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:
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?
I don’t think perfect gaster even knows how to use a phone...
Anyway, I thought the world’s best boomer would look good in cat themed clothing
Epictale Gaster by @yugogeer012
Alien girl, tome
I couldn't afford a Vanilla plushy so I made one with leftover felt instead (and little wooden hearts I painted)
A little sketch of sans because I haven’t posted in a really really long time. I’m still alive don’t worry lol
wait how did YOU learn how to walk in heels??
Step one: go to a thrift store and buy a battered pair of knee-high boots in your size. They have a blocky heel, tapered to a perfect one-inch square of stomping force. They have seen better days; they are about to see better nights.
Step two: you are thirteen years old and you have just moved to a house in the woods, built on a lot of untouched forest that slopes steeply to a quiet dark river. There are trails cut, tentatively, into the otherwise dense trees, and you have never moved before. You have never lived in a place that you do not know like you know your own hands, like you know your own stride.
Step three: it is two in the morning on a fall night with a full moon, and there is no screen in your window. It’s easy to open, easy to step out, and with the heels of your boots you don’t even have to stretch for the ground under your feet. It’s soft dirt, turned up by the foundation of the house, and the square blocky boot sinks in deeply as you slide out into the night. Your cat, two bright eyes in the dark and white, flashing teeth, leaps out after you, darker than shadow.
Step four: The trails are bright under the moon, bare dirt where the rest of the land is years of accumulated mast. As you start down the hill from the house the momentum carries you and you lean back into your heels like climber’s spikes, stablizing you on the slick clay slope where the river used to run. By the bottom of the hill you are running too, on your toes, because you’re moving too fast to stop. You can either run or fall, and this is how you learn to never, ever, fall.
Step five: At the riverbank the trail turns into shadow under the trees and there’s nothing--you follow the darker-place-in-darkness of a black cat running ahead of you, trusting her night vision when your own fails you. She leads you through the places where the bushes are so close they whip your face, back up the hill until you pass, breathless, where the dark mirror of your brothers’ bedroom windows are shining with reflected moonlight, and you keep going, leaning into the twists and flinging your legs uphill, your heels never touching dirt at all.
Step six: in front of the house the trails are a maze of flat land, weaving over each other to the road. Your cat picks the junctions, switching back and forth in the longest route between you and asphalt. You’re out of breath but your balance is steadying, your stride shifting, and now you run heel-toe, heel-toe, your weight flying on the balls of your feet. Everything is silver and black, you and the cat and the trees, and you know this place now.
Step seven: When you climb back through the window after your cat, there are mosquitoes everywhere. You take off your boots and climb on the furniture to smash them where they’ve gathered in the highest parts of your bedroom.
You realize the next morning that there are perfect one-inch-square spots of mud on your ceiling.
⚾ SMASHING TIME ⚾