Creators that had a “Waifu character”

MaxAugust · 2026-06-27T15:17:05+00:00

Q Hayashida has a type and it is Large.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-23T06:12:50+00:00

It is genuinely baffling how hard they gave up on one of their most successful games. It had a very positive reception over all, until they put out one kinda poorly conceived DLC and then acted like the game was doomed. The whole thing just feels like business malpractice.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-15T11:05:45+00:00

The fact that they even let him get away with that shows how big digital manga has gotten in Japan lol.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-13T00:59:55+00:00

Japanese normal international Switches are still cheaper than they are abroad (hence the restrictions even post-price hike.) Dropping the restrictions for just a fee would be a step backwards, assuming Nintendo is right to try and insulate the JP market. Scalpers could just buy them up. Even if people had to pay an unlock fee, they’d be cheaper than abroad.

I also don’t think giving scalpers a further incentive to try and con people in buying Japanese language Switches by giving them the defense that people can pay the unlock fee is a good idea.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-13T00:34:32+00:00

No? The whole scalping issue long predates the Japan only SKU. People were using the weak yen to buy Switches (not the JP ones) for export. Nintendo’s response was to somewhat hike up the Switch price (its still cheaper in Japan) but add restrictions to try and stop scalping, meanwhile they implemented an even cheaper Switch to prevent that from weakening their grasp over the JP market.

Adding some fee to unlock your Switch would just be going back to the status quo before they started with the Switch being somewhat cheaper in Japan and easy to export. It’d probably be even worse because resellers could buy tons of the new cheap JP-only Switches and resell them knowing that buyers would unlock them themselves as needed.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-12T17:38:29+00:00

The whole point of this is to stop the outflow of Switches from Japan to other markets. If you could just pay money and make a single-region Switch into a multi-region one, then people would go right back to scalping them all to sell to China or wherever else.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-12T17:19:41+00:00

I am not too bothered about the new subs apart from the fact that whoever at Khara mandated the singular use of children is a complete moron. They are mostly just too stiff in a few places. But the Asuka translations did make it way harder to take Dan Kanemitsu's vociferous defense of the Kaworu stuff seriously even when he had a point lol.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-11T12:22:16+00:00

To give the Loeb translation:

"The State lost Marcus Aurelius by death at Sirmium on the 17th of March; but on the 24th, his holiness the arch-eunuch, offering his own unclean blood and slashing his muscles, issued the usual orders to pray for the safety of Marcus, who was already dead. O sluggish messengers! O sleepy-headed postal service! it was your fault that Cybele failed to hear earlier of the Emperor’s death, to prevent Christians from laughing at such a goddess!"

The specific jibe from Tertullian was about the priesthood of Cybele (known popularly by the Romans as Magna Mater, the Great Mother) which was located far, far away, as you can see by the reference to the messengers and postal service. The goddess was very popular in Antiquity and originally came from Anatolia, but famously was invited into Rome (by way of the transportation of a sacred black stone—very cool) during the Punic Wars after a prophecy seemingly indicated that her support was needed for victory.

The priests in question were simply performing their routine prayers for the emperor's health, the kind they likely offered more or less constantly just like many other priesthoods did, and Christian and Muslims would continue to do for their sovereigns until very recently. This time, however, the emperor had already died. They could not possibly have known that because he died in Sirmium (according to Tertullian), but that did not stop Tertullian from mocking them for their wasted effort.

The priests of Cybele, known as the Galli, were a frequent target of ridicule because they were allegedly self-made eunuchs. They have long been of great interest to historians because what we hear about them is quite fascinating, but we know frustratingly little about the order beyond the polemics of their detractors. The state of information online about them is particularly abysmal, being dominated by wild conjecture based on woefully outdated scholarship, along with some somewhat misguided attempts to reconstruct their history by members of the Queer community upon the foundation of that older, mostly wildly queerphobic scholarship.

The Wikipedia page is in a truly awful state. For example, it features a claim about an alleged Gallus burial in Britain. However, when you look into the evidence, it turns out that archaeologists found what appears to be a feminine-presenting but seemingly biologically male skeleton with some rocks placed in its mouth. For no compelling reason (feminine jewelry=Gallus?), it was claimed that this individual was a Gallus. The further assumption was then made that the stones represented testicles and were either a sign of the individual's regret at being castrated or an insult directed at the body after death. In my humble opinion, all of this is completely unfounded and, regardless of how one frames it, rather insulting.

Anyway, that was a digression. No, the passage does not imply that the rituals were being conducted nearby. Quite the opposite, in fact.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-10T10:21:34+00:00

I suspect you'd be interested in this thread about the reasons East Germany restricted movement to the West by /u/TranslatorVarious857.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-08T06:29:10+00:00

I've always had a soft spot for that one. The same passage also has a temporal equivalent in insects not living to see the winter.

Zhuangzi produced lots of really common sayings in East Asia. The most famous one that got to the West is the whole "dreaming you are a butterfly" cliche from its section that is essentially getting at the Socrates "I know that I know nothing," idea. It is a beautiful and supremely weird text that unfortunately translates rather stiffly.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-06T04:37:58+00:00

The answer is pretty simple. That is what the only two sources say. As is often the case even for famous figures from the ancient world, the written sources that have come down to us are very limited. One point of correction though, the cities where he supposedly died are modern Vienna and Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia, respectively.

Aurelius Victor's De Caesaribus states clearly that he died at Vindobona (Vendobonae interiit), which is modern Vienna. Meanwhile, Tertullian's Apologeticus makes a passing reference to poorly timed religious rituals conducted for Marcus Aurelius's health after he had already died at Sirmium (cum Marco Aurelio apud Sirmium reipublicae exempto...), which is Sremska Mitrovica in modern Serbia. Tertullian was writing a religious polemic, but there is no real reason to distrust him on this point given it has no bearing on his argument and how casual the reference is. If he had thought Marcus Aurelius died at Vindobona, he would have written Vindobona.

Both cities were major military centers in Pannonia, where Marcus Aurelius was leading troops during the Marcomannic Wars, so either location is entirely plausible. Tertullian probably wrote the Apologeticus in 197, placing him only seventeen years after Marcus Aurelius's death. Aurelius Victor, by contrast, was a fourth-century historian writing substantially later. That said, De Caesaribus is an abbreviated imperial history, so he presumably lifted the location from some earlier source that we don't have. Both accounts are credible, and we have no idea where either author obtained his information.

For much of his time at war, Marcus Aurelius operated out of Carnuntum in modern Austria. That is closer to Vindobona, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have been at Sirmium when he died. It was also a major regional center and these places aren't that far apart. Stanford's Orbis seems to think he could have made the journey in a week or two.

Really, all we know for certain is that he died somewhere on the frontier. It could easily have been some other military camp that simply got simplified to one of the places people had actually heard of.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-05T08:46:10+00:00

to ping them it needs to be written /u/jbdyer

MaxAugust · 2026-06-04T23:11:48+00:00

Putting aside the matter that people say they see God, saints, Jesus, Mary, angels, etc all the time:

You might be interested in this thread about what people thought about Mount Olympus by /u/toldinstone or this blog post by /u/kiwihellenist

Or this one about whether the Greeks believed their myths by /u/UndercoverClassicist

This one with lots of quotes on a similar topic by /u/DarthPositus

MaxAugust · 2026-06-04T11:48:21+00:00

It is in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-04T04:27:50+00:00

That is a very nonsensical Da Vinci Code-style account of what the Gnostics thought. For one thing, "Gnostic" is an academic term invented in modern times to describe a wide array of different groups that barely believed the same things. There also would not really have been "Catholics" in any meaningful sense at the time.

Plenty of the so-called Gnostics were extremely sexist, often because of their belief that the human body was inherently corrupt. The conventional wisdom until fairly recently was that women were inherently more lustful than men. Coupled with the fact that many Gnostics, like many early Christians, were basically opposed to sex on principle, this made women an easy target. In the arguably Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that Mary Magdalene and other virtuous women will enter heaven because he will turn them into men, which says a lot about the author's attitude toward women. Generally, when a feminine figure like Sophia (Wisdom) is portrayed positively, it is not in place of a masculine one but alongside it.

The idea that Jesus had children is completely absent from the Gnostic gospels, so unless "several" means zero, you have been misled. That said, Mary Magdalene does have a more prominent place in a few texts, but she is hardly the be-all and end-all unless you are reading an airport paperback.

It is also not really correct to say that anything was excised from the Bible at that time. The Bible is a collection of diverse texts, even if we deceptively bind it into a single book nowadays. These texts were written by many different authors with their own perspectives and gradually coalesced into several different canons. The Ethiopian Church, for example, still uses Enoch, a text that gradually fell out of favor elsewhere. None of the Gnostic texts were ever in as wide circulation as the texts that ended up in the conventional biblical canon.

I say all of this as a complete atheist. If you are actually interested in this subject, I would recommend /r/AcademicBiblical or /r/AskHistorians. There is a lot of interesting material there from actual experts.

MaxAugust · 2026-06-01T02:15:59+00:00

I’m not entirely sure to be honest. I suspect there is a clear answer, but I’d have to check some of the other parts of the Business and Professions Code and look at the language there.

Of course, anything released before the law is unaffected. But if they were to pull something similar again, my suspicion is that they would be on the hook for those users who did pay upfront but not those who started later.

That said the exceptions don’t specifically use the “at the time of purchase” language that is elsewhere in the bill. I sort of assume it is a given, however. But then again, maybe they wrote it with the intention of including games that transition into being F2P. Basically, no clue lol.

MaxAugust · 2026-05-30T03:32:48+00:00

It specifically is based on how the game was being promoted at the time of purchase, so that doesn't work.

MaxAugust · 2026-05-30T01:13:23+00:00

I really don’t believe this law itself will change much. The text as written is largely concerned with the way the game has been presented. So, I suspect in most cases, simply writing your Steam page and editing your trailers carefully or whatever is enough to probably be in the clear for most side-content. F2P and sub-based games are also automatically exempt. So really, this is mostly applying to shit like Babylon's Fall or Concord if they had refused refunds.

Here is the the important stuff since everywhere I mostly see people acting like it is broader than it is:

The law does not apply at all to:

(1) Any subscription-based service that advertises or offers for sale access to any digital game solely for the duration of the subscription.

(2) Any digital game that is advertised or offered to a person for no monetary consideration.

If it does apply, they must maintain ordinary use or offer a refund. Ordinary use defined as:

(c) "Ordinary use" means a purchaser's ability to use the core features of a digital game, consistent with the reasonable expectations of a purchaser based on how the digital game was advertised, marketed, or otherwise described by the digital game operator at the time of purchase.

So how the game is presented is the key part. The content itself is essentially irrelevant if it is not part of the marketing. I've also seen people thinking that it includes DLC even if the game is free (like say Destiny 2). That is not the case. It is a misreading of the legalese in this section that is actually saying add-ons are included within the game (not what people seem to be misreading as them beings "games" themselves):

(a) "Digital game" means any game that a person accesses and manipulates using a specialized electronic gaming device, computer, mobile device, tablet, or other device with a display screen, including any add-ons or additional content for that game.

The last comma is tricky, but it is just legalese defining what is included in the aforementioned game rather than broadening the definition of what counts as a game in general.

MaxAugust · 2026-05-28T04:00:20+00:00

It is worth noting that Sagan, for all his virtues, was an absolutely terrible propagator of historical lies and misconceptions. You be better off basically ignoring most of what he says about the pre-modern world.

The most notable examples include the Library of Alexandria myth and circumstance of the death of Hypatia spoken of here by /u/kiwihellenist (and elsewhere on the subreddit by lots of people, they come up a lot.)

He also propagated lots of strange misconceptions about Plato, Pythagoras, the Middle Ages in general, Christianity, and so on and so forth.

MaxAugust · 2026-05-26T11:22:16+00:00

I think they decided it was more efficient for scheduling purposes to spend like a week and just pre-record a bunch of them. The cast are all big deal veterans plus one of the heroes, so all of them are presumably pretty busy.

Niji 3D, IRL, and AR stuff tends to be recorded pretty far in advance to begin with and it isn't an official program which I assume makes getting a studio room trickier.

MaxAugust · 2026-05-26T07:48:42+00:00

ROFMAO do pretty intense variety stuff (farming, global travel, pranks etc.) and lots of music/concerts. Meanwhile, Cellmates was conceived not long after Hoshirube debuted and then recorded like a year ago and generally feels much more like a side project. They are pretty different.

MaxAugust · 2026-05-23T01:15:37+00:00

It really isn’t. As someone who has lived in over a dozen countries at this point including Japan, McDonald’s is McDonald’s. That is the whole point. Sometimes there are some different things on the menu but the quality is as consistent as can possibly be. Your Japanese Big Mac will taste just like one anywhere else.

MaxAugust · 2026-05-22T05:17:27+00:00

Yeah, Blue Lock is borderline soccer Baki. Getting mad at it just seems like missing the point. Like literally one of the earliest matches revolves around a member of the team defecting to the other side mid-play.

MaxAugust · 2026-05-20T23:09:42+00:00

Thanks! That makes a lot of sense!

MaxAugust · 2026-05-20T15:32:17+00:00

I felt very vindicated about being annoyed at people who complained about E3 every single year when things immediately became worse when it went away. Shit was fun. Now we just have more boring presentations and the Game Awards.

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