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The Sex Blog Of Record
Thursday, February 28th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I’m going to be self-indulgent today (Ha! Don’t ask about all the other days…) and post some words about the reputed death of blogging. Karl Elvis has been a friend of ErosBlog since forever, and here’s what he had to say about six weeks ago, on the occasion of his blog’s ninth anniversary:
As social media finally got a real foothold, blogging crashed and burned.
That probably makes sense. Blogging was a fad, something of an era; every fucking person on the internet seemed to have a blog for a six month period there. And then they didn’t. Abandoned blogs are the ghost town of the decade; people will tour them some day, dodging tumble weeds and spam links and stealing mementos.
Actually they won’t. Because unlike ghost towns, blogs leave nothing behind but empty hearts and minds. No blood no guts no brains at all.
There are exceptions, obviously. Great writing happened, and is still happening, in the context of blogs. No, the issue wasn’t a lack of content, it was the opposite. It was that signal-to-noise problem that chases us around the internet; when something works, really works, it has the life span of a snowflake. Perfect, brilliant, ephemeral, and then gone, lost in the waves of it’s own success. The sheer mass of irrelevancy and stupidity swamped the goodness and buried it.
But you know that. And anyway you’re not reading; who reads blogs anymore?
I wonder if Karl hasn’t accidentally put his finger on one of the reasons why I’ve recently gotten weirdly obsessive about tracking down image relationships and attributions. Some people do still read blogs, or you wouldn’t be reading this. But I never did any long-read “great writing” for writing’s sake; I was always about the “hey, look at this!” with my value added being a snarky sentence or at most a few paragraphs of commentary. On a bad day, it can look (and feel) like I’m just doing Tumblr cosplay in a costume made out of stale WordPress; what makes it a good day is the feeling of value added, of context provided. Boost signal; filter noise.
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
One of the many ways Bruce Sterling is brilliant is his ability to churn out useful analogies. In this interview he explains the ephemeral nature of blogging in a way that resonates strongly with me:
I’m a blogger and I’m very keen on randomly-assembled narrative chunks, but I’ve always known that blog content has a short shelf-life. It’s like doing stand-up comedy.
Just so. I take him to mean that a blog post has a moment and a context and an intended audience. Even if it “works” on the moment it’s delivered, it isn’t designed or intended to make sense or offer amusement a year later. Sometimes, though serendipity, it may; but that’s neither the intention nor (usually) the outcome.
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Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Erosblog’s first post went live on October 3, 2002: Is This Sex Blog Thing On? That was ten years ago, which makes us like 70 in dog years (or internet years, take your pick). Surprisingly enough, there have been 3,652 posts since then; as close to a post a day as anybody could want. Plus, 16,772 non-spam comments. Thanks to everybody for reading and participating!
I have to shout out for the three other sex bloggers who were at it before I was and who are still at it; there may be others, but these are the ones I know about and remember, who were there when I started, who I found early on, who have kept at it, and who are still here. Violet, BJ, Daze — it’s been a hell of a decade. There’ve been dozens who came later, who told us (and the world) they knew more about how to do it, who did it harder or louder, or who (maybe) did it better. But we are still here, and most of those others are not. Survival is the ultimate measure of success, no?
I also have to acknowledge Indie Nudes — an ancient and venerable “list of links” that has survived and thrived like some ancient dinosaur turtle. Lists of carefully chosen links were the way the web was organized, for a few years a long long time ago, before blogs and even before decent search engines (*cough* AltaVista *cough*). So, when Erosblog was pretty new, Indie Nudes put me on their list. They’ve kept me there ever since, and they send surprising traffic; nobody but Google sends me more. I don’t know who runs it or why they keep doing it, but thanks!
There have been lots of changes since ErosBlog was a mere puppy. The architecture has changed a bunch of times; when I started, I used a desktop blogging client for Windows called simply “BLOG”. Eventually I updated to Graymatter, but I was late to the party and its evolution was slowing down right at a time when challenges (especially in the area of comment spam) were speeding up. WordPress was the next obvious step, and by now (how many templates later?) it’s such an old friend as a content management system that I use it for everything, even things that look nothing like blogs. If all a man has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…
Just as many changes in my life. When I started, I was single and lonely, and I had a professional job, with a tie and a (very small) office that put me one tiny step away from cubicle hell (just outside my door). I quit that job (for the second time) just days after ErosBlog went live, when the boss who was keeping the place afloat took a political appointment. I’ve been self-employed (at various things) ever since, and I couldn’t even tell you whether I still own a tie; if I do, it’s in a box in deep storage somewhere. Like most people who aren’t part of the metastasizing financial-services-and-megacorps conglomerate behemoth that’s eating the world, I’m poorer than I was ten years ago and a lot poorer than I was when I was lucky to be climbing the inflating side of the last bubble. But I’m living somewhere they can’t take away from me, I’ve got a good woman who loves me slumbering in our bed as I type this, I’ve got a big dog (who also loves me) slumbering protectively just inside my front door, and there’s pease porridge in my crockpot that’s been simmering fragrantly all night with a chopped onion and a hint of cumin. So life is excellent by any reasonable measure.
Changes in the sex blogging world? Wow. Blogging was a thing, had been for a couple-few years, when ErosBlog got going. But sex blogging as a category? I wasn’t first to do it, not by a long shot; but I think I may have been the first person to put “Sex Blogs” in my sidebar as a blogging category. Eventually it got real popular and it seemed like everybody was doing it. Even the SEO spam robots were doing it for awhile; they’d scrape actual blog posts, mash them up and change a few words out with a thesaurus program, and then bung them back up on the web somewhere as bait for GoogleBot. Now, of course, we’re on the downside of the slope; blogs are old and boring, more “stable place to put my essays” than “exciting community where I make my connections”. The web itself is changing in the era of Facebook and Twitter and the smartphone and the ecosystem of apps; people are looking at it in different ways, on smaller screens, from more places, in shorter bursts, if somebody tweets a link perhaps. Links in sidebars are as dead as webrings as a way of moving traffic around, to the point where a lot of things-that-look-like-blogs don’t link out to anybody at all and sidebars are going away as people do mobile-friendly redesigns. People still stare at screens for amusement, but almost everything about the process (when they do it, how they do it, how they decide what to stare at, how they find what to stare at) has changed.
Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.
In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
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Friday, November 18th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
There are a lot of sex bloggers who try to maintain at least a bit of anonymity. One of the non-obvious ways you can slip up and compromise your privacy is to use the same Google Analytics account on multiple blogs. This article explains.
Verb. sap., right?
Thursday, April 7th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Now this is mommy blogging I can get behind:
How Great Sex Made Me A Good Mom
That’s the name of the blog, not a post title. My favorite moment in a fast pass down the first page: asking the teenage son, as surreptitiously as possible (not very), how to find the cable channel with the good fucking music:
One night when we tired as usual but quite desperate to be each other’s arms I just really needed romance with the sex. I couldn’t take one more minute of quiet humping in the dark! I knew that I had seen some station that played many music videos in a row with Marmar. I tried to find it on demand with no luck. All the ones I saw were one video at a time. So I had to actually get up and put a robe on to ask him, just oh so casually, like I wanted to educate myself about R&B video on a random tuesday night at 10:55PM, “Honey what was that station that had the videos?”
“music choice”
“No not that one. The one with many playing a row.”
“BET Midnight Love….Where did you hide the Oreos?” Him yelling.
“Don’t wake up the boys. Behind the soup. …THANKS…” me half yelling down the stairs.
And that’s how we started having sex to the light and sounds of Midnight Love on BET on demand.
Friday, May 21st, 2010 -- by Dr. Faustus
Browsing through the big, big web today I came across an article about the sorry state of journalism by Maureen Tkacik in Columbia Journalism Review. Not ErosBloggable? Well, it does key into a theme Bacchus has explored here before, about how old media is screwed. Tkacik was working a “youth marketing” beat and managed to turn up the following story.
One of the companies in my “youth” sector, the mall chain Abercrombie & Fitch, made a weekly practice of purging its stores of hourly sales associates it deemed to be less than, in corporate parlance, “brand positive.”
The purgees were identified, a former regional manager explained, every week at corporate headquarters in New Albany, Ohio, during a conference call held specifically to critique photographs taken that week by the chain’s hundred or so district managers of all the “brand representatives” they had encountered in visits to their stores. The photos were uploaded onto some sort of company intranet, but my source told me his boss preferred printing them out on paper, so he could circle flaws, draw mustaches, scrawl racist epithets, etc. The source said braces, minor breakouts, the faintest possibility of weight gain, showing up to work in a prior season’s ensemble, wearing shoes that had not appeared on the list of authorized footwear for that season, and/or belonging to an ethnic minority could all be grounds for immediate dismissal from the ranks of Abercrombie & Fitch’s minimum-wage cadre of demand creators.
Not a bad story, no? But word got back to Abercrombie & Fitch’s lawyers and “crisis PR” people and before our intrepid reporter knew it, she was fired.
Must keep the corporate overlords happy, after all.
Looking for work, Tkacik took up a job (part of a bit of freelancing she was doing to try to get a new job) in a rather different kind of workplace.
The stranger thing about phone sex, though, was that the training program was more rigorous and extensive than any I’d encountered in journalism. There was a day and a half in a classroom learning such phone-sex fundamentals as the “hot statement” and the “ego stroke,” daily feedback sessions with supervisors who listened in on calls, a mandatory creative-writing contest for the best Halloween-themed fantasy scenario, refresher courses to hone fluency in more exotic proclivities, individual binders in which we recorded our progress in this stuff and collected, as per instruction, magazine clippings–Penthouse letters, perfume advertisements, etc.–whatever we found erotically inspiring. When my supervisor’s boss learned I was writing a story, he unfurled all the usual legal threats, but when it was published, the company ordered hundreds of reprints to dispense to new hires at orientation. They did not expect you to be some innate phone-sex genius, but they had full faith that you could get immeasurably better, especially if you wanted to, and they genuinely seemed to take it as a given that people wanted to become better at things they did.
I could comment at length, but perhaps I would do best just to refer you to the closing sentiment offered in another old Bacchus post: “Proof, if you need it, that there are still professions in the world where character and reputation matter.”
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Whatever I was expecting from my new Twitter account, I can tell you truly, I did not really anticipate it would be a fertile source of answers for that age-old question: What should I blog about today?
And yet, this morning in my Twitter stream I found the following, any one of which I could churn into a full blog post on a slow day:
- @violetblue asking “wondering: what sex toy changed your life?” My flip-sounding answer (but it’s true!): “WordPress. (And its ancestors.)” The beauty of Twitter is that I can just say that and let people unpack it for themselves, whereas if I said it here, I’d need eighteen paragraphs of exposition. But @MollyRen has part of it: “Sex blogs changed my life. For the 1st time I found out what people were *really* doing, met awesome people through them.”
- @mistressmatisse linking to her Stranger column about shooting for Kink.com The excellent quote I would have used to pad a link-post about this item:
Before we began shooting, I asked Bobbi about her limits. She eyed me a little warily. “Don’t slap me in the face–someone dislocated my jaw that way. And don’t call me a stupid whore or spit in my face.”
I was slightly taken aback. It isn’t that I’ve never done those things. (Except the “stupid whore” part; I don’t like that brand of verbal humiliation.) But I wouldn’t do them to someone I just met unless he or she very specifically asked for that. I suppose it’s different in porn, but I assured her that wasn’t my style of domination.
So Bobbi and I got along just fine.
- @rollertrain (Rollertrain! I’ve missed you terribly since you left us for art school and moved to a not-many-words PG-13 Tumblr…) passing along a link that informed me of a woman who died after elective buttock-enhancement surgery.
- @MollyRen again, this time her profile link: “Stuffies: A blog about food and sex“. Leading directly to a question for Faustus: Do you suppose feederism, with its sometimes interest in controlling body size/shape in a real and concrete way, has anything in common with the fantastical shrinking women and inflation fantasies you’ve blogged about? (And, yes, I’m aware of the awkwardness of specifying “fantastical fantasies” — but how else to contrast a fantasy that cannot come true, from the great many achievable ones?)
All that hit me inside of ninety seconds, whilst I was still blinking the sleep from my eyes. My head, it’s swimming I tell you!
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