Definitely Not Frankincense

If you read enough roundups of AI companion apps, they all start to blur together. Candy.ai shows up, a couple of clones show up, and the verdict is usually some lukewarm draw. I wanted to be more precise than that, so I judged sweetdream.ai on the things that actually matter day to day rather than on marketing copy.

Realism is the first axis. SweetDream's chat reads as natural and emotionally aware, and it carries memory across conversations, which is exactly where most rivals quietly drop the ball. You feel the difference within a few exchanges, when your AI girlfriend references something you mentioned last week without being prompted.

I think it'd be an interesting study to see how differently it affects different groups. Separate it into man/woman/other humans, and different types of fiction like books, tv shows, celebrities, anime, games, and AI.

With the big qualifier being that they self-report being totally uninterested in real relationships. (So even in the case of celebrities, they wouldn't actually want to be in a real relationship with that celebrity. Just the fantasy of their public persona, which they are aware is a public persona.)

I want to know what kinds of impacts it has on their platonic bonds with real people, their sense of loneliness, how much they believe their fictional lover could have genuine feelings for them, their grasp on reality, etc. and the differences in how much or how little impact there is across identities.

Some of it is just from suruga-ya which is easier to search, but a lot of them are from old mercari listings. In no particular order.

A transparent bag.

Marketable Plushes of the protagonist and Archangel (nuigurumi)

An.. acrylic clothes hanger. Gotta be honest, merch for older stuff was so much more interesting than what we get today. Who the heck was asking for a Baroque hanger? I don't know, but I kinda want it.

A floor mat. This is super cool. This is ultra cool. Does your favorite franchise have an ultra cool floor mat for sale? No it doesn't. But it deserves one. It deserves a cool one like this, but I can guarantee you that if floor mats became standard pieces of merch, they would be the lamest garbage you could think of. Like, it'd just be a character's face, and it wouldn't even use new art. It'd be the same key art used everywhere. Man. Baroque got the coolest merch.

A cushion. With the most obvious lil guy to put on a cushion.

A B2 sized poster.

An A4 sized poster.

koi kare cards of the protagonist and Archangel. They're going for over $50 each. This is objectively far less cool than the floor mat or hanger.

A pouch. I love it.

Fake tamagochi keychains. They're made of rubber, from what I can gather from listings. I can only imagine how delicate they are by now.

Pins and another pouch that makes everything look cute. Why can't we have more pins like this? Cool pins. Not stupid giant can badges with boring key art. Baroque got all the cool stuff.

Some kind of acrylic keychain. Kinda hard to see the detail in this awful picture.

More acrylic keychains. The backs are blank and I don't get why. Just print the same picture on both sides... I could be wrong, but from the other pictures on the listing, it looks like they may be layered and slightly holographic. Like, you turn them and parts of the dudes blend in or pop more from the background.

Tarot cards. I think one of the guidebooks or something had the illustrations for each card in it. It was scanned and uploaded to the internet archive. Too bad the raw cards themselves weren't scanned.

Rubber key chains of the tarot cards.

And the most boring stuff for last somehow. Acrylic standees. The worst thing to ever happen to merch.

square: [posting clerith for valentines day] 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰