Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Last week's thread
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I have to go run an errand soon but someone better have posted some commentary about the a16z anime blog post (as seen on the hell site) by the time I get back or I'll be sorely disappointed.
Ok.
I don't know how things are in Japan, but I'll be damned if I ever meet someone who gateway series into anime was a live action adaptation of One Piece.
The most popular what for anime characters and IP?
Some of them probably are. Screw them.
You can't just casually throw "social and parasocial" in there and then describe a purely parasocial relationship. Apologize to Shannon Strucci.
Also this is like saying television has allowed us to roleplay our favorite Radio announcers. They seem to be under the impression that the vtuber phenomenon is about people digitally cosplaying their favorite anime character together when it's more like an actor putting on a performance as an original character. And for the big ones, a bunch of Japanese style idol industry bullshit layered on top.
While audience inteeaction is usually a part of it, the nature of the medium remains highly asymmetric.
Keep Cowboy Bebop's name out of your filthy mouth.
I might be behind the times but even I don't think AoT is new. At least say Jujutsu Kaisen or something.
May all your subculture in-jokes die a dignified death before a VC firm references them in a blog post.
"Mai waifu" was originally a funny engrish quote from Azumanga Daioh and was used to refer to any favorite character. The non tongue en cheek relationship simulation aspect merged with the meme later on.
This doesn't seem to be what the linked Medium article is saying and seems like they're just mixing up light novels and visual novels.
Practical, huh?
To be fair I'd rather take almost anyone, gacha game character or not, other than Elon Musk as my conversation partner, whether simulated or real.
Factually dubious claim aside, how hard is it to write "series" or at least "anime" like a real human being with feelings instead of "IP".
I've watched some anime series and felt things about them. I've never given a shit about an anime IP. Why would I, never owned one.
Pixiv has existed for ages. Even before that was doujinshi, and people have made art, original and derivative, since before the beginning of civilization. Your idea of modding custom animu avatars for shovelware Love Plus sequels is not new.
Palworld is evidence of a lack of high quality anime games much like all nonblack nonravens are evidence of a lack of nonblack ravens.
It's actually incredibly easy to create and publish media based on anime and get away with it. You just can't do it too professionally. If you love democratizing art so much, go to Comiket.
Also there are tons of licensed games based on anime what the hell are you talking about?
Misspelled "plutocratized" there. Also had a double take checking out the third one: "Story is the World’s IP Blockchain, onramping Programmable IP to power the next generation of AI, DeFi, and consumer applications."
I'm sure I will continue to be as thrilled as I have been up to now to see more art made by people who can't make art and filling the gap with statistical average of all art ever.
Sounds great (not), but I heard someone say there was a lack of high quality anime IP games. Surely you can't both be right?
Consistency, what's that? Maybe invest in a bigger context window so you can remember what you generated a few paragraphs ago.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a fully original freeware pay-what-you-want indie game that became a viral sleeper hit. You're comparing it to Final fucking Fantasy? From a business perspective? Hell, despite the art style it's not even Japanese! The only connecting thread between these games is that they have vaguely anime style art in them.
It's really not.
I knew I could count on awful.systems.
SaaS = ~~Storage as a Service~~ Sneer as a Service
I agree that the Doki Doki Literature Club reference was out of place, but consider that the whole post is predicated on the assumption that anime is a radical new art form that is revolutionizing [$Product] while itself being revolutionized by the new technologies designed by a16z's stable of startups (the ones they haven't cashed out yet). DDLC is niche enough that the intended audience will feel clever if they know about it, but successful enough that there's a nonzero chance they'll have heard about it.
It also has the most anime title they could find.
I wish I had more updoots for this effortpost. Well done.
Some notes:
Who told Mark Andreesen about the overlap between possible AI ~~suckers~~ customers and weebs? Are we going to get a16z's next hot take - "Furries are eating the world?"
I'm sure most of the audience here can fill in their own 700+ word rant about the breadth of anime as a visual style, so I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. However, unlike the older trends of assuming that whichever shonen is currently most popular (the kids still like at least one Dragonball, right?) is representative or dismissing anything with the relevant aesthetic as "some weeb shit I won't like", here the writers manage a much more impressive feat. They acknowledge the breadth of what anime contains, but completely fail to ask the basic question: "why do people like this?" Similar to the original prompts for this kind of rant, they're assuming the art style and Japanese cultural background are the primary reasons why anyone connects with anything anime, and then expand from that premise. I'm pretty sure this is a root cause of why the whole article feels like it was written by goddamn martians.
Are vTubers playing existing characters a thing? What little I've seen isn't linked to existing stories (that's what humans call "IP") but rather focus on original characters who have their own shit going on. Even ignoring the attempt to shove genAI into everything (as though everyone is going to want to make their own vTuber avatar and stream it someday?) this seems like assuming that the people going to watch the finals of the local Battle of the Bands are going in the hope of getting an autograph from Kurt fucking Cobain.
There has been some criticism of gacha games as being monstrously exploitative and basically gambling targeted at kids and/or teens, but consider just how much money it makes. These people are ghouls.
Going back to the genAI we set aside two bullet points up, I do think anime has a unique property there. It simultaneously has a much stronger visual identity than many other aesthetics, including photorealism, but also has a massive number of scrapable examples to train off of. The more consistent style makes it easier to replicate statistically and what visual abberation you still get is less likely to fall deep into the uncanny valley. The outputs I've seen from even older anime genAI were better than their contemporaries, but still pretty easy to pick out. Something about shading or gradient or something, probably because since anime is drawn rather than captured like a photo there's no detail that's fully incidental. GenAI, of course, has no actual purpose and so all details in every output are incidental. That gives the output a weird unfocused quality I think?
In conclusion, I'm starting to suspect that VCs don't have souls and/or don't interact with any human being outside of potential partners-in-somehow-not-crime or potential victims.
I think I've seen some people do things with Live2D models of Touhou Project characters, but that particular AY PEE is famously extremely permissive about derivative works. If you squint, you might count cases where a vtuber version of an existing character is backed by the artist or company who already owns the rights to that character, which is not unheard of.
Other than that, no. VTubers playing characters from existing anime is not a thing that happens much. If anyone's confused why that's the case, consider a context where a someone who isn't a corporate robot might use the term "IP" (as in intellectual so-called property).
Off to a strong start I see
That might actually be the most infuriatingly US-centric post I've ever read, and that's really saying something! God!!!!
And it's talking about "The World" in the title of course!
We're sorry, but the brainrot is too far advanced. Amputation is your only hope.
long on keikakucoin! *
* translator's note: keikaku means plan
all according to k5u
a1l a7g t0o k5u
nani?
this mf'er watched all the naruto filler and fuckin' loved it
emails SHFiguarts every week from their work address, "Deluxe Mecha-Naruto when?????"
Two nukes weren't enough
Back in the day they let you nuke a self-styled god-emperor's fascist resource extraction empire of genocidal death cultist twice, but nowadays you can't even spare one little warhead for a16z?
Ok maybe this sneer is a little edgy even for my own tastes. Up it goes anyway.