🍀🌱 After Playing Nahida’s Story Quest… I Feel Like She Has A Sharp Tongue And Pretty Blunt,

Rohan has normal adult problems.

I don't think there's ever been a funnier piece of lore in a video game then the etymology of the word "gun" in FFXIV

I am correct actually

I went to a library book sale this weekend and I found a very old book called “Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers,” which was published in I think 1975? I’ve been reading it kind of like how I would read a historical document, and it’s lowkey fascinating

We love casting spells

my favorite funger guy

Dio's Mansion trying to comfort a mourning teenager, a concept.

Undertale Fandom and Crediting Creators

Why is the Undertale Fandom so obscenely bad at crediting people when they use their characters? I'm not saying you have to tag the creator everytime a sketch of their character makes it into their post, but general Fandom etiqette says: 'if you want to draw my character, at least credit back to me', and this Fandom just decided nope, never going to happen. I've seen AUs based on other people's AUs that do not once, anywhere on the blog, credit the original AU. I've seen alternate characters of AU characters not breathe a single word of the original creator.

'It's because theyre popular' so? I talk with people constantly who don't know the original creators of aus. Who don't know their blog names. Who have never laid eyes on the original material. And the fact 90% of art I see of these characters is completely uncredited, not only contributes to that, but is just such a basic disregard for other creators in a Fandom space that it's upsetting to think you couldn't take the 2 extra seconds to put 'character by ___ 'at the end of a post

I've never been in a fandom that thinks using other people's stuff should be done without credit. It's just common place. It's common knowledge. Here's an indie creator online, in the same fan base as me, when I use their chatacter, I credit back to them, because I as another indie creator in this fandom would want the same. But nope.

I did a little test, a little experiment, I scrolled through the undertale au tag and counted how many people credited while using a character that didnt belong to them

3/20 had credit.

Absolutely abysmal.

Now again, Im not saying to @ the creators every time a character is used, but simple acknolwedgement of their blog or other social media is all you need, so that if anyone wants to find that character off of your post, they can do so, without having to spend 20 minutes trying to find the 1 post that took the 2 seconds to credit another fandom creator with their own character.

This isn't even mentioning the countless times AUs have been purposefully targeted to be stripped of ownership by people that think they should either own the au, or that the au should not belong to the original creators. Ie x au belongs to the community (when it doesn't). A thing that was/is actively defended by a lot of people. Also abysmal.

There are some creators exempt from this criticism, but for the most part, I think just about everyone still actively posting content does it. And its a terrible habit the au fandom got itself into, and one of by biggest pet peeves about the content made for it.

If you want to use someone else's character, in the fandom, it's the most basic courtesy to say who made that character no matter how popular you think they are, because I know for a fact you'd want them to do the same for you.

So maybe we could start doing that again?

I found myself having, not exactly an argument recently, but a highly opinionated conversation with someone who did not believe my assertion that once upon a time there were official Hello Kitty vibrators. With the aid of the Wayback Machine, I found this article, and thought the world at large might enjoy it too...

Here's the text of the article:

The history of the Hello Kitty vibrator

By Peter Payne October 4, 2004

Sanrio is one of the top character licensors in the world, having more or less created the business model of doing business by creating something that doesn't really exist and licensing its use to other companies. Sanrio produces nothing -- all their characters, like the Little Twin Star, Minna no Ta-bo, Bad Batz-Maru, exist as legal entities and nothing more. Their most successful character, Hello Kitty, or Kitty-chan as she's known in Japan, is now now thirty years old.

One of the many companies that license Sanrio's characters for their products was a Japanese company called Genyo Co. Ltd. Genyo made a wide variety of products, from bento boxes to children's toys to chopsticks, many with the Hello Kitty character on them. They scored big in the late 1990's with an off-the-wall hit, a series of Hello Kitty toys which featured a different Kitty figure from each of Japan's 47 prefectures, each representing something the prefecture was famous for. (The figure from Gunma Prefecture, where we live, represented a wooden kokeshi doll.)

In 1997, Genyo designed a product that would live in infamy: the Hello Kitty vibrating shoulder massager, which really is a shoulder massager (trust us -- it says so on the package). Sanrio approved this design without batting an eye, and the product enjoyed modest sales in toy shops and in family restaurants like Denny's and Coco's. It wasn't until 1999 or so that people began to catch on to the fact that the Hello Kitty massager had other potential uses, and with amazing speed, they started popping up in adult videos in Japan. The next thing anyone knew, they had changed into a cult adult item, sold in vending machines in love hotels -- after all, what self-respecting man wouldn't buy his girl a Hello Kitty vibrator when she asked him for one?

The emergence of the Hello Kitty vibrator as a cult adult item caused friction between Sanrio and Genyo, and Sanrio ordered the company to stop making the units. Genyo refused, since it had paid a lot of money to license Kitty for their products. There seemed nothing Sanrio could do, since they had approved the item for sale (see the official Sanrio sticker on the boxes). The answer came when the Japanese tax authorities raided Genyo on suspicion of tax evasion. It seems that some creative accounting was going on between the president of the company, a Mr. Nakamura, his vice president, and the owner of the factory in China where the units were made. All three were arrested, and Sanrio had the excuse needed to yank Genyo's license. They seized the molds used to make the vibrators and destroyed them.

And so, the sad, weird chapter of the Hello Kitty vibrator is at an end. The last of the Kitty vibes are gone, so now what will the world do for wacky comic -- and sexual -- relief?