Tag: life update

Hentai!!

TiberiusLeave a comment

Where culture thrives

Doesn’t get any simpler than the title, eh? I’ve gotta confess first that I was so busy all week preparing for Army things to last the next few months (not a deployment or rotation, that would last way longer) that I didn’t even think to look at my topics list until last night and even then I was so tired I didn’t have much prepared until this morning save for this opener. Now that I’m well-rested and caffeinated, I’m going to spend this post talking about my journey into hentai, some of my favorite artists, and some updates; one related to work which may or may not have an impact on future blog posts, and one that covers an event in the city where I’m currently stationed.

Now, what is hentai? If you’ve been around the internet or can call yourself a veteran weeb, you might have instantly thought of an image involving an anime girl, tentacles, or in some cases, both. By which I mean a tentacle girl.

And there’s a reason the image of tentacles of have stuck with the genre for decades. For as long as art has been a thing, humanity has been sculpting, painting, and carving images of exaggerated and unrealistic human or humanoid bodies, to include depictions of deities. Travel the world and tell me about all the fertility statues you can find. In recent memory, I’ve stumbled upon a photo of this Indian Yakshini statue.

Shame the head’s missing, but simply what’s left is enough inspiration for countless artists, even today. Observe:

Credit: Takemi Kaoru, Original Source

In the context of hentai and overall Japanese pornographic works (live and drawn), the term “hentai” originally carried to connotations denoting strange or inexplicable behavior, not necessarily erotic or sexual in nature. Over time, the term has been so associated with animated porn that search engines preface that the results are censored or otherwise NSFW. For erotic art in Japan, early sources of erotic works of art can be traced all the way back to the Heian period. Theoretically, a daimyo who had some control of the Taira or Minamoto clans at the time likely had a stash of erotic art. Maybe a samurai clan had a treasure trove up until the Meiji Restoration or priceless art where everyone’s bits are out. Who knows?

One of the most famous erotic artists in history was one Katsushika Hokusai and his painting “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.”

An early depiction of a woman being sexually pleasured by countless appendages and a fixture that will grace the genre centuries later.

From these humble beginnings, come manga. The associated wikipedia page clarifies that what you think of as manga today meant something completely different during the Tokugawa period. I’m not talking about animanga series set in the Edo period (a completely different topic that I have no problem exploring in the future), manga at this time wasn’t made up of structured stories like a serialization or even a yonkoma. The pictures were unrelated and predictably more difficult to make, but if it can be put into a book format and follow a kind of plot with boobs, d[foghorn]ks, and p[tiger]y playing some kind of part in it (and not just in a playfully teasing manner) then by all accounts it’s an erotic manga. These days, we know them as doujinshi, the Japanese term for a self-published work that not a lot of people realize is itself a broad term not necessarily exclusive to hentai and not always limited to physical releases. Name your favorite artist on Twitter or Pixiv or Bilibili, they may or may not have dabbled in putting plot to artwork. Here’s a sneak-peek of one of my favorites:

Source: Tatsunami Youtoku

After manga came adaptations into the form of animation/anime. Classic examples to some of you veterans may include Bible Black or Sailor and the 7 Ballz or for all you Eva fans reading this, the enigmatic Human Salvation Project (the latter of these I found out about yesterday morning). All classics, but none of them are the oldest examples of animated hentai/porn, neither in Japan or elsewhere. Saberspark has an example of one such animation from the late 1920s. His video is below with more details.

Channel: Saperspark

I stand corrected, a link to his video is here with more details. The wikipedia page for the short film is also linked. Six-and-a-half minutes and not too out of place for the Betty Boop-era.

The true earliest form of animated hentai was an Osamu Tezuka directed film adaptation of the 18th-century Middle Eastern folktale 1001 Arabian Nights. There’s two films with the same name released a decade apart in different countries. The American produced 1001 Arabian Nights released in 1959, and the Japanese produced One Thousand and One Nights released in 1969. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the father of Astro Boy is behind this one. When your contributions kick a genre or medium into overdrive you have to go multiple different places. Still fascinating to see Tezuka’s name on such a thing.

Not as famous as the 1972 raunchy animated film Fritz the Cat, but preceding that film by about three years puts more points in that basket to me.

The more accurate adaptation of the Middle Eastern story isn’t the only one with Tezuka’s name on it as he also helped direct a raunchy retelling of Cleopatra’s life. After that erotic and hentai-like adaptations lay dormant and sparsely touched until the mid-1980s. Considering their laws addressing such material is from the late Meiji era when lines on maps were the most important thing in the world, in Japan’s case all hands on deck would be needed for such endeavors and leaving erotica uncensored was grounds for imprisonment. These days, it still is, which is why so many doujins and even live-action porn, known in Japan as adult videos, are censored even though the intended demographic is 18+… I won’t lie, I was a horny teen once.

I’m not a lawyer and I can’t argue in favor of either censoring or uncensoring Japanese porn and hentai, but what I do know is that the restrictions in place have inspired many geniuses ever since. An uncensored penis is how the artist gets slapped on theirs with a giant dildo bat not seen since Saints Row, but similarly shaped phalluses are not, which is all an artist needs to simulate pentrative intercourse or self-pleasure without the addition of censor bars, pixels, or more recently the lightsaber effect. The earliest of phallic replacements for the penis was tentacles which brings me back to Hokusai’s famous painting. We began with the likes of an octopus or other cephalopod caressing a naked woman’s body and have not looked back ever since.

Nowadays, references call back regularly to these early depictions of hentai online with comments showing tentacles in any such manner being some amalgamation of “I’ve seen enough hentai to know how this ends.” The genre wasn’t even done evolving. Where else could you find erotic anime-style scenes? Video games. Specifically, visual novels.

You might be familiar with early attempts at adult video games and the continuing legacy that I’ve found myself a part of recently, and that’s just speaking of the west where earlier depictions have fallen into controversy even in the wild times of the 1970s and ’80s. The time where the sexual revolution helped boost many names in porn and the video game industry hadn’t found its legs yet. The most infamous examples of adult-themed video games with any such action come in the form of the controversial Custer’s Revenge and X-Man, the latter of which is notorious for the pixely depiction of a Civil War and Indian Wars general George Armstrong Custer taking advantage of a bound, nude Amerindian woman.

Crazy that it took until Mortal Kombat and Night Trap to create the ESRB. Considering this s[bricks]t exists, it should’ve happened sooner.

From woodblock ukiyo-e print to manga to moving frames to playable frames, having dumped all that lore on the history of anime pornography on you, before I list my favorites, I must make another confession. My history with hentai is simultaneously a blindspot and a poorly-explored endeavor. Some of my recommendations come from the appropriate subreddits, but I’ve made a habit of saving so many posts and links that it’d take longer to find and paste the links into a browser than it would to view it all. As for what I have seen, Reddit’s not the only place I’ve seen what can be classed as hentai. Pixiv, Danbooru, Gelbooru, and even Twitter allow users to view and/or upload porn in some manner, though Pixiv and Twitter require age verification, Twitter especially recently.

My introduction to hentai actually came in the form of ecchi series like High School DxD and Shimoneta (both of which I’ve written about already). Shimoneta had a message about censorship hidden in between all the boobage and panty shots while DxD didn’t exactly have that same message and was merely about angels and devils with a side of T ‘n A, which sounds like the worst possible way to describe the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise.

Credit: u/thot_patrol117, s/EvangelionMemes

Try not to look for deeper meaning amongst the Eva memes. It’s not the deep. But the franchise definitely is, if you’re willing to take Hideaki Anno at face value.

I believe I’ve said it before that DxD and Shimoseka were gateways to pornographic animanga and I hold onto that dearly. They got the ball rolling by proudly showing Rias’ tits and boldly displaying the consequences of a horny (read: predatory in this context) awakening and thus led me to discover more hentai series. I’ve seen many and read many but my personal favorites have to be as follows:

  1. I Want to do Sexy Things with my Tall Younger Cousin
  2. Seika Jogakuin Koutoubu Konin Sao Ojisan; and
  3. Twin Milf

Admittedly something of a one-shot with an incest angle, the central themes of this plot boil down to a tall girl fetish. The fantasy lies in a shorter male scaling a taller female like summiting Mt. Everest on the journey to her Mt. Everests. See what I did there? It also does away with the cutesy embarassed trope. The two main leads are hardly what I’d call shy, in fact, they both confidently know what they want with hints in the doujin alluding to a history of having done this type of thing. What really reels me in is the tomboy trope of the female lead. Cute and playful, she reminds me of Tomo Aizawa from Tomo-chan is a Girl in some ways. Hardly anything deeper than surface level though so those who wanted some drama may have to look elsewhere.

Created by Kurosu Gatari, it translates to English as Seika Girls’ Academy Official Sanctioned Gigolo. This one does have a plot to go with the mountains and valleys. A man with a friend in debt agrees to share some of that debt to help the first guy get back on his feet, this means he has to repay the remaining debt and to do so he takes a job as a gigolo for an all girls’ school. The test involving sex with the dean of the school, before passing and being allowed to exercise this blessing on a select number of students. The operative logic behind this move is hands-on stress relief seeing as sex is a great way to relieve stress and burn calories.

Each of the girls is unique in their own right, one of them having deep-seated daddy issues that don’t arise until she reluctantly uses these gigolo services herself where she gradually evolves from bitch of the school to stern hand. Getting d[monkeys]ked down by the school man-whore softens her up so much that it leads to a personality change. From punishing a tiny infraction to brushing it off like a levelheaded adult, I haven’t crossed that bridge yet but with so many stories corroborating this, a little bit of bumping uglies does seem to go a long way. For the male lead, he’s drawn like an ugly bastard, but is merely just a middle-aged gentleman facing an unusual problem. Debt he can handle, but feeling like a hooker to pay some of it off over time was the last thing he was expecting. What makes his situation more tricky is that he’s married with a daughter no older than the girls he’s getting paid to sexually pleasure, so life at home gets extra awkward when his side job is to mingle with girls like this to make some extra cash. So if you want more drama than the last entry’s “tall girl fantasy,” have at it.

Created by a master of MILF hentai Tatsunami Youtoku, Twin Milf is exactly as advertised on the tin, identical twin sisters with voluptuous body types. A college student and avid soccer player/fan is neighbors with a thick, busty woman. In one such incident, water leaks down into his apartment where she comes down personally to apologize, only for him to accidentally grope her breasts and realize she put something on very quickly (i.e. no bra). From there, he spills the beans to his best bro who’s stuck with a tsundere girlfriend who doesn’t suffer perverts. Main MC presumably runs into his MILFy neighbor again only she’s more perverted than originally introduced and invites him to f[cannonball]k her in her own car.

It isn’t until after this he realizes she’s a twin and the rest of the series takes off. Like Kurosu Gatari, Tatsunami has a type and it’s a woman so thick the clapping of her ass cheeks alerts all of Western Australia and part of Jakarta.

These aren’t exhaustive recommendations as I have more from the same artists and then some so consider this another gateway that I’ll leave open for you to enter.

Now for those updates: without revealing too much, starting on June 16 and continuing until October, my unit will be travelling periodically back and forth between Fort Bliss in El Paso and a missile range in New Mexico. Thankfully, the first week will only be about three days long since Juneteenth is a federal holiday that I have off, so I can get the next topic out in time. We won’t be there during the weekends to my understanding so until later this year the posts will see a Saturday or Sunday release at the latest. If not, then delays are to be expected.

For the event happing in El Paso, I’m currently writing this whilst I have a ticket to an anime convention in El Paso lasting June 14 and 15 until the evening hours. I don’t exactly plan to write about my experiences in detail as each one is different, but it will be my first one in a different city, having attended one in Augusta during AIT last June. If I do, it’ll be more spur of the moment than regularly scheduled.

Comeback, Kinda

TiberiusLeave a comment

Did you miss me?

Howdy, audience! I come to you from my advanced individual training location at Fort Eisenhower, previously known as Fort Gordon with a few announcements, first for what I’ve been doing, how the schedule might work for now, and what may or may not be in my future. But first, a brief.

I’ve been open before about my previous enlistment in the Army during the Summer 2021 cycle, getting injured and getting out and fighting tooth and nail to come back and finish and get what I enlisted for: benefits and a future. Well, I’m pleased to report that I had completed my Army basic training for the Winter 2024 cycle. Knowing I’d have no time or means to continue writing/blogging, I kept a notebook to use as a personal journal of mine as a supplement for the blogging. I might not reproduce those writings here since there’s a lot that’s either not suitable for the blog both language- and content-wise, but I do want to provide a summary of my time at BCT.

We don’t use that pattern for the uniforms anymore, by the way. The photo is supposed to be from 2006, but considering those uniforms were the universal wear by January 2008, I’m a bit curious why there isn’t a mix of the old and then-new uniforms.

Anyway, I found out the day of ship-out that I was going to the second worst BCT location for training: Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

Credit: Military.com

Before I continue, I just wanna say f[gunshots]k that place. I hope the Army doesn’t send me back over there for any reason at all.

I checked into 43rd Adjutant General Battalion, a reception unit for all incoming trainees, waiting to be assigned to my training unit elsewhere. Those of you who are older or have relatives who’ve served before, you might remember old cattle trucks being used to ferry trainees everywhere. Yes, they’re still in use, but in my experience, they were converted and fitted with seating, so if you wanted to hear about how we were all sardined into a giant cattle truck going across the bumpiest roads, sorry to disappoint you in that aspect.

The day we were taken to our training unit, it started to snow, or technically sleet on us. We were called one-by-one by the company first sergeant to our respective training platoons to grab our civilian stuff that we stuck in these black duffel bags at reception and form up in the freezing cold. In case you don’t know, the heart of the Midwest gets cold, dry air especially in the wintertime. Being out in -10 degree weather in thin physical fitness uniforms was not a fun experience. Neither was being on a sidewalk that froze overnight.

For the cadre, drill sergeants often come in a variety of different flavors and styles. I was part of 2nd Platoon (MAD DOGS!) and we lucked out by having some of the most softspoken drill sergeants in the company. Most people’s idea of a drill sergeant/instructor comes from movies like Full Metal Jacket, Jarhead, or the Army scenes in Forrest Gump, and it’s not like there aren’t drills who try to behave in the ways of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman or D.I. Fitch, but to get pedantic, they were part of a different branch – the Marines – and are representative of different times in the military’s history. But for all intents and purposes, military instructors aren’t allowed to put their hands on trainees except in the case of an instruction. For instance, if you’re called on to demonstrate a certain firing position, the instructor needs to ask for consent before repositioning your hands or arms. This is to avoid accusations of inappropriate behavior between a trainer and trainee and to maintain strict professionalism in a training environment, i.e. no abuse of power, no hazing, all that stuff.

For punishments, it was the standard repetition of a specific exercise. Half-right face (45 degree turn), front leaning rest position, move (get ready to do X number of pushups). And yes, even our whispering drill sergeants did this either to just the platoon or the whole company.

After getting chaptered out in September 2021, I thought I was off their records until I got back in and everything restarted from scratch, but I learned at the last minute that this never happened and I was given an automatic promotion from private first class with a paygrade of E-3 to specialist with a paygrade of E-4. I can’t explain how this is since I don’t know how and it likely wouldn’t be a good idea to do so. All I know is that I’ve been a member of the E-4 Mafia for about a month and never even realized until I graduated.

Credit: Military-Ranks.org

After this rank, if I have the points necessary, I’ll have to go to a promotion board at my unit wherever that is since I’m still in training.

The first week of training was getting more gear issued to us: a ruck sack, a fighting load carrier with a family of buckles and pouches, helmets, an extra duffel bag, and some winter weather gear that would’ve been nice to have when it snowed on us during the week of MLK day. Call me bitter, but just because we were shivering together doesn’t necessarily mean we had to. Yeah, we’ve adjusted to the cold, but if the summer has overheating precautions then the winter also had hypothermia precautions.

After we got our gear, training went forward as usual. Introductions to the preparatory exercises, learning the chains of command, basic medical and comms classes, especially during the field training exercises, all the fun stuff. Of course, not everything went the way we wanted it all to. The weather did get in the way at times, and on good days where I and my battle buddies (read: fellow trainees) were doing the right thing, someone else was off doing the wrong thing and at least in the beginning we paid for it. As training progresses, the punishments become individualized and you stop having to push because Pvt. Pyle wanted a jelly doughnut from the chow hall.

Credit: Full Metal Jacket (1987), Warner Bros. YT: mercurio0100

For the training exercises, there’s three: the Hammer which lasts one day and one night; the Anvil for two days and one night; and the Forge for three days and two nights. The best, if not necessarily accurate way to describe these exercises and BCT most of the time is living for two months as an infantryman, which I say is inaccurate because U.S. Army Infantry (along with other combat-oriented military occupational specialties or MOSs) go through a longer and more rigorous training course called One Station Unit Training. BCT and AIT are separate locations either at a different base or elsewhere on the same base. One Station Unit Training or OSUT is BCT and AIT back-to-back.

In between all of this is what the morning physical training or PT is for: the Army Combat Fitness Test or ACFT. A six-course event covering all the things a Soldier, MOS notwithstanding, could do in the event of a combat deployment. Timed strength and endurance tests for the body and the spirit. The first one I did yielded an awful score because it was raining and there was no opportunity to rest in between events. Thankfully, it was better the second time and my goal to improve actually showed itself. Starting off with a 25.5 minute two-mile and ending with a 19.5 minute two-mile was a hell of an improvement, I’ll tell you that.

Towards the end of basic training, I had a singular mantra pushing me forward: the Anvil, the ACFT, the Forge. Two FTXs and a fitness test. I was in no hurry to stay in goddamn Missouri for any longer than I had to. That’s not to say I’m turn off from the state. If/when I get the chance, I’ll use my leave to frolic around St. Louis or KCMO one day. I definitely wanna use that time to explore East Texas after meeting a few battle buddies from that area. And also because Texas hearts military folk.

Whether a good section of my life will be in this state is another story. I know now that my MOS may put me in either Killeen or El Paso and based on the reputations of the installations there (Fort Hood/Cavazos for the former, Fort Bliss for the latter), I’ve gotta find some good, safe entertainment outside of Armying and soldiering all day.

When all the graduation requirements are finished, the last few days were dedicated to cleaning and returning equipment, getting our U.S. Army shoulder patches as a symbol that we graduated, a Warrior’s meal of the drill sergeants’ discretion complete with skits, and then Family Day and Graduation rehearsal. Family Day is pretty much what it sounds like: trainees hang out with their families all day until around 7PM, then it’s back to the company for the night. Same thing for graduation, but the uniform is different. While the graduates wear their combat uniform and black berets on Family Day, on Graduation Day it’s the green service uniform, AKA the pinks and greens. These bad boys:

Credit: Army Times, U.S. Army

Obviously, the uniforms look snazzier with evidence of experience on your chest. Having grown up seeing soldiers wear the older dress blue uniforms, learning that they were bringing back the WWII-era uniforms a few years ago had me scratching my head. I have theories, but again, someone smarter and more experienced than me has a clearer, if not necessarily better, explanation.

The last day with all our returnables return, we were up ’til at least 1 in the morning scrubbing our bunks and the barracks. Leave times for our AITs varied by MOS. Mine was one of the first, so we ate our MREs and hopped on a bus from Lost in the Woods, Misery to Fort Gordon/Eisenhower, Georgia. A 12.5 hour bus ride from the chem school to the signal school. I’m not kidding.

Reception at Fort Eisenhower was a lot faster considering we were already in the system. As of writing, I’m taking my classes for my MOS and the classes are expected to end by late July.

With all that out of the way, will I be able to go back to my regularly scheduled blogs? Probably… Keep in mind the military trains you to expect surprises all around, some benign, some major, and you don’t even need to be a stone’s throw away from a combat zone for something to happen. Even in training not everything goes to schedule, but that’s life sometimes. Everything I wrote about so far isn’t exactly a secret, though I’m still encouraged to practice operational security so obviously no secrets are going to be scared. General stuff, yes, but anything that could threaten security will never be shared, even after I get out.

I’m still in a training environment, I just have more freedoms from when I was in basic. If I’m able, I’ll try to get back to business as usual every Saturday, assuming no funny business comes my way. If not, then get ready for periodic posts and updates. I’ve been away from the media and I have a lot of catching up to do after duty hours and dinner chow. Speaking of media surprises:

I found out at the end of basic that Toriyama passed away. While I have a list of desired topics to talk about or expand upon since my last post, I feel I should dedicate the next one to one of animanga’s most legendary manga artists. His worked shaped mine and other people’s childhoods after all.