A friend of mom's is getting married in Cancun so she decided to make it a trip for both me and her, and it's been interesting since we first got past TSA, which was interesting itself because the TSA at our first airport (the smaller local one only about 20-30 minutes from the house) had zero white people as staff, at least at the moment.

We flew American Airlines, with American Eagle for the connecting flight, and the one "interesting" thing about it was that the sole flight attendant, a black woman with short hair, once we landed at the larger airport we flew to Mexico from, decided to talk about an "all-female flight crew", which for that connecting flight was a grand total of herself, as the pilots were two white dudes. Just something I wanted to put in since it came to mind.

The flight to Mexico was itself uneventful, we had a crew of 4 white, female flight attendants and two white guys as the pilots.

Once we got to Mexico, there's a place to scan your passport and your face, or you could go in line to get the stamp. Once it scanned my face, I got a receipt paper printed out with a QR code that functions as the stamp, as we cannot get out of Mexico without scanning that QR code at the airport. Once we got the taxi van to the resort we're staying at though, we passed by like five or six trucks of fully armed Mexican feds brandishing assault rifles openly. I knew the cartel problem was bad, but I didn't think I was going to pass by that many feds. We also passed by a Nickelodeon themed water park, which looked interesting because at the top of the gate was Spongebob, Arnold, one of the Rugrats, Timmy Turner and Jimmy Neutron, simply due to the character selection as three of those series have been dead for over 10 years.

That's all for tonight, as I came back from dinner at the resort and am now in the room hanging out as I didn't really wanna hang out with mom's friends, but the trip to Mexico and the resort was a bit eye-opening, if only because of that one flight attendant.

I just woke up so I won't be summarizing too much of it since I'm groggy as fuck, but the last two nights of wrestling have been really good, and I'm very excited to see what this Triple H era of WWE has in store for us.

I started doing research on the whole Selen/Dokibird situation when it was happening and made a post on here, but I didn’t really watch VTubers so I left it at that. After watching way too many video essays and going over too much content for my own good honestly, I’ve found my own understanding of why VTubers are so popular and why in my opinion, AI VTubers would absolutely fucking flop.

Independent VTubers and Corporate VTubers are very different because independent VTubers for the most part are just streamers, while corporate VTubers (or at least for the two biggest corporations, Hololive and Nijisanji) are also idols in addition to being VTubers, sing, take dance classes, learn Japanese, the whole nine yards. Hololive recently had a 3D concert (3D because their talents (or “livers” as the ‘official’ term wore rigs and then performed live as their VTubing personas) that was pretty much universally loved, and in general the whole phenomenon makes me think about how media is going to progress going forward.

One more thing about corporate VTubers is that every single one of them is under an NDA that forbids them from mentioning who they are to the general public. That’s why Dokibird had to be more subtle about telling people that this is where she was now, and the same reason why Kson can’t outright say that she was Coco Kiryu either, Henya the Genius can’t outright say she was Pikamee and the list goes on. I get why this is a thing, so talents can’t debut, half-ass their time as a corporate VTuber and then graduate (Japanese euphemism for leaving an idol group on good terms) from the corporation, say who they are and then get the exact same following, but in the case of what happened to Dokibird, it’s kind of important to at least be aware of VTubers’ “Past Lives/PLs” (the official term for their other accounts).

Lastly, I’ll just comment on some funny/interesting things I saw in my research, like Kson doing an IRL stream (she’s one of the few VTubers that also streams IRL on her VTuber account) with a Japanese pornstar, and also a gravure model feeding each other, feeling each other up and all that other shit, which nowadays is tame considering that was like 10 Twitch ‘metas’ ago. She also won a contest to be in the newest Yakuza (which is where the Kiryu in Coco Kiryu came from, and why Coco had the same birthday as Kazuma Kiryu), and shows up as a bartender, while voicing herself in both English and Japanese.

In general, most of the female Japanese VTubers who either have IRL channels or shown who they are IRL are all like 9-10/10s, while in the West it’s a mixed bag. There’s more I could say, but this is just my observations having gone really deep into VTubing as a whole while not meaning to.

Edit: Forgot to mention the whole “why AI VTubers would be a failure” thing. For the most part, it comes down to the fact that only corporations would want to use AI for VTubing, and in addition, live reactions to chat, concerts and all of the “outside of just streaming” stuff would be why it wouldn’t be able to work, plus someone has to go and run the stream and be able to react as quickly as a human so that the AI sounds human, and we aren’t there yet, it would be too damn obvious. I get the reasoning for why some of the people here think it would be appealing to the corporations, but as AI is right now, too much work for not enough reward, plus the parasocial relationship aspect just seems like it wouldn’t be as effective if it’s a corporation using AI to do things.

https://x.com/dauragon/status/1766012165817881060?s=46&t=pkYRN-wpjTtpdtd5waU7Cw

“I wonder if Toriyama was ever aware of the cataclysmic effect he had on multiple generations of young women by creating Vegeta.”

https://x.com/offkatherine/status/1766135972444389526?s=46&t=pkYRN-wpjTtpdtd5waU7Cw

“Bulma, the spoiled and rich girl, said "I can fix it" and it happened.”

I almost fell out of my chair reading that last part, but I think the replies to the first tweet are pretty interesting, as most of the women I know who like DB really like Vegeta and Trunks, except for one who’s a Fat Buu stan, but those two comments had me gone.

I’m a baseball fan and have been watching as the world discovers how awful John Fisher is at everything in his life, but one of the things that the people that defend the attempted relocation of the Oakland Athletics do is use the crime rate and whatnot, but apparently some people who live there said that In-N-Out is still open.

What’s true and what’s not? I’m just curious because of course the people committing the crime there are mostly black and the thread about the closing here did blame that, but if the In-N-Out is still open (I don’t know if they put a timeline out for the closing), then why fucking announce it in the first place if it’s not gonna be for six months or so? Most layoffs are pretty immediate and it’s been weeks since the announcement, so I don’t know.