Changes to adult blogs

Blogger announced this week that as of 23 March 2015, it will no longer allow adult pictures or videos on Blogger blogs.  Well, they will, but "private content can only be seen by the owner or admins of the blog and the people who the owner has shared the blog with." I don't know if that means they'll remove it from Google's search, or that existing links will fail unless they have some new parameter on the URL, or what.

The E-mail notifying me of this said "we think your blog may be affected," which surprised me, so I checked: it won't.  There is adult text on this blog, but there is no adult multimedia on here.  There's no media on here—not one image or video in any blog post.  So there ya go. I think they just wrote to everyone who indicated their blog had adult content.

I've mostly been active at Tumblr for the past year or so anyway, where it's almost all pictures and video, because Tumblr is mainly a reblogging machine on the adult side. I've written a couple of things, but the most popular any of them got something like 11 reblogs. I posted one original picture with a small story and it only got about three reblogs, two of which immediately removed the text and therefore all context. The existing content that I reblog, however, gets lots of reblogs from people who follow me.

I had thought that I'd get more of a sense of community when people liked what I posted, but I rarely get anything other than an anonymous half-flirty note every few weeks. That's just how that goes. The mobile revolution in hooking up gay guys has all but killed the more in-depth online communities where gay (and BDSM) guys got to know each other before moving to anything physical.

Your social media profile

Just a hint, guys:

Your profile on social media sites is where you answer common questions about yourself.

It is not where you ask other people to ask you the questions you didn't bother to answer.

"idk i hate profiles hit me up and ask anything" is not a profile.  It's equivalent to saying "I have absolutely nothing going on and I'm hoping you won't notice."  Plus, everyone hates profiles.  No one likes filling out the same damn thing over and over, especially for apps like grindr that gives you about 100 characters and filters URLs (or Adam4Adam which gives you more space but removes all URLs from messages).  It's one reason I started this blog: so I could point people here and not write the same things so many times.

Didn't work all that well, btw, because about a third of guys I chat with refuse to look at a profile.  One even went so far as to say "I'm not gonna read stuff about a guy."  (talk about nothing going on!)

But yeah, fill out the damn profile.  Empty profiles belong to empty heads.

The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire.

In the vein of this Oprah quote, I've been tumbling a little. You can check it out here if you wish. It's not really original content, but it's some of the things I like.

Talking in new places

I think I'll take the rest of the year off of AIM, Yahoo, MSN and any other IM-style chat services.  I've been scaling back on it some for the past few months, and it feels like the right time to just let it go for a while.  The buddy list is exceedingly small, and those who are on it know how to get in touch with me in lots of other ways.  :-)

But I am looking for a new place for gay, BDSM group chat.  Recon chat was full of good folks (even though the Flash-based technology was shit) until they discontinued it a year ago to spend more money on—well, I'm sure they spent it on something.  Gay.com's BDSM-related chats have been weak for several years, and as we enter 2013 they still don't have any way to access it on mobile devices (even though it's all HTML-based).

I can handle Grindr, Jack'd, and such even though they're full of vanilla types, but there's no group chat there either. I'm looking for a place where doms and subs come together and not only try to pick each other up, but also share stories, discuss experiences, bring questions to the table seeking input, and otherwise function kind of like a community.

I suspect such a place is out there, maybe even with some local participants, but I don't know where it is.  Do you know of such a place?

Maybe I doesn't speech so swell.

First: the boy I'd been talking with, who had been mine a couple of years ago, who had spent 8 months telling me he wanted to be owned again despite his fears, is no longer a candidate. His reasons for this are too ridiculous to mention.

(Don't get me wrong: I believe what he says. He's a good guy, in his own way that's different from the way of most other guys. He knows how much it would hurt me if he was lying, and I don't think he wants to hurt me. Nonetheless, were I to try to explain to you what happened, it would literally be ridiculous. So I won't.)

So what next? Probably nothing, for quite a while.

Current status

I would like to own a boy.

I have no reason to believe this will ever happen.

That's pretty much it.

Pictures

I can't give you direct quotes, but this is very close to a lot of the text I just got in a Grindr chat with a nearby cute boy who was allegedly seeking "friends":

besides, you're like 280 pounds. What could you have to offer besides controlling someone's life?

I had a friend who was in a relationship and he was kidnapped by someone like you. After reading your ventings on your blog I know I want nothing to do with a "sir" like you.

No, he didn't read what I sent him on limits or communication, because "I don't come here to read a novel about a guy I'll never meet." And his asinine comment about BDSM people being "kidnappers" provoked an angry response from me pointing out that it was no better than saying a pedophile was a "person like him." That was not my finest hour. *sigh*

But here's my point to everyone else: This is why I won't post pictures.

This place isn't what most would call a heavily populated area. The entire state of Oklahoma has about half the population of just the San Francisco Bay Area. The whole state. Gay boys tend to gravitate to certain jobs and recreational areas, and there aren't thousands of such places. Maybe a dozen.

So if I post my face picture, and assholes like this kid see me out and about, do you think I want him spitting in my food if he's the waiter at the restaurant I choose? Or keying my vehicle, vandalizing my home, or spreading unfounded and incorrect rumors? Or that I want straight boys from around here, who play on Grindr looking for targets, to pass my face pic around because it's easier to target someone like me than a younger "all-American boy?"

I've been in gay chat rooms and watched, amazed and frightened, as people whom I have never met told elaborate stories of evil things I had supposedly done, using my real name. Things that never happened, passed around as total fact, right in front of me, all because the liars didn't know that the real name they were slandering mapped to my screen name.

And no, I didn't speak up. My friends in the room asked if they could speak up, and I asked them not to, because I don't care what the liar thinks. Never met him, never will. I care when it causes trouble in my daily life, like in eating at a restaurant with a waiter who's like this kid, or when drunk guys try to trash my car, or if someone starts loudly spreading lies about me in the grocery store while I'm standing right there, all because I am a BDSM dominant.

It's not theoretical. I know what these things are like, and I'm not going to make it easier for them to express their hate. I do not keep pictures of me online because it promotes abuse from boys who do not understand and do not want to. I simply choose not to spend my days fighting them.

If that makes you think less of me, well, you probably weren't going to think much of me anyway. I'm open and honest with anyone who asks, but I don't advertise IRL.

Cranky profile text

Here's some stuff I cut out of my gay.com profile because gay.com is too brain-dead to properly include paragraphs, so the more explaining you do, the harder it is to read.

An idea of what comes next

Nothing.

Look, I know I'm weird.  I like privacy more than most people because I've seen what happens when you lose it.  I was never any good at cruising or going to bars or whatever, and I'm still not, and I'm okay with that.  I'm overweight.  I absolutely can't stand smoking, which rules out all the boys who have the cigar fetishes—cigars are worse than cigarettes to my lungs.  I'm a BDSM dominant, and I have had such poor luck with older subs in the past (by which I mean older than about 30—I am grateful that my range is expanding as I grow older) that unless I am extremely attracted to such a boy, I won't even try.  And yet I don't ever expect anyone to be attracted to me physically, though it has happened a couple of times for reasons I freely admit I still don't understand.

For these reasons, plus being a smartass and such, I haven't spent much time with many boys in my life.  Having the puppy collared for nearly three years was incredible, but he's now a she and that's that (and it's easy to deal with because she's so happy now).  I still miss the piggy boy every night, but that can't start up again anyway.

I had been chatting on Recon for a while to see who else was out there, if anyone, but there was no one nearby who could clear all the obstacles that, combined, are me.  I had been on Grindr recently as well, but oh my god it's such a meat market that I don't see how anyone with a soul can be pleased with it.  I know I've said this before, but I honestly do not get these kids who won't chat to someone who doesn't post face (or, often, dick) pictures.  Do they never use the telephone to call strangers?  "Eric, why don't you call the mechanic and find out if your car is fixed?" "I'd like to, but I don't have a face pic of him!" Madness.

Now Recon has shut down its chat rooms because, as they explained it, less than a third of their users had ventured into the chat rooms and they wanted to spend the resources on other things.  Resources?  They bought a Flash chat service and, as far as anyone could tell, mostly ignored it.  In most businesses, 33% adoption of a site resource is a huge hit.  But people were ignoring (or blocking) the incessant ads they were surrounding the chat room with, and there's nothing Recon can tolerate less than users who are using their servers but not spending money.  Ironically, without chat to prompt me to look at more profiles per day than the limited free service allows, I really don't have much reason to renew the premium membership there.

Gay.com chat died over a year ago—I mean, it's still there, but it's an empty shell of what it was in 2006-2007.  The Recon refugees are trying to figure out where to rebuild their online community with chat, but I'm not sure I'm going to participate.  One possible site is owned by a "cash master" (ugh) who is only expanding it beyond his "cash slaves" because Recon is giving him an opportunity, but he's still limiting conversation to things he likes.  Another seems limited in its topics and seems to have an eye on converting to for-profit status, and that's what killed gay.com (making the free service impossibly awful to use unless you pay a huge fee).

One of the two local boys who played here occasionally told me a year ago, when he was playing here (and backing out of something he'd pre-agreed to do) that he'd be moving in a year, so he'd have plenty of time to come back.

He didn't come back, of course.  Another boy I'm talking to isn't too far away (maybe 2 hours), but he doesn't seem to actually do much in real life, and I'm quite skeptical anymore of boys who talk about things but only want to do something every 2 years.  Age has granted me more patience in some areas and less in others, and which ones are which is not under my control.

So…no chat rooms operating suitable for any remotely local BDSM boys, no boys under serious discussion, no place to find them.  What comes next? Nothing.

I'm still around on the instant messaging services, and checking out things at Recon (and even occasionally Grindr, despite so many of its denizens being intolerably empty-headed), but I'm neither expecting nor seeking anything. It's just time to realize that the past four years were great but aberrations in my normally-celibate life cycle, and get used to it again.  I did pretty well without a regular boy to keep me satisfied, and as much as I loved owning those boys, I think I can do pretty well again.

What about unowned boys' hair?

It seems odd to me that I've never answered this publicly, but a question from the peanut gallery:

Should an unowned boy keep his hair how he wants, or short like a master would, or what?

I believe unowned boys should keep their hair long, as long as they can stand it and as things like jobs allow (military boys obviously won't grow shoulder-length hair).

There's no complicated philosophy behind this, just that it's better for the boy's next master. Consider this table of a boy's hair options and what the Sir might want for him.

	Sir wants boy's hair long	Sir wants boy's hair short	Sir wants to cut boy's hair himself
Boy's hair is long	Sir is happy	Sir is happy as he can take boy to the barber	Sir is happy because he can cut boy's hair
Boy's hair is short	Sir is unhappy as he must wait for it to grow out	Sir may be happy if it matches his style or can be cut to do so	Sir is probably unhappy because boy's hair may be too short to have fun cutting

See that? On the first row, where the boy has long hair, all three outcomes make the Sir happy. On the second row, one might be OK, one is probably not what Sir wants, and one is definitely not what Sir wants.

Seems pretty easy to me.

What if boy gets his hair cut off in a scene?

First, good for the boy! *grin*

Second, if a boy gets a radical haircut in a scene, I say he should feel just fine about keeping it that way for a while if the boy wants. If the boy will continue to play with the Sir who cut it, this may be prudent. But after a couple of months, if no Sir is keeping it short for him, I say the boy should start growing it long again.

Obviously it's up to each boy to decide if the orders of an online Sir are reason enough to cut his hair. However, I would note that there are dozens if not hundreds of online masters who will tell boys to cut hair (or shave their heads), and obeying all of them would keep all boys perpetually shorn. This displeases masters who want longer hair, or who want to decide how to cut a boy's hair. So I would generally reserve haircutting authority for in-person scenes or very, very serious online relationships.

Oh, and I don't think any boy should get his first short haircut simply from an online order unless he has absolutely no plans to follow through on his BDSM desires in person. But I doubt that those boys are reading this. :-)