“The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.”
— Richard P. FeynmanWhen I went back and extracted the tags from my previous cheesecake post, I found a popular and baffling one: cowboy_shot. I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t a fetish, but a cinematographic term: getting everything from head to mid-thigh in the picture, from Westerns that needed to show the characters’ six-guns. Gelbooru taggers seem to be a bit unclear on the concept, since many of the matching pictures include the knees or even feet, but it narrowed things down a bit.
Since this is all scripted now, the mouseover comment includes the matching tags for each image.
With widespread reports of violence, vandalism, and vast despair, it’s important for those of us not currently going through the five stages of grief to help the devastated deal with defeat.
As they act out on Twitter, Facebook, and CNN, remember this important truth about wrist-slitting:
Across is for attention, Down is for death.
99% of what we’re seeing right now is Across. They’re not going to leave the US or follow through on their death threats, they’re just going to have a two-year tantrum and then try to retake the House and Senate.
After the surprisingly good Doctor Strange movie, I decided to refresh my memory on just how the early comics stories went. It’s been a few decades since I read any of the stuff from the Sixties, and I know I’d never read all of it. Amazon has a Doctor Strange Omnibus for $67.50, but Marvel has a $60/year deal on their Unlimited subscription, which includes all of that material.
So, this morning while reading election results (spoiler: California just gave a huge boost to Internet tobacco/vape sales and Nevada gun shows), I opened up my iPad and found this waiting for me:
Just got back from the polls. When you’ve got multiple offices where the only two choices are “Democrat” and “Democrat”, you know it’s going to suck, but at least there wasn’t a line at this time of day. I can only hope that there are enough sane people left in California to shoot down the worst of the jaw-droppingly bad propositions, but I can’t say that I expect it.
[Update: expectation fulfilled; there is no law too stupid to pass in California.]
[Update: to make the game a little fairer, and to give appropriate credit, each picture is now a link back to Gelbooru; I hadn’t realized they let you link by the MD5 checksum, which I fortunately preserved as the filename. A quick bit of scripting, and I can also confirm that there’s only one tag (other than “1girl” and “solo”) that applies to all 22 images.]
In his cheesecake roundups from Gelbooru, Steven relied on an ever-expanding list of negative tags to exclude thing that definitely didn’t match his interests. The last version of the exclusion list was:
-1boy -multiple_boys -male_focus -penis -testicles -vore -rape -loli -fellatio -sex -bondage -furry -monochrome -amputee -anal -yaoi -abs -pregnant -shota -leash -tears -chained -noose -restrained -rope -asphyxiation -execution -hanging -corpse -blood -photo -peeing -gigantic_breasts -large_penis -huge_penis -futanari
I’d never really looked at the list before, and honestly, even after you exclude all of those, you still have to wade through a river of crap to find some decent pictures that match the positive tags you include.
See if you can guess what single positive tag I added to get the following pictures:

The link (pictures SFW, site Not) said, 「九州に尻が凄いアナがいる」, which even someone using an online translator can understand as “There’s an announcer in Kyushu with an amazing ass” (some interpretation required; Bing and Google return, respectively, “Kyushu has amazing ass Ana” and “There are ass is amazing Ana in Kyushu”). This SFW site has links to various places that have noticed her non-ass assets; she’s a cutie.

The real fun comes when you turn the translators loose on her Wikipedia page, where Google changes her last name to Pauli at the top of the page, and Bing not only changes her last name to Takeuchi everywhere, but converts the hiragana reading to “Maria holic Sayuri”. Still a few bugs in the system…
"Chizu's reaction to Mahoro's cooking was a running gag in the series which I never got tired of." --- Steven Den Beste
After nearly 500 hours with the original Skyrim, I can’t really take the new Special Edition seriously; nice-looking, but been-there-done-that. I’m playing at the default difficulty level and not even bothering to level up. This means that dynamically-leveled opponents are trivial to kill, but it also means that there are plenty of monsters that can one-shot me. I had to run like hell to dodge the frost troll on the way to High Hrothgar, I stumbled across a skooma den filled with vampires and got my ass handed to me, and the less said about blood dragons, the better.
When I realized that a few lucky loot drops meant I could afford a house, I decided I needed to adopt a child. Specifically, Dorthe, the daughter of Riverwood’s blacksmith. So I became a werewolf, killed and ate her parents, assassinated the woman who ran the orphanage, and convinced her replacement that I’d be an excellent parent.
I think we’ll be very happy together.