Stories are my core and strange is my brain

https://appendingfic.tumblr.com/post/797663954692341760

I found a phone bill from when I was in college.

Forty bucks. Or about sixty bucks in today's dollars. (If I hadn't been prorated for this month, my bill would have been about $45.)

Which might sound like "holy fuck, we're getting RIPPED OFF these days!"

EXCEPT.....

450 minutes of talk, or 7.5 hours, at a point in time when most stuff still had to be done by phone. Texts paid per message (strict character limits at the time, too), with a maximum of 250/mo, a fee to have text message availability, and an additional fee for every text above above that 250.

And data was $2 per MEGABYTE.

Let's get curious!

I pulled up my bill and usage on my app.

This month (July-Aug 2026) I've made 6.5 hours' worth of calls. That's below the maximum allowance, so we're good there. Although I still have a week and a half in this billing period, so I could go over, and then it's an additional 50¢ per minute.

But I've sent and received 889 texts. So that's, uh...

$64 in text charges.

I've also used 7.05GB of data. That is 7050 MB. Or, uh.....hm....well....

....so if you ever want to think "wow, I'm glad I live in 2026 for this one," just remember that if we still charged for cell phones now the way we did then, my bill this month--not even adjusted for inflation! Just using 2009 dollars!--would be $14,109.

Or about $22,000, in today's dollars.

Oh.

Also, my phone itself was $129, or $200 in 2026, and it looked like this:

You'll notice a distinct lack of apps. It did have internet, but its internet looked more or less like this:

Its big selling point was "you don't need to carry a phone AND an iPod." It held about ten songs. It did not take photos. The screen was about 1x2".

(All of this said, I did love the slide design. I still miss my Chocolate.)

And then, one morning, I wake up to find that, somehow, my internet has managed to use 65 gigs of data in a single morning, while I was asleep. So I immediately called them up and said "hey, I don't know what happened, I think something must have hacked my computer and used a bunch of my data."

Verizon's response? "It came from your computer, so you have to pay it."

That wound up being somewhere around $600.

It may not be the same as real child pornography but an adult enjoying it is very weird. Like, can they not watch animated adults do that? What is it about child characters that makes it more exciting?

1) does not watch that kind of stuff

2) thought I knew what Food Wars was but was apparently very wrong (I had the idea it was a TV show based on Sausage Party? Unless I'm correct but also entirely wrong about what Sausage Party was)

3) is a CSA survivor.

It's really weird to me the way loli is singled out as "weird" like this. Like, do you know what I think is weird? There was an entireass live-action show that ran for seven years where basically every episode involved rape, incest, huge amounts of murder, torture, sexual violence, and those sexually violent scenes being explicitly filmed to be titillating...

....and it was a global sensation that gets almost no play in discussions about "weird" or "unacceptable" media.

People will go to town about some niche anime ecchi but they're utterly silent about Game of fucking Thrones. And they don't say stuff like "people who were into Game of Thrones freak me out."

The main throughline/Running Gag of the anime is that the main character is so good at cooking that people who eat his food basically have legit "foodgasms," which is depicted by the eaters' clothes bursting off them. And it doesn't discriminate about just which characters have this reaction. The title comes from the main character entering a cooking competition, if I remember correctly, and as such is fighting other cooks.

Like I said, I've only seen one episode, so someone else might know more, but that's what I've gathered about it.

This is a teenage character and I just don’t understand why this wouldn’t turn someone’s stomach. Is it comparable to real life cp? No, absolutely not, but getting off to an animated kid character in this position is very weird and adults who can’t just look for 18+ characters to self complete to are… Strange. I don’t understand why they didn’t just make the characters adults. There’s so much anime porn of people over 18, making them teenagers in these types of porn-y animes is always a bizarre decision that I can’t rationalize a morally sound adult making.

And a lot of this sort of thing appearing in anime is because it's remarkably recent that their national age of consent laws moved things up to 16. As in, three years ago. So a lot of anime have teenagers in compromising positions or manners of dress because the age of consent included all teen ages.

Is that a good thing? No. But it's an explanation.

There's also a whole rabbit hole of things about how Japan tried to ban explicit porn a long time ago, and that's why there's so much "weird" porn-like anime things, like the tentacles in that image above. Try to ban something, people will try to find a way around it.

It may not be the same as real child pornography but an adult enjoying it is very weird. Like, can they not watch animated adults do that? What is it about child characters that makes it more exciting?

1) does not watch that kind of stuff

2) thought I knew what Food Wars was but was apparently very wrong (I had the idea it was a TV show based on Sausage Party? Unless I'm correct but also entirely wrong about what Sausage Party was)

3) is a CSA survivor.

It's really weird to me the way loli is singled out as "weird" like this. Like, do you know what I think is weird? There was an entireass live-action show that ran for seven years where basically every episode involved rape, incest, huge amounts of murder, torture, sexual violence, and those sexually violent scenes being explicitly filmed to be titillating...

....and it was a global sensation that gets almost no play in discussions about "weird" or "unacceptable" media.

People will go to town about some niche anime ecchi but they're utterly silent about Game of fucking Thrones. And they don't say stuff like "people who were into Game of Thrones freak me out."

The main throughline/Running Gag of the anime is that the main character is so good at cooking that people who eat his food basically have legit "foodgasms," which is depicted by the eaters' clothes bursting off them. And it doesn't discriminate about just which characters have this reaction. The title comes from the main character entering a cooking competition, if I remember correctly, and as such is fighting other cooks.

Like I said, I've only seen one episode, so someone else might know more, but that's what I've gathered about it.

“…. this is…. big.”

“Eighty feet long, ten high, in forty panels! It was originally going to be sixty feet, but then the Thomas Malory Arthuriana got big and I had to put more stuff in.” 

“… Malory published in the fifteenth century.” 

“Do you have any idea how long it takes one person to embroider eight thousand square feet of tapestry?” 

“You’ve had a lot of free time in the last eight hundred years, haven’t you?” 

Bea proceeded to shame and pressure her for the entire course of the marriage in addition to mentally and emotionally abusing her, then announced the annulment publicly on the TAS site before disappearing for a week. After that week, Bea reappeared with a weaksauce "c'mon guys don't be like that" and refused to stand up for her soon-to-be-ex-wife.

Her wife had to burn her entire online identity to get away from rabid TAS fans sending her graphic rape threats, death threats, trying to contact her job to get her fired, etc., because she didn't want to have sex. After being briefly hospitalized over this, she ended up moving to another town to get away from Bea.

To this day, Bea swears this is "slander" and "not what really happened."

But I was there. I know. And you know what else I know?

I know there would have been a Yu-Gi-Oh: 5Ds Abridged, with me and the former wife. I'd already written three scripts when she called it off because she'd asked Bea if she could borrow the DM TAS audio equipment and was berated, told she wasn't funny, nothing she did would be as good as DM TAS, etc. etc.

https://wheelofnames.com/ry4-3s4

The wheel is completed but if you the mod want to change it at all feel free and I couldn't figure out how to get the link to work properly even un-anoned.

Thanks, have a nice day and drink some water

You have just lost use of this random kitchen item/implement!

Spin the wheel to find out what!

oh well

How did we end up in such a puritanical culture?

Specifically, it's something I've mentioned a couple times here on Tumblr: Shimonetta: A World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn't Exist.

It's half comedy, half horror. As the long title indicates, it takes place in a Japan where not only have they outlawed dirty jokes, they've outlawed any mention of anything to do with sex ever and fitted everyone with collars that listen for it. And I do mean "anything to do with sex." The inhabitants of this Japan can't even talk about penises and vaginas from a scientific standpoint without getting arrested for it.

The comedy part of the story comes from The Resistance, whose leader runs around naked with a pair of panties on her head as a mask, while also jamming the signals from the collars in the area so the authorities can't tell who she is from that.

The horror comes from the fact that zero sex education means that none of the main cast have any idea what's going on with their bodies when they see someone they find attractive. Which then results in assault. In a disturbing variety of ways.

Like one girl giving cookies to the guy she finds attractive, telling him that she baked them using her love juices.

Yes. It's exactly what it sounds like.

And, yes, it doesn't show it graphically, but there's also what most people think of when they hear sexual assault.

Nothing special is happening... It's gonna be a different show for different people. That's all.

Maybe my opinion comes from someone who was the target audience back in the days. I'm just tired of seeing "AAAAHHH THEY KILLED MLP" or "THIS FRANCHISE NEEDS TO DIE!!11!!" shit

And the fans of Friendship is Magic (of which I kinda still am one) used quite a bit about the older generations for fanfic and memes. Like, calling Applejack a silly pony was a direct reference to G1 MLP, and then meme-ing "Rainbow Dash always dresses in style" whenever FiM Dash was in a fancy outfit specifically in reference to G3.

There were also all the fics where people would use the names of older generations of MLP characters as family of FiM characters, with some even doubling as being references to concepts that didn't pan out. Such as Fluttershy having Posey as the name of her mom in a lot of fics because she originally was going to be another version of Posey.