her curry has honestly got me cumin inside!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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?

watching the Thing and like

it’s a mound of flesh, right? and it keeps forming eyes capable of looking at you. and the longer you look at it, the more openings appear. and at first the openings are full of what looks like legs, which move aside to reveal a flower, which unfurls to reveal a fleshy orifice studded with teeth moving towards you with great power and longing.

TIL: Paper airplanes were not created to mimic real airplanes. They predate them.

via beatlyzer.com

tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse

masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

this is so funny 😂

“rent lowering gunshots” this, “we can’t let them know we like it here” that, i think everyone is just having fun posting cringe

idk whats funnier: that tumblr got people to spend multiples of $7.99 to add fake verification checkmarks to their blog to ""make fun of"" twitter's latest fuckup, or that these checkmarks literally do not show up for mobile users and thats why i had no idea this amazing feat of opportunistic capitalism was even happening until just now

nobody bitch about the tumblr checkmark this is the funniest shit staff has pulled in months and its absolutely contributing to the landlord-firing-gunshots-at-passing-cars vibe of the past week

now that everyone from twitter has joined tumblr overnight, it's time to lay a couple ground rules:

1. it's not called a "retweet", it's called a "reblog", but if you're REALLY cool, you refer to it as a "rebagel"

2. if someone has fewer followers than you, it is totally fair to call them "irrelevant", but it is actually more stinging to call them "irrelephant"

3. if you see someone irl that you think might have a tumblr, you're supposed to say "i like your shoe laces". the correct response, which any true tumblrite would know by heart, is "thanks, i stole them from the president"

4. there is a particular phenomenon that happens after 12am EST called "nightblogging", and everything after this point is the fault of the australians

5. tumbeasts

I've been waiting for him to say this lmao

I think women's restrooms should have urinals not just to be more inclusive but also to give cis girls the option of Challenge Pissing™️

gonna have to give the blokes a W for this one

i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck