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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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ultraviolence

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I wish rainbow trout flew around in the skies so I could release them like doves at my wedding.

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this sucks so bad i need to [remembers suicide jokes only worsen my mental health] put on the best talent show this towns ever seen

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You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is?  I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off.  Woopie. 

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Every single apartment on earth should have a balcony

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Throughout contemporary history, especially in the third world where oppression is more explicit and more brutal, the general attitude taken by oppressed peoples at governments that don't represent their interests and that violently supresses them has not been to hope a slightly less worse person is put in place, but rather to overthrow the entire system that supports them and creating another that does represent the interests of the social majority.

To the specific subset of people who prefer to remain ignorant or self-deluded about this fact, the mere suggestion of this might seem unrealistic, unproductive and idealistic. While it is true that the strategy stated above has failed some times, it has also succeeded the rest of the time, and the results have been better than any amount of reform could achieve.

The only actual harm reduction is the organized effort of workers to remove the source of harm altogether, and the only unrealistic strategy is to keep trying to reform your way out of a system that has been reinforcing itself for more than 200 years to guarantee its own existence.

Non-violence is a fairy tale. Almost 10% of the world population went hungry in 2021, and around 2.3 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure. 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing conditions and 15 million are forcefully evicted each year. We could keep going over statistics but the fact is that the global capitalist economy is built atop systematic misery and death. No amount of people with guns could ever even hope to come close to the magnitude of suffering imposed on the exploited. Violence or non-violence is not a choice you can make, it was made for you millenia ago. The only decision you can take is whether to dedicate your efforts towards ending class society, or not. Civility and "rational" centrism is a luxury only those who live by the accumulated wealth looted from everywhere else in the world can afford, and only for as long as their imperialist order can stand.

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Hey can you tag sfw please? I only want to see posts about sex.

Ok

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Y'all are acting like the giant robot fandom invented the eroticism of the machine when I've literally met self-taught mechanics who talk about working on their shitty cars in exactly the same way. When you've heard somebody wax rhapsodic about the transformational power of being shoulder-deep in a 1993 Ford Taurus, seeing folks on Tumblr shitpost about roboticising their genders just ain't that unusual.

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they used to put pennies in me and crank my wheel so that they came out pressed with designs of girls doing horrible nasty things with each other. but ok i guess i dont technically have a drivers license, officer, no

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Hello! I wrote for Hyperallergic about how minimalism went from high design to normie chic. 

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Steven Let’s play a fun game about adventure and mortal peril! What could possibly go wrong? Universe is playing a Warlock who thinks he’s a Sorcerer. 

Why not Bard? you ask

Well…

There was another contender for the position.

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Honestly surprised I’m not seeing MORE of these FFVII mashup shirts, but then again I value my time and don’t actively search for them.

Terence note: “Sold by Coochie”

also, in before some rando is like “ACTUALLY I LIKE THIS SHIRT”

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Uh-oh sisters! *phantom of the opera overture plays*

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How you all draw that cat from Animal Crossing if he were human: Hot chiseled anime boy

How he would actually look if he were human:

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small selection of favorite Gundam Names™