As far as Touhou goes, it's easy to appreciate from various angles because the music is incredible and the character designs are as well. Anyway, I became really aware of it because of the /jp/ board on 4chan. I did play the games though, so I'm not a filthy secondary (as they say), though I do suck at them (not counting the fighting ones, also, I 1CCed 9 with every character, that's the one that is like Twinkle Star Sprites). And I am aware of ZUN.

I'm one of those people that just never got good at shmups (I have seen other people that can beat some pretty hard games but get annihilated by shmups, no idea what that's all about but it seems to be a thing). I can play anything else on a decent level, but could never get really good at shmups. This is definitely because I haven't played them enough, and the few times that I played one a lot, I either got bored of it or hit a wall and could not break through it. Actually, I think one reason why may be the fact that I can't control the scrolling, which makes the games feel slower even though they're not really slower. Just controlling my own progress through a stage and the feeling of blasting through it really fast, I think is something that I miss in shmups, and didn't play them enough to get used to it.

Anyway, my limited system resources don't help. Unless I close my browsers, the shmups I like and played the most run like complete shit. I was actually pretty close to a Deathsmiles 1CC, years ago, and I really like that game so I would have succeeded, but the performance is really bad and I think it's the emulation. So, I would find a better way to play it, maybe get a new ROM set and a new version of MAME, and run it natively and not in Wine. But MAME suffers on Unix systems because they are designed by addict updooters. I want to update MAME only when I want to, because I'm generally not in the mood to download updates for my games, I just want them not to be fucked with. And of course, I can't play Touhou because Wine is shit. I could run Windows on another computer to play those, but then I'll have to do it on a tiny laptop screen, at an angle. Could do it in a VM, but then the RAM becomes an issue again. The PC-98 ones are an option, I played those a bit a while ago. Still have to set a controller up in DOSBox-X, though. Could just use the keyboard, but my keyboard switches are too heavy (they are medium weight, but I should have picked lighter) and I type too much, so it gets exhausting.

Also, my stick's actuation is too long. Though that one doesn't really matter to me very much for shmups, definitely not as much as I would expect. It hurts me a lot more in games with motions that involve going from up to down very fast and suddenly (that's a bad one), because I very frequently miss that input, though I can still do Guile's super pretty easily in 2X, so it really depends on the speed and whether I can hold a direction first. But for shmups, I'm less picky, probably because I suck, so nothing matters. Hell, pad is pad too, as long as it has turbo so I don't have to mash, because that destroys my thumb.

Anyway, I have Touhou cursors. They're animated, and pretty cool. Currently using the Reisen one. https://social.076.moe/url/137774