Touhou - Until the Water Became Wholly Red (Doujinshi) - Vol. 2 Ch. 8 - Aspiration and Aptitude

[MangaDex]

 

[Grimmycoffee]

What is the proper answer, I wonder.

 

[PresidentOkuno]

What is the proper answer, I wonder.

I'm thinking about it too.
It really depends on the the reason you write and the audience that will receive your messages. If it's general purpose writing for a general purpose audience, one way to optimize it is to analyze the character itself and minimize the amount of strokes and overall effort you put into making it without going too far and rendering it unreadable (perhaps just draw a 7 and make a horizontal line through the middle, neglecting the small complex curved lines at the top and bottom that seem visually insignificant in comparison). Though, if the goal is only to compress and readability is not a major concern, perhaps you could create notation for writing that could signify repetition and new lines, using some kind of symbols to show that this character repeats 6 times over 2 lines. And if you REALLY do not care about readability, you could also make a unique cipher for your writing that uses extremely simple symbols to represent Japanese characters. Combine that with the notation idea, and depending on how you want to create the symbols and formulate the system to fit your purposes, you could theoretically write the whole thing in three strokes (one to represent the character, one to represent that it's repeated 6 times, and one to represent that there's 1 new line, which is a copy of the old).
But the kappa believes that these kinds of ideas are unfathomable to the tengu because of how they neglect aesthetics and beauty for raw efficiency. They think the tengu cannot overcome this barrier in their thinking because those unhelpful values of theirs are deeply culturally ingrained. I don't really buy the argument personally; I have faith that the tengu can be taught to think differently, and even if they cannot, is there not value in an engineer who fundamentally thinks differently from the rest? I'm sure that there is a place for somebody like them in the engineering world, and I think it's a shame that the kappa rejected her due to racial biases (I haven't finished reading it yet, but this seems to be a common theme in this work; the white wolves were denied the chance to be promoted for the same reason and it's quite sad).

 

[Grimmycoffee]

I'm thinking about it too.
It really depends on the the reason you write and the audience that will receive your messages. If it's general purpose writing for a general purpose audience, one way to optimize it is to analyze the character itself and minimize the amount of strokes and overall effort you put into making it without going too far and rendering it unreadable (perhaps just draw a 7 and make a horizontal line through the middle, neglecting the small complex curved lines at the top and bottom that seem visually insignificant in comparison). Though, if the goal is only to compress and readability is not a major concern, perhaps you could create notation for writing that could signify repetition and new lines, using some kind of symbols to show that this character repeats 6 times over 2 lines. And if you REALLY do not care about readability, you could also make a unique cipher for your writing that uses extremely simple symbols to represent Japanese characters. Combine that with the notation idea, and depending on how you want to create the symbols and formulate the system to fit your purposes, you could theoretically write the whole thing in three strokes (one to represent the character, one to represent that

Hmm, looking back, maybe it's even simpler than technique and more about the method.

Since the topic is writing the same thing over and over again, maybe the kappa's answer is primitive printing block.

And yeah, I believe race is a pretty big part of the story so far (the next chapter 9 is also pretty interesting about this), and I'm sure it will somehow connect together with the little tengu somehow, an oddity even among its own kind.