Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
3people
2020–2025years
25% recommend75% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Azuma’s discussion of otaku culture is nothing short of revelatory for anybody who looks at the proliferation of animanga imagery and associated ideas and is attempting to understand their underlying structure. The manuscript he mentions in that interview is now an excellent book - “Otaku - Japan’s Database Animals” - which expands heavily on the concepts he mentions here including further discussion of Murakami.
- There is a lot of behavior online which I'd characterize as "hearing the dog whistles and barking" that when confront folks they will characterize it as "objecting to things in passionate terms"
Like the Otaku described by Azuma [1] there is a definite regression in terms of the of use of language and ideology, essentially a reversion from a language-using animal which can create unlimited meanings by putting together a finite vocabulary in a grammatical system as opposed to words that have a meaning in and of itself.
For instance, anti-resilience activists will run you out of some communities because you use the word "snowflake" because this is a dog whistle that makes them bark. With their lexicon of triggering words in hand you can talk about the dangers of anti-resilience all day and you're talking right past them.
This style of communication is especially dangerous for marginalized communities because they create a bubble of false consensus that makes them think somebody agrees with them but doesn't do the hard work of explaining themselves and doing the even harder work of bringing about a change of heart across the society would be necessary to do something widespread and durable problems such as the mutual lack of respect between black Americans and the police.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...
- I liked it at the time it came out, I like it less now.
It was a pivotal anime for a few reasons. One of them was that there was a technological change from producing anime with cels that get photographed on a multiplane camera to drawing the "cels" in a computer and compositing them digitally. Haruhi Suzumiya was not the first to be done with CG compositing but it figured out how anime would look with the new technology. So it looks far ahead of older stuff like Sailor Moon but looks behind something like Accel World or Bleach.
Story-wise it was an advance in postmodernization which was already well developed
https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...
but it used devices such as telling the story out of order and building systematically on tropes that seemed fresh at the time but now seem cynical to me.
- MAL was actually my source for thinking on this subject. In combination with the book Otaku: Database Animals[0] (anime fans catalogue the hell out of things, and this extends to tracking their anime and ratings) I realized you should be able to put together some very strong recommendations by scraping the MAL dataset — because the data should be fairly honest.
And then the realization that really the best recommendation isn’t to forge a new customized list altogether — it’s to simply find the most similar users and recommend items from their list. (MAL has/had a cosine similarity function for this, but no way to search because it’s basically an n^2 algorithm on 4M users; apparently they offered it at some point, and quickly found it untenable. That was what really kicked me off)
And then the realization that if I found users with similar taste, then shouldn’t they be friends? So then it becomes a MAL friendship algorithm..
Did a bunch of research on recommendation algorithms and weighting strategies, scraped most of the MAL users, stored it in a database, and then promptly procrastinated on actually implementing the algorithms. Been sitting on that for like 3 years now :|
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...
