I used to have a bit of a side hustle on Fiverr where I would research your mysterious porn and tell you its provenance. Fiverr turned out to be too large a pain in the ass to deal with in the long run, and five bucks turned out to be too little to charge; but I still do porn research commissions for discerning patrons when I can get them. Porn attribution is something I am good at and really enjoy doing, but sadly there’s very little market for it.
Last night, I was at my keyboard doing a research commission for Dr. Faustus when by happenstance (which is to say, I was procrastinating instead of working) I saw a hilarious animation posted to Twitter by an old web-friend:
And then:
Well, I was curious, too, and what’s more, this felt like an opportunity to show off. So, I did. To the research-mobile, Bacchus!
For a paying client, I would have also tried to find out some more information and include a capsule summary of the Iyashite Agerun Saiyuuki anime, about which I in fact know utterly nothing. But this was a freebie; I figured the provenance and a watchable link was enough.
But then came the flatteringly-phrased follow-up question:
Flattery will get you (or, well, Adele anyways) almost anywhere with me, but it won’t force the requested information into 140 characters. Hence, this blog post.
So, how did I do it? Here’s the step-by-step I used. A different porn sample might require different tools and methods, but this is what worked this time.
Step One: Undestroy the .gif that Twitter destroyed.
A .gif on Twitter isn’t actually a .gif; Twitter encodes all uploaded .gifs into .mp4 movie files. Which is fine for the Twitter user experience but is a pain in the ass for searching. Reverse image search tools we have. Reverse movie search tools? Not so much. There are fancy ways to extract searchable frames from an .mp4 movie file, but I took a good-enough brute force approach and snapped a screenshot of the animation while it was playing:
Step Two: Choose a reverse image search tool.
There are a variety of reverse image search choices, and in a paid research task I might use all the ones I know about. But this time, I went right to the one that usually serves me best for porn searches. That happens to be the image search tool at the Russian search site Yandex. This tool works like Google used to work back before Google started to pretend it had never seen the vast majority of porn sites. Yandex is great, I love it for this.
Step Three: Do your reverse image search.
Once you’ve got some search results, start scrolling through them, looking for something in the snippets that looks like it might be an attribution clue. When I’m searching anime, I’m usually happy to see random Japanese words that look like a title:
Step Four: Use the clues you find to refine your search.
So I clicked that link highlighted above. And don’t you know it? That tumbler was dead; nothing there. But I took a second look at the broken Tumblr URL: http://howl-et.tumblr.com/post/28324944865/awkwardjapaneseporngifs-the-hentai-task. That’s a reblogged post from a tumblr called awkwardjapaneseporngifs; the fastest way I know to find the original post (if it still exists) is to Google “awkwardjapaneseporngifs-the-hentai-task”. One click on the first of those results, second click on the source link and tada! Success. We have our attribution:
Step Five: Confirm the attribution.
So now we know that somebody on the internet said this was “From Iyashite Agerun Saiyuuki, Ep. 1.” The final step is to Google that and see if the original item comes up. In this case, I wanted to find the complete episode, so I could watch it and see if the rest of it was as lunatic-wonderful as the .gif scene. (Answer: mostly not, but there are a few moments…) And so that led me to this link, where you can view the whole episode. Sure enough, our scene appears about 22 minutes in. Attribution confirmed!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do that. Hope it helps!
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