Erika2rsis
Thank you for your contributions.
That is how it works, yeah. Very good point. Nobody needs to be actively malicious or conspiratorial, and it's silly to imagine people being that conniving: The most profitable matching algorithm on a dating app just happens to be ineffective for most people, and whoever happens to stumble on that algorithm first ends up making the most profitable dating app -- no need to know why it works, just that it does.
People find love through dating apps
That is part of the business model, actually: if these apps absolutely never work, then there will be no word of mouth, no success stories to use in promotional material, and users would pretty quickly figure out that it isn't entirely their own fault that they haven't made the progress that they're expecting.
Also, like, language learning apps suffer from the same problem as dating apps: if these apps could actually teach you a language, you'd eventually get proficient enough at the language to no longer need the app — and if you no longer need the app, then it can't harvest your data or subscription money anymore, and line goes down. So the app always needs to give you the impression that you're making progress, while actually sabotaging your learning at every step.
This isn't to say that these apps don't have a place in the language learning process, but rather I'm saying that you need to be incredibly wary not just of the privacy issues, but of how to actually use these apps effectively. If you're aware of their tricks, then they become less effective.
Honestly with a million dollars you could just become a cis-passing trans girl and still have at least $800,000 left to spend, if not >$950,000. Or in other words, the button gives you a 1% chance of only you becoming a girl, versus a 99% chance of you and at least four others becoming girls, assuming that you spend the remainder of your wealth on funding other girls' transitions. Though you could just as well spend that money on funding trans advocacy and medical research or other sorts of long-term investment.
From that perspective, the 1% chance seems like a loss. What does "become a girl" even mean? Are you transported into the timeline where you were AFAB? Are you transported into the timeline where you had a botched circumcision and your parents decided to raise you as a girl despite being told not to? Is your body just magically poofed into a cisfeminine phenotype? Is this the timeline where you transitioned MTF but did so before puberty? Is this just the same as transitioning MTF but now the folks who won the million dollars are sponsoring your transition? Is this the same as transitioning MTF but all of society has with a snap of the fingers unlearned all transphobia, getting rid of the social and material barriers to transitioning?
There are so many questions one can ask about this premise, like, "What would it mean for me to have been AFAB? Same zygote but with a random AR mutation? Do I keep my old memories from when I was a boy?", or, "If I was circumcised, and have my genitals magically transformed, have my new genitals undergone type 1a FGM? What happens to my secondary sex characteristics?", or, "If I'm magically transformed, is my ID also magically changed? Does God drop down some boxes of tampons and new clothes from the heavens above?".
I would ask the maker of the button to write some very clear terms of service, because this seems like it could be a real monkey's paw...
I've heard that a pretty big component of the sexualization of underage characters in anime is actually pretty similar to why casinos and their machines are so... slimy, as it were.
I'm not going to claim to be some expert on Japan or the anime industry, so take this with some skepticism, but what I heard goes roughly like this:
Anime is a risky endeavor because it's very costly to produce. Most anime will be costlier to produce than live action or even other forms of animation, and on top of this, the average consumer will not spend very much on merchandise, or manga, or blu-rays, et cetera, and will not stay up 'till the wee hours watching commercials just to catch a show live. Therefore, in an ever-saturated anime market, new anime increasingly have to walk a tightrope between not being patently offensive to 99% of their viewers, and being appealing to the 1% of "whales", to use the gambling term. The anime wouldn't be financially viable without both of these demographics.
And the types of people who would spend tens of myriads of yen on figurines and posters, evidently, are disproporionately likely to enjoy sexualized cartoon high school girls. Meanwhile most normal viewers evidently have a threshold of how much underage sexualization they can roll their eyes at or ignore, before it becomes too disgusting to keep watching. This especially applies if a large portion of the viewers are in the same age range as the characters, and so might themselves find the sexualization to be relatable; and this double especially applies in a very hierarchical society with very visible issues with misogyny and ageism in general, where people might generally be less critical of those things. And even within a production, even if the vast majority of an anime's staff are normal people, there could always be some small portion of the staff who are so-called "lolicons" who would put that type of shit into a production unquestioned.
Regarding why everyone is a high schooler, regardless of sexualization— The other comments I think have part of the story. Another part of it is just how high school is a universally relatable experience, since people's lives start to diverge after high school; and how the high school setting has just been proven to be a successful formula, and so they'll keep doing that and the "hit by a truck and reincarnated into a generic high fantasy world" stuff until consumer trends change — and the consumer trends will only change when someone actually creates an alternative, and God knows when that will happen. There are plenty of great anime where the main characters aren't high schoolers, but those are riskier to make.
One last piece to the puzzle concerns people like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai. Which is to say, that people just eat up the idea of minors saving the world in general, not only in fiction but in real life as well. Minors themselves like seeing people their age celebrated and empowered, and adults also like the idea of just a few kids fixing everything, instead of all adults collectively working towards a better and safer world. And adults also like looking back on their teen years or childhood as a time of freedom, even though in truth people are certainly no more free at that age than as adults. Realizing that fact for many comes with a feeling of responsibility to use adult freedom for good, and who likes having even more burdens and responsibilities? And realizing that fact also comes with the burden of actually making children and youth free, and who the heck wants to do that, right?
I dunno. This is a media analysis 60% based on a half-misremembered video essay, so this is probably a worthless contribution, especially when this thread is already like five days old.
got sold to Microsoft while Newell still lives.
Surely you mean while he's "Still Alive", right?
Jan Misali's 2022 Toki Pona language cover of the Symphogear "Beef Stroganoff" song is nearing its 40,000th view on YouTube. Whether this entertaining deconstruction of a beef Stroganoff recipe will reach this milestone of popularity this year or next remains to be seen. "Moku Sutolokanopu" is the most popular song about beef Stroganoff of the 2020s thus far, and the most popular song about beef Stroganoff in the Toki Pona language of all time.
That concludes this year's big Stroganews. Thank you for your attention.
- United Kingdom (or Liechtenstein, whose anthem uses the same melody)
- United States of America
- Dunno
- People's Republic of China
- Canada
- Dunno
Hopefully number 3 and 6 will come to me later!
STOP POSTING ABOUT POLITICS. I'M TIRED OF SEEING IT. MY FRIENDS ON LEMMY SEND ME MEMES. ON KBIN IT'S FUCKIN' MEMES. I WAS ON AN INSTANCE, RIGHT, AND AAAAAAALLLL OF THE COMMUNITIES ARE JUST POLITICS STUFF. I- I SHOWED MY CHAMPION UNDERWEAR TO MY GIRLFRIEND, AND THE LOGO, I LOOKED AT IT, AND I SAID, "HEY BABE, WHEN THE COMMODITY IS FETISHIZED" [ding-ding-dings to the tune of The Internationale] I FUCKIN' LOOKED AT A TRASH CAN, I SAID, "UNDER CAPITALISM, WASTE PLAYS A VITAL ROLE IN THE ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY THAT UNDERPINS THE ENTIRE SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEM". I LOOK AT MY PENIS, I THINK OF THE OMNIPRESENT PHALLOCENTRISM IN OUR PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, AND I GO, "POLITICS? MORE LIKE POLY-DICKS!"
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
"Was there a massacre in Tiananmen Square?"
—"No."
"Were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?"
—"...Ermh..."
"Ahem. I am asking you if people were killed in the area immediately surrounding Tiananmen Square, even if nobody was killed in the square itself."
—"The protesters in Tiananmen Square left after negotiations with the PLA. There was no bloodshed in Tiananmen Square."
"I understand that, but were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?"
—"Nowhere in Beijing were student protestors specifically targeted."
"Well, were non-students targeted, and were any students injured or killed without being targeted?"
—"Hey did you know that the Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest—"
"Gongchandang, my friend, I am begging you."
—"...Force may have been used when provoked by attacks."
"May force have also been used unprovoked? Could it have been that the protesters felt like they were provoked first, because you were sending tanks past the barricades that they'd put up?"
—"I mean... you know... uhh..."
"Gongchandang. Were you scared that the occupation of Beijing and the potential of a workers' revolt would threaten the survival of socialism in China, by presenting a still-socialist alternative to your rule, because societal division particularly among the less politically literate could be (and was) exploited by outside forces?"
—"OUR YOUTH ARE VULNERABLE TO IMPERIALIST PROPAGANDA, OK‽ ALSO, TANK MAN DIDN'T GET RUN OVER. SEE. HE WAS PULLED AWAY BY A PASSERBY. NOT RUN OVER."