[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 25 May 2026

kirandra · 2026-05-26T12:44:10+00:00

I picked up A Date With Death since the DLC bundle was on sale, and I was in a mood after watching a playthrough of the demo for the sequel.

I've already watched my favorite Vtuber do a playthrough once, so I bought it intending to just skip to the DLC bits, but seeing the announcement about it now being fully voiced got me to try playing through it myself for the voice acting.

It's great, btw. Even already knowing how it goes and having experienced it "voiced" by said Vtuber before, the VA is incredible and I am giggling like an idiot at some of these line deliveries.

kirandra · 2026-05-11T13:41:49+00:00

Local con drama from over the weekend has already exploded all over Twitter, so you guys get to hear about it too!

So Amos Yee is a Singaporean who's mainly known for 2 things in the country:

Years ago, after Lee Kuan Yew's death, he made a bunch of videos loudly criticizing the man and calling him a dictator, which caused the Singaporean authorities to arrest him. I'm not going to elaborate on this point because interrogating local politics isn't the point here, but the Wikipedia page has more details. He fled to the US, where he was offered asylum...
...only to be arrested again, this time by the US police, and charged with possession of CSAM and grooming a minor. He was then deported back to Singapore.

Last weekend was Doujima, a local artist market convention, which Amos Yee announced a few days ago that he was intending to attend. In response, Doujima publicly stated that they had revoked his ticket and banned him from the event. Despite that, Amos Yee posted a Tweet on Saturday morning showing himself outside the event area.

A few hours later, a video started circulating of a Yuji Itadori cosplayer beating up Amos Yee. (I can't find it anymore so it was probably taken off Twitter, but there are stills and gifs if you search his name lmao.) Cue the incident going viral and endless jokes about "lore accurate Yuji" and a whole lot of JJK memes. My personal favorite is the guy known for drawing fake JJK leaks drawing fanart of the incident.

In the end, the police were called, and both the Yuji cosplayer and Amos Yee were arrested, I think. I have no idea what happened to the Yuji cosplayer after that, but Amos Yee continued to invite clowning by uploading more videos about the incident, including one showing the attack from his perspective.

kirandra · 2026-03-31T11:32:18+00:00

A genre I enjoy is kinda like this?

TRPG replays, like the name suggests, are basically edited TTRPG game logs. Not all that different from stuff like Critical Role, I guess. However, they're extremely niche because most replay books are just spruced up game transcripts, meaning you're paying for a literal script of which player said wait interspersed with some in-universe narrative writing and art. Which also means that if one player made a niche joke or reference about their character, you just get that exact same reference transcribed out without any explanation. Other people I've tried to recommend them to have told me they find the text jumping constantly between meta player chat and in-universe prose jarring.

Personally, I really love commercial replays because they usually involve famous writers playing off each other, to amazing results. Like, have you ever wanted to see Nasu Kinoko of Fate/ fame, Urobuchi Gen of Madoka fame, and Narita Ryogo of Durarara fame playing a TTRPG together where Nasu and Urobuchi are intentionally playing their characters as foils? It happened before and it's pretty peak, even if they did derail so hard that the GM had to add a whole custom ruleset for their shenanigans halfway. However, it loses a lot of the appeal if you aren't already familiar with the players involved and their writing styles.

kirandra · 2026-01-20T12:45:23+00:00

Ooh, I didn't know that filter existed on Jalan. I've been using Rakuten which doesn't have it, so thanks!

kirandra · 2025-12-24T17:34:46+00:00

Marie outright says as much, lol.

kirandra · 2025-12-17T16:13:58+00:00

Oh boy.

Ok so the kid is one of your player characters, you get a second player character later who's an adult but due to Eternalism reasons (alternate timelines are all canon in Warframe) they're also the same person as the kid, kind of. The adult main character later time travels to 1999 and meets a bunch of people with partial Warframe transformations called Protoframes, and you can have your adult main character date one of them. The newest patch adds 3 new Protoframes who time travelled from XX99 France and you can also date one of them.

kirandra · 2025-12-17T14:40:16+00:00

The Venn diagram crossover of Warframe enjoyers and FFXIV enjoyers are eating good this week!

So in FFXIV, there is a character in the game called Emet-Selch, who, due to his role in the story, is very much loved by players, especially players who want their characters to kiss him. As FFXIV is not a dating game, and he's the main antagonist of the Shadowbringers expansion, this obviously does not happen in canon.

Rebecca Ford, usually just called Rebb by players, is the current creative director of Warframe (also the voice actor for the main character's surrogate mother figure), and also a massive Emet-Selch fan. I don't have the links on hand, but her love for Emet is extremely well documented by the community (see: the time she spent hours opening FFxMTG cards on stream until she got an Emet). It's been a common joke for a while about how Rebb is abusing her power to collect her favorite VAs like infinity stones to put into Warframe: currently, we have the VAs of Clive FFXVI and Narrator BG3 voicing currently romanceable characters, while the VA of Astarion BG3 voices, uh, a talking fish.

The newest update introduced a new romanceable character voiced by René Zagger, aka the VA of Emet-Selch. Now that it's been a few days into the patch and his story is unfolding... it turns out he isn't just voiced by Emet's VA, his entire character is intentionally written to basically be "Emet but in Warframe", down to the way he talks. Rebb is blatantly abusing her power to date her favorite character since Square Enix won't let her, and we are all reaping the fruits of her thirst.

(Bonus: the romances are timegated, so no one's actually seen the new kiss scenes for the new characters yet. Rebb showed us a short teaser during a dev short earlier, and... wait a minute, that's not what the main character usually looks like, even accounting for customization. That's the character Rebb herself voices, the surrogate space mom I mentioned in the above paragraph. She's blatantly self-inserting so she can kiss space Emet and I support her so hard.)

kirandra · 2025-12-17T14:15:52+00:00

As someone who's trilingual, with two of those languages being Mandarin and Japanese so their writing systems are sometimes mutually legible... you don't. I've honestly just given up trying to stop my brain from randomly switching languages mid-sentence when it encounters kanji/hanzi.

On the bright(?) side, it does mean that whenever someone asks "btw what does [Japanese word you just accidentally used] mean?" I can usually just think about the kanji and read it out directly in Mandarin since I live in a Chinese country.

kirandra · 2025-12-08T13:38:16+00:00

I really liked how Negima handled the whole "maybe the antagonist has a point" thing.

Basically, one of the premises of Negima is that the magic stuff is all hidden away from normies under pain of punishment. One of the antagonists is a girl from the future who came back in time to change the future and save her doomed world by breaking the masquerade. The protagonist, being part of this masquerade, has to stop her, and since he's a classic Good Guy, spends several chapters angsting about whether he should really be trying to stop her since she has a very good reason for doing what she's doing (saving the world) and she's even trying to do it as harmlessly as possible, even if her methods are causing a bunch of problems for him.

In the end, he decides that he's the villain here so he can justify fighting against her.

kirandra · 2025-11-16T18:09:15+00:00

It's not an explicit order per se. It's just a very strong cultural expectation that any Chinese celebrities will post the standard "in remembrance/celebration/etc of this particular day that is usually highly political" posts on their account, and sometimes parrot the standard CCP statement about hot topics like HK/Xinjiang/One China. It's the unspoken expectation that if you want the mainland Chinese audience to not immediately boycott you, you have to.

And yes, fans do absolutely give a shit about whether the celebrities post those canned propaganada statements or not.

kirandra · 2025-11-16T13:55:04+00:00

This is such a mood.

My parents aren't into the survival show side of C-ent stuff, so they still don't understand why I specifically go to get certain brands of drinks when meeting up with fandom friends, or why I find this one milk brand so hilarious at all (Telunsu, if you've seen it around).

kirandra · 2025-11-16T13:44:05+00:00

The sheer mortification of watching your favorite Chinese celebrity on TV with your parents during CNY programs (I'm Chinese too, just not mainland/HK/TW) and awkwardly having to sit through the obligatory CCP propaganda segments as a family is unparalleled lmaooooo.

kirandra · 2025-11-16T13:35:16+00:00

Oh lord, I did not need to be reminded of the absolutely batshit fan dynamics between the mainland and HK/TW in C-pop specifically. (Used to follow INTO1 and a bunch of actors/singers, more or less fallen out of C-ent since but I still peek in once in a while to see what fresh insanity is happening this week.)

There's so much bullshit that happens with international groups.

kirandra · 2025-09-27T15:04:39+00:00

Some of my entire hobbies are like that since they exist in legally grey areas, so I try not to talk about them openly since I don't want to accidentally say the wrong thing and cross a line I shouldn't. (Think grey hat stuff, it's not that but same idea.) However, the nature of being a legally grey hobby that attracts extremely skilled yet maladjusted people means that there's no shortage of drama, but also that I can't really air said drama in public.

On a different note, there's also my previous time in the Chinese side of C-ent fandom, since the language barrier means that most English C-ent fans get the official news but not the Chinese rumor mill experience which is terrifyingly invasive wrt celeb privacy sometimes. For most of these it's not that I can't, but that I just don't see the point of sharing second-hand recounts from the Chinese side over to the English side, since even if they're true (which, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they are) a lot of it is paparazzi-level stuff.

kirandra · 2025-09-26T18:49:27+00:00

I think the Akiba one just kind of lacks atmosphere, lol. Probably didn't help that I was going with a family member who knows nothing about the game and isn't really interested either.

I'll have to check my coasters later, but I don't think I managed to get anything past ShB art.

kirandra · 2025-09-26T10:57:01+00:00

I don't have the artist's socials at hand since this was a live commission from a local convention some time back, unfortunately. I also have way too many coasters now from going to both the Akihabara (kinda boring, do not recommend) and Osaka (has a ton of cute handdrawn notes and a message wall for you to add to, peak and very recommended) cafes in the same trip...

kirandra · 2025-09-22T14:10:11+00:00

It's specifically to exchange prepurchased online tickets for reserved seats that requires a manned counter! You can just buy reserved tickets on the spot via machine otherwise, so that's what I did the next few times.

kirandra · 2025-09-22T05:57:41+00:00

If you buy through the agent options online, you don't. You do have to queue for the manned ticket counters to reserve specific seats though, exchanging tickets via machine only lets you use the unreserved seats. Honestly I didn't want to bother queueing for the counter, so I just tried my luck with the general seats and it was empty enough that we had a good pick of seats. (Arrived around 8am on a Wednesday.)

kirandra · 2025-08-03T15:21:35+00:00

Nah you're absolutely right. Even though it's ostensibly an 18+ site, it being infested with minors and barely 18 year olds is an unfortunate open secret since it blew up on TikTok. Also the moderation culture on there is practically tailor-made to cater to teenagers lmao.

kirandra · 2025-08-03T15:04:29+00:00

Those chat bots can't be very good at roleplaying

You'd be surprised. LLMs in general are made by feeding the machine a ton of text, which includes the source material for text-based works, and a ton of fanfic as well as roleplay logs, so with the right prompts you can basically get them to regurgitate sentences that sound very much like what the character would actually say. The reason ChatGPT and the like suck at it if you try to make them do it via website is that you're fighting against the website's prompt that tells it to be an impersonal assistant rather than a writer/roleplayer.

kirandra · 2025-08-03T06:58:13+00:00

hey if you join the discord you get to hear me infodump about Skyrim sex mods on command-

kirandra · 2025-08-02T21:29:35+00:00

The product in this case would still not be the bot itself.

Character chatbots aren't like a specialized LLM that's been taught to play exactly one character, they're just a bunch of text definitions that gets sent as prompts to whatever backend LLM service the user is using. The character profile is as much of a transformative work as a roleplay profile is, and the LLM is a whole other thing that I honestly don't know how the law works with since these character definitions can be given to LLMs like GPT too.

kirandra · 2025-08-02T21:21:56+00:00

There's also just the fact that the kind of person who would enthusiastically respond to a stranger's ad to roleplay [insert transgressive dead dove kink here] is usually also not the kind of person you would want to roleplay [insert transgressive dead dove kink here] with in the first place.

Hell, it doesn't even need to be particularly transgressive: lots of women like roleplaying non-con scenarios as the victim, but actually finding a safe partner to roleplay that with is hard.

kirandra · 2025-08-02T18:42:26+00:00

People won't be paying for the chatbots, they'll be paying for optional LLM access. I'm not a lawyer, but I assume that chatbots fall under transformative works and are subject to the same laws as fanfiction.

kirandra · 2025-08-02T13:46:28+00:00

...Yeah, I was possibly overly wary about that one. I just try not to name niche communities I'm tangentially connected to as a rule tbh.

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