Why AI content generators can’t kill art (part 2: the one that actually matters)

I have to admit this, even as a lawyer (or especially as a lawyer) and as commenters confirmed in the last post: the law is often designed to protect those with power, money, and influence. I stand by my analysis of the legal situation in the first part of this post series, but I also don’t have very much faith in a political system that’s structurally pretty sound but run largely by people who don’t give a damn about the ideals they spout. If Hell exists, there may well be a special area for such people to hang around in, but in the meantime we have to deal with their rot and near-open corruption.

Partly for that reason, I think the US legal framework regarding the use of AI “art” may change soon, almost certainly through legislation, after corporate interests realize they can save a lot of money by not paying humans to create real art for their intellectual properties. I don’t believe artists will ever be out of a job entirely, but with the right (read: wrong) amendments made to the Copyright Act, plenty can be effectively made destitute.

So it feels pointless going on about the law, even if that is my field. I will be following legal developments and pending cases like Thaler v. Perlmutter (which if you aren’t, check my last post for more on why you should) but today I want to shift to a few moral and ethical questions surrounding AI “art” generation that I’m less qualified to talk about but that I’m more interested in in some sense.

“Look how cool it looks, it’s real art! I spent 1.5 hours tweaking my prompts”

I was originally going to put up a post about something else today, but man if Twitter didn’t just step in as usual to piss me off enough to push this post up in the queue: clowns pretending that their AI-generated images they pieced together in a matter of dozens of minutes using word prompts are “real art.” I’ve already addressed my feelings about whether this stuff is art (it isn’t) but clearly some people disagree with me.

Once again, the above is impressive. One year ago, we weren’t seeing AI producing images with this much detail. That’s ignoring the fact that some elements of these images are still off and clearly not human-created even after the fine-tuning this guy says he did — people have brought up the still-uncanny aspects of these images like their eyes and certain aspects of anatomy AI still can’t seem to quite pin down like fingers, the finer parts of the human body. I won’t get into that myself because 1) I’m no visual artist and 2) I think it’s reasonable to believe at the rate AI is advancing that it will get these down pretty well soon.

But yet again, the technical quality of these images is beside the point. Is it right for society to accept such AI-generated works as legitimate? Their legal status certainly has something to do with that, especially approaching it from a profit motive, but societal acceptance of this kind is a broader issue.

Before you might think “does it matter?” consider how culturally frowned upon plagiarism is. If you’ve ever written a paper for a school assignment as the vast majority of us probably have, you’ve been warned about not copying work without properly quoting and attributing it. A paper, article, or hell, a blog post — any of these can be beautifully written, but if they’re products of plagiarism, they’re widely deemed totally worthless. Plagiarism is rightly recognized as theft.*

Now consider how these AI engines operate. I got into it briefly before, but my basic understanding is that these programs generate images using vast pools of art for reference, basing the results off of the word prompts they’re given by the user. So for example, if you feed a prompt akin to “victorian large breasted hot woman in a fancy dress” you might get the following or similar:

If AI thinks big tiddy is the be-all end-all of the female form it is totally uncultured, but then perhaps that’s a reflection of humanity? Not that I have a problem with that particular form, but if I say any more I’ll get sidetracked so never mind.

Setting aside technical qualities again (these feature a few of the uncanny quirks that I still think will likely be sorted out in the near future as the AI engines continue to improve) what are these pieces exactly? They’re mashups of human-created works. Of course, a “mashup” of this kind produced by a human is art as well — it’s not like the existence of influences in an artist’s work makes it not art. In fact, it’s impossible to imagine art totally uninfluenced by other art unless you have some kind of highly unethical “person locked in a cage without human contact” experiment going.

The difference here is the method and the degree of copying. People have pointed out that some of the most popular AI-produced images use the work of artists like Greg Rutkowski and others who never consented to their art being used to train these systems. It’s not that we’re guessing at this outcome — users are actually typing “in the style of Greg Rutkowski” or whoever else into their prompts, so there’s no doubt about the copying.

This leads to what I think is the heart of the issue. Certain people advancing this technology as actually creating art have been, as far as I can tell, taking just the same soulless, empty approach to the value of creative works as our friends peddling their NFT garbage. No surprise then that there’s a fair overlap between the two groups: they both seem to have a love of reducing all human creation to “wow this looks cool” and “can it be marketed and sold”, ignoring the meaning behind art, the feeling, the context, everything that actually makes it interesting as art. Going back to art I don’t even like, I’m far more interested in understanding what motivated Mark Rothko to paint his color field works — there was a man who clearly was not in it for the money, not when you read his thoughts on his work and about how he even refused sales of some of his art to luxury hotels because he didn’t want it used as mere decoration for wealthy diners, instead donating it to galleries for public viewing.

Well, we have no use for this way of thinking anymore, do we? It’s old-fashioned. AI images are cool, and you can easily create large-breasted women with them or whatever else you like in a matter of minutes. Never mind that you can do exactly the same with a copy of fucking Koikatsu, yet nobody is trying to convince society that scenes out of that game are art worthy to be hung in galleries. In fact, a typical Koikatsu or MikuMikuDance scene is generally speaking far more creative with far greater human input required, so I’d strongly argue for its legitimacy as art over this nonsense. Even if 99% of it is made for one purpose alone.

If you really want to know, look it up (in private.) And here’s a clue to my likely next post. The screenshot, I mean. I’m not writing a post about Koikatsu unless someone really wants me to do it, but I have no idea what I’d even say about it.

Yes, I do believe the technology is going to continue improving and that legal standards will likely change to the great detriment of artists and art. But I also believe that AI won’t kill art. There are plenty of forms of art so complex that they simply can’t be replicated** — imagine an advanced AI-produced game with all the moving parts necessary to making that work, or an animated series for the same reason. Or take a novel or even a short story: as far as AI story generators have also come in the last few years, they still can’t produce anything better than somewhat coherent but ultimately meandering and meaningless trash without heavy human editing.

The same is true of visual art. As closely as some of the best AI engines can ape human artists’ styles or replicate or produce images based on photos, that’s all they’re doing. There’s still no thought behind the base results, not before a human starts making those edits, and even then if the base result is meaningless, how much meaning can touching up give the work?

If you’ve read this site for a while, you know I’m absolutely not a romantic type. But I do believe in the power of emotion and passion when it’s poured into a work or an activity. I wouldn’t write about art here if I didn’t care about that. And despite the tech bros’ gleeful insistence that AI is overtaking the arts, I believe most people still feel the way I do.

If you need some proof, look at the world of chess — programs built just for the purpose of playing the game have advanced far beyond Deep Blue in the 90s and are now unquestionably far better at it than the greatest champion. But do people now watch championships of rival AIs pitted against each other? I’m sure some people do, but many more watch inferior human intellects playing chess. Why? Maybe because that human element makes the game more interesting. People still give a shit about who Magnus Carlsen is despite the fact that Stockfish 13 has a far higher ELO. That fact gives me some comfort.

Me, I’d like to see what Osaka would do at the chessboard.

I don’t have much more to say on this subject, but I’m happy to hear readers’ thoughts on it, especially since I’m certainly not an AI expert. I was in a comfortable area talking about copyright in that first post, but I’m outside my zone of expertise now, so I’m happy to be corrected on the details if it’s necessary.

 

* [EDIT] A note on derivative works here, since I don’t think I addressed this point very well — just because a work is derivative of another doesn’t make it not art, and it doesn’t make it bad, but even the derivative elements and how they’re treated need actual thought behind their creation that I believe doesn’t figure into these AI works. We can get into hair-splitting pretty easily at this point, and I’m sure courts probably will do that at some point with these AI works as they have in the past in other copyright cases.

** And if we ever get to this point, it’s very likely AI will be so advanced that it can’t be distinguished from humanity, in which case we’ve entered the territory of works like Time of Eve and Her where we have to start thinking about them as having self-awareness and being integrated in some sense into human society. I’m not even going to get into that here, but I’ll just note that possibility in the endnote down here so the future AI superbeings at least know I considered it.

Talking shop #3: Get in the pot

One day in the year 691, in Tang dynasty China, two men sat down to lunch. These two were Lai Junchen and Zhou Xing, the chiefs of Empress Wu Zetian’s widespread network of secret police and informants. Lai and Zhou were infamous and widely hated for heading up an officially sanctioned reign of terror against the empire’s bureaucratic and military elites, even having produced a book on “advanced interrogation techniques” that’s survived to the present day.

Over lunch, Lai asked Zhou his opinion on the most effective way to get a suspect to confess to a crime. Zhou replied that he would place his suspect in a large pot of water with a fire lit under it. At that point, he said, the man would spill everything.

Lai agreed with his colleague. Then he called for his servants, who brought out a massive pot full of water that they began heating up. Lai explained that Zhou had been placed under suspicion of plotting against Empress Wu and invited him into the pot. No need: Zhou immediately confessed to his plotting, knowing what was in store for him otherwise. This story is the origin of a Mandarin phrase that translates as “to invite the gentleman into the urn” — to trap someone using their own cruel method. Maybe a stronger version of our own English saying, to give someone a taste of their own medicine.

Why am I telling you this? It is one of my favorite historical anecdotes — whether it all happened in exactly that way or not, it makes for a good story — but there’s another reason I’m bringing it up that relates directly to writing, social media, and accountability. Writers have various tools we can use, some sharper than others. For as much as I harp here on the importance of preserving and respecting freedom of speech, it’s also important to recognize this simple fact: we have the power through our words to influence society for the better or the worse.¹ Even if the effect of one person’s words is microscopic (like most of ours, including mine — I’m not going to pretend my basic as hell plan WordPress blog has that much impact on the world) I believe every writer has their part to play in this.

Which brings me to this dumbass tweet I saw a while back:

Name cut out partly because I’m not interested in calling particular people out and partly because I don’t want to give this person any more undeserved attention than they already received.

Now sure, some people might think: “Ah, AK is mad because he likes video game soundtracks.” But that’s not exactly the case here. I don’t even see the above tweet as a slap against me, since I listen to a lot of types of music, of which game soundtracks are just one. But calling a game soundtrack a “type of music” is inaccurate in itself, considering the amazing diversity of musical styles you can find in games. I can’t read this person’s mind, naturally, so I don’t know whether they have misconceptions about what “game music” consists of, whether they think it’s all either beeps and bloops or Sonic Adventure butt rock.

But even if that were the case, it doesn’t matter to me. The reason I’m highlighting this tweet is not what it might imply about the quality of video game music, but its nature as a personal attack over a matter of taste. Sure, maybe it was meant as a joke. But even then, looking at this statement in the most favorable light possible, it was a mean-spirited one, and not nearly a clever enough joke to come close to justifying such a tone.²

Anyone who’s spent a few minutes on Twitter will know that this tweet isn’t out of the ordinary. The platform hosts a constant flood of insults of this sort. To be clear, I don’t have a problem with all personal insults, though I think they should be avoided as much as possible — only that when I see insults lobbed at people who are actively and intentionally hurting others or making the world a measurably worse place (like say certain politicians and executives) I can’t blame those lobbing the insults, and sometimes I’m happy to see them posted.

Insults over disagreements in taste are another matter entirely. Even I, as bitter as I am, don’t have the energy for that level of constant negativity.

I also saw an unkind implication a few days back about the social skills and habits of people who like Nagatoro, Uzaki, My Dress-Up Darling, and similar series, and that initial tweet in the thread got a hundred thousand likes or something, so maybe I’m just an idiot. But it also raises an actually interesting argument against these series that I want to take on in a later post.

Naturally, social media is set up to encourage this kind of inflammatory talk since it thrives on engagement, both positive and negative. This connection has been so well understood for so long that I don’t even need to bring it up, but it’s always worth talking about considering how much social media has been woven into all our lives. Even if we don’t think about it much ourselves — my own engagement with it is pretty minimal; I only use Twitter and then under my pseudonymous initials, nothing using my real name, yet I have almost 3,000 tweets a little over three years into my presence there, which is probably far too many.

And on occasion I do read some boneheaded shit someone wrote in retweets or replies to tweets from people I don’t know, and though I don’t do it, I might at least have the urge to get into it with them. Over those three years I’ve even joined in a couple of those common ratio pile-ons as I noted back in this self-flagellation post, though in these cases I make sure to address the contents of whatever was posted and not to attack the person making them, a distinction not everyone makes. But I’m still not happy about it afterwards.

Yeah, Udon-chan from Aquatope would love Twitter I bet.

Looking back on my now 25 years online, starting when we got our first dial-up connection at home, I’ve probably done about as much of this dumb shit as the average user has. I’ve always been not much more than a bystander in these situations, even when I frequented 4chan way back in the day (and really 95% or more of that site’s users are bystanders too, despite whatever nonsense the news back at the time would have had you believe about an elite team of megahackers — though good on those actual rogue expert types for taking on Mr. Putin’s criminal regime right now.)

So maybe I’m not the best person to address this matter, but even as a bystander, I’ve seen enough bad consequences happen to other people that I have at least a basic understanding of how things work. Which as I see it goes like this: if you make a habit of insulting people and gain a following for that, be prepared to take serious hits at some point yourself. At the very least, insult people who really do deserve it, like those aforementioned asshole politicians and executives. Otherwise, it takes a very special sort to insulate yourself from blowback: even a few famously untouchable internet personalities who got into drama talk ended up pulled off their pedestals. So sure, none of this bullshit comes anywhere close to the horrific antics of Lai and Zhou above, but it’s still worth remembering that story if only for instructive purposes.

And in our own game/anime/etc. circles here and on YouTube, it’s vital to keep in mind that you can express dislike and even hatred for certain works and types of works without insulting those who enjoy them. I don’t think I ever do that, and I also don’t follow anyone here on WordPress who does — there’s no quicker way to get me to hit “unfollow” than to jump into the mud like that.

And it’s generally just a bad idea to make a spectacle of yourself unless you’re at least as entertaining as Mr. Libido here. This guy also mainly minded his own business in spite of appearances. Yakuza 0 is full of great life lessons, isn’t it?

My intention here isn’t to shake my finger at anyone. I don’t think any of the excellent people reading this site need this lesson from me anyway. Even if that weren’t the case, I don’t care to tell people what to do, but merely to give a warning, and partly to myself. Plenty of us can dish it out, but how many of us can take it in return? Best to worry about yourself and leave others to their own business. God knows I have enough to worry about.

Anyway, I didn’t expect to write another one of these posts so soon, but that’s how it is sometimes: I’ll read something that sets me off (this time the anime Twitter scuffle) and I can’t rest until I’ve addressed it. As usual, I’m interested in hearing about how other writers and readers think of these situations. Next up will be the regular end-of-month post, I promise.

 

¹ There’s an important distinction here between what I see as the social responsibility of the writer who takes on real-life issues and addresses real-life people, on one hand, and the contrasting lack of responsibility of a writer or any kind of artist who deals purely in fiction and fantasy on the other. I have far more respect for a writer who produces vile stories but acts respectfully and honorably towards others than for one who claims to be upstanding but uses their pen to recklessly destroy others’ lives and livelihoods, or even just to generally make the world a more miserable place to live. Life doesn’t need any help being miserable, does it? On the other hand, a vile story can just be critically torn up and ignored without further harm. At least that’s how I feel — again, I know a lot of people disagree with me on this point.

² And following up on the above point, I don’t think it’s even justified to attack people based on objectionable contents of the artistic works they enjoy. What counts as “objectionable” is usually pretty subjective, but even setting that argument aside, even objectionable fiction is still just fiction. To use a fairly common example I’ve seen from anime, Monogatari is a divisive series, and while I completely understand why someone would have serious problems with it based on what I’ve watched so far (though I still think the first scene of Bakemonogatari should filter a lot of them out) I draw the line at insults directed at the fans. The same goes for fans of any other ethically and morally produced artistic work.

I’ve already addressed this subject a few times (you can see those in that “commentaries” tab above along with a link to this nonsense I’ve just written) so I won’t beat that particular dead horse again too much, but it does keep coming back up. I just don’t think I have anything else to say about it.

A review of Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! (Season 1)

Here AK goes again, reviewing all the hot new popular shows right after they air, just as usual. Yeah, this is a bit different for me. Not because I don’t like any popular, topical shows and games, but just because I usually want to write about something that isn’t either of those things. For example, I could have gone outside the usual scope of the site and given you my whole rundown last year of why the final season of Game of Thrones was a big pile of shit, but after the 895,694th review about it being shit that already covered all those points, I didn’t feel like piling on.

All this is completely unrelated to the actual substance of the anime Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, an adaptation of a manga series of the same name. As a few other people have already said, this show probably would have passed by pretty quietly in the summer 2020 anime lineup if it weren’t for the completely stupid, ridiculous controversies that were somehow attached to it. At least partly as a result of those controversies, it instead ended up one of the most talked-about series of the year so far, and it’s already been confirmed for a second season.

This is one of those anime series that says its main idea in its title. Not in the kind of detail a typical light novel title would, but still, the title Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! describes a lot of what the show is about. It opens on a college campus at the beginning of the year following Shinichi Sakurai, a second-year student. This Sakurai is a bit of a loner; while we learn later that he does have friends, he prefers to keep to himself most of the time.

Unfortunately for Sakurai and his beloved alone time, one of his former classmates from high school has caught up with him. Hana Uzaki, a new first-year, recognizes Sakurai from their school days and reconnects with him. However, she never really knew him that well back in high school and after talking to and observing him, Uzaki notices how much of a lone wolf the guy is. She then decides to basically intrude on his entire life. Starting in the first episode, Uzaki insists on hanging out with Sakurai constantly, ignoring his objections and wearing him down until he just gives up and lets her tag along. At first, Uzaki only seems like she’s taking this opportunity to make fun of Sakurai’s loner tendencies — for example, mocking him for going to a movie alone and for spending his weekends playing video games instead of going outside. However, it soon becomes obvious that she actually wants to spend time with him, and Sakurai likewise soon ends up getting used to Uzaki and enjoying his time with her (more or less, anyway.)

Sakurai and Uzaki become friends pretty early on in the season, with the story following these two around as they hang out and trade jabs with each other over their personalities and lifestyle choices. The two couldn’t be more different: both physically, Sakurai being very tall and Uzaki very short, but more importantly in personality. Sakurai is a quiet, reserved guy, while Uzaki is talkative and outgoing, sometimes to the extreme. A lot of the comedy in Uzaki-chan plays off of this Odd Couple sort of “look how different these two characters are” dynamic.

But Uzaki-chan isn’t just a regular comedy, it’s a romantic comedy. So of course this is one of those shows where it’s implied that Sakurai and Uzaki have stronger feelings for each other than just the friendly type, but naturally neither of them can come out and say it, partly because they’re both kind of dense and partly out of embarrassment. And there are exactly the scenes you’d expect, like Sakurai unthinkingly eating a pastry after Uzaki already bit it and them both realizing they just shared that dreaded indirect kiss (a concept I had no idea about until I started watching anime.) But the two insist throughout when people ask that they’re only friends, which happens quite a lot — based mainly on their bickering, they come off like a couple to almost everyone they meet, and about halfway through the series they’re pretty damn close to actually being a couple without the romantic aspect, Uzaki visiting Sakurai’s apartment almost every day and even cooking for him.

Their situation is also complicated by two other characters: Ami, another student who helps her father run the coffeehouse Sakurai works at, and Sakaki, one of Sakurai’s college friends. Thankfully, these two aren’t thrown in to create a love triangle, square, pentagon or any other polygon that drags the show out with irritating drama: they’re actually rooting for Sakurai and Uzaki to get together and try throughout the season to make that happen, though their philosophies are a bit different with Ami being more of a hands-off observer.

These two are always around waiting for something to happen, just like us.

I don’t normally watch shows like this, and Uzaki-chan reminded me of why that is. Not that it’s a bad series at all. I actually did enjoy about the first half of the season — it was some light comedy that made for a nice escape from work and various bullshit in real life. After a while, though, the show started to wear me down. This may have been partly because the comedy bits started feeling like the same thing rewritten in slightly different contexts. You can’t keep writing the same “two characters who actually like each other in that way but don’t realize it have awkward moments” jokes forever without repeating yourself. And while a few of them feel like they’re meant to be callbacks to earlier episodes, I don’t know how much of it is just the show trying to drag things out between the two to keep itself going.

That raises the question of just how far a series like this can drag things out before people start to give up on it. Romantic comedies like Uzaki-chan are based on the premise that these two opposite types of characters who make an unlikely pair will end up together, so they have to deliver on that at some point. But when they do get together, the story is pretty much done, or at least it’s done telling that part of the story — I guess there’s no reason such a story couldn’t continue showing their relationship’s evolution, maybe even all the way to the two getting married and having a kid or something. But the “will they, won’t they” part of it is finished at that point.

And here’s the problem for me: the “will they, won’t they” aspect doesn’t appeal to me that much. If the answer is “yes, they will”, then I’m not that interested in watching the pair go through the same bullshit rigamarole for 24 or 36 episodes before that happens. And if the answer is “no, they won’t”, then by the end I’ll feel as though I’ve been strung along. This is one of those cases in which subverting expectations wouldn’t work, since the expectations are established by scenes that clearly imply Sakurai and Uzaki do have romantic feelings for each other that they can’t express or perhaps even understand yet. And in any case, that slow realization of romantic feelings seems to be the whole point.

No, we’re just two friends. You know, doing normal, friendly, not romantic at all things like feeding each other chocolate.

At this point, I’d just say these kinds of romantic comedies simply aren’t for me, but that’s not quite true. I wrote a bit about the manga Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro a while back, a series that like Uzaki-chan is a slow-burn romantic comedy between two very different characters, and I really like it. I think the difference is that I can see the characters developing in Nagatoro in ways that I can’t see in Uzaki. That character development makes that initially rocky relationship between Nagatoro and her nameless senpai interesting to watch — we can see both characters changing for the better and realizing things about themselves and each other that they wouldn’t have realized otherwise.

In the Uzaki anime, by contrast, I don’t see that Sakurai or Uzaki have really changed by the end of the first season. Sakurai still loves the alone time he manages to get, and Uzaki is still poking and prodding him in the same way she was in episode 1. Their relationship definitely develops, but the characters don’t so much, at least not that I can tell. Which makes sense: Sakurai and Uzaki are young but basically adults at this point and are pretty self-assured in their personalities, whereas the characters in Nagatoro are still in high school and figuring out who they are. I just think the latter makes for a more interesting story.

The question I have to consider now is whether I’ll watch the second season, and I’m not sure yet. If it’s just more of the same, I’d prefer to let Sakurai and Uzaki go on without me. On the other hand, I feel kind of invested now that I’ve watched a whole damn 12 episodes of them. I might check out the manga instead — it’s a lot farther along in the story as you’d expect, and I’ve heard that it might do a better job with character development than the anime does.

There are also a few “a crowd overhears and misconstrues the main characters’ conversation and shames one of them unfairly for it” scenes. Do you know the kind I mean? I hate these. People out in public need to mind their own damn business, screw these judgmental assholes.

Again, none of this is to say that Uzaki is bad or poorly done. It looks nice enough, and the characters are mostly pretty likable (even Uzaki, who sometimes walked a thin line between endearing and irritating for me, and I guess for Sakurai as well.) I can also appreciate the escape that a light comedy like this can deliver. But this show might just not be for me. Then again, maybe you’ll end up reading a second season review here at some point, in which case you’ll know that I’m full of shit.

Finally, I don’t want to pass by those controversies that I mentioned. For those who don’t frequent Twitter (and good for you if you don’t honestly; you’re better off for it) Uzaki-chan was the subject of a lot of pissy complaints from people who didn’t like the title character’s design. You can see from the screenshots that Uzaki’s bust is indeed SUGOI DEKAI (SUPER BIG) as her shirt states. She’s also short and pretty small otherwise, and apparently this just didn’t work for some artists on Twitter who generously decided to “fix” the art, redrawing Uzaki to suit their own preferences, along with some complimentary lectures on how “fiction affects reality” and so on (for greater detail/analysis of the situation and examples of the redrawn art, check out the article I linked here from a fellow blogger titled “The Uzaki-chan Drama”; it’s a very interesting read.)

Setting aside the supreme arrogance it takes to redraw someone else’s character and declare that you’ve “fixed” her (and the “fiction affects reality” argument that I’d like to address some other time) Uzaki-chan was just a weird target for this sort of attack. I’d be willing to bet that most of the complainers didn’t bother to watch a single episode of the series, because there’s nothing potentially offensive in it that I could find beyond the light ecchi elements that are present in every single series like this. Hell, if this is how these people react to something as mild and unobjectionable as Uzaki, the Nagatoro anime is probably going to give them a fucking stroke when it airs next year.

The required beach episode was about as crazy as things got, and the beach part was only half of the episode too. Nothing here to get too shocked about.

But I’m sure everyone involved with producing and airing Uzaki-chan is laughing about all this business, because there seems to have been a Streisand Effect here with the negative attention converting to more press for the show and a bigger audience. At least, that would explain why screenshots and art of Uzaki were being spammed all over the place for the last three months. Maybe it was a secret advertising strategy?

But now I’m getting into crazy conspiracy theory territory, so I’ll stop here. Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! is a pretty decent romantic comedy that hasn’t really gotten to the romance just yet. If that sounds like your kind of thing, or you’re looking for a light comedy and don’t mind watching events repeat themselves a few times, it’s a nice show to check out. Once again, it’s probably not for me, but I didn’t drop it partway through, so that has to count for something.

Deep reads #0: Preface

Yes, it’s yet another new feature here on the site. This time, though, the idea behind it is very broad — it’s just going to be me writing about certain themes and concepts present in games and anime series and other forms of entertainment I like.  This gives me the opportunity to cover both works that I’ve written about before in greater detail and sharper focus and works that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.  I’ll be lumping most of these posts into sub-series sorted by theme that might run anywhere from 2 to 4 or 5 posts.  I hope this whole series/sub-series setup doesn’t get too tangled up or confusing.

Hell, the title I’ve chosen for the feature is already confusing enough.  I went with “deep reads” because I’m covering these works in greater depth than I normally would in a basic review and because every other title I thought of was too clunky, but the “reads” part doesn’t make much sense because I probably won’t be covering any books.  I do a mind-numbing amount of reading at work anyway.  Someone else can write theses about profound works of literature; I’m sticking to weeb-centric and weeb-adjacent games and shows just like I always have.  And western stuff as well.  Anything that grabs my interest, really, but the point is it will be the same sort of stuff I’ve written about for the last few years here.

I admit I’d play video games for 3 days straight if I could get away with it, but I wouldn’t do those second and third things just to be clear

Since these posts are going to be more analyses than reviews, they’ll all be full of spoilers.  If you’re curious about my opinions of these works but you don’t want to read a particular post because you’re avoiding spoilers, here’s a blanket statement that you can rely on: I recommend checking out every single work I’ll be writing about in this series, because I more or less like all of them.  They might not all be for you, of course, which is why I say I recommend checking them out instead of buying them right away.  Though if you trust my judgment and taste enough to do that, I’d be very flattered.

You can look forward to the first post in this series soon (or soon-ish, at least.)  In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter even though I hardly ever post there.

The Sunshine Blogger Award Challenge Part 3: Revenge of the Sunshine Blogger

Thanks to Pete Davison of MoeGamer for my third nomination for this prestigious award!  If you don’t follow MoeGamer, you’re missing out: Pete posts a lot more than I do (well, that’s true of most bloggers around here, but never mind) and he’s not afraid to write about all kinds of games, including lewd ones the big sites won’t even mention except to pump out ill-informed hit pieces.

Here are the rules of the game as usual:

• Thank the blogger who nominated you and link back to their blog.
• Answer the 11 questions the blogger asked you.
• Nominate 11 new blogs to receive the award and write them 11 new questions.
• List the rules and display the Sunshine Blogger Award logo in your post and/or on your blog.

And now Pete’s questions:

• What’s your favourite piece of media (game, book, anime etc) that you think goes underappreciated, and why do you like it so much?

Gregory Peck as Ahab in the best-known film adaptation. I don’t think it’s really possible to adapt Moby-Dick into movie form that well, but Peck killed as Ahab.

Moby-Dick.  I don’t know about using that as an example because it’s one of the biggest, best-known classic English-language novels.  However, it was famously a flop when it was released.  And even though it achieved wild success after Herman Melville’s death, Moby-Dick is now used as one of the go-to examples of a classic novel that’s actually a big ponderous boring piece of shit, which I think could not be further from the truth.  Sure, Melville goes on a bunch of tangents about the shapes of different whales and how much butter Dutch whaling ships packed into their holds in the 1600s, but the novel’s plot and characters are amazing.  There’s a good reason Captain Ahab and the White Whale are so well known and so commonly used as metaphors now, even by people who have never read the novel.

For all the talk about whether Moby-Dick is an allegory, it’s at the very least a story about a man driven so insane by his personal cause of revenge that he ends up dragging a crew full of men along with him who originally joined only to kill some whales for their oil and get their cut of the profits at the end of the journey.  And Ahab’s revenge is not against another human, but against a monster whale who destroys entire giant whaling ships by ramming them into splinters.  It features action, suspense, conspiracy, philosophy, and what some people argue is a gay marriage 150 years before it was legal in Massachusetts (see Chapter X, though you could also interpret it as a sort of “sworn brother” situation that 21st century readers are seeing too much in a modern light.)  I really recommend checking the novel out, even if you have some preconceived notions about it being too difficult or boring.

• How long have you been creating things online, and how did you start?

If any kind of writing counts, I’ve been creating for almost ten years now, when I took work as a freelance writer through a site creating website copy for small business clients.  This blog is my longest-running project by far.  I started it as something non-law-related to do while I attended law school, and I’ve kept it going far longer than I ever thought I would.

• Do you share your creative work with your “real life” friends and family? If so, how do they respond? If not, why not?

I’ve written on this blog and in a couple of other places under pseudonyms for the last six years now, and I’ve never shared any of it with any real-life friends or family.  The biggest reason is that I want the freedom to write whatever I like, and if certain of my friends or relatives knew I kept this blog, I’d feel the need not only to censor myself but to delete some of the old stuff I’ve written.  Honestly, with my close friends it wouldn’t be such a problem if they knew.  With almost my entire family, though, I have to maintain a persona, and one that I wouldn’t be able to keep up if they read some of the stuff I’ve written here (like say my recent review of Nekopara — I don’t need to deal with the questions that might raise among the relatives.)  And once you’ve told even a single person, even one you trust, that you write a blog, that information can easily leak out in all kinds of ways.  It’s not worth the risk.

I don’t need them thinking I’m a horny pastry puffer, even if it’s the truth

To put it in a more positive way, I want to be completely open and honest with my readers, and I wouldn’t be able to do that if my real life family/friends knew about it.  I’m not really happy about that, but it’s just part of life.

• Social media: helpful or harmful? Why do you feel that way?

I’m a bitter misanthropic weirdo, so probably not the best person to ask about social media.  My own highly skewed opinion is that it’s generally harmful, at least if we’re talking about Facebook. It creates an expectation that everyone should share every aspect of their lives, even the private ones, if they want to be part of society.  As much as Mr. Zuckerberg and his underlings might insist that they value user privacy before House and Senate panels and in press releases, they don’t.  Of course they don’t — destroying the concept of privacy is their greatest purpose.  How else can they sell user data to third parties?

Sorry, I’m getting all conspiratorial here.  I promise I’m not one of those guys who thinks lizard-people run the New World Order or any of that nonsense.  I’m just happy that I’m a loner who doesn’t have a Facebook account.  I do like Twitter, though, since it doesn’t demand you use your real name and encourages drunk people at the bar/club to make stupid comments on their phones they regret in the morning.  Twitter still has some negative effects on society, I think, but those are balanced by the entertainment value it provides.  Facebook, by contrast, is just a pile of shit.  The newer platforms I have no idea about because they came around when I got old (“old” here being past my early 20s, so apologies to my elders.)  Maybe they’re shit too, maybe not.

• You’re presenting an important meeting, and you feel a horrific, probably unavoidable fart brewing. What do you do?

Excuse myself.  If I’m asked why, tell them the truth.  If they would prefer to have some kind of android who doesn’t fart, let them build one.  And if I get into trouble with my boss for it, well, so be it.  I’d rather lose a job like that than keep it.  Hopefully everyone there is understanding.

• Have you done anything that has taken you out of your “comfort zone” recently? How did you handle it?

I recently went to a friend’s party full of people I didn’t know and most of whom I couldn’t talk to much because they 1) weren’t lawyers I could talk shop with and 2) weren’t weird nerds I could talk weird nerd stuff with.  Or if one of them was the latter, I wouldn’t know how to broach that kind of subject on a first meeting.  Basically, I’m socially inept — a lot less inept than I used to be, but still inept.  I was happy to be there for my friend, of course, but I hated it otherwise.  If I could, I’d never leave my comfort zone again; fuck everything outside of it.  Sadly, that’s not an option for me.

I’ll never get my social link ranks up with this attitude.

• How have your tastes in media changed from how they were as a child and/or teen… if they’ve changed at all?

They haven’t really changed that much.  I still like fiction with sci-fi and fantasy elements, I still like anime stylings, I still like the same kinds of video games (even if I no longer have time to play all the 50+ hour RPGs I’d like to), and I still don’t care for most of what’s available on TV aside from sitcoms that are both funny and break the usual sitcom model (like Seinfeld, The Office, and I’d also argue The Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park even though they’re cartoons.)  And my favorite novel is still Moby-Dick.  I guess I haven’t grown much at all in the last two decades.

• Surprise! You have a single “save game” slot, and you somehow managed to trigger it to save right before something from your life that you want to try again. What is the thing you want to try again, what would you do differently and how do you think that might change your current life, if at all?

Can I cheat and say “my whole life?”

Okay, fine.  A real answer.  I guess I would go back to high school and try harder at math.  I have a lot of interest in astronomy, biology, and other sciences, but I can’t understand them on anything higher than the layman’s level.  Sure, I know law well enough, though at this point my knowledge is still much more theory than practice.  But if I could get on that STEM track, maybe I’d be happier now.  I don’t know.  It could also be a case of the grass being greener and all that.

• What are some things you feel comfortable talking about now that you wouldn’t have been able to discuss when you were younger?

The only thing I can think of that I can talk about more openly now is my depression, and then not even with certain people (some of my relatives who don’t believe depression is a real thing come to mind.)  I used to just hate myself and think that was normal, but when I realized that it wasn’t, I understood that I had a problem.  Even then, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone about it, but now I see it as more of a mechanical issue than something that’s “my fault” if that makes sense.  There’s no shame in a machine having a broken part, even if that part can’t be replaced.  You just have to keep working as best you can.

• Someone online writes something that you think is irredeemably stupid, and you’re pretty sure you have the specialist knowledge required to dismantle their argument comprehensively and grind it into dust. What do you do? Be honest!

Years ago, I’d have to admit that I would have taken that fucker apart completely.  Today, though, I wouldn’t do it.  I can’t even remember the last internet fight I got into, it was so long ago.  However, that shouldn’t be taken as a sign of maturity so much as a sign of apathy.

• Regrettably, the fart escaped before you were able to leave the meeting room, regardless of your intentions. It was a right old noisy ripper and it stinks. How do you handle the situation?

Own up to it.  I don’t think there’s anything else you can do in that situation.  Blaming it on someone else will only make things worse for you.  If you’re honest, people will appreciate your honesty at best.  At worst, they’ll think you’re an asshole, but at least an honest one.  And it’s better to be thought an honest asshole than a deceptive nice guy.  Again, years ago I might have given a different answer, but I no longer have the energy to pretend any more than I absolutely have to.

–

These were some very insightful questions.  Thanks for giving me the opportunity to answer them!  Here are my own questions, as the rules require.  However, I couldn’t think of eleven good questions this time.  I’ve already done this twice, after all.  So I cut the number of questions down to seven, but the last question is an extra-long hypothetical to make up for it.

1) Have you played a game that was so immersive and compelling that you ended up feeling disconnected from the real world while playing it?  If so, what was it and what do you think drew you into its world?

2) Is there a game that’s had a profound impact on you, either as a kid or as an adult?  What was that game and what influence do you think it’s had on you?

3) Is there a game that you loved as a kid but that disappointed badly when you revisited it as an adult?  What do you think appealed to you about it then, and why do you think that appeal’s been lost?

4) How do you feel about the use of subtitles in games?  Would you want every game made in a foreign language to be dubbed into your native language if possible, or do you prefer subs?

5) Have you ever sold a game, game console or handheld, accessory, or similar object that you later regretted selling?

6) With the dominance of Amazon and digital game markets, do you think brick-and-mortar game stores will be able to hang on for much longer?  If they can’t, will we lose anything meaningful as a result?

7) Your government approaches you with an offer: join its upcoming first manned mission to Mars.  You’ll receive a large salary, and if you have a family, they’ll be very well compensated.  If the mission is successful, you’ll be away from them for at least three or four years.  However, the mission is so dangerous that there’s a high chance (let’s say for the sake of the hypothetical 70%) that you will never return to Earth.  No matter what happens, you’ll be immortalized in history if you join this mission, and if you end up dead or stranded, your family would continue to receive a large pension.  Would you take them up on the offer?  (Assume also that you have skills that would be essential to such a mission, but that other experts would be equally able to perform the same functions, so the mission would still proceed if you decline to join.)

And the nominees this time are:

Angie of Backlog Crusader

Strange Girl Gaming

The Otaku Judge

Honest Gamer

A Geeky Gal

Best Nerd Life

One More Level

The Dragon’s Tea Party

gamergal.exe

Geek. Sleep. Rinse. Repeat

Sega Does

And also Red Metal and Lost to the Aether — apologies for throwing this tag at you again after answering my last set of questions so thoroughly.

On reviews, scores, and objectivity vs. subjectivity

I’m in despair again.  This time about review scores.

It’s never not a good time to use screenshots from SZS

Let me back up about a decade and a half (I promise there’s a point to this trip through time, so don’t worry.)  Back in my school days, I used to follow two music reviewers: George Starostin and Mark Prindle.  These guys maintained websites dedicated to writing album reviews well before the modern age of easy blogging — before technologically untalented people like me could start free WordPress and Blogger accounts and dump words onto the internet without knowing anything beyond the most basic HTML tags.  Messrs. Starostin and Prindle were both excellent writers, very knowledgeable about music, and incredibly prolific (in fact, Starostin is still writing at a different address, though he seems to be on hiatus right now.)  Most importantly to me, they were independent voices that I felt I could trust far more than the hacks at Rolling Stone, Spin, and the other big music magazines.

However, Starostin and Prindle’s review styles were very different.  Starostin seemed to try to take a more objective approach to his music reviews.  While admitting that he couldn’t be totally objective, being a human with his own likes and dislikes when it came to music, he still tried giving a fair chance to artists whose styles he wasn’t naturally fond of (though he could and would tear an album up in a very entertaining way if he thought it was lousy.)  Prindle, by contrast, seemed not to give a damn about even trying to be objective.  He could and often did also write deep and interesting analyses of albums, but they also felt more personal in the sense that you were getting his opinions based purely on what he liked and disliked.  Prindle’s more personal style also came out in the various rants, anecdotes, and obscene jokes he’d drop into his reviews, usually without any warning to the reader.  Even though their styles were so different, I liked them pretty much equally, and I’m sure both of them have had a serious influence on my own reviewing style.

Source.  Though how “Movie X no longer has a 100% RT score” could be considered a story worth writing about, I have no fucking clue.

Now back to the present day, where people on Twitter and other platforms are tearing their hair out over the Rotten Tomatoes scores movies get.  Red Metal at Extra Life covered this already in a recent post about the reaction to the film Lady Bird getting one bad review from a critic, knocking its score down from 100% to 99%.  Some people were apparently losing their shit over this development.  If it can even be called a “development”, really.  No doubt they’d also be piling onto Red Metal if his own mixed review of Lady Bird had been factored into that score.  I haven’t seen the film, but I can say at the very least it’s impressive that a movie managed to get such dedicated fans that they’d scream bloody murder over a single poor review.

Or is that really what’s going on?  It looks to me like many people have expectations that certain artworks should be insulated from negative criticism, as though they have a God-given right to a perfect score on RT and maybe also on every other review score aggregator.  I have no idea where these expectations come from.  Even among my favorite games and albums, I can’t think of a single one that I’d yell at a reviewer for over a poor review.  I’d certainly disagree with said review, but as long as it was reasoned out well enough, I’d just think “Fine, that person has a different opinion than I do.”  Because we all have different tastes, different perspectives, different life experiences.  Not everyone has to like what I like, and I don’t have to like something even if almost everyone else likes it.

I like drinking beer, chewing on dried squid, and playing visual novels, but a lot of people don’t, and that’s okay.

So how should I approach my own reviews?  I’ve been writing reviews of games and other media for six years now (not on a very regular basis, as you can tell from looking at my index of reviews and dividing their number into six, but still, six years is a long time.)  I always try to write my reviews in such a way that they’re useful to every reader who follows this site or comes across it through a Google search.  But when it comes to the score I assign a work, I sometimes find myself facing this conundrum: if I score the work based too much upon my own subjective tastes, the score won’t be meaningful to a reader with different tastes from my own, and if I score it based too much upon some kind of as-objective-as-possible balance of factors, I’m removing my own views from the process so completely that I may as well not review the work at all.

I usually try to strike a balance between these two extremes, but sometimes that’s difficult, especially when the work I’m analyzing is directed at a niche audience.  I’m facing just this issue with the game review I’m currently writing.  Maybe I should just not worry about the problem at all and write whatever I want like Prindle, or maybe I should still try to take a more objective view of things like Starostin.  Maybe I’m overthinking this like I overthink every single other aspect of my fucking life.

Maybe don’t worry about cutting the cake precisely Chiri, maybe just cut it and eat some god damn cake

I have another question for you, the reader: if you write reviews, do you run into this problem?  How do you resolve it?  Or is it even really a problem and am I just overthinking things? If you don’t write reviews but only read them, do you really care about how objective or subjective the reviewer is trying to be?  And should anyone even care about Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic scores aside from the film and game studios and distributors?

Sorry, that was more than one question.  You don’t have to answer all of them if you don’t feel like it.  Or any of them.  In the meantime, I’ll go back to finishing my next review.  Maybe one day, I’ll write a review that will get me a headline on Indiewire about how I’m an asshole who made people on Twitter cry.  I can only hope.