The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op
The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.
We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.
Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.
Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.
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????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
i do think it’s funny when you’ve been into a thing long enough that you’ve done all the serious analysis you can do so now you’re mostly just thinking up looney tunes scenarios to put the characters in
Confession time; while I may have started making my girlfriend lunches purely because I love her there’s now a little bit of gay spite involved as well. I want the straight girls she works with to see what they’re missing and hold their men to higher standards.
Literally since my bf saw this he’s started doing other things to model relationship goals for other guys. He’s always been lovely to me, but he’s made more of a point to show off the things we do for each other and raise people’s standards. He told his friend that we make dinner for each other every night and that guy went home and made his gf enchiladas. He posted about doing my laundry while I was at work (he does stuff like that all the time but usually isn’t public about it) and 2 other guys cleaned stuff up before their ladies came home.
Basically what I’m saying is that @solarpunkarchivist has started a chain reaction of straight people doing better and setting better examples and we appreciate it.
My dad has always sung to my mom on their birthday*, their anniversay, and the winter solstice because that’s her least favorite day of the year. He did this well before they got married, and he kept doing it after they started working in the same office building, walking over to her cubicle a few times a year with a dozen roses and singing a love song from broadway or an operetta. More often, he came over with a hot takeout lunch, or fresh salad or a dessert and would double-check who was picking me up today and what Mom wanted him to make for dinner if he was getting home first.
Some men gave him shit about doing that, bitching and moaning about “Maaaaaan you’re raising the bar!” or “Isn’t picking up the kids your wife’s job?” and so on.
But more men- many more men- came to him for advice. “Where did you learn to sing?” “My wife’s allergic to flowers and doesn’t like chocolate. What should I get her for her birthday?” “How did you get time off to pick up your kids early?” “I wanna do something nice for our anniversary, but it’s right before tax day and I never remember and I feel like an ass. How do you remember?” Net, he thinks setting a good example like that ended two relationships and saved five.
Setting a good example is a good idea to inspire people to realize they deserve better, but even better is that there are lots of people out there who want to do better and will glady take notes from you.
Whumper kidnapping monster Whumpee and keeping them inside a giant vivarium so that they can observe how Whumpee would behave in their natural environment, taking notes of everything they do.
I work for the road crew in the summer. Crack sealing (the process you see above) is fairly quick and simple. (Though holding a hose that pumps literal tons of 350F tar into the road in the middle of the summer is NOT easy)
I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.
For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.
Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.
Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.
So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.
A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.
TL;DR
There’s a lot of road, not many of us, and soup is expensive.
Back in 2013, I posted a Welcome to Night Vale fic and someone commented, “I’m autistic and I see myself a lot in the way you write Carlos. Did you intend for him to autistic?”
And I was like “I’m flattered you think so! No, he’s not intended to be autistic, but I’m glad you can see yourself in him.”
Now twelve years later I spent some time this evening trying to track down that comment to give a very belated clarification. Whoever you were stranger, hey. I only said no because I based Carlos heavily on me, and since I wasn’t autistic, Carlos wouldn’t be either. Well. I’ve learned some stuff in the intervening decade that strongly support your literary analysis.
Listing fabric prices by the half metre is bad and shameful and I hate that so many online stores do it. Listing it by the quarter metre is even more bad and shameful.
I know! Shocking! I came across it here a while ago when I was looking for glazed cotton.
(I clicked every single link on this big list of Canadian online fabric stores and this was the only glazed cotton I found.)
You can SELL fabric in smaller increments without LISTING that price as if it's the price per metre!! Grrrr!!!!
I'm still not over seeing "Buy exactly the right amount! My fabrics are sold in multiples of 10 cm." and "Order of 50 cm minimum." in the same description. what is wrong with you.
#i found one the other day that was listed with what i thought was a reasonable per metre cost so i thought no more of it until i clicked it#then saw it was listed in 20cm increments??? like you couldnt actually buy half a metre it had to be 40 or 60cm #and the note that said this was the smallest text on the page so they 100% were trying to scam people
Yikes!
I've seen a couple people say it's probably because of website templates not designed for this sort of sale, but I don't think that's an acceptable excuse, it doesn't prevent them from writing the price per metre in the title of the listing right after the name of the fabric.
Sure you can have the increments on the number thing be smaller, but there's absolutely no reason to keep the full price hidden as a sneaky math surprise.
Round 3, Poll 4: Kelly Beth Laughlin vs Definitely not Bjork
Kelly Beth Laughlin
Episode: 3x10 The Underground Job
Character: Parker
I've been following your career since your first term in the state senate. And this is your chamber where you dispense justice and fight for freedom! I'm Kelly Beth Laughlin of the Maysville Laughlins. See, I don't need a salary, okay? In fact, I would pay for the experience of working for you.
Definitely Not Bjork
Episode: 3x06 The Studio Job
Character: Parker
How's it going, Parker? I don't think I'm being weird enough. Somehow I doubt that.
Round 3, Poll 5: Jimmy Popodokolos vs Clarissa DuBois
Jimmy Popodokolos
Episode: 2x09 The Lost Heir Job
Character: Nate
Yes, your honor. Mr. Popodokoli--
It's Popodokolos. Pokodolokos.
Pop-- Pop--
Popodokolos.
This man spun these fairy tales in my office. It's a shakedown from a disbarred--
Suspended.
--ambulance chaser from Las Vegas.
Clarissa DuBois
Episode: 4x08 The Boiler Room Job
Character: Sophie
And a last-minute addition today, an elusive genius making her first-ever U.S. appearance and participating in her first-ever competition. She is the woman that the London Examiner says single-handedly changed the world of chocolate. The Queen of Cocoa, the one and only Chocolate Whisperer herself, Clarissa Dubois.
Best alias?
Jimmy Popodokolos
Clarissa DuBois
Voting ended onJul 7
hell if I know also lost the mochi @juneookami - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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