Questionable Content XVII: "My Brain Is Trash And I Live On The Internet"

[Ibrinar]

Because the author seems to think that major Internet personalities are like superheroes, complete with secret identities, rather than mass-media figures who, in the same vein as film stars, usually operate either under their real names, or with their names at least publicly available, even if they use a catchier screen name.

I believe it isn't unusual for vtubers to keep their identity at least relatively secret if they can. To pick a random hololive one whose character name sounds like a fake name, gawr gura, a brief google search didn't produce a real name. Maybe it is out there if I look more but it isn't just official information.

(Though I don't know the in comic context of this since I have stopped checking.)

[Mechalich]

I believe it isn't unusual for vtubers to keep their identity at least relatively secret if they can. To pick a random hololive one whose character name sounds like a fake name, gawr gura, a brief google search didn't produce a real name. Maybe it is out there if I look more but it isn't just official information.

(Though I don't know the in comic context of this since I have stopped checking.)

There's a threshold at which point concealing one's identity becomes functionally impossible, and that threshold is 'making real money,' because in order to actually make real money an internet personality has to register themselves for all kinds of ancillary things - for example the kickstarters Marigold is apparently running - that still require real names. Making real money also requires interfacing with the media (even if its just the extremely online media) which also involves real names. This is the point at which actual anonymity becomes pseudononymity - the state where identity may not be declared publicly but is easily discovered by even a fairly low effort search.

Lots of really famous people are pseudononymous, a tradition that may date back to prehistory, with a public identity that is different from their private identity (in some countries and traditions this is practically obligatory), but in the 21st century nobody famous is actually anonymous. One easy benchmark is that if you're 'significant' enough to have a wikipedia page it almost certainly has your real name on it.

Aurelia and Marigold have both been described as making substantial (and wildly implausible) sums through their vtubing. Their identities are exposed.

[DavidSh]

There's a threshold at which point concealing one's identity becomes functionally impossible, and that threshold is 'making real money,' because in order to actually make real money an internet personality has to register themselves for all kinds of ancillary things - for example the kickstarters Marigold is apparently running - that still require real names. Making real money also requires interfacing with the media (even if its just the extremely online media) which also involves real names. This is the point at which actual anonymity becomes pseudononymity - the state where identity may not be declared publicly but is easily discovered by even a fairly low effort search.

Which meaning of "real money" do you mean here? Fully convertible money as issued by a state, that is, dollars, pounds, or euros, vs. quatloos or schmuckers? Or meaningful sums, as in the quote "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

[Mechalich]

Which meaning of "real money" do you mean here? Fully convertible money as issued by a state, that is, dollars, pounds, or euros, vs. quatloos or schmuckers? Or meaningful sums, as in the quote "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

'Real money' as in enough to contribute substantially to a middle class US income - 5 figures-plus annually. Another way of looking at it would be 'sufficient income that if you don't report it the IRS will come after you.'

[Delicious Taffy]

'sufficient income that if you don't report it the IRS will come after you.'

So, anything above $0.05/yr?
(assume the above is blue, I'm not doing markup on my phone)

[Mordokai]

Not that it wasn't before, but...

Seeing Yay put it down in plain English really cements it how stupid this last plot really was.

[Rodin]

Not that it wasn't before, but...

Seeing Yay put it down in plain English really cements it how stupid this last plot really was.

And that's without adding "hack the network to look at pictures of a dog you have already seen publically available pictures of"

[Delicious Taffy]

Not that it wasn't before, but...

Seeing Yay put it down in plain English really cements it how stupid this last plot really was.

Is it weird that I preferred the old "who's dating who" stories that would spend like ten strips of two characters asking each other out and then the rest of their friend group reacting to that event, and then it would settle into a sort of rhythm of everyone contemplating their relationships with each other, mixed with semi-frequent single page gags based on a preestablished character quirk, and also they'd all go hang out at a bar for a bit? I don't know what to make of all these really similar weeks-long arcs of a mischievous robot thinking about being a person, followed by a second mischievous robot thinking about being a differently-shaped person, followed by an allegedly-mischievous-but-actually-just-benign robot thinking about being a differently-shaped person who can hack the planet's gravity.

[Ibrinar]

There's a threshold at which point concealing one's identity becomes functionally impossible, and that threshold is 'making real money,' because in order to actually make real money an internet personality has to register themselves for all kinds of ancillary things - for example the kickstarters Marigold is apparently running - that still require real names. Making real money also requires interfacing with the media (even if its just the extremely online media) which also involves real names. This is the point at which actual anonymity becomes pseudononymity - the state where identity may not be declared publicly but is easily discovered by even a fairly low effort search.

Lots of really famous people are pseudononymous, a tradition that may date back to prehistory, with a public identity that is different from their private identity (in some countries and traditions this is practically obligatory), but in the 21st century nobody famous is actually anonymous. One easy benchmark is that if you're 'significant' enough to have a wikipedia page it almost certainly has your real name on it.

Aurelia and Marigold have both been described as making substantial (and wildly implausible) sums through their vtubing. Their identities are exposed.

Well the one I mentioned is at three million subscribers, I doubts she isn't making what you defined as real money with that. So I invite you to tell me her real name since I haven't found it without investing more than low effort (I found an older channel but that wasn't real identity either). I am sure plenty people know who she is, from hololive to youtube and maybe if I dug deeper into the fandom somebody might have figured it out there too, but that is quite different than a name being readily available as you and Delicious Taffy suggested.

[Rodin]

Is it weird that I preferred the old "who's dating who" stories that would spend like ten strips of two characters asking each other out and then the rest of their friend group reacting to that event, and then it would settle into a sort of rhythm of everyone contemplating their relationships with each other, mixed with semi-frequent single page gags based on a preestablished character quirk, and also they'd all go hang out at a bar for a bit? I don't know what to make of all these really similar weeks-long arcs of a mischievous robot thinking about being a person, followed by a second mischievous robot thinking about being a differently-shaped person, followed by an allegedly-mischievous-but-actually-just-benign robot thinking about being a differently-shaped person who can hack the planet's gravity.

Not weird at all, I preferred that. Jeph is good at writing both relationship drama and characters just sitting around chilling out and riffing off one another. That's what the comic focused on when I got into it - a bunch of 20-somethings hanging out and having relationships with occasional wacky and not-so-wacky sitcom drama. There were usually multiple relationships on the go so we never focused on one person too much.

Now the size of the cast has shrunk as Jeph doesn't want to disrupt the happy endings of the various characters who found a stable relationship. We're pretty much down to Clinton, Elliot, Yay, and Roko. Two of those characters are only in the story because he wants to write about AI stuff.

The excessive focus on one character is probably the biggest flaw the comic right now. This storyline about Yay has been going on for 25 comics. At 5 comics per week, that makes it over a month we've been telling this one story. It's too much.

[Max_Killjoy]

On the flip side, one of the web comic habits that bugs the hell out of me is getting part way into a single scene, and then dropping it for a week to do random crap, then coming back to it either as if no time was skipped, or skipping over the meat of the scene and just going straight to the aftermath.

Makes sense if you want to "fade to black" on certain things, but often it's just random and jarring.

[Willie the Duck]

Now the size of the cast has shrunk as Jeph doesn't want to disrupt the happy endings of the various characters who found a stable relationship. We're pretty much down to Clinton, Elliot, Yay, and Roko. Two of those characters are only in the story because he wants to write about AI stuff.

I don't begrudge the former. Constant relationship churn becomes unrealistic at some point or you have to make all your characters slowly become awful or you end up with Moonlighting or Niles&Daphne after they finally get together on Frasier and become exceedingly boring together. With the later, it's frustrating because the cast hasn't actually gotten small. There's Melon and Lemon and Momo and the Nonprofit crew and the Trio and some still-underdeveloped Coffee of Doom or Bakery of Whateveritwascalled employees who may well be in school to do something else or have family drama or all the other things that happened with the original crew.

Or just Humanizing Yay. It is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. I kind of dig the 'they accidentally upset Roko, and are doing self-reflection' storyline (as a concept). It just went off in this really weird direction that pushed them back towards the weird demigod from which they were moving away. If Jeph had instead world-built it such that once they gave up their billions, they were mostly de-powered and the world didn't overly care about them, I wouldn't mind storylines about them trying to fit in with others and learn to deal with pedestrian things (they even did it earlier, with the personal shopper story). Some of the better ST:TNG and Xena storylines (man, I am really showing off when I stopped watching TV) did roughly that.

On the flip side, one of the web comic habits that bugs the hell out of me is getting part way into a single scene, and then dropping it for a week to do random crap, then coming back to it either as if no time was skipped, or skipping over the meat of the scene and just going straight to the aftermath.

Makes sense if you want to "fade to black" on certain things, but often it's just random and jarring.

I find it also works for strips like Poisoned Minds where it has always (excluding the first year or so) was tracking different groups of people at different points in a timeline of a time-travel story. Otherwise, yes it can be a problem. I remember a rather infamous Bloom County storyline which stopped abortively because Breathed jumped away and forgot to come back.

[Rodin]

I don't begrudge the former. Constant relationship churn becomes unrealistic at some point or you have to make all your characters slowly become awful or you end up with Moonlighting or Niles&Daphne after they finally get together on Frasier and become exceedingly boring together. With the later, it's frustrating because the cast hasn't actually gotten small. There's Melon and Lemon and Momo and the Nonprofit crew and the Trio and some still-underdeveloped Coffee of Doom or Bakery of Whateveritwascalled employees who may well be in school to do something else or have family drama or all the other things that happened with the original crew.

How many of those actually have development potential though? Melon and Lemon are joke characters through and through who would be difficult to do a serious storyline with, much like how Emily's storylines fell flat. The nonprofit crew don't have much going for them outside of Roko, who already does have a story going on (the most interesting at the moment I might add). Beeps is a single note ditz who is hard to write into a more fleshed out character, and Arthur (is that his name? I forget) is a dude who is already together enough to make drama difficult. Momo is a very well established character, but she spends most of her time with characters who have largely been written out so it's hard to wrangle storylines for her.

There isn't much to say about the rest of the Coffee of Doom crew. Cosette got written out ages ago because she's too stable for wacky antics. Emily is one-note wacky as stated above and has been replaced by Melon. You could do a story about Penelope adapting to managing CoD, but that means going back to characters Jeph doesn't want to touch. Besides, the window for that has passed I feel. There really aren't any other members of Secret Bakery staff, unless we want to see more of Renee and Dan.

The cast are so inter-connected that it's difficult to bring back one person without bringing the entire herd with them. I think that's why we moved over to the Secret Bakery gang in the first place - to make it easier to write out the CoD staff.

[Vinyadan]

The excessive focus on one character is probably the biggest flaw the comic right now. This storyline about Yay has been going on for 25 comics. At 5 comics per week, that makes it over a month we've been telling this one story. It's too much.

I think that one character could be a good focus, but it would need to be a good character, like Marten. Marten started out pretty undetermined -- some skinny guy who knew his music, didn't like his job, and was scared of asking a girl out. He was relatable AND he let other people speak. As a result, he could keep the reader's attention while other characters coalesced around him and got their own lives with more characters, and the whole thing had a real-world foundation with some "artistic freedoms".

However, it feels like we don't actually get inside any character nowadays. It's a bit difficult to explain, but it's as if we had been seeing the world from Marten's point of view, while these newer characters are seen from the outside. And they didn't get a positive introduction, either. Yay was this ultraviolent cackling thing, Clinton was creepy, Roko was trying to break up the place where Faye worked (that beautiful place that gave a chance to people with no other chance!). Modern Elliot instead doesn't really have much to do with old Elliot. Old Elliot was a scary, mopey, silent unknown quantity that nevertheless revealed himself to be remarkably honest, took some initiatives out of his own volition, bit the bullet when the time came, and actually scolded Marten for his low expectations from people. This new Elliot is an oddly submissive (that shirt thing), ultra-nervous guy that makes bread and looks more like an insecure kawaii stereotype than a complete character.

[Max_Killjoy]

Over time, Jeph's characters have become more and more subservient to the "needs" of the plot or joke he wants to do at that moment.

[Kish]

If Jeph had retired or semi-retired all and only his characters who were at the end of their stories--so, Marten, Faye, Dora mostly gone, and Claire, Bubbles, and Tai with them--I'd be a lot happier than I am looking at a "deprecated characters" page that has Penelope and Raven on it and reflecting on the chasm between Jeph's characters who I find interesting, and Jeph's characters who he apparently finds interesting.

[Mechalich]

I think that one character could be a good focus, but it would need to be a good character, like Marten. Marten started out pretty undetermined -- some skinny guy who knew his music, didn't like his job, and was scared of asking a girl out. He was relatable AND he let other people speak. As a result, he could keep the reader's attention while other characters coalesced around him and got their own lives with more characters, and the whole thing had a real-world foundation with some "artistic freedoms".

Well, Marten was a self-insert character, and the early portions of QC are, like the early works of most author's about Jeph's own life. He was rather obvious about it, setting the comic in the actual city were he was living at the time.

Jeph has very clear tried to move beyond that perspective in the comic, but it hasn't quite worked. Probably that's because the story was so structured around the aspects of his own life initially that it hasn't been able to morph beyond it effectively. He built a framework to tell the story of underemployed twenty-somethings in the early 2000s and it will never work properly to tell the story of future-shocked twenty-somethings in the early 2020s.

However, it feels like we don't actually get inside any character nowadays. It's a bit difficult to explain, but it's as if we had been seeing the world from Marten's point of view, while these newer characters are seen from the outside.

In early QC Jeph leaned heavily on two devices to reveal the inner lives of his characters: anthroPCs - which functioned as soundboard/therapist and allowed characters to reveal their inner monologues on panel; and alcohol, as characters regularly went to the bar and/or got drunk in Marten's apartment and said all sorts of revealing things about their feelings as a consequence. Both of those devices have largely been lost. AnthroPCs have become full-fledged persons, so having a conversation with one is just any other conversation with a friend, and Jeph has become considerably more hesitant to deploy alcohol as a storytelling device - I applaud his reasons for doing so, but the absence of bar/drunk scenes has hurt the comic's ability to go deeper into certain characters.

And they didn't get a positive introduction, either. Yay was this ultraviolent cackling thing, Clinton was creepy, Roko was trying to break up the place where Faye worked (that beautiful place that gave a chance to people with no other chance!). Modern Elliot instead doesn't really have much to do with old Elliot. Old Elliot was a scary, mopey, silent unknown quantity that nevertheless revealed himself to be remarkably honest, took some initiatives out of his own volition, bit the bullet when the time came, and actually scolded Marten for his low expectations from people. This new Elliot is an oddly submissive (that shirt thing), ultra-nervous guy that makes bread and looks more like an insecure kawaii stereotype than a complete character.

Jeph seems to struggle with characterization for people who don't fit a familiar set of types, specifically the sort of mildly laid-back 'creative' types you'd actually find hanging around in a hipster-ish coffee shop all the time. He struggles with people who operate at a higher baseline intensity level, whether it's ambition, or focus, or organization, or similar traits. This is detectable fairly earlier in some of Dora's characterization, and has only grown as characters who are oriented this way have come to dominate the comic. Clinton is probably the perfect example. It's quite clear that Jeph fundamentally doesn't 'get' what makes a guy like that tick. That's not uncommon, getting characters who have world-views vastly different from your own is hard and even brilliant writers struggle with it. However, at this point in time the comic has become dominated by characters like this, so that it bounces around between characters the authors incompletely understands (or in the case of Yay, who he fundamentally cannot understand completely).

[Gez]

There's a threshold at which point concealing one's identity becomes functionally impossible, and that threshold is 'making real money,' because in order to actually make real money an internet personality has to register themselves for all kinds of ancillary things - for example the kickstarters Marigold is apparently running - that still require real names.

It can be company names. These companies can belong to other companies, who belong to other companies, who belong to other companies, who belong to other companies, who are registered in some tax fraud heaven where attempting to find out the identity of the owner will get you a visit from thugs.

One easy benchmark is that if you're 'significant' enough to have a wikipedia page it almost certainly has your real name on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy was the first counter-example that came to mind.

[Delicious Taffy]

It can be company names. These companies can belong to other companies, who belong to other companies, who belong to other companies, who belong to other companies, who are registered in some tax fraud heaven where attempting to find out the identity of the owner will get you a visit from thugs.

And to use the video game industry as an example, that tax fraud haven is probably a basement in Holland that somehow contains the HQ of several multi-billion-dollar corporations.

[Manga Shoggoth]

Well, I'm prepared to bet Momo never woke her up like that...

(Although Momo's "unpleasant method" is probably a little more exciting...)

[Windscion]

Ooh, Mar-bear does a pretty good goblin! The pupils are a nice touch.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's easy to forget that May is still an AI, and one that was evidently involved in banking before "that incident".

[Keltest]

Fortunately for Mar-bear, a lot of this stuff is one time and settled stuff, like the tax forms. If she takes a deep breath before diving in, she can probably make it back to the surface and not worry about being pulled back under.

[DavidSh]

When does Aurelia sleep? She was up late last night streaming, and talking to Yay. Now she's up negotiating with May in the early morning.

[Yuki Akuma]

When does Aurelia sleep? She was up late last night streaming, and talking to Yay. Now she's up negotiating with May in the early morning.

It is very possible more than a day has passed between strips.

[Cikomyr2]

This is stupid

Like, real stupid

But I have this warm feeling whenever I see a story or actual event where the only thing someone needed to be successful was just better organisation, sometimes provided by someone else.

Like, it's a very common story beat, it's one that always gets me. I get seduced by logistics.

[Delicious Taffy]

It is very possible more than a day has passed between strips.

I'm sure we've seen even less obvious transitions than this, so you may be right.

[Yuki Akuma]

I'm sure we've seen even less obvious transitions than this, so you may be right.

This is a totally new scene with a new cast, there is absolutely no frame of reference for when this is happening in relation to the previous scene.

Media does these sorts of transitions all the time.

[Traab]

Fortunately for Mar-bear, a lot of this stuff is one time and settled stuff, like the tax forms. If she takes a deep breath before diving in, she can probably make it back to the surface and not worry about being pulled back under.

I was thinking exactly that. This is a big surge of important things but once they are settled it will get a lot less hectic. In fact everything but the pitch meetings and collab discussions are one and done. Even the pitch meetings will likely be greatly spaced out. You cant throw a thousand projects at once online and expect it to work out. You need to give each idea you go with a solid shot to see if it lands with your base. And even worse, too many at once means you are setting up a schedule you probably cant maintain. Ive seen a lot of youtubers go through burnout trying to keep to a crazy packed schedule.

[Delicious Taffy]

This is a totally new scene with a new cast, there is absolutely no frame of reference for when this is happening in relation to the previous scene.

Media does these sorts of transitions all the time.

Yes, thank you for saying more or less the same thing I did but with different specific words. I'm glad we agree that this scene transition isn't anything unusual.