The Rice Digital Friday Letters Page, November 12, 2021 – a question of identity

A fine afternoon to you all, and you will hopefully note that I got the date right first time this week. I honestly don’t know why I have such a mental block sometimes, but I suspect it’s something to do with continually reading a combination of American, Japanese and British-format dates all day every day when tracking down things for us to write about. At least, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

If you’re new ’round ‘ere, welcome! This is the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page, your opportunity to have your say in a rather more prominent position than your common-or-garden comments section tends to offer. You can write to us at any time on any day simply by casting your eyes over to the right-hand side of every page on the site and clicking the “Write to Rice!” widget — leave us a message and we’ll get back to you the following Friday.

It doesn’t have to be a question or feedback about the site — you can share whatever you want with us. Are you working on a cool creative project? We’d love to hear about it — tell us all about it in a letter and we’ll gladly share it with the rest of the community.

So, then, let’s see what people have had to say this week!

Weekly incoherence

Dear Rice,

I want sexey game for free real

Satish king

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Well, Satish, the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page is not the first place I would think to come if I was looking for sexey game for free real, but on the off-chance you are actually a human being and not a spambot, I’ll do you a favour and provide you with one of my favourite resources for sexey game for free real: The Asenheim Project.

We’ve mentioned this a few times in our The History of Lewd column, but for the unfamiliar, The Asenheim Project is a site that has archived (and, in some cases, translated) late ’90s and early ’00s visual novels that are difficult or impossible to play on modern Windows machines, and presented them in a modern, straightforward, Web-based interface. All the games on The Asenheim Project are presented in a form as close to their original incarnations as possible — and where there were several releases of a game (DOS and Windows, for example) you can often pick between those versions’ distinctive features.

The games on The Asenheim Project are, in most cases, no longer being sold online, and the site has been up for a good few years at this point. Prolific visual novel localiser JAST USA even partnered with the site a while back to offer Web-based versions of some of its own classic games over at their own website — though at the time of writing this no longer appears to be available, presumably since JAST’s online store had a substantial refresh a little while back.

Anyway, if you’ve ever wanted to experience titles like Three Sisters’ Story, Ring-Out!!, Paradise Heights and True Love ’95 for yourself, you can do so over at The Asenheim Project. Hopefully that will satisfy your urge for sexey game for free real, because that’s all you’re getting.

Take a look, it’s in a book, reading rabb– wait, no

Dear Rice,

I noticed your new “The Best Visual Novels” banners around the place and clicked through out of curiosity. First up, this is a really nice resource so thanks for putting it together. Do you have any plans to do the same for other types of game?

Secondly, are you aware that your banner uses an image from Grisaia but Grisaia doesn’t feature anywhere in your list?

ReaderUsagi

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Hi ReaderUsagi — I see what you did there, nice — and welcome to the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page. I’m glad you like the Visual Novels guide, we worked hard on it and will be continuing to expand it as time goes on. For now, we think it provides a nice cross-section of stuff that is available today and some more retro titles — along with ways to get hold of some of these games.

To answer your first question, yes, we’re absolutely planning to do some more of these. Currently in the planning stages are similar guides for RPGs, shoot ’em ups and 18+ erotic games, but if there are any other broad genres that you think would benefit from the “guide” treatment, do please let us know. Ultimately we’re making these guides to help you find stuff here on Rice Digital — and to find some great new games to play — so we want to make sure they’re as useful as possible!

Secondly, yes, I’m well aware — our initial plan for the guide was to include both things we’d already written about here on Rice and things that we just knew were good — but it ended up that we’d written about enough titles to make the latter part feel a bit redundant. Grisaia isn’t on the list as yet because we haven’t written anything substantial about it on the site to date. As a big Grisaia fan, I will have to correct this at some point in the near future, for sure — at which point I will happily include it in the guide, because Grisaia remains one of my favourite stories I have ever experienced in any medium.

I can’t give you a timeline as to when the new guides will be up and running as yet, since we’re putting them together alongside all the other stuff for the site each week… but watch out for them very soon! And thanks again for checking it out!

Rollin’ the DEMONDICE

Dear Rice,

I checked out some of those DEMONDICE tracks you posted last week. Isn’t that just [REDACTED]? Why didn’t you mention that? I mean, it’s not as if she’s trying to hide it or anything.

Hazmatt

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Hi Hazmatt, and welcome to the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page. To some it may be obvious that DEMONDICE also has another identity online, but to others they may not be familiar. And in this sort of situation I figure it’s always easiest and safest to err on the side of caution. After all, certain types of online entertainers make decisions about how they represent themselves with very good reason — sometimes they want to cultivate multiple, separate audiences, while in other cases they absolutely do it for their own safety.

Inevitably the truth often becomes popularly understood in cases like this — there’s another very high-profile example that you’ve probably seen on these pages — but given that the talent in question doesn’t bring it up themselves, it doesn’t feel especially polite to bring it up on their behalf, particularly when they have not indicated any clear preferences as to how they want people to handle this situation.

Look at it this way: if you recognise multiple identities of a single entertainer, you know a neat thing that potentially no-one else does. By all means share it with your close friends in private — particularly if you’re both fans of the entertainer in question — but bellowing “X is really Y” from the rooftops kind of isn’t cool. Likewise, sharing “face reveals” of entertainers who have deliberately chosen to obscure themselves in various ways — whether it be through VTubing, being a disembodied voice or whatever — is not something that it’s really a good idea to do if the entertainer didn’t do it themselves.

There are exceptions to this, of course — VShojo’s Veibae has been very open about her “real” identity and appearance on multiple streams at this point, for example — but in other cases, these people prefer to keep their “multiple lives” separate from one another as much as possible. And to be honest, I don’t blame them for that.

As such, here on Rice Digital we’ll be working on the assumption that each of an individual entertainer’s distinct “identities” should be considered a completely separate entity. The only exception to this is where the entertainer in question explicitly says “yes, I, X, am also Y” — at that point, they’ve revealed the information themselves, willingly, so there’s no question over it.

Life in 2021 is complicated, huh.

Following through

Dear Rice,

After your recommendation last week, I ordered some of the Buldak Curry flavour spicy noodles from Amazon and tried them. It took me about five times longer than I usually take to eat a bowl of noodles thanks to the spice factor, but you’re right — the flavour was really good! Not sure I’m ready for another bowl yet, but I certainly didn’t hate the experience.

coffeebeast

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Hi coffeebeast, I’m glad you enjoyed the Buldak Curry noodles — your experience sounds quite similar to mine, although I didn’t find myself having to take too long over eating them. I found the “fiery” aspect was more a pleasant sort of tingle rather than the overwhelmingly hot feeling you get with, say, an excessively spicy Indian curry.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I also found that there wasn’t much in the way of… uh… discomfort the following day, either, which was a pleasant surprise for sure. Given that I had some “extra spicy” noodles from our local award-winning Thai noodle place one time and was literally howling in pain the next day, I’d go further than that actually; it was blessed relief.

I’m still intrigued to try some of the other flavours that are available, so perhaps I’ll make a point of grabbing some and reporting on them in the near future. After all, with my current Weight Watchers allowances, I can squeeze in a portion of them without too much trouble, and that situation will change over time — so I might as well enjoy it while I can now, huh? Huh?

Why is no-one answering? Enable me, dammit!

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And on that bombshell, it’s time to leave for the week. Have a thoroughly pleasant weekend, everyone, and we’ll see you again next week with more fun, games and cute anime people who coincide with your sexual preferences.

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