Was just reading some articles and a lot of wealthy areas have lost a lot of the homes in them, which is honestly somewhat surprising, but fire does not descern between poor and wealthy after all. IIRC, environmentalists make controlled burns controversial in left-wing areas, so that's a lot of why wildfires happen in the first place, when they aren't done via arson anyways.

As many of you may or may not know, there is still a strike going on between SAG-AFTRA, the main actors union, and various studios over the use of said actors voices to train AI voice generation models.

The long and short of it is that voice actors see what the studios are trying to do, know that isn't in their contracts, and want no part of it. But because the strike is still ongoing and several studios haven't come to agreement on this subject, there are still shows and games that are being affected, such as Genshin Impact.

This came to mind, because I started playing Genshin Impact again, and am seeing through datamining that for the Lantern Rite event (the in-game annual event celebrating the Lunar New Year/Chinese New Year), there are over a dozen playable characters who will not be voiced, which includes of the playable cast from Liyue (the second nation you go to in Genshin, based off of pre-WWI China). I know how most of the people here feel about English voice actors, but I do hope the various studios come to an agreement with SAG-AFTRA at some point, because I didn't even realize the strike hadn't ended until now.

I was checking my bank account because I had family members who said they were going to send me money, and I saw that the IRS sent me over a thousand dollars and I had no idea why. Apparently, my mom told me that the IRS said on the news that they were finally going through the backlog of misfiled stimulus checks from COVID and sending them out, so I guess thank you IRS. Just curious if anyone else randomly got money from the IRS, because I saw that it showed up in my bank as a tax refund and got really confused because I already got my federal refund this year.

I'm currently trying to find the best deals for a domestic cross-country flight and forgot that some airlines still use Boeing planes, which I'd rather not fly on right now. The last time I flew on a plane, I went American Airlines and flew the longer flights on Airbus planes. I refuse to fly Spirit, but other than that, I'm just curious because another thing I didn't know is how much airlines struggle to stay profitable.

It's been a while since I made a V-Tuber news post, but the events of the past two days made it pretty clear that doing so now is necessary.

Sakamata Chloe, a member of Hololive JP's sixth generation, 'Secret Society holoX' (usually just called holoX), will be 'concluding her channel activities', similarly to Amelia Watson, on January 25th, 2025. Laplus Darkness, another member of holoX explains that she understands why Chloe is leaving, because even she says the amount of work that she expected from Hololive is a lot more than she previously expected, and that workload is a lot of why Chloe has chosen to leave.

The big news that got me to want to make this post today is that Ceres Fauna, a member of Hololive EN's second generation 'Council' (now 'Promise' with the graduation of Sana Tsukumo and addition of IryS to the group), will be graduating from Hololive on January 3rd, 2025. She isn't planning on leaving the door open with the affiliate status, like Amelia and Chloe are/have, once she leaves, that is the last that we will see of the Ceres Fauna persona. She specifically states that her reason for graduation is 'disagreement with management, and that she liked being an idol, that she was getting more comfortable with singing. This is notable because with Amelia and Minato Aqua, who have both left, Aqua choosing to graduate, their reasons for leaving were moreso for the sake of their creativity, as Amelia, now dooby3D, has an entire motion capture studio in her home that she mostly wasn't allowed to use in Hololive, and Aqua's problems were with the workload outside of streaming, which leads to something that I actually didn't know until last night.

Cover Corp went public this year, and Motoaki Tanigo, also known as Yagoo, was essentially forced to make Cover go public or be forced to sell the company. Cover was originally a tech company that only started the V-Tubing aspects of things because the person behind Tokino Sora wanted to become a virtual idol. This was done with the help of venture capital money, and because more people are learning this, a large portion of the viewerbase is blaming this new string of graduations and leaving on the investors pushing the girls to lean more and more into the idol aspects of being a vtuber, when a large portion of the fanbase mostly watches streams, and doesn't really care about the concerts. Who knows where this will take us, but Cover Corp going public, and Fauna graduating when there weren't any real signs that she was having problems is going to stain Cover for the foreseeable future. If the investors try to push Cover towards Nijisanji's route, I think everyone will simply be pissed out of their mind and the company will crash and burn for the sake of investors' short term gain.

I have seen conflicting reports of Sakamata Chloe's PL, but here are both of Fauna's channels. The non-ASMR channel has exploded in subscriber count within the past 18 hours since her announcement, as it started at 71k subscribers and has exploded to over 200k subscribers since the announcement of her graduation.

Asking this because that’s why the feds are doing this to Alex Jones and it’s been so long that I honestly only remembered that because of the posts from earlier.

In the other thread, there was no discussion going on other than complaining about Js, so I'm trying to figure out what those two leading it actually means. Linda McMahon was previously the administrator of the Small Business Administration under Trump, and is the wife of Vince McMahon, former CEO of WWE and one of Trump's closest friends. I very much am hoping that nothing about Trump comes up during the investigation of Vince, but outside of that, Linda being a part of his transition team already makes perfect sense.

Who is Howard Lutwick? Does him being the head of a primary dealer of the Federal Reserve automatically make him awful? What are his policies, who does he know, how does he know Trump? All of these are honestly 1000000x more important than the fact that he is a member of the "Triple Parentheses Gang", so because I've never heard of him before today, why would Trump have chosen him?

Edit for original thread link: https://kotakuinaction2.win/p/199hSZOad3/meet-the-new-cochair-of-trumps-t/c/

From my understanding of how tariffs as a whole work, the government(s) of the country the imports come from do not pay the tariffs, the company actually importing the good does, and the vast majority of companies will simply hike the price of a product up so they make the same amount of money, and pass the tariff onto the customer. This is one year where I honestly completely checked out of policy, so I'm not sure what tax incentives or other incentives that Trump said he would implement so that companies won't just keep using the cheap foreign labor and raise the prices on American customers. What are those incentives, because I highly doubt that companies are going to all of a sudden pay Americans decent wages for the labor just because of the tariff.

Not only did Trump win, but by quite a margin.

Your accelerationism doesn’t work, if it worked, people would’ve fedposted IRL due to the lockdowns, so I’m glad that last night was able to get the message out that yes, voting does in fact matter.

For those who do not know what happened, yesterday was the Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway, which was one of the most blatantly corrupt races I've ever seen, but to give a TL;DR of the situation:

Chevrolet told several of the teams that drive its cars to make a blockade in order to guarantee that at least one of its drivers, this time William Byron, would be able to make the Championship 4 race happening this Sunday. This blatant collusion was recorded on several drivers' radios being communicated by their spotters and crew chiefs, which is bringing into question the validity of the current 'playoff' format.

It sucks, and god I wish we went back to the full season format, or at max, the 10 race Chase, because the 'playoffs' don't even boost ratings, which I'd imagine is NASCAR's goal.