Alternative title: How To “Waste” A Fine Morning.
Dateline ErosBlog, 2003: I published a wallet photo of a vintage blowjob.
Most of a decade later, I see a similar photo on Tumblr, and I’m thinking “This woman looks familiar!”
So I do some image searching (on the web and on my hard drives) until I find the best available watermark-free version. And then I rummage my archives to find the other picture of the same woman that I posted back in 2003. Fast to say, but an hour’s gone already. Is it the same woman?
Yes! It sure looks like her when I make a side-by-side composite:
Hair is the same, and most importantly, she’s wearing the same striped hose. It’s her!
But now I’m in a frenzy of pointless data acquisition. I want to find and post the best available versions of these pictures, which turns out to be these (click for full size versions, the biggest and cleanest I found):
That’s another hour gone, spent in pop-up-hell ruski image forums and ancient foreign-language blogspot archives, satisfying myself that none of the versions in Google image search are better than the ones I’ve already found. I don’t find the holy grail I’m always looking for (glowing 1200-pixel-wide HD scans of these fragile old cracked wallet prints) but I do find another, wider, less-cracked, less-cropped version of the second one. Did you like the striped hose? That’s good, because now you can see more:
At various times over the years I’ve encountered life coaching advice that boils down to “figure out what you’re good at and really enjoy doing, then figure out how to turn it into a career.” Well, this post right here is what I’m good at. Rummaging through old porn, spotting something unique or special, making connections based on tricky searches and faint memories, finding kinky gems in badly-curated collections (including the biggest dusty porn closet of them of all, the internet), making do with unreliable metadata clues and suggestive image details, putting it all together with an artful crop or an illuminating caption or a half-witty line or a fantasy notion gestured at in an overwrought sentence or two. And it’s all “a waste of time” because at the end, all I’m generating is not-so-deep insights like “hey, these two vintage pics are from the same shoot” or “wow, here’s another picture where you can see her nifty lingerie better”. Maybe some people other than me are amused, but it’s not important to anybody … not even me (most days).
Still — it’s what I’m good at, and I really enjoy doing it. For awhile there (back in the mid-oughts, before the feral-debt bubble burst, when many ordinary people still could still afford to put porn subscriptions on their cheap-and-easy credit cards and porn “piracy” wasn’t yet a fundamental computer-literacy survival skill for everyone who doesn’t golf with Money Boo Boo) it paid the bills. These days? Not so much. With the ten-year ErosBlog anniversary just a couple of weeks away, I find myself wondering something I never expected to wonder. Not “Do I want to keep doing this?” Because — amazingly — I find that I still do. If desire were the only issue, I’d be confident that I could steer ErosBlog through yet another decade. And even if the commercial porn industry were to thrash its last ugly death rattle sometime in the next ten years, there’s enough stuff out there to keep me happily threshing-and-winnowing for a lifetime.
Nope, the only issue for me is, where am I gonna find the computronium? It doesn’t grow on trees, and web traffic doesn’t monetize as automatically as it used to back when we were all hiding from crack-addled refi mortgage brokers trying to sign us up for too-cheap-to-meter debt. The challenge of ErosBlog’s second decade, clearly, is going to be finding ways to keep the server up, and me “playing” at my keyboard.
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