My Personal “AI Wars,” and a Treat for Kantai Collection Fans
One topic that’s interesting are the changes society will undergo with of the coming of AI and deep learning programs, which already do everything from tracking your musical preferences so they can play tunes you like to telling you how far away your Uber driver is to Google finding oddly specific images like “anime girls with twintails sitting on motorcycles.” I’m even occasionally aware that the news article I’m reading has been written by a robotic algorithm. Sometimes people fret about “the coming AI wars” when humans will have to do battle with robots, but I laugh at this, since I already do battle with AIs every day.
As part of running J-List’s Facebook page, I have to rack my brain to come up with posts that will be appealing to the readers of the page but also acceptable to the robotic gate-keepers on Facebook’s servers that will decide whether a given post will be seen by 200,000 readers or zero. The recent trend is for Facebook’s “stealth hide” any post it thinks is too sexy, whether it’s a gif that might show too much bouncy cleavage or Elf-sensei’s efforts to help Sagiri be a better artist, and the challenge for me is to get my posts safely onto the screens of J-List fans on Facebook. Who would have thought the AI wars would have started this early? We hope you’ll follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and read our posts!
(Some spoilers below for anyone who intends to watch the KanColle movie and has not yet.)
Being a fan of “mecha musume” anime in general and Kancolle in particular, I decided to check out the Kantai Collection movie, which we have in stock in limited Blu-ray format. I expected lots of scenes of extremely cute moe shipgirls streaming over the water while doing battle with their enemy, the Abyssals, and was well rewarded with many uplifting scenes of battles and bravery. What I wasn’t ready for was a finely tuned story in which the characters learn about the reality of the bizarre world they live in, the way the fleet of zombie ships they fight are made of shipgirls who have sunk (died) and come back from the dead, and how they themselves have all been Abyssals in the past. They basically realize they’re caught in an endless purgatory of death and rebirth, and that’s there’s no way out of the universe they’re trapped in, which I found refreshingly “meta” and awesome. I basically expected them to realize they were packets of data created by Kadokawa for use in a popular browser game.
Every once in a while, an amazing personal stress toy comes along that makes us say “Daaamn…” The newest such toy is Lily’s Ecstasy Laboratory, a “perverted science girl” that goes beyond mere. Visit the J-List ecchi toys for guys page and see all our stock, or read the ridiculously detailed reviews I post to our blog.
