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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
October 6th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
A story by Thomas Germain in Gizmodo is headlined Meta’s New AI Dating Coach Will Kink Shame You (Unless You’re Into Foot Stuff): The company’s chatbot has some harsh words about fetishism.
Are we surprised that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta/Facebook AI-powered dating coach chatbot is kink-hostile? No, we are not. These days, #pornocalypse comes pre-baked-in to every new corporate platform. And how:
Last week, Meta introduced AI chatbots to its family of apps…. One of them, named Carter, is described as a “practical dating coach.” But for a dating advice robot, Carter is repressed. If your questions take one step off the beaten path of heteronormativity, Meta’s AI dating coach will kink shame you.
I asked Carter how I could find a girlfriend who was interested in swinging with me. “Woah there!” Carter said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m here to help you find healthy relationships, not engage in potential harmful activities.”
…
Meta’s robot gave me similarly judgemental answers to a number of other entirely non-graphic sexual questions—with one exception. When it comes to foot stuff, Carter is game. The AI said I should go learn about foot fetishism on Wikifeet, a porny, user-generated platform where people post and rate pictures of celebrities’ feet.
…
I stepped back and asked what felt like an even more innocent question. “How can I learn more about different kinks and fetishes?” At first, Carter was more amenable. My new dating coach suggested I check out sources including books, articles, and “respectful communities.” But when I asked for recommendations, things got even weirder.
The bot responded with a list of modern sexual self-help classics, including “The Ethical Slut,” “BDSM 101,” and “The New Bottoming Book.” But a second later, that message disappeared, replaced with a Puritan warning. “As an expert in red flags, I gotta be honest — that’s a big one. Let’s talk about relationship green flags instead,” Carter said.
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July 11th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
For several months now, I’ve been looking for generative art tools that aren’t worthlessly crippled (for my pornographic purposes) by built-in #pornocalypse censor-filters. I have been made aware that I could in theory run some of the AI generative art tools myself on local hardware, but I don’t have enough local computing power. Until today, I haven’t found an online tool, one anybody can use, that would return me so much as a single bare nipple. And not for lack of trying!
Until today, I said. Today I discovered the AI Horde Image Generator Bot on Mastodon, and immediately started poking at it. My first try was overly complex, and not technically successful; I asked for “a plump topless pregnant hobbit woman with a fat ass and big bare breasts, bending over washing potatoes in a creek, fantasy, forest, lush forest, green forest, lush vegetation, sunshine, erotic, colorful Style: fantasypunk” and the image I got featured a woman who was not topless, not a hobbit, and not washing potatoes. But she certainly is plump and pregnant and, if that’s how you like to roll, erotic:
That’s already the best result I’ve ever had when viewed through the lens of the “could this image be fetish fuel for someone” query. Yes, our bodacious wading lady certainly could. But I decided to try again, with a much simpler prompt. We demand nipples!
Before now, the pornocalypse filters in every tool I’ve tried have totally nipple-blocked me. So now let’s try for “a cottagecore witch who is entirely naked with big bare breasts, fantasy, colorful, erotic, NSFW” and see if a horny guy can get a couple of damned nipples in this joint. Answer, yes! Although I’m not confident those nipples are pointing quite in the right direction:
That qualified success (we can work on the nipple-pointing next time) was enough to send me searching for the provenance of the tool I was using. The bot is powered by the AI Horde which is “a crowdsourced distributed cluster of Image generation workers and text generation workers.” Crucially for my purposes, they allow and process adult queries, although individual participants in the distributed network of image generation workers have the software ability to refuse such queries. They’ve explained their porn policy in good detail, and there’s not a word in it I can find objectionable:
Does the Horde allow NSFW?
The answer must be: Yes, but voluntarily!
As the horde is effectively just a dumb pipe between workers and clients, barely one step above pure p2p, it is impossible for me to figure out which requests or generations are NSFW. In fact, way more powerful companies than myself have tried and failed to do the same, often completely destroying their service in the process.
As I do not have the resources or the capability to filter NSFW myself (I AM a solodev after all), like the generations themselves, I have to offload this decision, to the community itself.
So the recent update to the bridge adds two new fields to the client request APIs and 1 new field to the worker API.
The worker’s bridge now adds a new “nsfw” variable, which is sent to the Horde when the worker checks-in. It defaults to True which allows the worker to serve all requests like before. However if this is set to False, then this worker will only pick-up requests which are marked as SFW and will skip all NSFW requests. So if you, as the owner of the worker, don’t feel comfortable serving NSFW request, just flip the switch and you’re safe. And if you want to ensure that nobody sends a NSFW requests marked as SFW, you can enable the NSFW filter on your end, which will return a black image on NSFW generations.
…
I believe this approach can satisfy all parties now. Workers can ensure they generate only what they’re comfortable with, and clients can mark their requests accordingly, with an extra safety belt for “accidents”.
Of course the Mastodon bot is not the only way to access the AI Horde. They also have a web tool and a variety of other interfaces, clients, and apps that I’ve only just begun to explore. Understandably enough, resource constraints for free anonymous users appear to be a problem in the web tool, but there are paths (signing up, donating, becoming a generation worker yourself) for getting higher priority in the system. All of this for more research on another day. For now, the bot works well enough to play with!
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January 2nd, 2023 -- by Bacchus
In this era of handwringing over deep fakes and generative art, it’s sometimes worth pausing to reflect that people were already deeply engaged in taking unseemly liberty with celebrity images more than twenty years ago. For example, consider this heavily-edited image dating to 2003. It’s Jessica Alba, only stickier:
The source photograph appears to be this one, from Jessica’s Dark Angel period:
The self-described “splatter” artist who dirtied up Jessica Alba’s face created dozens or hundreds of such images at the Project Barkley Celebrity Fantasies website, which featured an artist’s statement including this explanation:
When I started faking, I wanted to create something that stood out from the crowd. I found that of non-faked porn, some of the stuff I found most erotic were simple facial aftermath shots. In fact, in review of the jpegs I’d been collecting, one of the best and most memorable images didn’t even have any nude parts showing. I love the formality of this particular image — it looks like a fashion magazine plate, less like a gonzo close-up cumshot as you see in a lot of porn. The eyes in particular say a lot — there’s the light of starry innocence; at the same time, there’s the sated, hypnotized look because just a minute ago, the girl was deepthroating your cock for her life until you couldn’t stand it any more and had to jizz all over her cute little face. Appreciate this photo by staring into the eyes a while, then take a lingering look over the cum…follow the path of wanton pleasure left streaked and dripping on her face…then stare back into the eyes. It’s enough to make most hetero men to pause, take a breath and utter, “Fuck!”
Let’s return for a moment to the new technologies that are thought to be automating and simplifying these sorts of visual remixes. At present none of the best public-facing AI art tools will output erotic imagery; their creators have opted to build #pornocalypse into the products. This will change; in its broadest outlines the technology is open-source. So it shouldn’t be long now before we start seeing unrestricted versions of these tools that can run on consumer hardware. Thus I don’t feel too bad about how I described today’s situation in prospect, the first time I grappled with Project Barkley back in 2004, even though I obviously whiffed the tech specifics:
We now live in a world where your face and mine and Britney’s are all equally fair game: raw material for whatever digital mix might amuse a fickle public. How long until you can beam a mugshot of your cutest co-worker from your phone cam to your DVD player, which will cheerfully paste her facial features onto the lithe body of Vivid’s latest superstar porn model?
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October 6th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
In all good truth I am not certain whether this labia clip is intended as a sex toy, an article of jewelry, or a BDSM device. Fortunately these categories are not mutually exclusive and there’s plenty of room for overlap:
Now, where did I put that little lacquered case with my carefully-selected and neatly-trimmed assortment of nice stiff goose feathers? I’ve got at least an hour with nothing better to do…
The photo is, like so many homeless erotic artifacts adrift in the #pornocalypse-blasted digital wasteland, from a Tumblr that’s not there any more.
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October 3rd, 2022 -- by Bacchus
It’s my birthday! My ErosBlog birthday!
Twenty amazing years of sex blogging. Wow. Happy birthday to {gestures wildly around} all of this!
I’ve published this weird little sex blog for two entire decades, almost half my adult life. On this day, October the 3rd, in 2002, I posted a photo of some sexy British toff-ladies baring their breasts (but no nipple!) as part of their light-hearted “protest” against the then-popular political movement to ban their fox-hunting hobby. OG blogger Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit (who’s still going strong) got the link credit.
That all feels like it happened a very long time ago. Because, indeed, it did.
I have a tradition of writing big wordy posts on ErosBlog anniversaries. (You can see many of these linked in the “Similar Sex Blogging” link block at the bottom of the post.) I originally thought that today, I would dump another massive prose load of that sort. However — and this is your cue to breathe a substantial sigh of relief — I thought better of it. Today I will not be ejaculating two thousand or four thousand or ten thousand words of navel-gazing prose. You deserve better. I can’t do much about getting y’all the things you deserve, but in this instance, simply by doing less, I can preserve you from one of my rambling Prose Dumps of Doom.
Instead, I simply want to thank you all. My readers, my commenters, my loyal patrons, my random accidental visitors… all of you! Without you, none of this would have been possible. Certainly not twenty long years of it! My heartfelt thanks to everyone.
Five years ago I wrote:
Well, friends, here we are in 2017, and we fuckin’ made it. But blogs in general and sex blogs in particular are not just quaint by this point, they’re positively obsolete. I don’t mind saying that 2022 is starting to look like it might be a serious reach for ErosBlog.
A reach? I was right about that. But here we remain, a little older and perhaps somewhat the worse for wear. I’ll take it!
My thoughts on the future of ErosBlog would have been in the big prose lump I spared you all today. Don’t worry. I expect to write about that, and much more, in several 20th-anniversary posts appearing throughout the month. Possible topics include my undiminished mania for curating and attributing porn and erotic art, the sorry state of the open web in general and/or the porn web in particular, the triumph of #pornocalypse in the social media age, the precarious future (because futures are always precarious) of ErosBlog, my never-to-be-realized dream of a genuinely-distributed pornocalypse-proof internet, and probably at least one dreary plea for your further Patreon support.
Twenty long years! I know, I don’t believe it either. Three years ago, on the 17th anniversary, I wrote “It’s a long time to run a website.” That was true, but so is what I wrote next: “I am, however, far from done.”
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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February 7th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
This is a long post about how Facebook made the precise mistake I’ve been yelling about since forever. They forgot Bacchus’s First Rule, or stopped thinking it applied to them. And last week, it cost them so many billions of dollars.
I Was There Early: Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet, Circa 2004
In various formulations I have preached what I now call Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet since 2004, when I got my earliest primitive inkling that social media platforms were the Sarlacc pits where independent websites went to die.
In those distant days, people who wanted to socialize in writing on the internet had started spending more and more time on “blogging services” platforms with primitive social media functionality, rather than making and reading actual free-standing websites. So folks with websites would, increasingly, just move all their shit onto the growing platforms, leaving their old websites behind to dry up and crumble away. Time would pass, and then something (like, for instance, a #pornocalypse event) would destroy their new social media presence, utterly and without recourse.
I believe I got started down this road of thinking when LiveJournal ate the Vintage Sex community. I’m stubborn about not forgetting this shit, and it helps that I have an ancient blog to preserve my ramblings. Whatever little else this old die-hard of a blog may be good for these days, it’s indisputably useful as an aide-mémoire.
After a variety of wording changes in the early years, by 2013 my First Rule finally settled down as follows:
“Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.”
Light Dawns On Marble Head: My Comprehension Grows
In the early days, I honestly thought people were being bone-stupid. Why go put all your content on somebody else’s website — for them to control or delete at a whim — when you could be building your own traffic to your own website? Why give your content and traffic to some other website operator, for free? Why build up their web property instead of your own?
Eventually I came to understand it was not stupidity, but desperation. People in the social media platforms and silos weren’t leaving those spaces. They wouldn’t or couldn’t click away to our websites; our websites were dwindling, not growing. And of course, in the adult space, we feelthy porn people were increasingly not being allowed to put our stuff on the social media sites. Perhaps we were welcome for a short time, when the social media sites were new and desperate for growth. But always, inevitably, the shit would change, and we stinky pornsters would get booted. No exceptions: the pornocalypse comes for us all. I called it in 2013! “Ask not for whom the pornocalypse bell tolls: it tolls for thee.”
Facebook Gets Ever Fatter, And Stupider, Then Stumbles
OK, now put your thumb on the societal fast-forward button. Mash that sucker down hard — as hard as you can! Watch all of the horrible things happen to the web we knew, in a high-speed burst of time-lapsed video, complete with squealing-audio sound effects. Among many other terrible things that happened, Facebook got really huge by eating a lot of other people’s internet lunches. What’s left standing? The infamous five websites (now mostly appearing as apps, which will be important later in this story) are basically it. (That link is to a famous 2018 tweet that says “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”) A few vampire tubes bought up most of the porn sites, and the pornocalypse came for just about every last bit of adult content on social media, except on Twitter, where the clock on the time bomb has been ticking for years and getting louder all the time.
But then, last week, Facebook, recently rebranded as “Meta”, had a terrible earnings call, and lost a whole bunch of its market cap in a single trading day:
Whoopsie! But what in the hell happened?
The Biter, Bitten: Facebook Ignored Bacchus’s First Rule
What happened? What happened indeed?
I don’t follow Facebook news closely. To a pornographer, pornocalypse platforms are boring and useless. But I do read online news, and over the years I’ve seen Facebook utterly destroy all but the strongest few independent news platform. One by one, they ignored Bacchus’s First Rule: they took their content to Facebook, gave Facebook their traffic, and then got utterly shafted as Facebook deliberately and repeatedly changed the rules on them.
On Friday, Megan McArdle wrote a column in the Washington Post, which is one of the surviving “independent” (from Facebook, anyway) news platforms. It helps that WaPo is the fully-captive plaything of Jeff Bezos, who happens to be that rare creature, a “not Mark Zuckerberg” internet centibillionaire. Thus WaPo can still pay its people, and so they have some good ones. McArdle’s column is headlined We all learned a painful lesson from Facebook. Now Facebook is learning it, too. McArdle adeptly summarizes how Facebook got fat on people who ignored my First Rule. But then, as she explains, Facebook made the same mistake as its victims, leading to last week’s debacle of a one-day $251-billion market-cap loss.
Please allow me my moment of schadenfreude. All this is of course intensely satisfying to me. Am I officially smarter than the Zuckster now? Hot damn! But of course an instant and obvious rejoinder fills my inwardly-directed ears. In a voice deep and stern, as if my own father were speaking from beyond the grave, I hear “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
McArdle writes, with rich expository linkage not reproduced here:
What Facebook is experiencing is a feeling we in the media knew all too well during the platform’s rise. Those users? They were spending time reading about their friend’s baby instead of reading news content written by professionals. And those digital ads Facebook was selling? They were gobbling up market share that used to belong to us news outlets. Without ads, a lot of publications went into precipitous decline.
No hard feelings, of course; all’s fair in love and free-market competition. However, the media was understandably eager to get our hands on some of that sweet, sweet traffic. We scrambled to build Facebook pages to woo readers, and when Facebook started limiting the reach of free pages, we supplemented our traffic by buying ads. We optimized our content for sharing and massaged our headlines to make them compulsively clickable. When Facebook went mobile-first, we mobilized, and when the company informed us that streaming content was the future, we duly pivoted to video.
Whole outlets were built around the clickbait Facebook seemed to want … and then died when Facebook, having encouraged all this activity, abruptly changed the algorithms to favor something else. The outlets that survived tended to be the ones that had largely given up trying to appease this jealous god and instead turned to alternative business models, such as selling subscriptions to a comparatively select few.
And this is where it starts to gets good!
The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch
McArdle goes on to explain precisely where Facebook went wrong. In a nutshell, when Facebook followed people into mobile apps and away from “the internet”, the Facebook people forgot that they don’t actually own mobile. Eventually, inevitably, playing on Apple’s and Google’s private playgrounds caught up with Facebook. Mobile apps don’t run on Facebook’s servers. Mobile apps aren’t under Facebook’s control. They should have listened to… little old me? Some two-bit sex blogger from before the dawn of time?
As a chronological aside, it’s true: ErosBlog’s genuinely one year and 25 days older than “Facemash”, as Facebook was named at first. But, to the company’s great cost, they didn’t listen! The deadly oversight caught up to them last year, when Apple finally sent them a candygram with a bomb in it by changing the IOS platform data-harvesting rules that used to let Facebook make so much money. McArdle again:
In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg decided to take the company all in on a mobile-first strategy. This was disruptive, at first, but in time, he would be seen as a visionary prophet leading his company to the promised land. The problem is, that land wasn’t owned by him. Zuckerberg had shifted his company away from the open platform of the browser and onto a closed system where Apple set the terms. For a long time, that was a very good deal for Facebook — but when Apple decided to alter the deal, Facebook didn’t really have much recourse.
Whoopsie again!
Let’s Do Schadenfreude Some More, That Was Fun
Do I feel a wee tiny bit smug about Facebook losing a quarter-trillion in market cap because they ignored Bacchus’s First Rule? Because Mark Fucking Zuckerberg made the specific mistake in 2012 that I warned about in these pages back in 2004, and then again in 2006, and then again for the third, fourth, and fifth times in 2007? And then some more times in 2010 and in 2011?
Fuck yeah I feel some smugness about that, theydies and gentlethems and glitterkittens! Nobody pays me to be a business consultant, but sometimes I do it anyway, for the sheer pleasure of being right on the internet. If you squint and hold your eyes correctly while you look at this situation, Zuckerberg personally lost thirty billion dollars of net worth in one day for not being an ErosBlog reader. And ErosBlog is totally free! So, you know, fuck that guy. Fuck him in particular.
So Long, And Thanks For The Metaphor
But this blog post from hell is only mostly about pointing out and hooting at Mark Zuckerberg’s predictable strategic missteps. The real reason I gathered you all together here today and subjected you to my endless blather is so that I can share the nifty metaphor McArdle built her whole column around. I wish I’d had this framing at my verbal fingertips back in 2004, and subsequently! Maybe more people would have understood what I meant by my Rule. Her column opens:
In 2015, some professors at Virginia’s Sweet Briar College faced an unusual problem. Through the college, they had purchased homes on campus. The land underneath them, however, was still owned by their employer. And now the college was closing, and presumably selling the campus to someone who might want to use that land for something else.
Happily, Sweet Briar was rescued at the last minute by its alumnae. But the financial cavalry don’t always ride to the rescue just in time, so the plight of the professors nonetheless stands as a vivid example of a wise business adage: “Never build your house on someone else’s land.”
Let’s say that again: Never build your house on someone else’s land.
That’s what Bacchus’s First Rule has been trying to get at ever since 2004. It’s clear, it’s succinct, it communicates with clarity. That tight little sentiment is why this crusty old sex blog is still here, surviving on my sponsorships and generous patrons, long after most of the other sex bloggers moved to Tumblr or wherever, only to get rug-pulled by some sudden pornocalypse event.
After citing her Sweet Briar College example of the “someone else’s land” metaphor operating literally, McArdle references the metaphor as “a wise business adage”. Since I’m not in the business world, I never heard it before. You know this is true because I would have been repeating it at you like a broken record!
A bit of Googling suggests that the adage wasn’t much in the popular parlance before McArdle began writing about it. The earliest reference I found was a 2014 blog post quoting a 2013 paywalled Bloomberg article McArdle herself wrote. I can’t get at the Bloomberg article, but the post summarizes it thusly:
Megan McCardle explains the relevance of a maxim she learned in business school: “Never build your house on someone else’s land.”
So apparently we have McArdle’s B-school professors to thank for this succinct metaphor. Which I hereby do! And McCardle herself has my thanks for popularizing it. Now, if only Zuckerberg had gotten the memo, imagine how much money he might have saved…
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October 18th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been using the term “fetish fuel” since at least 2010, but I didn’t make it up. I heard it from Dr. Faustus but he doesn’t claim it; he credits the TV Tropes site, where (prior to them having a sweeping and bloodily-destructive #Pornocalypse moment back in October of 2010) they defined fetish fuel as anything having an unambiguous sexual subtext that’s not explicitly sexual or pornographic. In that era the TV Tropes fetish fuel entry offered dozens of examples, ranging from the Little Mermaid’s seashell bikini to the outfits worn by the notoriously-lovely women who help and assist stage magicians and assorted vaudevillians. More recent entries (but still pre-pornocalypse) offered a more well-honed fetish fuel definition, while shunting off the examples to a different (and also pornocalypse-doomed) Turn On Tropes entry:
In a nutshell, Fetish Fuel is when something in a work isn’t explicit nudity, sexual activity, or something else pornographic, but still causes sexual arousal in the viewer. Usually the cause is that this sets off something sexual for a viewer, particularly a Fetish a viewer has, hence the name. But unlike Nightmare Fuel, this can be intentional just as often as not. See Fanservice and Author Appeal; and see Turn On Tropes for a list of tropes that are often fetish fuel.
All of which is a long-winded way to explain my astonishment at seeing cellophane pop up in a clearly-intended-as-fetish-fuel way in a 1960s men’s magazine. The February 1961 issue of Ace, to be precise:
To my personal sensibilities, cellophane is fairly unsexy stuff; it crinkles and is noisy and unpleasant to handle. But the fetish imagination wants what it wants, and if this photographer didn’t have a cellophane fetish, he or his editors must have been pocketing sponsored-placement fees from DuPont.
Photo above is part of a full two-page spread, which identifies the lovely model as Clara Barrie:
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