Sarah Z

Sarah's still alive! Back with a video about sexy AI chatbots

My initial impressions were that there would always be problems with something meant to be perceived as a human but could be changed on the backend at any time, like, any interaction could be subtly tuned to the agenda of the developer, but I never knew just how manipulative the business model is, having kept well away from these bots.

Really weird having 2 videos about Replika come out the same day. Many Kudos had one.

... I literally had never ever heard about Replika before this.

You must be new to the internet. The ads were everywhere during the height of the Pandemic.

Welcome to the internet. There's a gift basked. It's mostly porn.

You've never heard of adblock...?

Sure I do and i still know what Replika is lol.

Edited by Ghilz on Apr 26th 2023 at 9:44:57 AM

I tried out Replika at the beginning of the pandemic just on the basis of "ai chatbot friend", with no interest in porn or romance and no knowledge that the app even supported them.

... I got bored after two days and never continued. I guess I wasn't the target audience.

This was an interesting dive into specifically where AI/LLM's fail the Turing Test. No independent thought, can't form negative emotions about who it's talking to, doesn't have a real internal understaning of the big picture of a social relationship.

I have to said that while I like this, I dont necesarily agree with Sarah in doging the implication of what it is this parasocial interaction with AI

Been a few months and Sarah is back with a new video!

In this one, she touches on Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella musical, which...apparently opened on Broadway earlier this year, flopped hard, and was closed after a few months. I don't think I heard about this beyond maybe one mention somewhere, but yeah, this is apparently very infamous and Sarah delves into both it and the broader trend of YA musicals in general.

I recently listened to the KJB episode on Cruella and it seemed to parallel Bad Cindarella in many ways that stems from both being works that use signifiers of feminism and punk made by people who are neither, and coincidentally, both character reimagenings (Cindarella as a rebel, Cruella as a tragic anti-hero) fail because the new character elemnts clash so hard with how the audience is supposed to relate to them. Cindarella being stuck up and anti-social makes her unsympathetic, while Cruella's arc in turn doesn't explain how she then becomes the cartoon villain she is (based on event in the post-credits scene) just a couple years after the events of the movie that she ends still pretty morally good.

sarah mentions her age in the video and oh my god i'm older than sarah z by over a year

that's... admittedly bit surreal, i'm not used to watching stuff by people younger than i am

I already kind of knew I was older than Sarah Z but man. Now I know I'm older than her by almost four years and that makes me feel some kinda way.

Why you gotta be so old, Bleye?

For some reason I keep getting Sarah Z and Jenny Nicholson mixed up,it's really odd

Sarah Z is the Canadian who talks about fandom and has a straightforward sense of humor. Jenny is the American who talks about random things and has a quirky yet also deadpan sense of humor.

My first thought is wait isn't the opening thing, kind of like Disney's Beauty and the Beast except the townspeople are more justified?

Not that things can't share elements with other things, I just found it funny.

How the discussion of queerbaiting has turned really conservative

Oh god that term is so loaded and I've rarely ever seen it used correctly,it definately does happen though

Legitimate accusations of queerbaiting and how it's supposed to be used are covered on our site under Bait-and-Switch Lesbians, but maybe one in ten times is it ever properly used that way and not "my Ambiguously Gay ship which may or may not have legitimate legs didn't become explicitly canon, but the studio never overtly led people on with it".

Edited by AlleyOop on Aug 30th 2023 at 3:47:00 AM

One of the most infamous recent exmaples was how Bandai Namco Execs tried to state in a press release that the Suletta x Mio ship was "Up to interpretation" despite the staff stating outright in the show itself, the eventually released artbook, and even on their individual twitter profiles that it was a canon pairing.

Even fans within Japan itself were fuming over it.

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Aug 30th 2023 at 6:39:12 AM

No, the Suletta/Mio situation is Hide Your Lesbians. Both have the same root cause of neoliberal corporations wanting to appeal to queer audiences without losing homophobic straight fans in the process, but it's a different phenomenon and closer to a form of self-censorship than baiting.

It would only count as B&SL/queerbaiting if after all the flirting the ending had them exclusively engage in heterosexual marriages and actions and dismiss or downplay their past interest in each other. As it is they exist in a form of (im)plausible deniability but it's clear the narrative intent is for them to be seen as a couple and whatever backpedaling didn't erase the gay subtext entirely.

Edited by AlleyOop on Aug 30th 2023 at 3:53:04 AM

...The video is about how accusations of queer-baiting are being thrown at actual people for not performing queerness (or straightness) correctly. Discussion of SuleMio and the like better fits in our Diversity and Representation in Media thread

Edited by Hylarn on Aug 30th 2023 at 4:39:37 AM

The thing about harry Styles' fashion choises, I don't feel they're gender nonconforming. They're style noncoforming, that is to say, ugly.

But yeah, the youngins need to learn to respect people's privacy. Outing isn't activism, other than for Boomerang Bigot types.