[Update: significantly improved the Perl script]

The hardest part of my cunning plan isn’t “making a screensaver”; I think every OS comes with a simple image-collage module that will do that. The fun was in collecting the images and cleaning them up for use.

Amazon’s static preview images are easy to copy; just click and save. For the zoom-enabled previews, it will fall back to static images if Javascript is disabled, so that’s just click and save as well. Unfortunately, there are an increasing number of “look inside” previews (even in the naughty-novels genre) which have no fallback, and which are not easily extracted; for now, I’ll write those off, even though some of them have gorgeous cover art.

[Update: turns out it’s easy to extract previews for the “look inside” style; just open the thumbnail in a new window, and replace everything after the first “.” with “SS500.jpg”.]

A bit of clicking around assembled a set of 121 pleasant images at more-or-less the same scale, with only one problem: large white borders. I wanted to crop these out, but a simple pass through ImageMagick’s convert -trim filter would recompress the JPEGs, reducing the quality. You can trim off almost all of the border losslessly with jpegtran -crop, but it doesn’t auto-crop; you have to give it precise sizes and offsets.

So I used both:

f=foo.jpg
crop=$(convert -trim $f -format "%wx%h%X%Y" info:-)
jpegtran -crop $crop $f > crop/$f

So, what does a collage of naughty-novel cover-art look like? Here are some samples (warning: 280K 1440x900 JPEGs): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. [Update: larger covers, and full-sized]

These were not, in fact, generated by taking screenshots of the screensaver. It takes a long time for it to fill up all the blank spots on the screen, so I wrote a small Perl script that uses the GD library to create a static collage using the full set of images. If I desaturated the results a bit, it would make a rather lively background screen. For home use.

…will use a random set of book covers downloaded from Amazon Japan’s “dirty stories for men” collection. Not the trendy manga/anime-style covers, but the more realistic airbrushed cheesecake style many of them use.

For instance:

The title of this little gem, もっちり熟尻, breaks down into a current slang term for “firm texture”, followed by a kanji meaning ripen or mature, followed by the kanji for buttocks, translatable quite effectively as Firm Ripe Ass. This is not the least subtle title I’ve seen; that award would probably go to ごっくんOL (mouseover for NSFW translation).

[side note: I’ve noticed a lot of invented-word kanji combos in genre titles, and I suspect many of them are wordplay. In this case, 熟尻 might be read as jukkou, which when written 熟考 means “deliberation”]

Other covers I’ve liked in this genre include Wife-play, Temptation Paradise, My Aunt and Me, and Welcome to Honeyfun Island. I’m not terribly interested in the books, mind you, but I do like the cover art. [Update: and another, Saucy Sister-in-law (literally “with extra sauce”, usually used when ordering beef bowls).]

Not all of the artists working on these books are equal, of course. Welcome to the Honey Garden is a poor sister to Honeyfun Island’s main attraction, and Beloved Kindergarten Teacher isn’t as well-drawn as The Naughty Kindergarten Teacher, but there are a lot of these books available (as I first discovered here and later here), many with quite pleasant covers that are considerably classier than this vintage American example:

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…I like the sound of this one better: Ero-dere.

A look at the “customers who bought this item also bought” list turns up titles like Cool masochist, My maid is a classmate, My little sister is a bikini model, My S big sister and my M little sister, Dangerous sisters, School-swimsuit-maid at your service!, Milk academy, My big sister, My little sister, My maid, My princess, My doll, etc.

I think it’s safe to conclude that the main character lives up to her description. Often. With illustrations.

[Yes, all of the “My X” ones are by the same author. I imagine she got some crossover sales from fans of the Mai HiME manga/anime series when she got up to princesses and released My Hime. Interestingly, they also hired her for a To LOVEる book called Dangerous Girls Talk; sounds like someone qualified to work in that universe!]

Now I see why Girls Generation is unstoppable: they’re cyborgs.

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Please start a new blog for your knee-jerk political scapegoating. It detracts from your knee-jerk Apple fanboyism.

For those of us who feel really, really old when we find our eyes drawn to an eighteen-year-old in a bikini, here’s the latest photo of the former den mother of Morning Musume, first-generation member Yuko Nakazawa, age 37.

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Looking through the messages that were trapped by my spam filters, I found an odd one today. At first glance, it was very spammy:

1. Sent to username johngreely at my domain jgreely.com, something I have never, ever used.
2. Supposedly from a travel agency in the UK.
3. Booking a room at a Four Seasons Country Club in Portugal, 2 adults, no children, checkin date today.
4. Listing a home address for me in Ireland.
5. With a "click here to complete your payment" link at the bottom of the invoice.

Except, the agency seems to really exist, and all of the links in the message went to their site, and there really is a Jigginstown in Naas, County Kildare. To ice the cake, a search of the Irish Times family notices page turns up engagements for both the son and the daughter of John and June Greely, of Jigginstown, Naas.

So, enjoy your vacation, folks, and I hope the misdirected email didn’t screw up your booking.

WTF?

The Mac App store listing for one of your featured apps says “You must be at least 17 years old to download this app. Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes”.

The app is YummySoup, a cookbook.