The current record holder for most viewed video in my Music Video Pick series to date, I am pretty sure, Mrs. Green Apple’s “Kyohan” (「共犯」):
Not only does the video already have 8.6 million views (across 5 days), but Mrs. Green Apple just recently released “A Posteriori” a few days before and that one has ALSO hit 8.6 million views. Good for them.
To give you an idea of how fast the video is climbing, I saw these posts back to back this morning when I was catching up on Youtube posts:
If Mrs. Green Apple’s POPS doesn’t win a small stack of awards this year, I would be surprised.
This video is an absolute joy to watch a few times and note all the little things. Here are some of my favorites:
0:09 – Postman is iconic
0:20 – We see the letter A and a newspaper with the headline “More than a festival, a renewed Riverton” followed by the first blink storm
0:29 – We get our first pair of twins (and near-twins). The video is full of duplicates [and oversized food].
0:43 – On the left we have the cop-twins [with childish gun] and on the right we have the sun + moon twins.
0:47 – The dancers go through a range of emotions and might be happy or distraught depending on the particular shot. I also just love the way their dance is delightful but also just slightly offputting.
1:36 – Postman is our first slip out of joy at the start of the second section
1:47 – Guys carrying the umbrella are absolutely struggling while over on the left we get green-coat lady with double ballons [like the theme is starting to glitch]
2:00 – The Band is playing whimsical instruments that do not really match any real world counterparts. It’s a good touch.
2:22 – In a video of duplicates and pairs, we get the genius touch to expose the audience right at 2:22. It doesn’t take long before we realize who the audience is… We also see Studio B.
2:27 – The cut back to the “video” has the movements even less human while to the left we have a guy with a pink beard and a bald head that stands out.
2:46 – As the audience starts participating (becoming “complicit”) they become more animated. Feeling like part of the system.
3:22 – The word play is pretty exquisite around this part.
3:53 – In the last 10 seconds or so of the actual video, we see another audience (and the letter C). Turns out participating is just another spectacle, eh?
The play between complicit as both condemnation and something hopeful is so well done. It is bright and beautiful but also terrifying.
Easily my second favorite video of the year. I think I need to share #1, tomorrow. The two combined are some of my favorite videos of all time, as well.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn’t me…I realized after the fact that it might sound like I’m fishing for my own upvotes…
Good job, Duolingo… your fun event went over so well your volunteer community managers over on the subreddit are having to cut out complaints (while allowing multiple posts of people posting about how they only had to spend 2k gems to win back 5k gems).
Keep in mind Suggestion 0 is always this: never use gacha.
No One Can Use Gems to Get Pieces
Absolutely most important.
Easy enough. Some countries (and maybe some people) can’t use gems to buy pieces — and therefore get gems back — so make it where no one can.
I cannot stress this enough: no one buys pieces with gems.
Too many people online seem to be forgiving the game because they can cash out and get everything. Everyone should suffer equally if you want honest feedback because gacha players lie about being free to play and nothing wrecks a gacha fan base like FOMO. Make it so everyone is free to play and the truth shall set us all free.
No Gem Prize
Likewise, absolutely no gem prize at the end. Maybe, if you insist, give people 200 bonus gems a day for unlocking all that day’s nodes. At the end, people end up with 5k gems even if they don’t get all of the suits.
In fact…
Add in Too Many Suits
There needs to be more suits than any one can win even if they are absolute God-Tier in their luck. No one can collect them all. Everyone will have gaps.
As it stands, Duolingo has incentivized people — in most countries — to spend gems and wear the same two or three top tier suits which negates any reason to have those top tier suits. Hell, I imagine most players will have discarded wearing the suits in a week or two and it is basically just way for some people to game the system for a few free gems.
If you have it so that there are 10+ suits and people can only likely get 6+ then it means someone might miss the unicorn but get the Hawaiian Shirt and that is way better.
Duolingo Needs a Better Dupe System
Duolingo’s biggest sin after the allowing some people the chance to spend gems to make gems was the duplicate system.
Rather than getting five pieces to unlock a new piece which is probably a low tier piece that you will just get the next day and then it goes into the dupe pile itself you should…
either (a) Allow people to cash in dupes at a later date to give them some control over it,
or (b) [preferred] allow people to spend dupes directly on the suits with lower tier suits being something like 20-30 dupes while the upper tier suits maybe costing 50-60. This way folks eventually get the one or two suits they want.
Suit Pool That Returns
If you are going to emulate better and more profitable gacha, steal a core mechanic: you have more styles/suits/characters than anyone could win or ever need and most of them return in subsequent iterations.
This means the unicorn, etc, will be next time probably at a lower tier.
I would never suggest that Duolingo is anything like vital to anyone wanting to learn a language but it can be fun and helpful especially if you are also learning a language in another way. On its own, it gets a lot more variable depending on the language.
Then, this past month (give or take), they decided that what we needed was for them to add in a whole gacha mechanic. You play every day and then you unlock a certain number of pieces which then might unlock suits. There are six suits (+ 1 bonus if you get the rest) and from 1 through 6 they get a bit rarer and harder to get.
The suits are fun and whimsical and pretty optional and it doesn’t really matter, right? Just bonus content?
No.
And let me tell you why not.
Gacha mechanics in games are all about abusing human addiction-forming tendencies. They primarily exist to make money off people by triggering FOMO. People have suffered from gacha enough that I am generally never going to approve it being added.
Duolingo already uses multiple gamification metrics. Adding gacha is an awful choice on top of the stack.
I cannot imagine a proper gacha-centric system that would actually make game play more user friendly because the definition is that someone people will be lucky and some will not. Even if all it takes is time to complete, random chance means some will spend less time than others. This is BEFORE we get to the real world expenditure of some currency to speed up the process [which this, of course, has].
Like in this case where you need two “gold pieces” to unlock the rarest suit, the unicorn:
You have a 2% chance of getting a gold piece. There are, I think, 4 you need in total (could be 3, hard to tell at a glance at this point since I’ve already unlocked the majority). I’ll talk about this in a second, but I could personally get 4 pieces per day for I think 30 days. 120 pieces. At 2% odds, I can’t get there without luck being on my side and there is no guarantee that the gold piece you get won’t just be one you already have.
There is the standard stupid gacha duplicate system where every fifth duplicate you unlock a guaranteed-to-be-new piece. This improves the odds and makes it possible, but still not guaranteed. In the above, the purple pieces have a roughly 20% chance of showing up. Purple as rarity, not individual. I have something like seven days left so 28 pieces which should mean around 5 purple pieces. There’s no guarantee at ALL that it will be the purple pieces I need. Statistically, they will not be.
At this point, without getting at least one new purple, maybe two, I have no chance of winning.
“But, Doug, in this case, it’s just…”
No. Absolutely not. Because in this case it is like every other stupid gacha system and the lucky folks will get 5000 gems on top of their “just cosmetics” while others will not:
And sure you can earn gems on the daily by all sorts of things and in a few weeks (or months?) build up to 5k, but you know how else you get 5k of them at once? Cash…
Completing this month-ish long gacha event is the equivalent of spending around €15 in game (minus the gems you spent before going on reddit and claiming to be “free to play” because I have no idea what is up with gacha players and that pretense). All or nothing. You can miss a single piece and you are just as unlucky as someone missing 10 or refusing to play at all [unless you really want to dress as a lava lamp and frankly I respect that about you].
If they had cut the gem prize out and just said, “Hey, here are 15 suits and no one can win them all but if you don’t win your favorite then you can spend €2-€3 to unlock the one you want,” then I would have considered it more user friendly. It could have been comical just to see what kind of horse or sheep you end up getting.
It is also feels like some sort of test to figure out mechanics to be implemented elsewhere.
Some people (like me) can get 4 pieces a day but cannot buy additional pieces [probably thanks to Belgian law]. Some people seem to only only get 2 or 3 pieces per day (no clue why this might be). A lot of people have the ability to spend gems to get pieces (which seems to be the default). Some people started days later than others. There are a variety of glitches where people aren’t getting all their pieces.
This means you have all sorts of sub-pockets. Will people spend gems on such things. Is 5k worth it for the 4-per day crowd? How about the 2-per day crowd? There will be a PowerPoint slideshow about this presented at a board meeting.
Wave to the board, everyone!
HEY, DUOLINGO HEADQUARTERS, IT IS ME: SEMI-ANONYMIZED USER!
We have two options:
It is a real gacha and there will be some portion of the user base1 too unlucky to win the 5k gems and all seven suits OR
It is a fake gacha and eventually everyone should win which means anyone who spent real gems, and possibly real money, lost.
In this case, option #1 is technically better but it’s also pretty damned awful for any company to be injecting into their games. I have no doubt that someone is already typing up a report if this should be a new regular business model for them to try and use despite it having to be a failure.
This simply cannot win them any new customers.
I refuse to believe that people on the fence about language learning or who have never heard of Duolingo installing it to play for the toy hunt but there will be people who ABSOLUTELY will leave the app because of it.
They only way that Duolingo wins is if enough people either become more entrenched into the app because a unicorn avatar cost them time, possibly money, and effort OR if enough people bought/spent gems to get bonuses pieces that it triggered a slight uptick in monetary gain that outweighed the folks who are now unsubscribing or just putting put off by it.
That and/or selling addiction-forming-behaviors data to other companies who are trying to figure out how to gamify daily tasks while making profit.
Oh, by the way, buying pieces does not guarantee you won’t just get duplicates. For around 5k of gems spent, you are only guaranteed 3 new pieces, total. But hey, at least some people have the option.
snagged from u/wistfultyrant on reddit, used without permission
I did get the two I wanted (Rex and Mech). Even getting the two suits I wanted just makes me kind of distrust the game, though. And once the “learning app” adds in a game like this and makes it front and center, it is clearly defining itself as edutainment over education.
The tool I share below that sentence but above this footnote calculates actually the majority won’t complete it even if they do their lessons like a good little userbase. ↩︎
Kaz sent me a message to go out and look at the moon because there was a planet hanging out right nearby. I snagged this shot on my phone…
Didn’t occur to me until later that if I had waited I could have possible caught the contrail moving up from the bottom more centered into the shot as a whole.
Ah well, it was still a very pretty Belgian sunrise. I love the sunrises, here, this time of year.
I should find my actual camera and tripod and try taking some more proper shots.
Since I posted this, Renegade Studios has responded and offered folks who felt caught off-guard a chance for a refund. Also, quite a few folks who had a more positive response have joined the thread and pointed out some things I talked about here: the shipping was transparent, etc.
Again, my primary complaint is the timeline (I knew it was coming, had planned roughly accordingly, and was still caught a bit off-guard by the timing).
I’ll leave the discussion about if people could have saved money for certain tiers by waiting and ordering later. Probably. Almost definitely. I don’t think I could have saved money since I was all-in. Still, there will be some.
Original Post
I talked about, not that long ago, withdrawing from crowdfunding. It’s been brewing. And, in the immortal words of DJ Khaled: there’s been another one.
Now, before I continue, I do want to say that I do not actually hold Renegade Studios culpable for [most of] this. In fact, without burying the lede, here is an extremely relevant screenshot of a pair of graphics still up on the Backerkit page that, as far as I know, has not been altered from the time period when I backed it:
Shipping is relatively high and relatively variable. And it tells you that taxes (VAT) will be applied at a later date. This was honest, upfront, and for shipping broadly accurate.
Here is where I do hold Renegade Studios more culpable: I got an email this weekend that said, “We have just now added the total of shipping and VAT to your pledge and you’ll be charged Sunday/Monday,” and if you glance across the Belgium line you can get an idea that we are talking about at least double digits. +VAT. Because there was a glitch that caused the prices to not show up until around 48 hours ago and shipping was charged, for me, around 8 hours ago.
The minimum time to prep should have been one week.
The screenshots at the top of the page show some of the responses to this. Thread is up to 285 messages. Some are repeats. Some are in support. Most are complaints.
Folks were finding out they were going to be charged on Monday (message actually said Sunday but my bank was waiting until Monday) for an amount that we found out on Saturday (or Friday, depending on time zones).
That is a problem. Even if RS was very upfront about what it was — and shipping was technically cheaper than above (maybe around 10-15% cheaper, give or take).
And for people in the US it almost sounds like they could have pre-ordered it from Amazon, gotten a fair number of the items at roughly the same price, and saved on shipping at least if they weren’t going all in. Even the Renegade Studios website might give free shipping over certain amounts.
I’ll let others do the math.
THIS IS ALL TO SAY that it just gets added to the stack of the many ways I’ve seen confusion, dismay, and issues crop up even with otherwise open and honest companies handling crowdfunding when said crowdfunding could have been pre-orders through existing storefronts.
It’s not on them, but I miss the days when crowdfunding felt a bit more energetic rather than expected.
The past couple of days, the Youtube Algorithm has been extremely insistent that I want to watch this specific video:
A quick-and-Dougly summation for those who can’t/won’t watch: Hidden Rabbits was trying to find out how to read more books and stumbled upon a discourse/debate about folks skipping most of the books [in this case, just reading dialogue but I have heard of other techniques] and uses that as a lever to pry open issues with reading goals. Ultimately, Hidden Rabbits takes the stance of reading goals are good, being too hard on yourself is bad, some people are just better readers, and only reading dialogue is objectively bad. A few other tidbits ramble here or there in his discourse.
Books and I
Now this is something that sparked a LOT of thoughts in my head because I have been part of the online-book-sphere before there was a -Tok or a -Tube to fast-track the labeling process.1 I have seen the same arguments repeat forever like the whole thing is just an expression of liminal horror.
Perhaps most germane to all this is I sold books for years before becoming a librarian for nearly two decades (and, initially, had planned to retire as one before the international move).
I have had somewhere in the easy triple digits of people (frankly, probably easy quadruple digits of people) come up to chat with me in person about books, have attended formal lectures. All that. And a topic which echoes from grad school to the book store to the informal gathering has been “the right way to read.”
Ebooks? Reading goals? Young adult fiction? Graphic novels? Books over certain reading levels? Is The Lord of the Rings a book for children?2 All variations of that theme. How do we judge the way some people read as being right or wrong while largely forgiving ourselves for our own reading sins?
I’m now a bit past those days but it is a good to refresh myself every now and then so I want to riff off some points but FIRST an absolute CAVEAT: I think Hidden Rabbits bounces back and forth a lot and ends up into some rough waters here or there which are sometimes at odds with other things he says. There’s bits about some people having more free time. About the pretention of certain books. About the comparative “weight” of chunky fantasy vs thin (?) non-fiction. Stuff about owning books and whatever. It feels a bit freeform.
I link not because I agree (or disagree) with it but because I always appreciate when people talk about stuff like this even if I come from a different place than them.
SECOND, a less-binding CAVEAT: I generally consider a lot of the machinations of Social Media + Books to be ultimately a problem rather than a solution.3 I am not here to condemn BookTok (-etc) and I am sure there are many people that have found a wonderful community but in my experience you cannot have a gathering of readers without paradoxically generating what is effectively an anti-intellectual/anti-literary discourse.
I cannot explain it it just seems to bend that way.
The [Not Precisely] Wrong Way to Read
There is a bit where he says he doesn’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but…
Frankly, I would have stopped my sentence before the but and not tried to buckle down with establishing an objective measure of any wrong way to read.
Reading is a conversation between content creator and content consumer and what makes it so interesting is there exists such a wide sea of possibility even for relatively plain reading. A person who comes across Lord of the Flies as a teen will likely be seeing, and should be seeing, a different novel than a person who reads it in old age. You start to understand it is barely a book about kids on an island at all.
That sea is real danged complicated. There is no precisely correct path to navigate it.
The only real problem I would have with “incorrect reading” — be it dialogue-only or only reading the first few sentences of each page/paragraph and all the other skimming methods — is when you are dishonest about this in order to try and hold some reading-superiority over others.
Beyond that, the notion of “the wrong way to read” ends up being a conversation stopper rather than starter. Like Hidden Rabbits says: some read slower or faster. To add to that, some read deeper or shallower. Some are unable to process fiction or non-fiction as well as the other. Et cetera.
By all means, make guidelines for what you do and do not want to do while reading. That is fine.
Just it was not too terribly long ago where people felt that audiobooks weren’t reading and by “too terribly long ago” I mean people still have this argument. See also ebooks. Certain genres. Certain print formats.
Extreme example but what about a person who reads classics by randomizing the order of chapters and livestreams the experience of re-interpreting the book?4 That seems…interesting. Maybe thought provoking. But it completely violates the standard shape of reading.
A more pervasive example might be all the ways book consumption has been turned into content creation.
Going back to dialogue-only reading [which I doubt is all that common despite seeing at least two videos decrying it], it makes me think of graphic novels. Graphic novels have LONG been established an effective way to reach reluctant readers. A coincidence? Maaaybe.
There is simply no good way to draw a line even if I think many readers feel like there should be a line. I have styles of reading that do not interest me. I’m sure most of us do.
The best I can say is let reading meet you where you are currently. Cast a wide net into that sea of possibility.
Let other people mind their own boats.
Reading Goals vs Reading Schedules
The other main point I want to talk about is reading goals. I’ve talked about them, before. I have my own reading tally here on this blog which is badly out of date. I guess I should fix that. Anyhow.
Reading goals can help certain people.
Like Hidden Rabbits says, though, it can be easy to slip out of alignment with them. Or to use various “tricks” to hit and exceed them.
My recommendation if you are struggling with reading goals is to instead try something like a “Reading Schedule”.
Rather than trying to read 30-50 books (whatever) per year, just make time on a daily basis to read. You can either set a length (e.g., one chapter) or time (e.g., 30 minutes) as a goal but the idea is to give yourself some flexibility and to just get used to daily reading as a habit.
I think annual reading goals almost encourages treat reading like an assignment and like an assignment we end up front loading a bit, taking a long gap, and then trying to rush at the end.
Reading schedules are more like a mental exercise.
The Truth about Reading More
I maybe should have started with this but here is a quick concept that explains the stupidly frustrating truth about reading more in a way that is almost definitely unhelpful to anyone finding this blog:
(A) The only way to read more is to actually spend time reading more
(B) Reading, like an activity, invokes an opportunity cost
Therefore, (C) Actually reading more is going to come at the cost of other activities you could be doing
I think this ends up being a big stumbling block. This is partially why I don’t care so much about “the right way to read.” It is much easier for people to want to hit that place where they felt like a Proper Reader than it is for them to put down everything else — phone, work, other hobbies, TV, computer, videogames, whatever — and make a space to just enjoy that reading. Maybe a person is trying to return to those days when they would read in their room back at their parents’ house and feel like the future was endless but now it’s hard to find a book that returns them to that.
They are a different person now. The conversation they are having with books is different.
Especially for us old fogeys who might have read a lot back in the era when there were fewer constant distractions in our pocket and fewer screens dinging away at us with fewer gamified daily tasks we are supposed to accomplish.
I am not saying you have to gamify your reading — I’d rather you not — but maybe give yourself grace because it is an absolute fight and the main prize is just…reading. The end.
There is a lot out there. A whole lot. However you navigate that sea, paddle safely.
AND, and I cannot stress this enough, mind your own boat.
It occurred to me while writing that that there must be a Facebook-centric BookBook but I refuse to confirm or deny or its existence. I’ll let it live as a beautiful thought in my head. ↩︎
I lie a bit. The person did not ask but instead furiously insisted that LotR was a book for children with her two criteria seemingly (a) it had no sex scenes [i.e., adult content] and (b) I think the fact that it was fantasy. ↩︎
A couple of years ago I clicked on a BookTube video about “reading lesser known works” and the criteria was something like “Less than 4k (2k?, whatever, too many) reviews on Goodreads” and I legit can’t imagine ever wanting something to be reviewed by thousands before I considered it viable. ↩︎
“But, Doug, being pedantic about what other people read is how I like to read…” la de da. Congrats. You have trapped and confused me. Can’t argue against that, can I? ↩︎
In case you have no interest in clicking that link or for some reason cannot, the choice is… WOULD YOU RATHER
Get $2 million USD (tax free) instantly OR
Go back to 10-years-of-age with your current knowledge and have to relive your life?
Pargin argues, as I would almost immediately, that you want to take the money and not look back.
In the comments, though, several people bring up some of the classic reasons why someone might want to live their life again:
…you have nothing you really care to hold on to…
…you lost someone important and want to see them again…
…there’s some deep trauma somewhere…
…you have lost so many important things that re-rolling the dice just makes sense because you might get another shot.
And even reading those I would say that unless you are talking about a single, specific trauma that you could truly impact by redoing something…most of the reasons don’t necessarily strike me as actually compelling.
This is based on a few assumptions by myself:
Since you are retaining all your memories, you are taking the lived trauma with you even if you “fix” it.
There is absolute NO reason to assume everyone around you would make the same choices. In other words, if you assume everyone will be beholden to your will while you fuddle in the wonderland of your own past mistakes, you are being far too self-centered and that’s me being polite.
e.g., your ex-wife you want to try again with might not even be there at the same bar and might have hooked up with her high school sweetheart.
Even something like your favorite park to stare into the distance as you hate yourself might not be built in this new timeline.
Children, jobs, and everything that requires a monumental amount of chance and random luck to make work well are all just gone as something like a continuation of above but a very important one.
If you have a lifetime of regrets and poor decisions, going back to “fix them” probably won’t work out in your favor any more so than just moving forward. You will still have to endure everything that led to those mistakes in the first place except now you are in the funhouse mirror version of them all.
And…finally, depending on a lot of factors, your life at 10-years-old is a fairly powerless one even with future knowledge.
You know what, no, fuck it. I’ll one up my second point. If you are going back in time and rewriting EVERYONE’S choices just so you can get dumped again for being a selfish bastard, you are a terrible person.
Today, 30 September 2026, was for some reason an absolute collision of several singles by bands which I either listen to on the regular or just generally appreciate.
We’ll start with the one mentioned in yesterday’s post, mM7th’s newly rerecorded and released ｢エメトワ｣ aka «Aime Toi» aka “Love Yourself” [and yes, all that was just so I could use all the different quotation marks]:
It’s a fun video and the re-recording of the song does a lot to help the parts that already shine shine just a bit brighter. Originally the vocal mix felt a bit off compared to their other tracks but now when the Bridge/Chorus hits and eventually band members are chanting “One Day!” it works quite well.
There was also a new song by Pami, “Loser,” which is the video used in the graphic at the top of this page. The lyrics are a bit obvious but the video is anything but. I assume it is a metaphor. For what? Like, look… that feels personal.
It might win for best new video for today which is apparently a stacked category.
THEN, there was Nanajuuhachi’s “Half & Half” which is good song but the video will introduce you to “bedazzled pizza” and I tell you… kids these days, amirite?
I saw that Sezko had a new single coming which turned out to be a whole EP and then a video drop for “Honestly” which means there is only one more song without a video from the EP [which I expect around November(?) when the rest of it hits].
Finally, from today’s drops, alone [but wait, there’s literally more as I found out before I could click submit, see below] we have Froukje’s “Geen Rem” which, if nothing else, can act as a warning as to why you don’t use an eating contest to flirt. Two reasons, really. This is from an album that comes out in about three or four days so look forward to me chatting more about it, then.
NOW, going back just a little bit we have…
[one day ago] Lee Emi’s “Destroy Everything” and like I told Kaz having someone sing about the Devil telling them to destroy everything is fun and all but it would be a much worse conversation to have on a bus.
[four days ago] Cephalo’s “Bougainvillea” which is a nice song with a video in the always venerable “Blue tinted scene of Japanese woman by body of water” camp and finally, speaking of blue…
[five days ago] Mulasaki Ima & muque’s “Blue Cheese” which, and I say this with zero irony, does not actually feature as much blue cheese as it could have featured. Thank you. Might have done me in.
The last one has a cute little green apple as you hover over the seek bar…
It’s only been one week since the new Brandy Senki song hit. Is this something to do with the new fiscal year? Prices of digital singles going up tomorrow?
