new Okami game

That’s not Platinum, Hideki Kamiya and his new Clovers studio is making it.

From what I understand, there was some management shifts and the people on top want to focus on monetized online multiplayer gaming, and the veterans there had no interest in doing that and saw it as crass opportunism. So they’ve been jumping ship.

Even that isn’t a guarantee; I follow this streamer, Nitrony1, dude won the Guilty Gear Strive tournament at the most recent EVO and he’s still only getting a 100 and change viewers on his streams. Better than the dredges to be sure, but still on the smaller/niche end.

A lot of splatoon streamers. Chase247, ThatSrb2DUDE, and SourBraix are the ones of those I enjoy the most. A couple political ones, namely Hasan and Yugopnik. Some others I like that have good viewer engagement: Wirtual, Rookang1, Jakeblennings, karterfreak, AuroraPeachy.

I’d say a good reference streamer would be ZainoTV. He does Balatro streaming, so because of the pacing of the game and the often esoteric ways its system works, there’s a lot of explanation happening while he’s streaming. Also a generally chill guy, LGBT ally.

Definitely be prepared to spend some time having very few viewers. Like anything else entertainment-related, there’s a lot of streamers hanging out in the single digit viewers, a modest amount in the double to triple digit range, and then there’s the small handful of mega streamers like Hasan.

Try to have some sort of niche or gimmick to stand out. Decide if you want to have yourself on camera, not on camera, or an animated avatar.

Cross pollinate your platforms. A lot of streamers will also produce some YouTube content as well, even if it’s just uploading their VODs. Reaction content is super low hanging fruit for this. The point is that the algorithms all behave differently so being on multiple platforms helps to reach audiences on one platform that the algorithm isn’t steering towards you on others. It seems like every streamer has a Discord, I’m not sure how important this is as I don’t use Discord that frequently.

The liberalization of the Russian economy was shock liberalism to the extreme. Zero transition, some “ownership vouchers” the people got as a perfunctory nod to the state capital being public, but that quickly descended into a speculative market, which given the lack of guard rails meant an oligarchy formed. So the sudden fallout of social services plus a non-competitive market meant millions of pre-mature deaths, brain drain, corruption.

China, on the other hand, engaged in a system of requiring the factories of making X number of widgets per month or quarter for the state, but then allowed them to sell anything production past that on the market. This allowed for the introduction of markets in a controlled, gradual way, maintained government ownership to an extent (this is why so many Chinese corporations are owned in no small part by the state, a lot of them were spin offs the state kept an interest in), while avoiding the productivity downtime issue that Marxist-Leninist economies can sometimes run into. This is also why, while China has a capitalist class, it’s on a much tighter leash than in social democratic economies.

Years of Cold War propaganda convinced western libs that markets are the antithesis of socialism. So the emergence of markets in China was mistakenly interpreted as meaning the end of socialism in China.

Paul Volcker. When it comes to the architects of the neoliberal era, everyone talks about Hayek and Greenspan and Thatcher and Reagan. But no one mentions Volcker despite the man literally having the weaponizing of interest rates to break unions and the spending power of the working class named after him, the eponymous Volcker Shock.

Everyone who is an Other must be working together to bring down True Americans, as the Other does not exist as differing ideologies but rather as cartoon villains that hate True Americans for being the main character heroes.

Throwback to this banger from Newt Gingrich:

I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

But China didn't get intimidated and responded in kind, and 21 days after not a single country - not one - made a "deal" with the US against China, or even signaled their intention to do so.

Besides the U.S. economy not being as hegemonic as burgerites imagine it to be, it makes sense that countries would side with the country that’s consistently built mutual growth across the globe rather than the unstable bully. The latter is much more likely to turn on you.