Stupid Tumblr

This post is part rant and part request for help.

As regular tumblr browers may know, they’ve started getting a lot more aggressive about walling off adult content. Their general rule is that adult sites should only be accessible to anyone logged into a tumblr account. The application of this rule seems somewhat haphazard to date, but there’s a clear trend here, and ultimately all tumblr adult content is going to be accessed this way. Presumably this is so they have an easy line of defense if the morality police  – AKA annoying assholes who want to project their own sexual problems onto everyone else – decide to go after them.

Now having to log into tumblr is annoying but not a deal breaker for me. Creating a tumblr account is pretty quick and easy. What is driving me insane is the new web browsing experience for these sites. I don’t get the site customized, full-screen tumblr experience. I get a narrow strip on the right hand side of my dashboard with an endless scroll of large images. For example, alternativefemdom used to display as a dozen or so images per screen in a grid. Now I can only get one image per screen in a stupid cramped strip on the right side of my dashboard. It makes browsing it a miserable experience and destroys any UI customization the tumblr owner did. There’s no longer a sense of a site identity, just a hard to view list of images.

Is this what everyone is new experiencing on tumblr? Am I missed some configuration option? And if so, are there any alternative options for viewing adult tumblr sites? I can’t tell if in creating this horrible user experience the tumblr developers are being malicious, nefarious or simply incompetent.

This was an image I found on the alternativefemdom tumblr, right before the annoying UI drove me away from it.

More Yapoos

I’m not sure if 11Dutch spotted my post from yesterday or it’s just great blogging karma, but a year after his last Yapoo themed post, he has just put up another one in his series. Even better, he has managed to find someone working on an English translation of the original novel. There are only 3 chapters completed to date (out of a total of 14), but that’s a good start and I’m going to enjoy catching up with what’s there already.

My thanks to 11Dutch for his excellent find and to the translator N A Feathers for the work to date. This is also gives me a chance to feature some more pictures from the Team Rinryu site. I try and avoid posting their more extreme material on my front page, so I’ll go with a couple of drawings from their blog that were obviously based on the Yapoo themes.

Yapoo, the Human Cattle

Anyone who has spent any significant time browsing femdom porn has probably comes across material from the Yapoo Market series out of Japan. It features a lot of edge play activities, such as heavy beatings, caging, forced consumption and toilet play, including scat. Despite its extreme content, it’s produced with very high production values and typically contrasts smartly dressed women against their degraded and bruised naked slaves. I’ve featured images from the series in past posts like this, this, this, this and this.

I’d always assumed the Yapoo name was, like most porn company names, fairly meaningless. However, it turns out there’s a cultural and historical background to it. As 11Dutch very helpfully explains in this post and this post, it actually derives from a novel written under the name Numa Shozo and published shortly after World War II. According to this SF encyclopedia article, it features spaceships, time travel and a description of a future society where…

white women are the dominant class; white men are effeminate and idle, while blacks are a slave class (see Race in SF; Slavery). The worst fate, however, is reserved for the “livestock” race of Asians (in fact, Japanese), who have been transformed into heavily specialized chattels, including living human toilets, furniture, and sex toys.

Given the time it was written, there’s an obvious parallel with the collapse of the Japanese empire at the end of WWII and the subsequent American occupation. While the author might have been reflecting his feelings about his changing society, he was obviously filtering it through a very kinky sexuality.

It’s not often a porn company specializing in extreme kink can point to an allegorical novel as the basis for their work. Now that I’m aware of the context, when I look at their material, with the women in regular clothes, the heavy objectified men and the domestic caging/toilet scenes, it’s clear to see the influence of the original book.

This image is from the Team Rinryu site, creators of the Yapoo Market series. In the past I’ve never thought it possible to buy their material outside of Japan, but it looks like they’ve now put together a guide for foreigners to purchase a movie download. If this kind of material seems like your thing, then I’d definitely suggest trying some of their movies.

Movie Night

I went to watch the new Blade Runner movie tonight. Paltego’s hot take is that it’s a good movie, where the original was a great movie. Ryan Gosling is a perfectly fine actor, but watching this made me appreciate just how good Harrison Ford was in his prime. The original is packed with classic scenes, and while this version has a lot of emotional depths to mine, it never really manages to find them. There’s certainly nothing to match the “I want more life, fucker” or the ‘tears in the rain‘ speech.

From the femdom angle it did strike me that Joe’s electronic companion is the ultimate tease and denial. Beautiful, flirty and entirely untouchable. I also loved the sequence of the woman blowing shit up while getting her nails done. That was a lovely contrast of elegance and controlled brutality.

Her Cutie Pie

I’m continuing my theme of interesting things I’ve found on twitter. This is from Lady Hinako’s feed. You can even see a short video clip of the scene. The post title comes from that tweet.

I always feel that when I post images like this, I need to slather it in disclaimers. I have this mental image of someone dipping their toe in femdom, browsing this site and thinking that this represents the kind of activity they’ll need to get involved in. Or a domme seeing this and getting annoyed that the only representations of femdom are leather clad porn stars or shots like this of extreme play. I do get that, but at the same time, I love that there are people out there doing crazy stuff. It’s not so much that I want to do this myself – although I kind of do – but that I always enjoy seeing people pushing boundaries and exploring their desires. We should applaud the passionate and the unusual. They make the world a more interesting place.

A big stiffie

Twitter is definitely proving to be a great source for the kind of interesting play images that don’t show up in conventional kinky porn shoots. The image below is from 七海(natsumi) and, as far as I can figure out from the post, she has encased a man in plaster of Paris soaked bandaged. You can see another angle here. I’ve seen plaster used before in scenes, I’ve even been on the receiving end myself, but I don’t think I’ve seen a posed and standing statue created.

It’s a shame there wasn’t a small pedestal she could have put him on. That would have added some nice objectification to the bondage and sensory deprivation. Just in case a full body standing plaster cast wasn’t quite kinky enough for you.

Twittering

So having just burnt a series of posts on the dangers of maintaining dual identities on social media, what’s the next logical thing for me to do? Obviously it’s to create a new social media account. So you can now find me on twitter as @paltego1.

I’m not actually sure what I’m going to do with it. I originally created it just to get rid of all the ‘This media may contain sensitive material’ twitter warnings that were driving me crazy. Sensitive material is 90% of my reason for doing anything online. Then it seemed a good way to follow interesting kinky people. Now I’m debating if I should more actively manage it. Maybe use it as an overflow for links I don’t get to cover here? Or as way to bookmark articles before I have change to write in more detail on them? At the very least I can use it to publish the existence of a new post here.

If you’re a twitter user feel free to follow me and maybe I’ll end up doing something useful with it. I’ll also be on the lookout for interesting people to follow, so feel free to point me at anything or anyone you like!

Twitter does seem a particular rich source for fun kinky shots and short video clips. Most of them are casual shots snapped with a phone, but occasionally you get a gem like the one below. This is Domina M in Paris and was shot by Will Santillo.

Who are you? (Continued)

I hadn’t intended to write a series of posts on the intersection of social media and online identities, yet somehow, here we are with a third post. In a previous comment on my first post Ferns raised the issue of transparency and how companies hide the ‘how it works’ aspect. That’s a fascinating topic in itself, and so I wanted to circle back on it.

It’s clearly true that companies should do a better job of notifying users of what data they’re collecting. They don’t want to do that because there are only negative consequences for them. No user is going to say “I love that this huge faceless corporation knows all this stuff about me, but you’re missing out on a lot more private stuff I haven’t shared. Let me help you access that as well.” In reality, given more visibility of the data gathering process, users are only going to want to add constraints, which in turn hurts the companies product and their advertising revenue.

When it comes to the interpretation of the data – for example, why Facebook makes the friend suggestions that it does – then the story is more complicated. Machine learning and particularly deep learning is driving a lot innovation in big tech companies these days. Traditionally a  software developer would analyze a problem and code up an algorithm to solve it. Now that same developer will specify the end result they want (these people are friends, these people are not friends), gather as much input data as they can (user location, hometown, school, posts they liked, etc.) and try and train a system to figure out the end result from the inputs. Typically this involves throwing a huge amount of computational power at the problem (which is why this has only become practical recently) and results in a black box that nobody really understands. Given the right inputs (e.g. data about users) this black box might be able to make excellent predictions about who is friends with who, but it can be difficult to say exactly why it makes any single prediction. So when companies say it’s difficult to share why certain suggestions were made, they might not be lying. They might not know themselves.

As an example of this, let’s consider the original case of the sex worker I talked about in my first post. I should be clear I know nothing about this beyond the public articles and I know nothing about Facebook’s internal algorithms or what data they have. This is speculation designed purely to illustrate the issue. That said, imagine if Facebook had access to the WiFi networks people accessed from their phones over time. Being on the same public network as someone else doesn’t mean much. Even repeatedly seeing the same networks at roughly the same time doesn’t mean much. Maybe you just happen to regularly go coffee at the same time and place as some other random person. But repeatedly being on the same networks at the same time, but in different places over many months would be indicative of a possible relationship. That’s the kind of correlation that a machine learning system could figure out. It’s also the kind of correlation that would occur for a sex worker regularly meeting the same group of clients at different hotels in a city.

Apologies if anyone visited here with the crazy idea of reading posts about femdom. Hopefully I’ll get back on that track in the next day or two. In the meantime I’ll continue my theme of old school anonymity via masquerade style masks. This is the lovely Anne Hathaway, the one bright spot in the otherwise terrible Dark Knight Rises.

Who are you? (Revisited)

So it turns out I’m a bad blogger who doesn’t carefully read the articles he links to. Yesterday’s post featured the story of a sex worker being outed by Facebook, and my suggestion that limiting different social media products to different online identities would probably help. It turns out that was exactly what Leila, the sex worker in question, had done. She only used Facebook in her private life, but still it started linking to her work social contact. My bad for not paying attention. I should probably be punished.

In my defense, I will say that it’s likely the information leakage occurred through the path I did actually identify in the post – smart phone or tablets linked with social media. It’s feasible to set-up a PC with distinct user accounts and strictly enforced separation of data and identities. It’s almost impossible to do that for other devices. And while you could obviously just use physically distinct devices for each online identity, the reason we have these devices is for convenience. Even if you carry two phones, at some point you’ll want to share data between them, and as soon as you do, there’s an opportunity for tech companies to sneak in and exploit it.

The fundamental problem here is that users are not the customers of social media – they’re the product. The advertisers are the customers. The more data the media companies have on their users/product the better they can target it for their customers. So their goal is not to solve these kind of issues. It’s to do the absolute minimum necessary to stop the product getting mad enough to quit, while retaining the maximum amount of information for their advertisers. As a tech guy I can understand that, but as a kinky sex blogger and social media user, it definitely sucks.

It’s an entirely solvable problem from a technology perspective, but the incentive structure for the companies isn’t in place to do so. That leaves people with multiple online identities with limited options. Either never use social media anywhere, or give up anonymity, or keep separate devices for each identity and be incredibly careful to never link or associate them in any way. Or, I guess, roll the dice and hope Facebook doesn’t pop up one of those annoying ‘Your friends liked…’ ads for your local kinky munch on your mom’s Facebook feed.

I’ve no idea what an appropriate image for this post would be, so I’ll continue the masquerade mask theme from yesterday. I’m afraid I have no idea what’s going on in this image, or who it’s originally by, but I would love to attend the kind of parties that featured masked topless ladies drinking wine and brandishing knives.

Who are you?

This Gizmodo story is likely to strike fear into the heart of anyone who tries to maintain multiple and distinct identities on social media. A sex worker named Leilia had two separate Facebook accounts, one for her private life and one for her job. Despite keeping them distinct, with separate email and phone numbers, her friends and family account suddenly started suggesting her work clients as “People You Might Know.” Obviously Facebook’s algorithms had managed to link the data in someway and decided it was all one big happy social network.

Facebook coming up with surprising and unnerving friend suggestions isn’t a new story. This article, posted a few months ago, describes how it figured out the authors great aunt, despite the fact his father had been adopted as child and had no contact with that branch of the family. With the algorithms getting smarter, the amount of data online constantly growing, and neither of them easy to monitor or understand, I’m sure issues like this are going proliferate.

As a software guy, I find the situation somewhat perverse. Traditionally academic computer systems had very strong notions of user identity, because they were shared systems, where personal computers had no concept of it, because they weren’t powerful enough to support it. Companies like Microsoft and Apple worked for years to bring proper identify management and user isolation to PCs. No sooner had they achieved that goal – Windows XP being a major milestone – than smart phones, tablets and social media software arrived and turned everything into a inter-connected soup with no good way to managed different identities.

For now I suspect the only way to handle the problem is to not use the same social media platform with two different identities you wish to keep distinct. So if you have a Facebook account for a friends/family identity, don’t have one for your kink/sex identity. And if you want a tumblr account to share kinky porn, don’t also create a second tumblr account to share holiday snaps with friends. Pick the product most useful to each identity and don’t assume you can keep two accounts on the same platform distinct.

Life was so much simpler before the internet. It used to be only necessary to slip on a masquerade mask and you could attend any fancy ball of your choice in total anonymity.

This is from a shoot for Marie Claire by Koray Parlak and features Nina Reijnders with Victoria Lipatova.