Notices by ErosBlog Bacchus (erosblog@kinkyelephant.com), page 2

In the USA before Dobbs, abortion couldn't be outlawed outright, so opponents pioneered ways to make it "impossible but not illegal." Mostly by dreaming up impossible regulations for abortion providers.

This post is not about abortion.

Anti-porn forces are following the same playbook with age verification. AV isn't intended to "protect the children" or whatever. It's impossible to comply; customers won't ID themselves. It's a porn biz killer, and that's its purpose.

#Porn #AgeVerification

I absolutely guarantee that if somebody somehow managed to thread the needle by coming up with a cryptographic protocol and business model that solved all the privacy and security and trust issues in a cheap and easy-to-implement way, the folks who passed the current batch of AV laws would balk, object, and change the laws to forbid it. Because the impossibility is the point of these laws.

Nobody cares how oldsters feel about the slang coinages of younger and cooler people, and that's right and proper.

Nonetheless, I treasure the addition of "yeet" and "rizz" to the American English vocabulary.

#yeet #rizz

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @jon @pluralistic

See also: Never Build Your House On Someone Else's Land

https://www.erosblog.com/2022/02/07/someone-elses-land/

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @jon @pluralistic

I am struck by the sudden realization that Bacchus's First Rule (which I had come to view as increasingly obsolete in the social media age) remains fully operative, inasmuch as "your own server that you control" can now be, or include, a fully-federated social media presence.

https://www.erosblog.com/2013/06/11/bacchus-first-rule-of-the-internet/

#BacchusFirstRule

Our side does misinformation too.

All day my TikTok's been full of something billed as a church choir singing Madonna's blowjob song "Like A Prayer" and people laughing that these Jesus freaks think it's a hymn. (Which it is, sorta; a hymn to cock.)

In truth all of TikTok is reacting to video of a pop music concert in Germany. They know what they're singing along to.

Misinformation can be great fun.

#Misinformation #Madonna #LikeAPrayer #Blowjob #Choir #TikTok #Christians #Cock #Dick #Penis

I'm so out of touch I've spent half of today scratching my head and thinking "So, wait... are people really out there paying for sex work with Venmo? That feels like terrible opsec to me."

#SexWork #SexWorker #Venmo #OpSec

@AnarchoNinaWrites It's not just Republicans working at the tech companies that are putting machine guns on the robot dogs as fast as they can.

@AnthonyJK If my theory of pornocalypse is true, and the things I've read about venture capital involvement in Bluesky are also true, then evolution in a progressive direction on sex work and porn is impossible for them.

Super-summarized: financial inflection events are the main driver of pornocalypse. Venture capital always has one eye on the exit. Which means a VC-funded company will always tend to get more pornocalyptic, not less.

I say all this in abstract, I've never looked at Bluesky.

"Start archiving shit now." This applies to your favorite porn, your adult discussion boards, all the media in your online community spaces. But especially porn that's important to you. You need to have it on your own storage media. There's no guarantee that online adult stuff (or the internet itself) will survive the next four years, Project 2025, random acts of fascism and authoritarianism, whatever. Archive, archive, archive! Become an erotic data hoarder.

#archive #backup #porn #fascism

I just pulled a 1.75l bottle of Kentucky Gentleman bourbon (probably the worst actual bourbon, as opposed to "blended American whiskey", that money can buy) out of my hard times backup liquor cabinet, which is a cardboard box under my desk. I'm actually going to use this shit to make a big jug of punch for later, but I cracked the seal and took a swig right now because why not, it's election day, sodden drunkenness is a tradition as old as the republic.

So that's how my day is going so far!

At the top of any ErosBlog page you'll see a big pair of dice. Click them to see a random article from the EB database (almost 7,000 posts since 2002). I freely admit there's a lot of forgettable stuff in the #ErosBlog archives, but usually when I start clicking the dice it only takes two or three clicks before I find something interesting that I'm proud to have posted. Try it out [link goes to a random post]: http://www.erosblog.com/?random&random_post_type=post

I'm not much of a tin cup rattler, but here's your gentle reminder that Erosblog is partly patron-supported, and even a $1.00 pledge goes a long way to reminding me that people value the work. Thanks, web-friends, for your support! https://www.patreon.com/ErosBlog

@volpeon My editorial-standards rule about login-gated links is that I include them in a post, if at all, only when I'm trying to provide the most detailed and accurate provenance for a thing, and then only if:

1) I'm pretty confident the gated social media link is indeed the true-and-original source; and

2) In the spirit of piracy-is-curation, only if I have *reproduced* the item for posterity before linking to its invisible-to-the-archive-sites gated point of origin.

A fast comment I made on here about evolving public manners reminded me of a 2008 ErosBlog post that dove into how the rules have changed (in less than a human lifetime) on how much violence between strangers is socially acceptable, and for what reasons. Context: an old fart gives a swift kick to a squatting porn model making non-consensual public urination videos:

https://www.erosblog.com/2008/02/09/enforcing-the-social-contract/?refresh

#SocialContract #Violence #Kicking #Public #Boxing #FistFights #PublicUrination #Pissing #Pee #Piss #Porn

Shortly after 9/11 when I first became aware of combat drones (then mostly light RC aircraft firing missiles, usually at the weddings/funerals of the families of supposed enemies of the United States) I had the one obvious thought:

"This Is Fine™ but what happens when the supposed enemies of the United States start DRONING BACK? When tiny drones swarm & shoot bullets at the heads of important personages from six inches away? How will we like it? We will not like it."

I still have this thought.

I felt then, and still feel, as if the early adopters of a dangerous military technology did not give enough thought to the consequences TO THEMSELVES of introducing a technology and thus encouraging several decades of the usual refinement, miniaturization, and encheapening.

I mention this now because I'm having the same thought about another new military technology: supply chain attacks that inject explosives and control systems covertly into the global system of trade in small goods.

20 years after I thought "woah, these drones are going to be an enormous pain in the ass once everybody has them" we are watching a drone-enabled revolution in military affairs unfold in Ukraine/Russia. Give it another 5, 10, 20 years? It's possible that the state monopolies over use of force that enabled/created the Westphalian system of sovereign states will have collapsed under that technological stressor.

Supply chain injection of microexplosives might do the same thing to global trade.

Consider for a moment the nightmare shared so widely by serious computer scientists, who have confronted the fact that it's fundamentally impossible (or at least more difficult than we can manage) to verify what a compiler does, which means that code written in high-level languages (all of it) is deeply untrustworthy.

Now imagine that lack of trust given substance in the physical world. Anything you didn't make yourself might be a bomb, and there's no practical way to check or rule it out.

No, I don't have a snappy conclusion. I'm just thinking "those stupid fuckers have opened a Pandora's Box that could change the world, and I've had this feeling before, and I was right."

Hang on to your asses, comrades. And learn to whittle.