Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

It's not just about translation, after all, but localization. While you can (or kind of have to) assume some level of familiarity with Japanese life/culture for someone watching anime, it's easier for a native English speaker/someone who grew up in North America to notice cultural disconnects and figure them out.

An example I once heard: a book in Italian might say the character "ordered a coffee" and then "picked up the coffee, drank it, and walked out of the cafe". An Italian without as much consideration of American culture might translate that directly, but someone who understands localization would know that Italian character ordered what we would call an espresso, and know to change the text to be specific; otherwise, it sounds as though the person is guzzling an entire mug of black coffee on the spot, which would likely come across as psychotic and unnerving compared to taking a single shot of espresso.

Likewise, an Italian reader of an American novel might be unable to comprehend how or why an American character could spend 20 minutes nursing a cup of coffee, because they might be picturing a 1-2 oz espresso rather than a drip coffee.

So yeah, that's the big part of why it can't just be someone who knows English to some sufficient degree - because without fluency in spoken and written English, familiarity with how things would be said in English, and cultural differences between Japan and North America, you're going to end up with all kinds of dissonance.

Solid comparison, and illustrates the issue pretty well I feel.

> "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd is currently the most-streamed song on Spotify at 5 billion plays [1]. That's roughly equivalent to a 5-15x platinum album from a single song and streaming platform alone; the record for most platinum album seems to be 34x platinum for Michael Jackson's Thriller [2], which had 7 songs that all were hits to some degree or another. Michael Jackson did a lot besides just record the songs; he also put out elaborate music videos and went on showy tours. All told, there are more than 100 songs with more than 1 billion plays on Spotify (in fact, the 100th is still above 2.4 billion plays).

So then let's bear that out. I don't have the data on the Thriller album for for the sake of argument, we'll rely on a quick google which says it was about $8 in 1982. I'll use the same split you did (33% off for wholesale, about 30% of which went to the artist) so if we run all that down, with US sales being 35 million units. So $55.44 million went to Michael, if we assume all of that is true and correct, which adjusted for inflation would be about 184 million dollars.

We'll compare that to the Weeknd's streams for Blinding Lights. We'll put him on the high end of receiving a half a penny per play, that works out to about 30 million dollars, for as you point out, the highest streamed song on the platform.

It's still not quite a 1:1, unfortunately, but: Michael Jackson with 7 hit songs of varying popularity was able to shift 35 million albums for a personal profit of 184 million in 2025 dollars, versus the Weeknd, who with the most popular song on Spotify, made $30 million.

And it's worth pointing out here, these are both superstar heavy hitters. The story gets a lot worse for any artist not in that category.

Per most reviewers (e.g. Digital Foundry), the Switch 2 is expensive but not over-priced for what you get (unless what you get is motion sickness from the overdriven LCD display).

There's a stark difference between "expensive" and "overpriced". A lot of people have said over the years that Apple's laptops were "overpriced", when what they really meant was that they could get something good enough for their needs for lower prices. Lots of people still bought them because it was worth it to them.

Likewise, the Switch 2 is expensive, and it is not worth it to everyone, but for a lot of people it's not "overpriced"; I would point to the Switch 2's sales numbers as the fastest selling console in history to indicate that most people don't seem to feel the same way.

> with super expensive games.

Correction: every other gaming platform has super cheap games. If game prices had kept up with inflation since I was a kid playing on the NES, we'd be paying well over $100-120 for games these days. They're definitely more expensive than other games, but (as one example) if I play Mario Kart World half as much as I played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe then I'm getting better value for my money than almost any other entertainment I've ever paid for.

Again, not worth it to everyone, but not unreasonable also. It sucks, but still.

Would you be willing to crowdfund such an enterprise? It’s one thing to say you’ll put your money where your mouth is in some hypothetical future economic situation that may never arrive (as it was never funded by you or by anyone else), whereas it’s altogether another thing entirely to actually do what you say you’ll do in hopes that your investment will come good.