When I was in high school, I wrote a paper about Title VII discrimination based on disparate impact. Welcome to America’s Black  History Month, folks. It’s also where I first learned about this “liberal” concept. And it appeals to my sense of fairness.

Actually, more like, welcome to American Ps going to Japan to celebrate iM@S month, since I’ve been really busy working on it. But here’s a segue into John’s post, which feels more like a troll post (like many of his notable columns in recent years):

In a word, “No.” America’s 2008 anime industry collapse was caused by a number of interconnected circumstances, but fickle female anime fans were not one of those factors. In order for female otaku to have significantly destabilized the domestic anime industry with a sudden emigration, they would have had to have been a substantive supporting audience in the first place.

I think the easy, take-home lesson that John failed to grasp is that girls love shounen anime. And it’s not just him. A lot of people don’t understand that girls love shounen anime. I mean, just look at One Piece. The other takeaway is that nobody buys shoujo anime. Shoujo manga is basically a quaint, dying art form in Japan. It lives on (and will forever so) as an aesthetic, a style, a genre, a bundle of tropes, a few rows in an otaku’s database; but it’s near death commercially. It’s like cyberpunk as a literary genre.

As for anime, there are few shoujo anime to begin with, percent-wise. After 1997 that % plummets to abysmal levels. Most shoujo anime fall into the category that Precure is in–mainstream kids franchises. Licensing them internationally is a serious endeavor with real costs, nothing that even mid-bubble American industry could have really approached.

So John could’ve just said what I just say and be totally PC. But he would still get point #1 wrong. To his credit, the question he was asking wasn’t asking about the impact of shoujo anime, so he tried to use the sales of shoujo anime as some kind of support to his premise that few girls buy anime to begin with. Well, I have no idea if that’s true or not, but that’s like me saying nobody buys shoujo anime–it’s only true in the aggregate at best. For example, Fruits Basket sold gangbusters, and it’s as shoujo as it gets. But that is still just a drop in the bucket compared to all that DBZ FUNi sold. So John may very well be right about girls not buying anime, it’s just there’s no substantiation on this point. Plenty of guys bought Fruits Baskets, FWIW. I did just for the omake. So for all we know more boys buy shoujo anime than, say, a show like Penguindrum (which is kind of in a grey area) or Twelve Kingdoms (which is …technically shoujo but not manga).

Actually the worse thing John demonstrated is a total blind spot for shows like Kurobas, No. 6, Gravitation, and Free. Those are not “shoujo” either. Or maybe I should say, can we blame fangirls for the lack of financial support for Oofuri? Maybe in some MRA dream world.

What does this has to do with disparate impact? The concept, for those unfamiliar with it, is about how certain discrimination-neutral practices once implemented, gives rise to a systemic result that equals discrimination based on whatever that is discriminating. In the race case, it could be, say, a poll test, because one race of people are less educated than another race due to past discrimination patterns. The test itself is not a factor that discriminate based on race, but the result may very well be the same as a racially discriminating device.

So it’s easy to think that “hey anime that shamelessly pander to women is way rare compared to every other kind of anime, so fewer women watch/buy anime.” Except that’s just bullocks. It doesn’t mean anything, because these marketing labels (shoujo, shounen, seinen) are meaningless in this context. As in, the way to prove disparate impact is use numbers, and really numbers only. Maybe this is more like reverse disparate impact, like you hire by race and the result pool matches the general local demographic. Kind of like limiting the Asians admissions of Ivy League schools to keep the old boys club going.

So Gargon created this little thing that helps facilitate artists picking up commissions from people looking to commission. I used the “job posting” feature to post an ad for some work for 059Pro, and this is kind of the open feedback for that process after a successful transaction.

I guess first of all, a little about my background regarding art commissions. I’m pretty n00b at it, in that I have done it before and talked to artists about it to get their takes, but never in a very high-engagement kind of way. I’ve browsed DeviantArt’s forums a few times looking at want ads and slots. I’ve bought commission sketches at cons from AA-types. I’ve bought commission sketches from Mangagamer artists, LOL. And the list goes on. So while it seems like I’ve done a lot of this kind of thing, this is the first time I put down real money to have someone draw out something to spec. It’s for a specific project, and not just to hang on a wall somewhere (well, it might end up happening anyway).

So here is the thing, if you have a very clear idea of what you want to draw, and can express clearly how to do so, then the whole commission process should go smoothly, assuming both artist and client are professional at their interaction or whatever that is conducive to a good exchange of info and money.

In that sense, Artist & Client, the platform, takes care of the money part. That’s the number one add. For clients,  you have to pre-pay A&C and it holds the money in escrow. Then the artist begins the work. It provides this chat-like interface (a little like SMS-type chat mobile apps in fact) where you message the artist and the artist messages you. There’s a file attachment ability so you can send images this way. During the commission process. any images the artist uploads, the artist will have the option to watermark it so it has these hex-shape lines in the foreground.

I originally was going to just detail a list of bugs and user interface issues and send it to info@artistsnclients.com but I figured I should just put it all in a blog post.

First of all, the chat boxes is kind of too limited. I am TL;DR, as you may know, so too often it causes situations where I have to juggle multiple vertical scroll bars. I’m not sure what the best solution to this problem is. Of course, I was also doing a commission that is quite complex, so I do need that extra word count.

Second, the way it handle URLs is just lame. A&C uses a list of codes that people who mark up wikis and forum codes may be familiar with it. But it is a little clunky for people who are not. At the least, it should auto-parse plainly pasted URL as is. It also doesn’t handle single lines very well, and given the horizontal UI where on the left is user name, timestamp, and text and on the right is the input text box, you can exceed the horizontal lengths on image links very easily both in the text box and in the user text. So the tech solution to this is auto-recognize http links, reformat into shortened embed links (shortened in terms of text, not like URL shortening).

Third, the URL color is too close to plain text color. I think my artist missed at least one link because of this. Well, this is also partly because that person may not have used A&C much and encountered people who post links by embedding it with single-word text representation (eg., click here).

Those to me are important issues. If we’re going to use A&C as the primary channel to communicate it needs to not have these bugs. Maybe a tutorial could help, I don’t know.

There are then the asks, enhancements, I would recommend.

First, a tutorial would go a long way before putting in my money in a job, LOL. I mean, maybe there is something to that extent for job postings but I didn’t see any.

Second, the interface where you work with the artist need to be better… I guess if link handling is better then it would go a long way. Not sure what you would do in that case though.

In general, I have a positive impression of the overall service. There are some patches where it feels rough and could be A-B tested better, but it gets the job done. I can’t speak much about the community, since it’s kind of hard to tap into that besides looking at all the slots posted. I remember contacting one artist and didn’t get a response, and it generally is kind of a hassle to go through all the listing as unguided search is tough for someone like me. It’s not like I always know what I want from an artist nor do all listing are tagged with the right words. So posting a job seems like the way to go if you are looking for something specific.

https://artistsnclients.com/