jeff ruberg

Corporate anti-harassment training software

Dialogue from Honkai: Star Rail set to auto-advance, but still on a dialogue choices

you know how corporate training software forces you to click things every couple seconds to keep you engaged? (here’s 30s of video, here’s 1 paragraph, etc etc)

that’s what gacha game dialogue that can’t go five seconds on auto-play w/o getting stuck on meaningless dialogue choices feels like

still giving it a chance, and there are aspects I’m enjoying as breezy, popcorn entertainment. but this comment I recently saw on a TikTok video about the series I think really encapsulates everything I’ve been feeling about the type of reader it’s most captivating to

this feature has been available in japan through the jump+ app for a *looong* time (seems like it launched in late 2017: soranews24.com/2017/12/20/g...), so I imagine to mangaka the general idea is a fairly known deal by this point

sometimes I feel like the end goal of gen ai is to reactivate the latent trauma of everyone who read their assignments in high school english class having to listen to classmates who didn’t read anything get praised for saying “I think this is a metaphor… for jesus?”

kh1: riku’s turn to the dark side
com: tragedy of namine
kh2: tragedy of roxas
358/2: tragedy of xion
bbs: tragedy of the trio
ddd: ???
kh3: ???

started writing this post with a “i miss when kh games were about something” thesis, but maybe I just miss when they were tragedies

“clearly I’m being ratio’d here” this is the most ratio-able thing I’ve ever seen

i've learned my lesson, the only reason that anyone would ever say that agumon isn't 10x as popular as pikachu and definitely going to appear in smash is because they hate digimon and want the entire franchise to die 😔

i'm not saying to just stan corporations, or to accept every product / business decision without criticism, of course. but blowups like this centered about objectively very silly and obvious observations actually distract from the cause of serious criticism!

what i think is more fascinating (& troubling) is how much people turn on and tear apart publishers. you realize these are the people on your side, right? like how twisted do you have to get to think that publishers are the enemy, and to interpret everything they say as maliciously as possible?

i find these fandom blowups fascinating, but on some level the reason why people believe these things is simple and not very complex: communities *as a whole* never have realistic perspective outside the community (even if lots/most in the community do on an individual level)

yeah, I can’t really fault the book itself for this, but the number of people I’ve seen exclaim that DCC invented the genre of litrpg when stuff like RPO and SAO exist (and are hugely popular! I suspect more than DCC by at least an order of magnitude) is wild lol

“how dare a publisher call this genre niche!! this one show that kind of resembles this genre but isn’t actually part of the genre was one of the ten most popular anime last year!! niche??? how dare you lie to us”

internet discourse sure is something

willing to push through this frustration given how much people hype up this series, so I’m curious how I’ll eventually look back on this initial reaction

I’ve started listening to Dungeon Crawler Carl, and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I find the writing (and narration) of the system prompts so frustrating, and I finally realized why: it feels like the most obnoxious tumblr humor, put through the most obnoxious straight bro filter

claims of efficiency around workplace usage of gen AI piss me off, because that efficiency is directly opposed to due diligence to avoid hallucinations. like in the pitt, you only get the huge efficiency gains if you embrace just gambling with introducing serious mistakes. I think that sucks!!

“this ai will save you tons of time!”

“what, you didn’t thoroughly proofread the results [taking as long or longer than it would’ve taken you to do it without the ai]? but i told you it wasn’t 100%!”

the discussion about gen ai in this week’s episode of the pitt was so frustrating because of how realistically it captured the fundamental hypocrisy around the promises of time-efficiency (and then, for a show that’s often cringingly unsubtle, didn’t actually point out the hypocrisy)

huh. I can respect it the more I think about it

oh yeah, that totally would explain it, seems pretty likely lol

example of speech bubbles from the one piece manga, showing that all text is centered and crossbar i is only used for the 1st person pronoun “I” and sans serif i for all other uses of the letter

the difference between a crossbar and sans serif I is a subtle detail that letterers/editors are much more aware of than the average reader, so I could see how a random video editor might not notice. but getting them flipped?? how…

left-aligning the text is just embarassing tho

screenshot of an instagram reel promoting the second season of the one piece live action series, with a speech bubble saying “Well I can change that”. The I in the speech bubble does not use a crossbar-I.

screenshot of an instagram reel promoting the second season of the one piece live action series, with a speech bubble saying “Mr. 3 will be there, Miss Valentine…”. All 3 instances of I in the speech bubble use a crossbar-I.

wait, so they DO understand the difference between a crossbar I and a sans serif I, but they got the usage of it completely flipped??? I can’t tell if that’s better or worse

screenshot of a promotional tiktok for season 2 of the one piece live action series, showing a character with a manga-style speech bubble. the speech bubble is left-aligned and uses the wrong form of i character in the word “kings”

sigh…

the concept of mickey mouse wielding an anime sword shaped like a giant key is older than ICE

some of the places where endfield’s factory-building gameplay and standard gacha gameplay intersect are so funny

eg, each character needs 200x of a certain resource, and the easiest way to get that is to make 18,000 of them

view of San Francisco from the De Young Museum’s tower

me: wow, what a nice view of san francisco

the endfield gremlin in the back of my head: just think of all the zip lines you could place here

sign for the Art of Manga exhibit at the De Young Museum

last day!

logistically this (critical essays on each inductee from diverse points of view) sounds like the kind of thing that would have a lot more potential as an independent/unaffiliated project. I feel like that would be a really compelling lens to learn about the history, warts and all

gotcha journalism at its finest

the show does so much to mimic Terrace House that I can’t help but keep comparing the two, but then wonder if the stuff I feel is missing (and I do feel like a lot is missing compared to the magic formula of TH) is exactly what made TH’s false “reality” so insidious

I’ve been enjoying the new season of The Boyfriend, but the more I watch the more it just feels like using queerness and a progressive cause (1st same-sex reality show in japan!) to soft reboot Terrace House while sweeping all of the show’s controversies and criticism under the rug