 Streaming. I got the pipeline all set up. We'll see how that stream goes. Go to the live dashboard. All right. It's Wednesday, June 13th, 2018. I'm rim and this is Geek Nights tonight. Um, a musume pretty derby. So as many of you know, uh, we complain a lot about the city of Boston here on Geek Nights because they're playing about any city that's not New York. Yeah. But when we complain about most big or bigger than New York, when we complain about most cities, we complain that they're, they're not as big as New York and we can't get a bagel at like five a.m. That's correct. But if I went even Tokyo, which is probably bigger than New York, I'd complain the train stopped running at night. Yeah. Well, the train stopped running almost everywhere to be on time the rest of the day. So I guess it evens out. Yeah. But it'd be just as crowded as the four or five more crowded depending on when you go. Uh, the seven is getting to the point where I need someone to help push everybody into the car. Yeah, I also got the bicycle. I couldn't use it today though. It rained. I couldn't use it because I had to end my day at a different office and I didn't want to go from one office to the other on a bicycle. No, because I have to set up my shit if I want to park the bike at that other office, every building like independent of my company, the buildings have their own management companies. And those are the people that actually have to follow that New York City law. So every building I have to comply with like that building's bike policy. So I gotta like register the bike and do all this bullshit. So I only did that for one building. But, uh, Boston, we complain about for different reasons, the specific things we complain about with Boston that are within the city of Boston's control, because the third thing is that it's always too cold there is that one bought the city of Boston has in my personal opinion, the worst drivers of any city on Earth. Boston is to this day, the only city I've ever been in where I've seen a person in a car drive backwards up a one way street the wrong way more than once. I think I've seen that happen at the majority of packs as I've been to in Boston. I mean, you know, it's it's right in Boston. You have the problem of the roads were designed in ancient colonial times. Yeah. It's like the very bottom of Manhattan with the colonial roads before you go further north with is the grid made in smarter. But you also have this weird social contract for people in Boston just don't respect the idea of following basic rules except that's the whole city and not just one part. Yeah. But even that, like people I've now I don't understand nowhere else on earth to do people just suddenly start driving backwards long distances. Like where does that happen? I didn't even have to do that in fucking Istanbul confirmation, but let's see. Let's keep an eye out for the next time we see that happen. And I suspect we'll see it happen in Boston. But number two is Boston forces all the conventions there, the nerd conventions to have ridiculous fake security. And it's gotten to the point like it's kind of why we stopped going to animate Boston because there's too much of a hassle to deal with. And if I had to stop going to a PAX, PAX East in Boston is the one I would drop first. I would rather go to San Antonio than the one in Boston. And there's an article about this because the city of Boston itself is having problems with the security. So the city both forces events to have this completely fake security that causes huge problems, especially for nerd conventions and the security they've mandated is breaking their own rules. So there's this article in this like universal hub, which is like a local Boston thing. I think it's like Boston's Gothamist. Like I don't really know the deal with it. But I see people in Boston retweeted a lot and no one else talks about it. But it actually has an article about this situation. And basically during PAX East, there were some doors that were locked that can't bet according to some rules in Boston cannot be locked when there are people in the convention center. But they were locked because people kept trying to walk in those doors instead of going through the metal detectors that were only in like two or three places. Now they shouldn't have any metal detectors and all those doors should be open. But basically the city of Boston is now fighting with the city of Boston. And it's a fight between like whoever makes that bullshit security happen and the BPD licensing detectives because apparently there's all these licensing rules around building, having doors open or closed. And they got involved because a bunch of cops noticed that at PAX East, there was a huge crowd of people trying to get out a door that was not only locked but duct taped shut. Like our country is so fucked up. And yet we're spending courts and judges and lawyers time because someone didn't open a goddamn door, even though they definitely should have opened that door. But yep, that door should be open. That's the important part. The point is, look how small potatoes this is. This is such a small potato that like a baby, you would make one French fry for the baby and they'd still be hungry. That's how small that potato is. So I don't, I bet, I guess I hope the city of Boston loses and the metal detectors disappeared at some point, even though I know that's going to be the result. What I really hope for is that PAX will someday just leave Boston and then I'll never have to go there for a nerd convention again. That's what I actually want. Thing that is unrelated to nerdery almost entirely, but you know, it only happens every four years. But people in the US at least might not be aware because the United States did not qualify for the World Cup, which begins tomorrow. Oh yeah, the World Cup. Football. People don't even know because we didn't qualify in this country and we don't care in this country. But it's kind of a big deal. Yeah. Well, isn't it being hosted here this year or next time? No, I saw something about it. Something being hosted North America. What? Maybe it's the next one. There was some big news I saw in the term. I didn't do. Yeah. 2026. UX, Mexico, Canada, joint bid wins FIFA hosting vote. Oh, well, that's the news I didn't see. Yeah. 2026. That's a long time for now. That's the next two times from now. So I guess they'll have to call it soccer for that one. No, both Canada and the US call it soccer. Only Mexico would call it football. It's FIFA. There are no S's in FIFA. Sifa. Okay. All right. All right, into the real news is so anyway, in the actual anime and animation news very briefly, just because not everyone seems to be aware of it. There is an anime con where we will probably go to it because it's in New York and we can literally take this moment. We're doing this in the news because I'm not announcing that we're doing anything at it. I'm saying that if you want an anime con, that's probably the packs of anime cons based on the first one that happened. The second one is happening and it does not overlap with packs unplugged. So you can actually go to it. It's November 16th, 17th, 18th in the Jacob Jaffet Center in New York City. So if you live near and up to New York City worth going, otherwise probably not. Yep. But still probably worth going if you're close enough. But something interesting I noticed because there are cons that are bad where you shouldn't go even if they're right next door. Yeah, but the one trouble with having a nerd con in New York City, like as much as I want packs to leave Boston, I do not want them to get a New York City because a con in New York City is fucking awful unless the only attendees are people who live in New York City. Like there aren't going to be hotel blocks for people in New York that are affordable or anywhere near the convention. Yeah, this time of year, hotels are not the cheapest. If you want to have a convention in New York City, the best time is February where hotel prices can go down from usuals of 500 to like 150 a night in places like downtown and such. But no one wants to come here in fucking February because it's fucking cold and snowy and you get caught in a blizzard and your flight will get delayed and you won't get home on time. Yeah. And that's why it's 150 a night as long as you're not staying in the touristy area where it's always 500 a night for a place with cockroaches. Yep. So it's happening. We'll probably be there. But the thing I noticed is that the panels because you know, there's some panels and I haven't submitted anime panels anywhere in a while. Like I had to think about what anime panel would even do. But the panel slots are an hour long. And there's no gaps. So the actual panel slots are actually 45 minutes long, like by default. So all the panels at this con are actually like really short format, which is going to be a lot of panels. Yeah, which changes up my whole methodology. It's not like a short convention. It's just when you make the panel slots 45 minutes, 15 minute breaks instead of one hour of 15 minute breaks. First of all, the schedule looks real nice. Yep. But second of all, you can cram in a lot of panels one per hour. I wonder like, I don't know why they did this. I didn't even know this was a thing until like three days ago. But the 45 minute panel slot is interesting because anime cons in particular, the gaming cons largely have this problem now too. Most of the panels are some industry person or panel is going to talk for five minutes and go straight to Q&A and they give away some swag. So you really lose nothing by making the panel slots shorter. Like nothing is lost by having them shorter. The same amount of content will be provided. But for us, it's interesting because like everything we've ever done in a con, we use the entire hours. I'd actually have to think of it. We might change the kinds of topics we talk about. We'll see. But anyway, this anime con is happening. And in some other news, being puppy cat is getting its second season. That's my news. I just said some other news. Welcome to talk about it. So the thing is, right, is the the cartoon hangover with our federator. I'm not even sure what the difference is. They seem to be one in the same as far as I can tell. But they, you know, they make a lot of cool cartoons that would like like a Bravest Wars and the being puppy cat and a bunch of other stuff that no one knows. But at first they would post these things on YouTube. And then I saw some of them because I kickstarted and they would email me links to watch them on other sites. And then eventually, like they were posting like their YouTube channel, which I'm still subscribed to, it wouldn't actually be posting full episodes and they'd be like links to some other site where you can watch them. And it was like, it was very confusing. There was no easy and straightforward way to just watch all the new episodes of the shows we like as they come out in full. And because of that, I sort of fell off their bus because they made it too hard to stay on that bus. So another thing that really hurt them was that they didn't put out content consistently, which is understandable because they were making animated TV, you know, quality episodes as good as like, you know, an episode of adventure time. Yet they were just some little indie place that didn't have a TV network or anything. It was going straight to YouTube. Yeah. Now, if they were just on YouTube, that's fine. Like I'm already used to these sort of ad hoc schedules. So it's understandable that they would not be putting out content super regularly, but they were putting it out super irregularly. Like when was the last being public at episode over a year ago? Something like that. And people like paid money and Kickstarter for these things. It's like, all right. But now they've it's this seems to be at least as set in stone as they can possibly be. There's going to be a full season of being public at episodes that are made. They're coming. The episodes are going to, there's important differences like changes. The episode is going to be half hour full length episodes now. Yeah. But they're going to, it's still like the same creative team behind the story and stuff like that. Yeah. Natasha is actually the showrunner. Natasha Legger is actually Rims favorite, Rims favorite crazy person. Yeah. We, we have a lot, we, we came to a shared understanding that we like a lot of the same things. But the actual you think I like weird internet shit? Well, the, the actual you've got another think. The work and the animation of the show is going to be done by O. L. M. Which is Pokemon. Oh, the studio that makes animates Pokemon. Yeah, it looks like it. So I mean, if they can animate all those episodes of Pokemon reliably, I'm sure they can animate episodes of being public at reliably if they get paid, which I assume they're going to be paid. So yep. So I wonder how much it costs, like how much do we have to save to make them animate what we want? I don't know. But what's interesting is so the creative like how much would it cost to get them to animate one 30 minute episode of Geek, Nice, the anime. But apparently the creative team is actually going to be living in Tokyo to work on the production of the season together with them. That's interesting. The only the only bad news here is I'm going to read two sentences from the article that that concerns you're going to be waiting a long time between now and episode one. They should have just kept their mouth shut until they had her already. No, I could live with that. I think there's a trailer or something. But here's the problem. There is. The series will be available through crunchy role. Sounds good. Parent company Elation's verb streaming platform. OK, so it's going to be in it's not going to be on Crunchyroll. So it's in the same place. It's hard to watch as all their other stuff. It's going to be the place that I don't go to like two episodes of Bravest Warriors and haven't seen the rest. Yeah, because I think I left off with the horse when the other dimension or something and I think I saw it all. The point is there was more stuff after that that I'm pretty sure I haven't seen because it's on some weird website. Probably this one you just mentioned. I mean the ways I watch shows today are Crunchyroll Netflix. Like I just have those subscriptions. Amazon Prime. I just have that. That's how it like I watch a lot of anime on Amazon because it's just there. Shows like Venture Brothers, like the other kinds of animation I like. I just buy them on Amazon. How much does that cost? I don't know, like 20 bucks a season. So how many seasons of say like, you know, of that show are there? Like seven. So he was paying a hundred and forty dollars to watch seven. I used to pay a hundred and forty dollars for one fucking season of anime. And also, more to the point, I pirated the first six seasons of Venture Brothers. So I felt like I can give them the 20 bucks. That sounds like a better plan. Yeah, that's fair. Like I'm paying for the shows that I'm continuing to watch. But if I could watch them on a platform that I actually used other than Amazon, I would. Yeah. And I just I wish shows like this would just be on YouTube or be on Crunchyroll. I do not want there to be a lot of streaming platforms. I want there to be like four. I think that they like made they made this deal with this other platform because they weren't making enough money on the YouTube's. But it's like, guys, that is a problem. Just go on and go on YouTube. Take the pittance of YouTube money and then sell the merch. Look how much, you know, we love finds. Got all those like cat bugs and puppy cat plushies and shit. And I can't imagine that sales of those are going up because I see when I see that booth at cons, it has less of those things at it than it used to. Why? Because you're not making a bunch of fans and you're not getting fans because no one can see your shit. You're better off making an army of fans and then making money later than you are trying to make money off the fans you got. See lesson comic books. So speaking of the monetization models of anime, I want to there's two issues around something that has been creeping into my Twitter timeline called Otaku coin. Luckily, most of the people who run into Otaku coin run into it in the context of someone else saying it's a scam and them saying, wait, what's this thing? But for those of you who are unaware, why are you even talking about this? You're making people aware of this when we should really just if the more you talk about it, the more you inflate it. He's not mention it so that it goes away. You say that a lot, but there is no evidence that is true in media. There is very true. In fact, there's more evidence that positive coverage from biased outlets coupled with lack of negative coverage from other people not talking about something is way more dangerous and that negative attention generally does not increase the scope of adoption. No, because look, you have you basically have people, even if there's one person saying, oh, my God, Otaku coins, oh, my God, if everyone else just shuts up, Otaku kind will be a small thing, less people even know it exists. See, you say that, but there's really no evidence to back that up. The evidence says the opposite by everyone continuing to even mention its name, you know, spread its name and everyone knows what the fuck it is. All right. That's not good. Well, aside from the lack of evidence to back anything you just said, the deal with Otaku coin is that in my personal opinion, it's just a scam. It's everything. Anything coin is a scam. We know this already. We know this. A lot of other people don't know. Don't go do any bullshit with fucking coins. God, dude, the SEC made a website that was a fake coin that was like obviously like the fakest shit. And if you click to try to buy any, it takes you to another SEC page that is like, yo, you just got tricked. Let me tell you how these things are scams. Yeah, they should. This is because people spread all this. Keep talking about bitcoins. People just shut up and ignored the Bitcoin. No, what happened? If people who are critical of something just shut up, then you've seated all ground to the grifters. You shouldn't shut what you know, it's not that you should shut up completely as you should not mention the name of the evil thing. You should be like, don't, you know, saying, don't do any coin bullshit. But when you have all these, you know, news articles like Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, actually saying the name of the thing, it's like Bitcoin Beetlejuice, right? And suddenly like the Google traffic on the thing goes up. And then all the people on Facebook will start, you know, so you believe that has a carry-on effect where all the marketers will try to get on top of it. So there's, you know, and everything. And people start writing articles about it because it's a big term, right? Don't say the word and then it won't become a big deal. OK, again, aside from the fact that there's zero evidence to back up all your baseless assertions, the deal with Otaku coin is that the scam here is that they want to get nerds to use these coins to choose, like, which anime get funded. Like, it's supposed to be this democratization of anime production, that the coin is the currency to tell the anime industry what shows should be invested in or get sequels. How do you get the coin? So that's the part I'm not going to get into, because it's all just a fucking scam. You just buy them with real money? I don't even know. Why don't you know what you could do is you could just say, hey, here's a website, here's a bunch of anime listed, donate real money to the ones you want made. Why do you need these coins as an intermediary? What effect do they have? Well, wait, donating money to corporations nakedly already runs into weird tax issues. So you're basically just using a coin to avoid taxes. No, it's way worse than that. The real issue in that. So the real issue here, the fundamental, the core premise coins aside is a problem. And this is increasingly becoming a problem in all fandoms. Like the Star Wars fandom is total horseshit now. We're going to talk about some horseshit anime in a second. But so the problem is that fans of anime and fans of movies and fans of things these days feel like because they're a fan of something that they should have some agency and ownership around the production of the thing they're a fan of. And that's utterly wrong. And that is a big part of why there's such a horrible toxic community around pretty much every fandom these days. Well, that's because, you know, part of it is just because nowadays the tools of production are democratized where anyone can make stuff, right? So in a world where anyone can make stuff, right, even though you don't have the resources to make, you know, something real. I mean, you guys, you could theoretically if you spent all fucking day sitting at your computer learning everything and working crazy hard and somehow eating only ramen or whatever, you could eventually make a real legit movie. But good luck. Yeah. But it's not just that is that fans will like they'll get invested in like they think a character should be treated as no, but I'm saying because you can create stuff, right? And by creating stuff and usually creating fan works utilizing other people's stuff, right? You know, you're not just even the people who are pure consumers are no longer just pure consumers. You're writing your fan fictions of Harry Potter. You feel like you're part of the Harry Potter deal and you can't make your fan fictions contradict the cannon. The cannon is messed up and it doesn't go with their fan fictions anymore. Now you're mad and such and such, right? So it's like you, you know, if we're all work, you know, instead of having the original creators used to have this status of I write everything and you consume and you don't make anything. All you do is consume. Whereas now they've been demoted to more of a, you know, lead leader among the partners who create in the same world, even though they didn't say that people just do it anyway. They just do it because you can't stop them, right? Everyone's got a copy of Adobe Vermeer and Photoshop and a word processor. But also creators or the individual people involved in production are now more accessible to Rando's like they might have a Twitter like you look in the credits and look up someone's name and Google them and find their Facebook and start harassing them and also your head can and didn't match up. Well, and also in the olden days, right? If I read a book and the book doesn't jive with you, first of all, even if you complain, no one can fucking hear you because you don't have the Internet to complain on, right? But two that doesn't really disrupt your day, right? It's like someone in the chat was like, we went from the author is dead to we killed the author. It doesn't really mess with your day, right? Whereas consider say a video game, especially, right? If you're playing a video game, that video game is like, you know, especially an online video game, you're in the community of that game. You're playing it maybe even competitively. You're heavily involved. If they change the rules of the game, you know, the authors, the people who run the game. If League of Legends adds a character or moves a character, changes a rule, makes a patch, nerfs someone, nerfs a card in a card game, right? That actually affects your day because you're so involved in it, right? Which is different from back in the day where someone changed something, you know, the creator changes something. It affects your life, none. So my take on Otaku coin is that it's trying to combine the ridiculous buzz around cryptocurrencies, which are mostly scams in my opinion with the fan desire to control the industry that makes the things they watch and they're basically feeding into two very powerful forces among people who live in basements and generally don't have many prospects in life so that if they have no control over their lives and they're just involuntarily in their basement being sad watching Hentai or whatever, they can take their special magic cryptocurrency and use that to get the anime titties they want produced. Right, what's going to happen if someone spends a zillion Otaku coins to get a specific anime tittie produced? I think. And then that anime tittie is not produced. Yeah, or what if it's produced but it's the wrong anime tittie? It's three titties like I recall. What are they going to do then? So do not engage with the Otaku coin if you know anyone who does. Don't engage with any coin ever. Except for like actual real money. Not just because of the coin but because it feeds into this toxic idea that people who are fans of things gain some sort of inherent ownership in the things of which they're fans. Right, if anyone believes in coin, right, tell them, all right, you believe in coins, you need to have value. All right, I just made Scott coin. You work eight hours a day it's your full-time job I'll pay you in Scott coin. Why don't we make Scott coin? I mean I can make it right now. Yeah, we can issue it to the bad the stream and the share. Everyone you get a billion Scott coins, they're worth nothing. I'm saying we only issue like six of them. Okay, why? Just six. Why? I don't know, see what happens. All right. But anyway, things of the day. So I found this really cute comic and I think you've probably seen it around. People retweeted occasionally. I hadn't until you tweeted it. Yeah, that's a I've seen some of these comics before but now I see where it came from. It's just poorly drawn lines. They don't. They seem not so poorly drawn or better drawn than anything I could ever draw. For sure. But I don't know. This is my type of very simple humor. It's like Perry Bible Fellowship Adjacents. Is how I describe this type of humor. Humor adjacent. Yeah. It's really. All right. Just be a crab. Don't fuck this up. I really like this comic and I hope you do too. So what do you got? Oh, so this thing happened like a little while ago. It's not the newest news. But it's it's actually like continuing the snowball of it. It didn't just stop when it hit its end. So late last year, some I think some girl somewhere, she made this Twitter account called like Weezer Africa. And she basically just wanted Weezer the rock band to cover the song Africa by Toto. You know the song. That song. Right. Which is a Mimish song. Well, the song is these days. The song's really like on the upswing in terms of being used in memes. And it's been sucking my head for like a year now for some reason. Yeah. No, it's it's a big song in Mimeland along this day. No one seems along with like Ocean Man. Yeah. And a couple other and Sandstorm. Yeah. Anyway, but this person really, really, really wanted Weezer to cover this song and started a Twitter account dedicated Weezer to cover this dedicated solely to this purpose. And so and then they started cleverly tweeting they made really clever tweets trying to encourage Weezer to cover the song. And then they got followers and then they got like wrecking somehow people discovered this Twitter account that was dedicated to one purpose and one purpose only. And like, you know, radio stations, I think some morning shows talked about it or it was written up in some, you know, local shmo papers and, you know, I started to get attention. Right. And then over time there's only it took like a few months. Right. Eventually, like, it actually got noticed and Weezer posted a cover on Spotify of a different song by Toto that was not Africa. That is a plus that responds. And then they actually did eventually cover Africa. Looks like Weezer finally blessed the reins. Yes, exactly. Africa. And now they're going even further. They're like performing it somewhere with the guy from Toto. On Jimmy Kimmel apparently. Yeah. It's yesterday. Right. It's like getting bigger and bigger all the time. So I didn't find out about it until like maybe a week before they actually did the cover. And like I sort of put it out of my mind and it didn't become a thing in today. And then it happened and I saw that news and then I forgot about it. But the fact that it's still going and like, I can't believe it's snowballing. It seems like the kind of thing that was like, ah, they covered it the end. No, it's not the end. It's going to keep going. What other song will they cover next? Who else will attempt to make a Twitter account with one small dedicated purpose and fail because this is the only person who can ever do it and have it be a thing. It'll hit the peak when Rick Astley. Maybe in like 10 years someone else can try this again with everyone's forgotten about this and try to make someone do something with a one Twitter account or whatever it is. The two possible things for this are either Rick Astley covers Africa or there is a world tour concert of a ton of famous acts. And all they do is each cover Africa. We should have Toto cover Weezer. Oh, Dara Day cover everything and then Dara Day covers everyone else. And then everyone else does the sandstone. Is Toto even like it's still around? I guess they're still around. I don't know. Like I don't know what bands are alive or dead. If you live in New York City met a moment. All right. So into the met a moment. All right. So this Saturday if you live in New York City and you can get on the 7 train and go to Queens on Saturday night there is a free concert. Zero dollars. You don't even get fucking ticket. You just walk your ass right up. And the concert is I can't believe they're still alive which is why I just thought of it. Performers of such great hits as. Celebrate. Jungle Boogie. What really? Cool and the gang is for free free concert. In Fleshing Corona World. So you can get on the seven train and go to Queens on Saturday night. There is a free concert zero dollars. In Fleshing Corona Park this Saturday night. Maybe we should go. I was going to go bike over my girl. All right. Yeah. In the rest of the met a moment. We will see you hopefully at all the taxes that are coming up. But right now it's summer. Just chill time. Try to make some YouTube videos. Be warned. We're only really making YouTube videos when it rains. So if you really want like a lot of antenna episodes to come out in a hurry. You got to hope that it rains like every goddamn weekend. But we are continuing the Utena series. Geek Nights presents Utena. We did put an episode out. I'm already doing pre-production for episode 17 which is an actual non-nanami like good dual episode. And otherwise follow our YouTube stuff and join the Geek Nights forum. There's been a slight uptick in forum activity recently as a few people when I say a few like two people but. Oh honest room appeared what have both expressed that there because the Geek Nights forum we had it used to be way bigger and people kind of scattered. Goes up and down and up and down. Usually like what'll happen is like a listener will come and hang out for a while when they make an account and then go away. Yeah. But based on the stats you you're all fucking lurking there's a shit ton of lurkers because I can see you. Yep. I can see your numbers at least how many of you there are a lot of you but the people there are people who have to get into the point where you make a habit of keeping it open in a tab and like constantly reloading it like once a day. And once you get to that point that's when you're and a lot of people have that habit but they never post because they're lurkers but then there's other people who have that same habit and also aren't afraid to type. Yeah. And we need more of those people because that's like 10% of the people. One of my favorite things is when someone says something controversial or that might that could clearly cause an argument and you see a little icon that shows like eight people all simultaneously typing. It shows you when someone is typing. Yeah. Which is great because a lot of times I'll write a long post and then delete it. Yeah. I'm not posted and people someone knew that I was typing something. Yeah. They were waiting for it and I never got posted or I come back later and I write it again. Think about it some more. But the forums getting this slight uptake and activity and the sentiment seems to be that other places people had gone to for their like fandom specific talk have gotten increasingly toxic for all the same reasons we just talked about without talking about it. I think this is a general effect. And also a summer effect is that people who have out of school. Well, it's like people who kids are at school. People in the summer are going out and doing stuff and not sitting home posting online. Right. And just in general people who have people who are good people have better shit to do than post like posting an online communities tweeting Facebook Instagramming. None of these things are like necessities in life. You could just never do anything. Most people never do any of those things. And the benefit of doing those things is actually not that great. Well, you know what? I just do it because I like doing it. Yeah. It's the same as, you know, the other thing that Geeknize used to complain about a lot and we do less now that we live in the city where these don't exist. Homeowners associations. The people who run homeowners associations tend to be the worst people with the least to do. Right. So the people who post online are the worst people with the least to do. And then the people doing it like us. Of course, we're not the best people. But the fact that the Geeknize forum has a higher barrier to entry than most other online communities. Right. Well, the reason is, right, is because if you're dumb, you get run out of town. The horse he rode in on. Right. There's obvious reasons. Number one, to become a member, you have to be accepted. Right. You put an application and you write down a reason for joining. And a lot of people I think may have been valid joiners. But their reason for joining wasn't like some people have written stuff like want to talk about video games. And that was probably a real person. I've rejected that. I'm just like, first of all, I can't guarantee you a real person. And second of all, that's not, you need to prove to me that like you're a Geeknize listener who's actually interested in joining the community. Or at least a human being. Right. Somebody, you know, someone wrote something as simple as like, I want to talk to other Geeknize listeners. That's enough. I can tell that this is a real human being who wrote a complete sentence. Something like that where I can tell. Aha. You know, we've maintained a very high like the community, like the activity ebbs and flows, but the community is pretty high bar. Like you cannot get away with being a shithead in here. You get run out of town pretty quick and you get run out of town from by your own shame. Very few people have ever been banned from this forum. Yeah, no. It's it's usually just people who are the bad kind of person. It's not a comfortable place for them. Yeah. It's the same way that like land is a place for a fish. Yeah. If if you need if you need toxic misogyny to breathe, you can have a lot of trouble breathing in the Geeknize forum. So let's talk about Umu Musume. All right. So we we saw this show first on when we did our judging anime by its cover, which we're going to do. We're going to do it again soon. Yep. Now we've watched some of it. I watched one or two episodes that I remember. I watched one and a half episodes. I saw all I need to see right. So what the show is is an anime where the characters happen to be girls, but they're horse girls. Not not like centaurs, but they're like cat girls, but they have horse ears and horse tails. Now already I feel like that was a lost opportunity. I was actually kind of disappointed that they were just girls with horse ears. Anyway, and they participate in horse races like Kentucky Derby only Japan. Yep. Whatever their horse racing equivalent is. And they all they go to school for horse racing and high Q. I felt it was going to like I really felt it was going to follow the battle athletes template. Yeah. I thought it was going to be a sports anime only. It just happened to be, you know, the characters happen to be these, you know, horse girls. And I thought we would learn about horse racing and taking care of horses, but that that characters happen to be this way to appeal to Otaku's right. And I watched it and I was 50% correct. I'd say at least 50% correct. Because that the reveal in the second half of the first episode is that the show there's some perversion going on, which totally saw that coming. Yeah. We'll get back to that. That's obvious. That's obvious. It's not the kind of perversion I expected and it's arguably way worse. Yes. But I expected the thing I did not expect is that it would also be an idle show. A dad did not know that at all. But apparently the deal is that when you if you win a horse race, then you go that horse girl gets to go on stage or something or whatever. Which already even the really quiet horse who's the fastest girl ends up going on stage and singing like without any cowardice at all. So on one end you can make this like meta narrative argument that the show is about the dehumanization of the idle like the process of creating idols in modern pop music production. They compete and fight with each other in order for the chance to sing on stage. They're commoditized. The reward argument is just being more productive for the company that groomed that. Like you can make this whole argument but no, it's just for otaku fan service. Yeah. This show is so people who want to see cute horse girls interacting in a semi moe semi sports like half moe is one horse. There's one horse girl for every different possible personality. So there's going to be your favorite one of the harem show where there's no self insert character. It's basically like the school has the elite horse racing team and then there's the joke horse racing team and of course the joke one is going to eventually become the super one. And the joke team is basically two joke girls the main character and the best horse racing girl who just who's like the champion who just quit the good team for some reason and you know when the the new girl is oh my god she came from the you know the the what's it called the sticks like every other anime and she doesn't know how to use the subway she's the transfer student and oh my god now she's moved to the big city she's a horse from the country right obvious main character but the the main what's it called and whatever what protagonist no the one the super fast horse girl oh yeah the one who's like the number one most popular horse girl yeah she's like all super quiet this one right why did she quit the super team to come to the joke team there's probably a plot there I'm not going to watch much more of this but when the main character come to the city for the first time she randomly encounters some pervy dude right so this is the part that bothers me the show and then she kicks him in the face like a horse and he doesn't die though yeah he looked like he did it first oh she can run super fast cause she's a horse but she looks like a girl except for the tails the seat of the show because the conceit of the show is our real life universe exists and the souls of horses from our universe get transferred randomly as far as we can tell into pregnant women in this other mirror universe that is the same as our universe except all horses are just horse girls I thought that it was my mom fucked a horse yeah didn't you watch the intro explains this no I did not yeah souls of horses end up from our world end up in this world like that's it they just get right past that oh also the all the horse characters have names that are similar to the kinds of names that resources have from what I saw most of them are actual names of like what's her name like special week yeah they're all real horses which means I hope that both of these nuts is gonna show up to be the real main character in like season 4 both of these nuts definitely and if both of these nuts appears and it will most of me let me know and I will start watching again now it does a lot of cute things right like when the girls use a phone they like hold the earpiece up to their real ear and then they like bring it down to talk like it solved the problem of why is that cat girl holding a cell phone next to the side of her head instead of her ear but what bothers me and the main reason I'm not gonna watch the rest of the show at all other than the fact that it wasn't perverted in the ways I expected it wasn't just like that low key fan service you get from these I think there is some horses with big boobs or sexy legs or whatever I kind of expected that to be the level of like creepy fan service but it wasn't the creepy part was that we're introduced to this character who's an important recurring character who straight up assaults the main character in episode 1 like multiple times and that is already normalized in the show as well yeah it's a horse girl you gotta like check out her whatever you gotta grow her legs to see how strong she is and then that person immediately become is like the coach of the crappy team and somehow is obviously some sort of genius who's gonna help them all win with his strategies that character should not still be in the show and suddenly all the first episode like the narrative around that character and they don't resolve it in any way it's just like what we trust him now I guess he's our coach he's gonna help us win if that scene in the first episode had instead been he died when he was kicked and we never hear of that again that would have been fine but the fact that he is an important character that is a relationship with all these girls that alone is actually a reason to just now watch the show to be able to review it it's lighthearted generic anime high production value look at all these girls that are acting in a school there's also tons of like music because they sing whenever someone wins a race or whatever it's really well animated like everything about it's beautiful it's really colorful because it's you know I do appreciate like it is really really colorful and there's a lot of characters and it's pretty typical anime but I can't say that I recommend it to anyone to actually watch like idols and shit and doesn't mind some you know all these girls getting groped by this dude and you know only being mad once yep like I don't the fact that they just let that go and don't bring it up again not cool then you can watch this show if you're you know if you're the kind of otaku who will buy a body pillow unironically and have it in your bed and the show is for you or I guess if you're on the other side of the coin you can just why not go all the way just have like a giant centaur if they were centaurs this show would be better cause then well then when she kicked that dude he would have actually died and that would have been the end of that stupid arc if a horse kicks you you will probably die yeah they do there is I think that there is one nice scene where it's like she's at the train station and she's like when she got off this train too early or late like a station away from where she's the horse that's one thing I do appreciate though the show is very married to its core conceits and little kinda like my little pony actually did this too very small details that relate to those things like their horses they run whatever are appropriate and always right like the consistency of the treatment of those little world details is extreme to the point that the kanji for the word horse except it removed like two of the legs like little details like that I really appreciate when a show has this almost slavish consistency on these really dumb minor points but otherwise I don't think the show is actually worth watching and I don't think anyone should really bother watching it yeah if you wanna watch a sports show you can watch your pedal where the last episode that I saw basically they spent it was 50 minutes of that episode they had still not crossed the finish line but they had done flashbacks of the three characters who could possibly cross that finish line first yeah I mean initial D for all I love it it's a bunch of non-race episodes and then an episode that's getting ready for the race well the problem in initial D you're racing a bunch of different people in separate races in your pedal it's pretty much there's all these other races but they only care about this pretty much there'll be a few episodes like half a season of characters developing and setting up and then the rest of the show for another season and a half is just the race and then they do it again three times cause high school is three years yep say up easy anime review and we're done I guess I should do the patreon thing