yeah, they did. I wrote up a big long post about the Trevor Project and the 12 hour charity livestream I'm participating in right now, and they deleted it. twice. We've raised over $50,000 for a legitimate charity but because it helps trans kids it gets deleted from the site
"members of a marginalized group deserve to live and not get hate crimes. This is also the case if many of them are bigoted and some of them are violently so"
"well MY pet cause is comprised out of 100% pure non problematic people!"
Humans are not inherently good or bad. They are inherently social animals, who are predisposed to be kind to those in their in-group and hostile to anyone who isn't who is strong enough to be a threat.
Learning to widen your in-group is a skill which not all humans have picked up. Learning to be kind to people outside your in-group is a lesson most humans, including marginalized ones, never learn. It can't be an offense punishable by death or we'd kill billions, including people you love.
For context: this came out in 2011 in Australia. Same-sex marriage would not be legalized until December 2017.
It was only legalized in 8 US states (the 8th only a few months before), and wouldnāt be legalized nation-wide until 2015.
It was only legal in TEN COUNTRIES in 2011. We wouldnāt hit 20 countries until 2017. (Australia was 23rd)
As of today (April 14, 2026), I believe only 38 countries have fully legalized same-sex marriage. Out of somewhere around 200 countries in the world. Thatās only ~19% of countries.
It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.
Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!
I'm usually loathe to suggest TV Tropes as a resource, but given that only a person who's entirely unacquainted with the genre would be asking that question, a primer is probably warranted. Check out the Unwinnable By Design article and read the preamble for context on the types of softlocks we're discussing, then hit either the "Sierra" or "Infocom" links (yes, those two publishers each have their own dedicated sections!), pop open the "Cruel" tab, and get ready to read some stuff that makes you mad.
A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it ā most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!
(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)
It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.
For anyone that has ever played King's Quest it's one of those Sierra titles. I think it's now classified not just as a point and click adventure but also as an "inventory puzzle" game. And while I don't quite remember exactly which puzzles did this, there were plenty of times where I would play these games as a child using one item that, technically works... only to later need that item for a much deadlier puzzle down the road, and basically have to start the whole game over because I was not gamer savvy to know to make several save files. These games also came from a time before the Internet was as accessible, or as useful (not every family, especially poor ones had Internet, and there were guides but sometimes it was all descriptive text, rarely there would be a video, maybe you got some in game screenshots). So the options for figuring out where the Rotten Tomato with a face was supposed to be used (or that you grab it again on the way out to use again later), required paying attention to details within the game then trying to follow its logic, or face failure and have to ask my busy parents for help. I usually went the failure route and would get frustrated and go read in my room instead. I never beat any of the games on my own until I was a teenager, and I think the first one I beat was King's Quest 7, and that took a while but it was very satisfying to finally ride off into the sunset on a black Pegasus with my Happy Ending.
I think these games were more interested in making the gamer pay attention than making them fail, but it is interesting to see "let them fail and learn from it" as a core principle of the design process that modern games don't seem to offer quite as often.
I am so utterly fascinated by āSakiā, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decadesā 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 āthe fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheekā to āthe pussy is completely out on center pageā 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 āSakiā donāt wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And itās 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. Itās because the underwear ran out of places to hide. Iām obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of āSakiā, 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 didnāt even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I donāt 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, āthe one with the big boobsā, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesnāt get lost in the noise. Itās just that normallyāin like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for exampleānormally 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 youād go, āWell, this is now untenable.ā
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
Itās like this, okay: thereās no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. Thereās a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with āSakiā is different.
Itās 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 āleeringā, 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 itāI canāt imagine anyone is making her do thisābut āSakiā the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in āSakiā. 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 āSakiā, 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 itās no problem. Itās 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 āSakiā, right: itās just normal that they donāt wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. Itās been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. Itās just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, itās in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like whatās 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 itās mahjong time now, and weāre playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why Iām 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??
Let's be fair, the Rock is capable of solid line delivery and emotional acting, it's just that he always try stay in his comfort zone of "cool badass action hero" and won't allow his characters to show physical or emotional weakness, limiting his performances.
The Rock has the potential to be a great actor, but his ego is holding him back.
It really pisses me off how grossly culturally ignorant @lonewolf23kās comment is and how people keep reblogging it uncritically. Dwayne Johnson was THE ONLY A-List Hawaiian actor in Hollywood for over a decade before GoT converted Jason Momoa from a C-lister to an A-lister. He had no choice but to take safe roles that mostly presented him as a Good Role Modelā¢. He was THE FACE OF THE HAWAIIAN PEOPLE.
Yāall are really mocking the man who was literally the only token Hawaiian in Hollywood that reached household name status for the entire 2000s for being a victim of typecasting and not taking more career risks?
He has 30x the range of Jason Statham. I thought he did a great job playing socially awkward autism-coded nerd characters in Jumanji (2017) and Central Intelligence (2016). He was admittedly terrible in Black Adam but I blame the direction/the godawful script because even Aldis Hodge was terrible in that movie.
One time I was shopping and found a Chappelle Roan Coloring book and got so excited, and then I opened it up and... it was so ugly. Like it just looked like they put a "line art filter" on some pictures and called it a day. I WAS SO QUIETLY ENRAGED
So I vowed to make my own with black jack and hookers. It's taken awhile and she just keeps having more and more iconic looks that I need to add to the growing library of reference pictures, completely unsorted on my drawing device. But I'm doing it! I'm making it happen! And eventually going to learn book binding so I can just make a few by hand
Hi! I had a question regarding colors and prints on hanfu. In Western society, thereās an emphasis on making sure childrenās clothing is gendered (i.e. the āpink aisleā). Was this a thing with traditional Chinese fashion as well?
Hi!Ā Thanks for the question, and sorry for taking ages to reply! (boy's hanfuĀ photo viaĀ å°ååę°):
Generally speaking, no -- gendering children's clothing by color was not a thing with traditional Chinese fashion.
Historically in China, color was associated with social class, not gender, as the use of color was influenced by social status and economic ability. Expensive dyes were mostly used by the nobility, while commoners wore colors made from natural dyes.
Common colors for children's clothing - both boys and girls - included red, blue, green, white, beige, and light gray. Red was one of the most popular colors in children's clothing, symbolizing good fortune, happiness, and warding off evil. Blue was commonly worn because its dyes were relatively easy to obtain. Green was often used in everyday clothing and represented youth and vitality. Neutral and light colors were often used for baby swaddling clothes, underwear, and summer clothing. Below - recreations of red, blue, and beige boys' hanfu from the Song (left) & Ming (right) dynasties:
You can see the use of these common colors - red, blue, green, white, beige - in the below paintings from the Song and Ming dynasties. Paintings 1-3 (Song & Ming) each depict an older sister with her younger brother (1/2/3); paintings 4-5 (Song) depict boys at play (1/2); and paintings 6-7 (Ming) depict girls at play (1/2):
Colors that are now considered "for girls" in the West were worn by children of both genders. For example, pink was often referred to as "light scarlet" and was considered a version of red. Red tones (including light scarlet) were often worn by the wealthy and powerful due to the preciousness of the dyes and the complexity of the processing. Therefore, boys of upper-class families would wear pink as a reflection of status. Below - first row: recreations of pink boys' hanfu from the Ming (left) & Song (right) dynasties; second row: paintings of pink girls' hanfu from the Tang dynasty (x):
Purple was also worn by boys of noble/royal families as a reflection of status and privilege, given the expensive cost of purple dye. Below - recreations of purple boys' clothing from the Song (left) & Qing (right) dynasties:
When it came to prints/patterns, boys' clothes were more likely to display dragons and tigers, while girls' clothes were more likely to display phoenixes and butterflies, but most patterns were gender-neutral. For example, the below recreations depict floral patterns on boys' hanfu from the Ming (left) & Song (right) dynasties:
The historical lack of gendered colors and prints allows people recreating children's hanfu to take inspiration from depictions of any gender, as seen below in this adorable recreation of a Tang dynasty boy's hanfu worn by a girl (x):
For more references, please see myĀ childrens hanfu, colors, prints, patterns, motifs, and unisexĀ tags.
