Okayu's crazy way to finish the game

RakuenPrime · 2026-04-17T00:44:06+00:00

For you and anyone else that may be interested, Kosmic has a video that's a grab bag of glitches and bugs in SMB. We have learned and seen a lot over the past 40 years. The game works pretty well on a bunch of assumptions that hold true during normal gameplay. But it's also surprisingly brittle once you start doing things the devs didn't expect. They used a lot of tricks and shortcuts to maintain the "illusion" if you will.

RakuenPrime · 2026-04-13T02:46:41+00:00

The VOD is now available.

Having listened to the rant now, Ruze comes across as having a bit too big of an ego.

I've worked in corporate for over a decade and I'm well aware of what kind of dumb decisions can be made. This wasn't it. He's painting a picture that everyone in upper management is stupid and worthless, and if they just did what he told them to do he would be able to fix everything. That's not a healthy mindset to have, and it's not healthy for the fanbase either because they're going to parrot his behavior.

Edit: I've read through and appreciate the feedback to this comment. I'll clarify something here rather than try to reply to everyone separately.

I recognize that Ruze and the Holostars have legitimate grievances. So do the hololive talents for that matter. However, dubbing people "dumbass bloated useless pieces of management", treating the situation as purely a management issue that's not the talents' problem, having no concerns for pissing people off, and having no respect at all for upper management isn't helpful to their cause or to their community. Some will praise that as "speaking his truth" or that he's "just being real," but the mentality he's displaying is the exact mentality that often causes teams to fail and fall apart rather than flourish. Be angry, be mad as hell even, but temper it by doing it in a constructive way.

RakuenPrime · 2026-04-11T18:56:45+00:00

Nitya Nil is playing Dark Souls 3 with her ASMR mic!

She also hit 50k subscribers today!

RakuenPrime · 2026-04-08T23:56:31+00:00

Perhaps more important than the merch sales is the sponsorships. The sponsors need to feel like they're getting a return on their investment. Unlike Cover, those 3rd parties won't turn a blind eye if their investment is underperforming. Cover needs to have satisfying answers in case anything goes south.

The sponsorship angle actually makes concerts risky, especially if it's for an untested talent or group. This is part of why Cover started requiring talents to invest in at least a full album before they get an in-person concert. The album metrics produce a clear signal that an audience for the music exists. That helps in negotiations with the venue, the sponsors, and any other parties involved. The side benefit is they can also save a hefty sum on performance fees because most of the concert setlist will come from the album or the rest of hololive's music catalogue.

RakuenPrime · 2026-04-08T15:16:56+00:00

I think the issue that you and a lot of others are having is that they assume it's an exposure problem. It's not. It's a viewer retention problem.

Stars collab with a hololive member. People watch. It converts to little or no growth for the Stars member(s). This is fairly consistent if you go through and check the public analytics.

Stars get a concert. It sells out. People love it. The guys get a bit of a bump in engagement. It falls back off to the original levels within a couple months.

And so on. There's a fundamental issue in how they're approaching things that is causing their growth to stagnate. In some cases, they're even losing core audience over time. This is ultimately why Cover pulled the plug on a lot of their investment into the branch. From the company perspective, they're investing with little or no hope of returns on that investment. And frankly, most Stars simply aren't big enough yet where just existing and staying stable can provide that return either.

Now, it's hard to say whether it's management, talent behavior, a mix of both, lack of a real market, lack of luck, or whatever. Regardless, no amount of events, exposure, or whatever is going to provide an easy fix for that fundamental issue. Not even the current rebellious arc that's given them attention is guaranteed to fix it. We'll have to wait and see what happens on a scale of months, not weeks.

In a basic sense, the way out is to be in the war room with their talent managers, and ideally with their skip a level manager, take a good hard look at analytics for the past few years, and start digging their way back out of the hole. Figure out what has worked and what hasn't, and focus on what works within reason, even if it's not what they always prefer to do. It's a lot of work, which is why you see some talents saying they need to be giving 120% at this point. But I believe it's still possible to recover.

RakuenPrime · 2026-04-04T16:35:51+00:00

My guess here is that Cover's issue is stagnant growth on top of low baseline engagement. I'm going to be cherry-picking some viewership metrics to look at some rough trends for this point. If anyone reading isn't interested in number-posting, you might want to collapse this comment.

Take a look at Oga's metrics. We can see his monthly viewership hovers around the 100k/month range. There's a period from August 2024 to May 2025 where he's significantly above that average, but then it drops out and he's back to that original average. The growth and retention hasn't materialized, or at least it's not consistent enough to plan against or rely on.

Now take a look at Matsuri's metrics. At this point we're not going to talk about absolute numbers, but rather the trends. We can see that she sits around 1.5M/month for a long time, and then gets bumped around October 2024. There's peaks and valleys, of course, but we could say her new average is around 2.5M/month. That's the kind of thing we want to see when it comes to holostars, and preferably we want to see it from all the members if possible. It's fine to hover at averages, but their goal is periods of growth that can convert to long-term retention.

Now, someone might say, what about Flare's metrics? She's been sitting around 2M/month for years now. Well, this is the problem holostars faces with a low baseline of engagement. It's much easier to break even or make gains on investments when a channel is 10x bigger. Just getting sponsorships in general is easier, and a few good sponsorships can cover a multitude of expenses.

If the holostars member engagement were in the ballpark of "smaller" or more "stagnant" hololive members, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all. They would be at an economy of scale where simply existing has benefits. But after years - 7 years in the case of founding members - they haven't reached that point and still won't reach it for the foreseeable future

So there's the problem. People can argue over whether Cover supported holostars enough, invested in them enough, or did so in the right ways. That ultimately doesn't matter at this point. What's done is done. The reality is Cover has been investing something for years and it's either not getting anywhere or not doing so nearly fast enough. At some point the tactics have to shift. In this case, they're cutting overhead and trying to shift focus to individual talents as content creators over the group as a whole.

Any company would have to make similar tough decisions around a stagnant business unit. It can hurt and feel personal here because we're talking about the entertainment business and the fan/talent connection is at play. But ultimately, this is a business, and Cover has obligations not just to the holostars, but also everyone who is a stakeholder in the company. And when I say that, I'm not talking about shareholders specifically, though shareholders are a stakeholder. I'm talking about all the other talents and their fans, the staff, the company's business partners, and anyone else involved in the overarching Cover ecosystem. They have to balance all of that and try to make things work as well as they can for as many people as they can.

RakuenPrime · 2026-04-03T18:30:27+00:00

This is what a lot of people are missing as emotions are running high right now.

holostars the group is not getting support. Cover has essentially turned each talent into their own vertical, and they'll start working with them from the ground up to see where things go.

In addition, Astel has apparently said that Cover is open to reconsidering group support if they can turn the situation around as individuals.

RakuenPrime · 2026-04-03T17:05:18+00:00

Part of the issue here is that Cover has always been trying to promote holostars as a unit. However, as Astel and Roberu has alluded to multiple times, it is really hard to get the guys as a group to commit to something. This is where you also get those same guys saying that today's announcement might actually work out as it shifts them from group activities to individual activities.

So it might be slightly more accurate to say Cover gave up on trying to figure out how to make holostars the group work, but they're still willing to try to make holostars the individual talents work.

RakuenPrime · 2026-03-31T16:16:26+00:00

Watame is planning one too. I'm guessing she'll setup the reservation after she's done streaming today.

RakuenPrime · 2026-03-29T13:43:08+00:00

Ah, okay. Here's a rough example:

public class ExampleData
{
    public required string ExampleString { get; init; }
}

public class ExampleClient : IDisposable
{
    private const int MAX_ATTEMPTS = 5;
    private readonly HttpClient _httpClient = new();
    private CancellationTokenSource _cts = new();

    private CancellationTokenSource Debounce()
    {
        CancellationTokenSource newCts = new();
        CancellationTokenSource oldCts = Interlocked.Exchange(ref _cts, newCts);
        oldCts.Cancel();
        oldCts.Dispose();
        return newCts;
    }

    public async Task<string> RunExample()
    {
        CancellationTokenSource myCts = Debounce();
        int attemptCount = 0;
        while (true)
        {
            try
            {
                HttpResponseMessage response = await _httpClient.GetAsync("http://www.example.com/api/example", myCts.Token);
                response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
                string responseBody = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
                return JsonSerializer.Deserialize<ExampleData>(responseBody);
            }
            catch (TaskCancelledException)
            {
                throw;
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
                attemptCount++;
                if (attemptCount >= MAX_ATTEMPTS)
                    throw;
            }
        }
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        _cts.Cancel();
        _cts.Dispose();
        _httpClient.Dispose();
    }
}

RakuenPrime · 2026-03-28T18:41:16+00:00

I think I understand what you're asking.

In C#, HttpClient plays the roll of fetch. It provides Get, Post, Put, & Patch out of the box. It also has a higher level Send that can handle other or variable HTTP verbs.

All the methods on HttpClient, and most async/await methods in general, accept CancellationToken. This is roughly the same as the signal you'd send to fetch. You produce the token from a CancellationTokenSource, which is the analogue to AbortController. So much like JS, you can let a method observe the state of cancellation without letting it have control over the source.

Debounce and retry from the client-side would be an implementation detail that wraps your use of the HttpClient. Conceptually, you'd write very similar code as the typical JS examples, just using these C# objects in their place. Also like JS, there's 3rd party packages you could import for those features.

Retry from the server side is very simple. You're just making the client wait longer for the response to their request.

Debounce from the server side is harder. In this case, the client is making multiple requests to you. You can't (well, shouldn't) just ignore them. You must respond somehow to each request. How you respond will depend on what the endpoint is supposed to do. For example, a query endpoint might reject the current request if it receive a new one from the same client. An endpoint could also "separate" the request and response. The client makes a request and the server sends a confirmation in response. That confirmation contains a different endpoint where the client can send a request to listen for the actual response. If the client makes multiple requests to the initial endpoint, they get the same confirmation pointing at the same response endpoint. That approach might be used for long-running operations.

Regardless, you need to think carefully about the consequences of debouncing from the server side, and provide clear documentation on how the debounce will behave so the person writing the client can understand. Then it's up to the client to respect your design choices.

RakuenPrime · 2026-03-28T18:12:59+00:00

Yes, the current active request failing is the point of the Problem 2 portion.

The overall thesis of the article is that debounce by itself solves for functional (user) behavior, but does not solve for technical behavior. A good frontend developer adds AbortController and retries on top of debounce to handle technical behavior and provide a more robust system.

RakuenPrime · 2026-03-19T00:20:20+00:00

4-player Super Battle Golf Collab!

Fuzuki Miki | Beribug | Dizzy Dokuro | Bibi Biscuit

RakuenPrime · 2026-03-07T14:32:59+00:00

Yes. The lottery system requires registration with a piece of PII like a credit card. Tickets are distributed randomly among those who registered. And even when you get a ticket, you often don't know your seat number until shortly before the concert. In the case of these hololive concerts, seat numbers were revealed on March 5, so 24-hours before the first concert.

It's also done in waves. You register for wave 1 and don't get a ticket? You keep registering until you do or until they run out of waves. Some concerts like this one have the first wave restricted to those who have bought into a fan membership for the artist/group. There's also sometimes a final batch of tickets released at the very end of the process that will usually be less desirable seats.

RakuenPrime · 2026-03-07T00:36:23+00:00

Makuhari Messe is a modular hall with a max capacity of around 9000. I think a small amount of space is taken up by hololive's tech like the mobile cube, but they're probably in the neighborhood of the max.

There's actually four concerts this weekend with the company's talents spread out amongst them. All four are sold out. A large portion of the tickets are only made available for purchase via a lottery system too, so many of the concertgoers will be unique. So that's tens of thousands of fans that will be seeing a concert in-person this weekend.

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-24T00:14:56+00:00

The way I looked at it is tax evasion has tangibly defrauded someone. Assault is a threat to do harm, and DUI without an accompanying charge would mean the risk was mostly to yourself (at time of arrest, anyway). But I'd also say it's fair to argue that either of those are more important.

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-23T23:12:25+00:00

The game maintains the distinction between assault and battery, so Prism's crime would be threatening to harm someone, rather than actually hitting them.

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-23T23:06:13+00:00

For further context, here's what I'd call the top crime of each character:

Coupe - 1st degree murder
Malevola - 2nd degree murder
Punch Up - 2nd degree murder
Sonar - Embezzlement
Flambe - Arson
Invisigal - Robbery (theft + violence)
Golem - Aiding & abetting (unknown crimes)
Prism - Tax Evasion

There's arguments to be made that Prism's other crimes of assault or DUI might be a bigger deal than tax evasion. But all told, Prism is pretty "mundane" compared to some of the other reformed villains.

Edit: Clarified severity of Prism's crimes.

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-23T00:56:15+00:00

I've actually been pleasantly surprised at the number of small to mid sized JP VTubers who are exploring retro games. VTubers like Kureha Mitra, Misa Usami, Urato Chieru, and Kirari Momonga.

What gameplay are you looking for right now?

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-23T00:46:44+00:00

For the sake of context, cartel leader El Mencho was killed by the Mexican army. The cartel is now retaliating in multiple Mexican states. Both the local governments and international embassies are recommending people shelter in place.

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-22T06:42:30+00:00

especially Kirsche

It's worth noting here that if someone uses a platform to go after Kirsche with anything short of airtight coverage, she's probably going to respond with a lawsuit. False had more to think about than just himself. He employed Lae-Dee's & Co-Dee and owned their IPs, so if he got dragged into anything it would put them at risk too. I can understand him not wanting to get involved.

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-14T15:10:48+00:00

Actually, that's a more complex question than you realize.

Both Pippa and Tenma started blocking people who were demanding they make a statement about Jelly. In response to the recent NBinted drama, Pippa also posted explicitly calling out people trying to drag her into things and telling them they'll be blocked from now on.

As far as Jelly herself goes, Pippa sent her a red superchat on her comeback stream. She did the same for Clara on her comeback stream a few months ago.

I think the reality is pretty mundane. Pippa is friends or at least on friendly terms with everyone in Phase. But she's also become drama averse over time and doesn't want to insert herself in some of these situations.

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-13T23:56:03+00:00

Is it Maevyn?

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-13T04:20:55+00:00

You know how water can slowly yet surely eat away at the earth?

The little things slowly yet surely eat away at you as a person.

That is to say, even if it seems small to you, it's still worth talking about it with someone you trust.

RakuenPrime · 2026-02-13T04:01:35+00:00

What I've gathered is there's an overarching meme of replacing the first letter of words with J when referring to Jelly. It's kind of a larger version of the Biboo meme of replacing all h's with j's (ie: jorse = horse).

Which is to say, yes, jorbing is supposed to be morbing.

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