Implementation notes

rin pyou tou shaa kai jin let's go!

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0. Concept

Takanashi Rikka from "Chu-2 byo demo KOI ga shitai" was very cute,
especially at the end of episode 5.  So last weekend, on an impulse
and without much planning, I made this ASCII art code.

Well, there was a little bit of planning -- I have been writing
reasonably useful code recently (if I may say so myself), so I decided
this one will be just purely ASCII art, without much functionality.

And it will be done in Perl, because Perl is a language for the
impulsive mood.  Every other language, not so much.

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1. Quine

I have decided that this code will be an ASCII art quine.  Because
hey, why not.  How about *two* quines that print out each other?
Sure.

Actually, initially I wanted to include all 8 frames from kuji-kiri
sequence (from the ending song of the Lite episodes), but didn't have
enough stamina to convert all 8 frames, so I kept the last 2 frames.
The quines are made from these two frames, although the initial
program is made from the ending of episode 5.

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2. Random high resolution quine

I had rasterized these for terminals with size 132x56.  The code
definitely would fit in fewer characters, but the ASCII art will not
have looked as nice.  To account for the extra characters, Rikka will
fill in gaps with mostly random characters.  The end result is that
while the two alternating quines always maintain the same shapes,
their contents are mostly random, so the quines don't really cycle.

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3. Implementation

This being Perl, I didn't have to spend any extra effort doing code
layout.  Instead, the templates are edited as separate files, and a
script reads these templates to generate the final program.

Following recent best practices, I have recorded the process for
writing this generator, in edit.html.  Unlike the C programs, comments
and variable names don't really affect the final ASCII art, so I kept
those.  In fact, I added the comments as an afterthought for
documentation.

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4. Finally...

This Chu-2 byo series is very fun to watch, but perhaps very
embarrassing to describe to someone else what it is.

If you looked back at all the text above and thought it was all drivel,
please don't hold me accountable, it was all an impulse, I had to do
it.  Coincidentally, I have just discovered this 1 character bug in
this script that I have distributed for the past 6 years... Some days,
you look back and the past is just all very embarrassing.