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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "rule 34"
June 25th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Remember last week when I blogged about rumors that Google was disabling certain shortlinks built using the Goo.gl link shortener, if the link targets were porn sites? Well, thanks to a pair of tweets from Rain DeGrey attempting to share a photo from HardTied.com, right now you can see that that little chunk of the #pornocalypse in live action. Here are the tweets:
And sure enough, if you click the goo.gl link in that first tweet, right now Google is serving you this instead of the photo Rain linked to:
The only sentence in the two policy links Google offers that seems even remotely relevant is this one: “Do not use this service for spamming or linking to content that may harm other users.”
The modern state of Google’s anti-spam software: there’s a rule in there that assumes that porn and spam are the same thing. Don’t be evil? My ass.
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August 26th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
There’s a certain resonance with current affairs in this bit of internet art, at least the way I’m interpreting it:
Found here, and the artist appears to be “fleatrollus”, about whom I could discover little.
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April 20th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
My sporadic series in honor of ErosBlog’s upcoming tenth anniversary continues. We already did 2002 and 2003, now here are some of the “best of” posts from 2004:
- “If you don’t love pussy THIS MUCH…” Dumb young men.
- Definitely the highlight of 2004 for me was when The Nymph and I had our first visit. I’d been lonely for a long time before that. I don’t know if anybody but me ever got the joke where I linked a .wav file of Gerald Ford saying “Our long national nightmare is over.” But it still makes me grin! The Nymph In My Net: Oh What Fun
- Eight dollars very well spent. Funny thing, this handy kitchen tool vanished from our lives quite soon thereafter, and was never seen again! The Nymph In My Net: Ticklish
- Remember when sex bloggers were such hot media properties that tabloid reporters were going around offering cash money for tips that would help them identify the anonymous ones? Kind of funny how quaint that seems now, but it wasn’t funny to the (mostly female) bloggers who were the targets, back in the day: Tabloid Sleaze Emails
- All these years later and I still can’t think of a better example of why “I read about it on the internet” is such an insufficient justification for trying out a new idea: “Honest, Officer, It Was Marital Advice I Read On A Blog”
- Men and women. I think it’s Samuel Johnson I’m plagiarizing from when I say “two species divided by a common language.” I’m moved to steal that joke by this post featuring a woman fretting incomprehensibly over the aesthetics of blowjobs: The Blowjob Letters: A Correspondence With Aliens
- Remember that innocent age when it was actually news that the laws designed to protect children were being used to punish and stigmatize them, instead? Sadly, these days this is just routine, it doesn’t even make headlines: 15 Year Old Girl Criminally Charged For Self Abuse
- Sometimes guys can be real dicks. But sometimes they just need to be educated: A Basic Rule For Gentlemen
- All these years later, I still can’t believe somebody actually complained that “My child’s head literally exploded.” Kid Views Oprah, Head Explodes
- Sometimes in writing this blog I’ve managed to be controversial in ways I never intended. For instance: Markets In Sex, Redux
- This post is noteworthy because it’s the first appearance of what I’ve since learned to call Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: Why Blogging Services Suck
- This post features one of the most memorable comments ever left on ErosBlog: The Price Of Anal Sex
- To date, this remains the only pop-fiction discussion of prostate milking that I’ve ever encountered: Half-Cocked Canadian
- I think I should have titled this one “Teddy Bears And Hookers.” What I actually called it: Tales From The Nevada Desert
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November 20th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
I’ll cap off this series of posts on making your own with a little practical, if perhaps boringly technical, advice about tools you can use to make your experience as creator go well.
On things everyone ought to get a little familiar with is WordPress, exceptional blogging software, some version of which powers both ErosBlog and EroticMadScience. Most hosting companies make WordPress installation available directly from your control panel, so if you set up your own domain it will be sitting there waiting for you as soon as you’re up and running. In thirty years of working with computers I’ve had few technology experiences as agreeable as being a WordPress user: it installs in seconds and if you want, you can be up and publishing to the world in minutes. You can customize it and make a really good-looking site in hours, so if you follow Bacchus’s First Rule of the Internet and start making your own on your own site, I’d say this is definitely the way to go.
An option now available in WordPress that makes it an especially good tool for creators is that not only can you use it to publish to the universe, you can also create private, password-protected multi-site blogs by using a few simple plugins. These make splendid collaboration tools: you can, if you want, create a blog that is just for you and a single artist, which might sound silly but actually allows you to see a commission develop over a series of posts from initial script and visual references through pencil sketches and other drafts (which can be accepted or critiqued in comments) to delivery of finished product: the whole thing laid out right in historical order on a page, which is both useful as a means for both you and your collaborators to learn and creates something that can be quite gratifying to look back upon as well.
For writing tools that go beyond the capabilities included in WordPress or ordinary word processors you might want to look into a product called Celtx, which I’ve been using for a few years now. Celtx is media production software which you can use to create beautifully and correctly formatted and organized screenplays, stage plays, storyboards, and comic book scripts. You can download the basic version and use it by yourself — this version is available for free. It can also be used as a collaboration tool if you subscribe to something called Celtx Studio. The studio is subscription-only, but it does allow you (and people you’re working with) to work on common projects anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
Just think what she could have accomplished if she had had Celtx!
If you want to make your own e-books, look into a tool called Calibre. This is powerful and free e-book software which not only allows you to keep track of your e-books on your own computer, but it has a conversion utility which enables you to take, say, the beautiful archive of comic books pages you’ve created and turn them into a compact file useful for other people, like a .mobi file for people to read on their Amazon Kindles (or other e-book readers — it handles many), or a single neat PDF for them to read on their desktops.
For managing images, whether re-sizing, cropping, watermarking, etc., I strongly recommend an image tool called GIMP. This usually comes pre-installed in most Linux distributions I’ve seen, and there’s also at the very least a version available for Windows as well. It is very much the publisher’s friend, and like so many good things in life, it is also available for free.
Finally, while we’re talking about free, those of you who have ever been over to EroticMadScience might have noticed that it is liberally bespangled with little icons that look like this:
These are Creative Commons Licenses. You might or might not be interested in them, but if you see your work as being a form of hedonic philanthropy especially, please consider using them. They in effect give you a way of allowing other people to share and enjoy your work, with requirements for attribution and permission for commercial use or the creation of derivative works (or not) at your option. If you want your work to spread far and wide, and want people to feel comfortable that they are in the right in doing so, the Creative Commons license gives you an excellent tool for doing that.
So now you have tools: go forth and make something!
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November 13th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
So you’ve found someone you’d like to work with out there on the wide wild web. What now?
The first question worth asking yourself is, how do I present myself? A good place to begin would be to have a public presence where you can show a potential partner that you’re for real and what you’re into. There are many ways that you might do this, but I happen to think that setting up a site of one’s own and doing a little writing is an excellent start.
Write down what turns you on. Try to make that into a vision and publish. Don’t be shy. You can use a pseudonym if you want (I do!). About two years ago, after having diverted myself with writing a sequence of weird and porny screenplays that I’m pretty sure will never be acted out in front of a camera, I sat down and wrote an illustrated essay about what I really liked. This essay became A Thamatophile Manifesto, and together with that strange screenplay material, became the foundation for the site Erotic Mad Science. Then I started blogging about what I was into, writing posts as simple as “Look! A concept or image makes me squee (even if it makes others squick)!” or “Wow — here’s a provocative historical forerunner of one of my own kinks!” The useful outcome of all this activity (which, okay, maybe I took a little far) was that when I started looking for creative partners to commission I had a rich bed of source material to point to and say: here is what I am into — do you think you’re sufficiently interested in it to want to join me in working on it?
And I do think it is important for your creative partners to, in at least some degree, share your enthusiasms. If they do, they’ll be much better able to understand what it is that you’re asking them for when you place commissions. The art they work with you on creating will be sexier, because they’ll engage and have some of themselves in it. And they’ll be able to come up with ideas that contribute positively to the projects you work on.
A note about setting up sites and publishing. There are tons of places on the Internet that will allow you to do this for free, but as a general matter I endorse Bacchus’s First Rule of the Internet: “Anything worth doing on the Internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.” Anyone who’s done anything with erotica for any length of time knows horror stories: material deleted, accounts canceled, creators banned. You and your material are much safer if you set up your own domain. Sure, there are some up-front costs, but it’s easy to find someone out there who will register your domain and host your site and leave you alone as long as you pay the rent, which will work out to pennies a day if you get anything remotely like a good deal. With tools like WordPress available (for free!) it is easy to be up and running with a good-looking, customized site in a few hours. And of course, you will look a lot more for real if your domain name reflects your Internet identity.
Approach with respect. If you’ve found someone whose work you like and who want to commission, get in touch. Explain what you like about their work and inquire whether they might be interested in accepting a commission. There’s nothing rude at all about this. Remember: creators who publish on the Internet are out there because they want to be found, and in general, they want to hear from you. One good thing to try, especially if you have a site of your own, is to ask permission to publish an image or story-excerpt or whatever of theirs on your site (with attribution, of course). This is an effective way to communicate your admiration of their work, and as long as the request is reasonable, they will generally say yes.
When it comes matters of money and commission cost, be courteous but matter-of-fact and businesslike. Other creators have opportunity costs for their time and just like you they have to eat and pay the rent, and generally they’ll be able to tell you what they need to charge to do a given piece of work.
Don’t be afraid to ask in detail for what you are looking for. Here is an example of where it pays to have done preparatory work for what you’re into, because it will help another creator figure out what you might like, but at the same time, don’t be afraid to write a detailed script. (Your preparatory work writing on your own site will help a lot here to, because you’ll get in the habit of describing what you like in detail.) When working with a visual artist, use of visual references is also an excellent idea. For example, when working with Lon Ryden on the character design for Bridget O’Brian (one of the four adventuresses in the current Tales of Gnosis College story Study Abroad), I suggested basing her on Clara Bow. (A 1920s screen goddess not too much remembered today, except perhaps for some astonishing rumors which turn out not to be true.)
Lon’s artistry then resurrects the 1920s sex bomb as an early 21st century college student (how’s that for practicing mad science?):
Ask for what you want, and more often than not, you’ll come away happy.
Finally, and I think centrally important, remember that your creative partners are partners, not servants, and that this is true even when you’re paying them. If you’ve selected them well, they are people who are sympathetic to what you’re into. They’ve read what you’ve written and looked at visual images that turn you on and they have taken on your projects. Remember that they are creators in their own right. If you trust them, they can and will contribute to what you’re doing. They will have ideas about how to do things. You don’t necessarily have to accept them, but remember that they are often very good at what they do and often might think of ways to do it better. Take them seriously. Among the more gratifying experiences you can get as a co-creator is working with someone who has become sufficiently into what you’re doing that you no longer always have to write a detailed script or commission: you can just outline it and have gratifying results come back. You can get to that point, but you need to establish respect and trust, which you easily do if you use decency and common sense and keep the maxim of this paragraph in mind.
You can do it. I know you can.
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September 3rd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
You know those buff military-looking guys who are always going out in the woods. A lot of time they’re even on the government payroll when they do it. They say it’s for “military exercises” or “a training retreat” or “team building exercises” or something sensible-sounding like that. But what are they really doing out there in the woods, where there are no women and the normal rules don’t apply?
You know it — they’re playing capture games. Chasing, hiding, ambushing, wrestling, winning, losing, stripping, getting tied up:
And yeah, the losers pay quite a forfeit too. You know exactly what I mean. Funny thing is, they tell themselves this is not gay. To them, it’s just how you tell the winners and losers apart.
Picture credits: Bound Gods. More in this shoot.
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November 4th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Here’s something you don’t see every day: Superman getting his knob polished.
Parody fan art by Nikochan009.
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