#Investment models

[civilmentor1]

Current Affairs - 7 August 2024

1. Organ Transplant Overview: All cases of organ transplants will be allocated a unique National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO)-ID for both the donor and the recipient, according to a recent directive by the Union Health Ministry. Norms In a first, the Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfarehas issued a set of guidelines for the transportation oflive human organs. The…

[equalseleventhirds]

if i were an extremely wealthy owner of a television network i would shrimply pick up all the successful shows netflix and hbo and disney cancelled that ppl made petitions abt and the creators said they have more written for

and then make more seasons of them and my network's ratings would be wildly high and also it'd be baller pr or w/e

[anarchotolkienist]

The reason why social media has gotten so much worse recently (reddits recent fuck-up, everything on Twitter since Musk, FB being FB, Tumblrs various attempts at expanding profitability recently) is because it is no longer possible to exist as a company by fencing in large parts of our social life and having investment money pump in on the basis of expected future value of that amount of information when it suddenly costs money to loan money due to suddenly high interest rates after the inflationary crisis of the last year, which has made the current model of the Internet that has existed for the last about 10 years completely unsustainable. All of them need to become profitable or die, and they are learning very quickly that that just isn't possible no matter how much of the life and information of the users one steals. We are witnessing the death-throes of Web2.0, and what comes after is as yet unclear.

[coquelicoq]

little seiji must have thought shinobu hung the moon. based on the way he talks about her now, and the way he seems to have modeled kuromisa's appearance after her...like he needed to create an air of mystique that people would be drawn to and he immediately went well just dress up like nee-san. he worshipped her in that special younger sibling way. how did her resentment of him shape the person he's become? what did her leaving the clan do to him?

[essektheylyss]

I know I joked about DVDs but in all seriousness, I'm really glad that there's an option for watching VODs that isn't on Twitch and YouTube. It's been mentioned a few times today, but both of the interfaces of these platforms have been increasingly enshittified. I simply do not use YouTube anymore because of how horrid the interface is. I caught up on campaign 2 entirely on YouTube (and sometimes via podcast) in 2019 with no issues, but it is straight up maddening trying to use it now, and I don't know that I would have made it through the campaign if I was trying to catch up today.

I absolutely understand being tired of additional streaming services and I am absolutely in the same boat, but I also don't know how many people really recognize how gutted media distribution has become in the last ten years in the name of convenience. We all kind of realize it, but it's hard to grasp just how extensive it is. We can talk about independent business choices separately, and we should, but when the only platforms on which you have the option to distribute your work are at best frustrating to use and at worst hostile to human life, when monetization services can censor anyone they please with little explanation and have been cracking down on any content they arbitrarily deem inappropriate, when it is not clear that centralized conglomerate social media sites will continue to exist in the next year let alone decade, it is genuinely crucial for independent creators to start building alternative avenues of distribution that they control now.

[riacte]

I feel like I learned a lot about storytelling + "marketing" a story from Webtoon (the Webtoon from a few years ago when it was still decent). The way it worked was that 1) story blurb to draw in people 2) three initial episodes to get people invested 3) one episode per week. It showed the strength of a strong summary with a genre but without trope tags (unlike fanfiction) or describing your work as abc meets xyz (which seems to be what YA publishing does nowadays?). The three initial episodes introduces tone, artstyle, main characters, main plot, basic worldbuilding, and is supposed to quickly "hook" the reader. I like the format of three initial episodes (instead of one) because the first episode is usually different (given its main purpose is to grab the attention of new people), the other two gives you a taste of what a "standard weekly update" might contain.

I feel a lot of Webtoons start with a strong premise/ gimmick/ hook but they don't know what to do with it. And that's totally normal because some premises are better when shrouded in mystery and you have to do the hard work of explaining the mystery. I've read Webtoons that start with one premise, then it gets sidelined in the middle as new themes develop, and in the end you realise the "premise" was a marketing tactic to draw people in and the story is about something else entirely, but you stayed because it was still a good story, and you have no complaints. (Eg. I think people step into I Love Yoo thinking it's a romance, and the first bits do seem like a set up for romance, but it turns out the genre is drama and the romance is a slooooooow burn.) I've read Webtoons that start with one interesting premise, then it fizzles away and turns into a rather standard story for its genre to the point the hook is barely relevant when it was what made it stand out. And on the rare occasion you will find a Webtoon that has its premise, develops the plot from there, sticks with its themes, and the ending is thematically resonant. (I think Cursed Princess Club does a good job at this.) But it's difficult to craft a very consistent and coherent story (especially given the serial format), so it's fine to just kinda sideline or even ditch your premise so long the actual main plot is solid. Your premise is what initially got people reading, but they'll get invested in other things. Maybe you even have to manually create a hook and get into the meat later once your readers are properly invested. But I feel most of the time it's otherwise because you can get a really cool idea but NO CLUE on how to end it and it sucks because either you drag on or give it an unsatisfactory ending. The good thing is that you get a "buffer zone" in which readers are still interested in reading due to the premise/hook and you get the time to properly work things out.

So I don't think a premise has to be completely executed and explained in order for a story to be compelling. If it does its job of bringing in new folks and convincing them to stay long enough to get invested in style/tone/plot/characters/relationships/whatever, sometimes it's easier to let the premise go. Sometimes you want a tonal shift. But at the same time, a premise is so useful for marketing purposes. You can talk about what tropes it has and what media it's influenced by, but what is the story actually about?

[kaxtwenty]

I’m at episode 29 of 0079 and I’m kinda gobsmacked by how good this show is. It’s kinda hard for me to articulate what I like about it, because it’s simultaneously very different from the Gundam shows I’ve watched up until this point, but also very much the same.

It starts off pretty good, but manages to slowly raise the quality as time goes on until you keep coming across an episode every now and then that makes you go, “This is really good.” Of course, it’s a 70s show. So a lot of the writing is definitely different than what I’m used to, being raised on 90s-2010s anime and all, but I’ve grown attached to the White Base crew and the imperfect found family they slowly forge together over the course of the show.

I completely understand why it made the waves it did during its reruns and film releases and how it became the franchise it is today.

Mobile Suit Gundam is just good television.

[legendary-alliance-stance]

listen I’m really excited for wizard shenanigans but

bro I’m so depressed that we’re moving on from cantha already

especially because we… never really go back to places?? unless they change how they do things now that they’re swapping to the smaller but more frequent releases??

idk man it’s just so disappointing. i wanted to see so much more of cantha. i wanted to see drowned kaineng, I wanted to see the great turtle highlands, I wanted so much more than what we got

[clementine-kesh]

harry’s come full circle and found his own traumatized little ensign to be a questionable mentor to. when the cycles are cyclical <3

[whichcouldmeanothing]

what i understand of the industry finale is that harper is following in the footsteps of my hero

[arttsuka]

Just something that's been bothering me. What's up with the whitewashing in trigun stampede?

Somehow the 1998 version had more diversity in skin colors than the 2023 version

[indeedgoodman]

[bookrat]

Do you sell any of these statues?

Yeah, pretty often. I've got a few to put up for sale this week actually.

[elvenbeard]

Follow the River

[vigilskeep]

man i really wanted to go with a fire godlike but i just love the death godlike designs so much

[the-oracle-of-the-lost]

there's something so dismal about how so much of tv fandom's energy nowadays seems to go towards trying to prove to big corporations that their show is good enough to save. like whenever a new episode or series comes out it's "remember to watch it all in 24 hours or it won't get renewed!" "play it on repeat for a month or else it'll become another piece of lost media!" "don't stop talking and posting about it during the hiatus or else this season that's already in production might not air!" "if this tag trends on twitter for long enough we might get eight episodes instead of six!!!" it feels less like we're enjoying a show that so many people worked hard on and more like we're trying to create rituals to please the gods (which replace gods with The Algorithm and you're not far off).

like i haven't even been involved in fandom for that long but even just seven or so years ago if a show did well enough that it was nominated for awards and trending on twitter and having well attended comic con panels then it would be renewed for at least a season or two. and back then being renewed for another season meant "we're for sure going to get a new season next year!" with almost no possibility of cancelation. and even shows that did just okay ratings wise would easily get 5+ seasons.

and it was more fun. when i was watching Doctor Who or Arrowverse or whatever in 2014 i could enjoy and critique the media itself instead of constantly being nervous about whether the next season will be cashed in for nostalgia bait or have its episode count cut or be postponed for three years or just outright canceled because it was slightly less popular than last year. like the fandom would still stress out over potential bad narrative choices or whatever but we would also get excited about the future.

maybe it's just my own perceptions but i just tend to find myself favoring fandoms for shows (or at least eras, i'm looking at you Doctor Who) that have been completed. i like Good Omens and Our Flag Means Death and Strange New Worlds and Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the latest Doctor Who era but i just find it hard to get invested when there's so much anxiety around if there will be a future to those shows and so much of the fandom activity revolves around that anxiety. and then as a result when the show does end for good (whether through cancelation or design) the fandom starts to fade away too because so much of it was based on the temptation of The Future.

and i'm also quick to admit that production in pre-streaming era shows had their own problems (once popular shows running for 15 seasons and jumping the shark just because it's a cash cow, tampered down diversity in the interest of "popular appeal", the whole quantity over quality issue, etc) but at least the fandoms were more optimistic and focused on the story itself instead of just being angry about the eternal potential of cancelation or outright deletion.

(also there are obviously much larger issues to the streaming model re: residuals and everything else brought up during the wga and sag strikes but that's all been said much more coherently so i'm just speaking from my own perspective as a fan. and even then there's still definite overlap between the fandom anxiety over renewal and the real world economic anxiety for people involved with production over "will we have a job/be paid". it's far too early to tell but i really hope the strikes will help to solve this problem.)