stone-monkey (u/stone-monkey)

stone-monkey commented on Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons economist.com/asia/2022/1... · Posted by u/pigtailgirl

stone-monkey · 3 years ago

Haven't really thought about it in depth, but it's been pretty interesting to see this play out in the American online scans scene as well. From my perspective, Japanese manga was basically the 800 lb gorilla that we were all consuming. At some point in my college days, I think around 2014, this one webcomic called The Gamer came out and was pretty popular. That's the first big Korean webtoon that I recall blowing up in popularity in the online webcomics scene. Actually, I take it back. Tower of God was another popular one as well. I can't remember when that one came out, but I mentally omitted it because I fell off the wagon myself - thought the series moved too slow throughout each season. After those two was Solo Leveling, which really blew up. The premise for SL was pretty generic power fantasy but good enough to entertain on a weekly basis. What really sold it though was the art. Nowadays, if you're reading online scans, you just as likely to run into a Korean webcomic than a Japanese one. (I'm ignoring stuff like the Breaker because I'm pretty sure that started as a print series - the webtoon stuff is a new wave of comics designed specifically for its vertical format)

Recommendations: As someone mentioned earlier -

Peerless Dad

Administrator Kang Jin Lee (Same author as above - spin off series about one of the characters in the above comic)

Legend of the Northern Blade

Chronicles of the Heavenly Demon

Skeleton Soldier Couldn't Protect the Dungeon (I like it, but admit it's inconsistent. Also, author really likes to emphasize sexual violence against women early on - it's pretty grotty.)

Villain Unrivaled

Return of the Crazy Demon

Probably a lot of other series I like, but these are the ones from the top of my head that are generally pretty good.

stone-monkey · 3 years ago

Past Life Regressor is another one I just remembered - I wouldn't call it good, but it's more interesting than the typical action fare. Starts out with the most generic premise - fantasy earth where everyone has powers, and one guy lucks into being able to go back in time to do thing right the second time around. What makes this one interesting is that you'd expect this time reset to be about him doing the typical fantasy stuff where he becomes a super powered action hero because he knows everything that will happen beforehand. Instead, He uses his knowledge of the future to navigate the Asian financial crisis and enrich himself through day trading.

stone-monkey commented on Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons economist.com/asia/2022/1... · Posted by u/pigtailgirl

stone-monkey · 3 years ago

Haven't really thought about it in depth, but it's been pretty interesting to see this play out in the American online scans scene as well. From my perspective, Japanese manga was basically the 800 lb gorilla that we were all consuming. At some point in my college days, I think around 2014, this one webcomic called The Gamer came out and was pretty popular. That's the first big Korean webtoon that I recall blowing up in popularity in the online webcomics scene. Actually, I take it back. Tower of God was another popular one as well. I can't remember when that one came out, but I mentally omitted it because I fell off the wagon myself - thought the series moved too slow throughout each season. After those two was Solo Leveling, which really blew up. The premise for SL was pretty generic power fantasy but good enough to entertain on a weekly basis. What really sold it though was the art. Nowadays, if you're reading online scans, you just as likely to run into a Korean webcomic than a Japanese one. (I'm ignoring stuff like the Breaker because I'm pretty sure that started as a print series - the webtoon stuff is a new wave of comics designed specifically for its vertical format)

Recommendations: As someone mentioned earlier -

Peerless Dad

Administrator Kang Jin Lee (Same author as above - spin off series about one of the characters in the above comic)

Legend of the Northern Blade

Chronicles of the Heavenly Demon

Skeleton Soldier Couldn't Protect the Dungeon (I like it, but admit it's inconsistent. Also, author really likes to emphasize sexual violence against women early on - it's pretty grotty.)

Villain Unrivaled

Return of the Crazy Demon

Probably a lot of other series I like, but these are the ones from the top of my head that are generally pretty good.

stone-monkey commented on Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons economist.com/asia/2022/1... · Posted by u/pigtailgirl

screye · 3 years ago

Peerless Dad is excellent. It starts off with a trope (secretly high-potential martial artist) and gimmick (but he has triplets). But, unlike others which fizzle out once the gimmick gets old, this one actually gets better because of its main gimmick. (the MC being a dad).

The MC is competent, knows his limits and navigates a complex class system to set his own children for success and safety. And then it has its badass moments to bring it all together, which is far more rewarding with the time it spends doing the 'boring' groundwork.

stone-monkey · 3 years ago

Very surprised to see a comment about Peerless Dad on HN, and it being top comment. Huge fan of the series. But surprisingly, I've found the spin off series Administrator Kang Jin Lee to be even better. Peerless Dad has suffered a bit from trying to weave too many threads simultaneously which takes away from the focus on the main character. As a result, it occasionally struggles to thread the needle, especially with the politicking subplot. Administrator KJL starts with an incredible premise (What if you took a high functioning autistic amoral sociopath and tried to teach him how to blend in with normies) and has kept building on that premise to some really good shit. IMO it hasn't suffered any of the same inconsistencies of Peerless Dad. Still love PD though.

stone-monkey commented on More than half of Silicon Valley residents want to leave: The mood is darkening nypost.com/2022/10/05/mor... · Posted by u/rmason

salmonfamine · 3 years ago

Yes, they should build more. But again, that's just pushing the core problem away from SF (one of the most notable cities in the US for over a century, with a history of economic booms and high migration) to what was until recently a large-ish college town known as a haven for slackers.

Having lived in one of those cities as a low-income resident, a medium-income resident, and now a high-income resident, I assure you that the high income residents do much less for these cities than any other group. And no, taxes do not make up for it.

stone-monkey · 3 years ago

Those same reasons you listed why other cities can't fix the problem also apply to San Francisco. Despite being world famous, San Francisco is quite provincial - nothing like NYC. Their population doesn't even break a million, and it's also geographically limited - the infamous "7x7" miles. Mass migration has affected San Francisco in the same way it has for your city - many high income earners coming in from other states/countries to get a job at a startup or Google/Facebook/Apple etc. These people from other cities are complaining about getting a small fraction of San Francisco's outflows - Why would SF be able to handle it better than your city, when they've had the same problem you're having, multiplied by 10?

stone-monkey commented on The bottom is dropping out of Netflix pajiba.com/tv_reviews/the... · Posted by u/bryanrasmussen

Natsu · 4 years ago

All this makes me realize that we have Netflix and haven't really watched or enjoyed it since, I think, the Expanse. I guess we watched the Squid Game, too, but I thought that was terrible. Like a low grade ripoff of an old (and much more intelligent) manga called The Liar Game.

stone-monkey · 4 years ago

Ironic that you complain about Squid Game being a rip off of Liar Game, when it's also derivative of another series, Kaiji.

Reminds me of that classic Steve Jobs line where he complains about Bill Gates ripping off his idea of creating a GUI for OSes, with Bill pointing out that they were both really just ripping off Xerox.

stone-monkey commented on The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown storiesfromthestateofexce... · Posted by u/ilamont

ejb999 · 4 years ago

>>how did China avert the vast majority of equivalent deaths?

Do you really believe they 'averted 'the deaths? or is it more likely they hid the truth. I vote for the latter; they don't have a good track record.

stone-monkey · 4 years ago

It should be obvious at this point that China doesn't have hundreds of thousands or millions of covid deaths the same way other non lockdown countries do. We can definitively say that based on this specific outbreak in Shanghai - There's no possible way the Chinese government could have hid outbreaks at this scale for two years now. That doesn't mean their approach didn't have problems. But whenever I see comments like this about them hiding the true covid numbers it seems in in bad faith, especially because we're looking at direct evidence in this specific case that it wouldn't have been possible for the government to do so. Are the Wuhan numbers fudged? Probably. But it's pretty clear based on the failure of zero covid to contain omicron that it more or less worked well to stop the spread against Covid zero, alpha, and delta.

stone-monkey commented on AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues health.aws.amazon.com/phd... · Posted by u/zaltekk

fragmede · 4 years ago

But there's always been attrition. What are some of the ways that is now different that is affecting attrition rates and their effects?

stone-monkey · 4 years ago

Probably increased salary and switch to permanent remote. Amazon is notorious for their frugality and they recently doubled their maximum salary cap to 350k. They would only have done this to stay competitive in the current job market. This implies that many of their existing employees are underpaid relative to their peers at comparable companies and they've likely seen a large uptick in attrition. Not to mention attrition begets more attrition, especially if it's "influential" employees who are leaving.

stone-monkey commented on Twitter based map of Russian troop movements maphub.net/Cen4infoRes/ru... · Posted by u/jillesvangurp

Mikeb85 · 4 years ago

> What specifically do you mean by "concrete promises"?

Actually admitting it to the EU or NATO. Actually pledging to defend it.

stone-monkey · 4 years ago

Why would the US be in charge of admitting Ukraine to the European Union...

stone-monkey commented on Tencent Allegedly Wanted Bigger Breasts and No Black People in Movie It Funded thegamer.com/tencent-want... · Posted by u/snowgrove

bertil · 4 years ago

I wouldn’t quote this YouTuber for everything, but he was born in South Africa and was a teenager when the country was still under apartheid: if he was horrified by the blatant racism when he was in China, I can’t imagine it was light or rare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtVozQG2Q-4

I’m not really surprised. And I’m scared that might be good business _in China_; whether the effort to go against that trend will pay off internationally remains to be seen.

stone-monkey · 4 years ago

Knew it was a serpentza link before I clicked on it. You can make your own conclusions but I don't really see him as anything more than a clickbaiter. He lives in the US now and has said that the US is the only society without true racism, if you want to get a sense of his biases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Expatshame/comments/nlxlxs/serpentz...

stone-monkey commented on Show HN: WikiAccents, an Audio Repository for the World's Spoken Languages wikiaccents.org/wiki/Main... · Posted by u/stone-monkey

stone-monkey · 4 years ago

Hi HN, long time lurker, first time poster. I created this wiki with the goal of having it store audio files for any conceivable language, with respect to city or region - ideally, if the site were fully fleshed out, one could browse through the languages, listen to a native Vietnamese speaker from Hanoi, another from Ho Chi Minh City, and another from Huế, and distinguish the difference between Northern, Southern, and Central Vietnamese dialects, except with enough audio files, have this process be extended out to every region on Earth. I'm still in the process of seeding the Wiki with languages from other regions; I'm currently gathering English/Yoruba/Pidgin/Igbo from Nigeria, Vietnamese/English from Vietnam, and Swahili/English/Local dialects from Kenya. After that I'm moving on to India and Latin America. Currently, I mostly have audio files from China, but it should be enough to give you the gist of the project. Open to any questions. Thanks.