Next Wednesday (October 3) will mark the first day of the eleventh year of operations here at ErosBlog. So it looks like this will the last of the “10 Years of Sex Blogging” retrospectives. That’s OK — covering the first five years has a decent symmetry to it. Without further ado, here’s 2006:

• My micro-rant on why lap dances in strip clubs are “DO NOT WANT” territory for me, plus somebody else’s tips for getting a good one: How To Get A Killer Lapdance
• I found possibly the best happy-exhibitionist photo I’ve ever seen: Half-Naked And Happy To Be There
• Of all the things I’ve ever written on ErosBlog, this essay on joy and BDSM acceptance is perhaps the post I’m most proud of: Two Smiles
• Remember that shower gel commercial with the tagline “How dirty girls get clean?” Yeah, me neither; or I wouldn’t, if I hadn’t managed to associate it in my mind with this memorable photo: Girl Washing
• I can’t recall laughing harder or longer over a web thing (unless maybe it was the immortal Dogs in Elk waaay back in the last century) than I did over this cybersex transcript that didn’t quite go the way the dude expected it to: And Who Shall Be Master?
• I don’t often lose myself in consumerist fantasies, but I confess I did the first time I saw this product for sale. It’s still for sale, but sadly, I still don’t have any: Leather Sheets
• I’ve softened my stance on the virtues of color blindness over the years (having been exposed to possibly-better arguments) but I haven’t come close to abandoning it. Here’s one of the places it got me griped at, especially in the comments: Nude Women, Skin Color, Huh?
• This post and its comments was one of the places I’ve tried to expound on the foolishness and impossibility of imposing our personal interpretations of art (here, pulpy sex comics) onto other people. Of course it got me snarled at, as it generally does: Whipped With A Hat On
• What’s going on when women dress themselves to be looked at, and then appear to resent the looks they get? I had a theory: On Looking At Women
• I think every sex blogger has taken a go at mocking the contents of sex spam. Here’s one of mine: Sex Spam Subject Lines
• This I still believe: “If you can’t see a person without having a racial classification for them pop into your head, you’re part of the problem.” Not Ignorant, Adamant
• Even a cartoon ’70s metrosexual (before they called them that) understood that a fist in her hair can make the blowjob better: Hair Pulling Blowjob
• In which I stand up for the proposition that not all men are dicks: No Gentlemen, No Sex Pictures
• I had forgotten until just now this back-and-forth with Susie Bright about the reasons for the gender imbalance in the sex blogging world: Sex Bias In Blogging
• I still want to know what happened to this sex doll: Sex Doll Accident
• I still don’t think Violet is wrong about a word of this: Public Submission Ritual
• Another effort on my part to demonstrate that the sexy elements in art are (and ought to be) available to the viewer no matter how reprehensible the artist, his motives, or his historical context: Male Soldiers Fucking
• My irritation with a certain class of creepy comments, it overfloweth: Flashing From A Window
• My opinion on fake boobs, followed by an opinion that arguably matters quite a bit more: Big Fake Boobs
• I still laugh every time I see this: Bill Versus The Penguin
• The topic of what it does (did) to our society to have porn go from “hard to get” to “available on all screens” is fascinating to me, and has been for a long time: Internet Porn For The Greater Good
• Title speaks for itself: Dirty Owl-Fucker!
• “Who wants to find herself covered with Winnie-the-Pooh BandAids after sex?” There’s always somebody: But Gardens Do Differ

Similar Sex Blogging:

• 10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2005
• 10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2004
• 10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2003
• 10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2002

I have been informed that there is, in mathematics, something known as the Happy Ending problem.

Sadly, it appears to have nothing to do with the productive output of cheap massage parlors. “If it takes two massage comfort professionals thirty minutes to give six clients a happy ending, how many massage comfort professionals does it take to give sixteen clients a happy ending in 40 minutes?” No. That is not the problem.

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Am I the only one who thinks the world is a better place because everybody, everywhere, now has a camera at their fingertips for capturing moments of spontaneous joy? (Some of those moments are naked — extra awesome! — but that’s not essential to my point here.) Evidence:

Photo is Penny Barber, who tweeted it whilst “hitting the showers” after an Ultimate Surrender match.

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This Huffington Post interview with Peter Acworth, founder of Kink.com (which HuffPo describes as “the largest fetish porn production company in the world”), is more fascinating to me because of what Peter does not say about his business than because of what he does say. Kink.com has been innovative about extending its brand in startling ways while paring back its costs and its active site portfolio as the pay-by-subscription porn-site business model has crumbled in recent years, and the company has a unique asset in its landmark Armory facility in San Francisco. So what does Peter talk about in the interview when questions turn to the future of his business?

1. A new bar called the Armory Club that now anchors the beginning and end of his new-ish Armory tours;
2. The Armory tours themeselves;
3. A new permit allowing use of the drill court in the Armory for “sporting events, farmers markets, performance art, etc.; and
4. In the “still brainstorming” stage, “a thriving kink-centric online social networking site around our products and services.”

Notice what’s not on that list?

Yeah. There’s nothing about making or selling newer or different porn. No new sites, no new themes, no “reach new markets with our existing products”, no “branch out into newer new media”, nothing. What’s exciting about your current business direction, Mr. Porn Baron? Well, HuffPo, we’re doing all these fascinating things to monetize our awesome real estate better…

One more glimpse at the reality that porn remains, for now, an industry in search of a new business model.

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Dr. Faustus is our resident expert on erotic mad science, of course, but I am still capable of recognizing it when I see it. And I’m seeing it now as I page through the panels of The Clinic, by Erenisch (from Dofantasy). That is, it’s erotic mad science if by “erotic” you mean “she’ll do anything she’s told” and by “science” you mean “technologies for destroying female volition”. (If you think the world isn’t full of men who would turn into generous patrons of science if that’s what science actually meant, you haven’t looked under enough rocks lately.) Also, and this was the dead giveaway, all the best mad science has the fellow chortling as he works:

Believe it our not, our villain is working on Zombie Sex Slave Technology #2 in the panel above; he’s already perfected ZSST #1 in the form of an “on button” that works … well, let’s watch, shall we?

Once that button is on, her brain is not quite hers any more:

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A fascinating (to some) analysis of the four-digit PINs (that’s Personal Identification Numbers) as discovered in use in escaped password databases turns up one factoid of potential interest specifically to ErosBlog readers. It turns out that 6969 is the tenth-most-popular PIN in use.

The source article says “snigger”; I say “heh”.

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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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