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Most importantly: DO NOT FORGET TO PANIC. If you can form roving bands of discontent, all the better.

Hey everybody, Important head's up: we will be upgrading to a new version of our forums software (IPB 4) in the very near future, hopefully before the end of the week. Invision will be assisting us with the upgrade, so we can all feel better knowing we're in good hands. Stuff You should know: Some users' have a different log-in name than their public-facing forums display name. After the upgrade those two will be merged together, and you'll simply log-in with your display name (the name that was public-facing before the upgrade). IPB 4 can't utilize our current themes, so when the upgrade happens all our current themes will be scrapped. After the upgrade I'll start the process of uploading the new versions of the FuwaFabulous and Dark themes, but unfortunately Gravity Green 2013 is no longer supported by the Dev and will not be making the transition with us. We will absolutely take time to mourn its passing after the upgrade is complete. If you're making a meaty post, please write it offline in a word editor and then copy-paste it into the forums until the upgrade has been completed. I can't be sure we'll get much warning before Invision launches the upgrade process, and if you were to click "submit" on a big post just after the upgrade started, you'd lose your whole post. If I get a firm date of when they'll be performing the update, I'll let you know ASAP. As it stands, it could come at any moment of any day. Therefore: please take great pains to panic and form roving bands of discontent in the streets. What other questions do you have for me about the upgrade before we get this thing kicked off? ------------------------------------------------ EDIT: Answers to Questions: 1. Are we at risk of data loss? Another "rollback" catastrophe? A: There IS a risk, yes, that something could go wrong during the upgrade. With forums of our size, the best thing we can do is make backups regularly to minimize the loss we'd face in the worst-case scenario. Thus, I made full backups (database AND files) on both 10/5 and today 10/7. I will continue to make at least one backup each day from now until the upgrade is successfully completed. I hated the data loss we experienced with the two big "rollbacks" this Summer, and I want to mitigate as much of that risk as possible. 2. How will themes change in IPB 4? Can we make our own? What about re-creating Gravity Green? A: The software on the back-end of the forums is changing substantially, so a bunch of new functionality will require new/modified assets. Additionally, IPB 4 is responsive, so you'll get a much improved experience on any size of device. It may even be enjoyable to surf this place on your flip phones circa 2005. I don't know that for sure, so don't quote me on that. Smartphones and tablets, tho, will be several times better to navigate on the new themes, though. As far as making themes goes... Invision has guides for how to do that (I'm the wrong person to talk about the technical side of themes), so if you want to check out their site and learn the ropes... go for it! Remaking GG: by doing so we'd run the risk of getting in trouble with the Gravity Green theme's developer (who, it so happens, makes all our other themes) (I like them, and I'm not really looking for a blood feud atm). If there are talented coders who want to try their hands at it, however, I can help you get in touch with them. They're the ones who would make that call. ... EDIT 10/08/2015 5:10 PM EST Invision is working to upgrade the site. We ran into a small issue, but we updated a driver and we think it'll solve the problem. Suffice it to say that this may be a touch-and-go operation.... so hold onto your bootstraps. EDIT 10/08/2015 5:47 PM EST We patched the software ~5 minutes after we had the first problem, but I haven't heard back from Invision, yet. I'm really hoping they haven't gone home for the night, but if they did, I suppose they'll give this another go sometime tomorrow. That said, the support staff have been fabulous to us. All things considered, they're doing a great job.

FuwaFabulous rightfully triumphs!

Well, it's been fun here on Fuwa with you guys, but now I have no choice but to leave forever. See you all never!

You know how you can translate Japanese far too literally and end up with stilted and nonsensical prose? It’s also possible reinterpret Japanese graphics far too literally and up with an illegible mess. Case in point: vertical type. Japanese text is typically typeset one of two ways: the traditional tategaki style (characters arranged in vertical columns, read from right to left), or the more modern yokogaki style (characters arranged in horizontal rows, read left to right, as in English). When editing images for visual novels, you’ll usually be dealing with a lot of tategaki, but it’s possible you’ll encounter some yokogaki as well. Unless you just bought a pamphlet from that crazy guy hanging out beneath the subway stairs — Happy Birthday to Gravy! I’m Made of Bees! — you will literally never see English typeset this way. So how do you handle it when you do? Typically, as long as you have the room, you’d set it the same as you would any other English text: horizontal, left to right, for maximum legibility. But what if you don’t have room? Particularly when dealing with UI elements, you might only have enough real estate for a single vertical column of characters. What then? Grab it by the spine Thankfully, generations of English-language typesetters have already solved this problem for us. Just walk over to your media shelf and look for yourself. See all those books, DVDs, video games you’ve got lined up there? Not only did you spend an obscene amount of money on those — seriously, how are you ever going to pay off your student loans this way? — but their spines all display titles the exact same way: horizontal type, rotated 90 degrees clockwise so that it reads from top to bottom. Any designer worth his or her salt will tell you that’s how it’s done. So there’s your answer. Do that. You’re welcome. But now you face a much bigger challenge: convincing non-designers that this is, in fact, the best approach. The vertical smile frown This came up once on a project where almost the entire UI was arranged in vertical lines of Japanese calligraphy. I’d painstakingly set hundreds of text elements in the correct bookspine-style, only to get a note back from the project lead asking that everything be re-typeset in the exact manner of the original Japanese, character stacked atop character. Y o u k n o w , l i k e t h i s ? I’ve been a professional designer for enough years that, honestly, I forget not everyone gives much thought to why you don’t set type like this. So in that sense, the request didn’t annoy me; I understood the motivation behind it. But I did end up having to write a fairly lengthy defense of bookspine-style type as a result. Since I’m not the first person to face this problem, and I know I won’t be the last, I thought it might be useful to summarize a few of those points here. If you’re an image editor, maybe it’ll give you ammunition to back up your case one day. If you’re working with an image editor, maybe it’ll provide some insight into the thought he or she puts into typesetting. If you’re my mom, maybe you’ll finally believe I learned something in college. The End of the World as We Know It Seeing is believing, so let’s try all the options and see for ourselves what works and what doesn’t. I’ve cropped in on a small slice from a hypothetical UI sprite sheet for our discussion. I’ve also simplified it, hiding all the various hover and active states, so all we’re dealing with is the vanilla text. Here’s the original edited version: For this project, we need a script/calligraphic type that will remain legible even at very small sizes. (I do all my VN reading on an 8” tablet, so I use that as my small-screen baseline.) We land on this font here, a clean Western script that still feels right at home among traditional Eastern design elements. And since you can see that some of the UI text runs very long — these are chapter titles, I imagine — compactness is also a consideration. This typeface handles that quite nicely. Let’s see what happens if, rather than bookspine-style, we run these lines vertically: What’s wrong here? More like, what isn’t? It doesn’t fit: Unlike squarish Japanese characters, English letters tend to be taller than they are wide. This means if you stack them vertically, you’ll end up with something that eats up almost twice as much space as horizontal type. You’ll need to reduce the point size to make everything fit. Or worse yet, squish the letters vertically to compensate. Yuck. It fights against the letterforms: This is a script face, so it slants rightward, one letter leading the eye into the next. Moreover, lowercase letters set in script often physically join to one another, as if written in a smooth, flowing hand. A vertical stack is antithetical to both of these: there is no “next” letter to lead the eye into, nor is there any adjoining character to connect to. It looks like a gap-toothed palooka: Notice how some of the letter pairs almost overlap, while others have relatively large spaces between them. This is another reason English type wasn’t meant to stack vertically. Even though there’s exactly the same amount of space between the baseline of each letter, some have descenders (e.g., the “tails” of the letters y or q), some have ascenders (e.g., the “flagstaff” of the letters b or d), and some have neither (e.g., x or o). This gives the vertical type a drunken stagger-step of sorts, an ungainly visual gait that we’d like to avoid at all costs. It doesn’t handle punctuation well: There’s no graceful way to handle periods, colons, and so forth in vertical type. You could center it below the last letter, as in the original Japanese, but that looks confusing in English. And how would you handle a possessive, like “Darbury’s cat”? Stacked vertically, it would look more like “Darbury, scat.” (Fine. See ya, ingrate.) It’s borderline illegible: There’s been lots and lots of research into the science of how people read — how we recognize letters, words, and sentences. There’s a lot of pattern recognition going on in our brains and, for native speakers of Western languages, those patterns almost always work horizontally. Setting type vertically can literally slow down reading and comprehension speed by an order of magnitude. So let’s be clear: this sucks. But there are a few things we can do to slightly minimize the suckage. First, let’s set everything in all caps. Like this That eliminates our gap-tooth problem; uppercase letters don’t have ascenders or descenders, so all the letters now appear evenly spaced. But we’ve had to reduce the point size even further to make everything fit. (We started out at 20pt. We’re now at 12pt.) Also, our calligraphic type still slants to the right, making each letter feel like a drunk who leans against a wall only to find it isn’t there. We want a handwritten feel to the type, however, so we try switching to an upright block letter font instead: This is pretty much as good as it’ll get ... and it’s still not great. It’s still hard to read, and we’ve had to sacrifice the elegance of a script typeface. But wait — it gets worse. Right now, these lines have lots of padding left and right, since I’ve hidden all the other elements on this sprite sheet. What happens when they sit closer together, as they probably will in-game. You get this: I don’t know about you, but my brain wants to start reading horizontally adjacent words as sentences: “It birds and eye listen” Huh? It’s like trying to drive an SUV where the steering is constantly pulling to the right. It’s not what we’re looking for in a car, and it’s not what we’re looking for in our typesetting. In short, vertically set text is a god-awful mess. Don’t use it. (Obligatory waffling: Okay, maybe if there’s one or two vertical buttons in the whole game. And maybe if they were really, really short — you know, like “SAVE” and “QUIT”? Maybe then you could get away with it. But otherwise, nononono a thousand times no.) Introducing my backup singers I’m not the only one preaching this gospel. These fine folks agree: So the next time someone asks you to set vertical type, just say no. Then link to this blog post and tell ‘em Darbury told ya so.

As I was drinking my third cup of coffee this morning, it occurred to me that most non-otome or yaoi visual novels I can think of pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Bechdel Test requires that a work of fiction: have at least two women in itwho talk to each otherabout something besides a man.With obvious exceptions (Planetarian, etc.) most VNs have little trouble crossing this threshold — the casts are almost entirely female, and slice-of-life scenes are a staple of the genre. Meanwhile, nearly half of all American-made films don’t meet this same standard. So to make things a little more interesting, I’d like to propose the Darbury Test™ (full name: “The Darbury Addendum to the Bechdel Test”). To get this particular merit badge, the VN in question must: have at least two women in itwho talk to each otherabout something besides a man,neither of whom ends up having sex with the main character.That’s right. If either one of them ends up with a red-hot ramrod crammed in one or more meat holes, crying out, “OH, YOU CAME SO MUCH!” — fail. Even if the action happens off-screen (e.g., in an all-ages version) — fail. Even if the woman in question is actually a demon/robot/vampire/catgirl/taco — fail. Steins;Gate? Even that fails. I can also think of a bunch of VNs that pass. Either way, it makes for an interesting thought experiment while you’re waiting for that next pot of coffee to finish brewing. EDIT: Looks like the forum upgrade nuked all the styling of this post for a while. Sorry for the temporarily uncloaked spoilers.

*cackles madly*

THE FUWAPOCALYPSE IS RETURNING

I have a dream, that one day Fuwa will not face any techical issues, that Soon will be a thing of the past and that one day Aaeru will come back riding a white unicorn.

It's almost -- almost -- as if I made it my secret goal to steal and hide everything on Fuwa from you! ... RE: Guides -- I'll figure out what's out there and bundle them up for you guys. My Fuwa hours are 8-9PM today, so I'll plan on doing that tonight.

That wood probably be really pineful.

You mean Dark Theme

As a professional graphic designer myself, indeed rotating text is the way to go. You can also modify a font and/or let photoshop's pharagraph tool do the magic but in the end what you want is to keep type space even and readable.

Or actually, it might be tied with the Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya one, that one's amazing too.

2->4->1->3->5->6->7 if I recall correctly. Watching it chronologically won't change much to your comprehension imo. And it's not that complex. Do watch it though. It's great. edit: no, it's not based on the world of Tsukihime. It was written before Tsukihime and some characters are actually prototypes of future Tsukihime and F/SN characters. It's in the "nasuverse" though, but not in the same 'world' as Tsukihime.

I wonder how many nukiges will pass this test. Prbly not so many, considering most girls would partake in the orgy. Although prbly many normal vn's will pass the test. As it has side character girls never getting a route, so not getting to have sex with the protag. Although I doubt that would make the h-scenes still anything feministic. #kyaaa #Stop~~ #(Don't stop)IreallyLikeIt

Welp, I decided to go full ham yesterday. My team's lookin' real spiffy. If you guys want me to switch any of these to leader for a bit, I can... ;_; especially considering how Saber Alter's already got higher attack than my Lily at level 60.

Seems like ipb 4 has a reputation system I don't know if it is the like system reworked or a different one, I don't wont to lose my hard earned likes

little advice, do not study kanji alone or the readings just study vocabulary and grammar, learning vocabulary will teach you the readings and it will help you when you have to learn the grammar, also do not use romaji avoid it as much as possible.

No more... Gravity Green?

Fuwa Fabulous. Fabulously Fuwa. Glad to see I wasn't mistaken when I thought there was a reason I should force myself to abandon Gravity Green.

ggez gravity green

No more Gravity green? Gentleman, it has been a privilege reading vns with you in this forum until now.

Lego the original minecraft game since 1970s.

same for me, without gravity green my motivation for visiting fuwa crumbles hard, pretty much unable to cope with the other, less clear (to me) themes

RIP Gravity Green, it was a good ride.

Added this question to the OP and tried to answer it. Let me know if you want clarifications : ).

Yo yo yo, I'm feelin kawaii as shizzle this fine evenin. Welcome to the hood, uguu.

It's kinda like how Fate / Stay Night had a 2006 Anime...does that mean F/SN sucks? No, just the 2006 adaption does.

The anime is a lie. It doesn't exist. Read the VN, it's amazing.

katawa shoujo <3

Yeah, the grind is bad, but it's great you can use a controller. I just leaned back in my chair and relaxed on auto-fast forward battles.

Suspension of disbelief isn't consistent through every genre. I expect a bullet shot in Van Hellsing to do a different amount of damage compared to something like Band of Brothers and I expect gravity to work differently in anime compared to live action. In a slice of life school drama I expect people to act a little more like people not soulless puppets from a slasher movie. Bullying is something that many people have experienced and suffered from so they can already identify with the bullie, having it cartoonishly over exaggerated just seems unnecessary. There is already emotional weight in isolation and verbal abuse. You don't have to artifically try to up the ante.

Because that's the point, it has to be interesting. People don't want to read about some very mild bullying. It's like saying, god why do so many people die in action films. Or, why are all these people cheating on their partners in this soap opera. That shit doesn't happen in real life which is exactly why it's interesting. It's there to be entertaining, and being slightly mean to someone isn't very interesting to read. Of course they have to go off the deep end and push people super far. I don't know why you think it must be real, compared to every single other genre which you presumably know isn't.

A lot of it is that Japan is a collectivist society... which means it sanctions the sacrifice of an individual's happiness for the sake of the harmony of the group pretty much instinctively. Not to mention that moral cowardice seems to be ingrained into the modern culture amongst young people... I know, I am a long-time otaku and in many ways a weaboo... but if you obsess about something, you shouldn't be blind to its faults. Collectivism has a lot of advantages socially... but from an individual perspective, the peer pressure is unbelievably destructive at times. One particular Japanese saying says it all... 'The stake that sticks out will be pounded down'.

I can tell this is utter junk by how it looks. I'm glad they're disapperaing.

Welcome to the forums, chump. Watch out for fagets.

Welcome to the forums! Hope you enjoy your stay! Have a moe:

!! White Album 2 is one of my all time favorites ~ I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did~! I too wish to read the continuation but haven't gotten to it. I thought the VN was only partially patched or something anyways? I'm not sure but once I get a better grasp on Japanese it will be one of the first I read

Welcome~

you can use this one https://ankiweb.net/.../info/523650169 and this one https://ankiweb.net/...o/1668783345 to start, N5 and 4

Living in Japan, most everything I buy is naturally Japanese. However I figured tonight's purchase was worth mention. So, I decided to go and buy my first ever physical copy of VN. What I planned on buying tonight: Dies Irae or ChuSingra 46+1 What I ended up buying tonight:

Corpse Party: Book of Shadows Summary "I'm going to save you! I swear!" This sequel tells a series of short stories that help develop many of the characters introduced in the first game and even explores some hypothetical scenarios, answering those “What if they survived?” questions. Players will be given an opportunity to change the fates of the game’s characters – for better, or, in classic Corpse Party fashion, for worse. Despite the apparent benefit of knowing the first game’s events, players should not expect to have all the answers, and at times will find themselves asking if the destiny of these unfortunate souls can truly be altered. Ending Guideline / Suggested Route Order In order to move onto the next chapter, you must obtain the current chapter's True End. To unlock the final chapter Blood Drive, you must obtain all True & Wrong Endings OR import a Corpse Party: Blood Covered save file. Chapter Guideline Chapter 1: Seal True End Wrong End(s) Chapter 2: Demise True End Wrong End(s) Chapter 3: Encounter True End Wrong End(s) Chapter 4: Purgatory True End Wrong End(s) Chapter 5: Shangri-La True End Wrong End(s) Chapter 6: Mire True End Wrong End(s) Chapter 7: Tooth True End Wrong End(s) Chapter 8: Blood Drive True End Attribution This walkthrough is based on info attained on Gamefaqs.com (Ajogamer's walkthrough) with some adjustments made by me. Good, now go check the next least popular walkthrough by 'him'. Starts with a K. v .01: basic walkthrough template created. (9-19) v .02: Wrong Ends added. (9-20) v 1.0: True Ends added. (9-20)

Ever 17 FAQ Text displayed as tiny dots or tiny letters Various Movie File Issues