SocialismForAll liked a comment with this in it:

We just had an intense and insightful discussion around landlordism under Capitalism, during a potential transition away from Capitalism, and in an “ideal communist world.” For example, she has previously sought becoming a landlord to escape the struggle of being working class. The discussions she has seen about landlordism tend to lack nuance, such as how the system propagandizes towards ownership as as desirable lifestyle, the material conditions that could lead someone to buy into that “hopeful message”, and how most people do not have the tools for recognizing the inherent economic exploitation involved with being a landlord. Instead, the conversation is aggressively vilifying landlords without attempting to meet people where they are and educating them from there. The conversation is over before it starts and thus there can be no education or radicalization from it. She also doesn’t like the arguments that happen where a landlord’s personal character, and thus her potential character, is assaulted for having sought this method of existing within a Capitalist system.)

Fuckin’ done with that idiot. Even my boomer liberal dad who hasn’t rented in decades dislikes landlords and knows they need to be done away with. This commenter’s excessively liberal wannabe-landlord GF is not someone who has any useful insight.

That site has a lot of good interviews translated.

I also recommend these ones:
https://mangabrog.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/naoki-urasawa-and-hisashi-eguchi-talk-about-manga-in-the-70s-and-80s-mostly-otomo/
https://mangabrog.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/a-2016-interview-with-tsutomu-nihei/
https://mangabrog.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/interview-with-yotsuba-artist-kiyohiko-azuma/

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From Alpha To Omega had a podcast on the history of Yemen that was really good and one point that stuck out to me was that the west (US, I think?) was sending in anthropology students/degrees to go into Yemen (I think it was the relatively bourgeois North Yemen, but might have been ML South Yemen) to acquire intel and do sabotage basically. This guy seems like the continuation of that.

You know why.

Shoulda’ posted this in c/beardtube.

“Vietnam Syndrome” - Yussef Cole

America’s political landscape is rarely forced to be as honest. In reckoning with Vietnam, America took the position of the latter Mianaai: we chose to ignore reality and make up a story that allowed us to continue growing our empire, unchanged. Cold War lives within this uneasy blind spot. It recognizes, as liberal history does, that Vietnam was bad. But it also refuses to learn any moral or foundational lessons from the experience. It refuses to recognize the humanity of the men and women who fought us, who challenged our assumed superiority, who brought us to our knees.

Within this blind spot we seemingly must continue doing the same thing over and over, murdering and shooting the same people ad nauseum. In Cold War’s mind-control mission, this manifests literally, with the player’s character stuck running through the same recursive loop of memory, the same rice paddies and hamlets, the same firefights, the same bodies. We’re forced to circle this visual drain until we finally find the unrelated intel, and Vietnam is washed cleanly away, slotted back into history until it becomes needed once again.

Like the Hollywood industry it leans heavily on, American videogames, particularly ones like Call of Duty are inextricably tied up in the baggage of empire. Iran-Contra mastermind, Oliver North, consulted on Black Ops II. Its lead writer, Dave Anthony, went on to work for the Department of Defense. Many of the guns used in these games are based on real models and uncounted sums are paid into the weapons industry as licensing fees. In this irredeemably compromised model, it is vital to pay attention to how the victims of America’s imperial ambitions are portrayed, how little care is afforded to the people of these countries, and how that reflects the mainstream understanding of the conflicts that rage today. As long as we continue to misunderstand and ignore the implications of these wars in our art we will continue to do so in our politics, pushing mournfully, and blindly, into the future.

https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/11/20/call-of-duty-black-ops-cold-war-vietnam-syndrome

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I recommend reading that interview in Brutus too. It’s interesting seeing a guy, the creator of Attack On Titan, who’s borderline otaku and seemingly estranged from a lot of the world be so open about it. His interviewer is a Japanese psychologist, which helps.

–When was it that you started getting into manga and video games?

Isayama: Junior high school. I’d watched anime and read manga up until then as much as the next kid, but I didn’t know that there was this whole world of otakudom out there until I became friends with a Sega fanboy in junior high.

–What was it about that world that attracted you?

Isayama: I liked how it put reality off to the side. I liked the idea that this might be a world produced by electrodes stuck on our brains. I thought it’d be awesome to actually be a battery for machines like in The Matrix.

–There’s a scene in The Matrix about how illusionary steaks still taste good. Would you say you’re okay with being unable to ever eat a real steak?

Isayama: I’d say I’m the type who actually identifies more with the illusionary.

–Did you see reality as painful back in junior high school?

Isayama: Yes, I hated how pathetic I felt I was. You can see it in my manga, too — if there’s a character to my work, I think it’d be a sort of “endless adolescence”.

That Tumblr it’s posted on also has a bunch of other translated interviews/discussions that are worth checking out. Nice little trove of stuff on manga/anime creators.

Hopefully it works out. Amazon’s been hiring pinkertons and other infiltrators to quell unions for awhile.

A team within Amazon’s Global Security Operation Center, which includes former military intelligence analysts, according to LinkedIn, closely tracks organized labor and union activity in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia—noting where organized labor groups are strongest and could influence Amazon workers.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements

There are also these videos on anime and pro-piracy, which I would partly endorse, though mostly because they just question where the money actually goes in the anime economy and what consumers actually get out of paying for anime services. I don’t think any of them are leftists, particularly Uniquenameosaurus who makes some really garbage arguments later in his videos.

The Data Behind Digibro’s Stance on Anime Streaming: Legal vs. Illegal- AniNews
You SHOULD Pirate Anime.- Uniquenameosaurus
You SHOULD Pirate Anime 2- Uniquenameosaurus

I’d welcome any ideas or counter-ideas people have to sharpen my understanding of this problem though, as long as they’re marxist. I don’t think I wrote this as succinctly as I could and some terminology might be wrong here or there. I think the standard rebuttal to the issue of piracy by populist leftists falls into techno-utopianism though.

I also should have talked more about how sites like Crunchyroll, etc. exist to generate profit for themselves and would never help funnel money to like the animators or anything. It was always naive to think that “the only way to stop a bad company that exploits its workers is to fund a good company that exploits its workers” so that they’d somehow pay money to the animators. The only case of this happening is actually Netflix with only one of its shows, EDEN, which bypassed the anime production committees, working with the animation studio directly. But even with this I don’t see the worker’s pays being equalized to being non-exploitative.

It’s weird because Crunchyroll and Netflix use the terms entirely differently. For Netflix, it just means “You can only watch this here.” But internally, they have “Licensed Originals”, “Produced Originals” and in the case of anime: “Production Line Partnership”. In the case of anime, licensed originals are Violet Evergarden, Pokemon Journeys etc., Production Line Partnership shows (licensed shows where Netflix signed a deal with them early in production) are B: The Beginning and AICO: Incarnation, and the only produced original so far is EDEN. In fact, EDEN is the only anime they’ve directly funded.

However, Crunchyroll has been doing co-productions for years. But suddenly there’s this new term “Crunchyroll Originals”. In the article, I included a quote from Alden Budill, but I highly recommend reading the interview in full, because it’s ridiculous. Basically, it appears like it’s 100% a marketing term that covers both Crunchyroll Studios shows (High Guardian Spice/Onyx Equinox) and the shows that used to be called “Co-productions” like Tonikawa and EX-ARM.

So in this way, Crunchyroll focuses on co-productions that they refer to as “Originals” while Netflix focuses on exclusive licensing and “Production Line Partnerships” that they can group together as “Originals”.
-TheCanipaEffect on ANN’s forum

There is also the instance of places like Hong Kong or Taiwan, etc. where pirating anime was (and still is) more common than purchasing it and even when the official DVD/etc. products were sold at the same price as the pirated goods in roughly similar ease people still pirated there.

She usually focuses more on the '90s anime “fandom” than the work itself, which is a little disappointing sometimes, but it’s one of the best podcasts on retro anime. She usually has interesting or knowledgeable guests. The episodes talking about anime cels and anime cel collecting were really worthwhile to know as an animation fan; I had no idea how unstable and hard to protect they were, for instance.

Probably lib-left Labour supporter. Or like a Cory Doctorow utopian techno-socialist at best.

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Also, the latest volume is a collection of three short stories, two of which have already been released and fan translated (though moderately difficult to find). Thankfully the third short story is new and roughly half of the book. Despite what people are saying I’m like 90% sure we won’t see a season 3 of Suzumiya, despite what anyone says until there’s any sort of confirmation.

There’s a funny satirical article about it at least.

Even Digi knows better.

More or less. Though he just refers to them as advertisers.

For emulation I’m messing around with RPCS3 right now. I got Scott Pilgrim working fairly well and Siren: Blood Curse almost working decently, but almost everything else has massive issues like Castlevania: Harmony Of Despair, the menu just won’t render for me though I can blindly navigate it. I don’t think my computer’s powerful enough to handle most of the 3D games, the only reason Siren works I think is because it’s borderline PS2 level (which is totally fine). Trying out Under Defeat HD and Hard Corps: Uprising right now and they seem to work near perfectly, which is cool.

If you want something more indepth, Animetudes has a good series of articles discussing the definition of anime, though it comes at it instead in terms of genre, philosophy, the mechanics of animation, etc. Part 1 is kinda’ pretentious but the other two parts are really good.

https://animetudes.wordpress.com/2020/02/27/defining-anime-part-1/
https://animetudes.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/defining-anime-part-2/
https://animetudes.wordpress.com/2020/03/13/defining-anime-part-3/