social.noyu.me

we've been thinking we want to re-read SubaHibi DtRH1 for a week (not the same thing as DtRH2, which we just re-read the first “day” of before napping). we now… really need some calming, distracting activity. so… let's re-read SubaHibi DtRH1!

whoa we have never touched this game's CG gallery feature before, what a wonderful little photo album; in normal circumstances it's “just another feature of a VN” but it's really nice to be reminded of right now

i think it might be impossible, before (perhaps?) finishing the game, to return to DtRH1 once you've gotten past it, which i'm sure is supposed to mean something or other

however we are of course technically skilled enough to

have an idea how to bypass this

if there's some secret trick to it we're supposed to know, well, pity, we'll just have to read it a third time at some point :)

hmm :)

did you know Minakami Yuki is apparently quite good at computering all things considered? in SubaHibi, as a fictional character, that is.

we associate this image of her with the song “Living Game” from the SubaHibi OST (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DORkeovyXzI) and heard it just now :)

as much as you really shouldn't trust us on this, it's increasingly obvious we're quite far down the road of getting less psychotic now, but for as long as the danger remains and the griefs keep coming and keep being stronger, using the psychosis to our advantage is good

that is: magical thinking in a psychotic state, doing things like thinking “what would Minakami Yuki, the fictional SubaHibi character, do?” is in fact perfectly rational behaviour if you are very, very deliberate about it. and that's why we're posting our way through the arc

we must apologise to bystanders who will be harmed by this, and we will think about how to deal with it once we're recovered, but there is a sort of

ability to write your will into reality by posting publicly

(which we mean in a purely rational sense)

that we need right now

if we don't trust our brain to hold onto a string of thoughts, then… we trust twitter to

if we don't trust our brain to remember what we did, then… we trust twitter to

if we don't trust our brain to hold us to what we did, then… we trust our audience and future self to

and this kind of way of processing grief forces us to attain an absolute zen state, behaving as maximally rationally as we possibly can to get through things, for as long as it lasts — and it seems like the body rewards you by actually sobering up if you do this!

we must sound incredibly wise, we're not, we're idiots who shouldn't have picked up a posting habit ten years ago, but for so long as we have one, it is very useful for keeping ourselves intact through trying circumstances

Minakami Yuki would never be a poster; this is basically in the text of SubaHibi itself, she signs up to a forum under an alias so bizarre the forum moderator immediately knows who she is because it's so strange, and just lurks, and she has no mobile phone!

but you will have to forgive us for retaining the poster trait for at least a bit longer until we see how it washes out; you can perhaps see in our justifications for continuing to exist, like, several possible reasons why we might want to keep being posters despite it all

the song “Kaikoku” from the SubaHibi OST just auto-played on YouTube for us right now by accident and it also feels fitting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRdtb9yY3-E

okay, right, where were we… we will rename UserData to UserData2 and hopefully this will let us replay DtRH1 for a bit!

…that didn't work.

see, we are in fact not gods, we are in fact still human and we really hope you don't copy us, dear gods, it is a miracle we got anywhere here at all rather than immediate death by our own stupid fucking hubris

hmm…

maybe we can play the unpatched steam version, then, installed into a fresh Steam Library? that's not the worst idea. we have been looking for an excuse to do that eventually, we may as well do it

okay, time to make our SubaHibi install “conveniently go missing”

…done!

and now we can tell Steam to uninstall it with some semblance of safety

…done!

and now we reinstall…

i think the process of writing this thread has calmed us sufficiently after that nap (to be clear, when we awoke after a 1h nap after the previous SubaHibi thread, our vision was sizzling and our body was clearly not doing well — now it is doing fine by contrast)

but we picked this chapter of this game to play for a good reason, we'll let it see us through the evening to ensure we sleep well again tonight

the plan is seemingly working btw!

shoutout to whoever at Valve made it so that Steam doesn't constantly show your deadname on screen at all times these days, it did that for many many years and someone should think long and hard about why they made usernames unchangeable (and they need to fix that still!)

lmao the OST track on loop right now is called “Living Game”; yeah we are deliberately, rationally, trying to in some sense live out the game, yes, but only to the extent that benefits us

i think an important thing about stories is, if you really want to believe them, that's powerful. it's very dangerous also of course. but we are basically writing a story so beautiful about how we got out of the remaining part of this… “arc”… that we can strongarm our future self

we happen to know that past instances of stories have so badly affected us they've almost gotten us killed (cough Suruga Monkey cough), with any luck we can write one that gets us to not be killed (by ourselves), because gee, hikari_no_yume was not-so-secretly suicidal

i'm not sure we'd generally recommend it as a technique though; it works because we happen to be able to simultaneously intellectually regard it as a lie, as a thing that can be modified; as we are quite fond of saying in recent times, “all narratives are false”!

you really have to be unfathomably humble and good at rational and meta-rational thinking to pull this kind of thing off without it killing you, you know. and that's not an attempt to brag, we know we still have tiers of hubris to be knocked down from, it's just… instructive

oh, it also only works if you have “feels bound by past commitments” and “believes in truth more than they believe in protecting their self-image” and so on as core personality traits. hikari_no_yume absolutely hates being forced to walk back anything she's previously said

it's a magic trick, which is to say it is purely trick, there is no actual “magic” here, it works only as long as you believe it works, but when you do believe in it, it has some chance of becoming real (see: fiat currency)

we have spent an hour and a half or so explaining a lot of stuff to some very valued friends, and we have definitely hit the explaining budget for the day now, so finally, we will SubaHibi DtRH1… Steam unpatched version… we hope?

oh right the unpatched version looks different!

[pointing at the screen excitedly] hill of sunflowers

gods, hearing “yoru no himawari” again right now makes us want to cry, it's such a profoundly meaningful piece of music to us

minakami yuki winding up kagami never gets old to us

“the road to hell is paved with good intentions” sure is a phrase we needed this past fortnight but somehow never thought of until being reminded of it just now… so many times, so so so so many times have we needed to remember it… it's what we've been calling “hubris”!

the unpatched Steam version is the cute comfort media version of SubaHibi it must be said… lots of cute, with very little meaning, though… you know, right now we're overloaded, burdened with meaning, so cute comfort media is precisely what we need, hence the choice of chapter

this background image… we accidentally skipped past it and just restarted the game, configured the text-skip button and skipped back to this place just to take a screenshot… and we did that because

this is such a hikari_no_yume kind of background image

we want to live here

yuki heads there while trying to go to “Suginomiya”, no idea if that's a real place, and she also thinks she's made a wrong turn immediately after that scene, so who knows where this even is, if it's even meant to be somewhere specific at all, but: very hikari_no_yume space

it's also, hmm, not totally dissimilar in some ways from the place we actually live; at least, in some of the ways we most care about; which may also be illustrative!

man… if we're back to our source engine scenery vibing [i promise this makes sense we just might be too not-thinky to explain the connection right now], almost involuntarily, then we're not too far gone are we. hikari_no_yume is not yet dead, rejoice, rejoice

the way light scatters in built environments to create light and shadow and everything in between, this too is one of the many colours of the world [in the 色んな事 sense] of which we are so fond

it's not in a sense surprising we still think this, it's just… all was nearly lost

and this is a Studio SHAFT-ass environment (refuses to elaborate)

i forgot this chapter opens with what's very obviously [rot13]fbzrbar pbzzvggvat fhvpvqr[/rot13] (possibly fictionalised/rationalised into seeming like something else)

well, you know, i'll live happily etc (this is not a bit it's an important concept)

good grief what a beautiful background

this game keeps throwing calming evening sunset backgrounds at us

it's just what we need right now

zakuro our so dearly beloved 💔

[this comment and why her showing up makes us want to make it will make sense if you've played the game:]

lately it really has been, for us, during these trying days, like the sky is filled with anxious words 「不安な言葉」… and for that reason it has been difficult to sleep

but i think we're starting to feel, especially now, like the last of those 不安な言葉 might have fallen out of the sky and gently hit the ground. like there might be no more grief we need to process. like we can finally sleep long and hard. we really, really hope so, you know.

zakuro is really dearly beloved to us as a character for a lot of reasons. she's so terribly innocent, in a positive sense, and the world does her incredibly dirty for it, and it breaks your heart over and over and over seeing all the ways in which it could've been so different

and if we have any kind of hubris we find ourselves too deeply attached to, a hubris we refuse to discard, a hubris that at best we can only moderate and put in very sobering rational context, it is the idea that we want to somehow contribute to a world where zakuro wouldn't die

this has in some sense always been the most important of our dreams, one of 「光の夢」 (hikari no yume), for maybe a decade, even though we honestly couldn't tell you why we have that dream, beyond a sense that some younger version of us really needed something like it

and to be clear, the original form of that dream was something like “write a very compelling story” or “make a very compelling visual novel” or “make a very compelling video game”; we have been squatting the domain name magicalgirl.online for god knows how many years now

like seriously we have owned that domain for at least 8 years, and in recent years we almost never mention it, but we own it, with a reason, a project we … probably should consider returning to, with a decade of wisdom in tow

and as much as we may now be blackpilled on romance between human beings, and we've taken a significant hit to our hubris when it comes to the safety of the notion of the romance of a dream, we definitely can't… abandon this particular dream entirely, that's for sure

…in whatever form it may take! fiction is only one form of the dream, right.

in practice, there's like. well. our friend groups seem to always consist primarily of zakuros who somehow have survived the world, whereas we're somehow not a zakuro, because the world is kind to us

and we know that we must, must, must, moderate our hubris, lest we promise someone a dream so wonderful that our inability to deliver it kills them. that kind of thing has, quite literally, killed someone incredibly dear to us, and scarred many others, ourselves included

in fact, that exact thing almost killed us, very recently; this is a major ingredient of what set off this whole (incredibly regrettable) psychotic break thing, in more ways than you can possibly know

so maybe we are in fact a zakuro, just from the 0.1% of zakuros who get lucky

in recent years we have become so cynical and jaded as to perhaps think that even attempting to save zakuro is not a worthwhile pursuit… we used to do saviour-ish actions very frequently, we now do them much more rarely, even though we have more resources and time to use

and like, i don't know. sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is being their friend, and being a friend who won't and can't promise them the world, and who won't try to “fix” anything for them, because when you've been failed so, so, so many times, that's terrifying

it's something we need to really meditate on long and hard, and hopefully the massive hit to our hubris and everything else about the horrible experience of these weeks gives us a new perspective on everything

we don't know what to do about it

but we must do… something.

honestly, looking back at our childhood, looking at it with the kind of perspective you can only get from having had to change your opinion on it several times and get a huge amount of distance (distance we're really lucky to have, by the way), we… probably are a 0.1% zakuro

i don't think this world wants us to exist; broadly speaking, we've just somehow made it through selection after selection after selection relatively unscarred, remarkably unscarred, all things considered. we are proof not that the world is kind to our kind, but of the opposite

and somehow, somehow, we're really good at not telegraphing our vulnerabilities in such a way that the average person knows how to get us killed. this is partly because the world has been kind to us in ways that make us a lot less vulnerable than we're “supposed” to be…

but we are, in the end, a zakuro, tragically enough, and we know this because when mania personified, the psychosismaxxer, tore through our entire friend group of zakuros, we were not spared, and until today we couldn't say we'd be safe from a literal corporeal death to it

and that, everyone, is our grief, basically all of it, a full explanation for all that's happened the past few weeks, at least if you think long and hard enough about the many, many implications of the things we just said

and so we return to subahibi because we really need to be able to sleep tonight.

that's right