Eccentric Flower talk:201001/Reading List

Mel:

How did I know about Big Fish Games and not Big Sea Games? (I think I was better off not knowing.)

Also, god help you if there's a bare mammary on your screen.

Yup. That's exactly it (at least for some boss types). Although if your employer has software that looks for keywords in the pages you surf - and I hear that some do - you're fucked either way.

-- 22:45, 5 January 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

The whole "not safe for work" thing is really sort of a double/multiple standard anyway. You notice that you see a NSFW warning on written content a whole lot less often than you do on visual content. Apparently the idea is that if you're reading a dirty story and the boss walks by, s/he won't notice so much, but god help you if there's a bare mammary on your screen.

...Yeah.

See, having had a supervisor who could have gotten the institution sued for sexual harrassment because he kept looking at certain sites (in a cubicle environment -- really, where were that man's brains?), I'm thinking it's not so much "pas devant les enfants (or infantile minds)" so much as "if you look at this and the wrong person walks by at the right moment, you can't say you wasn't warned." (I still remember the inspirations for Tragic Tiffany and her wildly improbable maid's uniforms. No matter how many times I try to scrub them out of my mind.) (...Wouldn't that have been an interesting lawsuit, though? "I'm gay, and my supervisor keeps going to websites with very young women in maid's uniforms, and I go into his cubicle to ask him for something, and there they are! I can't help seeing them! O! The trauma! O! I dye!" Or something like that.

This is why I began writing smut. And this is also why I stopped writing it. Because I realized that ninety out of a hundred smut consumers feel that quality is actually a detriment to their pornography, and I got tired of trying to connect ninety percent of my work with ten percent of the audience.

I point out that for the people who, you know, want their porn in word form, this is probably not true. Mind, your definition of "quality" may or may not match theirs -- porn is, after all, highly idiosyncratic -- but in general, really, not true.

-- 23:15, 5 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Big Sea is a relatively recent offshoot of Big Fish. Basically they took their games-community tab and migrated it to its own site. It is unfinished and still has a lot missing (most games don't have help, some games from the old site haven't been ported, etc) but it's pretty spiffy. All the sites in that particular media empire are pretty well designed (the third leg of their trilogy being FaunaSphere).

-- 23:23, 5 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Also, the main point of the NSFW block was really, "Can we just have a blanket disclaimer that ANY site I am likely to link may very well have NSFW content on it by someone's definition, so I don't have to note it anymore?" I mean, I link very few utterly G-rated websites (although Kimono's Townhouse is pretty squeaky-clean, but then the boss is going to wander by and wonder why the hell you're looking at that, so, see what I mean?)

By the by, Iain, sorry, but I was talking about written smut and I disagree. I have a fair bit of evidence and I've concluded that for the average smut reader, such minor concerns as plot, structure, and syntax just get in the way.

-- 23:27, 5 January 2010 (GMT)

Nonelvis:

I have a fair bit of evidence and I've concluded that for the average smut reader, such minor concerns as plot, structure, and syntax just get in the way.

God, I wish this weren't true, but it really is the only explanation for the popularity of certain fanfic writers.

-- 00:23, 6 January 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

Well, yes, I suppose that's true to a certain point. I guess the thing is, if a story does what you need/want it to do, people are prepared to forgive or ignore a lot. And certain things will throw some people out of a story that won't bother others. (I recently read a professionally published story that actually made me think "If only this had been edited properly. Or at all. Run-on sentences that make you struggle to figure out what's going on aren't sexy!" I'm guessing that wasn't the intended reaction.)

-- 03:37, 6 January 2010 (GMT)

Ursula:

I think it's not unlikely you were trying to peddle your smut to the wrong readers. Post it on fetish sites, and you're going to hear from people who are disgruntled because you didn't given them exactly the orgasm fodder they wanted and you had too much talking before the boob stuff. But if you sold it more as fantasy or sci-fi that included some weird sex, that's another matter. I don't think you and Neil Gaiman are kindered souls, but I can see a lot of people in his audience going for your stuff, sexy parts and all.

-- 12:02, 6 January 2010 (GMT)

Settsimaksimin:

i've been using http://comicbooth.com/comicbooth_archives.htm to read Chickweed, although it doesn't get the Sundays (which are usually stand-alone anyway). i wish that it did Lio, but it doesn't.

do you have an opinion on Sinfest?

-- 16:34, 6 January 2010 (GMT)

Shmuel:

"I got tired of trying to connect ninety percent of my work with ten percent of the audience."

Ten percent of the audience is still something!

(Though I confess I'm probably among the 90% in this case. I might not go as far as "quality is actually a detriment to their pornography," but the Venn Diagram of "smut with literary merit" and "smut I find hot" has very, very little overlap in my experience. On the other hand, I do love the rare exceptions.)

-- 20:06, 6 January 2010 (GMT)

Shmuel:

...I'm having second thoughts about what I said above, to the extent that I think I want to strike it from the record. Now that I'm thinking about it, just about all of my favorite smut writers do manage both. (My Clean Sheets alter ego's even on record about that, somewhere in the depths of their archives.)

-- 22:21, 6 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

I haven't seen enough of Sinfest to really know how I feel about it one way or another. On the other hand, the fact that I've been there once or twice and was not immediately gripped by the urge to read back through the entire archives may be indicative in itself.

-- 03:32, 7 January 2010 (GMT)

DanLyke:

Thanks, a few on there I hadn't seen.

I should suck it up and do a full "all the comics I read" report, probably even an "all the sites I read" report, but it's kinda harder now that most stuff is in RSS.

I think we've had the "90% of smut is crap" discussion before, and my opinions on that have evolved, but probably not helpfully.

I do share your surprise on discovering that the creator of Oglaf is female. That rearranged a number of gender stereotypes I'd been harboring.

-- 05:39, 7 January 2010 (GMT)