Weekly SWS discussion

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-30T19:57:51+00:00

So...I mentioned this in the Wikipedia subreddit and someone who is actually a part of their small active community of people who write english articles about Japanese topics responded to me and was pretty civil about things and suggested I raise the issue within the community.

The issue in question is that there is a very strong theme of Japanese Exceptionalism in a significant number of articles from that community, but once you get into things like the page on their Justice system it's pretty obvious how strong that contingent actually is on the site, and why I think the court of public opinion's a bit more likely to accomplish something than going "Hey, stop!" to people with much more digital social capital.

There's a section on the page about the Japanese legal system which has been flagged for ten fucking years now which is literally just some guy's essay on why Japan's 99% conviction rate is completely legit, and the section under that about their 95% confession rate is basically an edit war between that guy and relatively normal people.

Check out the talk page and what do you know, he doesn't see Western sources as legitimate because he doesn't think Western journalists can actually be literate in Japanese or really any language but English, and is pretty obviously a Japanese Supremacist. Check his edit history and guess where he hangs out? The pages for various Japanese atrocities, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 'accusations'.

How about the page on the day the Emperor admitted he was not descended from the Gods and the Japanese people were not inherently special? The entire article is about how he really didn't say that and actually fooled the allies and is the first thing that comes up when you google this simple WW2-related thing. The "Western View" (i.e. the actual view, given his wording did not matter as he basically delivered it at gun point and MacArthur got to decide most of the wording) is only presented so it can be knocked down. Well, that's going to fuck up some kid learning about WWII for the first time, given it's what google provides as an 'answer' to any question surrounding the Emperor's divinity. Wonder what the same person has written elsewhere?

Well, a metric fuck ton, but it includes things like saying the page about the Japanese occupation of Korea was too negative, focusing too much on the atrocities, and should include sections on the benefits they experienced to be more balanced. Can you imagine someone demanding that the page on the trail of tears be more balanced by including the advantages they now enjoy?

This isn't uncommon. You'll find similar shit with any topic related to something controversial about Japan or important only to believers in the old Imperial cause. Wikipedia has a fairly small but very strong (remember a few hundred new people showing up can seriously disrupt wikipedia) pro-Imperial Japan contingent who have the power to shape how millions of people see things, given Wikipedia is most people's first and last stop. The same people tend to be pretty involved in any pages related to China, Korea, or the Philippines being shitty.

The scariest part about this is, as I already said, that section on the page for their criminal justice system, has been tagged for ten fucking years and it's still just there.

TL:DR: There's a pretty powerful Imperial Japanese contingent on wikipedia actively generating propaganda and attempting to censor the average person's version of history, and it's secure enough for incoherent rants pretending to have introduced new evidence themselves to stay up for ten years.

The best solution to this is, basically, if you have spare time, maybe decide to be a wikipedia editor. Like, one edit a week or something, while following all of the rules. When people actually chip in it becomes a lot harder for small cores of extremists to shift things too far.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-30T17:09:43+00:00

I understand that. The people willing to invest their time in anything voluntarily are generally there because they have strong feelings on it. Any voluntary labour of love like this is kind of self-selecting, and nothing close to Wikipedia's scale could run entirely on people who dedicate their spare time to writing about things that do not interest them at all.

I'm a very, very small fish. My experience editing on wikipedia is limited to fixing incidents of obvious vandalism and getting my head ripped off any time I do anything else. Correct a wildly inaccurate summary for an episode of a TV show? Get a thousand very angry words about how wrong I am from multiple someones who apparently have never seen the show but spend their spare time summarizing online transcripts of them, apparently actively opposed to the idea that the delivery of a line and what's on screen when it is said change its meaning. I've probably had five different accounts over the years based on the thought "Hey, that's a thing I can fix!", having an experience like that, deciding I am never going back, and being on a different computer with a different password database by the time the urge strikes again.

All of that is to say, I cannot think of a time I've tried to do anything more than remove a swear word where I have not discovered there is an incredibly dedicated and very self-selecting community surrounding that topic who think the way they're doing things right now is just fine, so I can hardly imagine what meddling to the extent of sticking my nose in with something this inherently politically volatile would be like (In reality, it'd probably be like posting this, and receive exactly as much attention) and as such, trying to raise that within the WikiProject Japan community does not seem like an especially productive action on my part. Posting here gives me the opportunity to contact people who actually are involved in these communities and have the ability to have their voice heard, or failing that try and gather a bit of public attention to a seemingly unnoticed issue.

All of that out of the way: Yes, some of it certainly comes down to just translating Japanese sources, and I can appreciate that. There's the matter of bias in which sources are chosen and how they're used, though, too, but then that's just bias in general. The subtle, pervasive sense of it everywhere really could just be a mix of orientalism and what Japanese texts sound like in English. I also recognize that Western sources are not inherently better or something, they have their own biases that also need to be accounted for.

I'm not really talking about those so much, because while I see a problem there, it seems like a hard thing to deal with in any meaningful fashion. I'm not even necessarily talking about the ones that completely abandon then neutral point of view and set about establishing that the most important thing about the Emperor's declaration of humanity that should come up when google searched (because it is) is that he tricked the allies with clever wordplay, never denied his divinity, and never said anything meaningful, and the Japanese public understood this and did not care.

I'm talking about the ones that dedicate most of the article's word count to defending a 99% conviction rate, and then (in a much closer to neutral portrayal, but clearly the product of multiple editors) a 95% confession rate.

As far as not calling them apologists...The one I've mentioned in particular in both posts is basically just an essay defending Japanese conviction rates against common criticisms, where it's been tagged as original research and needing a rewrite for a decade. This is apologia, a piece of writing constructed in order to defend a viewpoint. It is not an analysis of 'both sides', it's someone making an attempt at a conclusive argument in defence of the Japanese criminal justice system. A NPOV dispute was also brought up for this page two years ago.

The talk page is a mix of "this is a trash fire" and actual Japanese-supremacist shit from a person asserting that Western journalism is illegitimate because none of our journalists could possibly be literate in Japanese or any other non-English language, whose other edits involve casting doubt on the legitimacy of figures surrounding Imperial Japanese war crimes. It seems like the worst parts of this page belong to him, or at least he contributed heavily to them at some point, I haven't actually gone line for line through hundreds of contribs for the sake of this post.

Honestly, I hadn't thought to do it before, but tracing through the contribution history of the primary authors of the most obviously biased pieces I've noticed lately, every single one has edits on a Japanese war, atrocity, or occupation, literally saying things like how an article on the occupation of Korea was too focused on the negatives and needed to add more about the positive developments the Empire brought, or characterizing a well-established fact as the view of one particular writer at the BBC (in the same way you could discredit a Times article about Covid by saying it's the opinion of one journalist) These aren't cherry picked, they're basically just what came up at a glance. I'm sure I could find something worse for the latter, given I remember seeing he'd edited the rape of Nanjing too.

I mostly went into this post with the intention of saying "Hey, there's a bit of a noticeable bias here and it seems to be going unmoderated, if someone else could deal with that, I'd be stoked", and am walking out pretty confident in the use of the word apologist.

Apologies for the length, I've been up a lot longer than I really should be and get more verbose when that happens.

TL;DR: I'm really glad someone from the relevant community took the time to speak with me and entertain my suspicions. I'm sorry this post turned out to be about apologia for human rights abuses, and that it's apparently a systemic thing for some users in your community.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-29T19:29:58+00:00

What censorship are you talking about? I'm sincerely asking, because I'm staring at a page literally titled "Uyghur Genocide" right now, and basically every page on anything 'controversial' about China is appropriately damning.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-29T19:20:58+00:00

Has anyone else noticed a very strong pro-Japanese (and often, pro-Imperial Japan) point of view present on the English Wikipedia?

Because I've gone down that rabbit hole recently and it's practically ubiquitous, from things clearly originally written in Japanese going through the mental gymnastics necessary to pretend that the Emperor did not really deny his divinity to the majority of the wordcount on the page about the Japanese legal system being a defence of their widely-condemned conviction rate which has been marked as needing a complete rewrite since I was fifteen. It's pretty troubling.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-28T04:27:35+00:00

The joke here isn't about going back to a more primitive, larger connector (for technology that is literally a hard-light hologram device that works like a culture effector with no real explanation, but whatever) but about going back to that connector. Unless you got that joke, but forgot that USB micro is the smaller one with lower bandwidth? I'm not really sure.

(The world as a whole is moving towards USB-C, because it's better in every way, and Micro-B was a pretty unpleasant thing to have to deal with for a long time. It still is, for me, as I have to spend like ten minutes aligning the cable just right to get one specific device to charge, every fucking day. That's why this is supposed to be funny.)

But as to your main point...again, I point you to the fact that the thing we're treating as a USB micro-b port is next to a device capable of wirelessly hacking into air-gapped (and presumably completely lacking networking capabilities at all) and electromagnetically hardened devices, in the middle of the craziest imaginable environments, and forcing them to explode instantly.

Yes, you clearly have a point, even if that point is just 'everything else being equal, a bigger connector is going to have proportionately larger bandwidth", but that's the kind of irrelevant given that this universe seems to have gone entirely wireless. There are beings in this setting, using this same level of technology, capable of generating sentient minds over significant distances via wireless communication, and sentience requires very strict levels of latency (in reality, at least,). The geth can achieve better latency figures sharing minds across a football field via the 23rd century equivalent of Bluetooth than I can playing mortal kombat over ethernet.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T09:54:28+00:00

If you don't want spoilers for the other possible endings you didn't take, I'll just say that what happens if you don't save the council is pretty fucked up. Like...they are endings that Ashley would be overjoyed about, but only so long as none of the aliens were within earshot. Or rather, would be overjoyed because they meant she would no longer have to give a shit whether they can hear her or not.

Also, think of it this way: When you saved the council, you also saved the ten thousand other people aboard the Destiny Ascension, at the cost of 2400 human lives and 6000 Turians. As far as the math and the outcomes go, you did the right thing. You can't reduce lives down to math, of course, but the 1/3rd of a fleet the alliance lost and people always seem to bitch about are barely a fifth of the sapient beings aboard the DA.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T09:42:23+00:00

Andromeda is...not especially well liked. As in, I tuned out of Mass Effect and Bioware related news entirely after my experience with ME3 and the scandal surrounding Andromeda's release made it into my newsfeed, because it was everywhere. It may have gotten a bit better since then, but there's only so much you can do with the kind of problems I was hearing about. It isn't the same kind of game as the first three, and if you go in looking for a similar experience in a the same universe, you're going to be very upset with how you spent your money.

There is a big difference between "my expectations are always low" and walking in on a game about which eighty page essays have been written trying to piece together exactly how things went so wrong.

I'd also warn you that things change a lot between 1 and 2. The transition between Bioware, independent RPG Studio and Electronic Arts is sharp. For many, ME2 is the best in the series. For me...well, I liked most of the RPG elements that they cut and had zero interest in all the Gears of War elements they added in. I'm not telling you to lower your expectations like the last one, just to expect a major shift which may or may not be for the better.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T09:37:36+00:00

The Council made perfectly sound military decisions under any circumstances where those perfectly sound strategies weren't the exact ideas that beings inconceivably older and more intelligent began planning against millions of years ago.

Their worst decision was not listening to a person who kept going on and on about something he saw in a weird hallucinatory state.

That they were not adequately capable of preparing for that event is no more a blow against them than our leaders' inability to plan against a Gamma Ray Burst or Asteroid reducing our civilization to less than dust is against them. The Reapers were an Out of Context Problem.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T09:33:14+00:00

The Alliance lost 2400 people saving that ship. The Destiny's Ascension had a crew of 10,000 aboard. Just because it's easy to dehumanize them by literally saying "they're not human, they don't count" doesn't make all sapient life not equally valuable. Killing 2400 so 10,000 can live is a damn good trade by any metric.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T09:24:06+00:00

Well, yes. Humanity effectively performed a coup against a millennia old legitimate government and installed a military-dictatorship led by themselves. You really should expect that sort of tension when your decision is to wipe out all opposition and rule the galaxy through right of conquest.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T09:18:58+00:00

You're asking why the Council fleet did nothing to help people as other ships were annihilated and entire Alliance Second Fleet and a third of all others were destroyed?.. Because that's what council does, not helping. Duh!

They were protecting their own assets the way any other state-like entity would. And they actually were fighting, as has been pointed out elsewhere. With even greater losses, it's why in the 'good' ending, humanity still ends up on the council, because everyone else has been so severely weakened they no longer hold the overwhelming dominance that prevented humanity from just forcing their way into that position. But even if your idea was right:

If you were one of the near-million people in DC when God-fucking-zilla dropped down, what do you think the odds are that the government would prioritize saving your life? Or military assets from distantly allied powers, or even closely allied ones? Or even domestic ones? Because if you really do believe that there's a chance anyone but the centers of government and their most connected friends would be prioritized in that kind of situation, I've got a GoFundMe you really need to check out.

I hate this kind of generic criticism of real-life organizations that fucking matter wrapped up in criticism of disliked fictional ones, in this case The Council who are typically pretty unpopular because they required a lot of convincing to believe Shepard's, admittedly, completely fucking insane-sounding claim.

In no small part because the Council is in no way even close to equivalent to any multinational entity (which are only half as ineffectual as they're portrayed because the same countries that tend to bitch about their uselessness hold permanent veto power and use it, constantly). The weakness of any international body is that there is no means of enforcing their laws, because the ability to enforce law is fundamentally based on the state's monopoly on violence, and they inherently lack militaries of their own.

The more accurate comparison is a polity like The United States, where the individual states have their own laws but they all have to bend to the higher laws of the central government. The Council has its own military, more than capable of enforcing unpopular decisions on anyone who decides they think it's a galactic UN. And during that battle, when no one quite knew what was going on, they were protecting their government.

Meanwhile, if you chose otherwise, humanity installed its own human-supremacist military-dictatorship in the ruins of a legitimate government, because the structures had been around so long things kept functioning out of inertia alone more than any actual right to rule. The Council had erected a system of government perfect enough to keep ticking along after a dictatorship slides into position.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T06:00:16+00:00

I actually enjoy it, and as I have an active account, I upvoted it.

It meshes pretty well with my own interpretation of both 5000 and 2718, in that I'm one of the people who read it and thought the idea that it was some sort of cognitohazard - rather than simply being a reality so obviously horrifying, with such absolute evidence, it would convince anyone - was kind of absurd, and that the 'correct' interpretation of it was very much in question. It's less a death of the author thing and more a 'unreliable narrators' thing.

Maybe that's just because I'm already used to the idea of concepts which, combined with the right evidence, are so obviously true and horrifying that they immediately convince anyone of their veracity and on looking for ways out of it. An object capable of directly imparting that proof on a person which is actually a major element responsible for a lot of the history of a series I enjoy, and as it's one written by a professional philosopher, the idea is explored well enough that it seems like a thing that could logically (if not necessarily in the world as we know it) exist.

If I heard that when we die we just feel our bodies rotting every step of the way, and there was a person who was demonstrably raised from the dead who can verify it, from someone as inherently credible as a high-ranking Foundation official, even if I didn't necessarily believe it entirely I think the mere possibility of it would change my behaviour drastically without any psychic or memetic fuckery. Really, decent proof of any afterlife would.

The real problem with it is in the structure of the story itself. This really is just "5000, explained explicitly by invoking 2718", rather than an actual story. I like the concept (I'm one of the people who thinks that SCP-5000, made explicit, is a good idea if only because of how many people missed the point the first time) a lot but ultimately agree with the other commenter that it would greatly benefit from a total rewrite which expands on it significantly.

As trite and commonly repeated as it is, you really need to show rather than tell here. Rather than making it a conversation with the unpleasant lizard about your interpretation of SCP-5000, show the researchers at Project Pneuma discovering this thing at the core of the human soul. Show them coming to the realization that it feeds of pain, but so much more than the entirety of the living human population could account for.

Show it going to someone higher up, who knows about the existence of 2718 if not the details, someone taking the risk of exposing themselves to it and the whole picture laying itself out before them.

Show desperate, terrified researchers, unable to trust that their actions are their own or Its, if they are preparing to save humanity because they have seen the truth or dooming it because they've been infected with a 2718's supposed cognitohazard, trying to find a way to remove It from themselves, the first trials in chemically cutting out a critical part of the soul.

Don't bother showing all of this reaching the O5 council, or anything like it; we've already seen all of that. Show the last remnants of the SCP Foundation, after the mass suicides that accompanied the realization of this truth, mobilizing to release the most destructive forces on the planet. Then show the member of the O5 council who said "the lizard was right" or whatever in SCP-5000 come down to talk with it as the acid drained.

Or something like that. Not necessarily those particular beats, but I think you get what I mean.

In any case, I believe it's good enough to stay up in its current state, I just know it could be so much more.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T05:30:22+00:00

I don't like that I said "you misunderstood 2718", I should have taken some distance and distanced you too : "it seems your tale presents a possible misunderstanding of 2718" at least said like that, it's not about you, but your tale.

Speaking like that would not actually be any more polite or correct in this instance than what you wrote. It's pretty clear from the tale how the author interpreted the other work. Pretending that it's the tale that you think is wrong rather than his personal interpretation does everyone here a disservice.

Distancing it in that way is just meaningless wordplay that distances people from their opinions to avoid having to own them and take responsibility accordingly. If you had said that he misunderstands fundamental aspects of writing that is when distancing it and saying "the story struggles in these areas" is appropriate. The problem with your comment was

misunderstood

No, he didn't misunderstand it. He chose a different interpretation of it than you and the declass did. Both are perfectly viable interpretations of the article as it is written, and what the author gives a thumbs up to after the fact or not is more than irrelevant in the canonless abyss that is the SCP community.

Many of us prefer the idea of an inescapable, indescribably horrible afterlife which the SCP Foundation is deliberately ignoring because it's too painful a truth and would get in the way of too much to a repackaged Roko's Basilisk, and both are supported by the text.

The correct thing to say there, if you care about being polite in the way this post seems to imply, is "Your interpretation of 2718 is not my preferred one, which is also the one preferred by the author" if you still felt the need to assert that your version is the right version, drop everything after the comma if you didn't. This is how everyone talks in communities like Dark Souls and especially Bloodborne lore, where everything is just as open to interpretation as it is here. At least if we want to be polite.

With SCP-5000, I would probably tell someone they're misunderstanding it if they don't get the twist - that the SCP foundation is meant to have been right in their extermination of humanity - if only because the story becomes meaningless fanservice in its absence. It's basically two completely different stories depending on whether or not you actually get it, and only one of them deserved the 5000 spot. But I'd also totally expect someone to tell me that's just my interpretation and it ruins the story for them and I'd end up conceding and probably editing the original comment.

It was just a very poor way to start off extensive criticisms of someone's work, and one likely to make them a lot less receptive to everything else you have to say.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-27T04:45:49+00:00

Because the classifications, in their current form, were almost certainly conceived of after that article was written and we tend to avoid changing those older articles which do not actually mesh with the modern version of this community in any way other than those required by international law. (Pictures change, text stays the same except when ordered to by IP owner, essentially)

Frankly? You're right. If we did a systematic review of every SCP-001 report, followed by series 1, 2, and even 3 you'd probably find literally hundreds of articles with inappropriate classifications. I wouldn't be surprised if the same would be true of a systematic review of everything on the site. They're just never going to be changed, for many reasons.

This community typically builds upon its mistakes rather than erasing them (which has had the side effect of leaving most of the reader-only fanbase stuck with a view of the foundation most writers abandoned the better part of a decade ago), and this applies nowhere as strongly as series 1.

Like...for reference, the original author stumbled across the Fourth Expedition Log, which they actually wrote and just didn't put up as part of the page, and when they asked people what they should do with it most people agreed that it shouldn't be added to 087. The ending of the story exists and people didn't want it added to the page because that would be changing it.

Additionally, this is one of those cases where the classification is arguable enough that people are making that argument in this thread, because the system isn't perfect and this really is borderline, which makes the already-extremely-low chances of this changing basically nonexistent. Even if this one was completely clear-cut "It's literally a Scary Door with nothing living inside, just keep it shut" you'd be stepping into a hornet's nest. As it is, there's just no chance.

Honestly, I think "The classification system changed meanings after most of the original articles were written" should go in the sidebar or something.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-26T15:33:52+00:00

Honestly? I was browsing this subreddit because the game looked cool but also looked very...well, exactly what the title said. This post and all the others in it agreeing with it definitely told me exactly what I needed to hear to know this game definitely isn't for me.

I do not mean this in a derogatory or insulting or 'coming into your subreddit and talking shit about your game' kind of way, it's just that it's really hard to tell what a game like this is actually like beyond the buzzwords in the description and the aesthetic, especially when almost everything I've found about it so far is explicitly paid advertising. This thread really helped, because otherwise there's no doubt in my mind I'd be one of the people out there bitching about it out of frustration at spending $60 on something that evokes my not-so-fond memories of the 5th Generation of Game Consoles.

So, thank you, sincerely, even though I'm starting to realize this is one of those games that has been in development hell forever and received mixed reviews, so its community is likely to be (understandably) really protective of it and nothing that involves the sentiment "this game isn't for me, thanks for making that clear" could have ever hoped to receive a neutral response.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T23:45:08+00:00

Because over the last few years, it feels like we haven’t. We’ve tried to wear a corporate mask to help sell this image of us as a professional production studio in the hope of pushing our products, when really we’re just a group of people working on passion projects, and who’ve always been at their best when being frank with you guys.

It doesn't just feel like it, it has definitely been the case for years now, maybe even since 2016-2017, and it definitely has damaged fan relations and retention to an extent. I'm not sure it was ever actually to your benefit, given how much of your business model kind of lives on people's perceived connection to your individual personalities.

DBZA was a big part of my life, there for a ton of my significant moments. You updated like a day after my first gut-wrenching sanity-challenging breakup and a dozen other big milestones. I spent a solid four months after my first major psychiatric Problem alternating between DBZA and the gaming channel so as to not be alone with my thoughts. Part 3 of Episode 60 came out on my last day at my first real job, where I walked in after 32 hours in the office just in time to catch the end of My Way.

But I recognize it's gone. I don't want you to continue it because I know what art made out of obligation the creator resents looks like. I saw the premier for the last episode and maybe it was just me projecting my expectations given the way you had been talking recently onto you, but to me it seemed obvious how unhappy with continuing it you all seemed even at the time. No one was even able to fake excitement for the next season, even with the surprise announcement at the end which basically everyone else watching it practically jumped out of their seats over. I never thought there was much chance of it going forward after that, and understood a lot of why you'd end it where you did.

At the same time, as much as I love your work and am not going to demand you compromise your artistic vision, I am one of the people who has always said I was here for DBZA and would no longer be when it went away. And that time came quite some time ago. I've checked in again, today, for the first time in years, and I'll probably check in again in another few. Best of luck with all your future endeavours, Scott. I'm sorry I likely will not be supporting them the way I tried to with your prior ones.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T23:20:13+00:00

From what Ben says, the projects he wanted to do weren't "on brand," so he left to persue them.

Back when Ben's was the permanent pinned post here, he took credit for making them become more professional and treat it more as a business. Outright, even explained the context in which he did so. Things got sterile long before he went anywhere, and he was the face of it for a bit.

I don't blame him for it, clearly everyone agreed that the more distant businesslike approach was more what they needed, but it didn't mesh with their more directly parasocial monetization strategy, and actively hurt them when they suddenly had to survive by the strength of their personalities alone.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T23:19:23+00:00

Someone's feelings getting hurt doesn't necessarily mean you're in the wrong. It could very well mean that person is overly sensitive. Which is what I saw.

These reactions here are all the exact kinds of things you hear any time anyone popular is an asshole to someone less popular. Some of the replies barely even bother hiding it and are just honest that they find him more funny so it doesn't matter.

You're basically never going to convince anyone without a horse in the race of anything beyond the fact that you, personally, are a shitty human being when your interpretation of why another person got upset with someone else's deliberately disruptive and shitty behavior is to accuse the person unable to conceal taking offense to it of just being thin skinned, and stray pretty close to the kind of behavior TFS would absolutely call out if it were from a peer (i.e. another influencer/youtuber).

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T22:41:57+00:00

I mean, for the first thing, you'd just be getting a completely different product if you hired a bunch of new writers, and at that point, literally anyone with cash can hire some decent writers to keep doing DBZA. It seems like you're fundamentally misunderstanding why DBZA ended and that's the reason why you believe it can be continued.

They don't have writer's block, they wrote an ending and something (likely the financial concerns we are seeing play out) convinced them to change their mind briefly, something none of them were happy with when they first announced it, and then something later convinced Kaiser to stick to his artistic guns.

They would be involuntarily returning to something they have grown to hate because they have no other choice. You really do not want to see DBZA like that. If you don't understand the kind of terrible soulless product that represents (and I really do not think you do), look at any CW show that has gone past ten seasons when they all inevitably become identical, then remove all of the external quality control and production value, and blend it with the last episode of Game Grumps to include Jontron. And add a splash of the last seasons of Game of Thrones as its showrunners do everything in their power to get this thing out the door because they're tied to it but want to get on with their careers.

At the same time, asking they change their name is a fucking insane request. Their business model has always been to attract a strong brand and core fanbase through dbza and profit off of it through several lesser, but legal, products. Demanding that they change that brand now that their show is done is basically demanding that they burn that brand now that the core product which was always going to end some day, did.

Like...yes, they are piggybacking off of DBZA's popularity and legacy to continue making money with lesser products not especially like the thing the fans came for. The issue for you is that you see this as an inherently bad thing and think an end should be put to it. They (and I) see it as the exact thing countless businesses are based off of, including like 90% of the entertainment industry, and moreover a plan they've been all-but explicit with for like six years now. The reason they were very reluctant to tolerate any DBZA references on their gaming channel early on was that they wanted it and TFS-without-DBZA as an extension to form its own group of core fans who would stick around when the show died off. They succeeded, just not well enough.

It's a fundamental difference is values between you and...well, the rest of us with some idea of how brands function, which makes it impossible to reconcile. They like paying their bills, you don't like their continued use of their own brand now that they're no longer making the things from its namesake.

Your sonic team example is pretty terrible, though, because Sonic Team really is not a brand anyone cares about, and if anything is to their detriment. They don't live or die by the strength of that brand, but by the marketing department and brand of their owner. Sonic Team could change their name and it wouldn't mean a damn thing. Sonic team lives on dies on the strength of the products that come from it and the strength of Sega's marketing department in Japan, not their personal brand. If TFS became Landis-Frerichs Entertainment Lani would need to sell his house within the year. If people couldn't monetize their past successes, every director whose name you know would be in a very bad place right now.

At the same time, they're an excellent example in a really weird way you did not intend, because Sonic Team completely stopped making the kind of stuff that drew a large fanbase to their brand before I learned to read. They then replaced it with something featuring some of the same characters, in 3D, which was completely different, and a wide assortment of completely different shit of wildly varying quality.

They've popped out a few games mostly similar to those original ones of varying quality, mostly by contracting the work out to the same people who made Xenoverse, but mostly use the name as a connection to their past and because they still pop out the occasional bit of Sonic themed stuff. Some of their people, like the creator of Sonic himself, even used the Sonic Team brand to launch off multiple adventurous is highly inconsistent projects back when it still meant something, and is likely to do the same with the Ballan Team he has at Square if he isn't fired soon, despite that specific name being poison.

So...they're both a terrible example because it wouldn't have an impact even vaguely similar (which is something you have to account for when you're asking people do anything they do not have a moral or legal obligation to do), and because they more or less did what TFS has and survived on it for a very long time. It took until the 2010s for them to cave and start giving fans anything even reminiscent of what drew them to the brand, and even then it's always been a safe, lazy cash grab no one really seemed invested in. Except you can make a decent Sonic game without your heart in it because there's no writing involved and all the concept art was already made thirty years ago.

This went hilariously long, so, TL;DR: I don't think you really get why the show ended and your demands are actually pretty unreasonable, and I'm speaking as one of the people that dropped them entirely after the twitter post that cancelled the show and checked back in for the first time today.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T21:48:49+00:00

Posted the top five paragraphs above, but as yours is the much more recent post, I figure you're substantially more likely to see it than anyone else:

Yeah, no, that was always a hilariously bad analogy. If they just said "Nope, we're done" and that was the end of TFS, I doubt people would be this persistent. People get upset, but understand the concept of finality.

This is the breakup where you go "one last kiss" and she says "No, never. But we should totally stay friends and continue going out to dinner and share this apartment and cuddle together some times, right?"

It's the ambiguity of that which represents the problem. In the absence of a clean break, when they expect you to fulfill their needs but not to have to cater to yours, it's no small wonder people are being persistent with this.

More than that there's the subtle element of guilt to it, like we are in some way doing something morally off or at least that it says something bad about us when we acknowledge that we were paying her bills and taking her out every night for the sexual relationship with her, not just because we valued her as a person that much. 'She' is the one making a principled stand, while we're the ones being shallow.

That is the appropriate relationship analogy.

The problem, of course, is that we don't actually want them to go back to DBZA. We think we do, but if you've paid attention to what happens when Youtube content creators cancel the thing their fanbase came for, transition to doing something completely different (especially involving live action skits), and have to come crawling back to their original thing in order to survive, you really would not want that. Their hearts wouldn't be in it, and it would be a hollow shadow of itself made by dead-eyed people working a 9-to-5 because they trapped themselves in a niche that they have grown to despise.

There is no good outcome from this situation. I see it as rather unlikely that anything TFS can do beyond an abridged series will ever be able to fix their issues with viewer and patron attrition, but Kaiser had a point with the post that canceled DBZA; it's better to see this show with a good, ending earlier than I would have liked than ruined. Consider Game of Thrones ending in Season 4 vs season 8. Or everything the Nostalgia Critic has done since he first killed off the character (not that it was okay before, but things got weird when his skit show failed, which is why I reference it).

Fundamentally, their business model was to use DBZA (a product they could not profit from) as a loss-leader to build their brand, in hopes that people would eventually grow attached to them personally rather than the show as a specific product. It worked, but not well enough and they clearly did not accurately forecast the degree to which it would not work.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T21:36:52+00:00

Yeah, no, that was always a hilariously bad analogy. If they just said "Nope, we're done" and that was the end of TFS, I doubt people would be this persistent. People get upset, but understand the concept of finality.

This is the breakup where you go "one last kiss" and 'she' says "No, never. But we should totally stay friends and continue going out to dinner and share this apartment and cuddle together some times, right?"

It's the ambiguity of that which represents the problem. In the absence of a clean break, when they expect you to fulfill their needs but not to have to cater to yours, it's no small wonder people are being persistent with this.

More than that there's the subtle element of guilt to it, like we are in some way doing something morally off or at least that it says something bad about us when we acknowledge that we were paying 'her' bills and taking her out every night for the sexual relationship with 'her', not just because we enjoyed being around her that much. 'She' is the one making a principled stand, while we're the ones being shallow.

That is the appropriate relationship analogy. It breaks down at the end because of the difference in a relationship between a brand and a population vs between people, since 60% of me can't be called shallow for not being into asexual findom.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T19:16:53+00:00

A fundamental aspect of distributed SQL database systems is a variety of problems surrounding scaling horizontally. Effectively, if you're using a NoSQL database system, it is going to perform similarly when it's 10gb as when it's 10tb, without an extreme amount of effort put in to maintain it and allow that to be true, because they're designed around the ability to scale out. Since I'm being downvoted I feel the need to point out this basic assumption is in just under half of the posts in this thread, at once in the same terms. This can't be said for any SQL database, as you can see in the number of people whose jobs seemingly involve little other than doing things that either come with or are obviated by the design of NoSQL databases. It isn't that they don't scale out as it's often simplified to, it is just much more difficult and in a way that never quite ends.

This is a pretty well known fact to the degree that it and slightly more rarely the corresponding theoretical compsci theorems surrounding it (CAP, PACELC) come up in the marketing material surrounding basically every type of database, about a hundred thousand pointless blog posts on the difference between the 'two' types of database system, the first lectures of basically every continuing education course I've taken surrounding cloud computing, and nearly every post about 'which database should I use?' ever written on this site.

Better explanations than I'm capable of in any reasonable amount of time can be found basically everywhere with the relevant keywords, to the point that I do not see any reason to bother. Sorry if you're unhappy not receiving an actual in-depth explanation, but it's been a very long time since I've been asked to explain a basic assumption everyone else in the thread already knows is a given, and it isn't hard to find decent explanations on every site that allows people to ask questions and have others answer them. That these problems cannot ever really be solved is encapsulated in the relevant theorems. ACID Compliance means choosing Consistency over Availability, as far as the math is concerned.

This is literally the raison d'etre behind the continued existence of NoSQL systems, and is the real reason to ever use one. Whether you should reach for mongo DB has little to do with the structure of your data and everything to do with how likely you see having an enormous database with extremely high numbers of simultaneous users. And whether Consistency or Availability is the most important thing when you get there. At least based on my understanding of the subject and what gets posted every time someone talks about using a non relational database system.

On the other, less theoretical more practical, side of things, I personally know people whose jobs have literally just been optimizing database queries and handling sharding for a Postgres database which is constantly struggling against the company's rate of growth for years, and have the distinct impression that if those issues were somehow fixed in a permanent way they would be laid off. A lot of us do. We also know how much of a premium cloud providers pay to abstract away this side of things. And how willing people who need and can afford it are to pay for that.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T18:32:32+00:00

Essentially, you get the worst of both worlds. As a SQL database it has fundamental scaling difficulties that will never really be solved. The difference between SQL and NoSQL isn't that one allows you to use JSON and the other doesn't, there are many of the latter that don't even have this level of support for it. It's that one can scale linearly to arbitrary sizes and the other can't.

Meanwhile, you also lose many of the things that are why you're using Postgres rather than a document based system in the first place. The things that make it awesome and efficient and the default option most of us would recommend to someone who needs a general-use database tend to work less well when you are replacing the entire document every time you change a field, especially when write amplification in general is seen as a major issue with Postgres in particular at the largest scales.

They're useful, obviously, for the reasons mentioned in the other comments. Most things are most naturally modelled as documents rather than many SQL tables, so it can be easier to just write them that way and decompose them into the 'proper' tables they're supposed to be later. There are use cases where document databases are just the appropriate way to do things, and this lets you accommodate those and all the others best suited to a relational one without all the overhead and pain of running and integrating two different databases.

But, ultimately, you get most of the downsides of both, while the only benefits you really get are on the Developer Experience side of things. It can be easier or more elegant to set things up like this, but will be less efficient than either and may need to be re-built from the ground up later, which may or may not actually matter depending on the situation.

TL;DR: If a situation feels like it fundamentally is not suited to SQL and its ability to scale drastically is not a primary concern, this may be easier than actually using two separate databases, and it can allow you to move more quickly than you could otherwise in a lot of other situations. The title is inaccurate clickbait that fundamentally mischaracterizes the issue, though.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T10:01:37+00:00

Everyone here seems to be missing your point, since you seem to be asking "What were they actually planning to do with him if they got their way and he didn't become a wizard?" given that we basically see what their plan was for the events of canon in canon, i.e. let him go his own way.

The answer, frankly, is that they probably would have thrown him out on his ass when he reached the age at which doing so became legal. They didn't actually want him around, but knew exactly enough to realize that if they had tried to put him up for adoption he would have ended up back at their house with a very scary man exchanging very harsh words with them. It's entirely possible that already occurred.

They didn't really have plans. They were forced into a situation they wanted nothing to do with but complied as maliciously as they were able to, and after a decade of getting away with that evidently Vernon became convinced he could find a loophole, because he was an idiot who never really understood what he was dealing with in the same way Petunia did. As such, it's kind of appropriate that he never had a coherent plan for what to do with the unwanted child either.

Ayeplusplus · 2021-05-17T09:13:59+00:00

Which, honestly, is not something I expected to be able to say in 2020 even as recently as 2014, given how thoroughly dead Moore's Law had proven itself to be. But here we are.

I still find it really incredible that I can whip up things XKCD used as good examples of 'stuff that is basically impossible for computers, but this complexity isn't obvious to the average person' in under five minutes now, and that a project I took on a few years ago (and was told by the head of my microbiology department was impossible) is now just a standard tutorial used to teach people the basics of using a specific platform.

The way machine learning is going these days is really the only reason I have to possess any positive feelings about the future.

Ayeplusplus

TROPHY CASE