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Comment by hdndiebf | Hacker News Reader

This anime thing is the one thing about computer culture that I just don't seem to get. I did not get it as child, when suddenly half of children cartoons became animes and I just disliked the aestheic. I didn't get it in school, when people started reading mangas . I'll probably never get it. Therefore I sincerely hope, they do go away from anubis, so I can further dwell in my ignorance.

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I feel the same. It's a distinct part of nerd culture.

In the '70s, if you were into computers you were most likely also a fan of Star Trek. I remember an anecdote from the 1990s when an entire dial-up ISP was troubleshooting its modem pools because there were zero people connected and they assumed there was an outage. The outage happened to occur exactly while that week's episode of X-Files was airing in their time zone. Just as the credits rolled, all modems suddenly lit up as people connected to IRC and Usenet to chat about the episode. In ~1994 close to 100% of residential internet users also happened to follow X-Files on linear television. There was essentially a 1:1 overlap between computer nerds and sci-fi nerds.

Today's analog seems to be that almost all nerds love anime and Andy Weir books and some of us feel a bit alienated by that.

I think I'd push back and say that nerd culture is no longer really a single thing. Back in the star trek days, the nerd "community" was small enough that star trek could be a defining quality shared by the majority. Now the nerd community has grown, and there are too many people to have defining parts of the culture that are loved by the majority.

Eg if the nerd community had $x$ people in the star trek days, now there are more than $x$ nerds who like anime and more than $x$ nerds who dislike it. And the total size is much bigger than both.

> Today's analog seems to be that almost all nerds love anime and Andy Weir books and some of us feel a bit alienated by that.

Especially because (from my observation) modern "nerds" who enjoy anime seem to relish at bringing it (and various sex-related things) up at inappropriate times and are generally emotionally immature.

It's quite refreshing seeing that other people have similar lines of thinking and that I'm not alone in feeling somewhat alienated.

But what if they choose a different image that you don't get? What if they used an abstract modern art piece that no one gets? Oh the horror!

You don't have to get it to be able to accept that others like it. Why not let them have their fun?

This sounds more as though you actively dislike anime than merely not seeing the appeal or being "ignorant". If you were to ignore it, there wouldn't be an issue...

They can have their fun on their personal websites. Subjecting others to your "fun" when you knows it annoys them is not cool.

Well, this is their personal project. You're welcome to make your own, or you can remove the branding if you want: it's open licensed. Or if you're not a coder, they even offer to remove the branding if you support the project

I don't get the impression that it's meant to be annoying, but a personal preference. I can't know that, though whitelabeling is a common thing people pay for without the original brand having made their logo extra ugly

While subjecting the entire Internet to industrial-scale abuse by inconsiderate and poorly written crawlers for the sake of building an overhyped "whatever" is of course perfectly acceptable.

Well, to be fair, that's not our doing so not really an argument for why one should accept something one apparently dislikes (I myself find the character funny and it brings a fun moment when it flashes by, but I can understand/accept that others see it differently of course)

Yes, an argument for why one should accept something one apparently dislikes usually only works when it's from authority.

Might've caught on because the animes had plots, instead of considering viewers to have the attention spans of idiots like Western kids' shows (and, in the 21st century, software) tend to do.

I don't think it's relevant to debate if anime or other forms of media is objectively better. But as someone who has never understood anime, I view mainstream western TV series as filled with hours of cleverly written dialogue and long story arches, whereas the little anime I've watched seems to mostly be overly dramatic colorful action scenes with intense screamed dialogue and strange bodily noises. Should we maybe assume that we are both a bit ignorant of the preferences of others?

Let's rather assume that you're the kind of person who debates a thing by first saying that it's not relevant to debate, then putting forward a pretty out-of-context comparison, and finally concluding that I should feel bad about myself. That kind of story arc does seem to correlate with finding mainstream Western TV worthwhile; there's something structurally similar to the funny way your thought went.

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