I do! It’s called The Jolliest Term on Record, and I started it so I could whine about being at a school I hated. Now, it’s my (18+, kiddies!) porn blog… because I look at a lot of porn!

Specifically, I’m interested in porn from an academic standpoint. In the process of looking through masses of doujinshi and tankobon for reference purposes on my quest to learn more about the anthropological persistence of attempts at actualization of fantasy, I usually find things that make me laugh. So I blog about the things that make me laugh, both in a lol sense and an academic sense.

But this month, I’m doing something super fun! Not 18+ strictly speaking, I’ll be posting pictures of/download links to beautiful wimminz every day this month (I write about the process here).

I decided to do this because I’m very interested in the gravure scene - the lengths people will go to the have something look a certain way, fit a certain subset of a fetish. Now, you may be saying “But Mina, I thought you didn’t like it when people just talk about beauty” - and you’re right. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be INTERESTED IN IT.

To keep up to date with the December Beautiful Wimminz over at tjtor, this is a good link to keep handy.

Happy holidays!

I recently went to a Michel de Montaigne showing at the Cambridge University Library. I learned that Montaigne was a COOL GUY!

He was a Renaissance writer, and he wrote a lot of essays - popularizing the “genre” in the process. He was really good at segueing between philosophy and personal anecdotes, while keeping a good balance of the two.

I’m kicking myself for not taking many notes at the show - Wikipedia says “In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author” - which reminds me of how on one of the walls of writing about him, they said something along the lines of “…and when he returned home, they made him mayor.” It was completely off topic within its own context, and hilarious, but I FORGOT TO WRITE IT DOWN.

Wikipedia also says he was an ‘anti-conformist’ - which reminds me of a comic I wrote in my head when I read about how when he visited the Vatican, they basically did a customs check, and took a couple of his books away. This pissed him off, because they took one of the books “just because the translator was a heretic”. Here’s the comic I wrote:

One really cool part about Montaigne was that his contemporaries found him self-indulgent for relating to personal experience in his writing - sort of in response, he said: “I am myself the matter of my book.”

I like that he said that! It’s completely contrary to Barthes, and CENTURIES PRIOR. Barthes was an asshole, so I like that some 15th century author thought to “self indulge”, and influenced many in the process.

Another interesting point is that the books in the show were from Gilbert de Botton’s private collection, pseudo anonymously “gifted” to the university library. Gilbert de Botton was Alain de Botton’s dad, and AdB wrote about Montaigne in The Consolations of Philosophy - so why hush up his name, if he gave the books to the library?

Alain de Botton is also a cool guy.