Behind the curtain

Now here’s a hard post to write. The hardest I’ve had to write on this site, probably, even if there’s harder stuff on my other one I never promote. Naturally that subject is far heavier than this one in terms of scale and horror, but this story is also important to many of us, and certainly to me on a personal level, having been in this fan circle for years now and having experienced some of the feelings Dokibird brought up recently.

The story is still unfolding — I briefly brought it up in my last post, but if you want an overview in video form, VTuber YouTube commentary guy Koefficient has put together a couple of good ones, together with big commentary channels Critikal/Charlie and Someordinarygamers/Mutahar to show just how much traction this story has gotten. Briefly put, popular streamer Selen Tatsuki was publicly terminated from the agency Nijisanji EN following what she has confirmed now to be two of her suicide attempts stemming from abuses suffered while in the company. As of this writing, Niji EN has put out a bizarre statement presumably in an attempt at damage control, using three of their own talents as combined mouthpieces and shields.

This statement, for some reason released on Elira’s channel instead of the main agency channel Nijisanji EN as it should have been, turned out to be what many suspect was a recitation of a corporate script in which the three attempted to attack the credibility of their former colleague Selen Tatsuki, now known as Dokibird after returning to her old indie channel and character. Legal documents sent by Dokibird’s lawyer to Nijisanji’s parent corporation Anycolor in the course of legal business were reportedly shown to the three talents, and certain documents were discussed that very obviously should not have been. Nijisanji’s script ridiculously attempted to spin the real names of VTubers on said legal documents — which, again, were meant for attorneys’ eyes only* — as doxxing and a veiled threat, while insisting that Selen was able to leave freely if she didn’t like conditions (despite the fact that these livers work under contracts that presumably have terms governing that, and also in a complete contradiction of Selen/Doki’s own account.)

Audience response was about as negative as it could have possibly been. A large majority of fans, already angry with Anycolor over their treatment of Selen, boiled over in the chat. Everything about both its content and delivery was so vile that this short stream, meant to discredit Doki, instead destroyed what little confidence the agency still enjoyed at that point, and that together with the reputations of the three livers and most of all of Elira, who hosted and led the stream.

I watched this shitshow in real time, and it felt like having my heart ripped out. Maybe that’s extremely silly of me to say, but fuck me if it wasn’t the truth. I watched Elira and really enjoyed her chilled out feel, her voice, and her love for niche Japanese games. Her drunk stream years back is one of the most entertaining I’ve seen. And now here she was, perhaps being forced by corporate to carry out a character assassination on her former colleague, and for all we know at risk of also losing her job. Or not — nobody knows what’s really going on aside from the people most directly involved.

I’m not interested in handing out moral condemnation to individuals. There’s a lot of speculation going around right now, much of it likely way off the mark, and it shouldn’t even have to be said that harassment of these three or any other Niji talents is entirely unacceptable as Dokibird herself has repeatedly stated. Moreover, though I have dropped in on her streams, I don’t actually know what Elira is like, being a character and an entertainer as she is, and having watched no Vox or Ike at all, I can’t say anything about them aside from Vox’s part in the black-screen stream being especially infuriating (if you want a great example of victim-blaming, of a suicide survivor no less, watch his section of the stream if you can bear it, because it’s not harassment to express my opinion about the words that came out of his mouth.)

But that’s just the point: I don’t know her or any of these other entertainers on that level and never will. I visited their streams occasionally and had a good time, and that’s about it. That’s not a friendship, it’s just an entertainer-viewer relationship and nothing else.

Now you might say, well shit AK, isn’t that obvious. Of course it is. But watching VTubers, it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the color and music and lore. It’s meant to be a spectacle, and it’s absolutely effective if you’re into the style — some of the music is definitely too sugary/idol-ish for me, but even some of that works in the context of what these idol-like groups are trying out.

I should note that I’m not saying not to watch VTubers. I still have a few that I drop in on to this day, and I’ll continue to do so. I certainly recommend Dokibird, but the newest Hololive wave also has some great streamers (Fuwamoco alone have deservedly become a staple by now) along with VShojo, the rapidly growing agencies Phase Connect and idol-EN, and the not very rapidly growing but still highly talented Prism Project lineup. Three of these groups have also had to deal with terminations, and two of them with especially scandalous ones. But in contrast with Nijisanji, they’ve all handled these public firings with some tact and professionalism, keeping the confidence of their fans as a result.

However, this bitter drama has put all this entertainment in perspective again. It’s easy to assume things are fine behind the scenes when you never witness those backstage happenings. I believe this is especially true for VTubing, just about the most escapist form of entertainment I’ve ever come across if you can measure such things. The situation isn’t hopeless, though: I think the concept of ethical consumerism can and should be applied in this case. Don’t buy from companies that support corrupt and evil practices and actors, and don’t support VTuber agencies that treat their talent like product that should just be thrown away when they’re no longer of use, no matter the risk to their mental health. While some Niji fans will no doubt continue to stick their heads in the sand, I’m happy to see so many other fans taking a stand and disproving the common mainstream concept that VTuber watchers are all mindless, drooling idiots.

Finally, I stated above that I wasn’t interested in morally condemning any individual — but I will condemn Anycolor and Nijisanji. I have plenty of problems with my own country, but I thank God for the First fucking Amendment that lets me, along with so many other former fans, speak the truth about a company without being threatened with a defamation charge. I had honestly become kind of disconnected from Niji EN around the end of 2022, so I wasn’t following too closely when one of their other talents Zaion LanZa was terminated early last year, but I do remember her being very publicly and distastefully dragged through the mud similar to the treatment Selen received. Having never watched her streams, I don’t know much about her or her new/old form Sayu Sincronisity that she has since returned to, but her claims about working conditions at Nijisanji EN seem to have been vindicated, and she’s also enjoyed a boost in popularity in the last couple of weeks as a result. Though I can just imagine how complicated her feelings might be, given that she largely wasn’t believed until a far more popular streamer was mistreated.

To this day, I deal with depression and at my lowest points with suicidal ideation. I’m not in any danger to myself at all for a few reasons (family, a sense of duty to keep living in general, and religion though that’s a more complicated point) but these issues used to be far worse for me, especially back in the mid/late 2010s when I was a heavy drinker to the point that I might have actually killed myself with alcohol, working at a job so lousy I dreaded going into the office every single morning. That daily pit in your stomach gets hard to take after a while. This is all just to say that, even if I don’t know her and never will, I can directly sympathize with a lot of Doki’s account.

Now I pray that we’re at the end of this painful drama, and I hope the best for everyone in this situation, aside from Anycolor, which will sadly very likely keep coasting on its large, successful Nijisanji JP branch without having to account for any of its actions. Who knows where Niji EN is headed — a total collapse seems likely at this point given its reputation is now absolute shit among most western fans, but I’m officially out and done with it.

Next time I hope to write about something happier. I picked up Persona 3 Reload, the one single long JRPG that I consider grandfathered in under my “long narrative games are banned because I don’t have time anymore” policy, so maybe something about that. Until then.

 

* Attorney time, since I didn’t want to nitpick Niji’s stream up there (plenty of YouTubers have done that thoroughly by now): It’s absolutely natural and even necessary for a legal document to contain the names of people an attorney and client think are relevant to a case. “Here are the witnesses we’d like to interview”, that sort of thing. And naturally you can’t just put “Elira Pendora” on a document like that, being the name of a character and not of a real person.

What’s not natural is for a company’s legal department to share fucking legal documents sent by the opposing side to parties outside that confidence, and then for those parties to reveal information from said fucking documents to a live audience of tens of thousands. A child could probably tell you that, but for what it’s worth I’m speaking from a place of authority, since my job involves dealing with confidential and privileged material. I don’t know Japanese law, but the preservation of confidentiality in a legal context is such a universal concept that I believe if Anycolor has a legal department, and they were consulted and actually signed off on this trainwreck of a statement, the lawyers who so did should be fired.

P.S.: A few YouTube lawyers have commented on this issue. The one stream I was able to catch some of was by Runkle of the Bailey, a Canadian lawyer who looks like a Lord of the Rings elf for some reason. But he’s a good one to check out on this issue, Doki being Canadian and based in Canada, and he breaks down Canadian privacy law that I didn’t know anything about. I don’t know much more about Canadian law, but I do agree that Doki looks to be in a very good and very defensible position and that the best thing to do at this point for her might just be nothing legally speaking. Seems likely since she’s said she just wants to move on anyway. And for those who want to see Anycolor account for their actions, I wouldn’t hold my breath, not unless something happens to rock their main JP branch, which I honestly don’t know a thing about.

More YouTube stuff to fill your hours

All free to watch, as long as you’re okay with ads (or have Adblock. Reminder that I encourage everyone to use Adblock, because fuck advertising being shoved into our brains every second of the day.) This was originally going to be a proper post, but I guess I’m once again not capable of that right now. There’s still plenty of interesting stuff to talk about however. Like science:

A while back I was watching a string of videos about physics and chemistry, maybe kicked off by that video about the guy who made up an element in the last post like this. Angela Collier’s style is plainer, just her in front of the camera (or in front of the camera playing Binding of Isaac) talking about a topic related to physics. A lot of this stuff would be over my head, but Collier, a theoretical physicist, has a talent for putting her subjects in terms a layman or dumbass like me can easily understand. I especially find the videos about science-related controversies interesting, and she has some of those as well.

She also asks some of the most important questions, like whether Pokemon evolution is realistic:

Collier has a basic but effective style, and I recommend her channel if you’re into this sort of stuff. (But what’s with the trend of people making videos and talking over gameplay and/or other crap? Damn kids can’t enjoy anything if they’re not watching at least five of it at a time, I say as I have a VTuber talking live at me at the same time, because if I have even one moment without noise or light blaring at me I’d be left with my own thoughts and would have to reflect on myself and what I’ve become.)

If you’d rather watch another person talking to you (not with a VTuber rig, just the regular kind of person) about 90s animation, theme parks, and modern movies I’ll never see like those Harry Potter prequels, check out Jenny Nicholson. WCRobinson reminded me of her channel in the last post, and I’d neglected to giver her a spot even though I’d been subbed to her for a while, so here she is. Nicholson is great at taking subjects I have absolutely no interest in and making them interesting enough to learn about for me, a real skill. Probably helps that I don’t have to care about spoilers at all, same reason I can watch those Red Letter Media reviews of live action movies I’ll also never see.

There’s at least one movie Jenny talks about that I have seen, or at least I’ve seen one of them. The Land Before Time is maybe the first movie I clearly remember from my childhood. From what I remember, it was a pretty decent adventure movie with talking dinosaurs, and then whatever studio took the concept from Don Bluth and made 14 direct-to-video sequels. I’d always assumed those sequels were all pisswater like such sequels usually were, but maybe not? Respect for reviewing all these movies, because man some of them look rough.

Maybe you’d rather watch videos about horrible maritime accidents. In that case, I’d point you to Brick Immortar, a channel focusing on just that subject, recounting the histories of these incidents. This is still another subject I know nothing about, having been on a ship out of sight of land once in my life when I was seven. Hell, I barely even see the ocean these days, living as far inland as I do. I think it’s been four years now. Fucking hell.

I think I’m at a point now where the only way I can feel okay is by hearing about horrific accidents and being grateful that at least I wasn’t in them. If you need some of those, I recommend this channel, or also if you just want to watch some interesting videos about seafaring disasters.

Continuing with the disaster theme, here’s Fall of Civilizations, a history podcast featuring longform episodes each about the collapse of a civilization, most of them ancient. The production is impressive, with appropriate music and different voice actors reciting from primary sources. The most obviously standout features are the video versions of his podcasts, however — the substance of the story is all the same, but his films of the real-life spots add to the effect.

Creator Paul Cooper does a nice job with this material, presenting it in a digestable format. I appreciate his nuanced handling of the complex problems and conflicts he talks about, and also his focus on some of the less talked about civilizations like the Assyrians and Nabataeans. Not so with his latest episode about ancient Egypt, but there’s plenty of interesting detail there too (though also look forward to the video version in several months probably, that one should be good.)

Finally, once again, it’s the part where I talk about VTubers. A sad one again as well, but even more so this time: yesterday as of this writing, laughing purple Apex Legends dragon Selen Tatsuki’s contract was terminated and she was immediately let go and her channel shut down. Some serious allegations have been made, not about Selen’s conduct but rather that of the Nijisanji EN management, which had already stained itself in the eyes of fans for its handling of past controversies. I won’t go into details — there’s plenty of even more serious information about that around now that drama channels have already snapped up — but management now appears shockingly incompetent and unprofessional at best and malicious at worst, and since they’ve exhausted all their goodwill, nobody’s giving them any benefit of the doubt.

On the upside, Selen has gotten tons of support, and there’s even a sense that this termination was more of a freeing than a firing. I wish her the best — she was genuinely really entertaining, and I’ll miss her streams. A run of nearly three years is pretty damn good, though it’s sad that it ended like this. I have to wish the best to her old colleagues as well, who must be feeling it a lot more than the fans right now. There’s tons of talent in that agency, and it’s amazing how agency management seems to be neglecting it.

On a totally unrelated note, I just heard about an indie VTuber making her return after ending her activities nearly three years ago. Dokibird apparently enjoys drawing and playing FPSes, and she has a unique laugh. If you liked Selen, maybe you should drop in on her upcoming return stream?

Enough for now. Hope you’re all doing well — work is eating me alive, but I still have to find time to write. Next time I might bother to write something actually structured and coherent. Until then!

More YouTube channels and videos for your eyes and ears

The next post was going to be a review of cute girl fishing anime Slow Loop, but it turned out there was more to say about it than I expected, so I’ll be taking a little more time on that one. For now, let’s get on with some more low-effort posts. The last few weeks have been pretty taxing, which might be part of why I feel like I’ve fallen off a little here.

Always with the irresponsible hot older sister, these shows.

But watching YouTube can help take your mind off heavy matters pretty well. Not the version of YouTube where you’re not logged in, because that one is horrible — I mean when you’re logged in and the Google algorithm or whatever knows what you’re looking for. I’m not sure how relevant my recommendations are to anyone reading, but I hope the following channels and videos will help give you some free entertainment while you’re working or driving on the highway in the rain at 9 pm (but don’t do that.) Unlike previous YouTube posts, I won’t be bothering with breaking these into broad categories because I’m too damn lazy now.

Since we just passed by Halloween, here’s something possibly scary for you. I’ve talked up Kane Pixels a little here already, the guy who created those Backrooms videos. He’s back with a new series named The Oldest View, which I won’t spoil too much except to say that you might not think about wandering around a dead mall in quite the same way after watching it:

Kane is a serious talent, one of those rare guys who seems to know what’s truly scary and to implement those scares in a unique and interesting way. I’m not much for horror — the last piece of horror aside from this I think I watched was Mieruko-chan and that was half fanservice anyway — but Kane really gets at that interesting psychological aspect of horror, creating environments that seem fairly normal at first but then gradually fuck more and more with their victims. His concepts share a lot in common with House of Leaves and similar work, but he puts his own spin on the theme, creating all his videos in Blender apparently — extremely impressive when you consider how good these videos look.

Oldest View and those Backrooms videos may also be the one thing I’d be able to relate to zoomers about, because I don’t understand their music or anything else they like. It’s no wonder A24 snapped him up — I’m not a great fan of the studio’s work, but if there’s anyone who deserves a bigger budget to better realize his ideas, it’s this guy.

Now to something more horrifying in some ways: deep dive video series about technology and scientific research with a focus on massive failures and scams. Bobbybroccoli has been making excellent video documentaries for years, though it was this one that brought me to his channel:

His titles are attention-grabbing in a way that might make you doubt their honesty, but Bobby delivers on those titles. I’m no scientist, but I’m fascinated by a lot of the physics concepts that come up in his videos. I also love the style of his videomaking with his beautiful and unique charts and graphs — slickness alone isn’t enough to make a good documentary, but he also brings the substance to back it up.

Speaking of extremely long, in-depth video documentaries, Down the Rabbit Hole guy Fredrik Knudsen recently put out his work on space MMO EVE Online after two years of work, and it’s easy to see where all that work went.

I played EVE for a total of about two weeks in 2006 before realizing I’d fail out of college if I kept going, so I don’t know much about the game, but I have heard stories about Something Awful goons taking it over. Turns out EVE goes far deeper than that, with entire epic wars and dramatic betrayals that occasionally seeped out into the real world. Some of the battles were apparently worthy of Legend of the Galactic Heroes for their weight and scale, and combined with the real-life drama of Icelandic developer CCP, Knudsen’s video makes for a great story. This guy is the next Ken Burns, or maybe even the next Werner Herzog if he can manage to ride that line between crazy person and genius (really, just read about the things Herzog did to make his 70s/80s films — it’s a miracle he didn’t die.) And prolific blogger Wilhelm Arcturus of The Ancient Gaming Noob got a quote! Check it out.

Being from the old internet, I can appreciate a good Let’s Play video. I don’t know if the kids even know what the hell that is, but back in the day (the 2000s, I mean) people were filling YouTube with full playthroughs of games, often with commentary over the top. This concept originally came from either Something Awful or Chief Arino on GameCenter CX, giving people a relaxing/exciting new look at a game, something like what streamers still do to this day. However, my favorite kinds of playthroughs (not counting anything at all a sufficiently cute/entertaining VTuber does) are the challenges, in which the player takes on a game with severe handicaps to test their skills.

That’s my intro to YouTube video maker Ambiguousamphibian. He makes some fun videos testing the limits of largely simulation games. Maybe it helps that I’ve played some of them like The Sims and Cities: Skylines, but he explains everything well enough that his strategies are easy to follow and a good time to watch whether they lead to success or utter disaster, and in many cases the bigger the disaster the better.

If you’re looking for a mix of video games and documentary-style informative entertainment, here’s Cybershell, a guy who’s made a lot of interesting and insightful videos about the Sonic series. You never knew about Sonic the Hedgehog: The Screen Saver? Here’s all the information you could ever need about aspects of a game series you didn’t even know existed:

I guess I’m sort of a Sonic fan too, if falling off from the series 20 years ago and keeping up with it sporadically since counts, so maybe I’m just interested for personal reasons, but I respect the effort that goes into Cybershell’s videos (and for a non-Sonic one, watch An Internet Hero, truly an inspiring story.)

And finally for the obligatory VTuber ending: some advice from Houshou Marine.

It’s an old one, but still great. Thanks for the advice, Senchou. And hopefully you can see why I believe VTubers truly are the successors of late night TV. If only today’s late night shows had the courage to talk about prostate milking, maybe they wouldn’t be suffering in the ratings. Or maybe they do that, but it makes a difference when it’s cute anime girls doing the milking and/or talking. In any case, these ladies took the torch from Letterman and Conan, the last true greats of late night (and also Craig Ferguson. The rest are okay to lousy from what I’ve seen, Leno included.)

Now that I’ve both ended another post with a Marine video and complained about modern late night again, I’m out of energy. Until next time, which will definitely be that Slow Loop review, because you need to know about it.

Ten years later, throwing memories away

What a dramatic title, but I hope I can justify it today. This month marks ten years of my writing on this site. I think I’ve gone through the story of how it started a few times, so I won’t get into it again, except to say that writing here helped me survive three years of law school, a culture shock of a year working out in the country, and several of the worst months of my life after I returned to my home city to have my soul crushed by fast-paced (but not lucrative, of course not) litigation work. (And here’s a totally unrelated link to something else I wrote last year.)

Yet I hate most of my posts from those early years. I maintain that this blog was only really worth reading starting in 2019. But even so, writing here gave me some extra sense of purpose, a place to express myself freely and to talk with others like me, and I’ll never forget that. Who knows where I’d be without it?

Playing that “nostalgia” clip from Mad Men again

Though I’m grateful for all that, and to everyone who’s ever read my site, I’m still basically an unhappy person. At least I’ve been able to get enough perspective by now to cope with that somewhat, since I’ve realized that happiness would require more than I can reasonably expect to ever get in life, but it’s still not fun. This is part of the reason I can recognize the value in all that optimistic nihilism stuff that’s popular these days while also finding it totally empty on a personal level — it’s no good telling someone to just not worry and enjoy life when life isn’t all that enjoyable anyway.

But I have to deflate myself after all the bullshit I wrote above, so here: I’ve made no progress at all. If I had the means, I’d move as far from civilization as possible, while still having internet and all the other modern amenities of course. Maybe some kind of undersea base, staffed with catgirl robot maids. There’s a nice premise for a stupid ecchi anime comedy, but is the protagonist any good? No, and neither am I, because I just want to forget whole sections of my life. They weren’t even traumatic or anything like that, more just frustrating and disappointing. I’ve already blocked out about a decade out of the sheer desire not to think about that period.

And I’m beating myself up over this because I have the feeling that it’s wrong. I think I’d just rather use my memories as yet another escape from the present, which might be another part of why I can remember my years as an elementary school kid better than most of what occurred between then and college, and some of the parts after college (though my abuse of alcohol then did a lot to blur those later memories too.)

Even writing fiction plays some role in that. Especially while writing this novella I’m working on, I feel like I’m building a world that I can walk around in, with characters I might have real conversations with. Not that I’d want to walk around in this world given how unpleasant it is, but I hope I can write it to feel real in that way. But of course, building that world has one more benefit to me: it’s another place I can escape to, away from the shit memories and into some new ones, even if they’re false.

Is my fiction just another kind of two-dimensional world? There is a robot lady in my novella, but she’s neither a catgirl nor a bear girl, so I’d say I’m showing some restraint.

Now you may be thinking, this guy is off his meds. I should probably be taking some. But I’m so beyond worrying about anything at this point that it’s getting harder to care about how I’m supposed to live, even if I do need to care on some level since my life doesn’t just belong to me. Maybe that’s the only thing that keeps me grounded at all?

I guess this post was just my usual depressive way of saying thanks for reading, so again, thanks for reading. I don’t plan to ever stop writing.

Criticism and nostalgia: My look back at The Simpsons

I know I said I probably wouldn’t ever cover western animation again, but this is an exception I have to make. A while back, I found an interesting YouTube channel, TheRealJims, who seems to make videos exclusively about the famous and stupidly long-running animated show The Simpsons. The video that got my interest was this one about the commonly held idea of the show having a golden age. As the maker points out, this “golden age” concept isn’t unique to The Simpsons, but it is especially relevant to that show given how long it’s been running — as of this writing, season 34 has just finished airing — and the often repeated belief that the show fell off sharply in quality somewhere around the late 90s or early 00s after nine or ten years of innovation and sharp humor.

Several years ago, I saw another video by popular YouTube man SuperEyepatchWolf about the concept of the “Zombie Simpsons“, in which he argues that the show had been a shambling corpse for nearly two decades by that point and heavily criticizes the degraded show’s clunky writing and mediocre jokes. While I think there’s a lot to that argument, Jim’s (?) newer video presents some interesting challenges to it. And while I do agree that The Simpsons had seriously fallen off by around 2000-2001, I’ve gotten more and more used to challenging my own views over the years, something maintaining this blog all this time has helped with. So why not take my own look at the show and my view of it?

For whatever reason over the last couple of weeks (despair over the future and our impending end? Probably) I was in the right kind of nostalgic mood to go back to the 90s and rewatch some old episodes, pulling the three boxsets I own off the shelf: seasons 5 through 7. For the kids reading who might have never watched The Simpsons and probably consider it a show for old people, these three seasons are firmly in that “golden age” that the two above YouTube guys bring up. While there’s some disagreement among fans over where that golden age begins and ends as TheRealJims gets into, the most commonly accepted core of it is seasons 3 through 8, with some fans including the less polished first two seasons and/or the controversial seasons 9 and 10, when the show started showing signs of what it would become in the 00s.

I’m not sure where exactly I’d place that beginning and end myself, but watching parts of seasons 5 through 7, I still enjoy them, and probably on a different level than I did as a kid. Younger readers who likely never watched the show growing up will nevertheless almost certainly be familiar with some of the jokes from these seasons and those around it that ended up turning into memes. The most prominent example is the Steamed Hams segment from season 7, above (no context to this one; the episode is a series of unconnected “short film” clips in an unusual format for the show) but there are plenty of others. Works on contingency? No, money down! That’s a paddlin’. And I’m going to law school (I don’t know if this one is that popular, anyway, but it’s one of my favorites for obvious reasons.)

However, all this raises another question, and one that the two linked analysis videos touch on: how is my perception of these seasons and others in that “golden age” Simpsons affected by the nostalgia factor? My history with The Simpsons isn’t too different from other mid-30s (or let’s be honest at this point: late 30s) 90s kids. I was too young to watch it from the beginning, still being a baby when it began its run as a series of shorts on The Tracy Ullman Show in 1987 and then as a spinoff full-length series in 1989, but by around 1993-4 I was conscious enough of pop culture that I knew about The Simpsons and the fact that my parents didn’t want me watching it because it was widely considered crass and subversive.

Which it kind of was, to be fair, and that was partly the point. It’s easy to forget these days, after South Park, Futurama, and Family Guy took over as the prime western adult animated comedies in the late 90s and then over even more changes in the intervening 20+ years, but The Simpsons was a very different kind of family sitcom from the nice soft kind of the 80s, where the family would all learn a valuable lesson at the end and warm fuzzy feelings and all that good stuff. While the show wasn’t totally cynical or nihilistic and did have some of these moments, it presented a far more satirical and sharper look at working/middle-class American family life in the 90s than audiences at the time were used to, and people ate it up (and see also Married… With Children, which had some of the same effect in live action.)

The writing in the 20 or so episodes I watched recently was almost entirely excellent, consistently funny with pointed humor. So I think, but would everyone agree with that? A lot of people clearly didn’t like The Simpsons back in the 90s for that subversiveness, but I have no idea how younger viewers today would generally feel about it given how entertainment has developed since. Do I still love these old episodes more because I grew up with them and had my formative years in the period when the show was at its height of its influence?

That brings me to a common question I hear when people around my age talk about The Simpsons: when did you stop watching it? The last I remember watching it on anything near a regular basis was season 14, from 2002 to 2003, and by that time I wasn’t watching it religiously by any means. From what I remember, I’d catch it some Sundays just out of habit, and maybe partly out of a hope that whatever new episode was out would be more entertaining than usual. I also remember usually being disappointed, feeling the show had lost something, though I probably couldn’t have told you exactly what that something was at the time.

It’s probably a cheap shot to pick this moment out from The Simpsons deep in that “zombie” period from season 23, but it’s an infamous one for a reason:

Not that The Simpsons back in its classic period didn’t have a ton of celebrity voices and even celebrities playing themselves, because it did, but SuperEyepatchWolf was right to point out that it never worshiped at the altar of celebrity back then, and I remember that changing even back in the early 00s to the point that it was certainly a turnoff for me. Especially for me, being the hipster sort of pop-hating “I only listen to 70s prog and jazz” jerkoff I was, the kind you might expect from an outsider as I also was. That development came on top of and in some ways hand-in-hand with the show’s far more outlandish plots and Homer’s increasingly reckless assholishness that stopped being much fun to watch. I don’t remember feeling betrayed by this new version of the show or anything so dramatic, but it was clear to me that something had changed, that The Simpsons wasn’t for me anymore, and so I’d totally dropped it by the time I started at college.

But then I’ve read comments from younger viewers talking about how they grew up with and loved those early 00s seasons. While I don’t share their perspective, there’s clearly something to the show’s middle and/or late period that some people have enjoyed enough to continue watching. And in matters of taste, there can be no dispute. Though I’d argue that criticism should always be welcomed and absolutely don’t agree with the modern Simpsons showrunners that I only dislike the post-90s stuff I’ve seen thanks to nostalgia for the old show (a necessarily self-serving statement on their part, though I get them wanting to defend their work as well) I’m never going to tell someone they’re wrong for enjoying a piece of art that I don’t. Leave that to attention-seeking assholes on YouTube very much unlike the two guys I’ve posted about here who write about art merely to stir up stupid and useless arguments. That may be a fine line at times, but the line undoubtedly exists, and I hope I’ve never crossed it, or at least not since I’ve become a more mature adult.

All that said, I’ve heard that amazingly season 34 might be pretty good. Or at least pretty all right. I haven’t watched any of The Simpsons chronologically speaking between a couple of episodes I caught many years ago in seasons 15/16 and today, partly because I haven’t watched regular TV for at least 12 years now, but if you know more about the modern series than I do, feel free to drop a recommendation if you think it’s worth giving. The show isn’t going anywhere, in any case: it was just renewed for seasons 35 and 36. Apparently it’s still doing well enough for Fox to keep it on the air, and somehow all that despite the fact that its largely left-leaning political satire doesn’t bother Rupert Murdoch enough to take it down. The man likes money, after all.

And just as an aside, here’s a point to consider for those who want to claim The Simpsons “got political” — it was always pretty damn political, at least in parts. And I’m not the sort who claims that about every work of art in existence like some do. Though for all I know, the political stuff got cranked up when Mr. Trump entered the White House, but the man was and is impossible not to mock. See, I’m political too.

But I won’t dive into that hole today. Next time, I might get back to the usual thing and write about a few of the many games in my backlog that I’m playing, including a couple that I added to that backlog because of big sales. I’m an idiot, but what’s new? Until then.

Easy love

These days, there’s naturally a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and how it’s going to change the future by either making our lives free of labor and hardship or by fucking us all into abject poverty and misery and death, or more probably some complex mix of positive and negative outcomes. Most of the focus so far has been AI’s impact on the workforce and more recently on artistic creativity. I’ve written about that a few times here myself and will continue to do so, especially when the entanglement of AI in art raises more legal problems.

However, there’s another aspect of life, an extremely important one to most people, that I believe AI may affect. There’s not all that much talk about this potential use of AI, or not in the mainstream at least, but depending upon the speed and direction of its development, we may have to face another hard reality soon: that AI, perhaps joined with other emerging technologies like augmented and virtual reality, may intrude into personal and even into romantic relationships. I raised this possibility a while back in the last overlong post I wrote on AI and art, but while it might have come off as a joke there, I seriously believe that this technology might provide some comfort to people who feel the outside world isn’t worth interacting with.

Welcome to the NHK

First, a couple of personal disclosures. If you’ve read this site for a while, this won’t come as a surprise, but I am a severe introvert. I can get by in public and can work well enough with other people, but it takes effort that I wouldn’t be spending if I had the choice. That’s not counting close friends or (certain) family members, and also not counting other writers and readers I’ve met online, in part since I think we can connect far more easily here based on our common interests. However, I spend most of my days doing things I wouldn’t be doing if I had other options anyway, and that’s true of 95% or more of all humanity, so broadly speaking there’s nothing special about that. The point is that I can understand the desire for escape very well, even if it’s into a fantasy.

Also, despite what some of my extreme doubts about the use of AI in the creation of art might suggest, I’m not a Luddite. I’m not anti-technology in any sense, in fact: my problem isn’t with the tech but with the shitheads in charge of our lives who will decide to exactly what degree we’re all expendable. (My prediction: as great a degree as they can get away with, all while they continue to insist they care about us.)

I probably shouldn’t make broad, sweeping statements about society, but I’ll make one anyway: I think most people tend to do what’s easiest. That’s certainly true of me. Even though I feel I work hard and carry a burden, it would actually be far more inconvenient to me to quit and put that burden down. It’s easier for me to make even massive exertions at work and in my life considering what would happen to me otherwise.

Another broad, sweeping statement: love is hard. It can take work to maintain even in those relationships where it should come naturally — between siblings, between parents and children, between close friends. Love can also be hard to find when it comes to romance — I mean real love, or “true love” if that actually exists. Tending that kind of love once it’s found can be even more demanding than the other types because of the increased intimacy, requiring effort to understand your partner and sometimes to make serious personal sacrifice. I don’t think I need any proof to back that statement up; I’ve experienced it and you probably have too, unless you’ve been blessed with infinite understanding and patience or else you live on an island completely alone, and somehow also with internet access (i.e. living my actual dream life.)

I don’t even remember what Prisma is, but I want to go to wherever this is supposed to be

Considering the above, it’s hard for me to avoid an obvious conclusion: that given an easier path to companionship and love, at least some people will take it. Yes, even if it involves finding that companionship with a machine, as long as the illusion of love that creates is convincing enough. The true romantics can argue against me on this point, but I don’t think the mind is very hard to trick. Even if we are social animals as the experts always say, who’s to say something like an advanced AR/VR simulation in which you’re the only organic being wouldn’t fulfill those social needs, especially if the senses can be properly stimulated?

And hell, it might not even take an as-yet science fiction full-dive VR system to start this trend. It’s arguably already started, even if only at the very fringes of society. Remember the guy who married Hatsune Miku? Akihiko Kondo communicated with her in hologram form until the service that maintained it was shut down last year, but now it’s not hard to imagine, for example, a Miku-styled chatbot paired with some kind of graphic interface to achieve a similar or even more convincing effect. We’re not quite there yet, as anyone who’s tried out character-based generative chatbots can tell you, but recent events have taught me never to say “this will never happen” or even “this might happen in ten years.”

Now you might accuse me of bias — that I might want to use this hypothetical technology for these kinds of purposes and so hope for the outcome I’ve described. However, that’s really not the case. Yes, I admit that I would try out this tech if it’s ever available in anything like the form I’m anticipating. There’s also still a part of me that would not regret seeing certain social norms utterly torn to pieces — there’s the embittered outcast talking. But most of it is just my selfish desire to experience something new and exciting, to feel intoxicated in a way I can’t anymore, forced to live as I do in a sober reality (though I have to admit as always that this was largely my own doing.)

All that said, I don’t think it would necessarily be a great thing to give ourselves over to these new experiences so completely. I’ll even set aside understandable fears of an AI lulling us into our own simulated fantasy worlds and then plotting to murder us (another short story prompt there, though probably a tired one by now) or more probably just logically concluding at some point that we’re not worth the resources required to keep us alive. Even if these hypothetical AI-powered systems turn out to be benign in themselves, they may turn out a lot of users who, having spent all weekend essentially talking to themselves in their own custom fantasy worlds, are increasingly less able and/or willing to deal with their fellow humans.

Or is it?

These concerns come along with an important asterisk: that we won’t reach a point where these artificial entities gain sentience or at least seem to, and where they might identify as human or at least with humans. That development would raise entirely different questions that have been addressed in science fiction going back decades, including a few works I’ve covered here like Time of Eve and Planetarian. If we do ever reach that point, the concerns I’m expressing here will be completely outdated.

But we’re not there yet, not judging by my talks with the newly released Google Bard. What a god damn bore that thing is. Then again, I hear OpenAI’s planned ChatGPT 5 is supposed to be so advanced that it will put us all out of work, at least according to the ultra-sensationalist online tech rags.

Very few if any of us can accurately predict what the future holds, so feel free to throw out and ignore all of the above as rank speculation, but it was hard for me to keep these thoughts to myself. Sometimes I think if I don’t let them out here in post form, I’ll talk about them to people at work or at a party somewhere and they’ll think I’ve lost my fucking mind. Not that I don’t do that anyway sometimes, but this site helps me control the damage. At the very least, you all already know I’ve lost it, so I’m thankful for this safe outlet.

Six live-action TV series I like

Yes, shocking but true: I’ve watched live-action TV series in the past. I almost never write about them, because what can I really add? But since I haven’t been able to make much of any progress at all with my running games or anime series lately, I thought it might be a good time to fill that gap by briefly looking at six of these series I like. And if this strengthens my normie credentials a little, that’s fine too, because God knows I could use more of those when I’m forced to socialize with people outside the dank, dark subcultures I inhabit.

This list is not exhaustive, but I haven’t enjoyed too many more live-action shows than these. Listed roughly in order of airing:

1) Columbo

Here’s a true classic, one that stopped airing in its original run a while before I even came around. Even the kids today seem to know something about it, but if you need an introduction, Columbo is a police procedural drama/comedy centered on title character Lt. Columbo of the LAPD, a homicide detective. Columbo is notably not a mystery — a typical episode begins with the lead-up to the murder, the murder itself, and the immediate aftermath, all while following the killer’s POV. The entertainment in Columbo comes not from trying to figure out who committed the crime (in contrast with Agatha Christie’s Poirot for example) but in following Columbo as he pieces everything together.

This wouldn’t work so well if Columbo himself weren’t a good character, but he’s a great one. He’s naturally extremely sharp, catching small details that few if any others ever notice, the details that seal the perpetrators’ fates at the end of each episode. However, he’s also exceedingly humble, a natural character trait but also a major benefit to his work, since his disheveled appearance and his rambling stories about his wife and cousin and dog usually convince the perp that he’s harmless — until he has them cornered.

I highly recommend Columbo, and this is coming from someone who doesn’t generally like crime or cop shows (though I also like Poirot, sure.) There was a revival in the 90s following the original 70s run that I haven’t seen — it looks fine, but the original Columbo is the one I’ve watched and it’s the one that people seem to care far more about.

2) Blackadder

I first saw British comic actor Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean as a kid, but I only discovered his 80s “historical comedy” Blackadder much later, probably right around when I could appreciate it. Blackadder follows a series of four different and presumably related guys throughout British history named Blackadder. The first series was a little bit of a dud as even some of the people involved have said, the probable reason being that the first Blackadder is a sniveling, pathetic character who’s kind of hard to like. I still think that first series has plenty of good moments (see the great Brian Blessed as the fictional King Richard IV) but the following series definitely improved a lot on the formula, turning Blackadder into a much smarter and more cunning amoral asshole. As much of an asshole as he is, however, there’s plenty of satirical criticism dumped on incompetent and greedy rulers, and that’s always welcome when it’s done well as it is here.

Atkinson is always at the center, but he’s not the only prominent player here: if you’re an American like me who first saw Hugh Laurie in House, you should see his very different performances in Blackadder, and maybe it’s no surprise that Stephen Fry also shows up a lot. All the acting is great, however. If you like history or comedy at all, check this one out.

3) Yes Minister

Moving from historical to political comedy, Yes Minister is another British series from the 80s centered on new government minister Jim Hacker and his civil service counterpart Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby. Hacker is a well-meaning but somewhat cowardly politician — he wants to do the right thing, but he’s also obsessed with his poll numbers and his placement in the Prime Minister’s cabinet. He also has to deal with Sir Humphrey, a smooth, intelligent, and extremely cynical bureaucrat who runs the administration side of his ministry — though Sir Humphrey would say he’s the one who has to deal with Hacker. These guys spend most of Yes Minister sparring over policy matters and occasionally joining forces with Hacker’s personal private secretary (but also civil servant and therefore on the same payroll as Sir Humphrey) Bernard Woolley caught in the middle.

From what I can tell, Yes Minister doesn’t take a political stance — Hacker’s party is never named and just seems to be generic center-ish party. The real focus is horn-locking between the politician and the bureaucrat. Good stuff if you don’t mind watching mostly guys in suits talk in fancy rooms, but even if that puts you off, I promise Yes Minister is worth a shot.

4) Father Ted

I haven’t been to Ireland and haven’t had anything to do with Catholicism aside from the one side of my family who are about as lapsed as you can get without formally getting rid of that affiliation, but I still liked the Irish comedy Father Ted a lot. This series follows Father Ted Crilly in his virtual exile to a remote island off the western coast of Ireland for some financial mishap he was involved in, where he has to live with two other priests, the kind but slow-witted Father Dougal and the possibly senile and definitely alcoholic Father Jack. Ted spends most of his time taking care of all the actual church duties these two can’t handle while trying to put up with both them, their strangely obsessive housekeeper who gets irate when they refuse to drink the tea she’s constantly brewing, and his hardass boss.

I’m sure there’s stuff that’s still over my head (like what an ecumenical matter is) but I like the show’s comedy, which sometimes gets physical and sometimes absurd. Other fans of Nichijou, Asobi Asobase, and similar misfit absurdist anime comedies should check out Father Ted.

5) Seinfeld

It’s hard to explain why Seinfeld is enjoyable. It’s the famous “show about nothing”, after all. Though I’d say it’s actually a show about etiquette starring four friends consisting of three jerks and one generally well-meaning but insane guy. Each episode follows these four and their other friends/relatives/enemies as they stumble through life in New York City and get themselves in totally avoidable and unnecessary trouble.

I grew up watching Seinfeld in syndication, but I was aware of it as a kid while it was airing and knew it was a big deal along with 90s NBC’s other massively popular sitcoms. Friends and Frasier were both pretty good as well from what I remember, but I think Seinfeld holds up just as well if not better for its great asshole characters. And while Kramer and Newman are especially entertaining, my favorite character has to be eternal loser George Costanza above.

6) The Office (US, but UK is good too)

There’s the disclaimer I’m obligated to give above. I’m not going to say the US Office is better or worse than the UK one — they’re essentially different series and both have their good points, but the US show is the one I know better. On the off chance you haven’t seen either, I’ll just say they’re both worth checking out. Their use of awkward comedy might be uncomfortable for some people (especially the UK version, featuring far more of an assholish boss in David Brent than his American counterpart in Michael Scott) but if you can get past that, there’s a lot to enjoy in both. Though as usual, the American series ran far longer than the British one, arguably overstaying its welcome for a couple of seasons after its central character left the show. (Also, I wouldn’t recommend starting with the first season of the American series — it wasn’t that good, and the show was overhauled and possibly saved from being canceled at the start of the second.)

Some statistics in case you care at all to judge my own tastes: looking over the above list of series, five of the six are comedies and the remaining one has strong comedic elements; three are American, two British, and one Irish. Five are “old” according to the youngest generation that’s currently shaping pop culture (and maybe they’d call The Office old too at this point. Lord, my aching bones.) And maybe not surprisingly for that reason, four feature the old outdated sitcom standard canned laughter, which I admit can be annoying. But look at it this way: when you’ve seen enough older sitcoms, you can tune that laugh track out and focus on the comedy. If the comedy sucks, however, the laugh track only emphasizes its badness. There’s a certain more recent extremely popular laugh-tracked comedy I consider bad that I could name, but it’s taken more than its share of fully deserved kicks by now.

So maybe those normie credentials I was looking for are a bit out of date. Not like Seinfeld makes for water cooler talk anymore, after all. I’m sure there are other more current live-action shows I’d like — for example, Office spiritual successor Parks and Rec and arguably Seinfeld spiritual successor It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But man, I don’t know. My anime backlog is way too large to add anything else unless I somehow get a thousand-year sentence in an age-slowing isolation tank with a TV so I can watch all this stuff. Blackadder being on this list might even give me negative points in that sense, considering its status as a cult nerd sort of show — I may well have put MST3K on the list too if calling that a typical live-action series didn’t feel off.

But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s impossible to dig myself out of that  hole at this point, seeing how my current watch list consists of anime, VTuber clips, and “catgirl cleans your ears with her tongue” ASMR sound-only videos. Say what you want about that last category, but it works better than therapy and is a hell of a lot cheaper.

A look at an assortment of stuff I bought recently

Or a “haul” as the kids say. Look, I have to make these lower-effort posts every so often; I just hope they’re entertaining or informative somehow. I think I picked up some interesting items, anyway, though you can be the judge — I might end up writing dedicated posts on a few if they’re suitable and I have something more to say about them than I’ve written here. Starting with:

Unofficial Hatsune Mix by Kei

I found this brick of a manga volume in a Goodwill of all places while looking for an old shitty bookcase to drag back to my apartment. I eventually did find such a bookcase — it was very cheap and came with a bonus spider pet inside, and also a rusty fucking nail sticking out in a spot I couldn’t see. I believe God was watching over me that day considering I didn’t cut myself on that thing and get tetanus.

I’m also thankful that I found this book, a complete 400-page+ manga about the singing android Hatsune Miku and her other Vocaloid friends just living their lives. From reading the first several chapters, it looks like it’s mostly going to be absurd comedy, which suits me perfectly. There’s some very nice art inside as well, with a few all-color pieces, and all by Kei — if the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s Miku’s character designer and the guy who drew the original illustration on the Vocaloid 2 Character Vocal Series 01 box way back in 2006/7 or whenever that was.

The book itself is extremely used, with a massive crease on the back cover, but for five dollars from a Goodwill that’s okay with me. Anything to buy physical, especially if it’s cheap. And the insides are all there and accounted for as far as I can tell, and that’s what counts.

Girls und Panzer: This is the Real Anzio Battle!

Remember back in my Girls und Panzer review how I complained that Oarai’s match against the Italian-themed school Anzio got skipped over? Well here it is, the whole story behind the match in OVA form: one 40-minute episode on a single Blu-ray. The waste of disc space is astounding, and even more so since there’s an entirely different “OVA Collection” DVD/Blu-ray set, yet this OVA isn’t on it and has to be bought separately. Is it excusable or a cash grab?

I don’t know about that, but I’ve already watched those OVAs on a streaming service and this one on this ripoff disc, and I can say they’re both worthy additions to the series. But I might write an entire post about that very soon. It turns out that I have a lot of OVAs and spinoffs to catch up on, not a single one of which I’ve written about here. Yet — that’s going to be fixed soon. If I can actually write anything about them, anyway.

As for this Blu-ray itself, I can at least say that I got it for a low price. Fair enough considering that Anzio apparently isn’t available to stream (legally) anywhere at all, which is some real bullshit. Oh well — I don’t mind the cash grab as much when I consider that if this were an Aniplex production, I’d be paying at least fifty dollars. Now those are some fucking ripoff artists.

20 centimes (Haiti, 1895)

Yeah, I have yet another depressing nerd hobby: I collect old money. Not that much of it, really, but I pick up stuff on occasion that interests me. This particular coin was minted in Haiti in 1895, and for eight dollars it’s a good deal for me: I didn’t have any older coins from Haiti before this one, and it’s a nice .835 fine silver piece as well, if a small one. The reverse of the coin also has the fineness and weight stamped on it, a standard you can find on pretty much all coins from Latin America and some from the Caribbean (I don’t guess Haiti is part of Latin America because it was formed out of a French colony? Not sure about how the definitions work here.) Another interesting aspect of this coin is that it only has French inscriptions — modern Haitian money has both French and the French-derived Haitian Creole, now co-official languages.

I guess a coin doesn’t exactly fit the themes of the site, but I did buy it recently, so I’m putting it here anyway. Haiti has an interesting history that doesn’t get taught all that much up here in America as well. Maybe because we did plenty to fuck things up for them, and not too long after this very coin was minted? If you want to read a horrific story, go look up the fate of Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Not a very nice man considering what he did to lead to his death, but even so, that’s rough. I also have a lot to say about Woodrow Wilson, and not much of it very nice, but that’s for a different time and place.

S&M Ecstasy by Michiking

Sorry about the censoring. If it annoys you, here’s the full cover in a nice resolution (and NSFW of course.) I’m just doing my best not to give Google, WordPress, or whoever the hell any more excuse to make my site adult-only or whatever else they might be planning on doing. Considering how often I type “fuck” here, I really can’t be too careful. Just look at what YouTube is doing to creators now.

But to get to the point, yeah, I bought a hentai manga. Officially translated into English and best of all decensored, so you don’t have to deal with those annoying censor lines (that you may well mentally erase anyway if you’re used to this kind of stuff.) Michiking’s art is very nice, and the stories — well, it’s porn. There’s not much to this stuff story-wise, but then that’s not probably what you’re looking for if you’re buying this. It’s not all S&M as the title suggests, either, though that is in there too if you’re into it.

More interesting to me is the market for physical hentai works here in the States. There are a few specialty publishers who put this stuff out, most prominent among them Fakku, who published this and many other of these manga volumes, and JAST, who also publish translated/decensored original doujin works. I’m not sure how many perverts with tastes similar to mine are around and what subset of us insist on buying physical when it’s at all feasible, but that might be a good business to get into if you don’t have any moral qualms with this kind of art. I certainly don’t, but then you knew that already.

Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy

A digital copy. No, I’m not that happy about it, but here’s a story you can probably relate to: I saw this for 50% off on the Playstation store, so what was I supposed to do? Now the problem is ever finding any time to play this thing. Maybe when AI takes all the jobs and our benevolent government passes laws creating a post-scarcity society utopia, then I can do this stuff full-time. And maybe I’ll grow wings and gain laser-eye powers too while I’m in fantasy land here.

Sorry, I’m in a lousy mood this morning as I write this last entry. But searching around for a usable Ryza 2 cover helped cheer me up — I couldn’t find any I liked that weren’t 300×300, but then I came across original Ryza artist and character designer Toridamono’s many Ryza 2-related pieces like the one on the left from his Twitter feed, and I guess no further comment is necessary.

That’s all for today. I hope to return with another post this weekend, but in the meantime, I hope we can all drag ourselves to the end of another fucking week. Until next time!

New feeling

The name of this song is New Feeling, and that’s what it’s about.

Lately I’ve been feeling pretty up. Not happy, never happy, but energetic at least. It’s part of the reason I’ve been able to write so much — these ups are productive for me, though I can’t exactly call them pleasant either. And then add in my bouts of sleeplessness as I write this at 2 am.

At times like these, I don’t know what I’d do without music. And while I will be getting back to King Crimson soon, their 90s style of thrashing and stomping around isn’t exactly 2 am music for me. No, I’ve been using something a little lighter in tone. Some Talking Heads (listening to all of 80s Crimson sent me back there) and some bossa nova and fusion. I’ve also been revisiting legendary Japanese fusion guys Casiopea to see if my opinion of their music has changed in the last few years, and I’m happy to say it has, and for the better. Back when I first heard their debut in 2019 I loved it, and I still do. However, their following work left me so underwhelmed back then that I quit listening through their discography after their fourth or fifth album. It all felt like a bland soup of waiting room smooth jazz to me, a serious drop in quality from the excitement of their debut. I hated Super Flight, and aside from a song or two like “Gypsy Wind”, Make Up City and Crosspoint bored me to sleep.

I’m still not blown away by most of this music, none of which comes close to the heights of their debut for me. However, here’s the change in my opinion: aside from parts of Super Flight that I still can’t stand for their unbearably cheesy synth tones (“I Love New York” sucks; I’m not budging on that) I can appreciate this music a lot more than I could a few years ago. It’s tasteful, written with plenty of care, and even if some of it sounds like doctor’s office waiting room or mall lobby fare to me, well, those places need music to avoid awkward silence, right?

And this stuff is better and more interesting than 99% of what actually plays in those places where I live. I still hate this style of smooth jazz when it’s drowned in cheese: see Kenny G, who has technical skill going for him and not much else (aside from mass appeal and commercial success of course, and one halfway decent groove captured on the weather channel part of the vaporware-adjacent News At 11.) But Casiopea, those are some cool guys. That’s not to mention their massive influence on 80s and 90s video game BGM, or the fact that they were apparently amazing live. I probably need to watch a few of their old concert videos.

So where’s the connection with romantic comedy and slice-of-life anime here? It may be a stretch or the fact that I’m trying to live in a constant cloud of sleep deprivation that’s affecting my judgment, but I feel the same way about some anime series that years ago I wouldn’t have even given a first chance, let alone a second. It may have started with Nagatoro, which I found after coming across Uzaki-chan. Though I didn’t love Uzaki all that much, Nagatoro grabbed me where it put off some other viewers with its initially harsh depiction of a bully-turned-love interest (and that turnaround was pretty quick, even if the bully side of Hayase is still there.) Then I found the more straightforwardly sweet Takagi-san and loved that even more.

Okay, Takagi kind of bullies Nishikata too, but it’s a little more good-natured this time. I really do recommend this show, anyway. Even if it’s annoyingly split by season between three streaming services.

And finally, just last year Yuru Camp managed to break down my resistance to slice-of-life anime. I used to avoid a lot of these sorts of series I thought didn’t have plots, until I realized that many of them do; they just tend to have lower and more mundane stakes than most people would expect from anime (and another reminder to all of us that anime is a medium full of all sorts of stories and characters, not just the hyper-dramatic like we hear so often — but then you already know that if you’re here.)

Now I’m wondering whether I can take my new more generous feeling towards certain kinds of music and fiction and apply it more broadly so that I’m not such a miserable fuck. I’m pretty good at not coming off that way when I need to be presentable, but my friends know what I’m like (and you know too, since I hold nothing back on this site.) I don’t enjoy being like this, and if I knew some way to be more content in a life I feel extremely constrained in, I’d act on it. But maybe it’s really all about my state of mind. Almost everyone lives constrained lives, so even if my constraints might seem a little harsh to some people with the traditional family and culture I have to deal with, I can’t say I’m in a unique position.

I’d wish you a happy Valentine’s Day, but I’m not feeling that positive quite yet. If you’re with someone who makes you happy, you don’t need my wishes anyway. So happy St. Valentine’s Day maybe, if you observe that. And happy Tuesday, though Tuesdays usually aren’t that happy for your typical worker. I’m going to listen to more fusion and try to have some nice dreams for once. Until next time.

Notes before the new year

Nothing special today; I just have a few comments to make about where the site might be headed in the coming year.

• I’ll likely keep mixing the post subjects up between anime, music, games, and whatever else I feel like writing about. This is what I’ve been doing anyway up until now, so no real difference here, but my time for games has nearly evaporated thanks to my work schedule, which is why it’s taken a backseat over 2022. Sadly, I don’t see that changing as long as I have to toil for a living. I might even shift a little more towards music, since I can listen to that while I do my more tedious work. This is how it is, you have to make do — my generation calls it “adulting”, which I hate as a term but understand and sympathize with as far as the feeling/concept it describes.

• I have an idea for a novel. It’s the first idea I’ve come up with that I think isn’t total shit and could work in that format. No doubt it’s a derivative mess, with inspiration taken from several older sources, but that’s the story of art, isn’t it? I’m continuing to shift more of my free time over to my fiction, and my only real goal is to get something published in 2023. I already have a few stories that are in decent enough shape to get sent off and torn to shreds by an editor, assuming I’m lucky enough to not just get rejected by every journal on the planet. But if I luck out, I’ll let you know here. (Now I just have to find a suitable pseudonym — I don’t think they’ll let me use plain initials. What a pain.)

• I’ve effectively given up on living a contented life considering the external pressures on me that I’ve written about enough already. I thought that might affect my writing in a negative way, but just the opposite considering all the ideas I’ve had lately. As some wise person said somewhere, comfort is not conducive to creativity, and if that’s true then I’m going to have a ton of creativity in the coming year and beyond. Whether I have the talent to justify said creativity isn’t for me to say — I may well be another Amanda McKittrick Ros or Norman Boutin without realizing it.

This feeling of “I’m trash and everyone else will know about it soon” is very relatable: screenshot related. More on that soon.

That’s it for now. No best ofs in anime or games or anything, not from me. There are some excellent bloggers around the communities here writing them, though, so check those out. I’m sorry I stopped writing those month-end posts with links — they were taking up a lot of time I haven’t had recently, since I normally obsess over them. I’d like to return to them, but again, my free time is ever more limited and my fiction is demanding more of it (cutting into sleep, too, but that’s okay: I’ve never slept very well. And I know, it’s going to decrease my life expectancy, but I’m not terribly concerned with that either at this point. My doctor really hates me.)

On that typically dark note, I hope you all have a happy New Year. See you in 2023.