porn – Dan Q

Gamified… Pornography?

This article is probably “safe for work” (depending on your workplace).

It makes reference to a popular pornographic website and the features of that website. It contains screenshots, but the porny bits are blurred. The links are all safe.

Verify your age

After Pornhub introduced age check to comply with the Online Safety Act¹, I figured that I’d make an account to see how arduous and privacy-destroying the process of verifying that I was old enough to see naked people². I thought it would make an amusing blog post.

I felt confident that my stupid name, if nothing else, would guarantee me a hard time with this kind of automated system.

Unfortunately³, it turned out to be super-easy for me to pass the age verification.

I just hit “verify by email” with the third-party age verification tool they use, entered an email address that’s associated with a few online accounts (not even the one I gave Pornhub!), and… everything just worked.

Sooo… this isn’t a blog post about how insurmountable age verification is. This is a blog post about something else I discovered as a result of doing this research: Pornhub has “achievements”!

Achievement unlocked

I was slightly surprised to see how many “social networking”-like features Pornhub accounts have. You can upload a profile photo… you have a “wall” that you can post to, and you can post to other people’s. Your profile (unless you tell it not to) shares which channels you’ve subscribed to, which videos you’ve favourited, and so on.

Who on Earth wants those features? I mean: really? 😅 I consider myself pretty sex-positive, but I’m not sure I’d want there to be a web page with my name, photo, and a list of all my favourite dirty vids!⁴

Anyway… the other thing a Pornhub profile seems to provide is… achievements:

Screenshot showing a popover notification reading 'You just unlocked a new achievement: The Virgin' — Hurrah, I guess? *The Virgin* was easy, at least (snerk), unlike most of the things on my Steam profile.

I’ve only got the one achievement right now, of course, and it’s the one that you get “for free”. So it didn’t feel like I’d earned it.

I suppose I was an actual virgin, once. And I had to prove that I’m a real human to get an account. So… maybe I earned it?

Your profile page encourages you to ‘earn and show off more achievements’. Because, yes, your ‘achievements’ are on your public profile too!

But just stop and think about what this means for a moment. At some point, in some conference room at Pornhub HQ, there was a meeting in which somebody said something like:

“You know what we need? Public profile pages for all Pornhub accounts. And they should show, like, ‘achievements’ like you get for videogames. Except the achievements are for things like how much porn you’ve watched and how often. You can show it off to your friends!”

And then somebody else in the meeting said:

“Yes. That is a good idea.”⁵

If it weren’t for the time-based achievements like ’10 year-old account’, I’ll bet there’d be people competing to speedrun Pornhub.

Complete list of Pornhub Achievements

I’ve reverse-engineered the complete⁶ collection of Pornhub Achievements for you. Y’know, in case you’re trying to finish your collection:

	The Virgin	Congrats! You have accessed your account for the first time! Enjoy the ride on Many Faps Road.
	The Freshman	You have accessed your account for the 10th time! I take it you’ve enjoyed the 9 last times?
	The Sophomore	You have accessed your account for the 100th time! Maximus Fappitus, you’re a true Pornhub warrior!
	The Junior	You have accessed your account for the 500th time! If only you could get air miles for this.
	The Senior	You have accessed your account for the 1000th time! If only you could get air miles for this.
	The Porn Buff	You’ve watched 10 videos – This is just the beginning, trust me.
	The Two Thumbs	You’ve watched 500 videos – Lotion or no lotion, that is the question.
	The Cinephile	You’ve watched 5,000 videos – Be careful, carpal tunnel is a thing.
	The Connoisseur	You’ve watched 50,000 videos – you are a veritable porn expert now.
	1 Year Old Account	Our very first anniversary, I wish us many more!
	2 Year Old Account	Two years of pleasure!
	3 Year Old Account	Three years… Ah! The memories!
	4 Year Old Account	Most relationships don’t even last this long #funfact
	5 Year Old Account	That’s half a decade of watching porn.. woah… that’s impressive.
	6 Year Old Account	I guess we were a match made in heaven. Who would’ve known that 6 years later, you would still be fapping on me.
	7 Year Old Account	No 7 year itch here! Thanks for 7 fappy years
	8 Year Old Account	The Outlook is good: you’ve had 8 magical years on Pornhub!
	9 Year Old Account	In 9 more years, your account will be old enough to view itself.
	10 Year Old Account	You were really ahead of the wave – here’s to a decade on Pornhub!

I have no idea who this feature is “for”. I’d feel the same way if YouTube had achievements, too⁷, but the fact that you can, and by default do, showcase your achievements on a porn site is what really blows my mind.

But maybe they ought to double-down and add more achievements. If they’re going to have them, they might as well make the most of them! How about achievements for watching a particular video a certain number of times? Or for watching videos in each of many different hour segments of the day? Or for logging in to your account and out again without consuming any pornography (hey, that’s one that I would have earned!)? If they’re going to have this bizarre feature, they might as well double-down on it!

I also have no idea who this blog post is “for”. If it turned out to be for you (maybe you wanted to know how to unlock all the achievements… or maybe you just found this as amusing as I did), leave me a comment!

Footnotes

¹ Don’t get me started with everything that’s wrong with the so-called Online Safety Act. Just… don’t. The tl;dr would be that it’s about 60% good ideas, 20% good implementation.

² Obviously if I were actually trying to use Pornhub I’d just use a VPN with an endpoint outside of the UK. Y’know, like a sensible person.

³ I mean: it’s probably pretty fortunate that – based on my experience at least – it seems to be easy for adults to verify that they’re adults in order to access services that are restricted to adults as a result of the OSA. But it’s unfortunate in that I’d hoped to make a spicy blog post about all the hoops I had to jump through and ultimately it turned out that there was only one hoop and it was pretty easy.

⁴ Of course, the Indieweb fan within me also says that if I did want such a page to exist, I’d want it to be on my own domain. Should there be an Indieweb post kind for “fap” for people who want to publicly track their masturbatory activities as an exercise in the quantified self?

Or should there be a “sex” kind that works a bit like “invitation” in that you can optionally tag other people who were involved? Or is sex a kind of “exercise”? Could it be considered “game play”? What about when it’s a “performance”? Of course, the irony is that anybody who puts a significant amount of effort into standardising the way that a person might publicly catalogue their sex life… is probably rendering themselves less-likely to have one.

I think I got off-topic in this footnote.

⁵ To be fair, I’ve worked places where committee groupthink has made worse decisions. Want a topical example? My former employer The Bodleian Libraries decided to call a podcast series “BodCast” without first performing a search… which would have revealed that Playboy were already using that name for a series of titillating vlogs. Curiously, it was Playboy who caved and renamed their service first. Presumably the strippers didn’t want to be associated with librarians?

⁶ It’s possible there are achievements I’ve missed – their spriteset file looks like it contains others! – that are only available to content creators on the platform. But if that’s the case, it further reinforces that these achievements are for the purpose of consumers who want to show off how many videos they’ve watched, or whatever! Weird, right?

⁷ “Congratulations: you watched your 500th YouTube ‘short’ – look how much of your life you’ve wasted!”

Perfect By K Lynn Smith

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Oh Joy Sex Toy / K Lynn Smith

Now that’s a hot comic. NSFW, so don’t click through if you’re not in a place where you can do so!

Also, RIP Flapjack. 😢

Escape Room [NSFW]

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@TailsteakAD (Twitter)

Regular readers will know already that I’ve been a huge fan of comic author Tailsteak, ever since Ruth, many years ago, introduced me to his work. I’m particularly enjoying Forward, his latest webcomic: so much so that in an effort to work around its lack of an RSS feed I accidentally stole unpublished work from him earlier this year (oops!).

He announced yesterday his new secondary Twitter account, @TailsteakAD (the “AD” is for “After Dark”) and was delighted from the very top tweet onwards:

TailsteakAD: For the record, just because an artist makes erotic work, or even has a dedicated adult-themed account, that in no way implies that they have any desire whatsoever to receive your unsolicited sexual messages or images. I mean, *I* want'em, but other artists might not. — That’s the spirit.

Anyway: a short while later I found a 20-page comic he’d made called The Escape Room: read it on Twitter or via Threadreader. It might be exactly the comic you’ve always been looking for, assuming that the comic you’ve always been looking for combines B/D, gay sex, and escape room puzzle mechanics. NSFW, obviously.

Suddenly I feel like the escape rooms I go to aren’t quite as good as I thought.

How Can Free Porn Be Feminist?

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If you search “free porn” on Google, you get 1,400,000,000 hits. That’s a lot of porn. From vanilla lovers to BBW aficionados, kink and BDSM enthusiasts, foot fetishists and golden shower fans, there’s something for everyone. All at your fingertips, and all for free.

Although free porn is an accessible way for us to explore and embrace our sexuality, it relies on a business model that exploits sex workers and filmmakers. So while viewers are getting off, creators are the ones getting screwed. We boycott fast fashion brands for exploiting factory workers, we go vegan in the name of animal rights, we ban plastic straws to save the ocean, so where’s that same energy when it comes to protecting sex workers?

Free porn sites operate on pirated and unregulated user-generated content. Users can upload clips even though they’re infringing copyright, and stolen content goes up faster than studios can issue demands for it to be taken down. Award-winning feminist adult filmmaker Erika Lust tells Refinery29 that at the time of writing her team had been fruitlessly chasing Pornhub, asking them to take down some of her XConfessions films. “[Free porn sites] steal from studios, while at the same time profit from unregulated amateur production. This adds to the capacity for exploitation towards the performers, and the illusion that porn is free leads to the assumption that sex work is not work,” says Lust. “Most of the performers involved in these videos did not give their consent for their film to be pirated and hosted on a free porn site.” And they’re not making a penny, either.

…

Olivia Cassano (Refinery29)

Pay for your porn, folks!

UK online pornography age block triggers privacy fears

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The government will next week confirm the launch date for a UK-wide age block on online pornography as privacy campaigners continue to raise concerns about how websites and age verification companies will use the data they collect.

The plan for implementing the long-delayed age block, which has been beset by technical difficulties, is expected to be announced alongside the government’s other proposals for tackling online content harmful to children, although it could be several months before the system is fully up and running.

The age block will require commercial pornography sites to show that they are taking sufficient steps to verify their users are over 18, such as by uploading a passport or driving licence or by visiting a newsagent to buy a pass only available to adults. Websites which fail to comply risk substantial fines or having their websites banned by all British internet service providers.

…

Jim Waterson (The Guardian)

It’s a good job that the government doesn’t have anything big and complicated to be working on, right now, so they have loads of free time to establish a sex-shaming, unenforceable, and inevitably-ineffective law to impinge upon the liberties of individuals. Sigh.

We Watched the Toy Story Porn Parody So You Don’t Have To [NSFW]

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A wise man once said “To Infinity and Beyond”, Unfortunately there’s no way of knowing who that man was or in what context it was meant to be understood, so let us instead turn our attention to the Toy Story porn parody – Sex Toy Story The XXX Parody Part 1.

It says Part 1, but I searched and there’s no Part 2. Unless they’re doing like a Toy Story 3 thing where they wait like ten years for Andy to grow up and go off to college, in which case we will have to wait with bated breath for ten years for Part 2.

We open on an unnamed woman played by Veruca James (Lesbian Anal Vampires, Emo Teen Fucks at Work) getting ready to masturbate. She does so the normal way we all do, by rubbing her clothed body.

…

Ryan Creamer (CollegeHumor)

“Does it exist?”, I asked, when the conversation drifted perilously close to this topic. Well of course it exists: Rule 34, duh. I was so glad that this article existed, to spare me from having to watch it to work out how much I didn’t want to watch it. Now all I have to do is scrub the idea of this article from my mind, which is hopefully easier than the retina-burning image of the film itself would have been.

Resulting link NSFW, obviously.

Pornhub Bypasses Ad Blockers With WebSockets

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Pornhub has found an innovative way to deliver ads to users of ad blocking software, exploiting limitations in Chrome’s content blocking API…

BugReplay

Worst Weekend Of Cinema – Part 2

This weekend was the worst net weekend of cinemagoing experiences that I’ve ever had. I went to the cinema twice, and both times I left dissatisfied. An earlier blog post talked about the second of the two trips: this is about the first.

You know what – 2012 has been a pretty shit year, so far. We’ve had death (my father’s), more death (my partner’s grandmother’s), illness (my sister’s horrific face infection), and injury (a friend of mine lost her leg to a train, a few weeks ago, under very tragic circumstances). We’ve had breakups (a wonderful couple I know suddenly separated) and busy-ness (a cavalcade of day-job work, Three Rings work, course work, and endless bureaucracy as executor of my dad’s will).

But it gets worse:

Piranha 3DD. Twice the terror. Double the D's. — Of all the things that have gone horribly, tragically wrong so far this year… going to the cinema to watch this film was the worst.

On Friday night, I went out with my family to watch Piranha 3DD.

This is one of those bad films that falls into the gap of mediocrity between films that are bad but watchable and films that are so bad that they wrap right around to being enjoyable again (you know, the “so bad they’re good” kind of movies). To summarise:

[one_half]

The Good

Lots of nudity, all presented in 3D. If there’ll ever be anything that convinces me that 3D films are a good idea, porn will probably be it. Boobs boobs boobs.
Fun cameos from Christopher Lloyd (Doc Brown!), David Hasselhoff, and Ving Rhames, along with enjoyable accompanying pop culture references.

[/one_half]

[one_half_last]

The Bad

3D films remain a pointless gimmick, still spending most of their time playing up the fact that they’re 3D (lots of long objects, like broom handles, pointing towards the camera, etc.), and still kinda blurry and headache-inducing. Plus: beams of light (e.g. from a torch) in 3D space don’t look like that. The compositor should be fired.
The cameos mostly serve to show off exactly how unpolished the acting is of the less well-known actors.
Plenty of less-enjoyable pop culture references: if you’re not going to do the “false leg is actually a gun” thing even remotely as well at Planet Terror, don’t even try – it’s like trying to show a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie, but not even managing to do that.
Unlikeable, unmemorable characters who spend most of their time engaging in unremarkable teen drama bullshit. Same old sex joke repeated as many times as they think they can get away with. And then a couple of times more.
Lackluster special effects: mangled bodies that don’t look much like bodies, vicious fish don’t look remotely like fish (and, for some reason, growl at people), and CGI that would look dated on a straight-to-video release.

[/one_half_last]

So yeah: give that one a miss.

Amateur Lesbians

I’ve recently reformatted and reinstalled, and that means that – briefly – I ended up seeing advertisements on the Internet again, until I had my ad-blocker reinstalled. And so I came to see an advertisement that promised to let me see “amateur lesbians”.

Now you and I both know perfectly well what they mean, but I’ve always been amused by the term. It somehow carries the implication that there are “professional lesbians”, who aren’t just hobbyists or weekend-homosexuals. I get the image of a conversation along these lines:

A: “So, what do you do for a living?”

B: “Oh, I’m a lesbian.”

If there is such a thing as a professional lesbian, I wonder if it’s one of those careers that is protected from gender discrimination laws, so that it’s allowed to disallow men from applying. And I wonder if you can get a vocational qualification in the field: you know, a BTEC in Lesbianism or something. I also wonder if there are any perks to the job – I mean apart from the obvious: do you get a company car? Do you have to pay for your own uniform?

I wonder, sometimes, if I wonder about things a little too much.

OMG Child Pr0n (or is it?)

What a mess this is turning into! I am of course referring to the UK-wide internet censorship of a Wikipedia page (the one about the Scorpions album, Virgin Killer – if that last link doesn’t work, you’re among those affected).

The thinking is, according to the Internet Watch Foundation, that the cover of the 1976 album constitues child pornography and therefore we all need to be protected from it. It’s all a little controversial, though, because they’re not suggesting that Amazon US be blocked, for example.

But the worst of it is the amount of news exposure it’s generating is actually drawing traffic to the banned content. I wouldn’t ever have seen the album cover if it weren’t for the ban, for example, after which I realised how trivial it is to see the offending Wikipedia page. And that without the offending content appearing in a Wikinews article about the ban!

It’s hard to justify this kind of policing. In accordance with Wikipedia’s own policies, it is not a creator of content so much as a distributor: it takes content that is already “out there” and, in theory at least, legal, and disseminates it in an approachable form.

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out.

Veg Porn :: Titillating Tofu Eaters

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Bookmarked via del.icio.us: Veg Porn :: Titillating Tofu Eaters.

Vegetarian Pornography

Disneyporn

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This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.

Sian wrote:

Just got back from me favourite sleepy seaside town, missing it already. Dumped my brother in Penbryn, caught up with Strokey in the Blue Creek Cafe (which now has my fave Aber hot chocolate), learnt the wonders of googlewhacking and disneyporn with Dan and Claire, and saw Derry for the first time in ages (and got a Hollywood, yay!). It was so nice to wake up with someone again. Nice lazy Aber day today. I know I’ve done the right thing with having a year out – I’ve got loads more confidence and money – but I did feel jealous seeing all the ickle freshers arriving all nervous and excited.

My cousin, who’s in the TA, has just been called up to serve in Basra, which sucks. He’s just turned 18. Ok, so it’s his choice, I’m sure he’ll be fine, and he’ll get loads of money for it, unlike the Iraqi civilians who had no choice in the matter, but it still sucks for his family. Ach well, that’s war for you.

I don’t recall this particular incident of googlewhacks and disneyporn, but I can imagine the conversation, in retrospect. The former probably came up in respect to my experiments around that time into Google Search’s quirks and googlebombability; the latter perhaps an attempt to squick out “Strokey” Adam.