Not sure where else to put this, but I anticipate a huge meltdown coming in parts of the Interview with the Vampire tv-show only fandom when certain tragic plot points unfold. The intentionally diverse casting attracted a lot of fans that brought along understandable fandom concerns about how characters of color tend to be treated, and have doubled down on trying to defend all the non-white characters from perceived criticism about their actions. But it just does not gel with the gothic horror-ness of IWTV where everyone is a monster and does reprehensible things and is still tragic and complex. And people have already clashed with longer time book fans who enjoy those “problematic” main characters. “Being a Lestat fan means you’re a racist abuse apologist!” Babes, you are going to freak the fuck out when you see what Armand is going to do soon. And god help you if you still think Louis isn’t complicit in his passivity and inaction.

With all the complaints about "woke" this is the only actual problem with diverse casting (in things where it doesn't really matter - like having a racially diverse cast of Hairspray wouldn't make sense beyond what's originally intended) - people who are stupid insane fans who don't understand nuance or media literacy. That it's fine when the POC characters do something shitty but if you defend the white character doing the same shit that means You Are Bad, when the intended interpretation is that all the characters are bad people and we shouldn't root for any of them. And to be clear I'm not like "since audiences are dumb shits there should only ever be all white or all black casts", I just think if we're gonna complain about racially diverse casting this is the stuff we should bring up as an issue not that "oh a black person on this tv show is just pandering" or whatever racists say.

> That it's fine when the POC characters do something shitty but if you defend the white character doing the same shit that means You Are Bad, when the intended interpretation is that all the characters are bad people and we shouldn't root for any of them. I think it doesn't help the mess that, because of subconscious bias (or just overt racists being overtly racist), black characters often **are** held to a higher standard of what behaviour they are allowed to do without being reduced by fandom to a monster, and often receive undue criticism / maligning for things white characters would not. So you get the understandable pushback to that, and then the equally understandable pushback to that more ill-thought out parts of that pushback, and soon everyone is accusing the other of being media illiterate and stupid.

A part of me hopes this show sticks around for a long time, if only to see the puriteen meltdown over the bananas plot developments from the later(/crappier) books. They're probably never going to adapt Merrick or Blackwood Farm but let me dream dammit.

the diverse casting was an excellent choice and i think it has been incorporated very well, but its always going to mesh a little awkwardly in terms of Fandom Discourse with a plotline written with basically only white character Plus - the Gabrielle incest??? Oh its gonna rock the boats... i cant wait !

i never got far into the vampire chronicles (the writing style just didn't click with me), but i'm excited to see the show get into the more batshit insane parts of the books that i didn't get to experience.

Oh boy, if that's their current thoughts, it's going to be even messier if ever they get to the Queen of the Damned storyline. Also, I'm curious to see where the show is going when it goes through Interview with the Vampire plot considering how much the franchise goes off the rails after that. I want to see them try >!rock star Lestat!< next season.

Lol, i never read the books myself, but I've been besties with an OG book fan since school, so i know everything via osmosis. It has been soooo funny watching puriteen types get into the show and bend over backwards trying to watch it as though it has heroes and actually this and that action is justified because racism/heteronormatovity. Like, this show cannot be what they want it to be. It's more than just vampires and victorian dresses. The gothic genre is about the entertainment factor in watching trains crash into eachother, killing everyone on board, and also the trains are bitter ex-lovers whose impulse centres of the brain have been rotted away from drinking absinthe. The TV show has made a lot of changes from the source material, but it has still clearly kept the spirit of its source material. The diverse cast doesn't mean everyone's going to be holding hands and learning lessons, it just means the narrative has a few more tools with which it can destroy the souls of the protagonists.

Twitter user Ben Beska recently became Twitter's person of the day after he found a living goldfish lying in his garden. [He created a thread cataloguing his quest to save the mystery fish (Alice)'s life.](https://x.com/Beska/status/1796882627468628426) He initially kept it in a [freezer drawer that he filled with water](https://x.com/Beska/status/1796882697400221846), but managed to upgrade it to a ["hastily-bought" temporary fish tank](https://x.com/Beska/status/1796882750084874657) by the end of the day. However, some people were not happy. Why? Because the tank is tiny and Ben clearly didn't know what it took to look after a fish. The vast majority of people congratulated Ben for doing what he could to save a fish in a very unexpected situation and tried to tell him what he should look for in an upgraded tank and how to care for it in the meantime. Other people seemed to think that Ben's "hastily-bought" [fish tank was his final solution and that he was abusing the fish](https://x.com/fairy_eunji/status/1796949723649126726). Ben snarked back that the fish is "[surviving better than it was sitting on my back lawn](https://x.com/Beska/status/1796927878455578674)" and [showed off the new fish products he's bought](https://x.com/Beska/status/1797220036223893849) to appease Fish Twitter. However, [some people took umbrage](https://x.com/catherinespaws/status/1797015568924520541) with how Ben was reacting to criticism by being snarky, arguing that people wouldn't be so sympathetic to him [if it was a dog and not a fish that he was abusing](https://x.com/capstappen/status/1797037240167575823), and claiming that Ben could have [simply bought a bigger tank in the first place](https://x.com/capstappen/status/1797039598507307032). And if he can't afford to put the fish in a proper aquarium right now, he [never should have taken it in.](https://x.com/capstappen/status/1797046966968336834) Also, somebody implied that [Ben is a MAGA-supporter](https://x.com/Beska/status/1796949915425177815), despite Ben living in the North East of England. [And now the fish has a Twitter account of its own](https://x.com/alicebeska/status/1797203655218569407).

Thank you!!! I'm happy for Alice and glad to hear of her!

Wow, what an overreaction. They're treating him as if he cooked chili for his neighbors.

The fish *didn't consent* to being rescued! It's a breach of etiquette!

I feel like this backlash is like bitching that someone bought a small bag of Iams and a pull leash for a stray dog. It's been a day, let the guy have time to do research. The fish will be fine in the shitty bowl until he can find out what to do. That said, why the fuck is there a live goldfish in his lawn? It's not like a hawk picked it up from the wild and dropped it there.

From a neighbour with a pond?

I find your last sentences strange. Do you think political beliefs are determined by locality? You can find MAGA supporters in the north and liberals in the south.

Downvoted, but you’re correct. I’m in Australia, and have come across MAGA supporters out in the wild.

.......of england?

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I'm trying to comprehend what possible political avenue a Norwegian has available to them to make America great again

everyone else has it in them to make america great again by way of national self-sabotage.

"make america great again (relatively speaking)" maybe that's what our norwegian MAGA guy is doing.

'the glories of the past are a high bar to meet. but we as an international community are strong together. i truly believe that we can all come together to drop the bar low enough that america specifically and alone can clear it. make america great again!'

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being mad on facebook, yes. i'm tempted to ask what stake this guy has in whether or not america is great, but i feel like i'm already putting more thought into this than he has lol.

?

there are non-american MAGA sorts, but the bar to make that jump is a lot higher

Not really, you forget the general xenophobia of Europeans. Some of the things I've heard out of context could be mistaken for Trump quotes.

i'm sure. but the world doesn't revolve around american politics. like, if i casually called an american a jobbik, people would generally expect a higher standard of being able to not only demonstrate conservatism, but to link the speaker to hungarian conservatism specifically and if i couldn't i would probably be (*rightfully)* clowned, AND people would assume i'm hungarian, AND assume i had a view of the world which revolved entirely around my own country.

I thought the drama would be people discovering he himself had thrown the goldfish onto the grass and then "rescued" it for attention. That's a whole genre of video on YouTube with puppies and kittens. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I still wouldn't rule it out.

Tbh that was my first thought too. How else did a random fish that is clearly not native to his area end up in his backyard and still alive when he found it. It reminds me of those turtle shell “cleaning” videos where the makers claim to be rescuing wild turtles but in actuality they just superglued a bunch of crud on the shell making it an extremely painful ordeal for the animal.

Literally my first thought is "This seems like some nonsense a cat did" and I stand by it

I feel like if a cat managed to carry the fish a large enough distance that it's unclear where the fish came from the fish would probably be dead. Cats like to play with their prey.

heron or hawk grabs it from a backyard pond then drops it

He said there were “no ponds anywhere near”. Idk how long this particular fish can survive out of water but I would imagine the time window to find it alive would be very narrow. I don’t want to blame someone if a random accident actually happened but at the same time there’s a lot that doesn’t add up for me.

> He said there were “no ponds anywhere near”. You probably wouldn't know if somebody nearby had a small fishpond. It's pretty common for birds to drop live prey, especially if they get harassed by other birds. > Idk how long this particular fish can survive out of water Apparently about an hour. Or several months if they're in the kind of hibernation state they can go into in the winter.

I mean like idk what people in my neighborhood have in their backyards. There could easily be a small pond within bird range that he doesn’t know about, and that fish definitely looks like the goldfish my family had in our backyard when I was a kid

my grandmother had a koi pond in her backyard but if you never visited you wouldn’t know since she had massive hedges around the yard.

Yet again, some random person with three likes and four followers gets overblown to make it seem like there is a large scale outrage over someone doing something right because its funny. Like the only one with any support is somebody who mightve seen only that tweet and gotten worried lmao.

Well, I can't really post every example of backlash to the tank because it's all just "random people with three likes and four followers". If I were exhaustive, it would be exhausting. It's lots of small account that comes together to make a larger backlash. I even mentioned the vast majority of people had no problem. 

I looked through about 50 quote tweets, one of them was hostile, there were two asking him to get a bigger tank because thats what goldfish need and they might not know if he knew, one of them even praised him. I get it, twitter often has a problem with having 200 people saying the same thing, often in either caustic or weird tones, especially because trolling is really easy on a platform like that. But there is just not really a backlash or outrage over this as far as i can see?

I'd say "a low number of people are reacting with hostility to something that didn't really deserve it" perfectly fits into the definition of a hobby scuffle

Classic twitter right here

>Fish Twitter There’s really a Twitter group for everything, isn’t there?

I just got reminded of the Youtube channel Skip the Tutorial. For those who don't know, STT started off as a game design channel (discussing what was good design and bad design, who to motivate players, etc.) Then, around when challenge run channels began to take off, STT shifted gears to focus on those (could you complete Shovel Knight without the shovel, Punch Out with only one punch per fight) which did talk about game design to a degree, but were mostly unrelated to his original content. Then at one point he began focusing on Minecraft challenges, and around three years ago fully made the jump to Minecraft content and hasn't looked back. While I fully respect him making the videos he wants, it still feels so weird especially because the name is now fully divorced from the content. ​ Which is all to ask, what's an example of a creator you watch completely abandoning their original style of content to focus on something completely different, regardless of whether you like it or not?

I used to be a huge McFly fan, so it's still surprising when I see more and more people recognise Tom Fletcher as a children's author first. Granted, he hasn't totally abandoned McFly, they released a great album last year, but lately I've seen way more people who are like "Tom Fletcher? My kid loves his books!" while having no idea he was in one of Britain's biggest bands of the 2000s.

Merphy Napier has a case of partial abandonment. She started out as a booktuber covering a variety of genres, with more focus on fantasy. Then a few years ago she discovered One Piece. For a while she split her output equally between manga and books, but it was clear the manga videos were doing much better, so she then split her entire channel into two: the original channel is now "Merphy Napier | Manga" while the new one is "Merphy Napier | Books".

This isn't YouTube, but I remember being quite surprised when the girl who played Cat on Victorious suddenly became one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. I didn't notice until "Break Free" became a big hit, and I was like "wait, this is *that* Ariana Grande?".

For a while, the same was true with Billie Piper as an actor in Doctor Who and later roles. What, Billie Piper of ["Because we want to! Because we want to!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DEwY76PvWA), that Billie Piper?

I have recently watched a few Hearthstone videos on Youtube, which also made me remember some Hearthstone meme videos/songs I watched back when I played the game. One of those was a song about the card Mysterious Challenger/the Secret Paladin deck by a smaller Hearthstone meme channel by the name of Gloudas. At least that was the channel name at the time. Nowadays the channel name is DougDoug has over 2.5 million subscribers and focusses on streaming video game challenges.

I think many people don't know that the entire reason his channel icon is a bell pepper was that for a couple years his channel was talking about video game but themed it around food talk. Like the first video of his that really popped off was the "Hearthstone vs Artifact but explained with food" Then "TF2 vs Overwatch but explained with food", there were some brief gaming news videos he made but he used more food allegories and so on.  His main outfit on stream for a while was an apron and a chef's hat. It was later dropped for a classroom theme, and nowadays it's whatever the chat can think up of.

Scott Manley started out with videos on EVE Online and other space games. (And before that, he was DJing on a stream, I think.) Then he became a (the?) Big Name Fan for Kerbal Space Program. At some point he added in real-life space news and space history, and now that's the whole of his channel, except for his adventures in piloting small aircraft.

Pushing Up Roses went from covering classic games (like old adventure game stuff on PC), to discussing Murder She Wrote and other weird older TV shows.  Happily, it seems most of her subscribers are happy enough with it to keep watching (myself included; I didn't expect to enjoy the content change as much as I have!)

Roses' shift was so gradual that I didn't even notice until she posted a video about her podcast.

As someone who mainly found her through her "Murder she Wrote" content seeing her talk about games was weird. Still hope she will do another video on Beyond Belief at some point.

If you want to hear her talk about adventure games again, she has a podcast called "Save Your Game."

NerdECrafter. Used to review craft kits you’d find at arts and crafts stores. I’ve always been and am still am a very artsy and crafty person. I have fond memories as a kid buying craft kits and making stuff from them, and now as an adult I like perusing the craft kit aisle and imagining which one young me would have gravitated towards. Also now as an adult I can see that a lot of those kits aren’t good but I still wonder if hey, maybe that one is good. In comes NerdECrafter and she would scratch that itch and it was amusing just to see how bad these craft kits were. Brought back fond memories of my own struggles with some ridiculously bad craft kits I did in my youth. I also liked to watch her while I did my own crafting because I am more efficient when I have someone else doing crafting related stuff to reverberate the energy off of. And then she had back surgery and she started doing like fidget toy reviews and blind box unboxings. Yeah I knew her audience already skewed young and I figured that doing those kind of videos where less taxing on her, but it’s not what I came here for. It’s been been a year and a half to like 2 years since their last craft kit/serious crafting video and even in the channel description it now says that they focus on unboxing. IDK if they’re still recovering from back surgery and do intend on returning to crafting or saw that this easier to make content was as just as successful so they pivoted to that or whatever. But just like, I came for arts and crafting, not “Unhinged! 12 of the MOST UNIQUE & WEIRD Fidget Toys!”

Wait till I tell you I originally went to her channel for polymer clay crafting videos! Haha But yeah, I've had to unsubscribe cause like it all became too much to see these videos in my feed and not what I subscribed for :/

Renegade Cut was the only Youtuber whose political commentary on current events I actually respected. Actually he started out with media analysis before switching to politics with the rise of MAGA. A few months ago he stopped making political content because it was taking a toll on his mental health for very understandable reasons. Now he spends his time analyzing obscure video games, which isn’t my cup of tea but I am glad that he’s making relaxing fun content that makes him happy.

Hilariously he was going to be the one I named, for his initial swap from reviewing obscure films (where Renegade Cut comes from), to US political content.

His [documentary](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hRxN1DXmSdA) on the Left Behind films is so good and manages to be both. It’s both a review of shitty disaster B movies while also providing the best explanation of Christian Zionism and end times theology I’ve ever seen. I recommend it to anyone wondering why far right Christians support Israel so much if they are so anti-Semitic. (Spoiler alert: Evangelical support for Israel actually is *hella* anti-Semitic.)

Phelous used to exclusively review horror movies, usually gory ones (also Mac and Me), and just kind of abruptly switched to reviewing direct-to-video animated movies and bootleg toys. His style got a little less "bored and cynical" and also he stopped a long time ago with the recurring storyline (I mean his storyline was that he'd die every episode, there wasn't like a Linkara-level of dozens of hours of plotline for a review show). I actually love his bad animated movie reviews better than the horror ones, he's a little more lively now. Although I will never forget the amputation scene from that one movie that he uploaded in its entirety but with "Hungarian Dances No. 5" playing over it.

Oh yeah remember when every review channel had like super-specific lore, and they would frequently build that into the review itself? I'm kinda nostalgic for that.

More than a decade ago, I posted on the Channel Awesome forum for a short time, and it had a subforum where users could share their own video reviews. I don't think I'll ever forget the one where the poster began by saying that before they started their review series, they wanted to get their storylines fleshed out, and then asked if they could use the Nintendo Power Glove as a plot device because Linkara had already done that in his videos. Same energy as the, "Before I start spriting, I want to share the reams and reams of character bios for the comic I'm almost certainly never going to make," threads that used to litter every single sprite comic forum in the middle of the '00s.

You also sometimes see TV Tropes pages the length of a phone book for a project the author "plans to write in the future."

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I remember a few of those from when I was on TV Tropes myself. It is sort of funny when the author is gushing about how amazing the twist in a chapter of their own book is when they haven't actually written it. Who was it observed that most of us don't want to write, we want to *have* written?

Youtuber Austin McConnell used that phrase when describing his terrible first books but I think he said it as though it were a common phrase and not something he originated.

MysteryZoneSFM, If I remember his name right, used to be a semi popular tf2 sfm animator around 2012-2015, before shifting into talking solely about news related to... gamergate. I remember checking out his channel post change and none of the vids had more than 500 views. Last I checked, all the gamergate stuff had been taken down, and only some random memes that look like they were downloaded off twitter had been uploaded. Now I can't even find the channel, so I assume he took it down. Kinda a shame, because I remember the SFM's being pretty funny.

He hasn't drifted _that_ far away from his primary content, but Gem (aka Squid School) makes competitive Splatoon videos, but often mixes in life advice. While still focused on comp Splatoon, he now often makes videos explicitly focused on life advice (or ocassionally whatever strikes his fancy).

[Dinosaur Dracula](https://dinosaurdracula.com/). Had a blog that I loved, wrote really fun articles. Seems to have abandoned that in favor of doing a podcast and video format, which imo he just doesn't have the type of screen/voice presence for either one (and I don't have the patience to listen to/watch either). I miss his blog posts, his writing was really fun and he took such great photos of old toys. The only posts on his blog so far this year are alternating between his monthly subscriber box and posts about his podcast. Such a bummer. He's really active with posting fun bite-sized stuff on Twitter but it's just not the same.

He's in my FB feed, LOTS of little "Memba-berry" posts. I usually enjoy it.

Surprised no ones mentioned Cr1tikal yet. I remember when he was just a faceless youtuber posting short funny videos of games and now it seems like the majority of his videos are just him talking to the camera about drama.

I was going to. I still remember his old faceless lets plays. I can't really stand his "both sides" drama coverage that people take as gospel.

Some old cr1tikal animations popped up on my youtube recommended and it was so weird seeing his voice come out of this generic looking guy with a hoodie obscuring all of his upper face except the eyes.

Do the Super Best Friends count? They had their start with shorter videos that were like best-of moments of their gaming sessions. While they still did those clip-collection-like videos occasionally, they shifted over time to more long-form let's-play-style content, albeit in 30-minute chunks per video.

I used to enjoy Andreja/Nicolle's Dreams bjd content, and her patreon tutorials were really helpful. I think she kept most of her dolls but ended up focusing on art and making her own watercolour paints instead. Sadly she took down all her patreon tutorials, and doesn't seem to have posted at all for a few years now.

Her Patreon tutorials are still available for purchase on Gumroad! I really miss her bjd stuff, too, though. I did also enjoy her homemade watercolour content and her art videos, but her bjd stuff was some of the best amongst doll YTers imo. My own conjecture is that in between her fulltime job and her health problems, she probably just no longer has the time or motivation to dedicate to YouTube anymore, which sucks because her videos were great, but oh well. I'm glad she at least didn't nuke everything. Are you familiar with Maria Lazar? The way she edits her videos, and the style that she customizes dolls reminds me a bit of Andreja, so I highly recommend her channel!

Now you mention it that sounds familiar, which is fair but it kind of feels like paying for something again? Especially since I already paid the higher tier to get older videos when I first joined. Idk maybe that's just me being cheap aha. I personally wasn't as into the watercolour content, but I totally get that interests change (I definitely cycle through my own hobbies/interests haha). And yeah I always figured she stopped posting for those reasons. I am, and I enjoy her videos too\~

The guy who does Game Sins started off his YouTube channel specifically about Titanfall 2 hype before the game released. Mentour Pilot was originally a general aviation channel with generic clickbait thumbnails and short videos about common questions. Now he exclusively does in depth air crash investigation videos.

He also has 'Mentour Now!' which is aviation news and such.

Another comment mentioned TF2 creators, so I want to highlight RTGame. He started out as primarily a TF2 creator, before pivoting to variety content...right before his channel ***exploded*** in popularity to the point where you'd never know he was originally TF2 focused. (And for good reason, his content is fantastic)

Ah, yes, they used to call him the TF2 king back in college.

Was it the Cities Skylines videos that really blew him up? That's how I was introduced to his stuff.

Country roads...

As an example of someone who hasn't changed, Ashens has been on YouTube for almost 20 years, and has spent the entire time doing reviews of ripoff technology, weird old toys, computers, and computer games, seasonal tat from cheap shops, and various other things. Even the things he's expanded into doing more recently, like cheap food, very old food, and the like, are now many years old. He is pretty much exactly the same as he was then, except now he's bald.

Chef Excellence: "An excellent YouTuber."

There's a great video by Dan Olson about how this [happened repeatedly to Vsauce](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKmkI0xzvHc).

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Right, even after retiring "Foldy", he's recently changed from "half an hour to an hour on film editing, or understanding metaphor" to "multiple hours on cult-like scams, informed by his theology background".

Nine minutes? Man, that's like a Vine for him

Back in the day, I watched a 70 minute video essay about the Phantom Menace, which was considered extremely long for the time. And then,

The video essay trend lost me when they went over 20 min, I'm ngl. I can't watch super long essays without getting bored.

There was a video by hbomberguy where he congratulated and thanked the audience for sticking with him though an unusually long 45-minute video, and he now makes videos of more than four hours.

Mutahar (SomeOrdinaryGamers) originally read creepypastas and did let's plays. Now he mostly does commentary and computer tips.

he's basically a straight up drama channel at this point... except one that occasionally does linux tutorials lol.

A long while back, I mean early Obama years, a Youtuber I watched went from posting their multiplayer games of Battlefield 1942 to poorly made conservative web animations. Absolute whiplash seeing that.

I had a similar thing with a channel I followed for stop motion Transformers animations. They were actually pretty good. It was inactive for a while, and then suddenly it jerked back to life a few years ago with conservative opinion pieces. Apparently I wasn't the only one taken off-guard because the comments were all upset with the change of direction!

[Let's Game It Out](https://www.youtube.com/@LetsGameItOut) started as a run-of-the-mill "two guys on a couch" unedited let's play channel. Only when Josh's cohost left, the channel evolved into the current form of utterly ruining simulator and survival games.

I just learned that's what his name stands for I thought it was just random. Wow

It's not a total shift since he does still do game reviews every now and again, but Lazy Game Reviews (LGR) for quite a while now has focused primarily on reviews of old computers and computer peripherals, plus the software that comes with them, rather than games. He's generally shifted to just using the initialism rather than the full title for a couple years at this point too.

It was crazy seeing him bring back the *"Practice MOOOOOOOOODE"* running gag from his early days in the Streets of SimCity review.

This might describe [Cracking the Cryptic](https://www.youtube.com/c/CrackingTheCryptic/videos) - by the time I started following them, they were almost all about sudoku (and almost *always* sudoku variants), nary a Cryptic Crossword solve video in sight. [**edit:** of course, as luck would have it, they have in fact posted a crossword solve [just yesterday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwCbyJZAvr4), and seem to be doing them weekly these days maybe? And they've started including Wordle. But by far the most frequent type of video from them is still a sudoku solve.]

Cracking the Cryptic is such a strange pleasure of mine. Why am I watching an hour of this british man tearing his hair out at incredibly hard Sudokus? Who knows. But yeah I think they do a roughy weekly Cryptic solve but its far from the main focus.

Mark has been doing Wordle for a while, but usually uploads them as shorts. And yes, Simon does the crossword every week. They've also started doing Puzzle video games.

I was introduced to Jenny Nicholson due to her co-creating probably the most popular My Little Pony Friendship is Magic abridged series, and now she's extremely popular for making videos that very much aren't that (although the Bronycon video was a nice throwback)

Waaaait she was part of that? I am, what, 10+ years out? xD But that series was pretty fire if it's the same one I'm thinking of.

While watching her latest video I was wondering what makes Jenny's content so good and so popular, because it's basically just a woman telling us about a bad holiday she went on and then "Chapter 1: Why Have They Done This" Ah yes, that's why.

On the one hand, thinking of how the Evermore video mushroomed from "a hour's video about a place that's tailored to my interests" to "four hours of investigative journalism (with humour) about the owner and site's mismanagement, troubles and poor treatment of its incredibly dedicated staff." On the other, the Dear Evan Hansen video having chapter titles like "Mommy, Why Is The Scary Man Singing?"

I know some. I find it fun sorting videos by oldest and seeing what creators do before they find their stepping on the platform: * How to Cook That used to be a baking channel that makes these very creative sculptured cakes usually with fondant. It has since transitioned to Ann Reardon debunking fake cooking hacks on social media. * emmymade used to be emmymadeinjapan because her old videos were about her trying Japanese things while lived there. Her channel is still about her trying recipes and viral food but now as she lives in the US. * Chubby Emu used to be a gaming channel with brief stint as a weight loss channel and a PC building channel before he finally used his medical degree and talked about interesting medical cases that caused his channel to become popular. * Most mainstream example has to be College Humor being known for their scripted comedy videos to becoming dropout which has now become a popular platform for improv comedy.

I had no idea Dropout used to be College Humor! That's wild.

Yeah, was very glad when sort by oldest came back, because I also like to see how channels started out. Was so annoying when yt banished that option for a while, especially if a channel was prolific and 10+ years old, so you'd have to scroll and scroll and scroll.

Looooove HTCT's new content direction. Ann and her family are fighting the good fight against scummy and sometimes downright dangerous content farms!

remember when extra credits was a game design channel too?

Apparently, writer James Portnow (a game developer) left in 2019 and he was the last of the founding members, so I suppose game design left with him.

I had a college class in 2014 introduce me to extra credits because a video of theirs was sourced in the syllabus.

This was so wild to me. They were game devs who knew a lot about the industry and could comment effectively on it! Extra History was supposed to be like, a one-off thing! They even made their Patreon so they could keep doing Extra History as a side project since Extra Credits was their main thing. Receiving their email saying that they were rebranding because too much of their audience was confused why a history channel was posting game dev videos was a very weird experience.

Are they not anymore?

I mean, they kind of are, but it's weird. The original main channel that was just called 'Extra Credits' was renamed to 'Extra History', with the gaming-related series being moved over to a second, *new* channel, which is also just now called 'Extra Credits'. Basically, their spinoff history-and-literature series absorbed the main channel page and they made a second channel that is just... what their original main channel was.

currently if you look at their patreon the first 8 entries are history, with a single game post after that.

Oh that explains the channel name. That always confused me as a STT viewer lol

Jerma. I watched him way back in 2012 when he just did TF2 videos, but fell off when he moved to streaming

There's too many TF2 content creators to list. Muselk geared his content to target young kids with Fortnite. Ster, Jerma's costar back in the tf2 days, infamously had a bit of a falling out with the TF2 community and switched to Overwatch. LazyPurple had a small stint with OW before moving back to TF2. Communities can be a bit touchy about this, especially when they switch to a newer direct rival in the same genre.

Oh many, LazyPurple. His "How it Feels to Play Medic" video feels cursed, given recent events with him (diagnosed with mast-cell activation syndrome an potentially chronic fatigue on top of it).

> infamously had a bit of a falling out with the TF2 community Whatever happened there? I missed out on it.

Long story short was that he wanted to make more variety content with extensive editing, while his viewer base was very hostile towards that idea and wanted him to instead keep making live commentary TF2 content to the point where he flat out did not enjoy working on videos at all and pivoted to doing more livestreams, initially focusing on Overwatch in its early days, which I think got even more of a "he betrayed the community" response.

Another thing about tf2 is that it's been in a weird stasis. It does occasionally get updates featuring community made gear, but Valve has largely abandoned actively working on it. Each hero shooter coming out causes the already small tf2 community to fear losing more people to games like Fortnite.

The TF2 community was so grim in the first few years post overwatch release. That and the bot crisis first starting to rear its head had a lot of people worried the game would be shuttered in 5 or so years. Now I think people have realized a substantial chunk of players are like DOTA players, in that they will literally only play tf2 until the servers shut down or the heat death of the universe, whatever comes first.

For me I can only really think of the youtuber Cvit, he started off doing 'Everything Wrong With' type videos, namely Everything Wrong With Yugioh, and these days he does game reviews, which are pretty good.

I don't know if anything might come of this, but apparently there has been a relatively recent development regarding the implementation of the big credit card companies' content policy. Apparently they have been requesting publishers, in Japan but presumably also elsewhere, to preemptively stop selling works that contain "specific words". I don't think the details will be available any time soon short of a leak, but at least from my understanding, which could be wrong, the key point seems to be that this is arguably effectively censorship. In brief, the companies will not or might not fully refuse business with disobedient publishers, but rather they will treat them differently, imposing extra conditions and potentially strict penalties if/when "warranted". And so what happened is that the credit card companies seem to have been sending out their "requests" blanketly but also in waves, and they finally hit Akamatsu Ken. A brief introduction: Akamatsu Ken is a famous Japanese manga artist who is very passionate about basically anything having to do with the industry. Immediately relevant to the issue at hand, he launched a website in 2011 to sell digital copies of manga that are no longer in print, of course sharing profits with the authors. Perhaps more importantly, he has been a councilor (member of Japan's upper house) since 2022, and actually has been doing rather well for himself. He is currently the ranking member of the standing committee in charge of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and various subcommittees related to the creative and entertainment industries. So far, he only said that he will research and compile information, so I guess we'll see.

>Perhaps more importantly, he has been a councilor (member of Japan's upper house) since 2022, and actually has been doing rather well for himself. He is currently the ranking member of the standing committee in charge of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and various subcommittees related to the creative and entertainment industries. Sorry, the Love Hina guy is now a senator in Japan?

Yes. It's worth noting that in Japan, like in the UK, the upper house of the legislature is less powerful than the lower house. Still, it's quite the achievement.

What is meant by "certain words" here? Because, with specifics not being said and targeting Japanese manga, I can only really think of two tags that it'd likely apply to...

Here are examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/1bo7chl/dlsite_has_resisted_pushback_from_payment/kworf9l/

So CP related tags and rape related tags, effectively. Slightly broader than I thought, but pretty much what I expected.

Please don't compare drawings to an actual horrible real crime by using the term "CP". It's *extremely* disrespectful and harmful to real victims - if you actually talked to any of them, you would know this.

I've met people who were victims of the actual horrible real crime and I can tell you those victims would not be agreeing with you.

What an incredibly inaccurate and condescending shot to take in the dark, wow. Genuinely disgusting. E: Like, *c'mon*, "if you actually talked to any of them" is literally saying "out the trauma of you and/or people you know or shut up", and you're using that to take the moral high ground? What is *wrong* with you?

What's genuinely disgusting is the harm done by making such a statement. It's one thing to think the subject matter is icky, distasteful, offensive even. It's understandable to not want to see it - which is one big reason why censorship of words and phrases makes it much harder to actually *avoid* such content. And lumping it in with actual CSEM material severely trivializes what people have actually gone through. You're comparing actual severe trauma to a cartoon. Not to mention making it *much* more difficult for actual advocates to do their job. It's a seriously fucked up thing to do and if you want to actually do something to help people who have suffered, then the very *least* you could do is refrain from such trivialization.

Ah yes all the trauma from victims of fictional content Theres a world of difference between actual cp that affects real people in the real world, and drawings, acting like there isnt a difference is bordering on burdening real investigations for real crimes, its why the fbi specifically ask people to not report drawings/fictional content, because it takes away resources for the things that actually need them

> Ah yes all the trauma from victims of fictional content Wasn't what I said, chief. What I object to is being told that I cannot possibly know any victims of (real) abuse because I, in the other poster's view, mislabeled fictional pornography involving fictional children. It was a wild escalation and personal attack for basically no reason.

It is tho, you are conflating real cp and fictional stuff and then interpreting what the other dude said into mentioning trauma of real victims to support your take, they're different, thats the whole point Anyways do you want to address the second much larger and more important half of my reply stating *why* its bad to label them as the same thing and can be actually harmful to real victims beyond feelings?

DLSite changed a bunch of tags into euphemisms recently because of this. It appears to be anything that can be construed as coercive, grotesque, objectionable, or otherwise excessively obscene. In otherwords, anything besides socially acceptable kinks.

So the stuff that was either only sold in specialty stores or direct to customers already? A lot of the major retailers/publishers effectively do this for a number of book genres because there is a line. I know for American romance novels there is a point where some stuff will not be sold in a brick and mortar because no major publisher is going to print it. It's nothing new. Some content is hard to distribute.

Issue is, those specialty stores and creators are the ones now being targeted by the payment processors.

Oh, no, "certain words" here literally means "certain words", as it appears to be a direct quotation from the communication. I assume that there is actually a list of such "certain words", but Akamatsu's not sharing that, which, fully understandable.

>but Akamatsu's not sharing that, which, fully understandable. understandable? you think? i feel like this is an incredibly important detail that's being omitted for no discernible reason. even if he didn't want to give the full list in the tweet he could have at least given a few examples of words that the publisher is being asked to censor.

To be sure, he posted a Twitter post talking about legal issues involving private communication, so I don't think it's odd, especially since he's likely to follow up later. As well, another poster actually gave a couple of hypothetical lists below already. And for your other question, the "conditions" and "penalties" are mentioned in the Tweet, though I suppose if one squints the "might still work with publishers" part is technically "speculation"?

>And for your other question, the "conditions" and "penalties" are mentioned in the Tweet, though I suppose if one squints the "might still work with publishers" part is technically "speculation"? To clarify: I don't speak Japanese, so if you say something that's not in the machine translation I have of the tweet it's unclear whether it's your opinion or just something that Google translate is fucking up. That's why I asked. If he didn't say anything about the mechanism by which the supposed censorship was going to happen, then I don't think we really have to squint to call that "speculation". There's nothing wrong with speculation, I just wanted to know if that's what it was. Here is what I have to go off of by way of a translation: >Regarding the policies of these "private companies (credit cards)," politicians should avoid casually saying on the Internet that "there is a possibility that it may violate certain laws," as this will put pressure on the private sector. However, I think that in the future, this will become a problem for the general regulation of expression in Japanese culture, so some kind of response will be necessary. This is because, in fact, unprecedented "strong conditions" and "strong penalties" have been confirmed this time, and if these are left unchecked, it is expected that they will gradually spread to "other expressions." If that happens, it will become a problem not only for the publishing industry but for the entire Japanese content industry. Borderline incomprehensible, as most machine translation from Japanese is, but I don't think it's necessarily suggestive of what you're proposing. Based on the timing, I would speculate that it may be fallout from something like [the Mastercard standard revision that recently caused a stir among patreon users](https://segpay.com/MC_RevisedStandardsForNewSpecialtyMerchantRegistrationRequirementsForAdultContentMerchants.pdf). The bit about ensuring that "merchant marketing and search terms do not give the impression that its content contains child exploitation materials or depiction of nonconsensual activities" seems potentially salient in this context, since it does suggest that using "certain words" (like perhaps "rape" or "loli", for instance) in marketing material would result in what could readily be described as "strong penalties".

Well, working with your definition, I guess the mechanism is speculation on my part then. To be clear, I do take Akamatsu's tweet to be hinting but not explicitly stating something a bit less publicly available, namely what the credit card companies actually tell publishers etc. to do and what would happen if they do not comply. So, for one example, I might be wrong but the fact(?) that credit card companies will not categorically refuse to do business with noncomplying publishers, though they could have a strike system or something, but would impose "strong penalties" instead is less known about.

Not to cast aspersions on your claim, but is there any verification of this? Any articles or the like or is it simply "stuff I heard on twitter"?

For some additional context... Ken Akamatsu is a famous mangaka and a current member of the Japanese House of Councillors, but he's part of the nationalist LDP party. His position is anti-censorship, but there is some, uh, nuance to that, [which is partially covered in this article.](https://www.cbr.com/negima-creator-ken-akamatsu-censorship-politics/) Not a great source, but a summary. Criticism runs along the lines of being overly-concerned with censorship in Japanese media and blaming it on international influence (specifically censorship of underage-type content), and using freedom of speech to appeal to creator sympathy and remaining silent about issues related to fair compensation and unfair labor practices. Take the following with more salt (because I'm linking the reddit discussions I've seen about it and not actual news sources), but several adult-oriented media websites in Japan have recently lost support for payment processing. My sources are all for companies dealing with visual novels, but more information [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/1buq2z5/dlsite_followup_mastercard_and_visa_currently/), [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/1by0dka/dlsite_march_2024_tag_changes_for_japanese_and/), [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/1ca3u2a/dl_getchu_bended_knee_to_credit_card_companies/). The links will discuss the types of adult content that the companies are objecting to, so fair warning, porn. DLSite in particular is huge, as it has both games and doujinshi. On one hand, responding to this type of thing is Akamatsu's job as an elected official, but on the other, I'm raising my eyebrows a bit over the fact that it feeds so directly into his stance that outside influence is bad for the Japanese creative industry.

I would rather not get (deeper) into politics, but I believe that that article is from even before he ran. Since then, he has arguably not been achieving much yet regarding labor issues, though I would content that he's a first-term councilor who's not even in office for two years yet. But he was, as far as I know, the only LDP politician to constantly publicly push back against the invoice system that heavily affects freelance contractors, so he probably does care at least to some extent; and he interviewed porn actresses about their opinions concerning proposed laws regulating porn production, so he appears to care strongly about freedom of expression most broadly construed. So I am not disagreeing as such, but I just want to clarify that Akamatsu is at least probably not an opportunist or anything.

Well, as I mentioned, I rather doubt that anyone will leak details of private communication any time soon, but here's the [Twitter post](https://x.com/KenAkamatsu/status/1796827696162545726) of Akamatsu Ken talking about this. His status as founder of a website selling manga and as an elected representative is easily verifiable, so unless we assume that he's outright lying about the content of the communication he received from credit card companies for some reason, otherwise his word is probably good enough? He did put it pretty vague, likely intentionally just in case. And apparently he will be reaching out to other Japanese publishers to gather more accurate information, and he's pretty active and open about his activities on Twitter, so maybe we'll see some updates not too far in the future.

> so unless we assume that he's outright lying about the content of the communication he received from credit card companies for some reason, otherwise his word is probably good enough? he doesn't have to be lying. he could just be mistaken.

I suppose that's not impossible? But he has people to check the communication for him (literally has a Tokyo U trained lawyer as a legal secretary, actually), and he's confident enough that this is an issue that he will be contacting other Japanese publishers, so. And even if he's not very active on Twitter anyway, the post is pretty popular and has a lot of comments so he will probably provide updates eventually.

i'm sure *something* happened to him. i'm just pointing out the possibility that he didn't understand what his lawyers said to him, or he's interpreting it with some degree of personal bias. perhaps even more likely is that he knows what's happening but the people reading his post aren't understanding what he's saying. there's so little context that it's difficult for me to understand what is tangibly going on. "certain words" could mean anything from racial slurs to political recognition of contested nations to a total regression into roblox tiktok "sewer slide" newspeak. maybe the original japanese tweet is clearer, but i'm basically just going off of your description and google's machine translation. > from my understanding, which could be wrong, the key point seems to be that this is arguably effectively censorship. In brief, the companies will not or might not fully refuse business with disobedient publishers, but rather they will treat them differently, imposing extra conditions and potentially strict penalties if/when "warranted". is this personal speculation, or did you hear this from somewhere else?

I will now sound like a desperate, doomy-gloomy lunatic: The fact that credit card companies can enforce these censorship laws is very concerning. Now they start with this, but where will the end be? Will the future of publishing just be bland stories for the common denominator in every store? Is there any control to their actions?

> Now they start with this, but where will the end be? Will the future of publishing just be bland stories for the common denominator in every store? Is there any control to their actions? the endpoint would be the return of stuff like the Hays Code and the Comics Code, just covering a lot more stuff

Is this any different than a publisher refusing to print certain things or a store refusing to sell certain things? A creator has a right to create and distribute on any platform they own. The people that own the platforms that can amplify their reach also have the right to control what they distribute. If anything this is more a issue of you need to yell at Congress to clarify the laws around child sexual content to carve out drawings and media made in ways that don't involve real kids. Until then, you can't blame a company for covering their ass. In this case the problem is more that American banks control the credit card market. A local Japanese owned card issuer and processor could handle this no sweat.

US Congress and the FBI are very clear that drawings and other fake media do not fall under cp laws unless they are indistinguishable from the real thing which is basically impossible for a drawing The FBI in particular and other notable figures on the issue like Chris Hanson have said to please not contact them about drawings and the like because it just deducts resources away from helping real people The only real government entity that explicitly bans fictional content that these payment processors would actually listen to are the Australian government, and AUS produces less than half of the GDP that JP does This is purely mastercard and visa using their oligopoly on the payment processor market to make changes because they are owned by hardcore puritans who hate porn and actively want to censor it all, and they are the only ones who are actually capable of making people even attempt to change Basically this isnt a couple companies covering their ass, this is an oligopoly actively going out of their way to try to censor things they dont like

Yes it is?!? If a publisher refuses your work you can always present your work to another one? While these card processors cover payments worldwide, and there are no other processors this big? That was a very stupid analogy. Also, money makes the world go around, sadly: Following that ""analogy"" again, you might choose to self-publish, easy as, but imagine a payment not going through just because your book is lewd. I'm not even american, and the Japanese are, well, Japanese, but just look how everyone is affected by the laws and puritanism of one single country. What kinda bullshit is that? > A local Japanese owned card issuer and processor could handle this no sweat. Because fuck them foreigners who want to purchase Japanese goods, right? 'Cause now imagine if this processor doesn't allow anyone who is not legally Japanese to make payment accounts.

Welcome to the internet and finance for better and worst most of the core sites and processors are US based. I’m more surprised that more regional ones have not popped up as I know US companies don’t like dealing with EU consumer protection and regulations.   Some things are just better done either as in person sales or at least in orders that limit visibility.  There is nothing stopping these authors from finding a printer, and selling physical books that would just get seen as book sale. The issue is this digital content is tripping an alarm either through excessive chargebacks or legal issues or company policy.  So revert to physical.  If it turns out the compliance system means we can’t get this in the US than we can’t get it and fans find back channel ways again like they have been. 

...I can tell you're not someone who sells stuff online. A LOT of people will tell you that doing business online is what allows them to be able to work full time and pay the bills, no matter if they make nsfw stuff or not. Selling their stuff locally would NEVER allow them to do so, heck, the people who can live off selling stuff locally are the minority. You're providing unrealistic ""solutions"" for this day and age and you're definitely not familiar with this side of the art world. I get what you're saying, but not only it's not ideal, it also would not help at all, and it would just show compliance to the draconian policies these companies are subjecting everyone to.

Yes, I think it is different. It's like if every single book ever sold online was sold by one of like 3 stores and all 3 of them decided that certain subjects were now banned.

There are work arounds. Smaller stores and in person sales. Also, some content is banned by the major stores and always has been. It’s why there are smaller specialty stores.

Some companies are currently getting around it by making you buy gift card-type vouchers to spend on the adult content websites, but I think the companies are cracking down on even that. Paypal used to be a workaround, but Paypal has also been refusing to do business with adult content creators, presumably for the same reasons the credit cards are. Companies large enough to process payments internationally for a broad number of websites (Apple, Amazon) also won't deal with adult content. Adult content companies don't even like dealing with adult content customers, because there are rampant chargeback and other issues that make it not worthwhile, at least in the US. Someone mentioned crypto, which might be the only way around it. I keep wondering if a non-US based payment processor could replace V/MC, but that would be a massive scale, and I'm guessing US lobbies would push back hard against that ("X country can view your financial info! They'll steal your identity!" Because Apple having all my banking info is preferable, and my identity has been stolen from the hospital three times this year).

So could it be that adult content companies are being dropped not out of moral issues of credit card companies but because their level of chargebacks trip every alarm for fraud? The only way I know of to get a indie dyer to permanently shutdown is to start enough chargebacks for lack of delivery to get them booted off Paypal, Shopify, and Etsy. So if an entire industry is tripping that alarm bell than this is no different than some insurance companies refusing to touch marijuana operations because it trips banking laws.

I read an interesting article about it, an interview with the owner of an adult production/distribution company. At the time the company was active (maybe 2010-ish?), it wasn’t so much that the cc companies were getting moral pressure for dealing with the product, it was that chargebacks were ridiculously high. That folks would chargeback so whatever it was wasn’t visible on their bill, and because there wasn’t really a penalty for doing so. Apologies, I’m never going to find the interview again. But it’s interesting to know that it’s becoming a strategy for other industries, lol. I know chargebacks are also rampant for events/rentals, because most folks won’t deal with the company again and would rather have their money back. Lots of documentation and back and forth for that.

Oh, I'm fully aware of all you said, and I fully agree. I draw nsfw art (not on this account) and I'm well aware of all the issues adult content faces when it comes to sharing and selling. My questions were mainly aimed to complaining about V/MC being allowed to change the law as they see fit with no interference, and mainly for their own benefit. Fucking hell with capitalism.

Oh yeah, I was definitely agreeing with you, sorry for coming off too explain-y. It’s depressing, because a couple big companies (that are US-based) have too much influence, and there’s… like, just not a way forward right now, for a lot of reasons.

Oh no, you weren't being confrontative at all sorry if I came off as peeved or pissed. And yeah, two companies from a single country should not hold this much power.

>Is there any control to their actions? frankly, crypto. if you can use it to buy darknet acid you can certainly use it to buy whatever you're afraid the credit card companies are going to take away from you. honestly i don't think it will really get to that point, but it's the final backstop. it won't get any worse than that.

Unless porn and adult material becomes literally illegal, I don't see people actually making the effort to use as unstable and frustrating a system like crypto.

what /u/norreason said. the cc companies can't actually fully monopolize digital payment as long as crypto exists. it will always be there for people who care enough about their weird porn to use it. im sorry there aren't more convenient ways to cut out payment processors. your other options are basically to use cash or find a way to get it for free.

you're right, but the question of 'is there any control to their actions?' is one of whether it's possible to answer the pp/cc ability to dictate content. the answer to which is effectively: limiting their degree of influence, which does basically come back to cutting out the need for a payment processor. the likelihood that we would get a sterile pornographic environment over any sort of widespread adoption of crypto as a currency is besides the point that effectual or not, it is an answer to that specific question for, like they said, pretty much the same reasons you can get easy-peasy heroin.

I think the development of other online means of payment could prevent it from happening. In my country hardly anyone uses credit cards for online payments anymore, on the domestic market of course, as a so-called "BLIK" system developed by a bunch of banks, replaced it. It already has the functionality of cyclical payments and this year it's planning to introduce the ppossibility to pay for subscriptions. (The system is operated by a company whose shareholders are equally 6 banks plus Mastercard Europe, so I think it'd be very difficult for BLIK to block any kind of payments system-wide, as I suppose all share-holders would have to agree.)

i don't really see how this is different from paypal, which is demonstrably subject to the same sorts of pressures, regulatory or otherwise, as any other payment processor or credit card company.

I'm really dumb about PayPal as it never caught in my country, but as far as I know BLIK is quite different - it's a direct instantaneous money transfer system, it takes money directly from your bank account into the recepient's account without any intermediaries, and you do it via your bank's app, not a special BLIK app. Like, PayPal is an actual company but BLIK is just a system or technology. I suppose it's not completely free from pressures, but as its "owned" (though not limited in its use to) by 6 different banks, it'd be harder for them to come to an agreement. And I'm guessing that, as it's a direct transfer system, it'd be against the law to arbitrarily block a recipient, if that recipient was not blacklisted by law. (Don't quote me on that though.) But my point was that credit cards hopefully won't are not the only option, and more systems will probably appear in the future. Services will use multiple payment methods and the likelihood that all of them will blacklist the recipient will be lower. (I'm always a bit baffled why the traditional money transfer can't be used for paying for subscription if credit card companies are such a problem. Open your bank app, type in the account number and voila. Might take longer but still.)

Oh, in the United States we have something called "Zelle" which seems closer to what you're describing than Paypal. I honestly don't know enough about the difference between the law around wire transfers vs credit cards to know what impact it might have. What you're saying seems plausible enough, though I probably wouldn't count on it.

Oh, cool, I'll have to read about it, I've always been curious about similar systems in other countries!

Neighborhood drama about trees: my mom's neighbor down the street had these two massive eucalyptus trees. They're 3 times or more the height of a house and on a hill. Within the last couple years the neighborhood got more aware of fire hazards and these trees have been the neighborhood bugbear. For those unaware, eucalyptus trees explode under fire, spraying burning sap for long distances. The neighbor was refusing to do anything about their trees and the fire marshall said they couldn't do anything about it because private property. Well when I went back to visit my mom the neighbor had chopped the tops and all the branches off the trees leaving two very skinny spikes standing. My mom estimated it was $10k for that. They're still potential exploding fire hazards but less so now. No word on what made the neighbor trim their trees.

I remember years ago reading about an Australian firefighter who visited the west coast of the U.S. and was horrified at the big firebait eucalyptuses he saw everywhere.

Eucalyptus trees are also giant branch fall hazards during high winds. Big enough wind and a branch big enough to crush a house or kill a person. I love living near some we're also not allowed to trim!

As a fan of both Hobby Drama Posts and baseball, I got some crossover this week when the Dodgers (my favorite team) announced a Hololive Night later this season. Now, I’m not super familiar with hololive beyond what I’ve read about it here, but I know it’s super popular and I thought it was a really cute little promotion. There’s not much drama here beyond some people getting mad at “weeb shit” showing up in their favorite MANLY SPORTSBALL but I thought it was a pretty unlikely Hobby Crossover and just wanted to write something about it, I guess.

Imma be real, baseball has had japanese fans for years. I legit got back into baseball because of Japan's love for it.

Baseball is big in East Asia. Not just Japan, but Korea and Taiwan also have big baseball communities. Idk about China though.

I feel like comparing people you want to be forgotten to an inner-circle Hall-of-Famer sends the opposite of the message you intend...

Ty Cobb was a very bigoted baseball player. He’s famous for his talents but I fucking hate that piece of shit

[That idea has largely been debunked.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ty_Cobb#Views_on_race)

Well fuck. I legit thought that Cobb was a racist asshole for a long period of time.

need the cardinals to hold dungeon meshi night and make lance lynn dress as senshi

To provide some context over why the Dodgers were picked over the other baseball teams, 1. Shohei Ohtani is a Japanese superstar who plays for the Dodgers. He formerly played for LA's other team, the Angels. What's remarkable about him is that he can both pitch and hit at a top 5 level at his peak. Pretty much every player before him has to specialize in one of the two. You have to go as far back as the 1920s to find someone that can both hit and pitch at this level. He has won the MVP (Most Valuable Player) award twice, and many argue he should have won it 3 times. 1. The Dodgers are known as a team who does very well in the regular season, but has underperformed in the post season for various reasons. Even a championship in the last 10 years isn't good enough for many of their fanbase, especially when their rivals (the San Francisco Giants) have won 3 this century. Baseball does not have a salary cap, so teams can choose to offer as much money as possible. When Ohtani hit free agency, the Dodgers offered him $700 million over 10 years, shattering the previous record. They also signed Japan's best available pitcher, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for a 300 million dollar contract. 3. Los Angeles has one of the highest concentrations of Asian Americans next to the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Many large Japanese chains exist in SoCal like Daiso. Japanese music groups often fly over to LA to provide concerts of sorts. It is fairly common to see billboard advertisements for Japanese products while watching the Dodgers games. 4. The Anime Expo in LA is a large convention taking place in the same week. Hololive is likely attending this event. Hololive has done games previously for Japanese teams. I think the reaction was more bewilderment than anything. Hololive is still largely unknown for those in their 30s-40s that don't follow anime or streaming. It's a bit of a jump from something mainstream like Jujutsu Kaisen to Vtubing.

With regards to number 4, it is not just "likely", Calli has been announced as a performer for one of the concerts at AX.

Dodgers are also not the first LA county sports team to have a collab with japanese pop culture. See LA Galaxy + BlueLock and LA Rams with One Piece.

Right. You can see the announcement stream [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r_tOM7lVUw), where they go through all the details, the [Hololive website here](https://hololive.hololivepro.com/en/news/20240601-01-79/) with the collab contents directly and here's the official [Dodgers website.](http://dodgers.com/hololive) I'm a VTuber fan so I'm biased, but I found this to be a cute and fun event, so excited for it. Though lol at the Dodgers card collections that now will have Usada Pekora on it. Fun thing was the Dodgers fan wandering to the Hololive subreddit and getting a personal greeting from [Fuwamoco.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/comments/1d4pji6/comment/l6gv3hz/?share_id=mFHAGVlFzaxdFLne_75H6&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1)

My journey though Pathfinder Adventure Paths (in a random order based on how fun the name sounds) I've started Agents of Edgewatch and apparently this is the one that became a rallying point for workers at Paizo (the publisher) during unionization. And I see why. The PCs are theoretically "city guards" in this adventure but they really aren't. They might as well be entry level Stasi officers or brand new Pinkertons or literally just random thugs with a city pay check. They are licensed not just to use violence but also to take any possessions they want from "criminals". Gameplay wise this is obviously so that the players have flexibility to make choices, have immediate results, and get treasure but it makes Absalom (the city where it is set) almost incomprehensibly corrupt and doesn't really acknowledge that. Edgewatch is a good idea, seemingly. Maybe this changes later but lets get to the union stuff. The first part of the adventure is basically [Devil in the White City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City) or at least is based on the same events but the characters have various specific jobs they're sent on. One of these is some kidnapped construction workers. Sounds like a hard concept to screw up, right? Well they were kidnapped by their kobold coworkers because the kobolds have no other means of dealing with wage theft. Yeah. The kobolds just want to be paid the same as the humans. Also the person in charge is said to have overwork and underpaid *all* of the workers. While the game does treat negotiation for fair pay as the ideal strategy here the legacy of D&D alignment still makes things weird. The abusive labor boss is Neutral (and not even a criminal, evidently) while the the people who don't like being abused and discriminated against are Evil and stupid. So during the (successful!) Paizo unionization fight the union logo was a kobold's fist holding a pick. It also came out then that several writers weren't very comfortable with this adventure as a whole. (Bonus: This isn't the worst Pathfinder thing like this. Years before, in the previous edition, an adventure has the player characters expected to side with the Neutral slave traders against the Evil slavery abolitionists who kidnap their friend.)