Violet Blue has discovered, the hard way, what the dead tree newspaper industry (or, at least, a substantial fraction of it) has seized upon as its grand strategy for surviving in the second decade of this fast-moving 21st century. Turns out the answer is…

… wait for it …

Search engine spamming! Yup, Violet has documented how a bunch of newspapers are duplicating their online content like crazy across a nest of subdomains, after stripping out most of the links and stuffing with ill-considered keywords. Apparently the brilliant idea is to lure search engine visitors into these virtual crab pots, hold them there until they start to drown, and then hope they click on the advertising links as they struggle to escape.

There’s only one little problem: it’s not an original idea. People have been doing it for so long that it’s been prohibited by Google’s webmaster guidelines for years and years. Anybody still dumb enough to try it will eventually find that their sites don’t show up on Google’s search results at all … or not, at least, anywhere in the first ten or twenty pages of search results.

Game over, guys. Enjoy whatever it is you decide to do next.

Me being who I am, my eye is not usually drawn to the male warrior types in your average fantasy art. But I’m pretty sure I’ve got a reader or two who’d like to ogle (at a minimum!) this fellow:

It surely would be a waste if he were to be devoured at this time.

From here.

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Something about the hippy-style body paint in a drawing with Nazis made me think this was from some sort of alternate-history where the Nazis won, only to be suborned from within, a generation later, by free love and LSD. But no, it’s just hippy-era adventure-magazine art, looking irreverently backwards:

Illustration, via http://drakecaperton.tumblr.com/“>Drake’s Way, is from the December 1967 issue of Men, from an article by the most excellent name of “Free the Girls of Love Captive Stalag”. Oh, yes, do let’s!

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Erosblog has a longstanding policy of admiration for Jessica Alba and her many fine qualities. Of course, we particularly admired her performance in Sin City. Here’s another shot of her from that movie, this time in a moment of extreme peril, when she’s tied up in the sadistic clutches of the goony guy with the whip and the epic-bad fluorescent complexion:

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I noticed the following slightly-butchered factoid at the bottom of a “fun semen facts” infographic posted by Mistress Matisse:

The Etoro people of Papua New Guinea it is believed that to become sexually mature men, young boys must swallow the semen of their elders.

I’m calling bullshit. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the cultural anthropology has been done right and reported right — not too likely, but hey. Go with it. Assume the cultural pattern exists as reported.

It’s that word “believed” I’m choking on. My proposition to you: the “elders” in question “believe” this line of happy horse shit in exactly the same way that I “believe” the following two propositions:

1) Anal sex will make your butt bigger; and
2) Swallowing semen will make your unborn baby healthier.

For those of you interested in the business of porn, Ms. Naughty has posted an interesting ten-year retrospective. I haven’t been around quite that long, but I found myself nodding along. Especially when I got to these paragraphs about the relatively recent past:

In 2006 I remember going on to one of the adult webmaster boards and asking my peers: “What do you think of this Youtube thing? Should I embed this code on my page or will it break my site?” At the time I didn’t see that Youtube would become the future of porn. I don’t think many of us did. Yet it felt like only days before flash video was everywhere and porn tube sites sprung up like mushrooms, many offering full-length movies for free. Of course, it hasn’t ended well.

2007 and 2008 saw the Russians and the cheaters move into traditional webmastering in a big way, much to the frustration of the rest of us. A huge influx of new webmasters began catering to a dwindling number of surfers. Free porn was everywhere. The gold rush was over.

In the last two years I’ve seen an awful lot of old-timers sell up and leave the business, frustrated at constantly having to fight cheaters, liars, content thieves and scammers, seeing major companies beginning to rely on dodgy billing practices to keep themselves in profit. In the meantime the audience has come to expect that porn should always be free.

I think YouTube marked my first big “old fart” moment. You know, the one where you suddenly stop being the guy who falls in love with every new innovation, and instead you hear yourself saying for the first time “This newfangled thing will never catch on, it’s a buncha crap!”

And then you shake your cane at the clouds.

Four years later, I still hate YouTube (and embedded streaming Flash videos in general). They’re disgustingly linear, they create link rot when hosted by unreliable third parties (as they usually are), and until fairly recently, they didn’t generally look very good. But mostly I hate them because they turned me into this:

This is why your mama didn’t want you hanging around, down at the pool hall:

From Usenet.