Worfolk 18 is pleased to announce we’re expanding our existing range of adult entertainment websites with our first gay offering – Gay Men 365. Updated with a new photo every single day!
This month saw the AGM of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire. It was a rather well attended affair, at least for an AGM, which normally sees people stay away. This year, I had volunteered to give a short talk as well, so hopefully that proved to be a bit more of a draw.
While it’s pretty much business as usual, I will be changing my role from a general committee member to treasurer of the society. We’re also going to gauge interest in bringing over bigger speakers over the next year, so we will see how that goes.
Louis Theroux’s latest documentary sees him revisit a documentary he did 15 years ago, about the adult industry.
It’s makes me feel very old that the documentary is now fifteen years ago, though with that recently having been screened alongside it brought back some interesting memories – for example in the original, Louis actually appeared in one of the films. He was just an extra, and kept his clothes on, but I’m sure it provides him with a great dinner party anecdote none the less.
I actually felt his blog post about it was more enlightening than the documentary itself was, mostly with him just re-visiting people he had previously seen. A lot of what I saw made sense, but only because of the added commentary I had already read from Louis’s writing (to which I would link to but I can’t remember where I read it; it wasn’t on his official blog).
The industry is described as being one in crisis as YouTube still porn sites overtake the DVD market.
This seems somewhat obviously (as if anyone buys DVDs these days, the new MacBook Pro doesn’t even come with a DVD drive) and rather than it putting them hard times, it seems more that, as with most markets, changes happen and the industry needs to adapt.
The traditional film and music industries are good example of this. Internet piracy is apparently destroying the music industry, but it’s been destroying it since people started making recordings on casette tapes and yet somehow it has survived all these decades.
But to suggest that the internet has prevented the music industry from making any money is simply nonsense. Apple, with its iTunes music store, is now the most valuable company on the planet, ahead of oil giants and banks. Spotify is looking like it will soon be posting profits and as for the film industry, last year LoveFilm sold for £200,000,000. There is clearly money to be made for this willing to adapt to the changing conditions.
The adult industry is the same. People aren’t throwing money at mail order DVDs anymore, but to say that nobody pays for porn anymore is simply untrue. Just like at the rapid expansion of Kink.com who in 2006 were so profitable that they could afford to spend $14,000,000 on the historic San Francisco Armory to use as a film studio. Plenty of new opportunities have arisen too – cam sites for example is a huge opportunity to take a massive cut out of the strip club market, in the same way that live dealers on gambling sites have taken a cut out of the casino market.
When I first entered the adult market in 2004, it was all about pushing paid content sites. Now the landscape has changed – it’s now about pushing dating sites (I use the term dating sites loosely, casual sex sites would probably be a more appropriate name) because that is where consumers are spending their money these days. They’re not spending less, just as I don’t spend any less on digital music than I did on CDs, they’re just spending it in different ways and you have to change your business model to adapt to this.
If the industry wants to survive and thrive, it needs to be willing to role with the times.
Mustache is a logic-less templating system, written by people who apparently can’t spell moustache correctly.
It has been ported to almost every popular language ranging from PHP to C++, though it has its origins in Ruby. It isn’t just useful for HTML either – you can also use it for things like config files.
The idea behind it is that templates are logic-less. It divided the traditional view into two parts – a view which is a class in your host language, and a template which is the Mustache markup. The view class can also be an associative array, like you would pass with a traditional templating system, but using a class allows you to easily make use of functions.
It produces very clean mark-up – you simply place your variables in curly braces (or double moustaches if you will) like {{so}} and they are swapped out. Repeating sections are handled by {{#sections}} that repeat based on lists {{/sections}} or are just used once to display or not, instead of using if statements.
The advantage is that you get templates which are almost logic free. I saw almost because of course you do still have repeating elements and tags in there designed to replicate if statements. But there are no logical statements in there – just tags!
The disadvantage is that it means doing a bit more work with your views. MVC already splits out the stack into three components and Mustache divides the view one step further.
One of the drinks I missed most since I stopped drinking alcohol is Rekorderlig. It’s like Kopparberg, but a lot nicer, there is more of a fruit taste in it. Luckily, when you are in a country full of alcoholics, they cater for such a niche.
Alkoholiton is Finnish for alcohol free. It’s amazing! Devastatingly, since returning to the UK I had a search around on the internet to see if anyone imports it, but it seems not.
Apache comes with a cool load testing script called Apache Bench, which lets you throw loads of requests at a URL. It comes bundled with Apache, so if you’re running the LAMP stack, you probably already have it.
The syntax is simple.
ab -n 1000 http://www.google.com/
This will throw a thousand requests at Google and then produce a report on how long it look. You can also use the -c option to set the number of concurrent requests. There are lots more options too – see the Apache docs for full details.
Now that I am self employed, I hate holidays. It’s fine to say, well I budget for that in my earnings, but when it actually comes to taking time off and doing the maths surrounding it, it’s very hard to make that decision.
Therefore, given I was forced to take a four day weekend for the Jubilee, we decided to fit in a cheeky trip to Finland to go see Elina’s family.
As if I didn’t hate flying enough, it turns out Finnair were running a new programme trial in which instead of feeding us, they didn’t feed us. Rubbish,
I had previous met her mum who provided us with a warm welcome and some amazing cooking. Indeed, she cooked so much that we ended up having beef and chicken for breakfast the next day too! I’m hoping it will become the new traditional Finnish breakfast.
It’s a really beautiful country and not called the land of a thousand lakes without good reason.
We had to drive through quite a bit of forest to get to the lakes. No wonder Finland produces so many rally drivers, it was ace.
On Monday we went to Turku, one of the larger cities where Elina went to university. It was mostly full of sex shops that offered live shows and a river that you would never want to drink from, but was nice never the less.
Then, in the evening, we travelled up north to Rauma so we could eat at a restaurant that served reindeer steak.
It was a lovely traditional restaurant, and the food was excellent.
After a long day of adventuring, Moomintroll was very tired.
Thank you so much to Elina’s mum and brother who put us up for the three days.
At the most recent Toastmasters meeting, I took on my second role as Grammarian. This involved introducing the word of the day, which I had chosen to be jubilant (after giving a short rant about how we should abolish the monarchy), as well was watching out for good uses of grammar and interesting phrases.
Following on from the success of Sarah Jones’s blog, Worfolk 18 is pleased to announce the launch of Jenny’s photo blog. New updates every month!
Hey, do you remember SoBe? Probably not as it’s new. Well, forget about it anyway because it’s gone. It’s now called Hirst’s Yard. Confusing, it’s also located in Hirst’s Yard, along with a load of other bars.
Myself, Elina, Norm, George and Kat were recently out for post-Nando’s cocktails when we received a buy one get one free flyer, so decided it was worth a go. Perhaps they decided that the SoBe look was simply a bit too bright and happy for Leeds, but the essentials remained the same – quality, properly mixed cocktails, at reasonable prices (which changes to very reasonable when you have two for one vouchers).
It was reasonably quiet when we went in at around 9pm, though picked up soon after that, so head down early if you want a seat.
We followed that up with a trip to the ever-popular Call Lane Social where we ventured up to the tiki hideaway upstairs. You can question the wisdom of lighting drinks on fire when you have a tiki-style straw roof that is highly flammable, but we survived to tell the tale, so all is well.
At this point, myself and Elina left as we had to be up early the next morning, but I presume the night ended in a strip club.