There's a controversy going around on Tumblr (wow, what an enticing lede) about a senior staff member doxxing a poster that's leading some to discuss leaving the platform. I'm not familiar enough with what's going on to comment extensively. I tried to research it and got only so far as some screengrabs of said staff member disclosing said poster's alts, all of which included the name of some sort of bodily fluid, in an attempt to bolster a case that the user was posting sexually-explicit content that violated platform guidelines. I have no idea if she actually was posting content that violated guidelines. You got the sense from the text that the exec had been trying to make a sensible case but had gotten so fed up with the counterarguments that he resorted to a tactic he shouldn't have. Execs can sound very reasonable when advocating ridiculous shit, though.
The takeaway from this very Tumblr controversy - outside the propriety issue, which does matter, of course - is that a higher-up at Tumblr is getting fed up with the platform's users, justifiably or not. I don't think anything that makes Tumblr a further pain in the neck to its owners bodes particularly well for the health of the platform in its current anemic circumstances. Tumblr's latest owners tried a monetization initiative - weird merchandise, a livestreaming platform that ended up essentially just porn (so much for platform guidelines), original blog content from the site runners and an attempt to introduce daily topics - which failed. They've eliminated all of it; the platform now runs bare-bones. This is seen among posters as a good move, freeing Tumblr of the irritations of monetization, but I don't agree. Fewer irritations are soothing, of course, but businesses exist to make profit. If something is actively costing a business money, there's no hope of getting more money from it (either from selling it - it's a radioactive property at this point - or monetizing it), and they've demonstrably stopped efforts to put anything into the platform, it typically means they're gonna cut their losses and shut it down. Perhaps that's not what's going to happen, of course, but I don't think, as many do, it's alarmist to prepare for the possibility.
I created this blog after I left Tumblr for a bit due to dunderheaded politics, and I'm ambivalent about my going back there (a decision made in large part to support a friend). One thing is that 95% of the time, I'm just reblogging various stuff about games I played 20, 30, 40 years ago - which can be fun, and there's good content, but I'm trying to cut down on demands on my time, and this doesn't seem like the most vital or creative use of it. Another thing is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of all issues to oversimplify, has become the new dunderheaded politics thing - an attempt to solve with glib sloganeering, language policing, and demands for lockstep agreement something that's literally been a metaphor for an intractably complex quagmire for decades. I don't think many of us, safe and snug in our beds in a portion of the world unthreatened enough to obsess about shipping and fandoms, have much useful to say about it. I know the answer is to ignore the ignorant stuff posted, and there are folks who do that well, but it still seems that I'm in a way endorsing the platform by using it, particularly since the Tumblr staff feed is enthusiastically reblogging this view of the conflict. The third thing is that Tumblr is, well, Tumblr, home to a lot of exhausting folks who make their personal problems exclusively the province of other people and who fuel their self-esteem by yelling at others. Again, there are many folks who run blogs free of this, but it's so endemic to the platform that I frequently wonder, you know, why am I here, as a largely self-actualized adult.
Well, one reason is to have a place to publicize things - however feebly; Tumblr's reach has plummeted, and if a post is in the double digits, it's doing big numbers. For another, there are people on there I like and with whom I'd like to stay in some sort of contact, even if that contact consists only of liking and reblogging each others' posts occasionally. It does seem like the cons outweigh the pros on most days, though.
However: at least Tumblr is public and, to a degree, searchable. In the wake of the recent controversy, I've seen folks urging their followers to go to their individual Discords to keep in touch - which is understandable. What makes it frustrating to me is: Discord resources, to the general public, may well as not exist. You can't find them through search engines. They're not archived. Once they're closed, everything on them is up in smoke. (In my particular case, the entire platform's blocked off, because you need to be able to receive texts to register, but that's a me thing.) I like home-grown sites, but walling off everything from all but an inner circle is dispiriting to me.
I'm not a social media person, but I've found a lot of neat stuff through public accounts with which I don't interact directly, sometimes on platforms I'm not even on. Recently: a D2 comic anthology with a short story by Akari Funato, and a collection of observations from a Baten Kaitos playthrough from a game engine programmer, compiled from and linked to on Twitter. Conversely, the Angelique stuff on my site still gets traffic from the long-defunct Angemedia LiveJournal community - even moribund social media platforms and posts can serve as a wealth of information, if they show up on search.
And now a lot of that's going into walled gardens, available to no more than a handful of people and then never to be seen again. It's some sort of dark inverse of the old web: something more individual than social media, yes, but really more like balkanized. Not independent in the way of personal websites - and not the big, shared project of Web 1.0, where anonymity reigned, freedom of information was king, and your ideas and contributions made you who you were. Now, once again, it's all about who you know.
Fake ETA: As I was putting this post together, news broke about Tumblr making a deal to scrape user posts for AI training data, which certainly is an acceleration of the plotlines involved. This will put a damper on one of Tumblr's few remaining strengths, user art, particularly given dwindling user engagement; as one artist leaving the platform at the news put it: "#ten notes in return for being plagiarized thanks i won't then." I can't imagine Tumblr staff aren't aware of this, which signifies a) they're focused on getting any revenue they can out of the platform by any means, and b) they don't care how many users they lose or tick off. Both of which point to dim prospects for the platform.
Someone's leaked the next two upcoming chapters for Dead by Daylight - past the immediately-upcoming "SCP + goth girlfriend" one that just had a beta, I mean. The source has apparently been right about everything since the Alien chapter, so the leaks seem solid.
One of the chapters is a collaboration with an extremely well-known gaming franchise that hasn't been represented in DbD previously. If you don't care about getting spoiled on Dead by Daylight, I urge you to click the readmore (even if you don't care about DbD!), as the reaction is pretty hilarious.
It wasn't a significant other, as is usual; it was a friend. For the record, Dream Friend was trying to sell this 4-CD set Dream Me had that was largely of Lunar fangames - which I don't think exist at all, in real life? These had somehow gotten professionally published, despite having covers consisting of the logos sketched in pen on notebook paper; there were also one or two representatives of other franchises like Panzer Dragoon or Breath of Fire or something in there. Anyhow, Dream Friend was like, hey, it's all right if I sell your fangame set to cover my bills, right? (they were already halfway through the sales process before they asked, IIRC), and I was like, no, and then I got to wondering if they'd stolen or sold anything else of mine on the sly to take care of their financial problems when the dream ended.
Like most reasonable people, I had always considered being mad at someone for something that happened in a dream ridiculous. The thing I'd overlooked, through: dreams are a product of your subconscious, and the reason why you get so mad at your dream friends' antics is because they're illustrative - metaphorically if not literally - of something their real selves are actually doing.
(Which genre? It's up to you.)
I don't usually participate in pile-ons, but this one is relative to translation issues I've discussed previously in this space. A YouTuber and voiceover artist wrote a long Patreon post extensively trashing a recent anime release he helped localize. The licenser subsequently released a statement that they would not be working with him in the future, citing disappointment at his "lack of professional discretion."
Simple cause and effect at work, but the reason why the story's picked up steam, I think, is how utterly unhinged the author comes across in the blogpost, both in his rampaging ego and utter lack of self-awareness. I have never seen anyone shoot themselves in the foot so spectacularly. The very idiom seems painfully inadequate. He missed the foot and instead blew out his entire brain cavity.
- Outside of the ego on display, the blogpost is a superb argument for why this individual should not be writing anything, much less a dub script, where editing and time constraints are of paramount importance. It goes way too long for the little it says. His argument that the anime sucks consists of him just repeating that it sucks over and over, with the expansive vocabulary of Homer Simpson from that "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" segment. There are a few objections where he affords a degree of detail, but for the most part, he considers evidence beneath him - he's so self-evidently brilliant, after all, that any reasonable person would instantly agree with whatever he says! No one but someone completely blinded by their own narcissism could write this and believe it portrays their argument or themself in a good light.
- I've said it before, but: These people are always hell with whom to work. Their ideas are always terrible, and they insist that they are brilliant with unwarranted Dunning-Kruger confidence. They never get any better at their jobs, because they consider other people ants beneath their notice and therefore disregard any feedback. Their egos suck all the air out of the room. You cannot explain their suckitude to them, such is the magnitude of their suck. They actively detract from a project, and they are such hateful headaches with whom to deal personally - completely uncooperative, kneejerk dismissive, and profoundly ignorant of the most basic aspects of their jobs. And yet, like our Hemingway here, they can't stop bleating: "I'm so great and everyone else sucks! My genius is the sole saving grace of this project! You're so lucky I'm so spectacular and that I filled it up with me, me, me!" (Actual quote: "I am a romantic and love writing Actual Good Romance (tm) because nobody else on earth seems to know how to do it.")
- Incidentally: I've seen claims in forum discussions that the author was not, contrary to his credit-jumping, the head writer but that the "Marissa" mentioned was. I do not know if this is true but can completely believe this dude's rapacious ego and complete narcissistic disrespect for anyone who isn't him would lead him to steal credit from someone else.
- In a rare glimpse of self-awareness, the author admits that it's normally unprofessional to disparage a project on which you've worked and your coworkers by name immediately after said project's release, but he explains that he has what he believes to be a complete Get out of Jail Free card: he's an independent contractor, which oh, my God, you fucking idiot. (One: The vast majority of translation and localization-related work, game-related or otherwise, is done under independent contract. Nintendo's Treehouse and its stable of full-time employees, while one of the most visible faces of game translation, is an extreme exception, and even Nintendo uses independent contractors for some projects. Two: Even as an independent contractor, you will typically be under an NDA, which usually excludes disparaging the company or project by name for a set period of time. Three: Even if you're not under NDA, or your NDA does not have a non-disparagement clause, it is extremely inadvisable to advertise yourself to potential employers and coworkers as a toxic, narcissistic, backstabbing jackass without a shred of discretion or self-restraint when it comes to discussing your professional projects.)
The author does manage, despite himself, to let slip a few bits about the project that seem like genuine cause for concern - such as the oddly-offhand claim that the dub was localized and acted primarily through uncompensated work from professionals doing it piecemeal as a "favor." I have a lot of questions about this, but the info is coming from such a thoroughly unreliable source that I doubt anything is going to get usefully resolved without clarification from other quarters. Likewise, perhaps the heroine is indeed a complete sociopathic train wreck, but the author is such a demonstrably poor judge of appropriate human interaction that I'm going to need outside confirmation. (He's so emotional in ranting over and over about her, in a manner not commensurate to the misconduct of which he accuses her, that I have to think personal issues are involved to some degree.) The claimed treatment of the trans character is what gives me the most genuine pause: the show comes from the mid-2000s, a time when popular attitudes in the U.S. and Japan toward trans people were largely ignorant, but the "running joke" cited in the text sounds really...indigestible, let's say. I've seen discussion that the character was considered a historic stepping-stone in trans representation, but what was historic doesn't always sit well in the modern day. I'd have to watch the show itself and get more context to have a useful opinion, but I will say the author's discussion of how to handle material in this vein that would be considered inappropriate today is the closest he comes to acting as a professional, responsible localizer.
Outside of that, let me say this: As a translator, you're going to handle source material with which you don't get on perfectly. I have had projects where I actually kind of relieved I ended up for other reasons going on to something else, as I indeed didn't like the franchise. And if you feel really strongly that a project is irredeemable trash, you need to quit. (Even if it's only for self-preservation, to ensure that trash isn't associated with your good name!) Once you are committed to a project, though, I feel that being a translator or localizer imparts a duty of custodianship: to try to understand what those who like a piece of media see in it, and try to bring that out in your work. This guy is so full of himself that I can't imagine an attempt was even made in that department.
The guy needed to be fired, and I hope he doesn't work in localization for a long time. People like him plow projects into the ground, and I feel so sorry for whoever had to clean up after this chucklefuck.
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