Here at the Big Bad Blog, we like to do a little bit called you ask, we answer, where we take questions people have asked their search engines that led them to the Big Bad Blog, and try to provide the answer.

I even have a reminder telling me to post one of these every few weeks. I tend to ignore my reminder.

But not today. It’s the end of 2011, and we’re gonna answer the questions suggested by the most popular searches of the year!

Magnets, how do they work?

Despite the popularity of the Fucking magnets, how do they work? meme, and the existence of a website titled How Magnets Work, people asking this question still manage to find my blog.

Presumably because this photo is somehow near the top of the Google’s image search for the question.

To answer the question, we refer back to Battle of the Magnets, and will allow Dr. Feynman to refuse to answer the question.

We need you

Aw, thanks. We need you too.

(Actually we don’t need you. We’d keep on writing all this stuff anyways, and just feel a little sad when it came time to write about which Big Bad Blog articles were most popular, and discovered the answer was “none of them.”)

Do you happen to have a picture of a cat with a mustache?

In fact, we do! From the morning coffee and the mustache cat:

I’m thinking of getting a tattoo, do you have any very bad ideas?

The Big Bad Blog is the place to go if you’re looking for an awful tattoo concept.

Our vote for the worst tattoo comes from the article Tattoos: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which is one of the most popular Big Bad Blog articles of all time. We suggest that, if you’re looking for a bad tattoo idea, you can’t get much worse than this:

There are plenty more ideas at the latest in tattoo insanity. And if you’re super desperate, you can check out all the Big Bad Blog articles that have been tagged as containing bad tattoos.

Do you have any photos of a naked Felicia Day to share?

The most common reason for a person to arrive at the Big Bad Blog (due to search engine) is the eternal, unsuccessful search for Miss Felicia Day‘s uncovered flesh.

We are sorry to disappoint you, dear reader, but said flesh cannot be found at the Big Bad Blog. This will continue to be the case until Miss Day personally delivers such photos in an envelope, requesting they be published in this space, at which time we will be forced to comply with her wishes.

In the meantime, you will have to settle for BoneCraft.

It’s that time of year, again — time to take a look back at 2011, and see what you liked most about the Big Bad Blog.

How can we tell? We use a complex scoring system which tracks links back to the Big Bad Blog, comments made, and pageviews. Maybe not that complicated. However we came up with the list — and truth be told, even we are not entirely sure — this is it:

5: Google Plus: A first look

We received an early invitation to the new Social Network on the block, and dutifully gave our first impressions of it — and they were positive impressions, indeed.

While an update of those impressions are overdue — first impressions, while important, are not necessarily final opinions — this blogger still feels that Google Plus has the potential to be the best of the available networks, but it still has some way to go before it arrives there.

4: Character creation and alignment

The roleplaying area of the blog has taken a big backseat this year. While the generally haphazard update schedule has reduced the amount of content published, of all types, the roleplaying section has had to address a second deficiency: I stopped running my D&D game.

Most of the content I produced was the result of running a game myself — a weekly article was easy when I was introducing myself to the fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Running a game once a month was enough to provide ongoing monthly articles — ideas or actions would arise in planning or playing that were comment-worthy.

But a baby makes for little playing time, nevermind planning time, and the game only managed one session after Maggie’s birth in 2010 to prove itself to be too much work. It went on hiatus, and my impression now is that it is a permanent one.

Since then, I have been thinking about my next game, which will be of the more old skool D&D bent. Although actual game development has been minimal this year — maybe it will get off its feet in 2012 — I read something that triggered ideas about alignment, in terms of the next game, and voila. A popular D&D blog post.

If scheduling permits progress towards running this new game next year — by no means a necessity — we should see plenty of roleplaying goodness on the Big Bad Blog next year.

Otherwise? The 2012 edition might not have a roleplaying entry.

3: Bringing down the meme: Demotivationals

It seems that every year, I get excited about a meme. And then soon in the new year, I get tired of the meme and write about it.

In 2009/10 it was the FAIL meme. In 2010/11, it was the demotivational.

Next year? No idea. I sadly feel as though I’m not amused by any current memes — it could be the end of a Big Bad Blog tradition.

This particular blog entry makes me quite proud: the comments tend to be people stopping in to tell me that I’m unfunny or stupid. This, as you may be aware, is an indicator of blog excellence.

2: Because you’re all horny for Felicia Day

It has long been noted that Felicia Day nude, Felicia Day naked, and their ilk are popular search terms, when it comes to finding the Big Bad Blog, sending over 100 people our way on an average day.

The traffic from these search terms seemed to be spiking over the summer, when I saw this photo on Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr thingy. (I always call then “Tumblr thingies”. Calling it “so-and-so’s Tumblr” seems wrong. Calling it a “Tumblr blog”, also wrong. What to do?)

The forces of Google meant that I had to write something including that photo.

And the popularity of the search term guaranteed its place here.

1: Twitter to Facebook not working

Back in February, I noticed that my tweets had stopped automatically updating my Facebook page.

This was a concern — I disliked, and continue to dislike, interacting with Facebook directly. But I like all the people on Facebook (also known as “all the people”) to be able to follow me, if they so wish.

So … importation.

It had, for whatever reason, stopped working. So I did what one does in these situations, and starting to try to figure out how to fix it.

Once fixed, I figured that I would post the solution, as it was neither easy to find nor immediately evident. Mine was apparently well-indexed on Google, as it prompted plenty of re-tweets, Facebook likes and (for this blog) a healthy number of comments.

A bit boring, maybe, compared to previous year’s number ones, but it’s nice to be helpful sometimes.

Felicia Day nude is the top search term for the past week. Again.

Felicia Day naked is number three. Felicia Day porn is number five. Felicia Day topless is number eight.

This is not abnormal. Which isn’t to say that you’re not abnormal for making such a search, just that you’re not alone and all of you seem to find your way here. There’s a reason why Apparently the internet needs more naked Felicia Day is listed to the right as one of the more popular articles on this website.

If there’s one lesson that I have learned in the two-and-a-half years I have been running the blog, it’s that putting the words “nude” and “Felicia Day” in the same blog entry will result in thousands of pageviews, even if they appear in different paragraphs, and the former is not meant as an adjective to describe the latter.

It is, perhaps, the only piece of SEO advice you will ever find on this website. These terms have been sitting at or near the top of my search results every single day since mid-2009. If nothing else, it is a sure sign that nude Felicia Day photos are not available on the Internet. Because if they existed, you wouldn’t be coming here.

For whatever reason — Comic Con? Eureka — the hunt for a naked Felicia Day is more intense this week than ever before. Denizens of the internet are flocking here in huge numbers hoping to see Felicia Day without a shirt.

Well, horny Sci Fi nerds, you’re in luck:

Just kidding, of course. Ms. Day is fully clothed — or so Mr. Wheaton assures us. Believe what you will. Just be prepared for Wil Wheaton to call you a creeper.

Creeper.

Photo fearlessly, boldly and blatantly grabbed from Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr.