link » » Metro – Public nudity: Can it still shock New York?
An old story about an old question: Public nudity. Personally, I am all for it. It’s interesting to note that most state and national parks do not have strict policies against public nudity. Check the details before stripping in the parking lot, though.
Okay, they’re underwear commercials, but they are hot and humorous underwear commercials.
link » » 33+ Inappropriately Sexy Ads | Bored Panda
I always seem to miss these things when they come around.
link » » 44 Best Condom Ads Ever Created | Bored Panda
Some very ingenious ways to get people to think safe without losing the mood.
link » » Caped Crusaders Face Jell-O Shots in Superhero Crawl | Underwire | Wired.com
In honor of the San Diego Comic-Con. People watch out for these heroes. They defeat their enemies by drinking them under the table. You might wake up with a permanent marker dick on your forehead.
Little Girl paced the window sill. Her tail flicked anxiously. Something outside the window had her attention. Probably a passing leaf, Zeke thought, or squirrel. All Zeke was certain of is that if he looked, he would see nothing. Little Girl was easily entertained for hours by things that long since passed the window. For Zeke, Little Girl’s whip tail was endlessly amusing. Content in the thought that nothing was there, Zeke took another sip of beer and continued to watch the shadows of leaves dance on the wall just beyond the window and Little Girl’s tail.
This Saturday afternoon was warm like a proper Seattle July afternoon. It was a strange summer. Last week, the temperatures barely broke the Seventies. Today, the mercury was passing the Eighty degree mark. Zeke tipped back his bottle one more time to salute this proper July afternoon knowing that next week the whacked-out weather would probably shift to a blizzard. Today, though, Zeke was going to drink beer, read, and bask in the warmth.
It wasn’t long before the quiet afternoon and beer colluded to put Zeke to sleep. His hand slumped and the book dropped to his lap while his chin rested on his chest. His mind turned from the story he was just reading to a place just below waking thoughts. Dreaming for Zeke was a lot like trying to tune into a channel just at the edge of reception. Colors are faded and the image is filtered through static, and sound echoed from the inside of a trash can.
“Zeke.” It was a distant voice broken by static and interference. Zeke turned to locate the source. He couldn’t see anything except the field he was standing in and the tree-line ahead of him. The forest was dense. A steady breeze and high sun cast shadows that moved deep into the wood. It was impossible for Zeke to tell the difference between a moving object from a trick of light.
“Zeke, what are you waiting for? Come along.” The voice was definitely female and made a little clearer by a breeze blowing towards him through the forest. Zeke took a step toward the tree-line, but stopped short. From the woods to his left, an echoing crack like a tree trunk snapping sounded.
“Don’t wait in the open, you idiot. It’s coming.”
Zeke’s heart raced with panic. His feet felt buried.
“Dammit! Move or die!”
The treetops to his left started to tremble faster than the neighboring trees. Zeke turned to his right. When he tried to lift his right leg, Zeke just fell to the ground. Looking back over is shoulder, he saw to treetops nearer the tree-line shaking more. The snapping and creaking sounds were getting louder, nearer. Deep in the shadows, Zeke started to make out a shape. Too large to be real, he thought. His chest heaved and bucked harder. Zeke kicked his legs trying to get them under him so he could bolt towards the voice.
The book tumbled to the floor with a loud dead thud. Little Girl was more agitated than usual. She chattered at something in the trees. In his waking haze, Zeke thought he saw a squirrel sized person. Before his eyes focused, the blur fell from a limb. Little Girl followed with her eyes as it disappeared from Zeke’s view. Convinced that he saw what he saw, Zeke popped out of his chair and stumbled to the window.
Scuttling across the ground to a neighboring tree was a gray squirrel. It’s tail twitched in all directions as it made its ascent up the trunk. The spiraled around the trunk and disappeared. Little Girl stared wide-eyed at the tree expecting that at any moment it to reappear.
“Dammit, Little Girl. You ruined a perfectly good nap.” Zeke snatched Little Girl from the window sill and plopped her in her favorite spot on the couch. She just glared at him and silently added the comment “Kiss my ass, Zeke” by licking her butt.
In our day of fear-the-terrorist, this film will give us a little relief.
link » » Retro Star Wars: PLEASE REBLOG: The original Lars homestead
I can’t believe it!. This set piece from 1977 is still standing. Battered by winds and sand, it still looks out on the horizon the Luke stared towards. Amazing.
I am really very confused by this whole ‘Freedom from Porn” [link] thing that is bouncing around the net. Jobs is telling me that by keeping the iTunes App store free of porn that he is keeping my iPad free from porn.
This is just not true. I have porn movies and images synced to my iPad and iPhone right now. There is a world of porn on the Intertubes. It’s ripe for the picking. Hell, if I’m feeling really literate, I could find myself some public domain porno lit and squirt it through an ePub generating app. Voila! Text smut in iBooks.
What I don’t have are iPhone OS porn apps. And you know what? I really don’t miss them. I sampled a bunch of those apps when they were available in the walled garden. They were tripe. Utter dreck. I did find a couple of date-sim apps that were fun for a run-through, but didn’t hold my interest because they lacked real porn. The rest were just gateways to some porn vendor’s website. “Here’s some samples. Now pay for the full set.” Bah!
Worse than the tease was the quality of the apps. A very small percentage of the apps were written decently or useable for that matter. A lot were fart out of some developers ass as the aftermath of a burrito binge. Because they were dumped into the store as freebies and flooded the market, many of them rose to the top of the charts for no other reason than their download count. What that tells me is that we like porn! Simple.
The push back came in the form of the expulsion of the porn apps from the garden. They were lowering the bar for developers and consumers and providing nothing that couldn’t be delivered via a website. Any web developer worth his or her salt could write a web page for the mobile platform that delivered the same content.
What happens instead? Everyone bitches that Apple is censoring developers and content providers (and there have been legitimate instances [link] & [link]). The blogosphere rippled with indignation. Jobs uttered that he didn’t want porn on the iPhone or iPad.
The statement that he really should have said is that he didn’t want porn in the App Store. Sure it is the only mall in town for iPhone OS apps, but it is his mall after all. Steve gets to decide what he wants to stock the shelves with. I think it reprehensible that there isn’t a way for us to drop apps from other vendors into our Apple branded mobile platforms. When it comes to porn though, the Internet is my oyster.
Addendum: I dropped in on Violet Blue’s site and saw that she was fielding queries regarding this. Here’s my two cents to her.
Okay, here’s the thing that bugs me. One, the Gawker writer admits to having “a Stinger cocktail at [his] side” when he sent his email and the replies and two, well… It was two in the frikkin’ morning! Very few intelligent conversations happen at two AM.
What I don’t get is the big stink. Everyone is blowing this out of proportion. Jobs wants to keep porn out of his store. We have known this for a while. It’s his store (sadly, the only one) and he can stock the shelves how he sees fit. His statement about keeping the device “free from porn” is unsettling, but I think I have shown that there is room for interpretation here.
On the flip-side, the internet is full of porn. The only app needed for that is a browser. Voila! Porn in one palm and yourself in the other. Easy-peasy. Why worry about the availability of porn apps? When there were ‘sexy’ apps in the store, I downloaded several. Most were sub-par and still others were one-trick ponies. I did checkout a couple of dating sims that were fun, but mostly novel and short lived.
There are maybe two types of apps that would be suitable candidates for pursuit. First, sex games: 2+ people playing digital spin the bottle or something like it. It’d be fun, right? Pornographic Scrabble. Strip Boggle. The mind reels at possibilities here. Second, an app that functions as a device controller. With a multi-touch interface, a couple could have a grand time with an iPhone controlled sex toy (just watch out for lube. Apple’s pretty strict about liquid damage).
In the end, we have access to all of the porn out there. Right now, my iPad has 4 adult movies and monster collection of images. Give me public domain pornographic literature and an ePub generator, and I can naughty up iBooks in hot minute. Jobs can rattle his saber, but I have already defeated his intent for the Apple mobile platform.
This PSA from the Adult Entertainment Trade Association looks like it could be broadcast during primetime. There is nothing offensive about it. If the volume was turned down and this was presented to the unsuspecting and prurient, no one would guess that these ‘performers’ were porn actors. Most could be any Valley neighbor. Maybe Lisa Ann would stand out. (Those lips look ready to pop. I wanna tie them into a balloon poodle.) The word ‘arouse’ is only used once during the entire 35 sec. spot. It is a classy PSA that humanizes the personalities behind the screen makeup.
It reminds me that there are thousands of people behind and in the scenes that make adult films. The PSA gives them an unadulterated face. However, it is attempting to guilt me into something – not to steal porn. At this point, my illicit porn downloads have shrunk considerably. There are thousands of websites that offer freebie galleries and trailers. Who needs a magazine or DVD to get off anymore? Go by any adult site and you’ll get enough freely accessible content to put a satisfied smile on your face. Why steal?
In my nearly 40 years, I have consumed a lot of porn. To be honest, most of it was stolen. Hell, my first nudie mags were stolen from my step-father’s and dad’s secret stashes. (Hint to fathers: there is no such thing as a ‘secret stash.’ You might as well keep the respectable porn out in the open.) It’s a right of passage. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it is correct behavior. Any thievery hurts someone. Ask my step-father. He found pages missing from his stash. None-the-less, a precedent is set early in our porn consumption histories: Stolen porn is sweet because it is forbidden.
Eventually, I grew out of stealing the pages. Instead, I bought my own copies and kept subscriptions to Penthouse and Playboy. Hell, I even own a few DVDs. The amount of content I own does not substantially outweigh the illicitly acquired content scattered among hard drives and discs, but I did pay at one time. Then I got a computer. It opened a world of stashes to me. People shared everything that they could transcode and scan. A computer user is like a kid working as night watchman in a candy store. There will be half empty jars by the morning.
I quickly discovered USENET and alt.binaries. After USENET, web sites began to pop up. In the early days, image quality was crappy. Especially true for video. This wasn’t a deterrent, though. Hell, I cut my porn chops on scrambled Playboy channel. (I’m still a little turned-on by the moaning sounds of squiggly discolored video.) As long as AOL let me keep my connection up, I downloaded images. Soon the hard drives and Zip cartridges filled to capacity. Thank the Engineers for burnable compact discs!
In the meantime, the adult entertainment industry had the high ground. They could sell to customers a better quality viewing experience. Print and video was far superior to anything that the early internet had to offer. The producers and distributors still think this is true. In the meantime, the same industry has shifted to digital image and audio for all of their recording needs. (Huh, do I smell irony?) The producers and distributors still think that print and DVD is superior to their online counterparts.
It isn’t! Honestly folks, it isn’t. If the main capture methods are digital to begin with, then the highest fidelity will be preserved by the digital product. Simple math. DVDs use a highly compressed video codec. Blu-Ray media preserves more fidelity by using a lower compression scheme. This compression scheme also makes great video output for streaming and digital download. And print porn only has retro aesthetic going for it in comparison to digital images.
So why all of the thievery? It comes down to stashability (feel free to use the word). My dad’s stash was in the garage. Imagine the quiet footsteps as he went to take a peak at his latest issue. With digital porn, we can secret our stash away somewhere on a hard drive. Give a folder some innocuous name like “Architectural Erections” and quietly build a collection. No more sneaking out to the garage.
The thievery came in at the point that good quality digital porn was being collected and distributed by ambitious and generous collectors. They knew that the original producers and distributors would balk at the idea of making their products available via the Internet. So the collectors took it upon themselves to scan their personal collections. In the beginning, it wasn’t thievery. It was commodities exchange.
The digital era has banged the crap out of the media industry. Then again, most in the media (not just porn, but all media) looked at the internet as a hobbyists’ playground. It would never supplant the big producers and distributors. No. People would always come back to paper and tape. It’s an arrogance built on history. Moreover, that arrogance is killing the industry. Not only does the industry think that people want to collect hard media (he said ‘hard’), but they also think that people want the same scenarios and personalities. It’s just not true.
I know people that want their porn to have a decent story (weird, right?); and still others just want the scenes between the dialogue. The internet provides both without tying anyone to a single product. Somebody will want to buy a whole video. Other’s will prefer to stream just a few minutes of their favorite combination of partners. Instead of spending time trying to convince me not to steal content, the talent should be making an effort toward getting the producers and distributors to look at the viability of the Internet.
One of the things that could be looked into is creating higher quality content. Duh! The Internet has created a cottage adult entertainment industry. Anyone with a digital camera and some tech savvy can create a video or photo collection. It’s just easy. Models and performers have been hurt most by this. What was once a fairly tight knit group has now exploded into everyone’s neighbors. What has happened is that quality has bottomed out. It is a homogenized mess of flat lighting, bad audio, poor dialogue, and weak poses and sets. There is very little that is exciting.
The creators have seen this and have put models and performers over the barrel. Much of the talent has had to cut their performing rates to bare minimums. I worked with a Playboy model for crying out loud! If a crappy photographer like me can get a few hours with a model of that caliber, what does that say about the industry?
Big Media! Yeah, you. Pay your talent! They are hanging their asses out there and deserve better.
Cultivate talent. If you want to differentiate your content from the rest of the porn noise, then make sure that your talent is getting the support they need to improve their skills. Talent isn’t born. It is refined. So much crap is made that it will be easy to rise above. You just need to make sure that the premiums that your are charging for content are worth it to the customer. That value is seen in the quality of product your talent produces.
This also means that you should cultivate variety. Boy, I can’t stress that enough. Most of us are tired of seeing the same Barbie and Ken doll actors in your photos and videos. They just don’t titillate us anymore. We are more interested in people that we could possibly meet in a bar or live next door. Their accessible and usually not augmented by some prosthetic implant.
Here’s an example of what I mean. I resent that I have a subscription to Penthouse. Nothing in that magazine speaks quality to me anymore. All around, they have found people to work for the least amount of money and it shows. The models have interchangeable parts. (I suspect the PH is using Real Dolls.) The photography looks like it was done by Olin Mills Studio. And the sets look like the left overs from the 90′s. All around, blech. PH gets a quick thumbing on it’s way to the recycling bin.
Adult Entertainment Industry, I really do want you to succeed. At this point, I am more of a troll than a thief. I would like to be a customer. Just give me quality, and I’ll open my wallet. Honestly, I will.
Okay, in a world of dime a dozen pop and R&B instant idols, it gets easy to dismiss entire catalogs of music because you feel that nothing great can ever again come out of the morass of sludge dripping from the music factories. Then a random link (MeFi [link]) on the interwebs makes you feel like there is still hope.
Janelle Moráe (like Andre 3000) makes me feel that Pop radio can still pop. What’s even more appealing about Janelle (beyond just her great looks and those eyes – woof!) is that she combines great hooks with killer pipes and insightful lyrics. The kid in me taps his feet and bounces in the chair. All the while, the adult admires the poetry and imagery.
I really do look forward to more from this artist. Just loaded into my iPhone Metropolis : The Chase Suites [iTunes].
If you think I’m a nut, then just give these videos a look-see.
