by Ryan Mathews

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May 1999

Well, that was a nice vacation. It's nice to spend a month without having to think about web sites. But now I'm back, and I'm rarin' to go! Of course, I'm a bit tired after cleaning up the mess left by my guest columnist, Ryan Matheuszik. Sheesh, some people. You let them stay at your place and they leave it looking like a disaster area. I must've cleared out three garbage bags full of empty Molsen bottles and Tim Horton's boxes.

Hey, how about a good old-fashioned rant to get things back on track?

I would like to make an announcement regarding this column and JavaScript. From this point forward, I will not review any site that requires JavaScript to function. If your site includes JavaScript as a bonus feature, to make buttons light up or as a quick navigation tool, fine. But if your site will not work with JavaScript disabled, then forget about it. I'm not touching it. I've seen sites that are unnavigable without JavaScript. I've even seen a site that wouldn't display without JavaScript. I will no longer review those sites.

Why am I taking this stand? Simple. I've had it up to here with JavaScript. It does very little that is useful, and what it does do is annoying. JavaScript allows the web server to take partial control of your browser. I'm sick of the damned pop-up windows. I'm sick of being redirected to sites that I didn't ask for. I don't like my browser not telling me the URL of a link before I click it. All in all, I find JavaScript to be a major pain in the ass, and my browsing experience has been much more pleasant since I've turned it off.

When I research websites for Last Exit, I regularly browse over 100 sites. Many of those sites are on GeoCities and Tripod, two web hosts that are infamous for throwing JavaScript pop-up windows on your browser. These windows are not only annoying; they also eat up some of my 31200 baud worth of bandwidth that I'm using to browse. Anything that slows me down is something I don't want to put up with. So I am leaving JavaScript off. If that means I can't navigate your site, there's plenty more sites where yours came from.

On a totally different topic: I'm sometimes asked when I'm going to get around to reviewing hentai sites. My response to this question has usually been to laugh nervously and change the topic. It's not that I don't like hentai sites. Quite the contrary; I have a nice collection of hentai links in my bookmarks. I just feel uneasy about devoting a column to sites that feature material that ranges from erotica to outright porn.

That being said, I can give web explorers some tips on finding really good hentai artwork on the web.

• Ignore any site whose URL does not end in ".jp". US-based hentai sites, generally-speaking, are not worth squat. They mostly consist of boring, 16-color CG images grabbed from hentai PC games. What's worse, many of these sites actually want you to pay for this crap, which is insulting, if you ask me. The good hentai sites are in Japan, and are maintained by actual hentai artists, to promote their work. They're all free. (I'm being a little unfair here. There are hentai fan artists in the US with good sites, as well as good hentai collection sites. But these are drowned in a sea of garbage.)

• Since the good sites are maintained by amateur Japanese artists, you can forget about seeing the sites in English. Most artists know very little English, if any at all. What English you do see will often be laughably bad. Some artists maintain a separate English page, but this page is often not updated as regularly as the Japanese side.

• To find the images on a site, look for links named "CG", "Image", or "Gallery". If the links are titled in Japanese, pass your cursor over each link and look at the status line of your browser. Often the actual URL will be named in English. Keep in mind "gallery" may be misspelled. (E.g. "garaly".) If you can't find such a link, click on each link you find. You need to be patient.

• The first page on a site will often be a "warning" page, in Japanese, informing you of the adult content of the site. There's usually a "yes" and "no" link, with the "yes" link taking you to the site. If you can recognize "hai" in hiragana, that's probably the link, otherwise, look at the URLs in the status line as described above. Some artists have taken to hiding the entry link in tiny type at the bottom of the page, so no one can complain they entered accidentally. Again, be patient.

• If both hentai and non-hentai images are on a site, the link to the adult stuff will often be labelled "H" or "18", followed by a kanji you'll learn to recognize. (It's the same one found on the covers of hentai manga in the little yellow oval.)

• Try not to be offended! Some of the images can be very weird! If a particular site isn't your thing, move on to the next one.

• Always check out the link named "gift" or "kinen", if there is one. This will present a gallery of images given to the artist by his peers. There's usually some good art on these pages, and they will help point you to more good sites.

• Last but not least, check out the links page on each site, usually called "links" or "link" in the URL.

Hope that helps, you filthy perverts. :-)

On to the real topic!