I read somewhere that Evangelion has similar cultural impact with the Japanese as Star Wars does in the US. In that way naming this app NERV is similar to the US’s “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative…
Except there was a law suit in that case because nobody bothered to get the rights from Lucasfilm
The government didn't call it Star Wars, they called it SDI. Some lobbyists used that term and they were the ones that Lucasfilm tried to sue.
The lawsuit was dismissed, btw.
> On November 26, 1985, the suit was dismissed by Judge Gerhard Gesell of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, on the grounds that the lobbyists' use of the mark in a noncommercial and non-trade context fell outside the jurisdiction of trademark law. [1]
GP never said the government named it that. Besides which, "Star Wars" was not a term used only by lobbyists, even if they coined it. It's a very common name for that program among the general public.
Arguably Gundam is more equivalent to Star Wars - similar initial release timeframe (late 1970's), aimed at a wide audience, lots of toy and video game deals, many different stories with continuity, etc.
Gundam has definitely wider reach, including governmental recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_impact_of_Gundam#Gove... (the whole page is interesting read) but Neon Genesis Evangelion also had huge impact on cultural scene of japan from what I have read, and by now it has similarly been deeply embedded in ways other works didn't.
I was so confused when I clicked this link. I saw "NERV" and knew it was related to Evangelion. But then reading the website it seems so real and legit. But then they're using the real NERV logo from Eva, even with the "God is in his heaven, all is right with the world" subtext. Which makes seem like it must be some sort of spoof. But who'd set up something like this, in light of the recent disaster, and even publish real apps.
Man... the cognitive dissonance I went through mentally bouncing back and forth for a few minutes. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that before in my life.
I'm glad all the top comments on HN are about Eva though.
The original Star Wars is a perfect Hero's Journey story told on film. In a vacuum, it's an incredibly inventive and scrappy film.
Evangelion has the benefit of not being owned by Disney, and thus not being milked into oblivion*. If all we had of Star Wars was the original trilogy, and maybe the "Rebuild of Star Wars" aka the sequel trilogy (speaking purely in story terms of soft-rebooting things), it could probably stand toe to toe with Evangelion on prestige. It's just been watered down so much in the last two decades, as opposed to Evangelion which has been fiercely protected by its original creator.
Weird, I didn't think I'd be defending Star Wars in 2024. And I do much much prefer Evangelion.
*I am aware of how badly Evangelion has been milked for merch, but I'm talking exclusively about media appearances in this discussion. There was Evangelion manga, but I can remember there being three series or less for about 20 years (and two of those were gag manga). In terms of visual media outside the main series (anime, EoE, Rebuild films), I'm pretty sure there's just been a smattering of Japanese commercials using Evangelion characters.
Though there are probably at least 10 anime series Americans know about (Pokemon, Naruto, Dragonball-z, Yu-gi-oh, Death Note, Demon Slayer, One Piece, etc.) more often than Eva. Eva is a relatively strange anime in contrast. Is it that Eva is more "Japan"-coded than the other ones, which are more "American"-coded, thus they would have an outsized impact overseas but not comparatively in Japan?
Time and place sort of thing. There could easily be another timeline where Evangelion and Sailor Moon swap places popularity-wise in the US. The demographic for anime on broadcast television in the late '90s and early 2000s, when Evangelion was getting dubbed, just skewed too young for it to really be profitable in any way. If I remember correctly, it only ever had one complete run on Adult Swim, a late night block which really limited its exposure. I don't think End of Evangelion has ever aired on a major broadcast network. (The Rebuild movies did get play on the revived Toonami about a decade ago, though.)
I don't think Evangelion would ever have been a breakout hit, per se, like DBZ, but depending on the circumstances it definitely could have had moderate success.
Isn't Evangelion (in)famous for its use of Western religious and occult symbolism? I don't think it's more "Japan" coded than say Death Note (with Western characters) or One Piece (based loosely on Western pirate lore.)
It's more Japan-coded in that the framing of Christianity and the occult is from a Japanese perspective: it views Christian symbolism via an outsider's lens, as an abstract, esoteric ancient cult (which it is, but not in the common way it's perceived in the West)
Also, Eva is much more, for lack of a better term, adult-themed, thematically complex, and sexually weird than Pokemon, One piece, etc. This certainly would make it less universally popular as a cultural export.
Eva is on some level a parody of Gundam used to explore adult themes of depression, isolation, loneliness, parental conflict, and figuring out your sexual identity. It's more like Akira or Ghost in the Shell than it is like Pokemon or One Piece. For an American analogy, it's like Watchmen vs. Superman. Watchmen is a case of taking the kids entertainment of superhero comics and using it to explore more adult topics.
Read the end of the sentence after the parenthetical: "more often than Eva". I mean that if you asked any random American to name an anime, I'd wager if they knew any they'd know one of those much more often than Eva, it's about relative awareness, not absolute awareness.
And I'm pretty sure at least Pokemon is well entrenched into popular culture. Death Note and One Piece have had Netflix series, also indicated a good amount of penetration in the average market.
Eva was on Cartoon Network in the 2000s (a censored version, but still.) That's where I first watched it. Other shows I watched around that time included Ghost in the Shell SAC, Trigun, some Cowboy Bebop.
I recognize most of the names you mentioned, but haven't watched any of them other than to check if they interest me.
Obviously Pokemon is better known, but other than that it's going to depend a lot on age group.
> The name and logo of "NERV" are used with the explicit permission of khara Inc., the copyright holder of the "Evangelion" series, and Groundworks Corporation, which manages the rights to the series.
I'm japanese.TBH for a long time i had thought this was a parody account.
Around the time of 2011 3.11 earthquake, the NERV Twitter account(the origin of this app) gained popularity and reputation as a reliable source of information in the social media space (At that time government official information provided on Twitter was extremely little).
I guess a part of the reason of its popularity today belongs to otaku culture on the Internet that was a good fit for this kind of anime-origin stuff.
Plus the company that runs NERV is owned by Sakura-Internet, which is one of the biggest computer infra business, and is believed to provide a reliable system at time of emergency.
Ah... I just realized for the first time that this must be the same Robert Browning whose poem served as an inspiration for Stephen Kings "the dark tower"
I hate that tweet. It was coined in the context of whatever Meta was doing with "the Metaverse" which for some reason everyone decided to lose their minds about as some sort of imminent threat rather then just a ge nobody wanted to play.
The thing is, The Metaverse wasn't a problem in Snow Crash. It just was - it was a thing, and it was generally regarded as one of the last places not totally under the dystopian corporate lawlessness that the rest of the world was.
So the motivating example is built on misunderstanding the original text, in the same way that Meta doing it was built on misunderstanding everything about the concept.
Ok. I get that The Metaverse from Snow Crash is not quite a Torment Nexus.
However, the concept still holds weight. If you want a less obnoxious motivating example, there's actually a very, very old Torment Nexus that we've been trying to build for over a hundred years: humanoid robots. The play that literally coined the term robot - R.U.R.[0] - very much made them the central problem of the story. Building humanoid robots IRL is a very bad idea, and yet people still do it, resulting in all sorts of creepy robots with awful problems that could have been built as far more useful machines had they not been forcibly anthropomorphized.
"Language evolves" means language evolves. To insist that the only valid use of the torment nexus meme is in the context of a reference to the Metaverse from Star Crash vis a vis Facebook's meta is language prescriptivism at its most absurd. It works as a general metaphor in numerous contexts relative to the tech industry and the dystopic effects of its own utopian nerd hubris, in trying to make science fiction real while failing to heed the warnings of that same science fiction.
In fact, there was a whole HN thread about an article on just that phenomenon recently[0,1].
The meme is used so often because there are many, many torment nexuses. Just as the definition of "enshittification" ceased to be bound to a description of platform decay almost as soon as it went viral here, and "literally" has been its own contronym for literal centuries, "torment nexus" has evolved to communicate a broader concept than was originally intended. And that's OK. It doesn't take anything away from the original usage.
Yes, one can be angry that human language doesn't follow the strictly defined, rigid rules of a programming language, and that the meaning of words can change quickly, and that language is fluid, sometimes vague and even self-contradictory. But to be mad that other people are using a meme in a way you don't approve of is petty and silly, because that's how the internet works. Such people need to touch grass and get a life.
The comment you replied to wasn't complaining that the meme was being misused, but that the original tweet itself misconstrued the book it was referring to. This isn't a prescriptivism vs. descriptivism situation, it's a matter of literary interpretation. (Anyway, linguistic descriptivism doesn't forbid people from having opinions about usage.)
I think that pointing out of the misunderstanding about what exactly the metaverse was in the book and how it relates to silliness around Metas "metaverse" could actually become a meme in it own right. It speaks to how often the "torment nexus" meme is really just misinformed pessimism because "technology is scary" and many people just totally completely misunderstood the message in cyberpunk fiction.
I think there’s a difference here in the sense that the “torment nexus” meme was originally “off” (in the sense that it was apparently misunderstanding the Metaverse from fiction—I don’t know, didn’t read the book). I still don’t 100% understand why they dislike the meme, but I think it just might be that people are misunderstanding a book they like. I don’t really get why anyone who isn’t a fan of that particular book should care about this, it is just trivia about the book, the meme stands alone.
A change in the meaning of enshittification would be worse, IMO, because it is a nice description of a widespread phenomenon. It didn’t really have a great name before (“platform decay” sounds too passive, enshittification is good because it emphasizes the fact that it is incentivized to proactively make the platform bad).
So, I think we should go along with the former but not the latter.
This life force "Vril" is from a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, best known in hacker circles as the author of the opening line "It was a dark and stormy night" and the namesake of the Bulwer-Lytton (bad) Fiction Contest. Winning entries are a fortune staple. Or "were", since the newest entry on my Arch Linux box is from 1990.
In 2022 they also did a collab with MSI. Those components are pretty cool, but they're for a more mid-range build than the premium ASUS components (something like an i7 with an RTX 4060):
Their Japanese Twitter account has 2 million followers, the branding hasn't really caused enough confusion in Japan to hinder them: https://twitter.com/UN_NERV
The UI/UX graphic design from Evangelion is actually pretty cool and clean. The only other sci-fu UI design I've seen that is also clean and nice looking is from star trek the next generation. Actually they made the UI from star trek better with Picard.
Borrowing the name from Eva might be a bit much in this case but borrowing the UI look won't be. They've done both here. They could've even gotten away with borrowing the graphic design look from Eva without citing it as the Eva UI designs are generic enough that it's not an obvious copy.
Because it's strange and distracting? Is this a promotional app or an actual earth quake app?
Imagine this: Star Trek the next generation Earthquake Locator! and it's an Lcars interface.
Additionally Eva was a very divisive series. Popular yes, somewhat main stream in japan but also strange enough that its mostly liked by a certain crowd. I'm part of that crowd but at the same time I get why that crowd is different.
To help illustrate imagine 2010s Justin Beiber or Twilight themed earth quake apps. Right? That's sort of a different crowd from the people who like Eva and not everyone is into that stuff. Are you more likely to download the app if it was themed liked that?
Additionally Anime was not always mainstream in the world. It was considered nerdy to like it. It's become mainstream now in the last decade outside of japan, but in japan it's still considered a little different.
As others mentioned, it's apparently partly because of how the twitter account associated with the application was source of good information during the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011, setting the stage for making more.
Who is a wrong person for a disaster-readiness app?
> the right people will be turned off from downloading it
One, nothing precludes multiple apps. Two, we have different definitions for the right people to save if they’re going to prioritise cultural comfort over safety.
> Would you download a Justin Bieber natural disaster app?
If it were the only option, yes. Wouldn't you?
I think Bieber is a twat. But you're almost making putting his face on a disaster app sound like a good idea. If we're accepting selecting people based on their traits and biases, those who are unable to put aside a petty dislike for a pop star to survive seem like a decent place to start.
I'm kinda confused, shouldn't this kind of app be developed and diffused by government, open source and not include paid plans to have better information in case of emergency since it should be funded by your taxes ??
It works reasonably well, but a lot of times I just never get an alert. The two minutes of shaking I experience yesterday in Osaka I received no alert. Last year there was a very brief level 3 that they blared the dreaded tones on everyone's phones in Tokyo. Stuff like the NERV application are more accurate and I can customize what earthquake levels that I get alerts for.
It looks like all of the emergency notification features are available in the free version. The data is obtained from public agencies. I know in the US there's a wide variety of apps that present data from NOAA and that you can also get it from NOAA directly.
Its in the NHK World app and turned on by default. I'm not in Japan but my phone went crazy with all the earthquake and tsunami warnings. Remarkable how slow all the non-Japanese media were in covering the earthquake. Remarkable still how every streaming station I looked at was showing the shore somewhere. Fortunately these days without a reporter standing there explaining how dangerous despite the fact they are in harms way. Webcams instead.
Personally: Yeah, I think that would be a good use of tax money. I'd love to see systems like this (as well as ones like covid contact detection) built by governments, in open source, and I literally mean goverment__s__. I'd love it if they had strong encryption and privacy preservation.
Practically: they aren't doing it, so does that mean it shouldn't be made? Government also seems pretty captured by industry (not just US) who are more interested in profits than utility. Sadly that's supposed to be where governments should shine the most as they are supposed to have different incentive structures.
Best note(?): Seems when incentives align and there isn't strong capture that the two can work in tandem pretty well. But that seems more and more rare these days. In fact, this particular app works with JMA (government).
Additional note: But couldn't we also say the same thing about texting, calling, and even email? Are these not social goods? In fact, even in some ways the government does this. It's why the USPS exists, which is not a profit seeking entity and services places that UPS and FedEx don't. Also, the US gov donates to Signal (and Tor and some others) under the Radio Free Asia program. The intent is to get people under oppressive regimes encrypted communication so they can organize against tyrannical rule. But this also causes conspiracy around Signal (and Tor) because there are larger factions of the government that want to destroy encryption. This also creates a lot of distrust, especially among Americans, so would we/they have trust in such a system?
They certainly have a nerve to dilute and add an extra layer to an important public system.
Also the name is somewhat fearmongering, so many might prefer to sign up to this than the real thing.
I read the everything trying to determine supported locations. After finding nothing, I decided to install the app. After agreeing to everything and giving permissions, it informed me that only locations within Japan are supported. I’m not surprised, but it would have been nice to have that information somewhere on the website.
They got some fame because they were posting “too many updates” this morning due to the earthquake/tsunami and got blocked on Twitter and had to tell people to use their app instead.
That’s the reason I heard about them, for the first time, this morning.
I saw the name and had to go digging to see if it was real (yes), if NERV was a real government agency and not fictional as I always assumed (no), or if they stole the name/logo (no).
Shootings affecting many people (ie mass shootings) in America aren’t common, and are over very quickly. Notification apps would not change the outcomes.
Earthquakes in Japan are a fact of life, and affect many many people very often. Mass shootings anywhere (USA included) are rare, freak occurrences, that involve small numbers of people.
Additional fearmongering over the very tiny risk from gun violence in the US actually makes the problem worse, not better. The mass media already does more than enough of that.
When you look at a source like Gun Violence Archive, they report many incidents where there is no loss of life as "mass shootings", and they also report many incidents of criminal conflict as mass shootings. The reality is that if you are not involved in criminal activity, you are vanishingly unlikely to be shot by someone else in the United States.
In my neighborhood I hear gunshots almost every night. There were several shootings within a block of my house just in the last six months, including one where patrons of the nearest bar had to run and hide in the walk-in freezer while two idiots shot at each other (and both missed). Often times I hear shots and check the police log and can't even find a reference to them.
According to the Gun Violence Archive[0], the US has averaged 2 mass shootings a day over the last three years - less common than earthquakes in Japan, but far from being rare or a freak occurrence.
A report from the FBI on "active shooter incidents" from 2022 indicate between 30 and 70 occur in a year. In 2022, there were 13 that met the Federal criterion for a "mass killing": 3 or more killed.
The reason these statistics are so different from what GVA provides is because the FBI is looking at the kinds of incidents that present a risk to a member of the general public, otherwise going about their business: they exclude self-defense incidents, gang wars, drug deals gone bad, and domestic disputes.
GVA, however, defines any incident with 4 or more injured or killed with a gun as a "mass shooting", which technically includes even some gun range accidents. Many of the incidents they report do not involve any deaths at all. Most of the incidents they report are criminal conflict, not the kind of terrorist attacks people are thinking of when the term "mass shooting" is used. The risk profile of criminal conflict is very different from that of a terrorist attack, generally, since being involved in crime is a significant predisposing factor.
Using GVA statistics to get a sense of one's likelihood of injury from guns in the USA, as a basis for a comparison to natural disasters, greatly overestimates the likelihood of firearms related injury (unless you are a gang member or regularly engage in robbery, burglary, &c).
I am using the term in the layperson sense. In that sense, there are generally only 1-3 events per year, affecting fewer than 500 people in a country of 350M. (Most of the gun murders in the US are not from mass shootings.)
Significant earthquakes in Japan occur at least 5-10x more often, and affect 2-4 orders of magnitude more people.
Websites like the one you linked use a definition of the term much different than the one commonly used by everyday people.
X cut them off during the Earthquake because they didn't pay for a higher tier plan[1], but they also had a Mastadon account going that was unaffected.
If you rely on this service, you should probably either have the app or use mastodon. X doesn't seem to be a reliable option anymore. Twitter might have temporarily lifted restrictions when such info could save lives, but X wants its $$$ first.
Additionally, Mastodon working well at the current low scale doesn't tell us much. We don't actually know how reliable it will be if it ever reaches X scale.
X has failed in a way that endangered lives, and in way that will likely persist. Mastodon has yet to be tested. It seems logical to start testing Mastodon's limits in earnest.
Mastodon has massive Japanese communities on it, Pawoo (social that was owned by Pixiv, was the largest Mastodon instance before Musk took over Twitter, now it's second), mstdn.jp (used to be second, now third), now there's also Misskey, which is not a Mastodon instance, but it's perfectly compatible with it.
Mastodon was battle-tested by the Japanese, almost no one used it seriously before them.
We have a similar situation for public transport here in Hamburg. The status updates for outages on the S Bahn network are only available on X, if you don’t have an account there there’s no where else to see it
> The name and logo of "NERV" are used with the explicit permission of khara Inc., the copyright holder of the "Evangelion" series, and Groundworks Corporation, which manages the rights to the series.
Does this app report real information relating to actual earthquakes?
My understanding from looking at the website and logo and tagline (“God’s in Heaven, all is right with the world”) is this is an augmented reality game set in the Evangelion universe. Similar to Pokémon Go.
It's a little fascinating to me that Japan's public can so easily take advantage of stuff like this while the USA market seems resistant, while all the next-gen technology that enables the Next Thing is coming out of the USA. Seems like a strange juxtaposition.
The "Enter" button of the splash page is under the cut when my iPad is in landscape mode. The page is also not scrollable, so the whole page makes no sense. Had to turn the iPad 90 degrees for the button to appear and to be able to "enter" the site.
That's it, I can't no longer tell at a glance if it's legit, legit sponsored, satire or derivative work. I don't know if it's something real, if it's something real with an Evangelion sponsoring/branding for acceptance reasons, if it's someone who quickly made a mock-up app to show how NERV started in our world and in the anime's world, if it's related to today's earthquake in Japan. Or maybe I am tired :/ ?
It's real and has existed for several years. They licensed the name and branding from the Evangelion rightsholders. It got attention today because their Twitter account got rate-limited due to frequent updates related to the earthquake.
The japanese rights holders for the logo and the japanese company (?) making it at least disagree I think.
The name and logo if nothing else are pretty recognizable and memorable. I know nothing about features, but they seem to be collaborating with institutions too...
Except there was a law suit in that case because nobody bothered to get the rights from Lucasfilm