cro-iba - Tumblr blog

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THAT'S IT?????

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Decided to start collecting out of context post titles from PDX games and

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nintendo's palword case is actually pretty clever. it looks like they (correctly) understood that reporting would assume it's about the ripped designs and skim over the part about it being a patent infringement case, which has much more dire and wide-spanning implications given what gameplay systems would likely fall under patent infringement

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why do leakers spend so much time leaking like, video game announcements, when they could be unveiling national coverups of disgusting and inhumane crimes by our government [barely concealing a belief that leakers all belong to a small but tight knit secret organization of hackers and spies who infiltrate buildings to get confidential information]

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impoverished people in de facto feudal states: really like this marx guy. think we might establish a communist government under his ironclad principles

marx: mature feudal states revolt into capitalist states, mature capitalist states revolt into communist states

impoverished people in de facto feudal states: mmmm not that one though i think we can just speedrun this

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I think if pagers exploded at a bunch of US army base family residences we would nuke China.

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rb to give it up for laura hall and linda taylor

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kay shenanigans

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Portia and Bugbert Update(s)!!!

I am a fool and have forgotten to update you with the continued adventures of these silly little shapes. What a travesty! There's FOUR new pages since the last time I shared with you (in the middle of august), so be sure to check 'em out.

[cro-iba]

community notes are so brutal. tumblr needs to add that feature to escalate our pvp capabilities

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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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man who thinks "yuri" is brand new zoomer slang for "cute" or "romantic" and posts pictures of him and his wife captioned "yuri 🥰"

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had a dream that they added a new character to deadlock and it was a big daddy figurine. like the hero was specifically a plastic promotional figurine and NOT one of the actual big daddies from the bioshock universe and they dropped a trailer that was entirely dedicated to explaining this

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in 2010, "ps3 has no games" was a joke. now, "ps5 has no games" is a desperate admonition, a warbled cry to the heavens for some higher power to do something. "ps6 has no games" slated to become an epitaph

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If trump loses again there’s a non zero chance we get to do all this a fourth time in 2028