Somehow I clicked on the YouTube video for "Barbie Girl" by Aqua today, and couldn't get it out of my head. It's been stuck in my head off and on since high school, when it came out. It's just too damn catchy (original lyrics here).
I thought of setting some Gura-themed lyrics to it, like "Sharky Girl" or "Virtual Girl". Then it hit me -- daki, short for dakimakura, i.e. those body pillows with a character printed on both sides, which began in Japan but have since been adopted by other alienated societies like our own.
I had always assumed these were little more than blow-up dolls for coomers, which I'm sure they are in some cases. But after tuning in to the streamer culture over the past two years, I've seen how different they are from that function. For one thing, even girls have them -- Wolfabelle has hers prominently displayed in the back of her streaming room.
It's more like a child's security blanket, treasured stuffed animal, and imaginary friend all wrapped up into one item. A regressive defense mechanism, perhaps, but you can understand their motive for coping -- they don't have a steady romantic partner, and may not for a long while.
It's like the soft cloth substitute monkey mommy in those Harry Harlow experiments, where monkey babies separated from their mothers still cling to the closest thing they can get to the feel of her fur. They only visit the cold metallic milk dispenser to feed, and then immediately go back to cuddling the soft fuzzy one.
Obviously the dakimakura is not for replacing familial physical bonding, like a newborn and mother. But it's still meant to tie physical bonding with emotional and social bonding, like a substitute long-term steady girlfriend or wife, not a one-night stand, fuck buddy, bar slut, or cum dumpster.
The owner goes back to the same individual, who "lives" with them, they have a distinctive likeness (unlike the generic blank template of a blow-up doll), probably a specific name, etc. A substitute one-night-stand or fuck buddy are the girls in porn videos -- faceless, nameless, interchangeable, viewers go through one after another with no attachment. They get the simulation of being a provider and caretaker for their daki, vs. no such role for the girls they look at in porn.
If they were intended to stimulate the genitals, for masturbatory purposes, they would be rigged with a fleshlight or a vibrator. But they're not -- they're made to feel good while embracing.
I've never had one of these, and never will, but the psychology is worth portraying, since the kneejerk interpretation is totally wrong. And the causes underlying the phenomenon are all too relatable for many people these days.
So I wrote some lyrics to naturalize and humanize what's going on with this seemingly twisted pop cultural practice, taking inspiration from the movie Lars and the Real Girl (2007). That strikes a different tone from the original lyrics, which are inspired by kitsch, but I think it makes for a nice clash of surface vs. underlying substance.
Casual observers think these pillows are just like empty-headed blow-up dolls for purely sexual purposes, and that matches the upbeat bubblegummy music. But the reality is different, and is reflected in lyrics that clash with the perky hedonistic music. However, the music is written in a minor key, so it does work better with lyrics that are less rosy.
Pronunciation guide: "prickly" is PRICK-uh-lee. Owner's lines in italics.
* * *
Honey, I'm home
Hi, Degen!
Wanna cuddle on the couch?
Sure, Degen!
Hop on
I'm a daki girl, in a daki world
Your friend in satin, everlastin'
We can be a pair, and share your favorite chair
Simulation, emotional relation
Come here daki, share my Pocky
I'm a daki girl, in a daki world
Your friend in satin, everlastin'
We can be a pair, and share your favorite chair
Simulation, emotional relation
I'm a soft, supple girl in a prickly world
In a hard-landing time, I'm your cushion
You've got soul, not a hole, you're all ears when I'm thrilled
Hold my head, in our bed, cozy-wozy
You can hug, feel my curve
Till your nerve has been restored
Uwuuu
I'm a daki girl, in a daki world
Your friend in satin, everlastin'
We can be a pair, and share your favorite chair
Simulation, emotional relation
Come here daki, share my Pocky
Mmm, mmm, mmm, yeah
Come here daki, share my Pocky
Uwuuu, uwuuu
I'm your rock, round the clock, I can never deceive
You can let down your guard, even though I'm 3D
Let's stay in, have a gin, do a dance with a spin
'Cause your form's made for more than just stuffing
You can hug, feel my curve
Till your nerve has been restored
You can hug, feel my curve
Till your nerve has been restored
Come here daki, share my Pocky
Mmm, mmm, mmm, yeah
Come here daki, share my Pocky
Uwuuu, uwuuu
I'm a daki girl, in a daki world
Your friend in satin, everlastin'
We can be a pair, and share your favorite chair
Simulation, emotional relation
Oh, you treat me so special!
Well, daki, our bond's just beginning
Oh, I love you, Degen!
The daki phenomenon is like other made-to-order robo-gf types, which peak during the vulnerable phase of the 15-year excitement cycle. That's when everyone is in a refractory phase, doesn't want to interact with others (online or IRL), feeling over-stimulated from the previous manic phase. See this earlier post:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2019/06/made-to-order-robo-gf-archetype-appears.html
Judging from the dates of reddit posts -- and they are a major demographic for it -- the daki craze was more from 2015-'19, and is now more of a meme / on the decline. As of 2020, we're in the restless warm-up phase, ready to come out of our shells. Less of a need for the made-to-order robo-gf anymore.
The ASMR craze was tied to the vulnerable phase of 2015-'19 as well. Even Pokimane had a separate ASMR channel back then, and you can tell that some of today's big Vtubers like Fauna had their start as ASMR creators during the late 2010s. That content is not nearly as popular now as it was back then. Why?
ReplyDeleteWell, the quiet stillness of the background, and the wispy voice in the foreground, is perfect for someone who doesn't want to feel too strongly stimulated, because they're in a refractory state. But they still want a girl to speak romantically or sensually to them -- just not in a heavy-handed way.
And the other sounds that a given ASMR recording focuses on are isolated -- for a certain interval of time, the only sound you hear is, e.g., the simulated caressing of your ear, or some very specific single sound. This kept stimulation going, but at a low level because the guys felt over-stimulated and would have felt pain if stimulated too much.
So instead of the symphony of sounds that normal everyday life presents to our ears, eliminate all but one of those sources, at a time. If you want to hear multiple sounds, they have to be played singly, in sequence, not at the same time.
This prevented the disturbing feeling of *total* sensory deprivation during a refractory phase, while also not raising the stimulation level so high that it would cause pain during such a sensitive period.
None of the sounds were sexual or pornographic -- that would have been too much stimulation during a refractory phase. The sexual approach to ASMR only took off in 2020 and after, when the refractory phase was over and people were eager to come out of their shells and get higher stimulation again.
Now that its popularity is on the decline, the creators can poke a little fun at the genre and themselves. I never got into ASMR, but this is one of the funniest pieces I've heard in awhile (how brave of you to visit a cafe with 0 reviews and only open one day a year), while also sounding sensual.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McKL5PR2F-w
It's both an affectionate parody (from Gura's side) and sincere example (from Fauna's side) of the genre. You couldn't make one like this in the late 2010s, but only once we exited that phase of the cycle. You can be more self-aware about it now, and raise the stimulation levels and joke / meme levels, since guys aren't in the vulnerable, painfully over-stimulated state they were in during the late 2010s.
Now the female helper archetype is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, whose role in the cycle I first analyzed here:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2019/05/manic-pixie-dream-girl-arises-in-warm.html
She's not just a passive template that the guy projects his desires onto. If anything, she's more of a guide, and he's more of a follower, until he catches up to her, and realizes his full potential.
I predicted the rise of the Manic Pixie Stream Girls right as the restless phase kicked off in 2020, focusing mostly on Pokimane, since she was the only big one I knew about at the time:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2020/05/manic-pixie-stream-girls.html
I still think she's a major example of the MPDG in the streamer / virtuality media format. She would've been in a TV show or movie back before our society fell apart over the 2010s. Now she does the livestreaming thing instead, but it's playing the same role.
Since that post, I sampled more of that format, and I'd say the Hololive girls are the most concentrated grouping of this role. Gura most of all -- that's why she's the most popular Vtuber on Earth. But the rest of them have this quality, in varying degrees. Fauna for sure, Kiara, IRyS from what I've seen, and the others I can't say exactly where they are, since I can't keep up with all the hours of content that the dozen of them produce every day.
The main thing they share is what phase of the excitement cycle they were born in, and turned 15 later on -- the manic phase, in their case born in the '95-'99 manic phase (and turning 15 during the 2010-'14 manic phase).
They're the next crop of manic-phase births after the girls born from '80-'84 (Anne Hathaway, Zooey Deschanel, and the rest of them from the heyday of the late 2000s), or the '65-'69 manic phase (Julia Roberts, Sarah Jessica Parker, etc.).
The easiest way to see these cohort differences is between Pokimane and Valkyrae, the other ongoing contender for "top female streamer". Pokimane was born in '96, and is a typical manic-phase birth -- carefree, resilient. Valkyrae was born earlier, in '92, and is a typical restless-phase birth -- over-the-top, wild-child. I don't think anyone will describe girls born from '90-'94 as MPDGs.
Then the girls born from 2000-'04 are vulnerable-phase births, so they're lifelong sad girls, not the MPDG type either.
I predict today's MPDGs will evolve to a more independent, gypsy-like role during the next phase of the cycle, the upcoming manic phase of 2025-'29. We saw this before during the 2010-'14 manic phase, when the culture either moved beyond or turned against the MPDG type of the late 2000s:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2020/02/after-nursing-others-to-health-during.html
The bitter jealous haters are always against this charming, helping, encouraging, nurturing female archetype. But they're powerless to stop the rise of the type during a restless phase (like now).
However, after the restless phase, the need for their type starts to go away, because the MPDGs have accomplished their job of bringing the weary sad sacks out of their shells, and set them free after encouraging them to their full potential.
Some MPDGs will criticize or "problematize" their own type, like Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks.
Others like ScarJo will just evolve beyond the type, not criticizing or disavowing it, just becoming more of an independent spirit who isn't engaged in a project of helping a sad sack come out of his shell and realize his full potential. For example, her role as the OS in Her.
I think Pokimane will go in the Zoe Kazan / Anita Sarkeesian direction, because she's fairly woke. She'll start talking about how problematic it was in the early 2020s for her to be tending so much to other people's needs, and neglecting her own. So now that it's the late 2020s, it's time for her to chart a course on her own, branded in a feminist self-care way.
I think Gura, not being woke, will go more in the ScarJo direction. Or like Katy Perry, between "Simple" from 2005 to "Roar" of 2013. Evolving her role, and appreciating the part she played in helping all these sad sack male viewers come out of their shells and find their confidence -- but that was the early 2020s, and by the late 2020s, it's mission accomplished in that project. So now it's simply on to the next of life's many winding journeys.
Gura's brand will still have the "independent girl power" theme that Pokimane's will by that time, but Gura's will not be feminist-coded. More like "Roar", appealing to everyone, with no tinge of ideology.
"I've got the bite of the sharky..."
The anti-wholesome censorship at YouTube is so crazy that when I searched for "asmr" and sorted by view count, none of Pokimane's videos show up.
ReplyDeleteThere are about 40 of them, all in the 100K range minimum, most over 1 million, and one that's over 10 million. The term "asmr" is in both the title of these videos, and the name of her channel "poki ASMR". Yet not a single one shows up in that range of the results sorted by most views.
Instead, it's all this disgusting garbage about people slurping sloppy foods, one intended for gay perverts (guy eating garbage), and another for straight perverts (girl eating garbage).
Also, these videos are all new, within the past couple years, even though the peak year of ASMR was 2018. That's what I was looking into -- I already checked Google Trends and figured it out, but I was curious if YouTube confirmed that pattern.
It seemed like YouTube and Google Trends contradicted each other -- but no, it's just YouTube's management suppressing anything remotely wholesome / for normie straight guys, and only returning results that are disgusting / for gay perverts.
It's not like Pokimane's ASMR videos are outright banned, but you could never find them by searching, without knowing who she is already and putting her name in the search bar.
As usual -- female, ethnic minority (Moroccan), on the left, even with the verified checkmark, with zillions of followers and pageviews. Seemingly a demographic to be promoted. But she was catering in a wholesome way to lonely straight guys, a demographic who must be destroyed and humiliated and deprived by the Silicon Valley woketard cartel.
This is another reminder that the woketard mob is primarily motivated by who your audience is, if you're a content creator -- not what demo you yourself belong to.
The woketard cartel probably thought Pokimane was "enabling proto-fascist incels" who would overthrow democracy and rape every girl on the planet, thus content geared toward them must be suppressed, regardless of the demographics of the creator.
Part of the broader woketard trend of guilt by association -- "Oh, you have lonely straight guys as one of your largest demos? Fascist rapist enabler!"
Elon Musk should take over YouTube next -- hell, the whole cartel of social media sites that were destroyed during the late 2010s.
The ASMR craze was similar to an early 2000s trend I discussed here, about frustrated MPDGs:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2021/12/frustrated-would-be-manic-pixie-dream.html
They're manic-phase births, and it's during the vulnerable phase when people are in a refractory state. So it would seem like the perfect time for the MPDGs to tend to their needs, nurse them back to health, etc.
But since their would-be patients are painfully over-stimulated from the previous manic phase, they don't want much contact with others at all. Even a normal amount of stimulation would be too much, in such a state.
So they compromise and make these "lifeline to the drowning" kind of songs, to get their audience through the rock-bottom period, until they're comfortable coming out of their shell and accepting a rewarding nurse / patient relationship in the next restless phase.
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2021/12/lifeline-to-drowning-anthems-by-manic.html
That's what the ASMR recordings were for, during the 2015-'19 vulnerable phase. People were flatlining, so these recordings provided enough stimulation to keep them from dying altogether, but not so much stimulation that it would overload their sensitive nerves.
And most of the creators were '95-'99 births, albeit with some exceptions (like Gibi ASMR, who barely missed the cut-off, born Dec 19 '94). They were frustrated Manic Pixie Dream Girls.
But once the cycle shifted into the restless phase, and people were comfortable coming out of their shells, immediately the streamer and Vtuber formats exploded, in 2020. Yes, they were there during the late 2010s, but I'm talking mainstream viral popularity, not just among Millennial video game addicts.
And specifically, the kind of reality-TV (or virtuality) approach to the format. Not just "watch me play video games," but chatting for 30 minutes beforehand, vlogging, girl / dating advice, encouragement or other pep talks, and just being a relatable nurturer overall. That's not what the streaming format was in the late 2010s.
Certainly their tone was not as cheerful and engaging back then, but more somber or sad or weird. Now it's more upbeat and somewhat sub-cultural but more normie-friendly. Compare the biggest English Vtubers on each side of that 2020 dividing line -- Senzawa before, and Gura after.
Remake of Pretty Woman, but it's Camila Cabello as an OnlyFans / titty streamer. Probably the latter -- something that she doesn't try to glamorize, has the abject rather than aspirational vibe, humble rather than gloating. OnlyFans has way too much glamorizing aspirational bragging propaganda behind it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe she does something more than just showing her bod for dono's -- one of those body painter types. She has a frustrated artistic or craftsy side to her. But in this collapsing society, this is the only way she can make a decent living off of that talent.
The male protag isn't searching her out like a coomer, he's just a lonely bored sad sack, who is channel-surfing on Twitch late at night, and serendipitously clicks on her stream that only has a few hundred viewers.
But he's got the QE hook-up with the central bank -- and like the Richard Gere character, he makes money by buying up other companies, gutting them, and flipping them for profit. But today, he's part of the M&A wing of some tech cartel member, like Google.
So he's got plenty of money to serve as her benefactor, if she'll drop the titty-streaming and pretend to be his high-status online gf. He has an image to maintain, so she poses with him for pics that go up on Facebook or Instagram, she tweets affectionate normie stuff to him on Twitter, etc.
Then over the course of this business arrangement, they actually go all the way and fall in love with each other. She gets rescued from abject digital prostitution, and joins the wholesome world of IRL with her needs taken care of, and a fairytale Prince Charming ending.
Of course, Cabello is a manic-phase birth (late '90s), and she's such a natural wholesome earthy flirtatious extraverted cheerful smiley engaging encouraging type, like Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway. She's one of the most all-American girl-next-door types like that, yet she wasn't even born in this country, but our long-time rival, Cuba.
Talk about imperial cultural collapse. We can't make 'em like that here anymore, and have to rely on immigrants from outside our sphere of influence. But that would make it all the more true to these times, and not just another lazy out-of-touch remake.
I think we do make 'em like that here somewhat, actually, but even they can't get promoted up to a new It Girl status. Our whole cultural production industry is crashing down.
They couldn't remake Pretty Woman if they wanted to -- too broadly appealing. Again the guilt-by-association thing with woketard censors -- a Pretty Woman remake would appeal to Republicans as well as Democrats, and lonely straight guys, and girls looking to leave rather than take up virtual prostitution. So many strikes against it for the culture-making cartel.
Oh, and she gets an online Cinderella makeover, going from a basic-tier titty streamer's aesthetics and meme-making ability, to whatever the cutting-edge streamer aesthetic is today.
ReplyDeleteOh! She becomes a Vtuber instead of a titty-streamer! Then she doesn't have to show her bod, and doesn't have to make sexual comments throughout the stream to pander to coomers. And the "makeover" is going from her IRL looks to the state-of-the-art Vtuber model, or rigging, or whatever it's called. She also gets the best upgrades to her PC, mic, etc.
She's consulted throughout the graphic design process of her Vtuber outfit, like she's a client in a haute couture house. At first she DMs some rough ideas and an out-of-focus selfie to a leading graphic design firm, and they callously block her account and the employees trade dunking memes about her afterward, not knowing who she is / who she's been sent by. Like the Chanel boutique scene.
Then the protag intervenes, threatens to buy their company and wipe it out unless they respect her and take her seriously. She returns, and it's a whirlwind tour from lowly to elevated aesthetics.
And she gets private one-one-one lessons from a seasoned memelord, a la My Fair Lady / the Hector Elizondo concierge character. It's an older plain-looking guy, he's not hitting on her, he really sees her potential and wants to nurture it for its own sake, and to help out the protag, who directed VC funding to his startup when he was in a jam, and he's loyal to him since. She playfully flirts with him at times, and gives him a wholesome kiss on the cheek at one point. He is not gay-coded / fag-hag shopping buddy. He's just a sweet but firm old man (in online spaces, anyone over 40).
She has a titty streaming colleague who she shares an abject apartment with, and it's the same narrative arc involving her as in the original.
"Damn girl, did you just Venmo me $1000? That subathon must have been something else!"
"Actually, I, uh... I met a guy..."
"A real big spender dropped in the chat, huh?"
"Well, you see, he offered to support me if I stopped, y'know, stopped camming..."
"Oh god, here we go again. Another simp convinced he's found the e-girl with a heart of gold."
She's more wise-cracking and pragmatic, no illusions about her line of work, it pays the bills and that's it. She's not a romantic dreamer like her Cinderella roommate. She's the onscreen voice for the incredulous / cynical members of the audience.
This story writes itself, goddammit -- why isn't it being made? Because our fragmenting elite class can't cooperate enough to get even basic goals done. And they're all on the left! That's how bad collapse is, it's not just right and left warring, it's internecine feuds all the way down.
Related post:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2019/05/supportive-sex-worker-archetype-shows.html
The male protag has recently gotten out of a bad relationship with an insufferable BPD art hoe gf -- pretentious / of the 2010s / Millennial stereotype. That's what brings him down into sad sack status.
ReplyDeleteCinderella is down-to-earth / of the 2020s / Zoomer.
Similar to Elon Musk breaking up with Grimes. And similar to Richard Gere, born in the late '40s, taking a shine to late '60s-born Julia Roberts, when Gen X was just starting to get some attention, at the outset of the '90s.
And in another contempo twist, his moral arc concerns buying up a major company, but rather than gut it and flip it for profit, he does so in order to prevent woketards from destroying it internally. A la Musk buying up Twitter to restore some degree of online free association and free speech.
Maybe he gets a threatening note from his Wall Street intermediaries for QE, that if he goes through with that deal, he won't get any more QE hand-outs. But he sacrifices that, both for lofty reasons about restoring the platform that woketards had ruined, and because he's more concerned with marrying and settling down with his cheerful girl-next-door Zoomer Vtuber gf.
He's already got enough money to support their future family -- no need to be the literal richest man on Earth forever.
The woketard mob also comes after her at one point, as part of their broader attack on him. Doxx his gf, attack her, etc., in order to pressure him out of taking over their platform. That only strengthens his resolve to purge the woketards once he buys them out.
Plus the general public online rushes to her defense, seeing how appealing and charming and pretty she is, vs. how repulsive misanthropic and ugly the woketard doxx mob is.
Both of them take some hits, and sacrifice some of their personal comfort, in order to be with each other, and improve the online sphere for the majority -- he on the platform regulation end, and she on the content creation end.
Quite the endearingly offbeat power couple, with a semi-heroic touch that is not present in the typical MPDG / Cinderella story.
Great big hug for Aimee Terese, whose temporary suspension by the woketard mob will only strengthen her influence, grow her audience, and embolden the new Twitter managers under Musk to remove the mass-report option from their platform.
ReplyDelete'Member when you came back from the digital dead the first time, special fren?
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2021/04/aimee-terese-back-from-dead-for-good.html
The Russians With Attitude podcast account came back from a suspension recently, so it may be a few days or weeks, but the Phoenician of Unleashin' will return.
The trannies really are trying to re-do Weimar Germany, where the degenerate cultural correlates of imperial collapse did not lead to their being permanently incorporated as the "new normal" of an ever-progressing culture, but a backlash of normalcy that wiped them out. Sorry, no more kiddies for sale, no more trannies.
Similar thing happened here, when Gilded Age degeneracy led to Prohibition. But we weren't a collapsing empire like Germany was at that time. So our degeneracy, and its backlash, were nowhere near as intense.
This time around, however...
The dehumanizing intent of wokeness comes through in which types of needs they think are OK to be met for their enemies (half or more of the country).
ReplyDeleteOnly the physiological ones, at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- cooming, eating, etc.
So they are fine if pornstars, OnlyFans girls, and the like cater to lonely straight guys, who only use their content to jerk themselves off. Usually catering to a demonized audience would get the caterers themselves targeted, but if it's only their base needs, meh, let the creators off the hook.
But if online content creators -- whether it's purely textual (posting, blogging), still images, only voices, or audio-visual streaming -- begin catering to the emotional and social needs of lonely straight guys, then it's game over. Problematic. Toxic. Enabling -- worse than merely turning a blind eye to an evil group, but actively feeding it.
Any of these girls who are playing a therapeutic role for the lonely straight guy demographic, are seen by the woketards as nurses tending to the wounds of an army of evil, enabling that evil army to resume its war on the battlefield against the forces of good.
And because it's a non-physical, non-sexual kind of healing, it's almost like they're morale-boosters or cheerleaders for their audience.
"Wow, boosting the morale of literal Nazis? [75% of the country] Didn't know you were such toxic trash -- cancel this bitch, yesterday."
In reality, the guys in the audience have zero power, are not organized, and are losing whatever culture war there is. But woketards always project themselves onto their enemies.
Point being: wokeness dehumanizes the majority of the population until they can only be allowed to meet the most basic physiological needs, not the higher ones that make them normal human beings. Specifically, none of the emotional and social needs.
No freedom of association, IRL or online. Abolish the family. Shutter their brick-and-mortar hangouts, then ban them from online spaces too.
This is unstable and destabilizing, but it shows why the upcoming backlash is going to happen, and who it will wipe out from power positions.
Woketards love to preen about the moral treatment of animals, like those in captivity. They say it's not enough for their base physiological needs to be met -- being fed, having their waste cleaned up, shelter from the elements, etc.
ReplyDeleteThey need to interact with others of their species, form attachments, and be happy, but that this isn't possible in many of the captivity environments, like a poorly run zoo, or factory farms.
Woketards think of 75% of the country, their enemies, as lower and less deserving than animals. Who cares if wokeness is severing their ability to meet social and emotional needs, actively hunting down any content creator who tries to meet these needs for them? They have a roof over their head, 1000 or so calories a day, and free HD porn to jerk off to -- that's good enough for them, they're just sub-human scum. Worse -- sub-animal scum.
Returning to the body pillow phenomenon, that's why woketards can't stand things like that. That's why these latter-day Buster Friendly androids spend so much of their ironic snark venom to ridicule and ostracize the body pillow cuddlers, and not the porn-watching wankers.
ReplyDeleteBoth are sad and pathetic, but in different ways, and they're trying to meet a different set of needs. One is accepting a sub-animal role for themselves, so the androids are OK with that.
But the other has the audacity to conceive of himself as at least equal to an animal, maybe more, by deserving emotional and social satisfaction, whether or not there's sexual satisfaction involved.
Sorry -- that's a red line for the androids, who are bitter jealous haters against those with normal social-emotional lobes in their brains and crave this sort of satisfaction. Allowing those guys to pursue those needs would allow them to prove their "superior to androids" status, and like hell the droids are going to let themselves be upstaged by the human beings.
These body pillows are like the artificial pet animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Real animal pets are rare, and most desired -- not only due to the rarity per se, but for their authenticity.
Likewise, IRL gfs are increasingly out of supply for a growing segment of young guys, so artificial gfs will proliferate. Body pillows, or something new.
Androids don't understand the appeal of these pseudo-gfs, though, because droids are socially and emotionally vacant. Why would you want to bond with something that can't feel the same thing back? And it's not real anyway, it's artificial!
Yeah, well, the need is still there, and it will be met however well it can, under the harsh circumstances. But the need is simply not there in the droid's brain, such a need DOES NOT COMPUTE.
This is a test of one's humanity vs. droiditude, and the droids are inferior forms jealous of their superiors, so they hate any such test that would unmask who is fully human vs. a mere droid.
The dakimakura cuddlers pass the test of being fully human, while the detached ironic snarksters fail the test and prove they're just robots.
Speaking of DADoES, there's another Mercerist game that is viral among streamers -- Jump King. Just like Getting Over It, it's a one-man Sisyphean struggle upward over increasingly unforgiving environments.
ReplyDeleteAnd although sometimes it's the player's own fault for missing a jump, often it feels like the cruel universe is just fucking around with the player, causing us to empathize with their suffering-while-struggling-upward. And because we're aware that there are tons of us all watching the same figure at the same time, we empathize with one another, feeling communally bonded.
This one feels more Mercerist than Getting Over It, because if you miss a jump or lose your footing in Jump King, you can keep plummeting down down down, screen after screen, back to the very beginning of the game.
I was reminded of this the other night when Fauna was playing it. I don't know why a person would play it on their own -- it's meant to serve as the Mercerist focal point for a great big audience, all of whom are using their internet device as an empathy box, to merge their consciousness with each other, as they watch the same single streamer controlling the character.
It's also another one of those games that allow the streamer to just chat, share stories, and converse with other streamers (after awhile, Mumei popped in for an organic winding conversation). It's a social simulation, not just spectating a form of entertainment.
I know they don't intend for it to feel this way, but that's just how things will organically evolve, given how alienated everyone feels, and how these games, streamer channels, and online connectivity allow people to have the empathy boxes and Mercerist quasi-religious experiences of DADoES, albeit in a crude, incipient, inchoate form.
But the livestreaming format has only just begun. Wait a few decades longer, and see how close to Mercerism and empathy boxes the online ecosystem and physical hardware will look.
Blade Runner has little to do with DADoES, and you should absolutely read the original novel by Philip K. Dick. Blade Runner is an awesome movie, Ridley Scott is an awesome director, but they're only thinly related to each other.
ReplyDeleteDo not read summaries online, since they're mostly from clueless nerds (I checked). Only a fully-human reader would appreciate the themes of the novel, and most nerds are not fully-human. So they miss most of the book, and just write up the puny little slice they managed to glean from it.
And because it's sci-fi, most fully-human readers and critics wouldn't go near it -- out of snobbery, or just "I don't have enough time to read that kind of genre". They could understand it, but they won't get around to reading it, so their competent write-ups do not exist either.
I'm not a sci-fi reader, either, and he's easily one of my favorite 20th-C authors. This is one of his greatest works, too. I went through a lot of them about 10 years ago, but I remember this one, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and A Scanner Darkly as the stand-outs.
A sci-fi writer who isn't a backstory-obsessed goon, or an autist obsessed with technology per se. One of the few who could pass the empathy test as a full human. Seriously, if you've been sleeping on his books, there's no time like the present, as we devolve further and further into his dystopia.
FWIW, the only adaptation of his work that really resonated with the original tone and themes was Total Recall, especially the chatty robot cab-driver who insists on pointless rules to the point of absurdity, despite already catching on fire, etc.
Here's that recent Jump King stream from Fauna (and Mumei):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slkP9n3f7O0
Edgelords are a Lars & the Real Girl Ryan Gosling face, wearing a Drive / Blade Runner 2049 Ryan Gosling mask.
ReplyDeleteI wondered why they always left that highly distinctive and memorable character out of their list of "he's just like me" Ryan Gosling roles. Hits too close to home.
Thought you might find this interesting. Thoughts on how the social cycle impacts song length and bpm? https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/uh682b/oc_song_length_and_tempo_of_popular_music_from/
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