Serious question: Say you are an artist whose medium is video. Specifically, erotic video. Porn, not to put too fine a point on it. But you’re also part of today’s remix and fan cultures: you work with existing tropes, characters, stories, universes, and memes. (In other words, you are “extending and embracing” intellectual property that is not, strictly speaking, your own.) Now you’ve got a fun little porn loop sitting on your desktop, the product of a few weeks’ work that you want to share with the world.

Where do you upload it?

Forget my rule: almost nobody can afford to host their own video without a business model. Not if it has the potential to go viral.

YouTube is not an option. It’s a #pornocalypse platform. Google/Alphabet does not welcome your porn. Your porn will not survive on their platform for any significant length of time.

Что делать? What is to be done?

There truly is only one sensible solution. You would, you must, upload your work to a tube site.

Yes, yes, I know. Responsible commercial-porn consumers who pay for porn are primed to think poorly of tubes, because tubes have had a such pernicious effect on the commercial porn industry. But where you stand depends on where you sit. And if you’re an indy nonprofit artist looking for free distribution of bandwidth-heavy porn video files, tubes are an amenity. What follows from that is, that as a curator and researcher of obscure porn goodies, I have to give credit where credit is due: sometimes there’s no substitute for a good tube when I’m looking for video that won’t be found, that simply can not be found, anywhere else.

All of which is by way of explaining how I found myself searching pornkai.com for robot sex videos yesterday. Pornkai.com is an extremely interesting and useful site for the porn video researcher. Using various APIs made available by several large tubes and a search engine that does not suck, it exposes more than twenty-two million heavily tagged and key-worded video clips to the queries of intrepid researchers like your loyal reporter. Twenty two is a lot of millions. Or, to put it another way: that’s a metric buttload of video clips.

Did I find me some robot sex? Yes I did. Specifically, I found a somewhat puzzling fan video featuring a robot getting a blowjob followed by robot frottage (robot penis between humanoid thighs):

A bit of traditional in-out-in-out robot sex follows that but when our robot decides to sprout a whole bunch of tentacle dicks, Our Heroine (not actually a human, but apparently a humanoid android named Yorha 2B) has had enough; she draws her sword and there’s a sudden spate of robot de-dickifications. Cheering! And scene.

What does it all mean? Fuck me if I can tell you. I did track it all down as fan art associated with a videogame franchise called Nier: Automata. The artist and video maker is XiestoXenox-Xavi, aka Xiësto. I’d call them good at what they do.