element-jester - Tumblr blog

[element-jester]

[element-jester]

Voting for Democrats is the "leaving the house, getting some exercise, and drinking more water is good for your mental health" of societal change. Everyone keeps telling you to do it, worst of all your mom keeps telling you to do it, and it's not a magical cure-all, but it actually works and rotting in your room shitposting does not help in either scenario.

[element-jester]

applying for internships and i think the job market may be irreparable

[element-jester]

Important News

He's gone

[element-jester]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[element-jester]

the autism thing of having to learn to preface every question you ask with Holy Shit I'm Just Curious Please Dont Yell At Me because it turns out a lot of questions seem to Mean Something and people will get mad if you ask them

[element-jester]

Little life advice:

Everyone who says not to set your stove clock or microwave clock because you won't use them and don't look at them anyway is lying.

Set them.

Because sometimes, you will come come from a week away when no one was in your home, and see the stove and microwave clocks blinking and go, "Oh shit, the power went out while I was gone, even though it's clearly back, which means every single thing in my fridge and freezer might have gotten room temperature and refrozen, and will give me food poisoning."

And it will be the only indication whatsoever not to eat it.

Anyway, just got back from the grocery store, but at least I don't have botulism.

[element-jester]

Christ alive

[element-jester]

I hope my message finds you well. I would be really grateful if you could help me by donating. I need a donation of twenty to twenty five euros to save me and my family from the war in Gaza and escape to a safe place. Please donate, share and repost 🍉🍉🇵🇸🍉

https://gofund.me/70501154

.

[element-jester]

This is fucking deranged????

sorry to quickly cut in but i made a followup post on the full released document (Here) that is less snappy but shows more fucked up practices in the same document

[element-jester]

*sigh* just a friendly reminder that PluralKit attaches a unique code to your system that allows anyone to look up your system - and if you look up a system on discord using pk;system [code], gives a link to all of their public system data on PKs website, which for some of you includes information on triggers, sexuality, and other things that cyberbullies may misuse.

I have been messing around with the settings as much as possible and I cannot find a way to avoid this beyond privating all alters and all system info, which many users don't do.

Even with information privated, it still seems that PK will link your discord handle with your Pluralkit user if the unique code is plugged in.

Sharing as this seems to me like a breach of privacy at best, and dangerous at worst.

[element-jester]

ah yes, the two genders:

man and bath

[element-jester]

had a fascinating dream last night where there was a new, virally popular trading card game - it was called MOUNTAIN (stylised in all caps) and the whole gimmick was that you couldn’t buy boosters or anything - you had to find them?

nowhere sold MOUNTAIN - I mean, I expect players did, once cards were in their hands.

but acquiring cards meant noticing a box lying around, and just….nabbing it? they’d be in weird places - in a skip, wedged high up in a fence, nestled in the branches of a tree? nobody ever saw who left them there, and there was a lot of debate about how MOUNTAIN boxes were sometimes hard to acquire without risking one’s physical safety - but then, that was also bragging rights. especially as harder-to-reach boxes seemed to contain more elusive and sought after cards…

no, I don’t remember anything about the actual gameplay, we never played any MOUNTAIN. alas. I know there were “frame cards” that were literally transparent but for a fancy metallic or holographic border, which I guess upgraded the card they were applied to? frames were super rare, my coworker literally ran up to me in the pub purely to show off the frame he’d just found

dream brain gimme the deets on MOUNTAIN’s actual mechanics, I’m invested in this controversial unpurchasable scavenger hunt game

[element-jester]

So i’m just watching youtube, trying to chill out and whenever, when I get a Lego Movie 2 Ad for a video I was watching

do you see that timestamp at the bottom? Yeah, this is apparently 5 hours long.

And at first I was wondering, well is it the entire movie? No…this entire ad is for their newest “everything is awesome” type song. It is called “this song is gonna get stuck inside your head” and I am pretty goddamn sure it is going to repeat that one line over and over until my brain melts

So I am going to see if they really are playing it for 5 hours

[element-jester]

they're gonna violate food safety standards we've never even heard of

[element-jester]