Amazing Idea: Rental Museum!

     Okay, maybe it's not all that amazing an idea, but it came to me as a flash of "this is exactly what I need in my life."

    So, what is a "rental museum," you may be asking?  (Assuming you're not just rolling your eyes and clicking away...)  This is an idea I literally had like five minutes ago (well, longer by the time you're reading this, lol) so it's not very fleshed out yet, but it's basically a combination museum and rental storage place.

    More accurately, it's a place where people could rent space to display their collections and thereby free up space in their homes for more collection.  😅  (Who, me?  What makes you think I have a spending problem?)

    So it'd be like renting cases at an antique mall, except that nothing's for sale.  But the up side?  It would also be open to the public so that other people could come see the collections on display (among other things, this would mean you could show people your cool collectibles without having to allow them into your home) and there would be a small fee to get in to see the collections, right?  Then as they're leaving, the guests would have the option to fill out a small form about the collections they liked and didn't like (which would be identified to your liking, so it could be by name, by nickname, internet handle, whatever), if they were likely to come back again to see any of them, and if there was one in particular they came to see.  Being highlighted in these questionnaires as something people came specifically to see (or possibly just as something people would come back to see, or just as a favorite for the visit) would net a discount on the rental of the space, proportionate to the amount of attention gained among the visitors.  So, if your collection was popular, you wouldn't even be paying for the rental space, or not much anyway.  Plus your collection would be stored in a safe, guarded place, you could come and look at everything in pristine glory whenever you wanted, and it wouldn't be cluttering up every surface in your house.

    Obviously, there would have to be safeguards in place.  A collection would have to be vetted before the rental agreement could be signed, to ensure that it contained nothing offensive or dangerous.  That kind of thing.  Also, there would need to be a way of organizing the space, so you wouldn't have a doll collection sandwiched between baseball memorabilia and war memorabilia; you'd want all the dolls in one area, the action figures in a nearby area, the show business memorabilia in another area, etc.  This might mean either moving some collections around because a particular part of the facility was full, or even turning away potential collections because their particular type of collection belonged in a section that was full, but...like I said, this is an idea I only just had, so it's not fleshed out, and if it was really going to be a thing it would need to have all sorts of finely turned details worked out precisely as far in advance as possible.

    And, let's be real, I don't have the money, drive or social skills required to start something like this.  (And yes, social skills would be super-necessary to start something like this.  You'd have to be able to talk to a lot of people to get the funding, the location, the insurance and the staff to run such a complicated establishment.)  I just think it would be 100% a great solution to a few of my problems. 😅

    Case in point:  when I had to reorganize my Nendoroid "wall" because the Year of the Rabbit Wangxian Nendoroids arrived, I seriously found myself asking the question "which is better to go next to a ghost king, a vampire noble or the prince of the underworld?"

    (As you can see, I decided to go with the vampire.  Mostly because I thought his box fit better, thematically.  Although now that I think about it, Zagreus also would be less fitting on that row since he's from a video game, so he doesn't really fit in with characters from non-interactive media. (Okay, technically there evidently is a game based on MDZS, but it's like a cell phone thing?  I dunno; I saw it mentioned on the MDZS wiki, but I didn't look into the details at all.  (I also know of at least three fan games, but that's another matter entirely.))  Gotta say, though, the top row...that's like Lan Wangji's fondest dream:  sandwiched between two of Wei Wuxian. 🤣  He gets both the original and the Mo Xuanyu versions. 🤣  (And, ideally, someday I'll have the original Nendos of both LWJ and WWX, but I gotta find them affordably first.  Or Goodsmile could reissue them.  That would be ideal, 'cause then I wouldn't have to risk accidentally ending up with a knock-off.)

    Anyway, the fact that I had to ask that question is sort of a "send help, please" thing. 😅  (Or maybe the real "I need help" indicator is that I'll have to reorganize the whole thing again after the other Bocchi the Rock Nendos ship... 😰)

WTF, Etsy? Again!?

     Hey, a sequel post! :P

    So, I posted before about Etsy's algorithm doing weird stuff, putting in recommendations for things that are totally unlike anything I've been looking at/buying.

    Well, it's still at it.

    Here's my recent activity feed on the main page:

    As before, it's all MDZS merch, most of it cuddly romantic images of the two leads, and most of it in cute chibi versions at that.  (For those who happen upon this post unaware, MDZS is short for Mo Dao Zu Shi, typically translated as The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, a danmei novel (the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese genre called Boy's Love), and the basis of the very popular (and excellent) live-action drama The Untamed.)

    Now, my most recent purchase, admittedly, was not MDZS.  It was a bit of Persona 5 fan art:

    You will note that again, it's cute, chibi, and depicts the true love between two male characters.  (And yes, I feel justified in calling it true love, even though the game as it is does not allow you to romance Fox, because there's way too much evidence that he was originally supposed to be not merely a romanceable character, but the romanceable character.  I am intractable on this point.  Joker/Fox (or Fox/Joker, whichever floats your boat) simply is love.)

    So...the recommended items on the top of the page were a mix of MDZS and MegaTen items, which is reasonable enough, especially since I've bought MegaTen fan merch on Etsy before, and will certainly do so again.  (MegaTen is short for Megami Tensei, the super-series that the Persona series is part of, though in the US it's all released as Shin Megami Tensei, which is technically incorrect, because that is itself a different sub-series.)

    But lower on the page, it picks out a few "categories" that it thinks you're interested in, and points out some examples within those categories that it thinks you'll like.  And here's where it gets very messed up.  Because these are the ones it showed me:

    Again, I can only say "WTF, Etsy?!?"

    I do not buy things that sexualize women.  (I mean, not unless you count Barbie dolls.  And that is a very different level of sexualization than we're talking about here.)  And I haven't bought anything that could even remotely count as an action figure from Etsy since 2019!  I've bought some acrylic standees recently...but they were romantic ones depicting two men.  (Mostly Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, the leads of MDZS, of course, but I also bought a fantastic one a while back depicting the versions of Patroclus and Achilles from the game Hades.)  I may have looked at a few figures/figurines since then, but those were more MDZS merch.

    Furthermore, while much of what I've bought has been romantic, none of it has been erotic, so why is it showing me things that are so NSFW that the site feels the need to censor them?  (A few of the shops I've followed do sell some NSFW items, but only ones depicting men.)

    I mean, I guess I get it, to a certain extent.

    Persona has become a very popular series since it was restructured with the release of Persona 3, and Persona 5 is especially popular.  And there is a broad misunderstanding within our culture of gaming as the near-exclusive domain of the heterosexual male, especially the subset of heterosexual males who cannot obtain the love of real women, and thus pour out their desires onto absurdly sexualized representations of women.  That subset certainly does intersect with the subset of the population of gamers in the Venn diagram of the general populace at large, but it is merely a small intersection, not a complete overlap.  The grotesque assumption that "gamer = horny straight male loser" is disgusting and repellent.

    You would think that their algorithm would at least get the difference between art depicting women for the male gaze and art depicting men for the female gaze (or for non-gender-specific gaze, like in the case of the Hades fan art I've bought).  Or if that's too much for it, it could at least note the difference between male-presenting characters and female-presenting characters.  I don't think that's too much to ask for!

    Sorry.

    I realize there's no actual point to this post aside from me complaining, but...sometimes you just have to say these things, somewhere, to someone, even if it's just shouting into the void like this.

    Besides, really, how does one chibi keychain of two male characters hugging lead to having the algorithm suggest that I'd be interested in an erotic statuette of a furry woman with her chests hanging out?  It makes no sense!!  (The oversize figure of a robot soldier from the Star Wars prequels also makes no sense, but at least it's not erotic.  Though actually I might prefer an attempt to eroticize those silly-looking things to some of what the site has been pushing at me.)