Bunch of amateurs, they went up 13 places since last year.
Meanwhile I read somewhere that we fell in ranking practically, but appear to have gone one place up, since it was South Sudan that took the plummet and cost us the 108th place. But I do not worry, our TV and newspapers are hard at work with their pickaxes. Lower! we have to get lower! We are already winning at this game in EU, but we are the reverse Sergey Bumka in this. Each year you have to break your record, in order to establish your fame, eh?
Apparently Danish journalists expressed pretty much the same criticism about the interview.
But this Danish military analyst thinks that such questions would not have resulted in an interesting interview either. He’d have asked different questions, where Putin might have found it more difficult to respond, and where viewers might have learned something new:
I don’t know. I suppose that Putin didn’t really need to worry about Tucker Carlson asking about casualty numbers of the Russian army, lack of rotation of Russian troops, the performance of the Russian army in Ukraine and domestic air defense against deep strikes of Ukrainian drones, Wagner’s march on Moscow and other uncomfortable questions thay might challenge the image of infallibility that Putin needs to keep up, especially domestically.
But Putin doesn’t seem to want to take any risks, to the point of not allowing any opposition candidates to run in the coming presidential elections in Russia, no matter how unlikely they are to beat him even if the elections were fair. So I assume the interview was all negociated beforehand, but I don’t expect Tucker Carlson to admit that.
My smile of the day:
Trump attacked Nikki Haley on her husband (where is he? Where?)
He’s in some military training and send on X a pic of a wolf to Trump with these words:
“What’s the difference between wolves and humans? Only humans could chose the most stupid to be their leader”
Not the biggest news, but my personal wtf of the day:
The Mastodon instance queer.af was shut down unexpectedly…
…because .af domains belong to Afghanistan. And the Taliban decided to suspend queer.af.
So, I guess if I should ever want to register a cool or cute sounding domain for something, I’ll better think about the implications and find out who has power over it… (that being said, queer.af was an active Mastodon instance already before the Taliban seized power over Afghanistan again)
I think it is quite clear Carlson is more than willing to conduct this interview with Putin; I wouldn’t say that it’s negotiated. It has long been known that Carlson consistently holds far more radical opinions than he initially admits.
You know you are getting old when you read a sentence in a language you thought you were competent in but don’t even understand about what topic it is!
tldr, there have been rumors for a while that Nijisanji was a black company, and this came to a head when they pulled Selen Tatsuki’s music video for lacking permissions despite that there were months of advance notice internally and all permissions were gotten. Like a month later, Selen announced she was graduating, and then Kurosanji (kuro is Japanese for “black”, hence a pun on black company) fired her. Her redebut on her old channel (Dokibird) had 114k+ concurrent live viewers, and Kurosanji’s stock prices plummeted. She’s currently suing Kurosanji, for it seems other things too, but at a minimum leaking of confidential legal documents to unauthorized parties.
Other talents have also been leaving Kurosanji, and it is expected that that will only continue as Kurosanji makes it increasingly impossible to give them any benefit of the doubt.
The CEO of Kurosanji published multiple non-apologies within a 24-hour period, but actions speak louder than words, especially when the words in question don’t actually address the issue any fans are concerned about. People are comparing those “apology” videos with a recent video Yagoo (CEO of competing company Hololive) made congratulating Usada Pekora for being named the #1 female streamer in 2023.
I, too, had to do some searching before I understood what this is about. I even first found a reddit thread that made me more confused in the end…
But let’s see if I understand this right and can translate it to common English…
So, there’s people who stream online without showing themselves, but instead using computer generated characters, usually in a Japanese cartoon style. These streamers are called “VTubers” for virtual YouTuber.
There’s a company that employs several VTubers to do their streaming, called Nijisanji. But this company is apparently quite exploitative, and exploitative companies are called “black companies” ブラック会社 in Japanese, which is a word that doesn’t really exist in English, afaik. Employees of such a company of entertainers are called “talents” タレント in Japanese, which is another example of a Japanese-made English word. When a talent finishes their career in entertainment, this is called “graduation” 卒業.
Now, one VTuber called Selen Tatsuki got sacked by the company Nijisanji, which is then ironically called Kurosanji, to emphasise that the company is exploitative. This VTuber then went independent on their own channel.
Presumably in English language about Japan influenced culture. “Talent” is usually listed as a form of waseigo, i.e. Japan-coined English loan words, as the meaning of “celebrity” or “entertainer” is not very common in English. For instance, in the Japanese context a talent doesn’t need to have any talents, they just need to be famous and employed in show business.
Graduation is not typically used to describe finishing a career. You’d call that retirement in English (or in Japanese). The word “graduation” seems to usually be used in the context of Japanese or Korean pop idols leaving their idol group (such as members of boy bands leaving).
Black as in “black market” has a meaning of illegitimate in English, in particular of not paying taxes. I don’t think this is the connotation meant in “black company”.
Yeah, some of the vtubing terminology derives from the idol terminology. Though the joke goes that Hololive doesn’t employ idols (what the talents supposedly are), but rather comedians.
In American English, I think it’s quite common to refer to actors and performers as the “talent”, especially to distinguish them from other crew and personnel involved in producing content, but maybe this phrase is not so widely used to refer to celebrities in general or in all contexts.
I’d say the same applies in the USA and most of the rest of the world as well. Just being famous enough and employable in show business does seem to count as a “talent”.
I don’t think the specific phrase “black company” is common in American English, but I guess people might just say something like “shady business” or “exploitative company”.
