Cheesecake sites come and go, but most of the old reliable ones I used to link to just went poof one day, and most of the others ended up hidden behind login pages (Tumblr has gotten very aggressive about flagging adult content, and also shutting down too-popular sites).

Here’s my current rotation:

• Takitumblr/Shashinmeister: one of the few cheesecake Tumblrs not locked behind a login, this site is updated multiple times per day, and is pretty much the place I start. Lots of gravure models, idol singers, cat GIFs, etc. Bad: endless scrolling that can cause your browser to reload the page and lose your place, doesn’t always tag models by name (even when they’re obvious), and way too much Rena Takeda, Rina Koike, and Nagi Nemoto for my taste; Rena and Rina I can appreciate in moderation, but Nemo’s got wonky eyes and terrible stylists. No problems with ads or Javascript (apart from the endless scrolling thing). Good place to discover other sites.

• Overflowing Museum of Cheesecake: This is a huge archive of mostly-non-nude photoshoots, all neatly tagged by the model’s name. Bad: AdBlock Pro intercepts a lot of stuff on this site, and even with that, it loads very slowly unless you disable Javascript. The site is fully functional with ads blocked and scripts disabled. Updated pretty much every day.

• Giga-Kojimblr: I’ve lost count of how many times Kojimblr’s been shut down on Tumblr, but this is the current one. Excellent taste, reliable name-tagging, no endless scrolling, frequent updates. Bad: sure to disappear and change names again.

• Gaisenmon: generally decent taste, usually includes names, no endless scrolling, frequent updates. Bad: too much Nemo, no tagging, occasional burst of candid-schoolgirl photos.

• SheCool: frequently-updated archive of recent magazine shoots, including nudes. Well-tagged and categorized, one adult ad in sidebar. Bad: some picture links take you to product pages rather than larger images.

• Big Boobs Japan: excellent taste, not restricted to either big boobs or Japan, multiple new shoots per day, all named, romanized, and tagged. No real negatives, apart from a bunch of social-media icons splattered everywhere (including a prominent “save to Pinterest” link, which I’d rather die than do).

• Gazō Navi: raunchy, lots of porn pics, lots of porn ads, lots of garbage linkposts. Updated every few days, but maybe only a quarter of the posts are worth clicking on. More and more I visit this less and less, because actual photo galleries that aren’t just copied from one of the above sites only show up at most once a week.

• Sumomo-ch: mostly photo shoots from porn flicks, lots of redundant linkposts, and the occasional worthwhile theme post (“small-breasted women bathing”, “foreign swimsuit hotties”, etc). Bad: turn off Javascript; not only are there tons of porn ads with animations and popovers, but the site constantly chews up CPU (I suspect cryptocurrency mining). Also often adds a fairly large mosaic blur over the naughty bits, even in images where it’s not necessary, and adds a watermark that recompresses images. Multiple updates per day, at least, and the publicity stills of AV actresses can be quite nice.

• Passion Nippones: decent roundup of a lot of magazine shoots, as well as galleries from some pretty obscure sites, updated frequently. Bad: loads very slowly even without Javascript, tons of stuff caught by AdBlock Pro. I closed the tab after ABP went into triple digits and Safari threw up a SPoD. Not recommended without protection.

I’m taking a sort-of Underpants Gnomes approach to selecting cheesecake themes on Pixiv.

1. Collect Cheesecake.
2. ?
3. Blog!

Step 2 in the Pixiv Underpants Gnome Plan is “pick a theme I’ve already downloaded enough images for”. In this case, that’s everything containing the kanji 狐 except where it’s used in a proper name, or: 狐耳 狐娘 キャス狐 狐 狐耳巫女 #キャス狐 アサ狐 乳狐 狐っ娘 狐巫女. That produces a set of 107 images that I already like, and there’s even a pair of red half-rims for an offering.

For amusement, here’s what my theme-discovery process ends up looking like, using the offline DB I build with the API:

% sqlite3 -separator " " pixiv-girls.sqlite3 <<EOF | head -20
select count(i.id),i.tag,t.en
  from illust i
  left outer join trans t on i.tag = t.jp
  where i.tag not like "%users入り"
  group by tag order by count(id) desc
EOF
1010 オリジナル Original
597 女の子 Girl
484 魅惑の谷間 Charming_Cleavage
462 おっぱい Oppai
329 Fate/GrandOrder 
258 R-18 
242 水着 Swimsuit
237 FGO 
230 猫耳 Cat_Girl
228 極上の乳 Superb_Breasts
220 艦これ KanColle
210 尻神様 Butt_Goddess
194 おへそ Belly_Button
194 艦隊これくしょん 
167 魅惑のふともも Captivating_Thighs
156 マシュ・キリエライト Mashu_Kyrielight
134 巨乳 Big_Breasts
125 CLIPSTUDIOPAINT 
116 下着 Underwear
114 アイドルマスターシンデレラガールズ Idolmaster_Cinderella_Girls

Once I’ve picked a set of tags, I have a little Bash script that does boolean searches on the SQLite DB and opens all the matching images in Preview.app, so I can do things like “(catgirl or foxgirl) and big boobs and not loli”.

The tagging still isn’t 100%, though, because tags are applied to illustration IDs, and it’s common for users to post multiple “pages” of images. Sometimes these are actual manga pages, but it’s also used for “grab-bag of sketches”, “N variations of the same drawing”, “N characters from same series”, and the ever-popular “progressively-more-explicit scene”. So, if a series includes a busty fox-girl, a loli catgirl, and a glasses-wearing robot, the ID will have all of those tags. Similarly, if the final image in a sequence is the aftermath of a gang-bang, the wholesome first image gets all the explicit tags as well.

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Shipgirls. You can’t swing a loli catgirl without hitting a dozen of them. Fortunately they’re easy to classify, as the Pixiv tag まったく、 駆逐艦は最高だぜ!! (“truly, destroyers are the best!!”) makes clear. This also crosses over quite a bit with 下着艦娘 (“shipgirls in underwear”), so most of them are in the NSFW section.

As a genre, I think it’s past its peak, but I just can’t see the new isekai wave generating as much quality cheesecake. Some of the early ones have done okay with the standard fantasy tropes, but now they’re into slimes, giant spiders, and [vending machines] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0763LLK22).

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By now some of my regulars shouldn’t need introductions, but I’ll fill in the names anyway when I get a chance.

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I’ve never played/watched/read any Fate/whatever games/anime/manga, but Grand Order’s Mash/Mashu/Matthew Kyrielight/Kyrielite in a blue gingham dress with sweater and glasses pushes all of my buttons. The ensemble even has its own tag on Pixiv: 先輩を殺す私服 (senpai wo korosu shifuku), “clothes which kill senpai” (aka the player). A few people have tried to expand the theme to other characters, but it hasn’t taken off.

Amusingly, I typed the above at work, then went over to the break room to nuke my dinner, and three attractive asian women walked in wearing flirty little sundresses with sweaters, and they all had glasses, too.

In related news, I’ve got Pixivpy working well enough that I can extract metadata for an image based on the ID in its filename, store them in a SQLite DB along with my work-in-progress tag translations, generate HTML to post the selected images, and update my Pixiv bookmarks with whatever I just blogged. That last bit helps improve their recommendation system, another way of weeding out the chaff.

Update

Senpai-killing body pillow (NSFW, of course)

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Trying to find work-safe pictures of Ikumi Hisamatsu anywhere is pretty much a lost cause. Wearing very little very well is her job, after all.

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For some reason, it’s difficult to find not-entirely-unsafe images combining the 猫耳 and 極上の乳 tags, so most of this set ended up hidden in the NSFW section.

This is an experiment in using only positive tags to select images, as opposed to the laundry list of exclusions Steven had to use to weed out the mountains of hideous crap on Gelbooru. Having a paid Pixiv membership allows me to sort by likes, which tends to eliminate that sort of thing, although the Pixiv community has more affection for certain things than I do…

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No matter how hard they try (and they really, really do), the Hello!Project Costume Designers can’t make Maimi ugly.

Other not-uglies below, with the usual to-be-named-later.

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