Friendly reminder as we get closer to the launch of the ModRetro M64. ModRetro is owned by Palmer Lucky, a self described “Radical Zionist” who fundraises for Donald Trump.
Palmer Lucky also has another company, called Anduril Industries, that manufactures and sells AI powered weapons and surveillance systems. ModRetro even sells Anduril branded gameboys that were made from the same metal that they use to manufacture attack drones.
Don’t buy this thing. A 200 dollar Nintendo 64 clone is not worth your soul.
The reason I’m bringing this up now is because there seems to be a new marketing push happening for this device. It’s all over my feed on TT and IG right now.
They seem to be pushing the fact that there are new Nintendo64 games being made for the M64. This is very misleading because any game that runs on the M64 will run on a real Nintendo 64.
There’s also been new games coming out for the Nintendo 64 for years. ModRetro didn’t make this happen. They’re just publishing a few games. The Nintendo 64 Homebrew scene has been thriving on its own.
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??
This is a reminder for those who handmake Christmas presents that now is not too early to start. It may in fact be a good time to start if you have a lot to make/your craft takes a long time. You should maybe start it now, whether that's brainstorming or actually doing the crafts!
It feels cool to be "in" on celebrity gossip before anyone else. I ran into Californian Condor V9 and looked her up on the condor lookup website. It says her current mate is dead and she has no kids but I saw her with a new man AND a juvenile.
Not to sound like a decrepit, rambling corpse about it, but back in my day Word used to be a pre installed program that came with your computer, if you were running Windows.
No subscription. Just program.
On your computer. You got to use it forever and ever and never had to worry about it going away.
Because it was physically on your computer. As a program. That you actually owned. Not because you got it separately, but because it was a standard inclusion with your computer.
I'm sorry but I'll just never get over it. I remember when companies cared about their products being usable out of the box. I remember when our things belonged to us.
Old man shaking fist at cloud, wherein the cloud is the background of the Windows 98 logo.
writers really will spend twenty minutes pacing around the kitchen thinking “this scene is genius” and then sit down to type and suddenly remember approximately three words and one emotional vibe
SPOILERS for Uma Musume Pretty Derby, Kawakami Princess Route
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So, I play the silly horse daughter game, and I've recently started playing more of the storyline routes.
I'm on Kawakami's storyline and she's been trying to figure out who she wants to be. She wanted to be like Princess Striker, but Kawakami came off as too self-centered, and then she started listening to some old ladies and other critics who were saying she was too rambunctious (she kinda was a lil, but they were being asses about it). Meanwhile, there was this suntanned boy who would go to her races and watch them quietly.
Now, I'm at this scene where she is speaking with others at an event and reflecting on her past behavior. Turns out, one of the old ladies was the suntanned boy's guardian or mom or something. And the boy came out.
No, seriously.
With this being what I think is a mainstream Japanese game, I was very surprised. Maybe I shouldn't be, but I was, pleasantly so.
So then, of course, the guardian/mom pushes back.
And what does Kawakami Princess, a horse girl based on a real life racehorse, say?
Kawakami Princess says Anyone Can be a Princess.
Princess is a Mindset.
I'm happy she's the first horse I'm training for June. (* ´▽｀*)
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