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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
June 3rd, 2021 -- by Bacchus
Today I noticed that Mikandi’s adult app store website is gone. It redirects to a Mikandi-branded cams site now. This is semi-recent news; there’s an archived version showing that the actual website was still up on April 27. All you people who paid for content locked inside Mikandi apps: I am sorry for your predictable loss.
I am sorry, yes. But I’m not surprised. I have an amusing little history with Mikandi. The story goes like this: six years ago I got an email in a promotional mode from one of the very nice Mikandi marketing people. At that time they had been getting a lot of good press about their independent adult app store for Android. My correspondent particularly wanted me to try out their then-new Mikandi Gold “buy an adult comic as an app” product.
Instead, I wrote them 2,400 words of free, unsolicited, and undesired (I have no doubt) business-consulting advice, in which I made two points. First, paying for content that’s locked inside an app is a fools’s game and a cursed business model, because what happens when the app provider goes out of business and turns off the app servers or the digital rights management software?
“Basically if I can’t load it into my Calibre library (as I do with ebooks), convert it to whatever device-specific format I’m using this week, and then side-load it onto my devices, I’m not going to shell out good money for it. I realize this makes me a crusty curmudgeon. Nonetheless I have all good wishes for your venture; I’m just not excited about this specific business model of shoving media into app-wrappers that need to phone home periodically.”
Good news: I was just warming up!
Mikandi also had an offensively-vague content policy for publishers, at a time when the pornocalypse had already been on my radar for a few years. Mikandi had a payment processor who wouldn’t process rape content, is my guess, but Mikandi didn’t have the courage or the intellectual willingness to tackle the difficult philosophical problem of what that actually means in the comics context. That struck me as rather a fatal flaw for a publisher in the manga space. Maybe it wasn’t their fault; perhaps they couldn’t get their payments processor to set clear guidelines. I dunno. But I do know the nonsensical and patronizing solution they came up with: “MiKandi does not accept any non-consensual material, actual or implied. Consent is sexy!”
I told them: publishers need a lot more precise rules, and if Mikandi couldn’t achieve the needed clarity with their payments processor, their product was not ready for market. Moreover:
“Consent issues are at the emotional heart of a lot of BDSM fantasy literature, including in adult comic books. Ambiguity about consent is part of that, whether the ambiguity arises from the limited information available to a third-party viewer (if the opening panel is a handcuffed character fucking, we just don’t have facts to answer the consent question) or whether it arises in the notional mind of the character. Are they undecided? Have they changed their mind since inviting the handcuffing, but not said anything? How do we know? How would we ever know? Since the mind we are interrogating doesn’t exist, what do these questions even mean? It seems to me that there’s a huge realm of adult “comics” literature that is just INCOMPATIBLE with your current ten-word policy on consent. It’s not because non-consensual themes are predominant, but simply because there’s no way to evaluate the work against the 10-word policy and reach any kind of sensible, predictable, or reproducible answer.”
My friends, Mikandi did not get back to me about my observations. Which is fair. “Unsolicited business consultant” is right up there with “surprise volunteer subway dentist” on the list of unpopular people in this world.
Nevertheless, here we are. Six years have passed. So, too, apparently, has Mikandi. I can’t find any web coverage about them closing their virtual doors. Maybe it was so predictable it wasn’t even a story. Is this a genuine ErosBlog adult-industry scoop? Gosh I hope not; doing journalism stuff always makes me cranky.
Could Mikandi have avoided its ignominious end (vanishing from the internet without anybody except one cranky blogger noticing) if they had heeded, instead of ignoring, my unsolicited business advice? I very much doubt it! I don’t claim that kind of power or percipience. No doubt, they got eaten by forces larger than all of us.
However, I did give them advice, and they did ignore it, and now they’re gone. Moral: when Bacchus speaks on matters of pleasure, foolish mortals should listen!
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May 19th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
I’m sorry, but you do indeed gotta hand it to this ogre for making creative use of available sexual resources. Using a pair of tightly tied feet as a masturbatory aid is clever. But tickling the feet to stimulate enjoyable motions is, quite possibly, fetish genius:
The complete artwork (of which the above is but a detail) contains within it a caption suggesting that this scene began as an interrogation. But our bondage tickle victim swears she’s told everything she knows, and yet this vicious torment continues! She seems puzzled by this, but as for me? I am not!
Art is by em-car, whose Patreon seems to have been pornocalypsed.
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November 23rd, 2020 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been having fun recently digging through the Internet Archive archeological remnants of porn tumblrs that died in the big #pornocalypse of 2018, or that got deactivated by Tumblr (for reasons never explained) in the many better years before that.
One called A Good Girl Takes Pride In Her Bruises featured this bulky tattooed male arm well-buried in a happy pussy, attractively framed in tattered fishnet pantyhose. The simple caption: “He is so sweet to me.”
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September 6th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
It was five years ago that ErosBlog first covered the then-developing story of the sexualization of eggplants, to the point where the eggplant emoji was banned on Instagram. What with Rule 34 and all, it should be no surprise that by now, there is anal insertion porn of it. Bondage Blog has it:
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December 20th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
It feels like a very long time ago that I wrote the post Google’s Mechanical Prude, documenting how Google’s then-new autocomplete search-suggestion feature ignored your settings (if you had asked Google not to impose its censorious “Safe Search” on your search results) and used a bunch of stop words to avoid suggestion porn, nudity, or popular adult performers. It feels like a very long time ago because it was eleven years ago, in 2008. Of course, Google never backed down from that then-cutting-edge bit of search-invisibility engineering. One ludicrous example I documented back in 2008 was that Google autocomplete refused to comprehend or to admit that searching for “Jenna Jameson nude” was a thing that people might want to do. And today, in 2019, Google is still sticking to those ancient prudish guns:
That investigation was perhaps the genesis for my hatred and horror of search invisibility as a #pornocalypse tactic. It feels totalitarian and epistemologically violent to me. People search for a thing. The robot assistants who operate so smoothly we barely notice them: those helpful bastards blandly pretend that the thing we want doesn’t exist and never existed. It’s insidious, it’s dangerous, and it’s intolerable. It’s also unaccountable, and we have no real way to protest or demand better searches.
Today’s post, however, is not about Google. It’s about Twitter. Search invisibility on Twitter is hardly a new thing, to be sure. It’s been a sometimes “feature” of the poorly-understood shadow bans that have plagued adult performers and sex bloggers on Twitter for years, though denied by Twitter until the recent release of their new 2020 terms of service incorporating shadowbanning as normal practice. Yesterday, however, I discovered a new-to-me type of search invisibility on Twitter. (I say “new to me” because some accounts of shadow banning had previously reported this dysfunctionality, but I never saw it when I myself was shadowbanned.) Specifically, the autocomplete search function that we all rely upon when we are trying to “at” somebody appears to have some disfavored Twitter users whose user IDs are not autocompleted. My discovery exemplar, surprise surprise, is an adult (porn) megastar with 172,000 followers. Gee, I wonder why she’s been invisibilized? I don’t know … but there’s a pornocalypse stench to it, don’t you think?
Here are my receipts.
Yesterday, I went to tweet about a lighthearted Christmas femdom shoot featuring Syren De Mer taking extreme liberties with a hapless Santa. I knew she was on Twitter but I didn’t know her username, so I just dove in with my “at” symbol and the first three letters of her name:
At this point there are ten results in the drop-down autosuggest box, although we only see five (without scrolling) in the screenshot. None of them are for Syren. Not really a surprise; we are only three letters in. Moving on.
And on and on and on… By the time I get all the way out to “@SyrenDeM” we are down to just two suggestions:
That second result looks like a possible hit; it’s @SyrenDeMerX. But no; if you look at the account profile, it’s a low-activity fake or tribute account, dating to 2014-2015 exclusively, consisting mostly of porn retweets. Let’s keep typing:
Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Her true Twitter handle is @SyrenDemerXXX, which is a 10-years-old but still-currently-active account with her OnlyFans and her agency booking info in her profile. But when we type it all the way out to one letter short of the full user ID, Twitter is still stalwartly maintaining that it has never heard of her. @SyrenDeMerXXX? Who dat?
If this is a “regular” shadowbanning “feature” that Syren is currently suffering under, the behavior might be gone by the time you attempt to confirm or replicate it. Shadowbans are notoriously fickle; they come and they go. Or maybe she’s on some hitherto undiscovered permanent pornocalypse Twitter username blacklist aimed at adult performers. Does it really matter? This is a woman with 172,000 followers on Twitter, suggesting that she’s somebody that a lot of people want to hear from. But if you try to type her Twitter username, Twitter does its best to pretend that she doesn’t exist. The reason doesn’t really matter; the result is fucking shameful.
By the way, in case you were wondering, Syren De Mer is not just blacklisted in Twitter’s user search engine. She’s also on Google’s autocomplete search-suggest blacklist, just like Violet Blue was when I wrote Pornocalypse Comes For Your Keyword Searches back in 2015. Violet now appears to have escaped from Google jail, but Syren is very much in it, even when I’m logged into my Google Account with so-called “Safe Search” turned off:
This is a woman, mind you, with 12.7 million search results currently in the Google web database:
If that doesn’t make you wonder what else Google and Twitter refuse to show you when you search for it, you’re not a very curious person. And if having to wonder about it doesn’t horrify or concern you, I truly worry about your capacity for imagination, empathy, and self-preservation in the information age.
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October 3rd, 2019 -- by Bacchus
Seventeen years ago, on this day in 2002, I posted the first ErosBlog post ever. I linked to a political blog and a risque newspaper photo. Although both links still work, it’s only due to active maintenance on my part and some help from the Internet Archive. (Apparently neither Glenn Reynolds nor The Sun ever got the memo about cool URIs not changing.)
On other anniversaries, I’ve maundered about the decline of blogs and wondered how long ErosBlog would hang on. Not this time. This is a very different blog than it was in 2002, or 2007, or 20012, or 2017. Most things have changed, usually several times. No matter. I’m in a confident place. ErosBlog gives me space to do some things I want to do, and that won’t change while I’m hale. Science fiction author John Scalzi recently marked his blog’s twenty-first anniversary with these comments:
I do still tell people that they should keep their own sites for when whatever social media site they use the most eventually sinks into the Internet’s graveyard, they’ll still have some place to be. The longer I do this, the more I realize this makes me sound vaguely like an Internet Prepper, waiting and perhaps hoping for an online apocalypse that likely won’t come. I don’t mean it that way, honest. Writers and creators should definitely have their own sites, with information about them and what they do, if only for search engine purposes. Everyone else, well. Do what you want, I guess. I do, which is to keep this place running. When Facebook falls, you’ll all still want something to read! I’ll be the last site standing! Bwa ha ha hah ha!
His “joke” about Facebook falling? He’s kidding to be sure, but he’s kidding on the square. Even if megacorporate social media won’t be going away any time soon, lots of people are starting to notice the tarnish on it. In a pornocalyptic era when Facebook bans and silently vanishes people for using “sexually explicit language” or offering sex to their own spouse, my first rule of the internet doesn’t look quite so crazy. And when the huge porn tubes control the vast majority of adult internet traffic, while offering nothing but video clips to weary porn surfers, I can convince myself that even my laziest streak of dirty picture posts makes somebody happy. Plus, look on the bright side: after the suicide of Tumblr, I no long need to worry that I’m “just doing Tumblr cosplay in a costume made out of stale WordPress.” Tumblr porn? Add it to the lengthy list of things that ErosBlog has outlasted!
Seventeen years. It’s a long time to run a website. I am, however, far from done.
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February 25th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
As if we didn’t have enough problems, there’s a mounting body of evidence that Google now has an attention span somewhat shorter than ten years. After ten years or so, Google forgets things. Or, perhaps, Google just can’t be bothered to index these older web pages, because there’s no money in it.
A commenter mentioned this after my post wherein I spoke of the pain of the Kink.com transition to their “new” (2016) Kink Unlimited product that broke many hundreds of my old links. It turns out that blogging pioneer and web-bones architect Tim Bray noticed the Google-dementia phenomenon about a year ago, writing that “Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web.”
Bray had discovered that his old blog posts weren’t turning up in Google searches even when he chased them with extremely precise search terms. I had noticed the same thing, but I assumed it was the “Google hates porn” filter that was killing me. (More on this later.)
Bray also noticed that Bing and Duck-Duck-Go were finding his old posts just fine. The implication is that it’s not some inherent “the web has gotten too big to index” problem, but rather it’s a deliberate choice by Google to focus on newer, fresher material. Bray:
My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage. For this to be useful, it needs to be indexed, just like a library. Google apparently doesn’t share that view.
Indeed.
A couple of days later, Marco Fioretti expanded on Bray’s post with his own examples of the things Google forgets, and had this additionally to say:
Unless we’re all missing something here, it seems more correct to say that Google forgets stuff that is more than 10 years old. If this is the case, Google will remember and index a smaller part of the web every year. Google may do so simply because it would be impossible to do more, for economical and/or technological constraints, which sooner or later would also hit its competitors. But this only makes bigger the problem of what to remember, what to forget and above all who and how should remember and forget.
Neither Bray nor Fioretti applied the term “dementia” to Google. I got that term from an earlier (2017) blog post by open-data maven Tony Hirst, that was referenced in the comments on Bray’s post. Hirst posits that Google is getting both paranoid (because of SEO and other factors) and forgetful. To Hirst, Google seems rooted in the past, crediting signals of link authority that people are mostly not using these days (publication of links on websites) and not able to properly weight or remember the social media signals that accompany most links modernly. It’s a different problem to be sure from the one that Bray and Fioretti highlighted, but the terminology seems applicable here too.
My observations, from my perspective inside the adult/porn parts of the web, are parallel with Hirst’s. Google’s digital dementia is even more severe with respect to adult URLs, because our #pornocalypse-driven exclusion from so much social media means that our links are automatically absent from so many of Google’s modern page quality signals and ranking algorithms.
Here’s my own example, showing the type of digital dementia Bray highlighted. There’s an ErosBlog post from 2005 called Dildoes In the Subway (that’s the post title.) As of this writing, if you search for those four words in quotes, Google will admit to knowing of four places on the web — including three on ErosBlog — where that phrase exists, but Google doesn’t seem to know that the post itself exists:
Bing? Bing still has possession of all its faculties, and returns the proper post as the first search result:
I’ve been seeing this phenomenon for years, but honestly? I just assumed it was a porn thing. Google hates stinky porn sites like mine, and is always pretending not to know about pages that are actually in its index. Usually what this means is that you haven’t used enough “porn words” in your search query to convince Big Brother Google that you realio-trulio want a porn result, so the porn result is being hidden from you for your own good. But that’s probably not the case here, because “dildoes” ought to be porny enough. And anyway, we can test this; adding the “site:erosblog.com” search filter should override the “it’s for your own good” anti-porn filters:
Nope! Google is being adamant here; it knows of three places on ErosBlog that mention this post, but the post itself? Not in the Google index any more.
Just in case you’re skeptical or curious, though, here’s what it looks like when you’re searching for an ErosBlog page that actually is (unlike the Dildos In The Subway page) in Google’s dementia-ridden memory, only Google doesn’t want to show it to you, because stinky porn. I wrote a post in 2005 called The Pony Girls Of Ancient Egypt that contains the unique-on-the-web (until I hit the publish button on this post) phrase “a charioteer boffing a woman”.
Google knows about it. Google hasn’t forgotten it. Google has the charioteer-boffing in its index, all right:
But apparently “boffing” is an insufficiently pornographic word to signify that I am an adult who wants to see porn, genuinely and truly. Because, even though I have all the so-called “safe search” settings turned as far off as Google will allow these days, here’s what Google pretends to know about my Egyptian pony girls once I remove the site:erosblog.com search constraint. That’s right, it’s Sergeant Schultz time: they know nothing! Pony girls? Boffing charioteers? New phone, new search engine, who dis?
Increasingly I find myself going to Bing when I need completeness in a search result. Google’s digital dementia, it turns out, is part of why that has become necessary.
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