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The Sex Blog Of Record
November 17th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
ErosBlog has been paying attention to Anil Dash for a very long time. Indeed, the second ErosBlog post ever quoted his 2002 musings on the masturbatory uses of hand-held shower nozzles. So I’ve been mulling his Stop Publishing Web Pages article for about a month, now. Specifically, he talks about how mobile apps tend to present stuff to the user in a highly-functional stream that’s just more useful and easier to process than standard web pages are. I don’t consider myself much of a media company, but I recognize ErosBlog in this unflattering description:
Most media companies on the web spend all of their effort putting content into content management systems which publish pages. These pages work essentially the same way that pages have worked since the beginning of the web, with a single article or post living at a particular address, and then tons of navigation and cruft (and, usually, advertisements) surrounding that article.
Users have decided they want streams, but most media companies are insisting on publishing more and more pages. And the systems which publish the web are designed to keep making pages, not to make customized streams.
And I recognize myself (and my behavior) when I read this:
Pay attention to the fact that all the links you click on Twitter, on Facebook, on Pinterest, all take you to out of the simple flow of those apps and into a jarring, cluttered experience where the most appealing option is the back button. Stop being one of those dead-end experiences and start being more like what users have repeatedly demonstrated they prefer.
The Google Analytics for ErosBlog reinforce this unwelcome sense of familiarity. Not only do I click back in horror when I land on an old cluttered web page that doesn’t play well with my smartphone, but so do you. The ErosBlog bounce rate (a measure of people who arrive at the site and very swiftly leave again) is already an unflattering 61 percent, but for mobile users, it’s an even worse 68 percent.
What’s less obvious is how to streamify the ErosBlog experience. Even Anil (much smarter about content management systems than I could ever hope to be, having been the first employee of the folks who invented the once-famous Moveable Type blog software) admits:
Obviously, I’ve written this in an old-style content publishing system, and this piece lives on my website as an old-fashioned HTML page. But if I had my preference, I’d write up an article like this, and it’d seamlessly glide into a clean, simple stream of my writing, organized by topic and sorted with the newest stuff on top. Blogs have always worked this way, but they were shoehorning this stream-like behavior into the best representation possible under the old page model.
I don’t have a tool I can use to run my website which will output a stream that works the right way…
Of course it’s been three months since he wrote that. And (to me, at least, who may not be understanding what he’s saying as well as I should) it looks as if there’s no theoretical reason why smart HTML5 templates in a properly-constructed WordPress theme couldn’t do the job. Has anybody written them yet? Not that I’ve found, but I keep hoping.
I’ve been tinkering for more than a year on various efforts to make ErosBlog more mobile-friendly, but my coding skills deficit has proven too large, and so I’ve not really gotten a lot of traction. I’ve done a lot of not-so-idle Googling for solutions coded by others, but haven’t seen anything that really does the job the way I want it done. And that’s when my vision was simply to make something that “looks like ErosBlog” while making more efficient use of small screens. Then Anil came along and convinced me I was thinking too narrowly. Now the goalposts are moving, because the app ecosystem is teaching people to want/demand new functionality in the ways their media is displayed to them.
Do I have any idea how to get ahead of this problem? Nothing concrete, I fear. As I tinker with this, my skills get better (so slowly!); that helps my feeble efforts, and on top of that I take heart from the notion that smarter people than me are working up awesome templates and themes that I’ll eventually find and put to use. All suggestions gratefully considered!
November 16th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
I’m slow but I learn. And what I learn, I try to remember to share.
One of the consistent and persistent minor frauds in the porn industry is the subscription porn pay site that isn’t actually producing new updates any more. But, you know, nobody is going to subscribe to a site where the last bit of new content has a 2011 date on it, are they? People who pay good money for porn (an ever-dwindling pool) want to see new stuff at least once a week, minimum. So there’s a certain stage in the life cycle of a porn site where the updates aren’t happening any more. But rather than admitting up front that a site is “mostly dead” (and, say, charging a one-time flat rate for access to the moribund site’s archives, as sometimes happens) the site operators decide to use automatic scripts to pull old updates (from, say, 2002 or whenever) and put current dates on them. So you land on the front page of the site today and it says the last update was October 12 (last week), but you (if you are a porn old-timer) might realize the picture was actually shot ten or fifteen years ago. (Yes, some sites out there really do have archives going back into the 1990s that they are presenting in dribs-and-drabs as “new” weekly updates.)
There’s a sense in which this does not matter. (Call this “lies pornographers tell themselves to sleep better at night.”) If a site’s “new to you” and the archives are so very deep that you could subscribe for a year and would never view all the content, the faux weekly updates are just another content-discovery and presentation tool for you to use during your membership, as you wallow in years of yummy porn that you never saw before. But if the actual amount of content on the site is limited, you’ll swiftly be disappointed when you realize that (1) you’ve viewed all the photoshoots and videos of interest to you and (2) the fresh-looking dates on the tour (that made you think there’d be new stuff coming every week) were bogus. And then when the automatic rebill hits your credit card, you very rapidly start to feel cheated, because what are you getting for that money?
Since ErosBlog has historically (again, not so much these days) been supported in part by affiliate links to paid porn sites, it’s always been something I paid attention to. But for many years there was no good easy way to tell when this was happening. Until recently. The rise of decent-quality image searching and the ubiquity of porn on Tumblr have combined to make porn-dating quite easy.
It works like this. You’re looking at a porn site tour, trying to decide if it’s worth paying for (or, if you’re a porn blogger, worth linking to). There are, at a minimum, several pictures (and usually a video clip) presented as a recent update with last week’s date on them. You pick whichever picture you like best, on the assumption that what’s most pleasing to your eye is probably most likely to have been reblogged all over Tumblr. You image-search that picture. The dates visible in the snippets in the Google image search results will have your answer. If they are all as recent as the alleged recent update, the update date is likely to be honest. If you find this picture all over the internet with dates going back years, you’re being lied to.
Easy-peasy!
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November 15th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Tynan Fox went to the Ground Zero nightclub in Minneapolis. And there, he got, in his words, “hit by a girl”, which is not typically his custom. Here’s how it went down:
Up walks to stage this buff guy with huge muscles, tanned skin, long hair, washboard abs, and a huge upside down triangle tattoo across his shoulders. He tips the Domme as his friends make fun of him (and awful tragedy which shouldn’t be tolerated) and proceeds to get cuffed to the restraints hanging from the ceiling! Mistress Mara flogs him a few times and then scratches him some and does something else with an ice cube….
….and in my head, I fell into the slippery slope of discompassion. What I SHOULD have thought to myself was “Maybe it’s his first time!” “Maybe he needs her to go light.” “Maybe he injured himself already today!” There are any number of infinite possibilities that could explain why this Domme wasn’t lashing out on those buldging muscles with every last ounce of her strength. All of them are probably legitimate too. But as I stood there watching, the rum in my drink took over my thoughts. My mind darted around all the other times I’ve been flogged. The only logical conclusion my tipsy mind could come to was simply that the guy was a PUSSY. I can do better than that.
Move over, Fabio.
I marched up to that stage and asked Mistress Mara what her rates were. I tipped her appropriately (side note: gay kinksters don’t tip in our community. I THINK I tipped her appropriately, but I’ve never had to do that before. Hope she doesn’t hate me now) and asked her, “Can you flog a gay-boy, Mistress?”
“Hell yes! How hard can you take it?”
I gritted my teeth, half expecting to regret saying it but also determined to show Fabio what a gay boy can take. “I’ve been flogged until I’ve bled before.”
Mistress Mara just SMILED and secured my wrists to the shackles in the ceiling.
Being that it was the end of the night, it was a pretty fast flogging. But that doesn’t mean she went light on me. It was tough to remember to yell “Thank you MISTRESS” as opposed to my usual “Thank you SIR” or “Thank you MASTER”. It hurt, but like I said, I was determined to demonstrate what this gay boy is made of.
At a certain point I felt Mistress Mara slap a couple strips of duct tape against my back. “Just a little blood! No worries!” she said.
I didn’t break. I didn’t care. That wasn’t the point. Before I even knew it it was over. I said thank you to Mistress, and walked out of the bar, euphoric, and proud.
November 14th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Here’s Emily Nagoski on what it’s like when the famous and fabulous Annie Sprinkle comes to campus to give sex tarot readings:
I expected her to be fabulous. She was. But beyond the fabulous was the warmth, the welcoming, the openness, the inclusiveness, the eagerness to connect, to give something of value to each of the students who swarmed around her perimeter, watching, attendant, like damp, frozen children waiting for cocoa after an afternoon in the snow.
So it was The Annie Show all the way, but she noticed that and she created space for us other sex educators to read Tarot with her, see, because she’s a cup of cocoa after playing in the snow; she is the mittens drying on the radiator; she’s whipped cream on the tip of your nose. And so I sat next to Annie as she engaged with each student, limitless in her welcome.
She would explain a card and then say to the student, “What do YOU think?” And then she would look at me and say, “What do YOU think?” And she would smile and say, “Wow, you’re good!” And I would get all warm inside. Because cocoa.
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November 13th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
“Everybody grab a beer, the hunk-o-gram has arrived! It’s like a singing telegram, only it’s the bride-to-be who’ll be singing by the time these guys are done with her!”
Via Kinky Delight. Actually the fellows are from the TV show Spartacus.
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November 12th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Queens and commoners alike need a good brushing out before being delivered to the king’s chamber, apparently. At least, they do if the king commands that they do:
Apparently it’s also prudent to be kind to your serving ladies, too, lest they re-use the ass-brush a little too freely!
Panels are from the Dofantasy comic The Steel Trap Maiden, drawn by Ferres.
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November 10th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
This is your object lesson on why unsupervised military interrogations should not be conducted in San Francisco. One minute everything’s on track, you’ve got your guy standing there scared with somebody’s jockstrap in his mouth, surely he’s about to spill the beans:
And then without any warning at all your oh-so-serious tough-guy interrogator gets “caught up in the moment” and things get seriously twisted with the cattle prod and the forced butt licking:
Thanks to Bound Gods for doing it all wrong, but better — San Francisco style!
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