While I agree that many modern localizers go overboard, jumping to the other extreme is just as dumb, if not more so. The anti-loc crowd has become stubborn and clueless. So I'll try and demonstrate via example from one of the most important works of western literature. A 🧵

https://twitter.com/yakusou8/status/1841869128644092356

Much of this is taken from a 2011 article by Daniel Mendelsohn, so feel free to look his work up. It's far more detailed, and my Greek isn't what it used to be in college.

In the aftermath of Selen's termination, the community is up in arms, pointing fingers at other vtubers or vilifying Nijisanji, but that's a too shallow a perspective. Selen's fate was the product of a broader corporate structure that makes vtubers uniquely vulnerable. A🧵 I assume most people reading this already know the situation, but for anyone living under a rock, the gist is that Selen Tatsuki, a prominent Nijisanji vtuber, had grown uncomfortable with her management and the degree of support she had gotten from the company.

One of the main limitations of generative AI, if not the main one, is their operators lack of artistic vision or theory. You can prune AI to make about anything you can imagine, but there's no accounting for taste.

https://twitter.com/TheKnownOtaku/status/1743834363391816128

This Makima art is actually a really good example. It's plays to the strengths of AI - simple portraits where the algorithm doesn't struggle with context or perspective. It lacks detail or color to highlight the AIs abilities, while obscuring its flaws - no deformed hands here.

This is something I was thinking about throughout my playthrough, and while ER follows many of the same beats of a usual Souls game, I do think that GRRM's contributions are obviously visible. The Souls games are religious cosmologies. Elden Ring tells of man-made disaster.

https://twitter.com/TylerGlaiel/status/1500913796025511938

Spoilers ahead.

Souls and ER are all catastrophe stories, stories about decline and ruin, but all the souls games (Except DS2, more on that later) revolve around a "fading flame", an inanimate object, an embodiment of natural life that grows weaker and leads to catastrophe.

Lets talk about Uruha Rushia's recent graduation from Hololive. While she's been wrapped in controversy for a while now, this sudden escalation is straight out of left field, to say the least, and there's a lot of feelings left muddled. Debuting in 2019 as part of Hololive's third generation, Uruha Rushia fully embodied Hololive's business model at the time, away from grounded, virtualized representations of real people, and into performance, a sort of live action anime.

Let's talk about the graduation of Kiryu Coco. In the wake of the pain, bargaining, and utter shock of her announcement, I think there's a lot to be gleaned about the way international cultures interact, the operation of vtuber agencies, and virtual youtubers in general. Kiryu Coco debuted as a vtuber under the agency Hololive's 4th generation in December of 2019. She quickly rose to prominence as the most popular of her group. Being bilingual, she engaged with an international audience even before clippers made vtubers popular abroad.

This is the nature of "ironic weebs", and I'm personally no more of a fan than @pauseandselect is, but at the same time, I can't help but feel the elitist anger in this thread is exactly the sort of thing that makes so many people give up on critical thinking.

https://twitter.com/pauseandselect/status/1368732113361600519

Like, I get his indignation - this complex and fascinating subject has just kind of been dismissed and treated as a joke, any any attempts to call out this attitude are deflected with "lol why u mad fam its all shit", which stifles any attempt at discussion.

@RedBardIsCool's video on the matter is neat, I haven't seen it before, but I feel it doesn't do anything to answer the central question of WHY light novel names started to get so long, and I think this is as good a chance as any to answer that, a quick thread.

https://twitter.com/pauseandselect/status/1368747681124917252

In most fiction, when we think of the purpose of a title, memorability is key. A title is the crux around which all the memories of the work should revolve, so it should be evocative, gripping, clever, and unspecific - more a tone-setter than anything descriptive.

So there's this thing going on in Japan right now, and it's not the biggest deal but I think it raises interesting questions. A virtual Youtuber has been put on leave and forced to make a public apology for the crime of... having a male voice in the background for 10 seconds. A bit more context, Towa was taking a break and thought her mic was turned off, and a man's voice - identified as a friend of her's from before she became a vtuber, came on briefly before they caught it.