Recently the excellent post by OldFashionedMillenial, titled "Is Disney Monopolizing Hollywood?," has been getting a lot of hits and general buzz. So the Editors That Be asked the Present Author to weigh in. What a fortunate pass this is because I happen to have a lot on my mind about Disney. See, I grew up in Southern California, in the south of L.A., and quite a bit of my time was spent in Anaheim, California, home to Disneyland itself. My step-dad worked there as a night engineer. He'd score me free passes and Disney swag all the time. On top of that, going to school in Southern California meant that every time there was a field trip, the whole class would go to Disneyland. And yet again on top of that, whenever I had friends from out of town to visit, I'd hopefully offer a few activities from the bountiful recreation opportunities in the golden state. We could go surfing, or check out a swanky restaurant I know, or take the Universal Studios tour in Hollywood, or - nope, I was always…
Pardon my round-eyed white idiot weeaboo indulgence, but your Present Author has been sent on a mission by the Editors That Be to explore vTubers(Virtual YouTubers, Japanese: Vユーチューバー, バーチャルユーチューバー). This is 21st century living at its most stereotyped: whole subcultures emerge and gain millions of followers within a couple of years, without most of the world quite knowing they exist. But I'm a techie and media geek first, so even I can appreciate that there's something happening here. We all expected that better AI and CGI technology would give us virtual celebrities sooner or later. That's all a vTuber is: a Virtual Youtuber, a real-life celebrity who never shows their face (almost), instead of having their movements motion-captured and animated through a virtual character, for whom they also provide the voice. Westerners may smirk and say "Hey, that's Max Headroom." Well, no, not quite. It's actually more like Black Mirror. Namely, The Waldo Moment way back in season two: Scary, isn't…
Score: 1.3
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