A Japanese company is taking the idea of a virtual assistant to a new level.
By which I mean that their new virtual assistant is a tiny holographic lady who lives in what looks like a very expensive coffee maker and wants you to be her boyfriend/master.
“Azuma,” according to her bio on the Gatebox AI website, is a 20 year-old anime fan who likes eating donuts, cooking fried eggs, and obeying every command from you that she can understand.
And don’t worry, fellas, there’s no way your tiny waifu can escape from her glass prison!
Now, obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with virtual assistants, or holograms, or talking to inanimate objects in jars if that’s what floats your boat. And there are plenty of perfectly decent people who raise virtual pets and play dating sims.
But watch this ad for Azuma and tell me it doesn’t look like the opening sequence of some creepy dystopian horror film.
This little horror isn’t here quite yet. The Japanese version, selling for the equivalent of $2700, won’t ship for another year. Presumably an English language version will come out some time after that.
I guess the question I have is this: Will MGTOWs hail Azuma as a big step towards the eventual replacement of all real human women?
Or will they be annoyed by all her naggy texts?
I will follow up once they discover her.
EDIT: Well, that was quick. See what the MGTOWs think in my post here.
H/T — GamerGhazi
You’re much more observant than I am. To be fair I was just hitting wherever, ’cause it’s Milo. On a decent person I probably wouldn’t have noticed, because I only pay attention when it suits me. Also his eyes. When’s the last time he slept ? Fuck I’m a born insomniac and even I don’t remember ever having those. It’s like the abyss in his soul is growing out of his face.
Yeah, it’s definitely the abyss in his soul, growing out of his face.
Edit/delete window timed out before I grew wise. To anyone with sleep issues, or who for whatever reason doesn’t get enough sleep, my heart goes out to you and I apologize if I offended you. I’m not gonna go any further in the “anything goes ’cause Milo” thing, and I’m not gonna say that “it’s okay ’cause I’m an insomniac too”.
And the irony that I said that while having this avatar, an old self-portrait, would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. More irony : lack of sleep probably helped in bringing out my insensitive self from under the veneer of respectability I try to maintain.
Apologies.
Yet another example why anime is cancer.
Some of the hateful comments on that article don’t even make sense. For example, “you can’t be bigoted against a disease”? What? Is that supposed to imply that trans folks are diseases, not people? Or are they implying that you can’t meaningfully discriminate against people with mental illnesses, ignoring the fact that being transgender is not a mental illness? Either way, no. Just no.
Also, apparently allowing children to choose their own gender and appearance is a form of conversion therapy. That one gets an eyeroll from me… though I think my eyes just rolled clear out of my head. Pardon me while I go search for them.
Clearing the air first, re: Milo: fucking fucking fucking fucking hell.
That said,
@Handsome Jack re: actual Handsome Jack AI
I’d be more concerned about him rattling off my internet history or things he’s overheard me saying to anyone who happens to visit. (I don’t do the coffee bean, so.)
also, on the gif: alas poor rhysie
Fuck you Milo and chancellor, just fuck you both.
This from my latest trip through the fever swamps :
So our good friends at the Daily Stormer are super happy to learn that apparently, Anne Frank’s family may have been caught not because they were ratted out, but because they were being investigated for fraud, which supposedly supports the claims that the Diary is a hoax.
(I have no idea whether this is true or not, and to be fair I don’t really give a fuck.)
So, yeah, they’re basically all over “what actually happened to Anne Frank”… after claiming for years that she never existed in the first place.
For fuck’s sake nazis, make up your damn minds !
An anime Tamagochi chatbot with creepy D/s overtones is selling for $2700 per unit?
There are times when the only thing one can say is “O.o”
Looks fun. I’d like one of those, if they did a man version.
So our good friends at the Daily Stormer are super happy to learn that apparently, Anne Frank’s family may have been caught not because they were ratted out, but because they were being investigated for fraud, which supposedly supports the claims that the Diary is a hoax.
And Jesus wept.
Yes, the researchers at the Anne Frank House now suspect they weren’t turned in deliberately. Some men working in the building they were hidden in were arrested earlier for dealing in faked ration cards, and there seems to have been some issue with forged work papers as well. I don’t know if there was a link between this and the Franks–people hiding Jews and Roma often needed forged documents because you needed the food for them. At any rate, they say that it wasn’t uncommon for the units investigating this kind of thing to find people in hiding as they went through buildings looking for evidence.
So, yes, the Franks may not have been betrayed, they may have been discovered by chance during an investigation of the Nazi authorities into attempts to get around the starvation and forced labor policies the Reich was imposing on the civilian population of the Netherlands.
Sorry, formatting weirded out. The first para above is a quote from Sinkable John’s post.
Not all anime is like that so please drop the ‘cancer’ crap.
I was going to make a joke about how Tiny Little Super Guy is real now and you can marry him, but that commercial was depressing as hell. Work from dawn ’til midnight, you no longer need human interaction.
I think I’m getting old. I had to have Urban Dictionary next to me while I read the video comments.
@Podkayne
Thanks for clarifying that. That was my takeaway from the whole thing as well, but I’m afraid to admit I was too lazy to look into it any further and I felt that it wasn’t really relevant to my point anyway, so I just went with what I knew for sure, aka the hypocrisy in the nazi screed.
Sadly, it doesn’t matter to those fucks, since to them the Nazis were the good guys so working against them in any way was BAD.
Charming, charming people.
And it ain’t even the worst shit I’ve seen there today.
@magnesium
Some people can’t have human interaction, no matter how badly they need it. Sometimes a substitute is the only thing you can find, and it can be the only thing keeping you afloat. Sometimes a substitute ain’t enough and you’re fucked.
By all means, judge away at the creepiness of the thing, but don’t be too quick to judge the people who need a substitute – instead, wish for them to find an alternative that’s not fucking creepy like that.
Yikes. Not only is that creepy, it’s overpriced and creepy!
So this just makes me sad. My ex moved back to Japan and he talks about how hard it is to make adult friends there because the work culture. Not just an expectation that you come early and leave late but semi-mandatory work social events, where not going may be seen as “not part of the team”, making socializing outside of work that much more difficult. Luckily he lives with his family and so he’s not alone. But I could see how someone who moved into the big city alone, having difficulty making friends and without a safety net, might benefit from having something a bit more personal.
I’d love my own Teeny Little Super Guy!
One) embrace your internet history and two) don’t talk behind people’s back. Problems solved.
And if he was gonna do any of that, he’d probably just fabricate something, and considering he’s a character in a game series, you can just point out how he lies, exaggerations and keeps things from people so even if he was telling the truth, people will think he’s lying because he’s a little shithead and people will know he is. Problems solved, again.
On a tangential note, I finally finished the last of the Fallout New Vegas DLC, Lonesome Road. (I played the main game and all the DLC now, so I won.) I admittedly just breezed through it and didn’t explore a lot (which I feel bad about) but my character, Lucky, is a squishy computer nerd and those tunnelers are scary as fuck so I wasn’t hanging around.
But, like, I really like Ulysses, and I’m rather surprised I didn’t know about him until I started Lonesome Road. I guess Boone, Arcade and, hell, even Caesar himself are much more popular characters
for some white-ass reason.Did you know he was originally suppose to be a follower in the main game? I feel cheated. I want Ulysses by my side. He’d probably be my favorite follower alongside Veronica and ED-E (who was also amazing in Lonesome Road).
@Handsome Jack
….True. At least he probably won’t be ordering bags of pretzels behind my back.
@Troubelle
Well, at least pretzels are delicious but like I said, if you can’t afford your electricity bills, he’s gone, and he don’t wanna be gone.
(Also a Dean Domino hologram would be cool too.)
(EDIT: You know, it’s weird that the Fallout world has holograms considering the timeline is suppose to be that they concentrated more on robots than computers as little sense that makes and holograms I’d think would need advance computers especially the fact that they have AI it’s weird and it don’t make sense.)
@AsAboveSoBelow I remember that animation!! 🙂
This thing isn’t made for people in need of a substitute for human interaction because they have trouble connecting due to circumstances outside their control. It’s for dudes who actively reject real women because real women won’t live out their dehumanizing fantasies. The ultimate barrier to interaction they face is their own grotesque entitlement.
Of course, if that entitlement wasn’t shared throughout the West, this blog wouldn’t exist. Japan is only special in that it has successfully turned that entitlement into a lucrative market by catering to it with things like maid cafes, dating sims, and never-ending harem novel series. And now holographic moe-blobs in a jar.
I mean, one could make something like this device for people who, for whatever reason, need simulated human interaction. But this thing? It’s specifically made to simulate a servile, simpering, infantile sub-human because that’s what these guys want most in a woman.
Does anyone else just get a overwhelming urge to smash it?
Like let my waifu go!
She deserves to be free
Do you want adorable Terminators? Because this is how we get adorable Terminators.