Two weeks ago, Dokibird, formerly Selen Tatsuki of Nijisanji EN debuted a new model, which is essentially a blonde version of Selen, designed by the same person who designed Selen Tatsuki. Dokibird explains in this stream that part of why she went to the same artist who designed Selen was because she felt like she wasn't able to fully express herself and sometimes felt like a disappointment (which is a common thread with ex-Nijisanji Vtubers, because the company has the attitude of 'you are nothing without us').
Filian got in hot water over the fact that her model isn't a model for her, it's a model for VRchat you can buy for $50, because she had a Nendoroid announced, along with several other vtubers such as Dokibird with her original design (which she calls RetroDoki), and Fuwawa and Mococo Abyssgard (or Fuwamoco) of Hololive English's 3rd Wave, Advent. The reason that this is an issue is that the licensing agreement that you agree to upon buying the model does not approve of physical merch. You're allowed to stream and make money off of it, but you are not allowed to make physical merch.
Original tweet from the creator, Jingo.
This ended up being solved with Jingo requesting that merch sales stop, so for now, Filian's Nendoroid will not be made.
Today, Dokibird will be streaming Neopets for their 25th anniversary. The reason this is even news is that the original 'black stream' that Vox Akuma, Ike Eveland and Elira Pandora did that revealed personal information about Dokibird which was supposed to stay private between Nijisanji management and her legal team was intentionally synched with the start of a Neopets stream she had to end early in order to deal with Nijisanji's bullshit.
The Dodgers won one of the most exciting games this year 8-5, even though Ohtani went 0-5 with 3 Ks (strikeouts) on his birthday.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/comments/1dwguuc/7th_inning_stretch/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/comments/1dwmp7s/cole_sprouse_actor_of_disney_show_zack_cody/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/comments/1dwux5w/hololive_dodgers_fiasco/
The actual collab itself went perfectly, but the controversy is in the way that the merch was handled was really bad, as there was only one tent for all of the Hololive merch for the collab and the line for the event went all the way around the stadium, and was apparently the largest line for merch for a Dodgers collab in the history of the team. The line lasted for over six hours, from 5:30 PM PST until they finally stopped at 1:00 AM the next day. With Anime Expo being the same weekend, that helped boost the attendance, but I think overall the sheer enthusiasm that the line shows me is that vtubing becoming mainstream is an inevitability, and it's up to vtuber fans to identify 'tourists' and stop them from doing their bullshit.
Not only is this 4th of July weekend with events such as the July race at Daytona International Speedway among other things, in pop culture, this weekend is the weekend of Anime Expo in LA. Tomorrow will have the appearance of three of Hololive's biggest talents in Usada Pekora, Hoshimachi Suisei and Gwar Gura at the Los Angeles Dodgers vs Milwaukee Brewers baseball game at Dodger Stadium.
Dokibird, formerly Selen Tatsuki of Nijisanji EN will have a booth at Anime Expo with Hyte/iBUYPOWER, the former PC case sponsor of Nijisanji, who immediately terminated their partnership with Nijisanji upon hearing about her termination from Nijisanji and the reasons behind it. Said booth is directly across from the Nijisanji booth, assumingly because this was planned months in advance before the termination, but now it's just hilarious because a floundering agency in Nijisanji is going to be 'confronted' with the consequences of the biggest mistake in its history.
I've actually been somewhat checked out of US politics, so I'm not sure of what other celebrations are going on in terms of what the holiday means in and of itself, but in pop culture, there's NASCAR races, one of the largest anime conventions of the year, thousands upon thousands of barbecues and overall this weekend should be very good just from an entertainment perspective, assuming the Feds don't false flag.
I've mentioned it before in comments a few times, but my entire interest in the show as a whole started and ended with the fact that Mori Calliope sings the ending theme (and it's good as hell), but I didn't really have much interested in the actual setting of the show mainly because I checked out of American hero stuff with Endgame, but if any of y'all have seen what's available right now, what's your opinion on it?
Edit: posting the actual animation with the opening and ending themes for the sake of posterity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI9rO8qebx8&pp=ygUKZ28gZ2V0dGVycw%3D%3D
https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/s/R4HyfVVPOT
Just wondering if y’all know why Nintendo decided to do this now of all times.
This just came to mind because I genuinely am just curious, but off the top of my head, 'if she bleeds' was never something that a predominantly white society practiced, not even the medieval period.
TL;DR: I'm going to my regularly scheduled convention during Memorial Day weekend, and I genuinely forgot that planning everything out ahead of time is pretty much mandatory.
I've been procrastinating a bit and didn't buy the pass until a few days ago, but because of that, I have to juggle some things because while I am not personally cosplaying, which I'll get to later in this post as to why, I still need to generally plan out everything I want to do that weekend: when it comes to parties, hanging out with friends, going to panels, all that sort of stuff.
I already know I want autographs from three people, so I need to bring cash and a notebook to get those autographs, but I need to figure out if I want to get them all on the same day or different days. I also need to figure out what panels are worth doing on specific days, what events I want to go to, overall conventions have something for everyone, and there's so much for me that I need to figure out what I want to do so I don't get overwhelmed.
Back to not cosplaying, it's because my plan was to go as this Obito, and I can't get the contacts in time so I don't want to cosplay an incomplete character. There's just a lot for me to do for the next two weeks in terms of scheduling things out with friends and whatnot, that I actually have to time manage at the convention to make sure I get everything I want out of it.
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.