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sacchiri · 2 months

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I recently bought the jp volumes of Hellsing along with the guidebook, and since I'm reading the series in its native language for the first time I might as well share some random things that stood out to me in no particular order.

This isn't meant to be an analysis of translation differences, I'm too lazy for that. Also it's been 12 years since I've watched the anime and read the low quality fan scans of the manga so some of these comments are just "Lol, forgot this was a thing"

Volume 1

... I really want to know who this guy is at the beginning, yelling at Alucard in overly familiar language to "Get your shit together!" and "You're the only one we can count on!!". We know from the style of speech that it's a dude, probably just some Hellsing rando, and maybe it's not all that strange since he has probably been working with the same soldiers for years--but it's still funny.

"I know, it's just so nice out :("

..The way "HELLSING Organization" is spelled out like this reminds me that apparently the name is supposed to be an acronym. No really.

...

God they're so silly.

Now that I think about it, the only thing Seras has done this chapter since being turned into a vampire is say "I'm sorry" over and over.... girl you got shot in the lung, why are you apologizing

Not a huge difference, but what Integra actually says here is "Leaving a corpse here for 20 years... You're a terrible person too, Father" and not "What were you thinking, Father?" as the Dark Horse translation suggests (note the lack of question mark in the raw version). I thought that might be of interest to some.

Something else I thought was interesting is the first line Alucard ever says to Integra, and how uncharacteristically polite he sounds.

O-kega wa gozaimasenka- That's two honorific 御's back to back! (He even said them in kanji, even Walter isn’t that straightlaced and he’s literally the butler.) This is also the only time Alucard uses this overly flowery gentlemanly language with her, and good thing too because it would be so annoying if he spent the whole manga ending his sentences with ~gozaimasu.

What I'm trying to get at is, after seeing this sentence in the Japanese version, I'm like 100% sure he actually heard her when she was mumbling to herself about hoping to find a knight in shining armor, and he was totally going the extra mile in playing into that role for their first encounter. Which is kind of sweet.

Lol they misspelled Alucard on the top left... or rather, they incorrectly spelled it right?

One would normally expect Alucard to be written アルカード, and indeed pixiv dict lists アーカード as a misspelling (the u sound is weak in Japanese, so it's easy to mishear arukādo as ākādo). Hirano was definitely aware of the correct spelling though, since he used it in the pilot chapter and in his old character sheets. It was only when the manga officially began that he switched to the アーカード spelling. I doubt it was because of copyright issues because there is already a long precedent of vampire characters named アルカード in various old manga, OVA, and games in Japan that have coexisted without issue (like this guy Hirano mentions in volume 1's afterword).

Most likely Hirano simply thought it looked better, or was a means of differentiating his character from the others somehow. It certainly makes life easier for Japanese fans searching for fanart since アーカード is only going to bring up Hellsing and not the Castlevania character.

Jan Valentine even pokes fun at the spelling discrepancy later in volume 2, but since there wasn't a good way of expressing this in English it was left untranslated.

(Speaking of spelling inconsistencies, there's a lot of minor details I'm noticing now, like half the time the furigana for 吸血鬼 is written バンパイア and the other half it's ヴァンパイア... anyway)

Um, just noticed literally everyone's wearing glasses What should I do

Hirano's habit of jotting random comments underneath his panels is one of the underrated perks of reading the manga

The Dark Horse translation almost makes it sound like she's looking forward to seeing this battle play out, while in the Japanese she simply sounds apprehensive. Almost as if she's worried about them? And she's going out on the field personally to make sure nothing bad happens? Aww

Ok this is a weird tangent, but I just noticed the scans of the Dark Horse version I've been looking at use a slightly larger image range than the Japanese version does. It was only noticeable when I got to this part:

The second image is what the Japanese version of the scan looks like and I can confirm that this is what it looks like in my physical volume as well. You shouldn't be seeing the messy borders of the inking on the bottom like that.

Manga manuscripts are set up so that there are a few millimeters of bleed border around each page. You're supposed to color and line all the way up to (4) while keeping in mind that printing and paper cutting may result in the image being trimmed up to (3).

Either Hirano didn't color his lines all the way to (4) (this man has been drawing manga for years but this is Hirano we're talking about so it's very possible), or Dark Horse didn't honor the original bleed borders of the manuscript. I'm kind of leaning towards the former since there was a Hellsing exhibit in Japan a few years back where you could look at Hirano's original manuscripts and there's one where you can clearly see that he spilled a mug of tea or coffee across the entire page

Anyway, it's weird, and I'm curious to see if someone that owns a physical copy in English can confirm whether theirs actually looks like that. It's volume 1, page 141.

#hellsing #integra hellsing #alucard #seras victoria #i'm too lazy to do this for all the volumes #unless someone REALLY wants to see them for some reason but i doubt it

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creatortoypeacha · 5 days

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Just another day in Goodverse 🗿

-OCs owned by me (Toy Peacha)

#art #digital art #art dump #oc #ocs #skeleton #skeleton oc #undertale aus #goodverse #Kole #Sunrise #Moonburst #Code #Kega #shitposting

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pikahlua · 10 months

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MHA Chapter 392 spoilers translations

This week’s initial tentative super rough/literal translations under the cut.

1-2 私の何を知ってるの⁉︎ わたしのなにをしってるの⁉︎ watashi no nani wo shitteru no!? “What do you know about me!?”

tagline 1 大軍にのまれ！たいぐんにのまれ！ taigun ni nomare! Swallowed by a giant army!

tagline 2 No.392 ヴィラン名　　堀越耕平ナンバー392 ヴィランめい　　ほりこしこうへい NANBAA 392 VIRAN mei Horikoshi Kouhei No. 392 Villain Name Kouhei Horikoshi

3 フロッピーーー‼︎ FUROPPII--!! “Froppy--!!”

4 奥渡島のダメージでオクトじまのダメージで OKUTO jima no DAMEEJI de The damage I got at Octo Island,

5 くっ…うまく捌けなかった…！くっ…うまくさばけなかった…！ gu...umaku sabakenakatta...! ggh...I didn’t handle it well...!

1 何一つ不自由なんかなかったくせになにひとつふじゆうなんかなかったくせに nani hitotsu fujiyuu nanka nakatta kuse ni “Even though you had not even one inconvenience,”

2 ルールに合ってただけのくせに‼︎ ルールにあってただけのくせに‼︎ RUURU ni atteta dake no kuse ni!! “even though you only followed the rules!!”

3 生きやすく産まれただけのくせに‼︎ いきやすくうまれただけのくせに‼︎ iki yasuku umareta dake no kuse ni!! “Even though you were born only to live easily!!” (Note: This grammar pattern sounds more accusatory than it might sound in translation. The overall message is basically: “How could someone like you, who has only ever had such an easy life, know anything about me!?”)

1 スズメを殺して血を啜ってスズメをころしてちをすすって SUZUME wo koroshite chi wo susutte You killed a sparrow to drink its blood,

2 笑ってるなんて… わらってるなんて… waratteru nante... and then you smile...

3 違うのちがうの chigau no No, it’s different.

4 お庭に落ちてたのおにわにおちてたの oniwa ni ochiteta no It had fallen in the garden.

5 ハイ矯正していきましょう"普通"にハイきょうせいしていきましょう"ふつう"に HAI kyousei shite ikimashou “futsuu” ni All right, let’s go and correct you to normal.

6 あ　ハイもうちょっと待ってくださいあ　ハイもうちょっとまってください a HAI mou chotto matte kudasai Ah, yes, please wait a little longer.

7 すぐそっち行きますすぐそっちいきます sugu socchi ikimasu I’ll be right there.

8 えっと… etto... Um...

9 ええ大丈夫ですええだいじょうぶです ee daijoubu desu Yes, it’s fine.

10 そうですね… sou desu ne... That’s right...

11 強い"個性"を持つ子にありがちな倒錯ですよつよい"こせい"をもつこにありがちなとうさくですよ tsuyoi “kosei” wo motsu ko niarigachi na tousaku desu yo It’s a perversion common to children who have strong quirks.

12 この社会ではよくあることですこのしゃかいではよくあることです kono shakai de wa yoku aru koto desu It’s a thing that happens often in this society.

13 正して消していきましょうただしてけしていきましょう tadashite keshite ikimashou Let’s go correct and erase it.

1 ヒミコちゃんの顔コワーイ！ヒミコちゃんのかおコワーイ！ HIMIKO-chan no kao KOWAAI! Himiko-chan’s face is scaaary!

2 やめなさい‼︎何をしてるのやめなさい‼︎なにをしてるの yamenasai!! nani wo shiteru no Stop it!! What are you doing?

3 まるでーー異常者だ！まるでーーいじょうしゃだ！ maru de--ijousha da! It’s like--you’re a deviant! (Note: I feel obligated to point out that the word for “deviant” also works as a word for “pervert.”)

4 普通しなさい！ふつうしなさい！ futsuu shinasai! Be normal!

5 あの子ぜんぜん話合わないんだもんあのこぜんぜんはなしあわないんだもん ano ko zenzen hanashiawanainda mon That kid just doesn’t speak on the same wavelength [as us].

1 被身子‼︎ ヒミコ‼︎ HIMIKO!! Himiko!!

2 友だちの血を吸ったって⁉︎ ともだちのちをすったって⁉︎ tomodachi no chi wo sutta tte!? You sucked your friend’s blood!?

3 違うのちがうの chigau no No, it’s different.

4 怪我してたからちうちうしたのけがしてたからちうちうしたの kega shiteta kara chiuchiu shita no I kissed it because they were injured. (Note: The onomatopoeia here for “kissed” also sounds like the one for “sucked.”)

5 普通じゃない‼︎ ふつうじゃない‼︎ futsuu ja nai!! That’s not normal!!

6 まともになりたくないのか⁉︎ matomo ni naritakunai no ka!? Don’t you want to be normal!? (Note: This word for “normal” also means “decent, upstanding.”)

7 パパ　ママ PAPA MAMA Papa, Mama.

8 わからないの　私わからないのわからないの　わたしわからないの wakaranai no watashi wakaranai no Don’t understand, I don’t understand.

9 みんな好きなノになるのガマンしてるの？みんなすきなノになるのガマンしてるの？ minna suki na NO ni naru no GAMAN shiteru no? Is everyone restraining how they want to become the ones they like?

10 なんでみんな nande minna Why won’t everyone

11 ちうちうしないの？ chiuchiu shinai no? kiss? (Note: Again, this is that same onomatopoeia that means both “kiss” and “suck.”)

12 ああ…‼︎ aa...!! Aah...!!

13 あ〜〜〜〜〜〜〜 a~~~~~~~ Aaaaaaaaah!

14 違うんだこれちがうんだこれ chigaunda kore This is so wrong.

15 もう根っこが！もうねっこが！ mou nekko ga! Her core is already--! (Note: This “core” word means literally “roots,” and it’s the same word Katsuki uses to describe what Izuku is like “at his core” in chapter 284. I also can’t remember where but I’m pretty sure someone used the same word to describe Tomura at some point this arc. Maybe Dabi too.)

16-17 人間じゃない子産んじゃった！にんげんじゃないこうんじゃった！ ningen ja nai ko unjatta! We went and gave birth to a child that isn’t human!

1 だからあなたはフタをした dakara anata wa FUTA wo shita “That’s why you covered it up.”

2 抑圧し仮面をつくったよくあつしかめんをつくった yokuatsu shi kamen wo tsukutta “You suppressed [yourself] and made a mask.”

3 自分じゃない誰かになったじぶんじゃないだれかになった jibun ja nai dare ka ni natta “You became someone other than yourself.”

1 ああ aa “Aagh!”

2 麗日ぁあああ‼︎ うららかぁあああ‼︎ Urarakaaaaa!! “Urarakaaaaa!!“

3 梅雨ちゃん！つゆちゃん！ Tsuyu-chan! “Tsuyu-chan!“

1 ケロ！ KERO! “Ribbit!”

2 違うそっちじゃなちがうそっちじゃな chigau socchi ja na “No, not over there!”

3 え e “Eh?”

4 ゲゴッ GEGO “Ribbi-cough!”

5 トガだ！ TOGA da! “That’s Toga!”

6-7 ヒーローは殲滅するヒーローはせんめつする HIIROO wa senmetsu suru “Annihilate the heroes!”

8 飛び散った血を分身が摂取してるんだ！とびちったちをぶんしんがせっしゅしてるんだ！ tobichitta chi wo bunshin ga sesshu shiterunda! “The doppelgangers are ingesting the blood that’s splattering everywhere!”

1 ウチまで… UCHI made... “Even me...”

2 この量に抗うには… このりょうにあらがうには… kono ryou ni aragau ni wa... “To oppose these numbers...”

3 全員一丸となってのチームアップが不可欠だった…！ぜんいんいちがんとなってのチームアップがふかけつだった…！ zen’in ichigan to natte no CHIIMUAPPU ga fukaketsu datta...! “it was essential for everyone to team up all together...!”

4 散らされ…欺かれるのであれば最早… ちらされ…あざむかれるのであればもはや… chirasare...azamukareru node areba mohaya... “We’ll be scattered...and deceived, so the quickest way...“

5 うわああああ‼︎ uwaaaaa!! “Waaaaah!!”

6 最早もはや mohaya The quickest way

7 止める術は… とめるすべは… tomeru sube wa... to stop her is...

1 そいつを殺せそいつをころせ soitsu wo korose Kill him!

2 殲せん sen Anni-

3 滅めつ metsu -hilate!

4 トガ…ヒミコちゃん…聞いてっトガ…ヒミコちゃん…きいてっ！ TOGA...HIMIKO-chan...kiite! “Toga...Himiko-chan...listen!”

5-6 私は…！"ルール"を守ることが… わたしは…！"ルール"をまもることが… watashi wa...! “RUURU” wo mamoru koto ga... “I...! [Thought that] following the rules...”

7 ヒーローだと思ってた…‼︎外れる事が…敵だと思ってた…！ヒーローだとおもってた…‼︎はずれることが…ヴィランだとおもってた…！ HIIROO da to omotteta...!! hazureru koto ga...VIRAN da to omotteta...! “I thought that’s what a hero is...!! I thought that deviating [from them]...is what a villain is...!”

8 でもねトガヒミコちゃん demo ne TOGA HIMIKO-chan “But you know, Himiko Toga-chan,”

9 私のお友だちは今わたしのおともだちはいま watashi no otomodachi wa ima “my friend right now,”

10 そんなルールより何よりそんなルールよりなにより sonna RUURU yori nani yori “more than the rules, more than anything,”

1-2 あなたと向き合おうとしてるあなたとむきあおうとしてる anata to mukiaou to shiteru “is trying to face you.” (Note: The word here literally means “to face, oppose, face off with, confront,” but the meaning implied here is that this confrontation is not a merely physical battle but an attempt to address Toga philosophically.)

3 それはただ殲滅するよりそれはただせんめつするより sore wa tada senmetsu suru yori “Rather than just annihilating you,”

4 ただ確保するよりただかくほするより tada kakuho suru yori “rather than securing you,”

5 困難な道だと思うこんなんなみちだとおもう konnan na michi da to omou “I think it’s the more difficult path.”

6 だから dakara “So,”

7 お茶子ちゃんのことおちゃこちゃんのこと Ochako-chan no koto “about Ochako-chan,”

8 遅くなったかもしれないけれどおそくなったかもしれないけれど osokunatta kamo shirenai kedo “maybe she was late, but”

9 少しでいいから…話を聞いて！すこしでいいから…はなしをきいて！ sukoshi de ii kara...hanashi wo kiite! “just a little is fine...listen to what she has to say!”

1 構造が違う‼︎ こうぞうがちがう‼︎ kouzou ga chigau!! Literal: “The structure is different!!” Contextual: “We’re built differently!!”

2 おまえ達が言う祝福も喜びもおまえたちがいうしゅくふくもよろこびも omaetachi ga iu shukufuku mo yorokobi mo “The blessings and joy you all speak of,”

1 私は何も感じない！わたしはなにもかんじない！ watashi wa nani mo kanjinai! “I feel none of them!”

2-3 そっちの尺度で私を可哀想な人間にするな‼︎ そっちのルールでわたしをかわいそうなにんげんにするな‼︎ socchi no RUURU (kanji: shakudo) de watashi wo kawaisou na ningen ni suruna!! “Don’t make me a pitiable person by those rules (read as: standards)!!” (Note: In an incredibly well-timed turn of events, this ask has become extremely relevant. The sentence above, in content and structure, resembles Twice’s narration directed at Hawks in chapter 266.)

4 そういやトガちゃんって souiya Toga-chan tte “Come to think of it, Toga-chan,”

5 敵名つけねえの？ヴィランめいつけねえの？ VIRAN-mei tsukenee no? “can’t you [use] a villain name?”

tagline 蘇る記憶…‼︎ よみがるきおく…‼︎ yomigaeru kioku...!! A memory revives...!!

#my hero academia leak translations #mha 392 #bnha 392 #my hero academia manga spoilers #final showdown spoilers #himiko toga #thinly-veiled allegories for direct expressions of affection #and how japan is so painfully allergic to them #the fact that toga's affection was so repulsive to society #that society so utterly failed to teach her anything about consent #THE MESSY WEB HATH BEEN WOVEN SO INTRICATELY #THAT IS _SOME SHIT_ MY DUDES

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bleachbleachbleach · 3 months

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[Bleach 076]

I know I wrote like five posts about zanpakutou being violent and cool, but I also love that Ichigo's reaction to Ichimaru's extendo-sword just being, "Daaaamn, what the hell? That bastard! I could've gotten hurt!! Shit, owww!!"

I kind of love the JP version, which doesn't even entertain the (real) possibility of death. Ichigo says ケガ (kega) which is just the word for "injury." Injured like someone beaned you with a baseball. Meanwhile Orihime and Ishida are just like "that dude almost died O_O."

I feel like Ichigo is redefining what it means to "storm Soul Society like a fucking casual" (a phrase that is definitely in common usage and appears in many places that are not this post) and it's completely bananas, but charming. Because honestly the part of this chapter that stood out most to me was how casual he is with Orihime:

In the Viz, Ichigo calls her "Orihime"; in Japanese, if Ichigo calls Orihime by her name, he calls her Inoue. (Remarkable mostly because Ichigo is on a first-name basis with a whole random slate of people he probably shouldn't be, but he calls his schoolmates by their family names [and Shinji, because I guess he's... a classmate...]).

But here he straight-up calls her "omae." Not once, but twice!

Which would sound so rude, except he's obviously not trying to be rude. Sure, Ichigo's got his punk-ass shounen guy speech going for him, and that's reflected in his language here overall, but even in that context his use of "omae" was surprising to me! But it makes me feel like they're super comfortable with each other, in ways they certainly weren't a few months ago when the series started and Orihime was just a girl in his class. Orihime's one of the guys and they haven't even made it INTO the Seireitei yet!

#kurosaki ichigo #inoue orihime #bleach manga #bleach language #bleach reread 2021 #bleach カラー #no brain just bleach

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vadapega · 1 month

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You know what really grinds me to a stop when watching gameplay?

People still using old versions of Gens in this day and age I know what you're thinking : how can that possibly be a-

NO, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND

KEGA Fusion:

Old versions of Gens:

BOY do I have A LOT to complain a bout here

This is with all those "high quality" settings turned on, though even without em, the noise-mode bass would be off-pitch anyway and it makes a lot of gameplay videos of games and hacks thta use it sound absolutely terrible.

Bonus comparisons:

Regen:

PSG is slightly off-pitch which can sound nice but may make things sound weird

BlastEM:

Closest to real hardware although may sound muffled on the default settings.

Once I'm finished with this project, I will release a version of the soundtrack recorded directly from my Megadrive.

#pantufa the cat #pantufa #rom hack #sonic hack #rom hacking #mega drive #sega mega drive #sega genesis #ym2612 #emulation #Stop using old Gens it's the Megadrive equivalent of ZSNES #gatoslip

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coolgreatwebsite · 5 months

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Happy 1 Million Views to the Video That Broke Me

This is a repost of something I wrote over on my Cohost, but I figured a year later it should also probably live on the domain I pay money to have. Better late than never!

This is the most successful piece of content I have ever created. At one million views it is the thing I've made that people have seen the most. It is the thing that the most people have seen my name attached to. And it's total trash.

It's 2017 and we're a week or so out from the release of Sonic Mania, a game that I'm, at that point, pretty damn excited for. A kindly poster from the Something Awful forums (that I have known from many forums previous) poses a challenge: be the first to beat his short kaizo Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ROM hack and he'll gift you a copy of Sonic Mania on Steam when it comes out.

I was already getting the game on PS4 but I figured whatever, everyone else seems to be having trouble with it, I'm bored, I got nothing better to do, I'll give it a shot. I load up KEGA Fusion, start a low bitrate and resolution OBS recording because it'll probably take a few hours and who cares it's a forum contest verification video, and get to work. A hour and half-ish goes by and I'm finished with the hack. I upload the video to YouTube, post it in the thread, win my free copy of Sonic Mania, and that's the end of the story. Thanks for reading.

youtube

Except of course it's not the end of the story. A few months after I got done thoroughly enjoying Sonic Mania, I realized that I'd been getting a weird amount of new subscriber emails from YouTube. I decided to actually look at my metrics and noticed a uh, highly localized spike of activity. Give you one guess on which video (hint: it's the one this post is about). "The Algorithm" had suddenly taken it and was running away with it at lightning speed.

In the timespan between posting the video and this spike, YouTube had announced they were drastically raising the bar on the metrics you needed to hit to have your channel monetized. I was by no means a large YouTuber at the time, but I was meeting the old requirements for monetization just fine. I wasn't anywhere near meeting the new requirements until now and this video was blowing the hell up for whatever reason, so I decided to do what any good opportunist would do and made it an unwatchable experience.

I set the ad frequency on that thing to the maximum that it'd let me. I forget exactly how frequent that was but it was something absurd like an ad every 5 minutes. Maybe even more than that. I figured I'd either get rich or maybe it would make people stop watching and leaving the worst comments in the world. Seriously the comments on this thing are their own nightmare, a bizarre soup of people ascribing meaning to nothing, trying to suss out emotions where there are none, saying complete gibberish, I'd need an entire second post to unpack whatever the hell is going on there.

Well, I wouldn't quite say I got rich. The money you get off what most people would conventionally call a popular YouTube video is just not much in the grand scheme of things. But holy shit they didn't stop watching. If anything they were watching more. Why didn't they stop watching? This video was less than nothing. It was an ordeal to watch all the way through. Why were they doing this? Why was the algorithm showing this to everyone? Why this and not one of the things I put effort into or something that was at least meant to be entertaining at all? I didn't have the answers and I still don't.

Before this I personally wasn't lamenting the possibility of losing monetization on my channel as up until this point I had made around $40 total on YouTube in the decade or so I'd had a channel. But I had been spending a lot that time watching friends with channels around the size of mine who were actively hustling to, and unfortunately failing to, meet the new hurdle. They were putting out some really good shit. Way better than my stuff, frankly. And here I was getting launched to the finish line by... a throwaway, blurry, hour and a half long, commentary-free, save state abusing playthrough of a crummy Sonic ROM hack? That I had made as a means to a completely separate end?? That got promoted by a computer program for seemingly no reason???

It felt shitty. One of the friends I mentioned in that last paragraph was my longtime friend Fotts who was in the middle of getting their (sadly now dormant) series TAS Force off the ground. They were constantly tweeting about the ordeal of trying to meet the new monetization requirements and it was a damn shame because they were putting in a ton of effort and it was great. The kind of thing I'd watch even if I wasn't friends with anyone on it. It was a million times funnier than anything I was doing, and the complete opposite of my shitty contest video. If there was any justice in this world the views I was getting on this dumpster fire would be going to them. But as it turns out, there is no justice online.

I recalled a conversation I had with them a few years back while they, I, and a group of about 7 or so other friends were all wandering around an Orlando Wal-Mart wearing identical black t-shirts that read "MARVEL CAN SUCK MY COCK" in big block letters (long story). They had actually kind of gone through this sort of thing before. See, they're the uploader and one of the voices of this video you may or may not have seen with 6.5+ million views on it.

youtube

They lamented to me many of the laments I was currently lamenting. "This was just a stupid throwaway thing", "why is this so much more popular than the stuff I put effort into", "it's just me making PaRappa the Rapper say the word 'Chinese' over and over". Ok maybe that last one was a bit more specific to them. Anyway, I responded with (and I admit a lot of the reason I felt this way was because I thought and still think the video is funny) something along the lines of "you can't pick what hits for people, it might have been throwaway but at the end of the day you posted it because you thought it was at least a little bit funny, try and focus on the fact that you have a popular video at all rather than the fact it's not one of the videos you're particularly proud of".

But yeah damn turns out that advice is easier said than done when it happens to you, and it's even harder done when it happens to a factually not entertaining video. One you could have uploaded as unlisted and achieved your intended result with. The runaway success of this thing genuinely broke me on this whole "Internet" deal.

I should stress I mean this in a good way. I realized that it's not so much that you can't pick what hits for people, it's that you physically cannot pick what gets put in front of people. The people cannot pick what hits for them. A computer does. You can try and promote and affect what gets seen in your own small sphere of influence, but ultimately we are, on YouTube and on all of our social platforms, at the mercy of a black box of computer programs that I'm not even sure the people who created them understand anymore. I'd obviously known this on some level prior to this video existing, but bearing witness to it all happening firsthand to this video in particular was another thing entirely. Anything prior that I had achieved marginally similar success with (there were a couple that had broken 100k) was meant to be entertaining. It was meant for people to watch and go "I liked that", not for one guy on a forum to see and go "good work solving my maze Superman". I could classify the success as "neat, people liked that one" in my brain. This defied classification.

The only logical conclusion was that it truly didn't matter what I uploaded. It's all decided by a random machine picking things at random to serve random amounts of people, and the people click on it and watch it simply because it is there. You can poke at the machine, prod at the machine, try to guess what the machine likes, try to iterate on something the machine has previously demonstrated that it likes. It's all an effort to get the machine to put it in front of the people who will click it because it is there. That's what all the bigger capital-C Content Creators do. From the high level stuff of "what kind of things do I upload" to the low level minutia of "how many curse words can I say in the first minute", making it Big On Line in any capacity is about trying to appease an unknowable mechanical entity and nothing else. It's either that or you're "old money" in a sense, established before this all became the case.

And again, the bigger names do this. Entire companies do this. If I were "smart" I would have pivoted my entire YouTube channel to nothing but hour and a half long commentary-free bullshit hard ROM hack playthroughs. Maybe another one would hit like this did. But for the life of me I could not and cannot think of anything more soul crushing.

I wouldn't say I had aspirations to be a Big Time YouTube Man, but at that time I would have maybe liked to be a Moderate Size YouTube Man. Or a moderate size Twitch man. Someone who had people watching but was still able to have fun with it and do his own thing. This newfound realization that it was truly a random lottery, even beyond the random lottery that most of human life is, that becoming any size bigger than Small Time was literally decided by an actual factual random number generator, freed me from the desire to do anything that I didn't want to do. If actively chasing success on these modern, algorithmically-driven platforms, actively going after "Kaizo Sonic 2 Full Run" numbers, meant putting aside the things I like and reinventing myself and the things I do down to the minute details in order to appease a literal ghost beyond anyone's understanding or control that changes what it's looking for on a whim, then I did not want to do that. I did not want to keep a timer for when I could talk normal, I did not want to announce my streams on Twitter with the link in a separate reply one day, in an embedded image the next, and in my display name the next. If there is absolutely one thing I do not want to do in my life, it's dance for a robot.

But the most freeing thing about realizing this is that it also meant if I just kept doing stuff I liked, maybe, someday, I could get lucky enough to where the unknowable internet robot would push that in front of a million or so people. In the grand scheme of things it's about an equal chance of that happening on something I like and am proud of versus something I made in a desperate cloying attempt to placate an algorithm.

Anyway damn this got long and rambly sorry about that lol. This was initially meant to just be a little toast to the 5 year-ish anniversary of me fully becoming an Internet nihilist. Remember folks, it's meaningless to chase success in an algorithm dominated landscape. In the words of a certain extremely Normal-type man, "real life isn't all just being true to yourself", but I reject the notion that the Internet is not or should not be, in spite of the legion of ghouls and freaks at the top of the chain actively trying to make that the case every day.

Be true to yourself. Do what you love, make what you love, post what you love, and maybe if you're lucky a computer somewhere will decide it's your turn, because that's the single deciding factor in all of this. In the mean time, you'll end up slowly and naturally surrounding yourself with cool people who get you, if only a little bit. At least that's what's happened for me so far. I've been pretty alright with it.

#article

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