But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version.
I guess the main point is branding clash if you're a large company website (most companies care a lot about how their brand is shown, if they care about spacing/padding around their logo they also care about what pictures are shown when joining), hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art. (though resentment could build up if actual humans get frequently unexpectedly rejected as bots by this system, not sure if this actually happens however, didn't ever for me at least)
The approach they took here looks very reasonable from that standpoint indeed.
The resentment point is a fair one! If that happens and maintainers care about public perception of the mascot, I can imagine them wanting to change it somewhat.
> hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art
I’ve known at least one person who genuinely seemed triggered by anime-like visual style.
Apparently a good chunk of HN is. Anubis-tan seems to me the main reason that this comment section about FFmpeg and Forgejo has devolved into a debate about Anubis; more than the intersitial page itself.
OSS projects are mostly done by people on their free time, they can do whatever they want with their mascots/branding/project. And those OSS projects tend to be significantly more respectful of users than the average modern software so on my side I tend to see those kind of harmless personal touches quite positively, sign of software that is made with the user in mind.
* use it
* don't use it
* use something else
* pay to change the picture
Easy.
> fetishes
And what fetish would that be? That's just a picture of a girl (maybe? Not sure they were ever gendered) holding a magnifying glass, if that's improper I'm not sure what is proper.
"Cassiopeia is down" - emotional event, especially if she never comes up again. AWS instance 54653-345r3453-34234, meh. Sure, we got more nines, but at what cost?!
It's just art style.
Art styles aren't picked randomly out of a hat. Humans are pattern matching machines and will draw conclusions based on choice of art style or mascot.
> classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions
Corporate Memphis is an abomination and I harshly judge any company that uses it. Everyone hates Corporate Memphis and makes fun of it.
They do offer an unbranded version, botstopper. It is part of their commercial offering [0] and intended for "professional" environments
Otherwise, it's MIT licensed software. You can remove it all you want, but I will use that as a signal to focus my time and energy as I see fit.
I have been reading your stuff for a while, and if anything disproves my original point, it's your published output. cheers -
> People have sent me horrible things because of this.
That sucks, and I see how it makes my (somewhat) measured reaction scan differently.
> Just please take one femtoiota of care that the other side is also a human being with thoughts, feelings, and that they may just be incredibly tired of hearing people complain about something.
Your shit rocks, your stuff on Tailscale in particular inspired me greatly, and I'm sorry you caught me seeing orange.
Is pretty damn rude. It's the kind of thing you say online but would never say face-to-face.
Hastiness and inelegance tends to happen when you want to trip over yourself to make a point on this site, which we're now both guilty of.
Fwiw I like the mascot but I also don't associate this username with my actual identity because I draw anime style pixel art, so I get it.
Like... imagine Anubis, but with the "anubis is overdrawn" meme.
Unbelievable.
At least that's the spirit, of course someone will eventually just use random strings as user agents, but then again this is all a tragedy of the commons anyway.
The obvious positive reading of the GP comment is that they disagree anime characters make it not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne".
You seem to be unnecessarily pedantic too, while being wrong at the same time (I would get those relationships wrong sometimes if I thought it was clear enough).
I kinda like the Anubis girl though (as you said, subjective)
EDIT: zig is very cool thank you
I think perhaps you might be overestimating how popular anime is with Americans because of how popular it is on the Internet.
My point is that people get used to such things, and stop to even notice.
It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them. Anime wasn't always accepted in Japanese culture(where it was born); it always existed and was growing consistently over the entire postwar history, but there were still plenty of cancellation forces on Twitter when it launched in late 2000s.
Don't worry, companies like Apple would be having an ultra sexualized silver gimpsuit teenager mascot by 2030 and anime hate would be replaced by something by then at this rate.
> It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them
uh... no, not in my case at least.
It'll be like insisting YOLO[1] renamed and presentation video changed up. We all kind of deserve a right to say so, and insisting anime is unprofessional and must be removed don't look that way yet, but IMO it very well could be considered insane talks in 5-10 years.
It's just flashing a logo as the equivalent of a loading spinner while it does things. I don't see how the specific logo could possibly be interpreted as tasteless or offensive -- I know I'll take it any day over fucking Corporate Memphis.
> very time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"
I'd hope at some point you'd start remembering whose branding it is, that would make things much less confusing for you :-)
Now imagine if the developers of sudo were behind this, now that would be the stuff of nightmares...
and in my personal capacity -
I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site.
With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Cloudflare for things like this, but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"