Edit: I was just feeling glum because someone I respect wrote something I wish were true, which I do not believe is true. I don’t feel like I was able to fully express my thoughts on this.
Full disclosure: Bing is an advertiser on this site, yet BlueBlood.net does not on the first dozen pages of search results for a search on Blue Blood. SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is internet professional lingo for the process by which someone expert in this area would attempt to fix Bing’s search results so they would no longer be defective in this regard.
I’ve been really bummed out all day because of something Derek Powazek wrote. (Also, I made the mistake of watching this week’s brilliant but melancholy Mad Men on TiVo to snap myself out of it. Doh.) Halcyon first turned me on to Derek Powazek’s writing. Derek Powazek tends to write useful articles about how to make good web sites. He has an engaging style and manages to speak clear tech talk. I think we shook hands once at an event, but we do not know each other; I’m just a fan.
Entertainment industry professionals always used to joke with me and Forrest Black about Blue Blood in print being the “trade mag of cool”, maybe because we always found the next big thing and provided contact info. I suppose I’d be wildly wealthy today if I’d just marketed myself as a consultant and charged quite a bit more for that data than the price of a magazine. My focus, however, was just on making a good magazine. One of the coolest things about making a magazine, versus making a website, is that I could just mail anyone I thought was cool a free one. I never felt like I needed fancy press releases. I could just show what I created to people I respected and hope they liked it. I didn’t know it until years too late for this to be useful to me, but Blue Blood was far and away the highest circulation magazine in its niche. So I guess that all worked just fine, in some respects. But, for a web site, this becomes a lot more challenging because previously normal human journalists may freak out that they are being spammed when sent a press release, as opposed to physical freebies.
Here is where Derek Powazek’s “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” article really depressed me. His advice is to never SEO (see the witty title there). His article states that SEO does not work and also, because it works temporarily, it clogs up search engine results. (I think he should pick which is the problem.) He directs his readers to avoid making sites for Google and just make good web sites for one’s readers and tell people you know personally about them.
So here is why the “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” article really upset me. The whole time I was growing up, it was drummed into me that I absolutely had to get good grades and go to good schools, so I could get a good job and a good life. Okay, both my parents went to Harvard and I went to Wesleyan, but Wes is still one of the top universities in the country on all ranking lists. And that paired with a hot suit will get me a job as a nonsexual escort. Escorting is actually the only job I’ve ever done which required me to have an advanced education. As writing about that job for Hustler’s Chic got me my first non-music glossy magazine clip, I supposed I’ve arguably gotten two jobs for all those years of school. Kind of a sucky ROI.
But I digress. The point is that I was told to just work hard and do what I was supposed to do and I would be rewarded. And I fucking well wasn’t. So it upsets me being told once again that I need to just work hard and do what I’m supposed to do and I will be rewarded. I mean, I still do that because it’s just how I am wired at this point. Like the characters on Mad Men, there is a thin patina of mild disappointment on a lot of my experiences, but I no longer get wildly, dramatically, heart-breakingly disappointed, because I stopped believing my reward was just around the corner and would be given just for making something good which people liked.
In point of fact, for example, I work very hard on making BlueBlood.com a good site. But I spend my time creating and publishing content the readers will enjoy, not optimizing for Google or Yahoo or Bing. BlueBlood.com never makes the front page of Google for a freaking search for Blue Blood. This makes doing radio and TV shows much less beneficial than it should be. That site has actually only received 844 visits from Google total this month. And 143 of those were people searching for specifically blueblood.com. I don’t get why someone would type that into a search engine, but the point is that just working hard and doing good work are absolutely not enough. I would love it if someone from Google could explain why the heck that site is never indexed properly. Thank goodness I have extensive traffic resources outside of what search engines provide. And I work hard on those too. It makes me viscerally angry to see Twitter lighting up with venture capital rich tech gurus saying everyone else should just work hard, tell their friends they’re working on cool stuff, and sit around waiting for something good to happen. The Underpants Gnomes on South Park have a waaaaay better business plan.
I like to do the right thing and I enjoy working hard. But I am well aware that I pay a heavy price for the luxury of doing what I feel is the right thing on the road less traveled. And I am sick to death of being advised to keep doing the same thing while expecting different results.
I hope we have recreational space travel within my lifetime. And I’d kind of prefer it if all the extraterrestrials didn’t hate Americans by the time that happens.
When I went to high school in Germany, my (brief) boyfriend at the time was beaten up by protesters during anti-American missile riots. His father actually was a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, but the pacifists clocked him for a beating because he was hanging out with someone whose parents were attached to an African embassy. Although the hilarious irony of getting his ass kicked by pacifists was lost on their victim, the fact that Americans don’t always exactly get the benefit of the doubt abroad really is kind of a drag.
This weekend, NASA TV will be rebroadcasting an event they did today to raise awareness of the need for clean water. Guy Laliberte, founder of — wait for it — Cirque de Soleil, spent some time on the space station to put this fiesta together and other celeb participants included “former Vice President Al Gore, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Julie Payette, actress Salma Hayek and singers Shakira and Bono.”
But the salient point here is that WE JUST BOMBED THE MOTHERFUCKING MOON! In theory, the idea was to check whether the moon has water we could utilize. Presumably by bombing it. According to multiple accounts in the world’s media, the Indian moon mission Chandrayaan already clearly scientifically proved that there is water on the moon. And they didn’t need to bomb anything to prove it.
Many conjecture that the USA is testing a new warhead. I hope not, but I also know that, despite all our hand-wringing about nuclear disarmament, our country is the only one asshole enough to actually have dropped atomic bombs on human beings.
On a lighter note, after the first broadcast of the NASA and Cirque de Soleil collaboration Moving Stars and Earth for Water, my Twitter lit up with the banter of my witty compatriots. Forrest Black tweeted, “I sure hope we don’t discover the moon’s subsurface is rich with fluorocarbons…the hard way.” Syd Blakovich twittered, “I’m pretty sure NASA is totally undoing all the blood sacrifices the Aztecs did to delay the end of the world w this moon/rocket business…I’m just worried I’m going to have to start going blood sacrifices, mainly because I already have too much on my plate.” Jessie Seitz twittered, “Good to that during this recession our tax money will FINALLY find out if “ice is hidden in the perpetually dark lunar craters” of the moon.” Halcyon tweeted, “I think it’s about time we knocked the moon down a few notches. That bastard has been mad-dogging us for YEARS!”
Seriously, for fuck’s sake, do we really need to knock the moon off kilter? Has earth not had enough tsunamis? And isn’t all that expensive? Okay, this is the part where I’m just going to degenerate into using very very very bad language, so I’m just going to eat a delicious organic Braeburn apple and watch cartoon cows I TiVoed from Nickelodeon now. Or maybe the second half of The Company on On Demand. Spies on secret missions could be diverting . . .
SXSW is upon us once again. This reminds me that I meant to post the podcast of a panel Halcyon and I and this camgirl Seska did at SXSW. Halcyon is the king of coming up with humorous, lurid, and otherwise catchy panel titles. This means that, like me and like most web professionals, he has about a billion funny site domains. His main home on the web is currently CockyBastard, although Pinkgasm is listed in the SXSW credits. I’ll spare you all full bios, but SXSW edited my bio to say “Amelia G holds the titles of editor, writer, and photographer who founded Blue Blood” instead of just saying I’m an editor, writer, and photographer. My title on my business cards says chick-in-charge and writer and photographer are not titles. SXSW is a fun conference and they felt very strongly this particular year that it was vital that they refer to those things as titles, so I rolled with it and who knows what process they used for deciding how to specify site or company for each guest speaker.
At any rate, here is the MP3 podcast of our panel:
Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?
Moderator: John Halcyon Halcyon Styn Digital Explorer, Pinkgasm
John Halcyon Styn Digital Explorer, Pinkgasm
Amelia G Chick in Charge, Blue Blood
Seska Lee Sajnet
As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services can types of sites are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans inthe online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.
My work with the SpookyCash B2B affiliate program, which allows people with high traffic sites to get paid for sending members to pay sites, is probably most relevant to what we discussed. So I gave away like a gajillion SpookyCash T-shirts to folks I chatted with after our panel. One of the people who came up after we spoke introduced herself as the ex of Kevin from the cover of Blue Blood #5 in print. This intro was a little nerve-wracking, but she turned out to be cool and Kevin assures me their relationship is amicable. What I make as a content producer is not porn, but the panel was really a discussion of the pay-for-content business model which primarily works for naughty membership sites.
The other big sex panel at SXSW that year was:
Sex and Computational Technology
Moderator: Amanda Williams, University of California at Irvine
Amanda Williams University of California at Irvine
Violet Blue Blogger, Open Source Sex
Johanna Brewer University of California at Irvine
Kyle Machulis Engineer, Nonpolynomial Labs
Cory Silverberg Author & Educator, Come As You Are & About.com
Computer technology has moved off the desktop and into homes, cars, pockets, and urban streets, in support of human relationships casual or intimate. Sex is an important facet of human experience, something that intertwines with intimacy, domesticity, mental health, play, and many other areas of our lives. Sex + tech is more than lots o’ internet porn. Let’s talk about teledildonics, virtuality, intimate interfaces, assistive technologies, and more.
The Sex and Computational panel was a lot of fun and it did not take long to figure out that the exuberant Kyla Machulis was qDot from SlashDong. SlashDong is a site I discovered via Molly Case’s SexyFandom which is all about pimping out electronics for orgasmic purposes. If you have ever wondered what would happen if you hooked a sex toy to pretty much any other device in existence, SlashDong probably has your answer, along with technical diagrams. For this SXSW panel, qDot brought a number of entertaining little devices and just lit up the room with his personality. To shine on a panel with so many big personalities on it takes some serious oomph. Hopefully, this comes through on an MP3 podcast the same as it did in person. After this panel, everyone from the various sex panels except for Halcyon who was MIA all went for dinner together, and we got to have a spirited debate about sex workers rights and exploitation and eat pretty tasty SouthWestern. I told Kyle Machulis how I had first come across his site and we talked about how SexyFandom had not updated in a while, but Molly Case said she’d be getting back to it real soon (hint, hint).
Austin has good SouthWestern cuisine and requires a lot of eating and drinking. UT Austin was my safety school and all I have to say is thank goodness I did not end up going there or I would have had liver failure before my sophomore year. Not that it would not have been an entertaining journey to liver failure.
A while back, I was appalled to learn that my pal Halcyon had taken a gig assisting with promo for Experian’s FreeCreditReport.com. Halcyon has always struck me as someone, who not only has a beautiful soul, but someone who usually strives to better the world around him, rather than polluting it. He and I made plans to do an interview on the topic of Experian and FreeCreditReport.com before it fully launched, but the interview never came to pass. As we were having the conversation about what he was doing with Experian and what I found disturbing about that on Twitter, there was only so much detail we could each go into in 140 characters or less.
From Halcyon’s comments on my NWA article, I think he may have thought that my objection to FreeCreditReport.com was solely that Experian as a larger company has done some sucky things. Most of you probably know that Experian is a credit reporting bureau. I found FreeCreditReport.com’s youth market targeted commercials really offensive. I felt that their commercials came across like Experian’s marketing department was sitting around laughing about how their version of a permanent record can totally ruin people’s lives. The commercials strongly implied that maybe hipster loser types should be demanding credit reports from their dates and housemates, just in case any of them had bad credit which might be an inconvenience down the road, whether the black marks on their credit were accurate or identity theft or whatever. There even seemed to be an undertone of implication that, if your friends and lovers didn’t feel like handing over their credit reports to drinking buddies, it might be smart to secretly enter info on people you know into FreeCreditReport.com. (I believe this would be a felony, as it should be.) Experian seemed to be congratulating themselves on connecting with the youth market via calling them both hip and losers. The value proposition put forth in their commercials is that you should use a service Experian provides so you can see how much false data Experian is keeping on file which might ruin your life. Every American is legally entitled to at least one free credit report a year, so I thought it was borderline extortionist for Experian to try to pry extra data from consumers, via FreeCreditReport.com, to give them the same free credit report information they would be legally entitled to without having to provide quite so much personal information.
What most marketing businesspeople and social scientists know, but the average person may not, is that Experian is not just a credit bureau, but a multi-faceted data mining corporation. For example, a number of years ago, Experian launched another site aimed at gathering data on people in various cool subcultures. It was called Thirsty.com and Sean Suhl, who is now head of much-derided punk porn site SuicideGirls, was then in charge of content for Thirsty.com. I had never heard of Sean Suhl at the time, but Forrest Black and I got really bummed out about updating BlueBlood.net for a while because someone over at Thirsty.com kept copy/pasting articles we wrote without attribution. At first, we thought maybe they were just getting the same press releases we were, although the coincidences seemed extreme. Then we posted an article I wrote about Godhead when they were sign by Marilyn Manson where we included a line about how we, knowing them personally, wished them well. Thirsty.com immediately followed with an article about Godhead which included a line about wishing them well, which is not the most common turn of phrase to find in rock journalism.
The funniest Thirsty.com copy/pasting from BlueBlood.net moment was when Forrest Black wrote an article about Roman Dirge’s Lenore. Forrest accidentally linked SpookLand.com instead of SpookyLand.com. He later corrected the link on BlueBlood.net, but it ran as the wrong link in the nearly identical article on Thirsty.com. As I recall, SpookLand.com had a lot more spy stuff than cute gothic comic book girl stuff. At any rate, Experian’s Thirsty.com is what mined the consumer data Hot Topic used to shut down all the independent punk rock stores which were the cornerstone cultural centers of so many local scenes. It is reasonable to assume that, as Sean Suhl held a management position at Thirsty.com, he, like Hot Topic, was also able to utilize Experian’s data mining to found SuicideGirls, with all the havoc that project has wrought on what was once a cool, vibrant, artistic, genuinely feminist and progressive community.
So it would be reasonable to dislike Experian for acknowledging that much of their negative data is bad and using that as a reason people should give them more data. It would be reasonable to dislike Experian for having mined data which made being a gothic, punk, coffeehouse, nightclub etc. sort of person a heck of a lot less fun and a lot more sanitized and homogenized. It would be reasonable to dislike Experian because the commercials for FreeCreditReport.com are so disrespectful of their target market and the jingle is so annoying. However, there is one more reason to dislike them: FreeCreditReport.com apparently is not free.
I noticed a $14.95 charge from a company called CIC*Triple Advantage. I didn’t recall buying anything from a company with that name, so I entered “CIC*Triple Advantage” into Google. The search results made my eyes bug out of my head. This was the name of the billing entity for freecreditreport.com. The thousands of search results were full of words like “deceptive practices,” “scam,” “ripoff,” “unauthorized billing!” and “beware!” In fact, all the top results were either from people complaining that they’d been conned into signing up for a $14.95 monthly credit monitoring service without their permission, or they were about how to cancel the service.
In the unlikely event you are not familiar with Mark Frauenfelder, he is one of the few people to come out of the zine explosion really successfully and more importantly regarding FreeCreditReport.com, he is one of the most highly respected web tech journalists on the planet. Yet he was taken in by FreeCreditReport.com’s offer and ended up getting unexpected charges on his credit card from them. So it turns out the free credit reports those willing to give up extra data get from FreeCreditReport.com are not always free.
Blue Blood’s SpookyCash webmaster affiliate program sent yours truly and Forrest Black to the XBiz Hollywood show. As the XBiz show was this past weekend, I was reminded that I had some entertaining snapshots to post of the fun we had. (Footnote: Webmaster affiliate programs are what people with sites reaching thousands of visitors use to, ya know, make money.)
The first night of the webmaster show, we went out to dinner with my friends Lange and Warren. I tried to convince them to go to a restaurant called Koji’s. Koji’s serves sushi and shabu and features pretty good food in a kind of weird mall setting. Some of the same folks who Disneyfied Times Square built a structure called Hollywood and Highland adjacent to the venerable Mann’s Chinese Theater and across from the Disney one and the historic Roosevelt Hotel. Hollywood and Highland features a variety of paid street performers dressed as costume characters and it is a mall, but Koji’s is tasty. Nonetheless, when Lange and Warren realized I was directing us through a mall, they nixed Japanese food and peer pressured me into going back across the street to Hooters.
I’ve never been to Hooters before, but there had been an open bar by the Roosevelt Hotel pool earlier, so I was feeling tipsy agreeable. At the time, we all thought our waitress was super hot. Warren offered to put her in Penthouse and she giggled and he was like, “no, seriously, I’ll put you in Penthouse.” It seemed like she thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. Warren really does shoot for Penthouse. Actually, come to think of it, Forrest Black and I have both shot for Penthouse as well, but Warren has the uber hook-up there to the point where a party at his house isn’t over until the pool is chock-full of Penthouse Pets. Some place I have the snapshots to prove that too. But not at Hooters on this particular night. Now that I look at the Hooters snapshots, the waitress looks only okay. Maybe she smelled really great. Maybe Lange just had her keep the beer flowing to the point where I also thought Hooters food was surprisingly delicious. (More on this later.)
We went to a party after this at The Ritual Supper Club. I think the primary occasion for the party was the CyberSocket gay web awards, but Stella Artois says I may or may not be particularly specifically accurate on this point. The Ritual Supper Club has been known variously as Ritual, White Lotus, the local bus station, etc. and is a Hollywood hotspot where A-listers like Mark Wahlberg can go to bang porn stars cast for the next season of Entourage on HBO. Luminaries in attendance included Chi Chi LaRue, Anders Manga, Joanna Angel, Mario from Stockroom, Halcyon Pink, Ashley Steel, and of course Forrest Black and Amelia G.
XBiz then threw a really cool seminar with talented filmmakers Joone and Andrew Blake. I tend to be really turned off by most of what the mainstream of Porn Valley churns out, but Joone and Andrew Blake are seriously good at what they do and bring a real artistry to their work. Later there was a really painful speech from one of the guys responsible for the Penthouse acquisition. He was going on about his mainstream credentials and, although he has an impressive background in some respects, I just think of maintream as a pejorative. And I find it really tiresome when people make a huge distinction between what they perceive as their adult work and their “mainstream” work. I always wonder if they just think they can phone it in as soon as exposed breasts are involved. Monetizing media is monetizing media. The reason so few adult videos produced can touch Joone or Andrew Blake is that some people think they do not have to bring their A game if nudity is involved. Heck, some people even believe they should not. I’m personally a fan of doing a good job of whatever one does.
I certainly know some club kids who are fucking awesome at being fabulous club kids. Forrest Black and I ran into journalist Gram Ponante as we snuck out of the Penthouse keynote. We had a conversation about some of the more wannabe upscale webmaster events. I have started skipping this variety of velvet rope-oriented shindig, even though I adore some of my friends who attend and throw such parties. I’m fine with genuinely upscale and I’m fine with a real velvet rope whether it is glam rock disco or casino VIP, but I only enjoy such things if they are the real deal. I tell Gram that I like my club kids to be professionals and that watching internet professionals mack at being club kids is not my idea of a good time. This lead to me being horrifically misquoted, but, hey, at least I made the front page his site and it was kinda funny and we were all operating on not a lot of sleep.
For an example of an event I was definitely down for, Vic DiCara from the seminal Hindu-infused hardcore punk band 108 took a whole bunch of us out to dinner afterward and we had a really great evening. Ross Horowitz of Shoot Out the Lights fame drove me, Forrest Black, and his beautiful companion over to Koji’s. Now you all might be recalling that I mentioned walking to Koji’s at the beginning of the weekend. Yes, it was walking distance and, no, we were not that partied out, but Ross just bought a black Rolls Royce, so it was imperative that we drive to Hollywood and Highland. After making me go to Hooters, Lange of course was the first person I saw when we got to Koji’s and I gave him grief about it, but forgave him when he introduced me to photographer Chris Cuffaro whose band photography I had published in Blue Blood magazine in print years ago, but who I had never met in the flesh before. Unsurprisingly, given the proclivities of the guest list, we all talked about music most of the night. At one point, Vegas Ken from The Best Porn told an anecdote about working in an emergency room and maybe not being startled by the horror in the same way that probably no one at the table was startled by naked people any more. But mostly we chatted about music and music biz.
I forget whose party we went to after that, but the next afternoon found us at Hooters again. I had not been to eat at Hooters twice in my entire life. We had lunch with a plethora of cool folks on the various days of the XBiz webmaster conference, but Hooters made the buffet brunches at the Roosevelt Hotel seem yummilicious. And they were not particularly gourmet buffets. Hooters food is absolutely revolting if one has not consumed the proper number of refreshing adult beverages beforehand. The weird MSG-style flavor enhancers at Hooters made my tongue swell and the flavor of everything I tasted there seemed sickening. Forrest Black consoled his annoyed tummy after Hooters with the purchase of a stuffed Kuromi plush. In the unlikely event that you are somehow unaware of this, Kuromi is Hello Kitty’s new punk rock gal pal with the fetish hat.
In conclusion, after enough beer, Hooters chicken wings and shrimp are tasty and Hooters waitresses are delicious, but you really need serious beer goggles to eat that food. Well-prepared Japanese food, Rolls Royces, and Hello Kitty dolls may be enjoyed while entirely sober. I think this may illustrate some of the quintessential truths of the universe.
You all will be pleased to see that Blue Blood hottie and Community member Halcyon Pink’s HugNation project is getting great props as he tours the country. The basic concept is that every Tuesday at 1pm Pacific time, you should hug who you are with or hug yourself. This could get dicey depending on where you work, but the idea is to get in touch with being a part of humanity and commonality with one’s fellow man. Halcyon says, “Think of it as a sort of prayer — a communal expression of compassion. It is a weekly reminder that we are connected and we all far more similar than we are different. Everyone can use a hug.” Halcyon picked up an old RV and painted it pink and put pink fun fur in it and generally made it cool enough that his neighbors complained about it. He is just finishing up a six city Hug Nation tour in the pink RV. There has been a bunch of local press as he has gone through Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Sacramento, culminating with the CNN report posted here. This weekend, Halcyon hits Los Angeles and then heads back for one last stop in San Diego.
BlueBlood.com hottie Halcyon’s Cocky Bastard Vision from the Pink Broadcasting Company did two entertaining videos on the 2007 SXSW experience. Halcyon has been going to SXSW basically forever, has MC’ed more of the SXSW Web Awards than he hasn’t, and introduced me to the Interactive portion of the show when we did our “Turning Pink Into Green” panel back in 2005. We got to work and play together again at this year’s event and he is always a pleasure.
In the first interview video, Halcyon says his goal was to ask “a bunch of web visionaries what they loved most about the web.” My favorite answers were from web book author Derek Powazek who enthused about the internet’s ability to connect all different sorts of freaks and of course Forrest Black’s answer about how much he loves the creative exchange where he gets to directly connect with people when he makes media. Stay tuned after the credits for a little fellatio joke with yours truly. Halcyon’s pink microphone was just so darn alluring. He cut the part where I said something smart because (a) it was sorta similar to Forrest’s sentiments and (b) let’s face it, blowjobs are always more interesting than most other things.
After watching Halcyon’s slightly downbeat most recent video about his experience of the SXSW show this year, I feel kinda bad for not being a sketchy and lazy crack addict. In all seriousness, it is sort of odd for any internet professional to go into a high tech environment where a lot of people just take things like venture capital for granted. I would absolutely accept VC if I had a project which (a) would really benefit from it and (b) which I was really sure would benefit the angels investing in it. But one of the other things I love about the internet is the freedom it can offer the individual. I don’t really have to answer to much of anyone and that warms my punk heart. At any rate, both videos are funny and I am absolutely certain that Halcyon is going to do just fine.
I perused TuckerMax.com upon my return from Austin, to see if there was any vital news I should include in my article about Tucker Max and his writing and his SXSW panel. There was nothing which really jumped out as necessary for an introduction piece. But, what the heck, I’ll give you all the lowdown on what he has coming up.
He is currently working on a series for Comedy Central. He envisions the show as being a 100% scripted half hour comedy with no laugh track. Something like The Office or Entourage or Tucker suggests one “picture a Sex and the City for guys, done in the vein of my stories.” I’ve never seen Sex and the City, so this doesn’t evoke much for me, but maybe it will for other folks. At any rate, a fictional comedy half hour with the feel of a Tucker Max adventure sounds entertaining to me, so I’ll be putting the key phrase “Tucker Max” in my TiVo for whenever the heck the long-ass cycle of television production produces an actual show. I just used the word heck twice in the same article. Don’t get me wrong, I like the word heck, but I think this means I am jet-lagged.
A fun factoid is that apparently one of the producers of the upcoming Tucker Max show is former ABC president Jamie Tarses, the first female entertainment chief in the industry, who is reportedly the inspiration for the character of fictional sensitive-but-tough network president Jordan McDeere on the Aaron Sorkin-written, Thomas Schlamme-directed, star-studded, and shockingly disapppointing NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
The Tucker blog announces his SXSW appearance and mentions that the show might be a bit pricey just to hear him speak, but caveats: “If you are a hot girl in or around Austin, well, you don’t need to pay to hear me speak. Just send me an email and we’ll get drinks. Or just we can just skip the pleasantries and you can come over to my hotel and fuck, whichever you prefer.”
The most recent entry in Tucker Max’s blog announces that he is going to be co-writing a book with Paul Wall. I told Forrest Black this and his first response was to ask if it was going to be called Stuff in Your Mouth. He then immediately posted this thought to his Twitter account. Twitter, although you can use it in your browser or instant messenger client, is essentially like short attention span LiveJournal for your Blackberry or Treo, and it was this year’s hot site to, err, twitter about at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference. If you are feeling digitally trendy, you can find my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/AmeliaG and the still kinda undeveloped Blue Blood Twitter account at http://twitter.com/BlueBlood. Ya know, I just popped over to Twitter, preparatory to making this post and the two most recent posts were Forrest saying “Coffee is a good thing” and Halcyon saying, “trying to find a balance between SXSW inspiration and despair.” There may be a certain sort of odd haiku quality to Twitter.
So it has been crazy busy in the Blue Blood compound this week as we ready ourselves for the 2007 SXSW extravaganza in Austin, Texas. Gotta paint my nails and make sure my purple hair dye is fresh and, oh yeah, make sure BlueBlood.com and its associated sites will be updating in our absence. Blue Blood hottie Halcyon will be moderating the panel I am speaking on. Halcyon and I are returning speakers and I’m looking forward to meeting long-time camgirl Seska, who will be joining us this year. Forrest Black will, of course, once again be doing press photography of the whole shebang and some editorial afterwards.
If I remember to bring them in all the hullaballoo of modern air travel, I will also be giving out some free SpookyCash T-shirts. They are 100% cotton black T-shirts with kickass original artwork by the incomparable Ed Mironiuk.
Here are the details of my panel for those who wish to stop by, reap the fabulous benefits of my wisdom, and say howdy:
Panel Title: Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path? Panel Location: Room 9AB, Panel Date: Saturday, March 10th, Panel Time: 5pm-6pm SXSW Panel Description: “As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.”
Despite the lurid title, the main topic is essentially a discussion of the pay-for-content business model (which allows Blue Blood to give back to the community with all the free goodies you all get to enjoy.) I’ll have more to say on the SXSW panel and I’ll probably post more here later, but, in brief, SpookyCash is the Business2Business affiliate system by which people with high traffic websites can make some beer money by linking to some of the membership sites we support. I’ll explain more later, but that is the core of it.
I’d also like to state for the record that Halcyon totally came up with the name for our panel. I don’t make porn and I tend to be suspicious of people who really segregate their sexuality from who they are as human beings. For example, if you like light bondage and you also like Nine Inch Nails (Thanks for advertising again, Trent.) then you would ideally seek a partner who enjoys both. I think porn porn tends to isolate the act from the personality and I find that really lame. But “Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?” is a catchy title. Last time we spoke, our panel got one of the highest ratings of any panel at SXSW and I’m hoping Halcyon’s inflammatory title will incite even more interested souls to attend. Hopefully, despite the raunchy title, our audience this year will be as interesting and friendly as last time.
This feature was originally published May 18, 2005. With this year’s SXSW looming close, I thought it would be fun to bring it back.
–Amelia G
photography by Forrest Black
Every time I take a trip to some place which is not Manhattan or San Francisco, I start drooling at real estate. Property is at such a premium in Los Angeles that I can’t help it. On my recent jaunt to SXSW, the cab driver who picked me and Forrest Black up at the airport must have known this. He launched into the most amazing dissertation on the socioeconomics of the city of Austin. He told us that 120,000 of the city’s residents are students at any given time. The majority of cab drivers have at least a Bachelors. The city is the live music capitol of the U.S. and perhaps the world. Nightlife is hopping. Booze stops flowing at 2am, but some clubs stay open dry until 4am on weekends. Finding nightclubs which serve coffee should not be difficult. Panhandling is not totally uncommon. High speed wireless access is quite common. There was once a student at UT Austin who dropped out after his frosh year much to his doctor father and stockbroker mother’s dismay, but now he is one of the biggest employers in Austin and his name is Michael Dell, you might have heard of him. Forrest and I might even have gotten some tips on playing Texas Holdem as the cabbie was also a tournament poker player, but alas we arrived at the Hilton. I kicked myself for the rest of the week for not getting that first fascinating and wonderful cab driver’s phone number. Later on we kept getting this chick who must have bribed her way or something into being the main cab driver in front of the Hilton during the big SXSW convention and she was a total scammer who repeatedly claimed not to have change and snarfed an extra $20 from us when she dropped us off at the airport at the end. Regardless, being used to the cablessness of Los Angeles, it was kind of nice to be able to be driven places fairly easily.
The checkin guy at the Hilton was adorable and super friendly and nice and I headed upstairs to sack out. Due to loathsomeness on the part of American Airlines, which I will for the moment spare you all the details of, I sort of missed the first night of SXSW Interactive. It involved a talk about the success of Alien Hominid I think. My bed at the Hilton was tiny but the mattress was oh so very comfy and the sheets felt super nice to the touch. Apparently a prior guest had broken into my mini bar before I checked in. The Hilton folks were amazingly nice and friendly and told me that sometimes this happens with underage guests who they don’t give a bar key.
I ate at a place called The Boiling Pot my first night in town. Not only did they have crawfish which I expected, but they also served blue crabs which I had thought were something one could only get in the Chesapeake Bay area. The waitress was charming and friendly and discussed my beverage tastes with me. I couldn’t get sparkling water, but she recommended the local Shiner Blonde based on my preferences and totally steered me right. Shiner Bock by the same company is apparently more commonly consumed but is a bit darker craft beer.
I ate waffles and steak for breakfast the next day at the Hilton and the hostess was friendly and the waitress was so amazing she almost made me like morning. I kept waking up early and eating breakfast in Austin and then wanting to go back to sleep. Of course, I had panels and seminars and keynote speeches and such to go to most days, so I ended up a little sleep-deprived the whole time. I was not alone in this though. The panel I got up earliest for was the Blogging Software showdown which was totally worth losing a few zzzz for. It always makes me happy when something I enjoy is created by someone who is just as great as I would want them to be. Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, came across so passionate and brilliant that it made me feel all warm and fuzzy about loving his creation.
The second day Halcyon and Tassy swept into town. They had just participated in a reality show in Jamaica. They basically got to the airport in San Diego, pulled some things out of their bags, threw some clean things in, and headed back to the airport to hit Texas. Despite all this air travel, they looked tanned and lovely and once they arrived, the party got going in earnest.
Apparently famous cyberpunk author and futurist Bruce Sterling used to always give a party at his house during SXSW Interactive. But now he has succumbed to the siren song of Los Angeles. So Wired sponsored him throwing a shindig at an American Legion Hall where he ran around in pajamas demonstrating how a still works. Actually most of the parties were just as educational as the seminars because of the intelligence and curiosity about the world of the people partying. Ben Brown, the self-proclaimed Internet Rockstar, gave a bash at his Home for Wayward Boys which includes a hot tub and which a biker-looking cabbie told us was in a shifty neighborhood. Whatever that means. Looked great to me, although I guess the host did say something about bodies being dumped in the area. Then again, some folks just need killin’. Blogger gave a party and we got groovy baseball caps. Gawker gave a party at a bar which is one of an apparent 211 nightlife locations in Austin which chose to be smoking establishments. What this means is that patrons can smoke in side, but everybody has to be over eighteen years of age. I guess so second-hand smoke won’t stunt their growth or something. This bar didn’t have Shiner Blonde, so I had a Lone Star to keep with the local theme, but it wasn’t totally my thing, so I switched to Amaretto sours. I appreciate Gawker buying me the drinks but kind of wish I hadn’t mixed alcohols.
Halcyon, among other things, is in the process of launching a site called Pinkgasm with Tassy. He says it is going to be “love-infused porn” and I believe him. Jonno D’Addario is the editor of my favorite sex news site Fleshbot. Halcyon and Jonno are collectively two of my favorite people who move in online naughtiness circles. When I told Halcyon, who is a SXSW vet, that I wanted to go to the convention this year, he set me up to speak on a panel called “The Business of Pleasure: Turning Pink Into Green.” For the record, he named it, not me. The convention quite reasonably thought we should have a third person on the panel. Halcyon asked me who I thought would be good and Jonno was the first person I thought of. We both loved the idea of having him speak with us and happily the convention organizer agreed. I was a little bit worried that the panel would be such a lovefest that we wouldn’t be interesting enough for the audience. But we actually got together beforehand and planned and stuff and, although we all like each other, our viewpoints and experiences are not identical, so I think the panel actually went super well.
I’ve spoken in front of a lot of different audiences over the years, but this one was very different. I try to pay careful attention to audience response and see which topics I should spend more time on, according to what they seem most interested in. This was a new experience for me because the audience was so techie that many of them were blogging about the panel while it was going on or talking in IRC about the panel. The conference takes place in a convention center with wireless access in every nook and cranny. I definitely came home thinking that I crave all sorts of new tech toys.
Returning to eating which is my favorite thing to do, the Blue Blood contingent all lunched in Austin with a bunch of cool interesting people at a place with Asian food of some sort called Mekong Somethingorother which was pretty nummy. There were whole shrimps with the tail still on sticking out of my sort of egg roll and the lemonade was delicious. In the middle of the night, the always-open Magnolia Cafe supplied me with a taste of gingerbread pancakes and other folks with all sorts of Tex-Mex breakfast fare. No bottled water though. We ate pizza at a place which played death metal. Loudly. We ate pizza at a bunch of other places nestled in between clubs with different sorts of music emanating. We ate at a place called Jazz which specializes in cajun food and we got to eat beignets made from mix shipped in from Cafe du Monde in New Orleans and fried oysters. It seems like every place in Austin features raw oysters, so I knew they had to have fresh ones, but I like mine cooked thanks and was overjoyed to find such especially excellent fried ones on my last day. Technically, I guess I also had cooked oysters at Finn & Porter, the Hilton’s higher end restaurant, but they had some creative wasabi thing going which would probably be done better where I live, although the service was great and the steak was perfect and, unlike most every other place in Austin, they had some damn sparkling water for me.
It is really easy to get booze and coffee in Austin, but it is kind of difficult to get anything actually thirst-quenching. Juice tends to be high quality when found but not too common and sparkling water is just a fantasy. Austin is right off a river so it is much less dry than Vegas, but I got way more dehydrated there. Forrest opined that perhaps this dearth of hydrating beverages is the reason cowboys look like raisins. I tend to think this must be an accurate observation.
But I could be a pruney mofo with some damn affordable real estate in a great walking neighborhood with friendly if sometimes a little disorganized denizens. Then again, Bruce Sterling is a smart guy and he left Austin for Southern Cali. More research in the field is clearly called for. Now where should I check out next . . .
Edit: I was just feeling glum because someone I respect wrote something I wish were true, which I do not believe is true. I don’t feel like I was able to fully express my thoughts on this. 
