Steam is reportedly cracking down on "scantily clad cartoon women" in its online gane platform. Publishers of adult-themed anime visual novels say they've been told to remove offending titles or leave town.

"It's an anime titty holocaust," HuniePot, the developer of HuniePop, a match-3 puzzle game where players also chat up busty anime girls, said in a tweet. Thursday night, HuniePot tweeted that it received an email from Valve, the company that operates Steam, saying that HuniePop, "violates the rules & guidelines for pornographic content on Steam and will be removed from the store unless the game is updated to remove said content."

MangaGamer, a company that localizes and publishes several Japanese visual novels, told Motherboard in an email that it received a notice from Valve Thursday morning for its game Kindred Spirits.

Steam is, in other words, panicking and excluding a genre from its platform without explanation. It's allegedly warned at least one publisher over material they don't even publish on Steam.

These seems to be a general unwillingness to directly address two facts at hand:

1. Much of the material in question depicts childlike characters in sexual contexts.

2. Some of the people selling it are misogynists and some of the adjacent fandoms are tinderboxes of rage and entitlement.

Instead, we have vague objections to vague policies. This enables Steam to push out anything superficially similar, a pattern that could later be used to push out sexual and political minorities and anything else that might make trouble in the serene walled gardens of content. Read the rest

Mike from the Useless Duck Company simply wanted to make a dancing and talking banana robot. For his troubles, he got banned from Twitch due to racist and sexist content. Read the rest

Jiz Lee, Stoya, Nikki Darling, and Asa Akira talk about representation, the marketing of white women vs. women of color in adult movies, and how porn is still a very white industry. And unfortunately you have to click much deeper to find real, respectful diversity.

"What Porn Stars Want You To Know: We Don't All Look the Same" (Iris)

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If you like sweary Canadians with lots of knowledge about building materials and construction, Arduino versus Evil has the most interesting armchair analysis of what caused the Florida International University bridge collapse. Read the rest

Did the scene in the new IT movie where Pennywise bites Georgie's arm, only for the camera to cut to an exterior shot of the drain, leave you frustrated and hankering for more? If you want to dwell on the boy's dismembered fate on an indefinite basis, this animatronic prop at the TransWorld Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis this week should be right up your sewer.

You might be fortunate enough to see this at your local haunted house this fall, the laughing and shaking and screaming as an endlessly looping moment.

I usually love the pop-culture grand guignol transgressive trash of modern Halloween horror, but I really hate this! A sense of amazed wonder subsiding to cold dismay. There's something very 2018 going on here. It doesn't have anything to do with our lives but we all know that terrible things will soon be happening and we've developed a very strange language to accomodate ourselves to the prospect of it.

Here's the top comment on the YouTube thread:

Funny Vine Videos | FVV 3 hours ago Can we feature your video in our YouTube channel ? Please make sure to email me at funnyvinevideos.fvv(at)gmail(dot)com I have a great offer for you $$$

Am I just getting old? Tell me if I'm just getting old. Read the rest

This ad, featuring happy people grinning in clinically perfect environments, is immeasurably improved by having its soundtrack replaced by remarks from comedian Bill Burr concerning his experience with the 3D-printed transparent braces. I found my way to it after reading this article about smarmy "free speech grifters" who decry political correctness while supporting the status quo: it leads with a funny anecdote whereby oleaginous creep Bill Maher expects Burr to agree with his anti-PC whining but is instead berated by him. Read the rest

The good folks from Night Vale have launched Pounded in the Butt By My Own Podcast, a new audio treat in which guest-readers read the extremely NSFW and utterly delightful erotic fiction of Chuck Tingle (previously). Read the rest

George Nader, the international businessman of mystery who is now cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller, was indicted in 1985 on obscenity charges involving child pornography.

Nader is a political operative who was seen frequently at the White House during the early days of the administration of President Donald Trump. Read the rest

Born in 1919, this gentleman thinks he's only 79 years old. Watch as he learns he's going to turn 99 this summer. He asks, "How did I get old so fast?" I hear ya, buddy, I hear ya.

(reddit) Read the rest

Here's an F-bomb-filled anthem about Benjamin Franklin that never made it into Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musical, Hamilton. It's a humorous tune called "Benjamin Franklin's Song" and it's sung by The Decemberists.

The band shares the song's story:

HAMILTON, as you probably know, is an American musical theater production written by a guy named Lin-Manuel Miranda. Lots of people have seen it, lots of people are continuing to see it, lots of people have raved about it. We saw a production of it in New York last year and we can tell you: it’s very very good. And important. And transformative to our countrys current milieu. Etc.

Well, it happens that Mr. Miranda reached out to our own Colin Meloy to put music to a set of lyrics that had been written for HAMILTON but had never been used: a first-person introduction to one of the US’s founding fathers, Mr. Benjamin Franklin. Lin said that he’d wanted to include Franklin as a character in the show initially, but it just never quite worked something about not wanting to remove the audience more than once from the action taking place in our nascent United States. Funnily enough, he said he’d imagined Franklin singing in a sort of Decemberist-y way, whatever that means.

FAST FORWARD TO 2016: Lin passed on the lyrics to Colin, who was very much up to the task, and a new song was born: BEN FRANKLIN’S SONG, to be exact. We really like it. It’s very swear-y, but there’s a clean version too.

British cops got software to help them identify children in abuse images, but it's having trouble telling the difference between skin and sand.

...the department is working with “Silicon Valley providers” to help train the AI to successfully scan for images of child abuse. But as we’ve seen, even the most powerful tech companies can’t seem to deploy algorithms that don’t fuck up every once in awhile. They have promoted dangerous misinformation, abetted racism, and accidentally censored bisexual content. And when Gizmodo recently tested an app intended to automatically identify explicit images in your camera roll, it flagged a photo of a dog, a donut, and a fully-clothed Grace Kelly.

What are the odds that Londons' finest paid fabulous sums of money for what amounts to a dumb imagemagick script that averages and compares color samples from various points on each image, and are now paying fabulous sums more to have some rinkydink machine learning grafted on. Read the rest

This video encapsulates every British middle-class family's Christmas since at least the 1960s. Read the rest

Since Gordon Ramsay got 25 million views showing how to scramble eggs, there's been a sharp uptick in inane cooking videos. Enter The Onion with the perfect response. Read the rest

Data wizard Gregor0410 crunched the numbers and figured out what the most common swear words on Reddit are. The top two, running almost neck and neck, are "fuck" and "shit." An order of magnitude behind are "dick" and "bullshit", with "cunt" and "cock" putting in respectable totals each similar in size to other swear words combined. [via] Read the rest

"Parasitic endeavours" is a short NSFW animation by Simon Christoph Krenn, with sound design by Matthias Urban, an entry in the emergent genre of ultra-realistic CGI human bodies behaving like unusual materials. [via Sploid] Read the rest

The yoga pants are $42, and the swim shorts are $45; either one will turn you into a Renaissance hunk. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

Cool 3D World's "Earth and Moon" is just over 2 minutes' worth of goopy, poopy, sexy, planetary, grotesque and wonderful experimental 3D animation; it's like a hand-turned, grownup version of those super-weird algorithmically generated Youtube Kids spam videos, but in a really, really good way. (via JWZ) Read the rest