Peter da Silva posted a link on G+ to a collection of “redneck haiku”, most of them “not very good”. I commented with something I think is better:

Gently melting snow,
rusty pickup truck on blocks.
Spring revelation.

The Amazon listing for the upcoming Niven/Benford collaboration contains the following sentence:

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

“If I were to create a Tumblr blog…”, he says, refusing once again to enter the swirling vortex of multi-panel animated gifs, endless-scrolling memory hogs, and myspace-like design aesthetics, “I think I’d have to call it Baffled Cheesecake, in honor of a sexyfail expression that’s almost as common as Bored Porn Star, Angry Stripper, Constipated Chick, and Wannabe Realdoll.”

Two samples below, one nude.

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They’re universes where the Boy Scout virtues work. They follow the rules of Boys Adventure, not Gritty Realism. Dog Days mixes it with a healthy dose of cheesecake, but the key word is healthy; there’s shock and embarrassment when a special attack manages to destroy a female character’s clothing without harming her in any way, but there’s no fear, no leering, no dominance, nothing negative. It’s all good clean fun.

I think the closest Hollywood has come to this (the feel, not the special attacks; pity) was the 1996 version of The Phantom, featuring terrific performances by Billy Zane, Kristy Swanson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Patrick McGoohan. It tanked, of course; too wholesome for the market.

[Update: …except for poor Becky, who’s strayed into the world of Men’s Adventure.]

As a contrast to the previous grammatical mouthful, I offer this novel: 妹!妹!!妹!!!, read as “Mai! Mai!! Mai!!!”, neatly stripping the genre to its essential truth: “Little Sister! Little Sister!! Little Sister!!!”.

Having nothing to do with trains is 妹ChuChu, read “Mai Chu-Chu”, for “Little Sister Kiss-Kiss”.

Opening a different vein, we have ツンマゾ!. Read as “Tsun-Mazo!”, for “‘Aloof’ Masochist!”; just in case you miss the point, the theme is clearly explained in the subtitle. And the cover art.

Longer, but spelled out in phonetic Engrish for the benefit of the younger reader (or, well, not), is ミルクプリンセス ラブラブにゅ~トピア, or “Milk Princess Love-love Nyuu-topia” (nyuu being the reading for the kanji 乳, “breasts/milk”).

Not spam, but a challenge: ツンツンしてた小悪魔妹が嫁になるまでデレた理由

Breaking that down:

(((tsuntsun shite-ta) koakuma-imouto) ga
((yome ni naru) made) dereta) wake

(Note: the last word is the kanji for riyuu, but as you can see on Amazon, it’s glossed wake; both mean “reason/explanation”, but at the moment I can’t really explain what difference in nuance they’re playing with here)

Stripped to essentials, the base sentence is imouto ga dereta, “younger sister was ‘lovestruck’” . This complete sentence modifies wake (as what’s often called an attributive verb; your textbook may vary), making it “the reason younger sister was lovestruck”.

Now for the rest: koakuma “little devil” modifies imouto, or, more precisely, I think it should be read as a compound noun koakumamai, “little-devil younger sister”. Tsuntsun shite ita, “(someone) had been ‘aloof’” is another attributive verb, modifying our complex little sister. That leaves us with the particle made, “until”, which provides the condition that ended her tsuntsun nature: yome ni naru, “(she) becomes a bride”.

The base sentence is past tense, so the awkwardly-precise result is: “The reason my used-to-be-aloof-until-she-married little-devil younger sister became lovestruck.”

In more natural English, perhaps “How marriage made my bitchy little sister sweet”.

[Update: I read a bit of the back cover blurb, and the protagonist says his ideal bride is a not-related-by-blood little sister, so given the genre and the cover art, perhaps that should be “How marrying me made my bitchy little pricktease of a step-sister put out”.]

General-purpose android for lab work. They named it Mahoro. No word on the lifespan.

Hopefully this nonsense was just painted on for the photo, and she doesn’t really have this tattoo. It’s classic Hanzismatter material. I can’t see them all clearly, but the fifth and sixth look like the top and bottom of “老”.

I’d like to credit the original artist, since the content of the “tattoo” is only a minor part of the composition, but of course it arrived through Tumblr, a system that goes out of its way to hide sources. My search dead-ended at the ironically-named Cool Tattoos tumblr.

[Update: the model’s name is Salleh Sparrow, and sadly, it is indeed a tattoo. She’s also a photographer, so it may be a self-portrait; I eventually traced it back to a defunct DeviantArt page under her name. The slightly larger version of the image that I found didn’t make the characters any clearer, and her Facebook portfolio doesn’t have anything that shows them off, either.]

Speaking of Hanzismatter, I think this is my new favorite bad tattoo. At least the tattoo artist used a real character, and the result is only a bit absurd, not obscene or gibberish.