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So I'm gonna need every frame of Transformers One tattooed on the insides of my eyeballs.

(It does not beat Nimona for my favorite movie of all time, but second place is still pretty good. And damn, it's pretty.)

(On an unrelated note, did you know that there's a French "live-action" Bambi movie coming out next month? Or at least, in Dutch cinemas. It's probably more an adaptation of the original book than of the Disney movie, but still, I may have to go see it.)

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Homes are expensive because of landlords hoarding them for profit, not because of regulations.

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When you’re sorting the tank filters and a big boye wants cuddles. 

(Source)

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I’m getting a lot of people on that post I made about minding your own business who don’t seem to understand what BDSM is

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The aftermath of what J.D. Vance and Donald Trump have created and who continue to spread these vicious lies today. The party of hate and racism strikes again.

This is despicable on so many levels. These are people that are legally living and working in Springfield, Ohio. People who will now be targeted.

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Israel is now carrying out another massive terrorist attack in Lebanon. Similar to the pager attack yesterday, Israel is targeting electronic devices and making them explode all over the country:

Reuters news agency reported, citing both a security source and an eyewitness, that the devices involved in Wednesday’s explosions were portable radios, unlike the pagers that were attacked the previous day. Al-Mayadeen reported that the devices, apparently ICOM V82s, detonated, and “due to the devices containing highly flammable lithium batteries, the explosions were severe.” “The explosions caused massive fires in cars, motorcycles, apartments, and stores all over Lebanon,” the report added.

Several residential buildings and shops are on fire. Nine people have been killed so far, and hundreds more are wounded.

People with family in Lebanon are now receiving texts and calls from their loved ones telling them not to worry if they don't hear from them for a few days, as they're scared their phones might be rigged with explosives.

What do you call this, if not terrorism?

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Me: Hmmm, I measured my temperature earlier this morning and it was 38.2 degrees Celsius, but now, just before I'd depart for work, it's gone down to 38.0 degrees. Should I still call in sick?

My brain: Nah, even 38.2 degrees isn't that much higher than your new usual temperature due to The Fever That Will Not Leave. Go to work, you'll be fine.

Me: Well, due to the fact that I got, like, two hours of sleep due to the fever last night, and also the fact I needed to use the bathroom four times in the 45 minutes I've been awake (after those two hours of sleep)... I still think it'd be better for me if I stayed home.

My brain: Your loss.

(Later that day...)

Ear thermometer I used to measure my temperature again: 38.5 degrees.

Me: VINDICATION

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Going to see Transformers One on Friday.

Nobody else had bought tickets yet for the showing I'm going to, so that was nice. Let's hope not many more will also buy tickets, I hate having to sit right next to total strangers.

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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????

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Blue Mosque - Istanbul, Turkey.