Can I get a sense-check on something pls? It annoys me when people leave silly jokey comments underneath guest work. I find it belittling and dismissive, and it's rarely (never?) funny enough to justify undermining someone's deeply personal, often vulnerable sexual fantasies.
If it's my work I don't care. If it's a guest, it really fucks me off.
Is it legit that this annoys me, or am I being a humourless cunt?
@girlonthenet I vote "legit annoying" but then I'm the guy who spent the last 22 years moderating away the emotional nine-year-olds who think it's funny to post "Grandma!" in the comments to any porn photo from 1980 or previous. Which is to say I long ago gave myself permission to be as annoyed as I wanna be at any kind of comment humor attempt that's tone deaf or creepy-feeling. Comment jokesters have an absolute duty to not be weird about it!
@geraineon I have been a MilSF fan since the spectrum went from Heinlein's Starship Trooper through Barry Longyear's Enemy Mine all the way to Joe Haldeman's Forever War. And you are not wrong, in the later Baen Books era it has become too much of a haven for foaming xenophobia and racism.
Pornocalypse comes for Google Drive. This appears like it might be the "we classify everything erotic as spam" subvariant that's been growing in popularity lately.
@spielkind For as long as I have been on the internet, there has been a specific type of troll who reacts to any expressed grievance with "What did you expect?" It's trollery because it combines a lie ("if you're mad about the thing you must not have been smart enough to predict the thing") with an assertion-of-superiority dominance move ("smart people like me aren't affected by your grievance because we use better tools or live in a freer place"). Of course you're not sorry; trolls never are.
@spielkind I have been carefully documenting the answers to the questions you ask here -- and specifically with regard to Google's behavior -- for well over a decade, in dozens or hundreds of posts. http://www.erosblog.com/?s=pornocalypse
I'm confident that this device, if it exists at all, is a modern sculpture. But the image has been circulating for more than twenty years, so the notion appeals to somebody. Behold, the steam-powered sex machine!
@gray17 The Prague machine is a different machine -- a whole bunch of the visible mechanical details don't match -- and I'm not sure which one goes with the manipulator/Taylor info. Also remember sex museums have a bit of a rep for including spurious artifacts (like medieval chastity belts) that sell tickets, so caution is warranted. But I'm delighted to have the George Taylor info, even with however many necessary grains of salt. Thank you!
There are vendors selling generative AI to create RFPs. There are vendors selling generative AI to write proposals in response to RFPs. There are vendors selling AI to review those proposals.
I started reading a book on "cult" cinema written by people who worked for TCM Underground and it is just making me sad.
So much is out of print, not on streaming, and barely or not at all available through illicit means.
And these are films that people are writing Books about. What hope does a film that didn't catch the attention of a critic have? (Often, the answer is none!)
@KitMuse@ajroach42 Don't overlook garage sales, estate sales, and especially church rummage sales as a source of obsolete but nearly-free VCRs. $5.00 is a very normal price for a VCR even if it was originally a major brand quality unit.
Today the pornocalypse came for Gumroad, which has been a platform where a lot of erotica and fetish artists could sell their stuff. As of today, all "sexually explicit" material is unwelcome there. A few hasty details, and a side-by-side graphic showing the adult content policy changes in the last 48 hours, are to be found in my ErosBlog post where I document this sort of thing:
@dominaschule I once wrote "the #pornocalypse is an artifact of the prudishness of the rich" (http://www.erosblog.com/2015/11/13/modiglianis-pornocalypse/) but you're absolutely right: the wealthy fucks who drive the pornocalypse aren't phased at all by violence but are deeply squicked by sexual expression. My most lefty friends would argue that wealth is only accumulated through death and violence and although I have some reservations about that, the fact that rich people aren't squicked by violence does seem telling.
Today I learned that a man at an open air auction in a parking lot in Omaha Nebraska bid twenty bucks for a shrink-wrapped pallet of old 35mm movie prints because he wanted a cartoon he could see through the shrink wrap. And that's how he accidentally bought the only known copy of a 100-year-old silent movie called "Pill Poppers" starring film legend Clara Bow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yEeWWuJWAY
Bella Lugosi was apparently so obsessed with Clara Bow that he commissioned an artist to paint a nude portrait of her. But since she didn't sit for the portrait, it doesn't look much like her. Lugosi nonetheless treasured it: