Forensic Photoarcheology, Vintage Blowjob Edition
Alternative title: How To “Waste” A Fine Morning.
Dateline ErosBlog, 2003: I published a wallet photo of a vintage blowjob.
Most of a decade later, I see a similar photo on Tumblr, and I’m thinking “This woman looks familiar!”
So I do some image searching (on the web and on my hard drives) until I find the best available watermark-free version. And then I rummage my archives to find the other picture of the same woman that I posted back in 2003. Fast to say, but an hour’s gone already. Is it the same woman?
Yes! It sure looks like her when I make a side-by-side composite:
Hair is the same, and most importantly, she’s wearing the same striped hose. It’s her!
But now I’m in a frenzy of pointless data acquisition. I want to find and post the best available versions of these pictures, which turns out to be these (click for full size versions, the biggest and cleanest I found):
That’s another hour gone, spent in pop-up-hell ruski image forums and ancient foreign-language blogspot archives, satisfying myself that none of the versions in Google image search are better than the ones I’ve already found. I don’t find the holy grail I’m always looking for (glowing 1200-pixel-wide HD scans of these fragile old cracked wallet prints) but I do find another, wider, less-cracked, less-cropped version of the second one. Did you like the striped hose? That’s good, because now you can see more:
At various times over the years I’ve encountered life coaching advice that boils down to “figure out what you’re good at and really enjoy doing, then figure out how to turn it into a career.” Well, this post right here is what I’m good at. Rummaging through old porn, spotting something unique or special, making connections based on tricky searches and faint memories, finding kinky gems in badly-curated collections (including the biggest dusty porn closet of them of all, the internet), making do with unreliable metadata clues and suggestive image details, putting it all together with an artful crop or an illuminating caption or a half-witty line or a fantasy notion gestured at in an overwrought sentence or two. And it’s all “a waste of time” because at the end, all I’m generating is not-so-deep insights like “hey, these two vintage pics are from the same shoot” or “wow, here’s another picture where you can see her nifty lingerie better”. Maybe some people other than me are amused, but it’s not important to anybody … not even me (most days).
Still — it’s what I’m good at, and I really enjoy doing it. For awhile there (back in the mid-oughts, before the feral-debt bubble burst, when many ordinary people still could still afford to put porn subscriptions on their cheap-and-easy credit cards and porn “piracy” wasn’t yet a fundamental computer-literacy survival skill for everyone who doesn’t golf with Money Boo Boo) it paid the bills. These days? Not so much. With the ten-year ErosBlog anniversary just a couple of weeks away, I find myself wondering something I never expected to wonder. Not “Do I want to keep doing this?” Because — amazingly — I find that I still do. If desire were the only issue, I’d be confident that I could steer ErosBlog through yet another decade. And even if the commercial porn industry were to thrash its last ugly death rattle sometime in the next ten years, there’s enough stuff out there to keep me happily threshing-and-winnowing for a lifetime.
Nope, the only issue for me is, where am I gonna find the computronium? It doesn’t grow on trees, and web traffic doesn’t monetize as automatically as it used to back when we were all hiding from crack-addled refi mortgage brokers trying to sign us up for too-cheap-to-meter debt. The challenge of ErosBlog’s second decade, clearly, is going to be finding ways to keep the server up, and me “playing” at my keyboard.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=8583
Yeah, I feel comfortable expressing that I feel that it’s safe to say they’re the same model.
The earlobes look the same, despite lighting differences that make the ear canal difficult to compare.
Yes, I’m serious here folks… They say that like fingerprints, no two people’s ears are the same. This is a process (along with an eye and eyebrow comparison, and a comparison of the hairline above the forehead…), that I once used to verify (to my own satisfaction), that several nude pics of a young lady (who was likely at the time, borderline too young to be posing for such), were indeed of a beautiful young Hollywood starlet taken at about the time that she “broke out” in a movie with one of the two gents pictured here: http://www.eros...jobs/ .
As it happens, the same gent was more recently embarrassed, when, according to Reuters, he peed on the carpet of a commercial Air France jet, in front of passengers…
…but I digress…
Not only is the female the same model, but I’d venture to say that the male model is the same as well, due to the slightly sharper than normal upward bend of the last third of the penis that he appears to sport.
I feel that it’s from the same day, and likely the same shoot, if for no other reason than I doubt that one could so convincingly duplicate the details of that hair bun so precisely, even if one tried!
Hi Bacchus,
Have you ever heard of Jason Scott from http://www.text....com? He’s has a dramatically similar, though less focused, outlook on poring through data and now works for the Internet Archive at archive.org as a digital archivist through their some 5 petabytes of information. He also has a staggering amount of data that he’s scraped together from the internet years (BBS and on)and before. He’s also bugnuts looney, but in a good way.
If anybody would have suggestions on how to make a living at this, it would be him. Take a look at his Defcon 19 talk called A Distributed Preservation of Service attack.
http://www.yout...X3cog
Cheers!
T.
Thanks Tommy — I haven’t heard of him but he sounds like my kind of loony. I’ve got that youtube vid queued up for watching with my breakfast tomorrow.
Bachus We might have to hold a fan appreciation day in you honor, due to the service you provide. I know you might not get $$$ for what you do but you are deeply appreciated!
Thanks for your looniness Bacchus, your digging conveys a lovely recognition and respect to this woman and others like her.
Miss Piggy, you’re most welcome!
Round of applause from me.
Tommy, I just wanted to come back and say “thanks ever so much!” for the Jason Scott linkage. He’s one of my new heroes.
Fuck the cloud! indeed.
I was at a conference this weekend where Carol Queen was talking about the archives being created and maintained at the Center for Sex & Culture. It seems that your unique ( and awesome!) skills could fit in well there.
Love what you do! <3
[…] proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and […]
[…] proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and […]
Same Bangles, plus short unpainted fingernails – same girl.
Rsvp.