The time has come for another ramble. I didn't feel like doing one at the end of May, but June has been a wonderful month, and I've got the motivation to write, so let's talk about all of it. Brace yourself, dear reader. This will be one hell of a diatribe.

    So for starters, I've finally filled this notebook with drawings. 100 sheets, apparently. There's crap from 2017 in there, just to give an idea of how long this has taken. Of course, about a quarter of it was done in June alone, and April and May's combined output makes up another quarter. I originally bought it at the behest of a psychologist to track my daily activities (or at least the productive ones) with the hope of forming a useful habit of some sort. The first page has something about cooking eggs written on it. Nothing else. That's how long that lasted. At least I know the last time I cooked eggs was October 2 of (probably) 2016.

    In any case, it was later cannibalized into a sketchbook, and a resolution was made. "When I fill this with drawings, I'll have proven my capacity for commitment and will buy myself a tablet." So, are we actually ready? It's true that June has been unprecedented. For probably the first time since my brief affair with the piano in college (like 8 years ago) I have fixed my obsessive inner eye on something other than gaming. It's possible, I've done it. Drawing is now "the thing". But still, it's really only been one month of acceptable performance. And I'd like it to be much more than "acceptable". Those 6 hour sessions in the practice rooms of the music building. The brain melting journey to a triple digit combo in MPE. Let's find that fire again.

    Anyway, let's talk about the last two months. And let me voice, again, my hatred for this website. I tried to put these things in chronological order, but they just did whatever they felt like.

Mid-left: This was done May 2nd. It's a copy of a picture by tomatojam. I was still experimenting with Adderall around this time, and drew this one on it. In this case at least it worked very well. I was actually interrupted at one point (to help carry some planks into the basement) and I immediately resumed drawing when that was done. Maybe that doesn't sound like anything special, but for me it is. Typically such a thing would require me to "restart" completely. Might take hours, might not happen at all. Actually, come to think of it, this was the first time I drew something in the middle of the day. Everything before was always done at night (for a handful of reasons, avoiding distraction chief among them).

Mid-right: This was probably done on the 2nd as well, though I uploaded it to twitter on the 3rd. I didn't use any particular reference for it, so of course it's quite simple. It also features the classic "hide her body in a big shapeless sweater" technique. It could be worse though. I don't really mind how the clothing came out. Mainly I'm not happy with the shape of the head and the hair. The text on the sweater says "the big D". There's a bit of a story to that, but I suppose now is not the time.

Middle: From the 3rd. Again I was copying the ineffable Kotoyama. I just like how these came out. I need to study Kotoyama's style more in the future. He(?) seems to be a master of making simple things look fantastic, particularly facial expressions.

Far left: From the 8th. The pose is strongly based on something by Kotoyama, and the clothing is lifted from tomatojam's spider girl. I did not originally intend for her to have bat wings, but there was room on the page and I figured it matched the outfit well enough, so I just threw them on for the fun of it. Again the shape of the head is a little off. The intent is that her head is tilted back so we see it from a low angle, but I'm not sure this really comes across. Apart from that I was quite happy with this one, though of course I leaned heavily of the references.

Far right: The 31st. The rest of May had some up and downs. Once again I got kind of disconnected from the energy I'd found. Many days I drew nothing, and a lot of what I was doing felt boring or pointless. I can't quite remember what was going on. Probably something sexuality related. Most likely, in fact, seeing as the solution seems to have been drawing lots of lewd stuff. But I'm digressing.

    So there is always power in catgirls. This isn't a direct copy of anything, but I'm ripping off Nametake's style quite a bit. Or at least trying to. It wasn't really meant to be Orin either, just a catgirl with huge tits. But, well, it's clearly Orin.

    So let's talk about June. It had a sort of slow start actually. I wasn't completely out of this rut I'd gotten into in May. I also started playing tons of TSS on fightcade and sank a few nights into TGM grinding. Thankfully I finally got the long sought Death Master rank on the 9th, and so TGM's priority in my mind shrank to a reasonable level. In fact, stupid as it may sound, this is probably one of the reasons June went so well. I knew I needed to push gaming to the background to properly focus on drawing, but I'd been practicing for this M rank for months, and had come within less than a second of achieving it several times. To just stop caring about it at that point was unthinkable, so it gnawed fiendishly at my mind. Every few days I'd have to devote several hours to it, even if just to prevent my skills from rusting. With it finally done I was free to take a long happy break from that game.

    So anyway. At some point I started copying a lot of stuff by Okiraku Nikku and Kenkou Cross, and this seemed to get the ball rolling. After a shaky first week I started drawing pretty much every day, only missing one or two due to the chaotic cycling of my sleep schedule. I even reached a point, unbelievable as it may sound, where filling two pages was the norm.

    Here's a bunch of copies from June. They're just ones I like, basically. I could try to talk about them but I don't know if I have much to say. Maybe in the future I won't post copies. I should be spending more effort on original things after all. I've been holding myself to one or two a week, but I think I can do better. I should also experiment more in the realm of copying itself. I mentioned this in a previous post. I should practice reproducing things from memory, doing things multiple times with certain variations, etc. But it's okay. The urgent task was gathering concentration and putting in time, and great progress has been made. Can only take one step at a time.

    Here's the names of the artists I copied, in order: Petenshi, Radiohead, Otokoter, Caburi, (I forgot, oops), Morisugi, Collagen, tomatojam88, Akita Morgue.

    And here are the "original" things I did this month. I wasn't sure I wanted to talk about them, but why not. By the way, don't ask why the thumbnails are different sizes throughout the page.

1. I had this idea that I knew how to do fabric all of a sudden. Why I thought this I don't know. Her clothes look stupid. I copied the crystal ball thing from Kenkou Cross's "Vamp Mosquito". The eyes and hair are loosely based on some of his succubi as well. I spent a decent amount of time on this one but didn't really plan ahead at all. This is a blunder I make regularly.

2. Is that Momiji? I'm not really sure myself. Here I tried to do something in Okiraku Nikku's style. I did a lot of copies of his stuff this month. Big boobs are really fun to draw.

3. A slime girl, inspired by tomatojam. I had a blast drawing this, though I don't really like the way her face came out. I should do more of these. Simple, stupid fun.

4. Pretty lazy. I wasn't really planning to even put this on twitter, but I did for some reason so now I guess I have to include it here. I tried to reproduce the forward leaning posture of Otokoter's inkling. The face is pretty much directly taken from a Kenkou Cross picture.

5. Based on nothing in particular. I guess that's why it looks so weird. I tried to utilize differing line thickness, but this is still a technique I don't properly understand. I think her torso is a little too long and her legs are too short. I also made the whole thing too small. Some better planning would have helped. Still, at the end of the day, I don't hate it. Inkling fetish too strong.

6. This is based on several simple drawings by the artist Kuromotokun (I recently discovered him, he's a genius). Finally, I made a point of planning things out, even drawing a whole "rough draft" of sorts on another page. There are silly errors all the same of course, but whatever. I'm very pleased with the lack of eraser damage, and the hair came out nice. The clothing is also some of the least disastrous I've done. The big problems are her butt being too low, and the legs are fucked.

    So, in summation? This was a rather horny month, but maybe that's the key. I'm a perverted maniac after all. You've got to follow your nature to some extent. It was a cute semi-coincidence that I filled the sketchbook (notebook really, fucking lined paper) on the last day of June. That inkling in the hard hat was the very last page. I'm really amazed at how much I did this month. Even just the act of drawing every day, no matter how much, is something I thought I'd be lucky to do by the end of the year. I'm thrilled by this, really. Things are actually looking up for once. Let's keep going!

    Also, in a way this green book has served it's original purpose. How poetic.

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    Oh, and here's a little story. About 7 years ago, around when I drew that girl in a tie, back in the golden age of kusoplay, I actually bought some proper sketchbooks at the campus store. I never opened them though. I just continued drawing on random crap pieces of paper (my dorm room was a holocaust of loose pages and unfinished assignments) and since I only drew one thing every 5 months this served me well enough. Anyway, gremlin that I am, I kept the sketchbooks this whole time, still wrapped in plastic, somewhere in my room. So I went rifling through my old college shit (which I've also kept for no reason) and inside an ancient swollen notebook I found this picture of Youmu.

    From #DrawYoumuDay, 2016. What a surprise. I used to draw things this way, microscopic and crammed in the corner of the page, as if to not waste any space. I also remember I took the pose for this Youmu from the minotaur on the cover of Show No Mercy. Well, I found the sketchbooks. I guess I'll draw in them now. Only took 7 years. Today (or rather yesterday, I've been writing for like 6 hours, I'm a slow guy okay) brought back some nice memories. I also had 15 other things I felt like writing about, but I think this is enough for now.

So I had the idea to do a kind of monthly summary. I think April went very well, for a couple reasons. In the past what I've often done is selected references based upon some impression of them as being a good thing to try to copy, then saved these for later. This usually results in me finding that I don't really want to draw those things when the time comes. This month I would sit down, look for something to draw, and just use whatever seemed appealing in that moment. There was also this feeling I had before of not being "ready" to try the things I'm more interested in, so I stuck to things which were simpler and more generic. I think a big "breakthrough" this month was just focusing on my favorite artists and working with stuff that speaks to me most, regardless of how esoteric or difficult it might be. These are most of the highlights.

So let's ramble. I've been inconsistently "tracking" certain things such as the date, the music I was listening to, how "fun" the drawing was, the artist whom I'm copying, whether or not I was on adderall at the time. This manifests as the information being scattered randomly in the open areas of the page. A lot of the time I actually go back and write these things based on memory because at the time of doing the drawing I decided I didn't give a shit.

The first thing I did this month was, if I'm not mistaken, the catgirl with huge tits from the previous post. Then that squid girl (the Ixy thing, not the inkling) was two days later. I was very happy with this one at the time. Low confusion, just seemed to go onto the page smoothly. After that was a slump of ten days or so. Starting taking adderall, mismanaging my time, motivation became a mystery again. I started the Kotoyama thing eventually, which took three days for some reason. Probably 60% of it was done on the third day. I was listening to City, got into a decent groove, but ultimately that one was unsatisfying.

Finally on the 20th I seemed to get my power back. I went through Akita Morgue's old geocities galleries, looking for some gnarly stuff to take a shot at. The girl with the mechanical arm was ambitious. The original is full color and complexly shaded. Torn flesh, shiny metal, warm "glowy" lighting. I quickly realized it was far beyond me to actually get it to look correct, so I just kinda breezed through it in an experimental way. Even though it looks a mess I had a blast doing it. I did the crying one and the one with the flails immediately after, and that was the most drawing I'd ever done in a single day. Not much by general standards of course, but for me it was a milestone. Then the very next day I equaled it with the next two pages. All of these were a lot of fun. The angel girl proved to be quite difficult. Her hips are wack, and technically she's supposed to be leaning forward even further. I also had a hard time getting her head and face in the right spot, and in the end I'm not sure I was particularly successful.

The two little girls were whatever. Not too much thought involved. Each one being an entire day's output is a little underwhelming, but at least it's something. Honestly this is a style I'd love to be able to do quickly and easily. Just blast out hundreds of simple, cute little girls. The catgirl cyborg was more meticulous. I realized it was the kind of thing that could come out bonkers if I was too careless with the proportions of things, and really I think I'm lucky it ended up as acceptable as it did.

The next thing is not a copy for once, but you can see I used bits and pieces from the other recent drawings. Originally I intended to just make a bunch of heads on this page, but after the first one an idea for a corresponding body came to me and so I tried to make it happen. I wanted her to have her hands over her heart, chest turned to the left, looking back over her shoulder. I couldn't get it to look right of course, and I kept sliding her shoulder more and more to the right, essentially rotating the torso more towards the viewer in the hopes of bringing the pose into more familiar territory. I didn't really widen her torso at all in the process though, so she ended up insanely thin and the chest area just a mystery, which I tried to cover up by putting a big ribbon over it. Her waist doesn't bother me too much in and of itself, but seems really mismatched with the rest of the body.

The girl with the axe was another challenge. Lots of little details. Aside from her fingers, which are supposed to be visible under the axe head, I think it came out okay.

The last one was a joy. Perhaps there are other worlds than this one. Parallel timelines and realities. How many of these have inklings in them? How many of them have Akita Morgue? I cannot say. I only know that in my blessed corner of the multiverse, we not only have both, but there is a magnificent love affair between them. In any case, I had fun experimenting with line thickness and putting slime all over her body.

Been a while. I've neglected the journal as well, so there are tons of things I could conceivably write about. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. For now let's have another drawing rant.

So they're all copies again. I did ten or so over the past month. These were the most fun.

1 - Hair has typically been pretty tough so far. This was one of the rare instances where I actually enjoyed drawing it, and I like how it turned out. The pose is also cute and felt surprisingly uncomplicated. I think this is a style I should try improvising with in the future. Simple, expressive little things.

2 - Another one from the same artist, and it had a similar sort of "easier than I expected" feel to it. Again I was enjoying something I usually fear - in this case clothing. There's so little to it, and yet it seems to come out so nice.

3 - Fun to try something hot now and then. I changed the hair from the original this time, but it came out pretty bad. I think sooner or later I need to just sit down and fill a few pages with nothing but hair.

4 - This one was done last night. I think the hatching turned out pretty well. This of course is something that usually isn't present in the pictures I'm copying, so I just kind of trust my gut in trying to achieve the desired effect. The highlights on her boobs were also an experiment. I just left those areas blank (what else can you do with graphite?) and they actually stand out much more than I expected. Of course they aren't really in congruent positions but whatever. Anatomically it came together pretty quickly. It's not without issues obviously but in the past much simpler things have taken me several hours of confusion to get to an acceptable level. This time I actually felt myself leaning on past experience, especially for the arm and hips.

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So what else is going on? I'm currently falling asleep around 1 or 2 PM and waking up at 8 or 9. So like, a complete inversion of a sane sleep schedule. But hey, it's not like it really matters right now. I actually feel pretty good. Finally recovering from my disastrous time on antidepressants perhaps. The end of last year and the start of this one have gone to waste, but a lesson was learned I suppose - never take antidepressants again. Now lets once again start the climb up the mountain.

Well, what can I say. I don't use this thing much. What happened is I couldn't decide between starting a blog or a private journal, so I made both at about the same time thinking I would either use whichever seemed more appropriate whenever I felt like writing something, or cross-post the occasional journal entry to the blog. I now use the journal pretty much exclusively and I'm not sure what to do with the blog. It's not even that I'm uncomfortable presenting "personal" topics on an ostensibly public platform (I'm perhaps dangerously unbothered by the idea), but rather it just seems incorrect to do so. Or maybe unnecessary is the better word.

Well, let's do something. At this particular point in my life, I spend most of my time pacing back and forth, sitting still and thinking, wasting time in vague, random ways, drawing (or at least thinking about it). I'm barely playing video games, I never go for walks anymore, I'm not doing yoga at all. Other "tests of responsibility and motivation" are not happening either. Sleep is neither great nor terrible.

This is a weird place to be. A lot has been stripped away, and yet, I draw. I set my sights on that one specific thing and it appears to finally be happening. If I can do to it what I've done to games in the past, maybe something good can come of it. As for my total inability to focus on more than exactly one thing at a time, it's not like it's anything new. If it's going to be a lifelong curse I'm prepared to accept that. After all the whole point in shifting the focus to drawing is to try to "work with" this problem.

As for posting drawings here, I just feel no reason to do it at the moment, but there's a fair chance I eventually will. Maybe when I reach a skill level I deem satisfactory.

drawing stuff

So let's think about drawing. I've been copying things lately. I'm not really sure what the best approach to learning is, but this is at least something I can get myself to do, and I think it's sensible. I mean, you'd normally use real people or objects as references if those are what you're drawing. If you're drawing anime girls, you've got to use anime girls, right? It's a little weird though of course because that's somebody else's art, but I remember a number of assignments from high school art class that were just copying famous paintings and stuff, so maybe it's not so weird. Still, I think an extra step needs to be introduced. I think after copying something, I should try to recreate it from memory the next day, with intentional changes here and there when I think I know what I'm doing. And keep doing that, increasing the experimentation each time, and then try to frankenstein different things together. And so forth and so on.

Have I mentioned that the formatting on this site makes me want to kill someone? Can't I just put them horizontally in one row? No, I can't. The universe would sooner implode. Anyway, here's some recent and not so recent stuff, all blatant copies (nametake, fkey, fatalpulse). I don't really know what to say about them. They were fun. I did the third one last night. It was a first foray into heart pupils, drool, and gargantuan tits, among other things. So, let's say tonight I do that drawing again, but without looking at any reference. Then I can see how much I've absorbed.

I think this was a good idea. Let's try to do this regularly, and entertain the notion of being organized and thoughtful and such. It beats scribbling a bunch of cryptic nonsense into the margins of the pages. I should still write down what I was listening to though, just for fun. For the demon girl it was, of all things, the Jerma Rumble.

So I made this blog and then proceeded to live in fear of it, in my usual fashion. But let's give it a try. What's the worst that can happen? I humiliate myself? That's not really a big deal. In truth there's nothing to worry about. Better to go looking for something and fail to find it than not go looking at all, right? Maybe.

Things are strange right now. Every year things seem to get weirder, and this one's the weirdest so far. I thought some time ago that I'd made a revelation, and I think in some ways I did. I'm not quite the same person (psychologically, emotionally, what have you) I was at the start of the year. Once again I'm playing by different rules.

For a while I actually had a normal sleep schedule. I think getting an appropriate amount of sleep is one of the best things you can do for yourself. That's one of the lessons I've learned, and I hope I will never forget it. Sleep is sanity, pure and simple. At the same time, it's beyond my control. That, too, is something I'm convinced of now. I've generally accepted that I'm not trying hard enough, and certainly (and as is often the case) if I'm not even getting into bed, I'm not trying hard enough. Even when I do get into bed and "try" to sleep only to be kept awake by the mania du jour, I can hold myself accountable in some way, but sleep has become strange lately. Often times I cannot tell if I've actually slept. I've been having this experience of "coming to my senses" in the middle of the night. It's very smooth and sudden, and I can't remember what I was thinking about before it happens. Was I asleep? It doesn't really feel like it. I don't know too much about this stuff, but I think there are stages of sleep. You get deeper into it as time passes. I think what's happening in these cases is I've actually begun to sleep, but I'm waking up before getting to the next stage. Further, the experience of "properly" waking up is worse than ever. I wake up straight into the grip of powerful emotions, the kinds of things I almost never experience in day to day life, and as usual there's a touch of delirium or something. That's probably why they seem so strong. Sometimes I forget things about my life while focusing intently on others, and the screwed up context gives me some overwhelming concern. Once I felt that I'd somehow recovered the ability to want things, a trait that I'd apparently been lacking for most of my adult life, and now that I had it back my mind just raced incoherently. And this all slides into the realm of "was it a dream?", "was it sleep paralysis?". I'm not really sure. In any case I'm in sleep hell again.

I've had some concern over where motivation should come from. As a teenager I had it. As a teenager I was also a crazy person. I think a part of me is still looking for... what? Something that can't coexist with my worldview today. I don't even know which parts are incompatible. It's not like any of it was compatible back then either; I was just fucking nuts.

There was a big sexuality rant I wanted to go on, but it's too hard to articulate. I'm not sure my suspicions are even correct anyway. Suffice to say it's like everything else. Is there a common thread somewhere?

Well, I'm worried about where things are headed. Very worried. I don't know how to put it into words. I feel like a simulacrum of a person, and life is like a prison. It's not even that I'm depressed. In college for instance, I felt so awful that I'm pretty sure people could just sense it when they were in my presence. I remember the first time I walked into the counseling office, I couldn't have uttered more than two sentences before they were scrambling to find someone to talk to me. I learned afterward that that's not how that place is supposed to work. You're supposed to make an appointment. I'm still not even sure what it was about my demeanor that made them react like that. But where was I? There was a silver lining to that time. When you're in hell, you get to believe that things will go back to normal once you're out. Now I'm (ostensibly) out and the world is more unreal than ever. Something needs to be done I guess. Something even more than what I've been doing. When I've talked to psychologists and such in the past I've always downplayed what was going on. Maybe it's about time I go somewhere and just puke everything onto the table. Can't exactly make anything worse at this point.

I wasn't planning to talk about the past, but I just let my mind wander and that's where it always seems to go. Writing this was probably a good idea. I don't know what I expected, if anything.

And whoa, my dad just walked in on me and asked if I'm okay, and I told him I think I should see someone again. It was that easy. Surreal! (And yikes, I really am so easy to read, aren't I?)

Kotohime Observations

Kotohime is all about planning and foresight. More than most characters, she rewards you for "screen watching" and understanding some of the game's more subtle aspects. She gives you a lot of control over the flow of the game, but you have to use that control wisely to get the most out of her.

Let's start with what I think is her most defining trait: the significant delay on her spell attacks. This delay means her spells need to be timed differently from any other character's, and the number of factors you can realistically take into consideration when choosing your timing is more limited. For example, let's say you're playing Mima. What do you think about when you cast Mima's spell? Some important things would be: the formations which are currently on your and your opponent's screens, the formations which will appear after these (assuming you have this knowledge), how soon and how completely your spell will be reflected based on your opponents formation, how well your charge attack can clear or avoid clearing the formation you've currently got, your current position and potential mobility in the immediate future, which fireball phase you're in and how long before it shifts, and whatever dodging needs to be done in the meantime for the sake of your survival. Nevermind that truly keeping track of all this requires having a swirling galaxy for a brain, my point is that it's a lot. But now let's look at Kotohime. The first thing to realize is that, for Kotohime, most of the more "immediate" factors (current formations, current position, the impact of her charge attack) are actually pretty unimportant. If you can anticipate the next formation or two, this can be very useful, but in practice it's rarely possible. So what does Kotohime have to think about? There are basically two critical things, and one of them is uncommon: whether or not you've recently triggered a level 3 spell, and which fireball phase you're in, or more specifically, which phase you will be in in about 5 seconds. If you trigger a level 3 but then cast a level 2 before it explodes, the level 3 is often retroactively transformed into a level 2, and if you're not prepared for this you may get a surprise shitstorm to the face. But in general, the most important element to consider when choosing your spell timing is the fireball phase. Kotohime's spell takes about 5 seconds to explode, and the phases last 5 seconds, so if you want the spell to explode in focus phase you should cast it right at the start of the preceding scatter phase, or in other words, every 10th second.

Now, the timing for the initial casting may be easy to choose, but what you do in the next 5 seconds is very important. Basically, all of the factors which you would normally think about when casting a spell (but couldn't because they were too far into the future) will quickly reveal themselves to you in the time before the bomb explodes. The key now is to guide things in a favorable direction. Let's look at the general idea step by step. First, the formation you've got on screen at the moment you cast the spell is not going to be the one you use to reflect the shitstorm. The formation that does the reflecting will be either the next one, or more commonly, the one after the next one. The general idea is to remove the current formation, then remove the second just before the bomb explodes, and then use the third formation to reflect. If the first formation is one of the few that can be stalled an extremely long time, then you may stall that one until just before the bomb explodes and then reflect with the second formation. When the shitstorm arrives, it's important to be ready to macrododge the pellets even if you've got an exploding formation to shelter you, especially if the game is in focus phase. In doing this, it's important to understand that when fireballs are created, their aim is already set in stone, but pellets do not choose their aim until they materialize at the top of your screen. For example, let's assume you're right in the middle of the screen with a small formation exploding directly above you. At this moment, your spell explodes on the opponent's screen and is totally reflected. The instant this happens, you should dive to the left wall, so that even as all the pellets and fireballs come flying to the top of your screen, you're already on your way over to the left. The fireballs will still be aimed to the middle, since that's where you were when they were created, but the pellets will aim at the left wall. Now you macrododge down and under, returning safely to the middle. (Kotohime is fast enough to consistently macrododge the reflected spell regardless of whether you reflect any of it as long as you're prepared and nothing gets in your way.) It's also very important to keep an eye on the opponent's screen before the bomb explodes. Because you can see the bomb's exact position, approximately when it will explode, which formation the opponent has on screen, and where they are shooting it, you can predict almost exactly when and how your spell will be reflected. You can see, for instance, if the spell won't be reflected all at once, but rather will be reflected late after the bullets have spread out, and react accordingly. It also helps to understand that the further the point of reflection is from the inner wall, the longer the reflected bullets and fireballs will take to reach your screen, and similarly, the further you are from the inner wall, the longer aimed fireballs will take to reach you.

Another quirk about Kotohime is that her boss attack barely uses any pellets. This makes it very safe. In fact, from a scoring perspective, it's existence is actually counterproductive, since it tends to distract the AI from shooting the formations. Nonetheless, between the safe boss, and the careful precision with which shitstorms can be created and reflected, Kotohime is a character who, when played thoughtfully, can score very high very safely. If you're swimming in energy and want to take greater risks, start casting spells every 5 seconds rather than every 10 seconds. If you want the game to cool off, just stop casting spells. Your boss attack rarely backfires and suppresses the AI very well.

Now let's look at some particulars.

At the start of each round, I think the usual goal should be to build up enough energy to cast a spell at 20 seconds. You could cast one at 10 seconds but it's almost never possible to get enough energy in time. Triggering a boss attack before you've cast your first spell seems to be a bad thing more often than not, so don't go out of your way to preserve your spell points in the beginning. If you lose a round and start the next with enough energy for a spell, you have two options. Unlike most characters, who can cast a spell after about 3 or 4 seconds and get it reflected by the first formation right at the start of focus phase, Kotohime can't quite get her spell out fast enough. If you cast the spell as soon as possible, it explodes towards the end of focus phase, but the first formation tends to show up a little too soon. The most effective response to this seems to be immediately killing the first formation with a charge attack and then reflecting with the second, but this is a little unreliable. The safer option is to just wait and cast the spell at 10 seconds. If you've only got the energy for a single spell, that's the one I would pick. If you've got a lot of energy though, may as well take the risk and cast instantly.

Kotohime's charge attack is great for some things and terrible for others. Bosses melt when pointblanked by it, and it invariably destroys any fireballs that cross it, making it reliable for self defense. It's slow speed makes it hard to use for chaining though, and playing Kotohime against characters whose extra attacks block bullets can be a struggle. It's also difficult to reactively clear a formation just as it passes over a boss that's about to shoot a bunch of pellets. This is especially annoying against bosses who move while shooting, such as Rikako and Ellen. I think Kotohime's most favorable opponents (for scoring) are Marisa and Mima.

As mentioned before, you can actually convert level 3's from boss panics into level 2's. This can be very lucrative, but keep an eye on the opponent's screen to see when the bomb will explode.

Boss cancelling is very good for Kotohime since you'd usually rather not have her boss on screen anyway.

It can be very tempting to try to speedkill Yumemi's boss attack, since you can indeed sometimes kill her before she attacks, but this is a bit of an illusory advantage. You generally can only kill her that fast when she was going to do one of her weaker attacks anyway. You need near perfect timing to kill her before she does the cloud (and if you over commit you just take it to the face), and even preventing the swirl is difficult. Further, if you try to speedkill before the swirl but aren't fast enough, you now probably don't have time to use another charge attack to go through the swirl with i-frames. Speedkilling her has its merits of course, just be careful.

And here are a few gameplay examples.

https://youtu.be/nZO6AdrkLKc?t=1553
In this case the first formation takes a long time to clear, so I reflect the fireballs with the second. I destroy it on the right to make the fireballs appear sooner.

https://youtu.be/nZO6AdrkLKc?t=895
A level 3 converted to level 2.

https://youtu.be/nZO6AdrkLKc?t=2136
A surprisingly viable way to dodge shitstorms when you're too low to properly macrododge them. Dive upward into the space created by exploding fireballs, then cut right.

https://youtu.be/nZO6AdrkLKc?t=2327
Another example of how being near the inner wall makes the fireballs arrive sooner. If I had tried the exact same thing on the left it would have failed. Also shows how starting with an instant spell tends to cut it very close. Alternatively I could have speedkilled that formation and then reflected with the next.