Andrew Dice
@SpaceDrakeCF
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Founder, Project Director & Lead Editor for Carpe Fulgur. PD/LE on Recettear/Fortune Summoners/This Starry Midnight We Make/Midnight Sanctuary; LE on #SRW30 !
Portland, Oregon
Joined July 2010
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So.
Many of you have been, once again, wondering what we've been up to.
And once more, I say: NDAs. Are. Formidable. Things.
Alongside
@dramata1
,
@gtcaphi
,
@mosesplan
&
@MatatabiMitsu
,
@BlondRobin
was a primary translator, and I was lead editor...
...on Super Robot Wars 30.
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Okay, I imagine many others are commenting similarly, but aside from everything else, this whole statement is one of the most outrageous things I've ever seen a company post, and I've been following JP biz in particular for about a quarter-century now.
【Notice: Termination of Selen Tatsuki’s Contract with ANYCOLOR】
We hereby announce that we have had to make the difficult decision to terminate our contract with the NIJISANJI EN Liver ‘Selen Tatsuki’ effective immediately, due to repeated breaches of contract and misleading
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Oh god dammit, I *need* to get back to work, AND I want to another followup long-thread, but Anycolor just keeps dropping bazingas that I can't help but marvel at.
So, an hour or two ago, they dropped this wonder on their Investor Relations page:
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So.
There is a genuine development on this.
Previously, it was thought that maxing out a character in Diablo Immortal would take $50k-100k, depending on gacha luck, as you can experience here.
It has now come to light: you need to multiply that by 6.
So if you want to experience just how bad the Diablo Immortal gacha is for yourself, guess what, there's now a way to experience that hell:
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okay but: I think people who don't have at least decent experience with how 3D modeling works in games can quite appreciate how *completely mental* this is. Artists dream of getting to do this, much less make it WORK this well.
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Firstly: yes, that's a full A2 PDF for a header and exactly two sentences.
Secondly, and more importantly: no, they did not release a similar statement on the departures of Yugo Asuma, Zaion LanZa, Mysta Rias, Nina Kosaka, and *Pomu Rainpuff*, arguably the face of the EN branch.
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This document is *appalling*. It's farcial. In isolation, I would think it some kind of parody shit-post, if it hadn't been posted to Nijisanji's official English account at close of business hours JST and left up, flapping in the wind, for fourteen hours straight as of posting.
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So this is already a very obvious attempt at damage control. Anycolor is aware of some of the negative reaction to Selen's firing and is trying to get ahead of the bad press.
Which, of course, this has the opposite effect of doing.
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@sdshamshel
The *best* part is the original post cropping the image just above the point where you'd see she's holding a bamboo flute.
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First of all, the thing so obvious it got Twitter Noted: second full paragraph of page 2 leads with "we made the video private". Two sentences later, they call Selen's statements of "management made the video private" misleading.
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Anycolor is, in this statement, openly admitting to attempting to harass Selen into putting out a statement saying she was wrong and they were right *WHILE SELEN WAS IN THE HOSPITAL*. Even after all this time, I'm not quite sure how it goes for JP celebrities in such a situation,
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As a public relations post, this statement makes mistakes I would expect undergraduate PR students to be able to catch & correct. Mistakes I expect of a socially-awkward sole proprietor streamer.
That this came from what is ostensibly a publicly-traded 株式会社 is mind blowing.
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(I suspect that one of the "emergency contacts" was with the hospital proper, and they were "unable to come to an agreement" because the hospital staff kept roughly telling Anycolor to fuck off and not harass their patient.)
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but in the US & Canada in particular, it is seen as absurdly inappropriate for employers to contact hospitalized employees for any reason save *very* basic health updates, *ESPECIALLY* in the aftermath of a traumatic event. Hospitals also respect and even enforce that privacy.
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So, next paragraph: "[mindful of Selen's health], management did their best to communicate with not only Selen herself but also her emergency contact".
Setting aside the artful dodge of "this incident drove Selen to self-harm to the point of hospitalization": what.
What.
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But even this remains secondary to the yet bigger problem: NO ONE WAS TALKING ABOUT LIVER VS LIVER HARASSMENT UNTIL THIS STATEMENT. Selen was either very tactful and not dragging others in, or genuinely did not feel harassed.
And then here comes Anycolor, toot toot.
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- are still finding your feet audience- and earnings-wise... what the *hell* kind of takeaway are you supposed to draw about how the company values YOUR contributions, when they're willing to put this statement out to investors?
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I need to get back to work (oho?) but if you are interested in supporting The Once Selen And Once And Future Dokibird, you may do so at her YouTube channel () where she'll be streaming live in a few days. Adios!
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So, if you're a performer currently signed to Nijisanji EN, and you see Anycolor issue a statement of this sort about the firing of the top-subscribed, 800k-subs female performer (and confirmed to be a top earner) of the branch, and you're out there with <250k subs and -
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Any Anglophone company with a PR department with a pulse would never admit to doing anything other than wishing a performer a speedy recovery. Doing otherwise has even long been mocked, with images of lawyers trying to coach half-conscious ambulance patients -
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Anyway, if you're reaching the end of the thread, you are a trooper and I apologize for this ballooning out to be as large as it did. I didn't anticipate it being *this long*, but there's just so much going on in this statement alone, and I still missed some of it.
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I previously wondered if Anycolor lacked an English-language public relations team. I am now beginning to wonder if anyone within the company has any training or experience with public *or* investor relations, period.
And on that bombshell, it's back to the word mines with me.
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If the goal of this press release was to paint Selen Tatsuki in a light as unambiguously heroic as humanly possible to English audiences, then A+. Mission accomplished.
If the goal was to justify Anycolor's actions in this case, whoever approved this release needs to be fired.
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So if you want to experience just how bad the Diablo Immortal gacha is for yourself, guess what, there's now a way to experience that hell:
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So Selen, according to Anycolor and not her, asserts that harassment is going on inside Nijisanji, making it hard for her to work. And Anycolor, on its own, asserts its reply is "Nuh uh, there is no harassment, we are right and you are wrong, and we will not investigate this".
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This is such a basic mistake that it's difficult to tell if it's some kind of translation issue or indicative of an internal communication error, and I won't really linger on it. But it's definitely a nice early shot, a splash of grenadine, for what we're facing here.
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Okay, so the company that may have broken Canadian law (I still need to fully check that) in a previous statement has instead decided to go on camera, very *visibly* break NDA terms/law, abuse some of their contractors into being their mugs, and try to intimidate their victim.
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This is... absurd. Farcical. Asinine. Other, less appropriate terms I try not to use, but they seem to fit the situation so well.
This isn't even cultural differences. Who upon the Green Earth Of God *puts* something like this in a PR document?!
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And then here comes Anycolor suggesting your favorite Liver might be a buttface, refusing to investigate potential buttfaceitude, and acting in a specifically arrogant fashion that cannot help but introduce the idea that your fave is, in fact, a buttface.
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Today the stock has been in *actual* free-fall. There's still a few hours left in the trading day in Japan, but it's looking all but certain that the stock will close at under 3400 Yen, having shed at least 200 yen of value in one day.
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- implied that other performers were harassing her, or indeed causing any problems whatsoever. She has framed it as being purely a Management vs. Selen issue.
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So when you combine the whole narrative presented by this press release, this is what you get:
"Our Liver, Selen Tatsuki, has developed a propensity for Breaking Da Rules, the rules being made up by Those Assholes. This annoys us, and we have warned her to stop having fun.
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Selen is fired. The video's gone. We hate fun. Your oshi might be an abuser and a buttface.
And Shareholder Value has been maintained.
See you next time!"
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- on what to say to the media burned into our collective consciousness for decades as a symbol of comically unfeeling corporate overreach.
For Anycolor to just blithely admit to attempting exactly that makes me feel as if I'm reading a parody of a PR statement.
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And. God. Anycolor just throwing the entire English roster in front of the Buttface Bus like that still leaves me stunned. If I was one of their longtime Livers, whom suspicion will fall most heavily on, I would be angry beyond the capacity for language. What a shitty move.
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"[Selen] claimed she was no longer able to engage in her activities as a Liver (ed. note: V-tuber performer) due to decisions made by Anycolor, *was being harassed by other affiliated Livers due to mismanagement*, etc."
So, problem: Selen never mentioned that last part.
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So Anycolor, completely unprompted, this previously not being discussed, has introduced the specter of some performers behaving in a fashion that Selen perceived as being harassment, and reported such to Anycolor.
They continue:
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A bit more importantly... the investors don't seem to be buying it.
Yesterday, Anycolor's stock dropped a tiny bit on the announcement, but it was really mostly general market actions, coming down from a recent spike.
Today?
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Selen/Dokibird has been rather vocal about her problems with the management of Nijisanji for months. (This is another mild point - Anycolor asserts they saw the video for the first time on the 23rd/24th, timezone depending, when the video has been known to be in production for
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Over Literally Actual Christmas, she Broke Da Rules again to give you a video. We didn't like this, and took it down, and told her she was lying when she says we did. This finally drove her to attempt suicide, which we responded to by chasing her ambulance -
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- and trying to get her to agree to say she was wrong and we were right. Also, we faked some of her tweets (god the thread's just too long as it is to get into *that*).
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And I do mean irreparable. I don't know if I see a way forward for NijiEN after... this. Anycolor has made it very clear they WILL publicly tar any performer who displeases them, and will throw other performers under the controversy bus unprompted when convenient.
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Now, "workplace harassment" has dogged various industries for decades, and it's a bit of a meme that "internal investigation" often doesn't lead to much.
But most companies at least make the APPEARANCE of trying.
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months, and Selen would discuss the difficulties around getting everything assembled, including having to go out of pocket to get the video finished. But.)
As far as I'm aware, at no point before this, and certainly at no point once The Incident began, has Selen/Dokibird EVER -
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Okay, next up: well, first, "inform the public about about the reasons behind our decision to make the video private", so congratulations on reinforcing that yes, you did unilaterally act and set off the entire incident, but that's again not what to focus on.
So:
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Told you we'd come back to this.
So in addition to that previous blunder, they bring up "the stakeholders" when speaking of the interested parties in making sure the Activity Rules™ are followed.
This one is PR 101. Don't bring up the *fucking* shareholders.
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So when you, a genius, come in and say that the Activity Rules are in the interests of "the stakeholders", any reader in English is going to look at it and go "ah, okay, so these are rules made up by *assholes*. Gotcha."
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It's generally the job of a talent agency - of any sort, not just for v-tubers - to protect the image and productivity of those it represents. This includes protecting their public image against defamation or other kinds of doubt about their character.
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"Anycolor believes [Selen refers to previous rules issues], and attempts to shift responsibility for these violations, Anycolor's image. [...] Anycolor firmly believes we and [our other Livers] have not engaged in unjust practices toward Selen."
That. Holy fuck me.
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They just... haven't learned this, or refuse to learn it. And the end result is embarrassing nonsense like this, where in one press release the company does more "irreparable reputation damage" to itself than an entire generation of unruly Livers could ever hope to accomplish.
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If I was an up and coming EN v-tuber, I would look at this and stay a million miles away. Sure I might be laboring in obscurity or get stuck with a "smaller" agency, but at least I won't get sacrificed at the altar when I dare to challenge bad management decisions.
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They don't say "well, we say it doesn't exist and we think you're smearing us, so it doesn't exist and we won't investigate it!"
A freshman PR student could describe the problem with displaying arrogance of this sort. Under no circumstances do you ever want to sound like this.
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Once she was out of the hospital, we continued to press her on this, and we assert, but she doesn't, that she accused other Livers of being abusive, which we say isn't true anyway, so they aren't, and we definitely aren't making you think your fave is a buttface.
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We've explained here why that can be problematic, but Anycolor hasn't. Which is problematic itself, because to an English-speaking audience... this is a positive.
Selen's showing initiative. She's a go-getter. She's doing what the reader might do.
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It feels emblematic of something I've thought about Nijisanji ever since hearing about their earliest problems: they charged into a new market, eager for profit, without the first understanding of the dynamics of the culture and market they were entering.
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*Everyone* hates shareholders. Especially in 2024. Even shareholders hate other shareholders.
The only time shareholders are brought up in an English context tends to be in dry, purely business-related settings like investor meetings. They're never brought up day to day.
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Framing this as a negative, without attaching the additional context of Japanese companies *needing* a paper trail and full permission chain to feel secure from legal entanglements, just ends up as coming across as bizarre. As punishing someone for being assertive.
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So that's... wild. It's completely uncalled for, introduces a whole new element to the situation that wasn't there previously and that Selen hadn't even previously discussed or brought up as a possibility. All for... that's the other problem, I'm not sure.
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Is this some kind of attempt to pre-empt abuse allegations? (In which case, they already anticipate such allegations and have known of them before?) An attempt to spread blame to the performers (which is hideously shameless)? Simple flexing?
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And, like... this particular confusion isn't even theoretical. The top non-blue-check reply to the thread, you'll notice, is expressing this exact confusion about what the problem even is.
@NIJISANJI_World
Okay so from what I gleaned from this document:
She was skipping "proper" steps through Copyright Aquisition (she always goes straight to developers/Composer/singer/ Anyone who hold the copyrights) so that she can release more stuff faster. tldr she does your jobs for you
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This one, translated/posted by user noriyatsu on reddit, particularly cracks me up: "Anycolor is expected to grow in the coming years. Also, Anycolor firing its top English earner will not affect growth. Please explain this."
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So, because of cultural assumptions and a lack of feeling a need to explain circumstances, what was intended as a negative and lead-in to the further issues instead makes Selen look like a heroic go-getter. Super. Fantastic job, Anycolor.
I'm sure the stakeholders will love it.
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It also at least kind of betrays the ostensible purpose of Nijisanji, which is to be a v-tuber talent agency. They now insinuate, to you the viewer, that your "oshi" might be a buttface.
And I'm now single-posting these, because we still aren't *done* yet.
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and Anycolor has now said, in the clearest language imaginable, to the people who handle the money, that individual performers and their acquisition or departure do not matter in the *slightest* to them and do not have any particular value to The Company.
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Because of how easy it is, doing this yourself, or at least arranging it so that all your boss has to do is sign a paper, would be seen by most native anglophones as a positive. You're making your boss's life easier. You're making stuff easier to produce.
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The investors also don't *really* seem to be buying the line Anycolor is offering.
This is just Yahoo Finance, and is an internet-postery tiny slice of the investor base, but there is a *lot* of anger about the IR memo and Selen's termination notice,
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PR almost always tries to make a company seem like a "family". Stakeholders cannot be family. Stakeholders are known, intrinsically, as a hostile element working against artistic expression. Real PR loves to play up the artists "winning" against stakeholders, even when not true.
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It helps to understand that many of your hires will be assertive go-getters. It helps to know that having a formal branch office outside Japan can make the rights situation different (even Hololive/Cover still struggles with this, tbh).
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Now, Anycolor's stock has been very volatile since their IPO in 2022. But after settling down from what looks like a short-seller's paradise in October '22, the stock has generally maintained a price between 3150 and 3800 yen, usually higher, with fluctuations -
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And that's pretty much it. As a piece of PR, it so comprehensively fails in its purpose due to cultural gaps and... I'm not even sure what entirely some of it is, but I really can not remember the last time I saw something like this.
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In the English streaming community, obtaining rights can still involve negotiation for the bigger streamers, but it often more boils down to just checking with the rights-holder if things are cool, getting a thumbs up, and going for it.
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Real PR professionals know that shareholders are often seen as the source of many of society's ills in the 21st century, and so assiduously avoid mentioning them. If individuals come up, they're referred to by title, NEVER as "a stakeholder".
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So, we've established that the document has some truly ridiculously-laid-out claims that pretty much ultimately engender sympathy for Selen, the supposed villain of this PR piece. But there's a few spots where cultural difference are also really getting in the way.
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The Japanese game industry has, historically, taken a significantly dimmer view of live streaming than much of the industry in the anglosphere (and "eurosphere", for want of a term) has. Doubly so for streamers with corporate backing.
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In early 2020, in fact, Hololive faced near-destruction when they'd been lax in securing "steaming permissions" from several major corporations, who threatened to start obliterating channels with copyright strikes and sue Cover Corp. for piracy damages.
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Anycolor then notes how she didn't "[comply] with rights confirmation and authorization flows", which even to a casual reader will come across as "she approached rights-holders directly to try and secure necessary permissions herself".
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- caused more by earnings reports, some of the instability in other overseas branches and "market feel".
For a single personnel decision to cause a drop of this sort is... atypical.
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It helps to understand that your performers, and the audience, may chafe under rules that are still necessary to avoid lawsuits. It helps to understand that they may react very differently to managerial styles that would work well in Japan.
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Well. You might notice. They don't explain this context, or why it's so important, at all.
(Also, translation nitpick, but "socially condemned behaviors" is a hilarious nonsequitur in this context.)
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with some, as I predicted in replies to the previous thread, demanding the firing of whoever penned that ridiculous Selen notice.
@fakeNEET
Yuuup, another thing that I decided to axe from the thread, but I wanted to bring up how, if I was a Shareholder, I would absolutely *furious* with Anycolor right now and demand to know who approved the posting of that statement.
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Including the stakeholders in the PR at all was a ridiculous faux pas, and demonstrates a real lack of understanding about how certain phrases come across in English versus how they are understood in Japanese.
And then you combine it with the rest.
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Let's wind back to the heady days of page 1. One of the first things Anycolor does is establish what the "Activity Rules" are for Nijisanji participation. For the non-v-tuber-initiated, these are actually fairly important for JP-sporsored performers.
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So these are pretty important. And ideally, right permissions need to be handled by a full employee of the agency (v-tubers are typically contractors, and not duly appointed representatives of their host agency/company).
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They explain briefly what the Activity Rules are, and then plow on with some propaganda about how it's good for everyone and will protect everyone's interests, including the stakeholders (we'll come back to *this* in a moment) so you gotta do it.
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So, it's been a pretty bad day for Anycolor so far. We'll have to see if the ~stock damage~ continues, but at the very least, The Stockholders Who Are Part Of The Stakeholders are unimpressed,
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So there are a number of reasons why there isn't a HUGE BLOWOUT CELEBRATION for it, but yes indeed, it was on this day ten years ago that Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale officially went on sale, pretty much changing my life forever.
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@CraigGaIIagher
@PerthshireMags
Which is hilarious, because by memory, earlier seasons of L&O in particular could be sharply unsparing toward cops. They screwed up relatively often.
It was SVU that really rammed home the "cops are the only thing keeping us from abusive sexual anarchy" craze.
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@PCGamesN
I'd like them to delay it further so they can work on it at a pace more suitable to human life.
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@StrangeRiceTwit
I suspect the answer is "a certain yacht-owner who has nobody at the company who can tell him no".
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IT JUST DOESN'T STOP
ANYCOLOR, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, *SHUT UP*
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@TristanACooper
@antumbral
"we imprisoned him forever for a crime. but we think he DESERVED IT. Don't YOU? *in the most 'agree or else' voice*"
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@TzviaAriella
@AuntHortense
And of course, the real key to the puzzle here is: guess who's encouraging the kids to do that over-sharing?
If you said "corporate interests who want to monetize everything, including insecurity", ding ding ding! Give the Twitter poster a cookie!
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Oh, and this was also clearly timed to interrupt the victim's stream.
Coooooooooool cool cool cool cool.
What is it with wannabe Elon Musks and just insisting on engaging in criminality out on the open.
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@PCGamesN
@NeocoreGames
Please delay Inquisitor much further so that your employees can work normal human working hours and turn out a good product.
Crunch is awful, will result in a poor product and harms people.
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I want to point out that even in some of the cruelest, "stingiest" modern hero gachas, you will usually be given a hard pity at somewhere between what is $500-750 here, and it would not only be a max-rarity drop, it would be the exact thing you're looking/rolling for.
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So now that some people have begun max-leveling their 5 star gems (because yes, you also need to level the damn things), it turns out that there's an additional mechanic: you can awaken a 5* gem to give an item FIVE ADDITIONAL GEM SLOTS.
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I will say that Square Enix is not doing the *best* job of communicating what Trials of Mana actually *is*, and what makes the Collection of Mana so special.
A fully localized Super Nintendo game that fans have been pining for the last 20+ years should be a doorbuster news item.
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So I've been following "the news" since the 5th (hasn't needed me butting in again, tbh) but last night, I had a look-up-from-the-paper moment I feel moved to comment on.
I don't know & haven't heard of any Nijisanji Japan V-tubers.
Like, I've never see them discussed *at all*.
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Okay but, memes aside: Game of Thrones is going to hang over every single piece of fantasy in motion-picture media like the fumes of a volcano for the next decade and a half, isn't it.
Here’s your first look at the opening theme of the Dragon’s Dogma anime, straight from the game’s composer, Tadayoshi Makino.
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This is still massively exploitative and preys on people who want to go "just one more" to get that character they just ~can't~ live without. It preys on people who just have to have things.
Run this a few times. Pity gacha's not even in the same *galaxy* as what DI is doing.
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