the appeal. I've always found friendship more cute/easy to idealize. - 12/17/23

I wish that eloquent and complex prose was still the norm in popular fiction. I think that many writers nowadays believe that words are only supposed to utilitarian; the idea that words are only supposed to convey an idea, nothing more and nothing less, that words in and of themselves and their arrangement is not supposed to be lyrical or exhilarating, and that the contemporary reader cannot continuously pay attention to more complex writing. The last idea may be partially true, but it's only the case if people have no complex works of prose to train themselves on, to see if engaging with eloquent writing is pleasurable. - 12/23/23

I miss dollmakers, although I suppose it wouldn't be fair to say that I 'miss' them because they still exist but a lot of the newer ones seem more catered towards social media users looking to make custom profile pictures than weebs trying to visualize their anime OCs. A lot of the newer ones seem more watered down and less fun for some reason. At least a ton of old dollmakers from the past were saved from the brink of destruction when flash went down via emulation. - 12/24/23

I've never really been a yumejoshi/selfshipper, despite how common they are among fangirls. I've never really had any blatant self insert original characters either, although I've definitely based aspects of my original characters off of aspects of myself. Back to the original point, I think it is because media that I consume for escapism as well as things that I create generally tend to trend towards being things that I can simply be a spectator to as opposed to projecting onto or self inserting. This leads me to my bizarre delusions related to obsession with friendship between men in fiction. After a bit of thinking I've come to the conclusion that this obsession probably originated with my fixation on the Night At The Museum movies as a kid, more specifically the tiny cowboy guy and the tiny Roman guy. If you've watched these movies you know what I'm talking about ,and if you haven't you should because they're really good. But I only really became conscious of this obsession rather recently when I got more invested in fannish activities online. This ties into my spectator tendency in that it's ultimately an obsession with something I can never experience and therefore the idea of simply admiring something without attempting to directly engage with it via inserting yourself into it mentally is at it's strongest. I've always kind of felt weirdly self conscious about this obsession for some reason, honestly not sure why since there are MUCH weirder things to fangirl about as the internet has taught me, it's just that it's so oddly specific. - 12/26/23

Youtube isn't great. I've barely used YT in the past like what, 3 months? Because I feel as if I can consume the same sort of content (music and educational content mainly) in a better way elsewhere. Youtube has been going downhill both in regards to viewing and uploading videos for several years honestly, but I feel like in the past 2 to 3 years it's gotten significantly worse. My main gripes with Youtube are the abundance of advertisements, YT Shorts being shoved in your face even if you show absolutely no interest in them, and the way recommendations work. It seems like with each passing year online advertising in general becomes more abundant and more obnoxious, I genuinely think I can tolerate ads you see on regular satellite TV better than ads you see on the internet. It's just something about online advertising that tends to feel more manipulative, as if these companies and advertising agencies are trying to hack your brain, 'personalized ads' make this even worse. As for YT shorts, I actually didn't hate them at first I just wasn't interested in them, but some recent updates to Youtube's layout have made it effectively impossible to bypass shorts in your recommendations, in addition to a line of random popular shorts that pop up when you search for anything. The unavoidable popular shorts brings me to the issue of really lousy moderation when it comes to the shorts section of YT as well. I've had to report short thumbnails for containing NSFL content and titles implying that these videos contain NSFL content multiple times without youtube doing anything about obvious violations of their TOS. The last thing is probably the recommendations section, or more specifically how it seems to be getting worse in terms of accuracy with each update. The biggest drawback to trying to research something on Youtube is that if you watch one video related to a topic that you normally don't watch videos about, YT assumes your obsessed with it and will watch any video about that topic. Say for example I watch a video explaining different Charismatic Christian denominations, then youtube will flood my recommendations with weird megachurch services and things of that sort for the next week because I watched one video related to that topic. It's just not worth it in my opinion. - 12/27/23

Someday, when I feel that my art is good enough, I want to sell something like prints or fanbooks with my art on/in them. Not for the money, but just for the experience of doing so, so I wouldn't charge very much. I feel like I've improved a lot in the past year alone, so maybe someday I will. - 12/28/23

New year's day. It feels odd that it's 2024 already, the 2020s always seemed so far off and futuristic, but I guess it's here at last. Anyways, the last song that I listened to in 2023 and the first that I listened to in 2024 was Snowy Feather Kiss by ave;new feat. Saori Sakura on niconico, I thought that it was a fitting song to close the year with. I mostly just read and edited my website on new years eve, wasn't interested in going to see any fireworks or anything. Also, this Christmas season felt shorter, maybe it's because whenever you want time to pass slowly it ironically feels shorter than you want. - 1/1/24

Ugh, I hate it when one of my niche, old online communities gets discovered by Twitter/TikTok/Instagram users. Writing this because I drew something on 2draw, an old oekaki site for the first time in several months and it seems like 'Twitter artist' types have discovered it. I hate when chronically online social media zoomie brain rot reaches some of the few saner parts of the internet, I'm not even sure why they are interested in these sorts of sites since they won't get the instant validation and drama they so crave. - 1/2/24

I've noticed that when I draw traditionally regularly, and then create an oekaki illustration, that it's easier to do oekaki by practicing on pencil and paper. This is most likely because early oekaki applets were designed by and for people who drew a lot traditionally as well as digitally, so things such as complex blending modes and tons of layers weren't to be expected. I feel like part of the reason why oekaki boards aren't very popular nowadays is because a lot of people getting into digital art now get started using rather complex programs that make simple web-based oekaki applets seem rather limited. - 1/8/24

In my reading, as is evident from my book log, I've come across and read many now-obscure public domain books that I've thoroughly enjoyed and been somewhat disappointed in how unknown they are. Many of these books were rather popular once upon a time but have since gradually fallen into obscurity as far as people reading them for entertainment goes, and are primarily mentioned in academic contexts (e.g the study of 19th century popular fiction). While I do relish the occasional mentions in academic literature that I find in researching these books after finishing them as I find these mentions helpful, I do wish that more people were interested in reading these books for fun nowadays. - 1/22/24

I've become quite obsessed with 19th century English boarding school stories over the past few months. Not sure why, but this specific genre is oddly appealing to me, and easy to explore too since a ton of these old books are available online for free as they have lapsed into the public domain. Objectively speaking, these books are rather difficult to rate and are impossible to rate from a solely contemporary perspective, so I've had a lot of fun in doing research to aid in my understanding of these stories. Most of these stories weren't written with the intention of being literary masterpieces or anything, and although good, are effectively YA fiction from 100+ years ago and aren't perfect (although nothing is). Once you read around 3-5 of these books you begin to pick up on common genre conventions and tropes, something which doesn't bother me as long as they're used well in a creative matter (all art is ultimately derivative, after all). I don't mind the dated prose style, idealistic sentimentality, or pervading pious tone that form a large part of the reason for the contemporary obscurity of such literature, on the contrary I find all of those things quite endearing. This is a thinly disguised shill, but I mean practically half of the stuff on this site is me shilling underrated/obscure stuff that I like so whatever. - 2/17/24

I like looking at pictures of dead people. Not pictures of dead bodies but rather old photographs of people who you can say with certainty have passed away because the age of the photos. I particularly like looking at photos that weren't taken in studios but rather were taken in the spur of the moment, like Christmas photos from the 1890s, or pictures of children with their toys. In addition to seeing daily life from the past, since photographs were harder to take in the 19th and early 20th centuries somebody would have had to find the events - or more likely the people depicted in the photo to be rather important and worth remembering, which helps counteract the dehumanization which comes with the passage of time. And yet for some reason which I can't ascertain, I feel an odd sort of nostalgia when looking through sepia tinted images from the century before last, it's as if these long gone people could be smiling only yesterday. - 3/15/24

One of the things that I like about operating a personal website is that there's no need to fit the things that you display on it into broad, popular categories. When you post something on many social media networks, you have to 'tag' your content with certain keywords in order for it to appear when somebody searches for that thing, or for it to get recommended to people who look at content related to that subject. The main weakness of this system is that while it works fairly well for subjects with large online followings, it leaves much to be desired for content related to more niche subjects depending on how the site prioritizes particular tags based on activity and the number of posts using that tag, meaning that content can get effectively filtered to the bottom of a website due to not being advantageously tagged in spite of quality. Another common issue with social media tagging and metadata is almost the opposite - how content can end up being shown to an audience you never intended to see it, which I believe is a substantial factor in the rise of pointless online discourse; websites make it easy to find content that you are likely to dislike based on your browsing history so that you'll interact with it angrily (e.g a comment argument chain), and spend more time on the platform, and therefore be exposed to more advertisements. Of course many social platforms allow you to block tags, however the efficacy of this strategy varies depending on how the website's filter system is designed and there is also the additional issue of unintentionally blocking content that you want to see due slight overlap in related yet distinct subjects, spellings designed to circumvent content getting included in a tag or getting filtered out of a tag, such the phenomenon of people censoring the names of fictional characters and the like (although this is related to the larger issue of social media being designed for fairly mainstream 'normie' content and failing the needs of more niche content). On a personal website, you only really have to be concerned with Search Engine Optimization which is something that many hosting services handle for you. One thing that I like about Neocities in particular is that the SEO isn't super broad, so you have to actually be looking for something hosted on a Neocities website in order to get one as a search result. - 5/17/24