A Look Back At 2023
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024 -- by Bacchus
A few days ago on New Year’s Eve, Girl on the Net posted a question on Mastodon, asking sex bloggers to reply to her with a link to the post/story we’re most proud of from 2023. It reminded me that I hadn’t done any sort of retrospective, and I didn’t have time to do one before 2023 gasped its last. Instead I gave her a quick answer, along with this disclaimer:
Not a great year for my blog writing. I’ve been demoralized by the degraded state of the open adult web and the usual #pornocalypse difficulties around linkage and search and traffic and attention and money. For me it was a year of modest image posts with light commentary.
Every word is true, but upon reflection, it’s not hard to come up with a double handful of posts I’m proud of. So here’s my 2023 “ErosBlog in Review” notable posts list, a couple of days late.
- Let’s start with the post I chose to respond to GotN’s Mastodon question. I told her “my true blogging joy these days is surfacing vintage pop culture that illuminates the ties between historical and modern sexual culture.” Daddy Doms And Sugar Daddies features a 1950 magazine article I found about sugar daddies and their sugar babies. There were so many more age play tropes in two short pages than I ever would have expected to see 75 years ago. Plus, the post includes a bonus meme!
- My post The Free Love Bus Hasn’t Stopped Here In Years is a short post, but personally notable for me because I finally managed to capture in two sentences something I’ve been thinking about since the 1980s. Specifically, the complex and highly specific grief that people my age felt when the promised benefits of the sexual revolution were snatched away by the AIDS crisis during the few years while we were old enough to anticipate them but not yet old enough to have enjoyed them.
- If 2023 was, for me, mostly a year of “modest image posts with light commentary”, I still managed to find some delicious images. He Chose Ass is the post with the modern commercial porn photo I most enjoyed sharing in 2023.
- By far the most personal post I wrote in 2023 was She Balked At The Zipping. It’s about an unusual moment of clarity during the beginning of the end of my first serious relationship, back in the 20th century.
- My first post in 2023 turned out to be thematically important to a big story for erotic art this year, which of course is the rise of generative art made with AIs trained (controversially) on large databases. On January 2 I posted Sticky Jessica Alba, in which post I revisited a link from twenty years previous when ErosBlog was young, and celebrity fakes were made the old-fashioned way, in Photoshop. In January I speculated a little bit about the new AI tools, but by mid-summer, I finally got my hands on some that were simple enough for me to play with them, leading to a short series of posts like Generative Art: Alien Sex Toy Shop 2 with a few of my own primitive efforts using these tools.
- In July, I realized that an awful lot of artists have played with the erotic implications of Snow White and her seven horny dwarven roommates, so I did a Snow White And Lusty Dwarves Roundup post of examples that had previously appeared on ErosBlog.
- One of the simple but time consuming post types that I once hoped to do very much more of here on ErosBlog is curation of vintage gems from 20th-century pulps and men’s magazines. These are fun to do but when I give them the full treatment, cropping and cleaning the imagery for blog presentation and converting machine OCR results into clean text for searchability and ease of reading, one of these posts is often most of a day’s work. If I had more Patreon support I could and would do a lot more of these and less random gig work. Instead I’ve only been doing these when the subject matter particularly delights me, such as this failed 1970s effort to boot up a floating sex club aboard a Dutch cruise ship: All Aboard The Sex Boat: Atlantis.
- Another curation post that I couldn’t resist doing involved a presumed-fictional “feature” in True Men Stories magazine about a notional WII-era sea-going bordello in the Pacific. The 1970s headline was The WW II Cruise Of The Ship Of Sex and the post is Tramp Steamer And Floating Bordello.
And now, onward further into 2024!
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