Monstergirl Doctor...Almost Over
Well, Monstergirl Doctor has really gone into wilds of nowhere.
Our female protag, putting up a fierce face.
There is a brief moment in episode 4 when one of the protagonoists literally trips over what appears to be the actual plot to the show, but that potentially interesting storyline is resolved in the same episode, mostly off camera. It then muddles along for several episodes with our male protagonist being either a predator, or autistic (or possibly both) and our female snake girl protagonist trying to drive through his thick skull the importance of communication with one's patients, or at least not intrusively examining one's female patients without discussing the matter first and getting consent. (good grief)
Dark secrets are revealed...and then thrown away and due to the lack of actual storytelling, background on the world and characters is provided occasionally by a giant exposition squid.
...and then this happens and there is a...ahem...scene... between these two centaur chicks and our human protagonist and I must say that I have never laughed quite so simultaneously hard and uncomfortably before dropping a show.
This is a medical procedural set in a fantasy world and there has been some exploration of interesting ideas...and there are only three episodes left....so I may finish it...for the sake of completeness....but yeah at this point I'm taking a break and am going to have to say that the show has not lived up to its early potential.
Asking the Important Questions That Have Nagged at us for Some Time
And come to think of it, yeah, our protagonist is not in a fetal position perpetually screaming for some reason. (Well...MOST of the time he's not)
Season 2 of Re: Zero seems to have come to an end, though the story is DEFINITELY not over. If you have not seen this show, do NOT start with season 2 go back and start with Episode 1-A of season one (which I discussed here back in....it's been four YEARS since this came out!).
This season, while lacking the breakneck pace of the first, is nevertheless exceptionally good, maintaining the gatling gut-punch tone but interspersing a good deal of character reflection, development and revelations about the overarching plot, which give the viewer a better understanding of who the heroes aren't.
This show is grimdark to the max but it has a thread of idealism running through it that keeps it from becoming nihilistic.
This season does not progress as far as the first by a long shot, the time that has passed is about what it would take to watch the whole season, and the characters are not far removed in time place or situation from where they were at the beginning of the season. The season finale, doesn't really FEEL like a finale, but there is a definate sensation of having gotten over a hump of sorts as the plot is moved forward tremendously and the story keeps one on the edge of one's seat.
This is a fantastic show, and I highly recommend it to any who have missed it.
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That's the first half of season two; I think the second half airs in January.
(Just checked - yep, second half in January.)
Which will be a busy month since we're also getting season three of Log Horizon and Non Non Biyori, season two of Re:Slime, and season one of That Spider Show.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sat Oct 10 20:11:05 2020 (PiXy!)
Chekov, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn Look Down and Weep....
...at the chilling proof that they have, again, been unheeded.
BLM/Antifa rioters march into the suburbs of Wauwatosa (Watch on Bitchute)
There's a lot of talk in certain circles about Civil War, most of it profoundly ignorant, on many different levels. For one thing, such a horrid event would not be cathartic, or cleansing, but rather would be a dreadful terrifying, cancerous waste of lives. Second, the U.S. has never had a real civil war, . "The Civil War" was, in reality, a failed secession, with the secessionists not trying to take over the country, but leave it. While this is hardly more than a semantic point to some, it meant that there were clearly defined geographical boundaries, and an intuitive understanding of the definitions of victory and defeat.
What is shown in the video above is akin to a REAL civil war. The most applicable example of which might be the nightmare that befell Spain in the 1930s. I suggest you read about the Spanish Civil War....but not on a work night, for your sleep will be neither sound, nor in great quantity after you do so.
Other actual Civil Wars had far worse outcomes than even that nightmare.
The parallels to the seeming insanity of our own upper and upper middle classes with the the behavior of the minor nobility and upper middle class in the last days of Tsarist Russia are sobering to say the least. They are completely unwilling to criticize even this pandemonium, lest it threaten their political purity and social standing.
...and that was a thread I was going to expond upon until this morning, whence came news that a small group of smooth brains, allegedly opposed to the above suburban raiders had decided to play the left's game of Burn Loot and Murder....and then it became clear that...well not clear at all....'cause I have no IDEA who these numb-nuts are actually affiliated with. They certainly don't SEEM to be on team MAGA or team D.
However, I would argue that, on balance, this ugly plot is actually not as worrying as the video above. That is because an attack on a public figure has been thwarted (something we should be able to, in a bi-partisan fashion rejoice over). But the attacks on ordinary citizens in their homes...for the crime of being middle class...was not responded to until well after the fact.
In case your reading comprehension or my typing skills are lacking, I'm not suggesting that an assault on a public figure, even one as loathsome as Whitmer is in any way acceptable. I'm pointing out that, in a time of civil unrest, it is easier to protect a few politicians than the vast bulk of the unprotected populace from those who seek to do evil, and evil rarely attacks the most protected positions, leaving the citizenry to fend for themselves in this situation. And this situation is a very worrisome one indeed.
I'm FREE! But Not As Free as I'd Like.
Last Tuesday I was...ill. I had a bad cold and a splitting headache on top of an active kidney stone. Going to work in a mask with a runny nose is unpleasant in the extreme, and given the anxieties I would cause my fellow employees as a snot-rocket, I called in. Wednesday I was sicker, with severe gastrointestinal distress a headache akin to having a wayward chestburster in my head and the cold had moved into my chest, but the coughs were dry.
Thus, I scheduled a test to see if I had indeed been visited by Coronachan. The test was on Friday and I was, therefore, under quarantine, until I got the results, which came in yesterday.
I failed the test.
No Wu-Flu for me.
This means no certificate of pestilence-proofedness to get me into the fast lane on planes or allow me to go to Japan or any of the other benefits that come with getting the Corona-coof . Dang.
OTOH I'm feeling much better and am not, you know, dead. Since I did have a certificate of not having Coroina YET, I was allowed to return to work today, which I VERY much needed to do having missed over a week of pay. However, 10 days in bed did nothing to get me into shape for lifting boxes during our peak season, which started last Wednesday.
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Aww, a miss again. Looks like all hurricanes this year were basically fart in a puddle, except one. And this one is passing so far away from my house that we're not getting a drop of rain. I'm going to go to a fly-in on Saturday.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thu Oct 8 21:57:08 2020 (LZ7Bg)
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Not sure if you've heard the news, but Amazon has scheduled Prime Day for next week. I hope your place of employment has taken this into account and doesn't get blindsided. All I can say is good luck!
Posted by: StargazerA5 at Mon Oct 5 12:37:02 2020 (h0tOe)
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I'm under state mandated quarantine because of the "coof!' so unless my test comes back negative I'll miss out on that overtime.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 5 13:53:43 2020 (5iiQK)
Perhaps Ben referred to Taiwan as, you know, a country.
That's what happened two two Hololive V-tubers, Kiryu Coco and Akai Haato, who, in the course of a joint You-Tube livestream looked up their analytics online (a very common thing for V-Tubers and YouTubers to do), discussed where their viewers were, and, I gather thanked the residents of each country. A lot of their viewers are in Taiwan, and they mentioned and....
For those "inappropriate remarks", they have been suspended, by Hololive's parent company, Cover Corporation for at least three weeks.
There is coverage of this here, here, here, here and here...though it's anyone's guess how long those links will go somewhere.
The whole affair came as something of a shock, particularly since these are not small talents, Kiryu Coco is much bigger than one would think as as she's frequently the top super-chat earner on You-Tube in any given month. This made such waves that even American V-Tubers who avoid politics completely have taken a moment to mention it...and say "Taiwan".
It's telling that according to the ANN and Niche Gamer articles linked above that China's One China Policy was specifically mentioned in the Simplified Chinese version.
There has been a bit of backlash particularly about that latter discrepancy.
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I'm OK. Site should be back up, now. It was a simple matter of mis-reading a bill. I thought it was due January 10th, not October 1st. It means a lot that someone noticed, though...hopefully I'll get back to posting about models or World of Warships again, soon.
And someday, I'll detail my epic 5 year adventure.
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So for some reason this site seems to have gone into night mode or something, with black on black text.... Hopefully that's just a glitch on my end....
Posted by: Mauser at Sun Oct 4 03:27:36 2020 (Ix1l6)
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It's black text on a black background for me as well...
Posted by: Siergen at Sun Oct 4 08:53:02 2020 (jIT9h)
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Well, I was playing around with the settings and tried to switch to a dark background with white text, but for some reason the white text remained black. Now the text on the Styles dashboard is invisible and I'm fumbling around in the dark trying to fix it.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Oct 4 14:29:14 2020 (5iiQK)
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Hololive is an idol production company, Japanese-style; indeed they initially intended to be a singing-type of idol thing, just on Youtube, and the whole vtuber streaming kind of happened organically. The downside is, of course, that it also imported a bunch of the pathologies of that market to a new platform.
The real trick there is that their performers basically start off with a huge leg up. The technical challenge of setting up a cute little avatar image and getting the streaming going is not that large. But building an audience is tough - most people stream to almost nobody, and it takes a lot of work and luck to go from a dozen people to a thousand.
The Hololive folks, now that they've got that critical mass, basically walk into the job already successful there. They launched their EN side with five streamers all with thousands of people watching, just because the company could afford to spread a little hype around the market - because they've got their already-popular stuff feeding into it, it's like being a brand new cover band getting picked to tour with and open for an established band that can pack the stadium every night. Of course they still have to be engaging enough to keep people watching, but there are plenty of people who have that trait but not the interest needed to get a career off the ground.
The downside is that yeah, the idol industry is not pretty; it's about sucking a bunch of money out of the wallets of lonely young men, and part of that is not pissing off the lonely young men. In Japan this usually manifests in "no boys" - no boyfriends, no partners, definitely no getting married, to keep up the fantasy that you're at least theoretically available (even if the guys have no chance, a lot of them just won't deal with the reality of "my idol is interested in a man who is not me!")
If you take the Japanese money, you've got to deal with that kind of pathology; if you take the Chinese money, well, you have the Chinese equivalent.
In either case, the company reaction is pretty much par for the course - even though as observers we can nod and say "man, the idol industry sucks," that's how it is. As far as the production company is concerned, the idols are there to do a job and get paid, and they're disposable if they cause the company trouble; how much more so for a vtuber, when they're just anonymous actresses for an identity that the company manufactured?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sun Oct 4 16:58:12 2020 (v29Tn)
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Brickmuppet, do you know HTML at all? If so, you can hit F12 and use the browser tools to disable the black background so you can read the control panel. You might have to do it more than once--so that I could read the text here I had to turn off hte background-color on both the html body tag, and the div with the "main" id.
Posted by: Rick C at Sun Oct 4 17:13:24 2020 (eqaFC)
An idol company.
So the "doesn't have their employees back" thing doesn't aply, since in this country they'd be a 13th amendment violation.
Interestingly, several of their V-tubers got their audiences on their own and (as I understand it) Hololive walked in and offered them marketing deals.
Now Hololive is doing auditions for V-Tubers whose ascendance they can micro-manage. I've heard (from a few English language V-Tubers) that even the ones who built their own following have, in the last few days. been shocked to learn that Hololive owns the characters now, and they can be replaced. ( I have no confirmation from that other than hearsay, but learning that Hololive is an Idol company means that they are the Weyland-Yutani of meat markets).....and yeah...looking it up, If I'd known ANYTHING about the Idol scene I'd have known what hololive was. I thought they were a new company looking to get in on the V-Tuber thing.
Still no luck on the Blog obviously. In fact, it is supposed to be back to its old settings now.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Oct 4 17:16:03 2020 (5iiQK)
8Huh. So I can just color my text using the widget at the top of the comment field.
Also, if you highlight the text, it's readable.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Oct 4 17:17:49 2020 (5iiQK)
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The only thing I want to know is if Kizuna Ai is owned by Hololive.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sun Oct 4 18:46:26 2020 (LZ7Bg)
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No.
Kizuna Ai was affiliated with upd8 but now she is run through Kizuna Ai Incorporated.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Oct 4 21:30:37 2020 (5iiQK)
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Time to have some kind of Taiwan film festival!
Did you guys see the story about the new CCP Chinese ethics and law textbook, where they include the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery... where Jesus waits until the Pharisees have gone away, and then HE stones the woman to death?
Seriously, I think it's clear who the baddies are.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Mon Oct 5 08:43:25 2020 (sF8WE)
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While Cover Corp (Hololive) is indeed an idol company, they take a percentage (albeit a large one) rather than taking the whole amount and paying a salary. And the talents are largely individual; from what I've seen (Korone, Coco, now Gawr Gura) many of the girls could walk away, set up an alternate new character, and have 50,000 followers on day one.
I hope that what went on behind the scenes is more along the lines of "you did nothing wrong, but we have to pretend to punish you because these Chinese assholes are insane".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Oct 6 10:25:05 2020 (PiXy!)
While Cover Corp (Hololive) is indeed an idol company, they take a percentage (albeit a large one) rather than taking the whole amount and paying a salary.
OK. That's better than I'd feared. It also makes sense given how the first lot of V-tubers were recruited (Most, if not all were already established.)
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Oct 6 10:51:03 2020 (5iiQK)
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I'll admit that I find Coco quite funny and I've watched quite a bit of Fubuki playing various games (and they just announced a Fubuki nendo, so there's a buy!) Haven't quite fallen all the way in the hole, though, there's a bunch of them I can't recognize and a few I only know names for but can't really get into watching.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tue Oct 6 14:43:27 2020 (v29Tn)
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Remember the good old days, when the internet was free, and it really did interpret censorship as damage, and route around it?
In all seriousness, Trump getting the Wu-Flu is hardly a black swan, there being a pandemic and all, but the timing is such that it fosters maximum chaos.
If Trump succumbs to the virus it is too late to replace his name on the ballot, indeed people are already voting, so I'm not sure how that works. I checked...and I'm less than edified.
So go ahead and rant about 2020, where the headlines over the last month have been something out of an '80s cyberpunk novel, but with forest fires. However, remember that 4-chan has been around for 17 years....so it's not entirely 2020's fault.
But 2020 is obnoxious, so here is some gallows humor to help you face the day.
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On the other hand, you can already see the conspiracy theories and news articles (Same things.) that will come out if Trump manages to beat the Wuhan flu in time to go on a tear on the campaign trail.
I am surprised that people are not saying 'It's a conspiracy to get people to buy this 'drug' or that 'drug'!" right now.
Posted by: cxt217 at Sat Oct 3 18:22:07 2020 (4i7w0)
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