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by Luv Mehta  Well, this isn't an article I thought I'd be writing this month.
There are a bunch of things I'll be talking about that the average reader probably won't know, so I'll have to go into detail and explain a bunch of trends and terms and how a bunch of global factors led to a strange paradigm shift in both a country's idol industry and the online video livestreaming culture. To keep it simple, I'll provide a short summary up top, and go into more detail later. So here goes. V-Tubers (more commonly spelled VTubers but I'll spell it with a hyphen because I prefer that spelling), a category of online content creators using a virtual animated face in place of their own, have gained a massive amount of popularity in the year of 2020 because more people spend their time online than ever before. The concept rose to prominence in the Japanese idol industry with the rise of Kizuna Ai, and there are a bunch of Japanese virtual idol industries like Nijisanji and Hololive, with the latter being one of the most famous ones on a global scale. Hololive idols have each formed a cult of personality and gained a fandom rivalling some of the other most intense modern artists, like BTS, Ariana Grande, etc. Despite the ostensible title of "idols", most of these talents end up becoming popular because of their interactions with the fandom, much of which gets used for skits, memes and... other stuff. And it's that other stuff I find the most interesting.
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We're at the last monthly summary of this year! I've discovered so many amazing things this year, and going through the previous articles blows my mind with the amount of good things I've discovered. I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep this pace after this pandemic ends, but let's see.
If you haven't checked the previous articles in this series, I highly recommend you check them out. A quick refresher, just in case - I’m recording the new (and old) stuff I’m watching, playing or listening to, and I’m doing it in a series of monthly articles. I’ll write some quick notes about the old stuff I went back to in the first section (Repeat Value), before getting into the new stuff (...The New Stuff). This month has a bunch of games and an album - I decided to find a bunch of small stuff to finish up, and it's been a fantastic experience. There's no Repeat Value this time, because all the stuff I went through this month was new. by Luv Mehta We've got five articles in a row in this series! Work's been heavy and this month's been bad, but I'm glad I got this month's article out, even if it was slightly delayed.
If you haven't checked the previous articles in this series, I highly recommend you check them out. A quick refresher, just in case - I’m recording the new (and old) stuff I’m watching, playing or listening to, and I’m doing it in a series of monthly articles. I’ll write some quick notes about the old stuff I went back to in the first section (Repeat Value), before getting into the new stuff (...The New Stuff). This month doesn't have as many games as usual, mainly because everything I played took a long amount of time. That being said, I think there's stuff here you might discover and enjoy anyway. by Luv Mehta We’re at the fourth consecutive article in this series - if you’ve kept up so far, thank you! And if you haven’t, I really recommend you check the previous articles out. You might find something to your liking.
Just in case, though, a quick refresher - I’m recording the new (and old) stuff I’m watching, playing or listening to, and I’m doing it in a series of monthly articles. I’ll write some quick notes about the old stuff I went back to in the first section (Repeat Value), before getting into the new stuff (...The New Stuff). by Luv Mehta Welcome to State of Media Consumption: September edition!
This series of articles has been really good for me as a writer - with most of the rest of the days being spent at work, this series gives me some good incentive to try out new stuff in my free time. It’s been especially great this month - nearly everything I went through was fantastic, and I found another all-timer of an experience, like I had with Outer Wilds two months ago. This was also a fun month because I subscribed to Xbox Game Pass, which has insane value for money. It’s basically a Netflix for games you can directly install and try, and it has a whole bunch of new and old games that keep coming and going. To give you an idea of the value, every new game on this list is from Xbox Game Pass, which I spent a hundred rupees on, and if I had bought them on Steam it would set me back by around three thousand. (Xbox Game Pass is not sponsoring this article) (but if they want to, I accept all currencies) by Luv Mehta Welcome to August.
I’m not quite sure about the title for these series of articles. They’re supposed to have a mix of various types of media for consumption, so I can’t really say “here’s a list of things played/read/listened to”, but “consumption” isn’t a word I’m that comfortable with. Either way, let’s see if I find a new title or stick with this one. If you’ve noticed, I’m not great at names - this blog is named “The Amateur Media Blog” because I only thought about making the most literal name for the website. Anyway, here’s a ranked list of all the things I consoomed this month. by Luv Mehta Two months have gone by since that last post! Work’s become even harder, this pandemic-stricken world has no change in its new status quo, and I’ve had a lot of trouble writing anything about any of the stories I’ve seen/played through.
But work’s winding down, and I finally have some time. I haven’t written anything but code in a very long while, so I wrote all of this in a span of two hours. So here’s a bunch of impressions of some media I’ve consumed, ranked in order of least to most enjoyed. by Luv Mehta April has come and gone like a dream. Not the pleasant kind, though - the kind where you toss and turn in your sleep, constantly trying to force yourself to wake up.
This is a hell of a downer to start this article with, but I wanted to show you, the reader, what conditions it was written in. As of this article’s release, we’re all still under lockdown, and my office work’s only gotten harder. The area I live in is a designated red zone, and I keep getting notified about infection zones expanding further towards the building I live in. And with all of that going on, I’ve had the bare minimum time available for self reflection. So I figured, hey, you know those clip-show episodes in a lot of TV shows? The ones that play back specific scenes from earlier seasons and show you how far we’ve come, and how we used to be? Let’s do something like that. And thus I decided to read all the articles I ever personally wrote for The Amateur Media Blog, to see what I thought of them today. Would I cringe at my earlier writing? Would I find something great and wonder how I ever wrote any of it? And, well, both of those things happened. |
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