"going out to get milk" is a common turn of phrase used to describe a man abandoning his family.
the "milkman" is a common figure in stories depicting a woman's infidelity and adulterous affair.
this implies that the ability to provide milk would both decrease the likelihood of a man abandoning his wife and children, as it would eliminate the need for leaving to get milk AND would secure that man's marriage, as his wife would have no need to seek milk from an extraneous source.
therefore, all men should produce milk, through various means such as:
- being a cow
- being an almond
- being a woman
- being a coconut
- being in the omegaverse
- being an oat
(list is exemplary and not finite)
in this essay, i will redefine the nuclear family and explain the seductive and inflammatory nature of the 1993 "Got Milk?" commercials.
I'm trying to make it a goal to write more, I wanted to do that ever since I started using Tumblr again, so. If this isn't your thing that's fine, but I do want to start recording some personal fannish stuff here, for my future self's benefit more than anything.
Brief 2025 recap
I'll dip into late 2025 here a bit too. I had wanted to do a big retrospective post about the sbms web events I participated in, but I've since decided I don't want to reveal too much about the inner workings of that space. It's not place to share it, and I still consider myself immensely lucky to have been accepted into it as an interloper in the first place.
All I'll say is that these events lit a fucking fire in me in the latter half of 2025. I put together my first fan artbook, created some new sbms merch, and figured out how to set up netprints. I know I've said it a few times on my twitter, but it was incredibly humbling to be able to participate in that side of the fandom, and to see so much support and interest in my work.
Early 2026
That said, I think doing these events in September - December took me out a little bit LOL, especially with the holidays and a local market taking up my time and energy as well. I actually wasn't motivated to draw at all in January and February. Which was weird, because I don't think I've had no desire to draw at all for years.
But I've learned that artblock, or whatever equivalent of it I was experiencing was going to be temporary, and so I tried to focus on other things. There were a ton of birthdays in January, I started taking a few pole dancing classes again, I went to see a few movies, and I was working on a cross stitching kit I got for Christmas.
Fic writing
I did post two fics to my Ao3 in February; one of which was written in a single day for a Valentine's Microcest prompt, and one of which I had been writing slowly since November. I posted an additional fill to the Pkmn kinkmeme that popped up in early January. I still have yet to post it to my Ao3, but it's the Cynthia/Caitlyn somnophilia one, if you've happened to peruse the thread. I'd been wanting so badly to write something for that exact ship and kink since I started getting back into Pkmn, and so when the chance presented itself, I couldn't resist… I posted two prompts myself, both of which have been filled (lucky me!!!). One of them was filled by a really good friend of mine too, which made it even more special!
Unfortunately, my fic writing slowed down again as the start of con season approached. I signed up for the Perished Pidove gift exchange and finished with a fic of around 7k words (more than I was expecting, truthfully). It was a fun opportunity to try writing some new stuff (namely nsfw pokephilia) and overall I'm happy with how it turned out!
As always, I have fics on the back burner that I pick away at, and I have concepts that I feverishly write out in my phone and then never touch again. I am trying to make sure two of these fics actually do see the light of day. Wish me luck ahaha.
Spring conventions
Speaking of con season, I was part of the CitrusCon artist alley this year, which was a really cool experience. It was my first time being involved in an event held entirely on Discord, so I was a bit nervous. Needless to say, it all went well — I thought it was incredibly well organized and I will definitely look into participating again, even just as an attendee if I don't get into the AA again. Unfortunately, it fell on the same weekend as an irl obligation, so I didn't actually get to experience much of it… Hopefully next year I won't have a similar conflict.
My usual two local cons went really well; I kind of ended up attending the first one last minute, since I wasn't sure if I wanted to go (it's the bigger and more "general nerd-dom" oriented of the two), but I ended up changing my mind to help out a friend running a panel. I brought back my Marina (Fear & Hunger) cosplay and debuted a very thrown together fem Emmet cosplay, both of which I got very excited compliments on. The weather ended up being miserable that weekend, driving a lot of people indoors, which made the con feel more crowded than usual. That said, it was cool to see the rennovations that had recently been made to the convention centre. Some of the stages are definitely closer in size to what I've seen at US conventions. Also had a lot of fun at the convention's maid cafe — a few of the maids recognized me from artist alley and from my past life in an idol cover group LOL, so it was really fun to chat with them.
The second con (my main one, the one I table at every year) went well, but it was definitely a little different this year. Normally, especially because of my tabling, I stay in a hotel room at the venue with a few friends, but that fell through this year, meaning I was driving in every day. Not a huge issue, it IS a local con and I'm not that far from the convention centre, but it meant I was getting up earlier for this con than I usually would to accommodate for the commute, and for the fact that the convention centre parking garage started to fill up like two hours before the hall opened. I did get to debut my new Volo cosplay at this convention, which I was worried about only giving myself two weeks to make and somehow finished it in only one. The wig I bought for it ended up being a total bust, but thankfully my days cosplaying Eichi Tenshouin from Enstars came in clutch. It wasn't long enough for the little bun at the back, but it was the right colour and bang length, and that was far more important LOL. This convention was somehow my most exhausting one yet, and I'm not sure how much of that was the early mornings and how much of that is just me getting older.
This summer?
Now it's almost a month after this convention has ended and I'm honestly kind of at a loss at what to do with myself LOL. My next tabling event isn't until September, and even the big web event I participated in last year has been moved to November this year, so I'm left with an awkwardly large gap of time to myself this summer. That void has at least partly been filled by all the films coming out this summer (I had a three week stint where I was at the movie theatre once every week LOL). Backrooms was a fun ride, Obsession has been haunting my brain for an entire month now, and a last minute invitation to the finale screening of The Amazing Digital Circus finally forced me to binge the series, which I ended up really enjoying. And now we've got a screening of the Utena movie and Leviticus coming up as well. The movie theatres are getting a lot of money out of ME this summer ahaha.
I still find myself in a sort of art block — unlike January and February, I AM drawing, but I don't feel very satisfied with the results, and I'm trying to figure out what sorts of inspiration or studies I need to be doing to overcome this. I SHOULD be working on more new merch, and I would like to keep working on the doujin I started at the end of last year, so I'm hoping that working on those will keep me motivated for a couple months at least. I will definitely be documenting the doujin creation experience if I can stick with it — I will say that the coverage online of Manga Ichiba at Fanime re-invigorated my desire to finish one, and I'm so incredibly thankful for the resources that have been shared because of this event, and that there seems to be an appetite for similar events in the future. To be honest, I've become really tired of the rat race that artist alley has become (that might be a future post LOL), and I hope smaller doujin-centred events will be a way to break out of it.
So originally I got inspired by the aroace flag which matches the colors of their sygna suits quite well! And of course the flag itself suits them well because it seems to be the general consensus that they’re on the ace spectrum (myself included, haha.)
It’s also been fun to see that a lot of people headcanon Ingo as bi and Emmet as pan, but honestly: all headcanons are valid! They can even be... <gasp> straight! xD /lh And projecting onto characters is completely okay too!
No one needs to label themselves under any specific flag either. It’s also fun to think that Ingo and Emmet would be completely clueless about these flags but they would still fully support the message of Pride Month. It doesn’t matter which flag you’re under as long as you treat people equally regardless of their gender or sexuality.
Have a really awesome Pride Month and stay safe! 🏳️🌈
i dont want to be in a fandom that critisizes the choices of fictional characters like they are human beings. i want to see THEORY and ANALYSIS and STORY STRUCTURE and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!! I WANT PARALLELS AND MOTIFS AND VISUAL CUES!!! They're not REAL they are TOOLS so stop acting like they are people who made bad choices and should be punished. of course they made bad choices!!! that shit is funny and cool to watch!!
Latest commission because apparently yall really liked transformer Ingo (there needs to be a transformer Emmet, i swear)
The goal was to make him look really huge! I even rewatched The Iron Giant for inspiration for this. still such a good movie omg!
Progress below!
You can see in the geometry sketch phase: Ingo's brim was supposed to be much higher as it would be if i stuck to perspective BUT very rightfully client insisted on having the brim cover his eyes partially which was the best change in this whole piece i think
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??
