Notes

What is it and what's the Story behind it?

You keep mentioning and linking to this Hololive and related stuff. I'm not in the loop. What's that, and what's the background on it? A personal background viewpoint could be helpful. I spend long hours at my workstation by myself often late in the evening so having something else on the other monitor helps me not be distracted by Twitter or other social media sites.



For a while, I was a devoted listener to an extensive list of podcasts, including networks like This Week in Tech and The Incomparable. However, as we entered 2020, a lot stuff I was listening to in the name of geek or tech subjects was turning unpleasantly political. By "unpleasantly political" I mean batshit mad communism. These were the same issues that had decimated Twitter in the year 2018.



This is evident in my YouTube recommendations. It's the only time that Google has been able to do anything right since 2013.



It's only a 20 second clip , but it was long enough to make me wonder What is going on? extremecraft and take a closer look. Then I realized there's no way to escape the rabbit hole.



This is Hololive.



Yes, there are many of them. (That's seven videos that were edited together by a fan, which explains why some of the transitions aren't flawless.)



In essence, Hololive is an international 24 hours a day all-girl improv comedy channel. Unwoke, unpolitically correct as well as irreverent and chaotic. They even have their own Bugs Bunny character - you see her for a few seconds in the video. Her name is Usada Pekora and she has 1.8 million YouTube subscribers.



They dance, they sing and they perform live with full motion tracking and 3D models, they draw at least two successful commercial artists They play a lot of Minecraft and do not take shit from anyone.



Hololive's own background is interesting. Cover Corp, the parent company was working on an AR device that would replace expensive motion tracking using a regular iPhone. However they were not having much success in gaining traction in the market.



Then in 2017 two Japanese girls fresh out of high school approached them and told them that what they needed was their own virtual spokesperson. One of them is Tokino Sora, with the number of 900,000. The other is A-chan, who is an executive manager who is responsible for every aspect of the company.



The pivot was a huge success , and Hololive has become essentially a money factory. Their smallest channel and they have dozens of channels - has around 300,000 subscribers, while the largest is approaching 4 million.



Many people are sick of waking-up hypocritically and need entertainers who are sincere. The 2D characters they play and the stage names (and a very strict corporate policy that protects their privacy) provide them with enough space that they don't need to keep a facade to their opinions.



They're not explicitly political however, they do make a powerful political statement in the current age.



Beyond the official content - and there's so much of it that it's impossible to go through it all - there's an absolute avalanche of fan-generated content, ranging from cute videos:



To whole virtual worlds



So forget Hollywood Don't forget Netflix and podcasts, I really don't care anymore. I'll be here in the corner juggling hedgehogs.



Hololive is also the main reason why I decided to return to Twitter. They post their stream announcements there.



This is Gawr Gura from Hololive EN, the most successful virtual YouTube of all time:



She's a bit of an idiot on a few things. She can talk for up to four hours every day, and not repeat her own words. She can do that while simultaneously doing three other things that are a rare ability.


Here's my website: https://extremecraft.de/