Bill Watterson and John Kascht talk about their working process on The Mysteries, a genuine collaborative process in which nothing was planned and each decision was taken unanimously: “we didn’t know what we wanted but we knew what we didn’t want once we saw it“.
Nothing better than hearing two passionate people talking about how they worked together and managed to create something despite of or maybe because of the huge differences in their prefered way of working.
Even out of context this is a terrible, cliched “joke” but in context it doesn’t even make sense:
Because this is a player in a virtual reality MMO game! She designed this character herself! Why would she be bothered by the fact she doesn’t have breasts when she choose not to? (Heck, why assume she’s actually the same gender as her character?)
It’s the perfect example of how lazy this series is and how little it and its original creator ever thought about its videogame setting. I’ve read the manga version of this until I got bored of it and never ever got the sense that this was indeed a game you could play. Let alone have fun playing it. Playing a VRMMO casually with a focus on crafting rather than combat is not inherently a bad idea for a series, but you have to have some energy and thought behind it to make it worthwhile. Reading a manga where every other chapter is the protagonist inventing another new crafting method is one thing. As an anime series it’s just dull.
In nothing of what Toaru Ossan no VRMMO Katsudouki does is there any hint that the author thought about what it would be like to play a game this way. Why would our hero be the only one to play this way? Why would anybody else care that he does, or even know how he plays? Why is this world so underpopulated in the first place? It all feels ripped off from other, better stories. If you want a series about virtual reality gaming with some actual impact, go watch Shangri-La Frontier instead.
Natalie Weiner writes about the fears that record catalog site Discogs is starting to enshittify itself.
Underlying the sellers’ complaints is a kind of dismay, the feeling that what had previously been a safe haven for nerds to buy and sell $2 records is being threatened — that one more corner of the internet that wasn’t yet a glossy behemoth designed to subsume and capitalize on your personal information was about to collapse.
If you’re serious about music, especially buying vinyl, Discogs is essential. It has the largest catalogue of actually existing records in the world, created over several decades by the users itself. It’s arguably the place to buy obscure records, often cheaper than on Ebay or Amazon. But with it starting to up its fees and other moves, it may be preparing for an IPO or being sold. Even if this does not happen, it’s already in the process of enshittifying its platform, making it worse for users and sellers both.
For me, I mainly use it to get information on music and albums and it’s always my first stop for that sort of information, so it’ll be vexing to see it gone.
I hate to link to the notoriously transphobic Guardian, but occassionally they do have articles you cannot ignore. in this case it’s a short article about ex-employee Preeti Kathrecha suing the Equality and Human Rights Commission for unfair dismissal and race discrimination. In the process, she dropped this gem about the controversial inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour party:
She also claimed that she was asked to sign off the executive summary of the inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour party, without being allowed access to the underlying evidence, because the EHRC wanted the signoff from a BAME employee. She refused to do so, describing the request as “upsetting, disrespectful and humiliating”.
Which fits to a t the way the Tories use ethnical minorities as poster children for their most cruel policies. Rishi Sunak, chosen as PM to clean up the mess that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss left behind, tightening the austerity screws again. Suella Braverman, spouting National Front rhetoric about migrants, but if criticised has the press holloring about how you dare to expect a daughter of migrants not to be racist. Sunak again, spouting transphobia in his conference speech. A predictable pattern of using the brownest faces in the party to shield far right policies from scrutiny.
That it also occurred with that EHRC report into Labour antisemitism is telling. The report itself barely found any evidence of antisemitism in the party, certainly no systemic antisemitism. Nor did it find evidence that Corbyn and his allies were antisemitic. But it was certainly publicised as vindicating the ongoing smear campaign against him and Labour. Having a BAME employee sign off on it would’ve strengthened that impression.
The quality of the subtitles for the Yuzuki-san Chi no Yonkyoudai series was so bad, even the ANN reviewers took notice:
The entire episode is nigh-unintelligible thanks to what is almost undoubtedly unedited machine translation. On the lighter end of things, there’s almost no proper punctuation. Four out of five sentences end without a period. Later in the episode, there are sections where two versions of a subtitle will appear side by side for reasons I cannot even figure out. I’m pretty sure every line in the subtitle script was fed individually through a translation program – because every line starts with a capitalized letter, regardless of whether it’s a new sentence.
The examples given are indeed egregious, but I want to focus on some less obvious mistakes, mistakes you can find in other anime as well. In the screenshot above, the translator has confused who is the subject of the sentence. When watching, it’s clear that she’s talking about him, not herself. Even if not clear from the scene itself, it should be clear from the preceeding ones, which saw him getting upset by his brothers not trusting him to do house work. It’s the sort of error you can make when you only have the to be translated text to go by, not the actual footage. An editor should’ve caught this, but how well if at all is any subtitling edited at Crunchyroll these days?
Here the tense is obviously wrong: it’s should be copying, not copied, as they’re still doing it. Ending on “as if nothing had happened” is also weird, a bit of a cliche translation of “atarimae darou”, more literal, as if it’s obvious or the most normal thing in the world to do. It does get the gist of what he’s saying, but it’s slightly awkward and lazy.
Watching through the rest of the episode it all gets so bad that it completely ruins the show. I cannot believe any human looked at this and thought it was good enough to release. You wouldn’t tolerate this reading a scanlated manga, let alone from a paid for service. The one thing Crunchyroll offers other than a convenient place to watch anime at and they fuck it up like this. Hope you weren’tlooking forward to this show.