Corporate Sex vs Amateur Sex

The last couple of weeks have been crazy & I'm both physically & mentally exhausted. The girlfriend who was renting out my condo met somebody & within just a few weeks decided she was going to marry him & have babies. She moved in with him, so that meant finding someone else to rent my condo to. That part was actually easy; the first person I showed the place to ended up calling back a few days later to take it. But getting the place into move-in ready shape? Whole 'nother story. I am quite possibly the worst painter ever. It is so difficult for me to stay focused on the task at hand long enough not to...oh, stick my hand in paint, swipe the brush across something I'm not painting (like the floor, other walls, tile) or bang the lid back on the paint can splashing paint dots all over the floor.

So, after days of painting, spackling & scrubbing, the night before I was to hand the keys over to my new renter I only had to sew some curtains, install the new silver handles on the kitchen cupboards & replace the bathroom faucet. Curtains - done. Not straight, much cursing when trying to figure out how to thread a fucking bobbin, but done. Kitchen cupboard handles - done. Well, mostly. Damn Swedish innovation! Of the three packages of handles I bought at Ikea, only 2 or 3 in each package had the same size holes, so several trips to Home Depot later & a shitload of different sized screws, I got the new handles on all but one drawer. I can't believe what a difference little things like painting the inside of closets & new cupboard handles makes. The condo looks much nicer now than it ever did when I lived there.

The coup de grace? Changing a bathroom faucet that's older than I am. My poor back was already aching from bending into awkward positions to paint the cupboards & my shoulder was sore from the repeated motion of pushing hard on the roller. But it was two plastic washer thingies on the faucet that almost did me in. I don't know what they're called, but when you try to remove a faucet, under the counter are two big plastic nuts screwed onto the brass threaded bolts. If you've done this before, you'll know what I mean, and if not, sorry for my pathetic powers of description. Plastic nuts doesn't sound like a huge job to tackle, but when they haven't budged in almost 30 years? WD-40, a basin wrench, a sharp knife, repeated whacking with a hammer - no effect whatsoever. I called my dad to see if he had any tips & his exact words were, "Even if you offered me $10,000 I would not come over & try to get those off for you." Ah! So it wasn't just me that had battled these stubborn bastards before. He told me that after smashing the suckers with a chisel & hammer for close to 2 hours, he finally did get them loose, but on the last blow of the hammer, he also cracked the sink. Doh!

I was finally successful after buying a new kit for my Dremel & cutting the fuckers off. New tap looks fab & doesn't drip. Lease signed. Keys handed over. Dunzo for another year, thank gawd. The sexy, glamorous life of a landlord! Just need a polyester jacket & ya'll can call me Miss Furley.

So that's my physically exhaustion, now for the mental. After working until dark on the condo every day, I've been coming home to tackle another job - configuring an admin system for the members area of Private Kitten, the sex site I'm going to be managing. The plan for the site is to have a little bit of everything - from amateur girls to professionally shot movies to live cams. Even though my personal site is going to be tame by sex site standards (strictly nude pics), it's going to be part of Private Kitten network, so my members get to enjoy the best of both worlds. I love indie sites run by the real girl in the pictures. They have personality, original content & interaction with the people who pull out their cash to sign up. Corporate sites, on the other hand, tend to treat their members like walking wallets. It used to be just upsells in the member areas, but now you see join pages with pre-checked boxes signing you up for another site you haven't even visited yet & spam in your mailbox as soon as you cancel. Of course, sites that make money also have money to spend on models, photographers, DVD-quality movies & super fast hosting to get those movies downloaded to your computer. The good corporate sites have got the quality & the quantity. It's tough for indie amateur models to compete since they're usually working with limited budgets of time & money. There are only so many ways to make your own house look like a different location & when you're relying on your boyfriend or husband to take the pictures, they're not going to get the same quality as a pro. Plus the indie girls have to deal with everything themselves. They don't have a team of webmasters doing marketing or putting together updates. They do it all, which means their time is limited. A single girl can't update her site every single day with new pictures, and really - who would want her to? Yes, I've had my share of cyber crushes, but we're talking about porn site memberships, not marriage! Most guys I know have their favorite web girl & then a few other sites that enjoy runner up status.

Have I officially sold out now that I'm throwing my hat into the corporate porn ring? Maybe, though the benefit of having my original photos up beside bought content means my site will launch a hell of a lot quicker. (FYI - "Bought content" is a term webmasters use to refer to sets of pictures photographers license for use on several different sites). The problem with trying to launch a new site in 2005 is that you're competing against models who have been updating regularly for years. They have hundreds of photo sets in their archives & add new stuff each week. I love shooting photos & will have no problem updating my site once a week, but getting enough sets together to launch a site that has value from day one? Just like the established sites, that takes years! By being part of the PK network, there's a lot less pressure for me to build up a huge archive before I even get started since my members will have tons of other girls to check out while they wait for my next update.

Speaking of other girls, I can't wait to start recruiting local girls who want to be part of the site. I love photography & have shot a couple of other models, but most girls ask pretty hefty fees for nude pics & I just haven't had the budget for it. Trying to find girls willing to put in the effort to build up a huge archive of content so they can have their own personal site is even tougher. Actually, scratch that. It seems like the corporate porn world has figured out that people who join single model sites will often stay members for ages because they become fans & friends of the model. Instead of shooting a bunch of scenes with a stupid premise for some "reality" site, they've figured out they can hire a photographer & a model to shoot for a month straight, launch a new single girl site & then rake in the cash. The girls have nothing to do with the sites usually & the updates stop once they run out of pre-shot content. So what I should say is it's difficult to find girls willing to put in the effort to build a GOOD single model site that's worth joining & staying a member of.

Now why is this exhausting? No, it's not the effort that ranting about corporate porn takes. It's the frustration of trying to find a good admin system for managing huge archives of content that's searchable & can be organized by model name, niche, member rating or date added. I've installed & fiddled with just about every CMS on the market now & can't find anything that does what I want it to do. I've customized so much code, piecing together bits of this script into that module until my mySQL databases are groaning for an admin that knows what the heck she's doing. It doesn't seem like it should be that tough! I want an easy layout that loads quickly & some simple functionality for members, like the ability to rate content sets, search for the things you like to see (big tits, blonde latinas, whatever) & leave comments. I've technically found scripts to do everything I want, but they are bulky, buggy, impossible to customize & simply unelegant solutions to easy problems. I wish I had taken more coding classes in school. Somehow I don't think my Pascal background is going to help me out here.

I was up until 4 a.m. last night staring at code trying to figure out what file had a hardcoded database table name that was causing the error I was getting. I finally figured it out & got the thing working, but when I tried to unpublish certain unneccessary fields, the script gives an irritating pop up letting me know that certain lines have errors. It still technically works, but obviously not a solution.

So that's my life as of late. So busy I even missed the first half hour of the ANTM premiere. Gasp! I survived & now have an old computer acting as trailer park TiVo unit recording my fave shows. Why is it that the Canadian dollar keeps getting stronger, but everything still costs so much more here than in the US? We can't get TiVo service here, but our local cable company offers their own version of a PVR for the low low price of $499, plus a monthly charge of something equally ridiculous. My car? Would've been under $15K in the US, but here? By the time you add cruise & air conditioning, I was over $22K. Have you ever seen those Tobin commercials for the car dealership in Vegas? Argh! So cheap! If insuring a US car in Canada wasn't so difficult, I would've driven home. I wonder if Vegas is a particularly good city to find used car deals since there are bound to be more people down on their luck & needing quick cash.

Now that I've officially bored anyone who's still reading, I think it's time to shut my yap (shut my fingers?). Late night gym run, some coffee & then more admin research. Can't wait to get a good system set up & then start recruiting foxy chicas. Talk about job perks! =)