Serious question: Say you are an artist whose medium is video. Specifically, erotic video. Porn, not to put too fine a point on it. But you’re also part of today’s remix and fan cultures: you work with existing tropes, characters, stories, universes, and memes. (In other words, you are “extending and embracing” intellectual property that is not, strictly speaking, your own.) Now you’ve got a fun little porn loop sitting on your desktop, the product of a few weeks’ work that you want to share with the world.
Where do you upload it?
Forget my rule: almost nobody can afford to host their own video without a business model. Not if it has the potential to go viral.
YouTube is not an option. It’s a #pornocalypse platform. Google/Alphabet does not welcome your porn. Your porn will not survive on their platform for any significant length of time.
Что делать? What is to be done?
There truly is only one sensible solution. You would, you must, upload your work to a tube site.
Yes, yes, I know. Responsible commercial-porn consumers who pay for porn are primed to think poorly of tubes, because tubes have had a such pernicious effect on the commercial porn industry. But where you stand depends on where you sit. And if you’re an indy nonprofit artist looking for free distribution of bandwidth-heavy porn video files, tubes are an amenity. What follows from that is, that as a curator and researcher of obscure porn goodies, I have to give credit where credit is due: sometimes there’s no substitute for a good tube when I’m looking for video that won’t be found, that simply can not be found, anywhere else.
All of which is by way of explaining how I found myself searching pornkai.com for robot sex videos yesterday. Pornkai.com is an extremely interesting and useful site for the porn video researcher. Using various APIs made available by several large tubes and a search engine that does not suck, it exposes more than twenty-two million heavily tagged and key-worded video clips to the queries of intrepid researchers like your loyal reporter. Twenty two is a lot of millions. Or, to put it another way: that’s a metric buttload of video clips.
Did I find me some robot sex? Yes I did. Specifically, I found a somewhat puzzling fan video featuring a robot getting a blowjob followed by robot frottage (robot penis between humanoid thighs):
A bit of traditional in-out-in-out robot sex follows that but when our robot decides to sprout a whole bunch of tentacle dicks, Our Heroine (not actually a human, but apparently a humanoid android named Yorha 2B) has had enough; she draws her sword and there’s a sudden spate of robot de-dickifications. Cheering! And scene.
What does it all mean? Fuck me if I can tell you. I did track it all down as fan art associated with a videogame franchise called Nier: Automata. The artist and video maker is XiestoXenox-Xavi, aka Xiësto. I’d call them good at what they do.
Amid today’s cable news babble, one bit of good news. The ongoing government shutdown disrupted plans for a State Of The Union speech that nobody wanted to hear anyway. But as I poured myself a celebratory shot of booze, it occurred to me that I never gave you all a report on Kink.com’s extremely rocky — but eventually successful — process of uniting its once-ragtag empire of kinky porn sites under the Kink Unlimited brand.
I have a long and positive history with the company that became Kink.com in 2006. Peter Acworth’s original sites (beginning in the ’90s with Hogtied) were fresh and easily-marketed from an affiliate perspective. The company was professional, easy to work with, and paid like clockwork. As a sex blogger — even one not primarily focused on kink — I had a lot of time for all their projects. And at least in the early years, their models routinely reported safe and happy shooting experiences. They broke new ground with Sex and Submission, combining sex and bondage in a way that no mainstream porn company had previously had the courage to do. So great was their success, they were spinning out new sites like cotton candy. It honestly got hard to keep track of them all. They spent double-digit millions to buy their famous “castle of kink” — a former national guard armory — and ramped up production so much that by 2013 or so we started to need special web pages just to list all the Kink sites. Frankly, it was all getting to be more than just a bit of a wonderful mess.
But by that time, the arc of the profitable porn business had already peaked. Piracy, consolidation, and tubesites were taking their toll. In 2012 I noted with fascination an interview with Peter Acworth about his future plans for Kink.com in which none of those plans involved actual innovations in porn production. Obviously he wasn’t going to just walk away from his company’s core revenue stream, but his entrepreneurial eye was roaming off in other directions. About that time is when I started noticing that the affiliate department stopped being reliably and courteously staffed, too. Suddenly, getting affiliate support became catch-as-catch-can; whomever was doing seemed to be doing it “other duties as assigned” instead of as a core priority. Corners were being cut. Times were getting hard in the porn business.
One response from the company was to shut down or put on hiatus a few of its raunchiest sites (Bound In Public, Public Disgrace, and HardCoreGangBangs), eventually relaunching some of them with softer content, new shooting guidelines, and a bit of metaphorical soft-core Vaseline on the camera lenses. This was explicitly part of an effort to reposition the Kink.com brand as more of a mainstream lifestyle trademark a la Playboy. The unspoken notion, I think, was to license the fancy K on merchandise, and extend the “Kink” brand beyond porn, which was seen as a business in the final throes of ignominious death.
This cost-cutting and brand repositioning culminated in two huge moves in 2017 and 2018. 2017 brought news that all porn production in the huge San Francisco armory building had ceased, due to a search for tenants that were being dissuaded by sharing space with porn production. (That same story included rumors of a 40% decline in porn subscription revenue, driving the need to find tenants to support the massive space.) Porn production reported moved to “Southern California, Nevada and other parts of the Bay Area.” This caused one waggish email correspondent to describe the company to me as “a loose collection of contractors flying in formation” which I think may have been accurate at the time — except, I’m not sure if they were managing much of a formation. Of which, more later. (The move out of the Armory had to be traumatic for the organization. Empathy.)
Anyway, when I heard production was leaving the armory, my instant assumption was that this was preparation for sale of the building. I was not wrong: it sold in early 2018, for $65,000,000. (2006 purchase price: $14,500,000.) I’m not saying Kink.com didn’t make lots of money in porn, but this makes it look like a wildly-successful real estate business to me!
But I got ahead of myself. Backtrack to 2015 or so, when nobody much was making any money in porn. Everybody was grasping at crazy straws like remaking themselves as “lifestyle brands” — this was the brutal year when even Playboy briefly flirted with the notion of abandoning nudity because they were bleeding losses and couldn’t get any social media traction due to #pornocalypse anti-nudity policies everywhere.
One strategy, widely adopted by the few remaining big porn companies, was to take all their little porn sites (and everything left was little compared to previous years) and shovel them together into package deals. “10, 20, 30 sites for one low subscription price!” Those were the shouty offers, and to this day they remain the industry’s default value proposition. Some of these offers — if they are backed by a company that’s still actively producing a wide variety of porn — are very good offers indeed.
But that’s not even close to the whole megillah. Every test shoot, abortive site concept, and side project that never saw release — why not throw that in? Stuff that only ever got sold via their Kink On Demand porn-by-the-shoot product, that goes in. If it’s got a shoot ID in their shoot database, there’s really no reason not to throw it into the final product. And then, icing on the cake — why not let other porn companies into the action? I don’t know the details of their cross-licensing deals, but apparently it’s not hard to cross-license kinky porn from other companies and make that available too. (Presumably the back-end-software tracks views/consumption and compensates the original owners on some sort of negotiated pay-per-view basis.)
The end result? A product called Kink Unlimited. It rolled out in beta in 2016. The price point has fluctuated a bit, but it’s currently about forty bucks a month. That’s the base price. Sales — usually around various national holidays — can dip quite a bit cheaper. It’s also the case that if you’re willing to prepay for six or twelve months at a time, the monthly cost drops radically. Whichever price point you go for: for your money, you get access to a fucking ludicrous amount of porn.
Kink.com no longer makes any serious effort to estimate how much porn you get; the various banners and bullet lists don’t get updated regularly. “Over 70 channels” is their current claim — where a “channel” is code for a former site, or for a collection of content licensed from some third party. They say “Over 10,000 hours of HD video” — and they’ve been saying that for quite some time; I’m sure it’s rather more by now. “Over 12,000 shoots” — likewise. “Over 2,000,000 photos” — that number has not been updated since perhaps 2016. You get the idea. You get a shit ton of porn for your monthly Kink Unlimited subscription!
But friends, we did not get to “here” without some growing pains. The consolidation was painful.
Consider what the Kink.com porn site landscape looked like in 2015. They had thirty or more kinky porn sites, each on its own domain. Many of them were closed, or at least moribund, not being updated, with discount-priced access to stale archives. They had millions of affiliate links scattered all over the web (using at least three generations of different link structures) belonging to a bunch of affiliates most of whom where no longer active, due to the overall decline in the online porn business. They had millions of expensive “hosted galleries” — free porn, on their servers — to support those mostly-out-of-business affiliates and a bunch of freeloading porn surfers. And it was a world where the conventional wisdom was that the future was video, video, nothing but video. Google was giving all the search listing to porn tube video pages. Still porn photos weren’t appearing in search engine results anywhere in the top results (they still aren’t) because “the time the surfer spends on the page” is considered a powerful page quality factor by Google.
How in the nine frozen hells was Kink.com supposed to transition this mess into a single subscription offering under the Kink Unlimited banner?
In the event, they went with the Leroy Jenkins strategy:
That’s right. In June of 2016, they just burned it all down.
Hosted galleries? Gone. All the old legacy affiliate links? They mapped a few of them, but most of them broke. Gone. Those two million photos? It’s the age of video, we don’t need ’em. “Only…a small portion of our members use or appreciate them.” Gone. (Fortunately, the legacy photo collection did come back after about six months, although new shoots are variable; some sites don’t produce many more than the handful they need to show for free on the shoot promotional page.)
Needless to say, I found all this pretty demoralizing. My increasingly urgent (ok, desperate) emails to affiliate support were getting either no answers at all, or snotty “we don’t have the technical resources to address your issues” non-resolutions to my tickets. At one point one tech gave me a tiny cash credit for all the broken links he was refusing to fix, which I calculate was enough to cover about four hours of link repair work at my normal freelance rate. At this point I had something like 270 posts covering the years between 2004 and June 2016, call it an average of 3 links per post, something like 800 links. In excess of 500 of those were broken — either not going to the right place, or not crediting my affiliate account. Virtually none of these were simple, repetitive links amenable to a bulk find-and-replace. It was a fucking nightmare.
It was also too burdensome and demoralizing to fix. I didn’t even try.
What I did do, eventually, is start making new posts about holiday sales. I explained my reasoning here. And I noticed that people were buying, some, the Kink Unlimited product.
It’s a good product. It has kept growing since it was introduced in June of 2016. It’s fucking enormous now.
Finally, during the long holiday sales event that started in December, I bit the bullet and laboriously went through my 270 old posts, rooting out all the old broken links and replacing them with “new” working links. Everything is a Kink Unlimited link now — either to the main site itself, or to one of the channels (really just a themed subpage within the main site, showcasing the content from one of the old branded sites).
The laborious part was the old hosted gallery links. Those hosted galleries are gone. But, for the most part, each of the galleries had 20 pictures, and those same 20 pictures are now the free photos used to advertise the shoot. Most (but not all) the old hosted gallery links had the shoot ID numbers encoded in their URLs. So it was possible — not easy, but possible — to look at those old hosted gallery links, extract a shoot ID number, deduce a modern shoot URL, and edit the old post so that instead of saying “see more pictures in this free hosted gallery” it says “more pictures available with the shoot” or something.
But it took days and days and days. I drank. A lot.
Why did I do it? Honestly, it wasn’t about the money. Porn affiliate sales aren’t much of a thing these days, and what sales there are, come almost always from new posts. I have stats, and they tell me that old posts don’t see much traffic. A few long-tail searches, but the numbers are tiny. Honestly, rationally, leaving the links broken for 2.5 years didn’t cost me much, and leaving them broken forever wouldn’t have cost me a whole lot more.
Part of it was obsessive-compulsive disorder. It bothers me to have a large body of broken links in my archives. (Don’t tell me, I know, there’s still a bunch.)
But part of it was … the successor product is good. Kink.com has built a good thing with Kink Unlimited. All those hundreds of old posts, pointing at sites that no longer exist? I’m proud of those posts, and it’s worth some effort to point them at the closest thing to the proper modern URL.
In June of 2016 when Kink.com went Leroy Jenkins on us all, I didn’t imagine they’d build anything worth linking to. They were a company in crisis, a company in transition. A flock of contractors looking for a formation, with a boss looking for the real estate payout of a lifetime. I did not trust that it would be worth my time to invest in changing out half a thousand links.
It’s still very much my impression that Kink.com is a real estate company with a serious porn hobby. I don’t expect Peter Acworth to walk away from his porn revenue stream — which obviously remains substantial — but I very much doubt that porn is his primary obsession here in 2019. I don’t think it has been his first focus for many years. If he sold the business to MindGeek or another one of the big players, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. But that shouldn’t (fingers crossed) affect subscribers or affiliates too dramatically, at least in the short run. Kink Unlimited produces, licenses, and distributes a colossal volume of iconic kinky porn at a value-package price. It was worth a week out of my life to fix all my broken links. You might find it worth a twenty (or two) to subscribe.
October 2022 update: The Kink Unlimited product has been rebranded as “Kink Prime” and no longer includes any of the gay male content, which has been rebranded and repackaged as a separate subscription product as Kink Men.
So what kind of good shit have my fellow bloggers been publishing since the last time I did a Share Our Shit Saturdays post? It’s my last chance in 2018 to round it all up:
The Rialto Report has issued another set of otherwise inaccessible porn-history magazine scans. This batch is all the issues from 1980 and 1981 of the magazine called… well, it’s complicated: “The east-coast magazine Porn Stars first appeared in mid 1980. It only lasted for four issues before undergoing a name change and becoming Skin Flicks. Skin Flicks was even more short-lived and lasted only two months before it was renamed Starlet. Starlet lasted for four issues, before reverting to the magazine’s original name, Porn Stars, once again.” They sort this sort of curatorial mess out, once, so that nobody like me ever has to worry or wonder about it ever again!
Paltego at Femdom Resource was “flipping rapidly through his Twitter” the other day when he “noticed a domme pitching her ‘selectively crafted artisinal pee'”. It seems he was prepared to mock this as a marketing overreach — and well he might! — but discovered it was a false alarm caused by reading too fast. As you were, torches down people.
Susie Bright’s blog sadly sees little activity these days but she has a gig producing audiobooks for Audible as their Editor at Large. I’m linking to her Top 10 Audiobooks I Produced This Year because of one title described thereon: A Day In The Life Of Marlon Bundo, featuring Vice President Pence’s gay pet bunny. Royalties go to good causes that will piss off annoying people.
STD testing is one of those sensible and virtuous best-practices that everyone always advises without pausing to consider the practicalities. It’s easy to breeze “Get tested, be safe!” but for a lot of people there are barriers. Money is an obvious one for which there aren’t easy answers, but even if you have money or insurance that will cover, there are often surprising obstacles, like doctors who will argue with you, not give you all the tests you need, or engage in sex-negative shaming and gatekeeping behavior that makes it all exquisitely humiliating if not outright impossible. In this post, Rain DeGrey positively reviews an STD testing service that sidesteps most of those problems by letting you go to a blood lab near you and then sending your test results by mail. It won’t solve everybody’s problems, but it’s an approach I hadn’t considered and it sure sounds less daunting than having “that conversation” with your regular provider when they aren’t up to speed on the necessary issues!
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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!
