My post this morning gave you the tools to backup and save your own porn tumblr, plus perhaps a handful of others. Good. You’ve carried your fully-loaded book bag safely out of the burning library. Now what else can you do?

Say hello to our rogue archivist friends at Archive Team. Powered by “rage, paranoia, and kleptomania” in all their data-rescue efforts, their Tumblr project page and associated IRC channel indicate that they’re rumbling and grumbling into full power-up mode on this Tumblr #pornocalypse crisis. Their previous data-rescue exploits are legendary. They can’t get it all, but they are going to get a bunch. How can we, how can you, help?

I’ve been monitoring their public-facing channels. From what I can tell, here’s what’s going on. They are tweaking the scripts for the software they use for distributed scraping and downloading. (They call it “Archive Team Warrior.”) When Warrior is ready — hopefully real soon now — if you’ve got a good internet connection you could help by running an instance of that.

But even before it starts to run, they need a list of Tumblr porn blogs to feed into the Warrior. They’ve already got lists of course, massive ones. But the lists are far from complete. They want more and better ones. There’s a web form here where you can contribute your favorite porn Tumblr URLs. The form accepts ten URLs at a time, but you can fill it out as many times as you like. And if you have a much bigger list? Just paste it up online somewhere and paste the URL to that into the form — they’ll make it work.

All told, based on past experience, they figure they have time and bandwidth and volunteers enough to rescue maybe 60 terabytes of porn blogs. That’s enormous — but it’s only a tenth, maybe a twentieth, of the total amount of the porn on Tumblr. (Everybody is guessing; these are wild-ass guesses.) Still, it will be a massive save if it works. What will happen to all that data?

Eventually — and these things can take a lot of time — the idea is that rescued blogs can end up in the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Every terabyte that winds up in the Wayback machine adds, they estimate, about $1500 to $2,000 in long term cost. Archive.org donations are needed, and welcome.

OK, Monday was our day to smack foreheads and react to the Tumblr porn ban. Tuesday was our day to mourn the loss of communities. For people who need a new home, yesterday began the migration process, or at least the search for a destination. Today? For me it’s a day to act. I’m a porn curator, and I’m aghast at the collections that will burn on December 17. What little I can do to fight those fires starts today.

Five years ago when I first saw this shitshow coming, I researched and advised the community on backup options for adult tumblrs. But since then, Tumblr has taken several technical steps to make porn tumblrs harder to view or copy. And fundamentally, I’m a technical idiot. I gloomily thought all my old advice was obsolete, which is why I wrote this fundamentally wrong depressed Eeyore shit on Monday:

I haven’t tested, but I don’t think the advice in that post would work any more, now that you have to be logged in to Tumblr even to view your own porn blog. (I could be wrong.)

Reader, I was wrong. After consulting with my good friend Dr. Faustus at Erotic Mad Science, who is technically sharper than me and who has spent much of the past five years diligently rescuing material of interest from Tumblr and turning it into a deep and intricate set of self-hosted blogs, he pointed me at some instructional material that set me straight. It turns out that I can pick the best backup solution from my old article, add one screenshot with a single new setting (the password/login you need to be able to see porn on Tumblr), and we are back in backup business! (Product best when used before December 17, 2018, contents may settle in shipping.)

How To Back Up An Adult Tumblr

These are instructions for using HTTrack/WinHTTrack Website Copier to make a local mirror of any Tumblr in a folder on your hard drive. HTTrack is a free-software GPL general utility for copying and mirroring websites, available for most current versions of Windows as well as for a wide variety of Linux/Unix flavors. The Windows version presents a fairly old-fashioned interface with a bunch of cryptic options, but most of them come pre-set with sensible defaults that you actually don’t need to mess with. Plus, there’s good documentation.

Download the software and install it. Windows will probably try to scare you out of completing the install. Be bold, be brave. Trust your open source software developers.

Now run the the software. You’ll be presented with a welcome screen where you need to click “Next”. Then, this screen:

The arrows show you the two fields that need your attention. All you really need to do is give this backup project a name and tell the software where to save the backup. Then hit “Next”:

The two red arrows above screen point to mandatory buttons that need our attention. The first one opens the screen where we tell Tumblr the URL of the porn tumblr you want to download. It will be something like: http://yourtumblr.tumblr.com — this doesn’t have to be your tumblr URL though, it can be any tumblr you want to save, like one that nobody has updated in five years that you know will be going dark in two weeks. This is also where you input your Tumblr login information, to prove to Tumblr that you’re special enough to view porn. This does have to be your login, no matter whose blog you are downloading.

The next screen is the one you see when you push the “Set options” button, which is absolutely vital. When you do, you’ll see this:

I’ve pointed arrows at three optional settings tabs that you may want to adjust, and at the one mandatory options tab where you must change a setting. I’m going to ignore the optional ones for now, except to say that you would tinker with these if you wanted to change the sorts of media files you’re saving beyond the basic .gif, .jpg, and .png (you’d need to do this if you were saving a Tumblr that had .wav files or .zip files or .mp3s), or if you need to limit this program from slamming your internet connection too hard. It’s the mandatory “Spider” tab you really need to click:

See the box where it says “follow robots.txt rules”? Change it using the drop-down menu to say “no robots.txt rules” so that this software (your robot) will know to ignore Tumblr’s robot-hostile electronic “keep out” signs.

Yay! We’re almost done. Hit the “OK” button, hit “Next”, hit “Finish”, and your site copying should begin.

How long it will take to finish depends on the available bandwidth of your net connection, the memory and processing speed of your computer, and on whether you tweaked any of the options that control things like how many simultaneous connections your computer is making and how many files it’s trying to download in parallel. It also depends on how many pages there are on the Tumblr blog you are backing up, and on how big the images are. The default settings seem to be fairly gentle about not maxing out your internet connection or putting an unruly amount of strain on the server at the site you are trying to copy. Using default settings and a fairly crappy internet connection, I downloaded an ancient porn blog overnight last night. It had 3,300 posts and took up 1.8GB on my hard drive.

What does success look like? You’ll have a folder on your hard drive with the name you provided on the first options screen. If you open it, you will find many sub-folders, and much that may seem mysterious. You should also find a file called “index.html” — and if you click on it, it should open in a new browser window where you’ll be looking at your backed up Tumblr site, using nothing but the files on your hard drive.

What have we not accomplished? Well, you’ve made what should be a full and true copy, but it’s not a nice clean export in some standard format that you could use to easily import all your posts into another content management system or blogging tool. HTML files and related images are scattered through a system of directories and subdirectories that, while logical, may not be the simplest thing to work with. Using the data you’ve got, a clever computer person could generate an XHTML document (or something similar) that could be semi-automatically imported into (say) WordPress. But it would take parsing; it would take work. Figuring out how to take the copy you just made and turn it back into a non-Tumblr website is a solvable problem, but how easy or hard it might be to actually do it depends on your access to computer expertise and tools. For now, you’re safe in the knowledge that you’ve got all the posts you’ve made this past however-many years. You’ve got the images, you’ve got their metadata (any tags you set for them and any credits you may have reblogged or included) and you’ve got the clever things you said about them, all, safe on your hard drive.

Now would be a good time to back up your hard drive. I’m just sayin’.

Additional caveats and warnings and gotchas and thoughts:

1) This might or might not work on your own porn tumblr after December 17. Tumblr hasn’t said it will delete porn, just that it will make it invisible to everyone but the owner. But I don’t trust them not to continue deleting stuff. I wouldn’t wait. And for any blog you don’t own, this will almost certainly stop working. Every old porn tumblr that is no longer being updated? This is a way to make a copy on your hard drive. Hurry! Don’t wait. Hell is coming, but so is December 17. December 17 will get here first.

2) You have to type your Tumblr login and password into HTTrack to use this method. There’s a good chance that login information gets recorded in the many complex files HTTrack writes to your hard drive. If you ever turn those files over to someone who is, say, helping you convert those files into a WordPress blog — or if, say, you send them off to the Internet Archive for posterity — your password could be exposed. It might be smart to set up a “burner password” on Tumblr that you never used anywhere else and will never use again before firing up HTTrack.

3) There is a method offered by Tumblr for doing a fancier and more complete export of the Tumblr blogs that belong to you, including some of the social interaction metadata. I have not covered it here because it appears not to be very reliable; in every case available to me for testing, it failed permanently with a “processing backup” message that never ends or goes away. So I decided not to waste your time with the instructions for making that attempt. I have heard precisely one account on Twitter of a successful official export.

I hope this helps!

It has been far too long since I published a Share Our Shit Saturdays meme post, but I’ve got to at least touch some of the highlights of the best stuff that has been put out there by a few of my favorite bloggers since the last time:

1. In his usual industrious way, Dr. Faustus has published two more full chapters (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5) in the Tales of Ashley Madder, and is currently chugging along through the daily page-by-page publication of Chapter 6 at his flagship Erotic Mad Science blog. He’s also published additional versions of his Rosetta Stone comic Bubbles in Punjabi, Turkish, and Farsi. And finally, he published three commissioned artworks in connection with his comic Bait: one called The Daughters Of Leos by Faustus Crow (no relation), and the more light-hearted damsel-in-distress artworks Deep Sea Lola and Bubble Tube Lola.
2. The hardworking and discerning curators of pornographic history at The Rialto Report have released three more quality scan sets of vintage porn magazines since my last report on their curatorial efforts: the issues from the first year (1976) of High Society, the 1981 issues of Adult Cinema, and the issues from the first year (1976) of Cheri.
3. Back in September Girl On The Net published this ridiculously-good post on what it takes (and, more importantly, doesn’t take) to be a sex blogger.
4. From the Sensual Liberation Army, an ErosBlog friend going back to the very earliest of days, we learn that the magic of the crochet bikini does not care how many nipples you have.
5. Franklin Veaux wrote at some length about the kinkiest sex toy he’s ever used. Considering that he’s the creator of the famous Map of Human Sexuality and that his answer involved a six-week campaign by the women in his life to make him more sexually suggestible and biddable, you might not have expected so much mathematics — or such a small piece of aluminum! — to figure in the tale.

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After numerous posts in 2016 and 2017, developments on the virtual reality porn front have been slow here at ErosBlog in 2018. I still don’t have a quality high-tech VR headset, although I have finally had the chance to tinker with a few of the worst of the cheap ones that you basically just wrap around your phone. These are now starting to show up at local garage sales for next to nothing. But a real headset, like a Rift or a Vive? I keep thinking someone will send me one to review, but it hasn’t happened yet. Oh well. The day will come!

Meanwhile I remain interested in developments in VR porn, and in the sites that aggregate it for surfers and consumers. So I always welcome the opportunity to look in depth at another VR porn resource site like the one at Ultimate VR Porn. This is a slick-looking portal that combines trailers and teaser clips from all of the currently top-rated virtual reality porn movies, a ranked list of the best VR porn sites complete with the reviews that support that assertion that they are the best, and a detailed series of tech guides explaining how to set up all the leading VR porn devices. (Given that these are somewhat complicated devices, guides explaining how to get them plugged in and loaded with porn seem likely to be useful, especially given the way the #pornocalypse tends to keep porn hard to reach from official content and app stores.)

Any fool can throw together a list of VR porn sites, but I am always more interested in a good ranking that’s justified with reviews and user ratings. This catalog of the best vr porn sites appears to be at least somewhat data-driven:

One more new-to-me thing I noticed at the Ultimate VR Porn site is that the display of VR porn clips and trailers and teasers to people (like me) who are checking things out without a VR headset has been enormously standardized and improved, at least in an up-to-date Chrome browser. In 2016 when I first started looking at VR clips in a standard browser, they would often (but, confusingly, not always) appear as two side-by-side clips like some sort of 1890s stereogram you would hold up to a candle on a wooden stick. Talk about retro!

It’s different — by which I mean better — these days, though. Today they present themselves to our vision on the screen looking at first like a standard video clip, such as you would encounter at any tubesite or clipstore, only with the slight fuzziness that hints of three-dimensionality on a 3D television. But you-the-viewer can interact with the clip using your mouse; you can grab and pan the scene left, right, up, and down (somewhat similar to how you would look with head movements while wearing a headset) and zoom in or out using the scroll wheel. It’s not having a headset, but it does give you a fair way to interrogate the VR porn clip or trailer to see how it was shot and what you would get if you indeed were to buy the whole scene and were viewing it with a proper headset. This is an enormous improvement over the way sample clips worked just a year or two ago!

I’ll confess to not being as regular about Sharing Our Shit on Saturday as I would like to be, but here I am today on this particular Saturday with some excellent shit to share:

1. That industrious patron of the arts and my good friend Dr. Faustus has been busy since the last time I shared his publications and productions. Recent output includes editions of his comic Bubbles in Hebrew (עברית), Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt), and Bengali (বাংলা). The third chapter is now available in The Adventures of Ashley Madder, and there has been a substantial revision/addition to the comic Bait, announced here. Four new pieces of commissioned art supplementary to Bait (or pendant to it, if you prefer the word that Dr. Faustus uses) have also been published: here and here and here and here. And finally, all the Bait goodies have a permanent secure home at the Internet Archive now. I swear I don’t know how Faustus does it!
2. The Rialto Report continues its ambitious project of making high-quality scans of porn magazines from forty years ago. This time it’s a visit to 1980 with the issues from that year of Cinema-X Review and Adam Film World.
3. Ten Things I’ve Learned From 10 Years Of Sex — a really smart bit of writing from Kate Sloan at Girly Juice. I sure as shit didn’t learn that much in my first ten years of having sex, and in a lot more than ten years I never learned to write paragraphs so nice and tight.
4. I appreciate a good obsession as well as the next person, so I am in awe of this post at Vanilla Spanking that explores at 3,500-word length (plus extensive visual material) the question of whether there was ever a Tarzan movie in which Jane gets a spanking. One word answer: no. But every near-spanking and situation in which Tarzan threatens to spank somebody is lovingly detailed, and the one funny-papers comic-strip panel in which Tarzan does spank an abusive lady big game hunter is presented in both its as-originally-published and later-reprint spanking-censored-out versions. Obsessions, man, long may they wave!

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The press of affairs in recent weeks has kept me from Sharing Any Saturday Shit, and I still haven’t had time to trip lazily through my links for undiscovered gems, but a few of the usual honorable suspects who reliably churn out things that need to be shared have, indeed, produced on schedule:

1. The Rialto Report, which had formerly published online digital copies of the complete first eight issues of Flick magazine, has now added to its website the other twelve existing issues of this short-lived 1970s porn magazine.
2. The June link roundup from History of BDSM is, again and typically, good. So much so that its appearance is another one of the strong motivators for doing this #SoSS today.
3. My good friend Dr. Faustus has finished another Tales Of Gnosis College chapter: Chapter 2 in The Adventures of Ashley Madder. (Don’t miss the bonus Women Of Gnosis College Angelique Porpulac pinup on the last page.) Also now available in the ongoing march of Dr. Faustus releases: Bubbles in Polish.

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I may have missed a couple of Saturdays in a row but that’s just all the more reason to slide in another Share Our Shit Saturday post, isn’t it?

1. For the last two months my venerable blogfriend BJ has been posting photos of bearded men from his inexhaustible collection of vintage gay porn. He was up to “beard058” by the time he posted this shot, which also typifies the reason that the phrase “assless chaps” gained the popularity it enjoys. (Not to mention the power it has to make linguistic pedants tear their dull and lifeless hair out in great double-fisted clumps.)
2. The Rialto Report has reproduced for posterity the rare-as-hen’s-teeth first year’s run of Adult Video News issues from 1983/1984.
3. It has become traditional to include the monthly BDSM link roundup from The History of BDSM in whichever of these #SOSS posts follows it. The roundup never disappoints.
4. Finally and as usual, my good friend Dr. Faustus has been busy! Publication is complete on the first whole chapter of The Adventures of Ashley Madder (a Tales of Gnosis College comic and tribute to the Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist). What’s more, there are three new pieces of commissioned supplementary art for the previously-published graphic novella Bait. And finally, for those of strong stomach, at Infernal Wonders there are two exercises in recovering deeply-lost fringe artists from the depths of the Internet Archive. Content on these is likely to squick most readers, but the demonstration of methods for retrieval of very old and very lost web content may have interest beyond the content itself: Atomica, Hekonix. And last but not least, Bubbles is now available in Tagalog!

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