Translation ...
 

Hi vincent

Even if your English might be poor (it can't possibly be as bad as my French), please try to write in this language, since it's the main language here and the only one Danielle speaks.

Google translation - might be horrible: ;)

Language translation widget
 

Hi Anoree,

The other month I wrote you suggesting that forum admins try to automatically embed a free third-party language translation widget into every page (e.g. header or footer) which vBulletin assembles. Did you have any time to look into this? By supporting more languages, perhaps Danny can get more international sales.

Huh? I could have sworn that in a lot of her videos, Danny shows great skill at "French"! :p

Cue the theme music from (and by!) France here.

Calendar girl
 

Additional charges for a custom salutation with signature and/or lipstick-kiss on the front cover interior! And how about making the photos month-appropriate? Danny already has some Valentine's Day, St Patrick's Day, Christmas, et cetera shoots done. Gosh, I wonder how July's big firecracker will fit... ;)

Cue the theme music here.

Also sometimes "The Horniest Place on Earth"!
 

Hi Danny,

Your latest journal video is most welcome, thanks! But your intention to take 5yo nephew Carter to Disneyland obliges me to warn you not to accept any invitation to stay after the park closes. Some of the staff can get pretty damn rowdy!!! Just trust me on this one, okay?

Danielle calendar
 

Ron, even better! A personalized Danielle calendar would be amazing, especially the kiss! :D

Danielle, after your last update, I saw this picture and thought of you:

http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs12/i/20..._AvinaStar.jpg

FYI: Three new documentaries on erotic camming
 

Hey Dani,

You've told us it is now your ambition to forsake traditional "commodity" (mass sales) video for live cam shows, so I'd like to bring your attention to several information sources which I hope may prove useful in helping you.

First is an article that advocates for the wisdom of your new path which, at the least, should provide encouragement. It writes in part:

DVDs are dead, pay sites are struggling and porn is free and unlimited... Why live cams, Twitter and Skype may be the porn industry?s last hope.

Find this September 5, 2012 publication here.

The suggestion is made that if you can beat back the ample camming competition and serve the one-percenters, it's not impossible to rake in enormous profits: Maitresse Madeline, Dominatrix, Auctions One-On-One Webcam Session For $42,000 writes the article of 01/09/2014 here.

It seems that the mass-media has picked up on the erotic camming industry, because recent months have seen the broadcast of not merely one, but at least three English-language documentaries on this subject! You can thank my informal UK source for the discovery of the two from Britain.

Sadly, I can't tell an American how to purchase a copy of any of them, although perhaps your provider Cox has a means of selling you the HBO program about which I don't know. The two British programs are among those typically made available via free Internet VoD, at least for a limited time after broadcast, but only to British IP addresses via common geolocation tools.

But guess what? Just because it's hard or impossible to buy legitimate access, doesn't mean you have to forgo this very timely crop of vital business intelligence. As I write, you can find at least one copy of each program on YouTube, and goodness knows how many other places less subject to easy scrutiny. Now, onto the programs themselves.

First, this year HBO effectively resurrected the breakthrough series it launched a generation ago and retired in 2009, called REAL SEX. The new half-hour series is called SEX // NOW. The pilot episode, airing in January, consisted of three different segments on erotic camming. Find a preview of the show here and a chat with its creator, plus the pilot trailer, here. The most shocking (and unsubstantiated) text-based claim it makes is this:

There are an estimated 6 million cam models globally. (sic.)

To paraphrase Mr. Morse's quotation of Numbers 23:23, "What hath Jennicam wrought?"

The second program on this subject is from the UK's BBC 3 and called The Truth About Webcam Girls. The BBC describes it here, which includes a two-minute trailer and notes that this program about UK camming debuted to Britons in February.

The third program, also British, was broadcast by Channel Five in early April. It is called Webcam Girls - At Your Service and is profiled by Five here. It glibly claims a mere 10,000 British women do erotic camming - which would be barely a fifth of the global rate which the HBO program asserted. It also claims that earnings average 800 pounds sterling weekly. I found the handful of remarks posted on its legitimate (UK-only) playback Web page, especially by claimed camming pros, interesting.

I hope that, one way or another, you arm yourself ASAP with these information sources, which I am sure no small number of your competitors will. Even if they provide you little or no new insider wisdom, I think it's also important to keep tabs on what the public at large (including potential clients) is being told about one's industry.

Best of luck!


P.S. With all this broadcast media interest in camming, I would not be at all surprised if someone took up the suggestion I posted the other month about telling the Jennicam story to a new generation.

I love it! It's so freaking pretty!!!

Hell yeah! I <3 cartoon porn...especially Disney cartoon porn. Probably one of my weirder fetishes.

Deep Inside Snow White
 

G.o.t. MILF? I wish!
 

As I am ignorant of Ghiscari, I must admit that I did not know what Mhysa meant. Thus I asked Missandei, who said it simply denotes "mother." (Apparently, canines and felines are not into using possessives.)

For those of you who want to get into, or catch up with, Game of Thrones, check out the often hilarious Funny or Die miniseries, Gay of Thrones, in which the swishiest Hollywood hair stylist you will ever meet recaps the episodes of the third and fourth seasons!

Where are my drag queens? ...errm, I mean dragons?

Hoe White? Snow White goes ghetto and gets crunk!
 

WTF? Young lady, words have CONSEQUENCES! You "aksed" for this! ;-P

Montana is renowned for its mining and its many big buttes. So what could be more natural than for some "shawtie" dwarves to get crunk, make a bootie/butte call and then go mining Hannah Montana's "tunnel of love"?

Yo-yo-yo! That's just what the Ying-Yang Twins (YYT) want to make them tiny-D mofo's do! They hail ol' Miley with Hi hoe, hi hoe! as she arrives, dons her Snow Whitebread drag, and then starts twerkin' away. Listen up dawg, as the YYT serenade her in the club with its "very romantic" song, Whistle While You Twerk here.

Shee-it, that Cyrus B dancin' gonna wreck mah balls. And they don' need no room, and no instructor to skeet! Damn straight!

Automotive pleasure
 

Hooking up in Orlando
 

Well, I'm not surprised after hearing the conversation you had about the Disney theme parks with your girlfriends Caroline and Max, posted here.

You know, Mickey's wandering eye eventually led Minnie to retaliate, as we all learned during their ugly and highly public divorce proceedings. Who can ever forget how it began?

Judge: Mr. Mouse, your petition states that you are seeking a divorce from your wife, Minnie, on the grounds that she has lost her sanity.

Mickey: No, your honor, there's been a mistake. What I actually told my attorney was that I'm sure she's f_ucking Goofy.

LMAO...this whole post made me laugh!

Nope I didn't see that. That is something that I wanted to do on camera but FTVRob told me that it causes a huge mess :rolleyes:

More Disnography
 

Oh no! You've got the DOUBLE whammy!

Kudos on going higher tech!
 

Erotic camming show et alia
 

Hey Dani,

As I freely confessed long ago, I don't know the porn film business... So I don't know any implied business advice to you is worth very much. But the Internet makes it possible for people to discover and explore so many things previously inaccessible! Like most men, I've often been a porn consumer during my post-pubescent years. Thus it is a real temptation to pull back the curtain, so to speak, and examine the machinery which has made the production of porn operate, even if I don't have the pecuniary interest in the industry which you do.

Recently, I asked you What education did you have for your current vocation?, partly as a prologue to pointing you at some educational material. This week, I was surprised and delighted to discover how much interesting material the AVN wesbite publishes - not just rehashed press releases, as I had cynically expected, but lots of in-depth stuff as well. I hope you have been reading their news feed for a long time, but if not, I would encourage you to start doing so.

One AVN item which caugt my eye was Inaugural Camming Con Moves Dates to July 31-August 3 which alleges that it is the first trade show of its kind. I have no idea if the cost of going to this event would prove worthwhile to you, but I thought you deserved a heads up anyway, giving the professional plans you told us about. There is no little irony in having a physical convention to address the supposed needs of an industry based on virtual meetings, but the announced secondary goal of the event is to let fans and models meet IRL.

Apropos of e-space vs meatspace, a few months ago I had naively lamented By the time your generation reaches middle age and starts to control things, I'm sure we'll live in a thoroughly virtualized world where physical location won't count for much in your business.. But for now, I'm not sanguine the porn kingpins socialize via LinkedIn or cast via Skype. But the AVN article Crowdsourcing Column: Mainstream vs. Adult - How different are they, really? implies my anxieties were misplaced. It quotes Colin of TranslationsXXX so: In mainstream almost everyone wants to do business face to face or over the telephone, while in adult email, Skype and ICQ are often preferred.

Again, let me say I am delighted with your recent initial foray into CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) via webcam software. I think such stuff can only grow in importance throughout the entertainment field as the years pass - which is the premise of that EnterTech certificate at ASU I have mentioned more than once. And in any case, your web site upkeep has already kept your finger at least a little in the technology pie for some years now. So I hope you will also pay no little attention to the AVN Technology and Webmaster news feed.

Please take note of the remarkable range of world-class Free and Open-Source Software available to you for the asking. I'm NOT talking about pirated commercial software, an analog to something that plagues your industry, but something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. For a generation now, this category of software has been designed, debugged and supported by volunteer cooperatives spanning the globe and linked via the Internet. Their motive has been a combination of unmet personal needs, ego, professional reputation building and philanthropy. They have produced remarkable tools, the equals, or sometimes, superiors of similar commercial for-profit software. Want an example? The Linux operating system, which all of Google's millions of search engine computers have always run since the day the company was founded. Google's Android, which as likely as not, runs on your smartphone or tablet, is in fact a Google derivative of Linux. It is free to all takers, as long as they don't use the name in producing products based on it.

I hope the day never comes that you still want to star in porn but cannot. But if next time (hopefully NEVER) that you "total" your car, your pretty face also becomes a permanent, irretrievable total loss, it would be good to know that you have a set of well-practiced non-trivial skills useful to a wide range of industries.

Uh! I would be highly offended if my wonderful fans DID NOT watch each and every one of my video logs. Haha...I am kidding...sort of. I'm pretty sure Anoree is the only one that watches everyone of my video logs. If someone watches at least one of them then that makes me a happy camper.

I'm pretty sure that some other fans watch every video log you post, too.
I might be the only one who watches them over and over again, though. :eek::o

Stay tuned for the next exciting adventure!
 

P.S. Most Webmasters have their servers generate logs which document which files are accessed when, allowing one to measure the popularity of various files with a script. Maybe the FTV folks can lend you a hand.

FYI: Stop switching cables by hand
 

Hey Dani,

The other day I was showing someone your video logs. In one of them you complained about the need to constantly remove and replace cables when you used your TV set as a screen for your video game console. You can easily buy a cheap automatic switching box you only wire up once. Almost certainly you are switching between so-called HDMI cables. If so, you can use the three-way switching gadget ($6 with shipping) which Amazon sells here, pictured below. Believe me, your TV set will be grateful when you get it DPed this way!


You're a great switch hitter! Why shouldn't your electronics wiring be so as well? ;)

Vlogs 46x
 

Hey Dani,

I caught up with your videlogs, numbers 461-469, and I have some feedback to offer.

I don't know if it was an accident or not, but the use of a mirror behind you offers some interesting cinematic possibilities. Since they are so cheap, you could even use more mirrors yet, as long as you are careful to assure they won't break through a lateral impact or fall. Mirrors can even enhance the eroticism of a scene (cf. honeymoon suite design!)

Speaking of sexy, I am yet to see you take full advantage of your bare breasts by doing things like coloring (same/different) the areolas with lipstick, or using the areolas as irises while you draw pinched ovals around them to create giant mock eyes. Other ideas include using a very loosely-woven doily-style tablecloth as a shawl to play peek-a-boo or just donning one or two old-fashioned pasties to hide the "naughty" parts of your ample boobage, to protect our innocent eyes, oh my! Do they make a big enough helium balloon to loft your boob with a cord by its nipple? Even if not, you can pretend and simply allow the cord to extend beyond the top of the of frame; hanging the cord over a horizontal pipe, with a counterweight on its end, can complete the illusion of a balloon. Might it even start to loft you away whole at the end of the video? Yes!

It seems like for the most part, you have found Isis something other to do than pester you during shoots. But someone told me that "other thing" is establishing a fanatical theocratic state in the Middle East. Can that possibly be true? :eek:

At this point, I'm sorry to wag my finger at you (I know you prefer hard dicks) - but I feel I must. The exposure problem in videolog 461 should not have perplexed you by now. Almost the first thing people learn in doing photography is that it is almost always a bad idea to shoot someone facing the camera while they take up a small part of the frame with much brighter light hitting their back than their front side. This is especially true when the camera is using automatic brightness control, because it cranks down the gain to bring the background into mid-range, making the front of the person too dark! It is common to light a subject with a triple of lights (front, back and key), but if you want to keep it simple, just make sure the subject is dominantly front lit - and not from below, unless you want to go for a "Halloween" effect! Of course, sometimes a bright rear light can produce a desired artistic effect - like an intentional silhouette (e.g. to prep for a reveal), or as seen below, collimated off-lens-axis to create a glorious halo.


Do you know the pretty lady above? She's Debbie Harry, the singing front-woman of the legendary band Blondie, as she looked a third-century ago, during their glory days. I chose her for the example photo in my lighting mini-lecture above largely because of the way you answered the last question in videolog 467.

You don't have to be on "E" to sing I'm On E, which Debbie does in the music video seen here. I believe this was from a performance on a German television program named Musikladen, circa 1977. Check out how her wardrobe and demeanor put a sexy spin on her frenetic performance: braless under a loose-fitting blouse, watch her shake those literal (non-biological) maracas, reminding us that her chest is definitely female!

If you're in a party mood, maybe you'd like to lipsync the music and mock her moves in a video shoot! You know, much of the time, owners of copyrighted music allow YouTube to host non-professional videos using their material, electing to use same as an ad, by linking to a download sale of the corresponding high-quality track.

D461
 

While it was cool to see that you shot this video log while editing one of the latest hardcore videos, the lighting problem would probably have dissolved by simply switching off the bright monitor behind you. :o

And you're very, very welcome. I get a huge kick out of seeing your reaction to my gifts. :)

More porn history
 

Hey Dani,

I hope you've had a chance to watch the UK-made multi-hour video history of porn that I sent, which you showed in your recent birthday present vlog. If you'd like a pointer to a text-based supplement to it, consider the long essay titled The History of Modern [1527-2009] Pornography here.

With your professional involvement in *photographic* porn, especially motion pictures, I'd bring to your attention a relevant book titled Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR (2007). Amazon sells a Kindle version for $10, but let me point out that you could instead preview a copy at ASU Tempe. (They own both e-book and printed copies.) In many US states, residents have unpaid access to state university libraries, and perhaps that is also true in Arizona. I know in fact that the public library system in Tempe, like those in so many places, can arrange interlibrary loans for material they lack (MOST times without any user-paid fees.) Sure, these alternatives don't much matter for a book costing a lousy ten bucks, but others, like professional books, can run HUNDREDS. Use WorldCat at http://worldcat.org to query which libraries near you own copies of most "significant" books and other materials (about 2 billion items at over 10,000 libraries around the world).

Do also bookmark the wonderful, extensive, free, illustrated history of 20th century "mainstream" erotic cinema titled: Sex in the Movies: An Illustrated Cinematic History, here.

Over your short lifespan, there has been a real revolution in the acceptance and integration of erotic content in all sorts of everyday US contexts, like advertising, humor, music, etc. A 2008 book (written by a couple of English profs) on the history of US porn, which especially well explains these most recent changes, is The porning of America: the rise of porn culture... You cannot understand the sexual psychology which STILL dominates the minds of SO MANY older Americans (and folks in many other places, too) unless you appreciate the magnitude of the *recent* sea-change in sexual culture!

The stagecraft of "extreme" makeup and costuming
 

Hey Dani,

Whether or not you know the term, you do seem to understand the principle of the so-called Coolidge Effect and the obvious fallout for a porn performer, especially in an age like ours, where the production and distribution of mediated performances is so inexpensive. Evidence of this includes occasional changes in your tattoos and hair color over time.

In the post above titled Vlogs 46x here, I encouraged you to intensify your efforts in combating the Coolidge Effect. Since writing it, I've come across some related matter you might find helpful, or at least inspiring. Obviously, one can only put so much effort into pedestrian video logs, so this stuff is basically directed toward enhancing your money-making hardcore sex videos.

I know you basically outsource the creation of things like costumes and accessories, but I still suspect it is useful to become better educated about such work, if only to become wiser about soliciting its thrifty CUSTOMIZED creation by fabricators. One helpful recent book is Costume Craftwork on a Budget: Clothing, 3-D Makeup, Wigs, Millinery & Accessories (Focal Press, 2007). I perused a copy and discovered detailed treatments of topics like these - life-casting (to help create personalized appliances, masks, etc.); transforming contemporary clothes into (historical, not menstrual!) period garments; making mock jewelry, pseudo-metallic armor/weapons, and headgear; producing mock animal parts like torsos, heads and even fangs; and so on. I suspect a non-fiction book like this would appeal to your sense of whimsy and romance - quite aside from its practical value in stagecraft!

You probably have access to the SyFy Channel through your Cox cable service. So perhaps you have already seen the 6-episode series of late 2013 titled Naked Vegas, about a "body-painting" firm of that name. I found it fascinating to watch as the artists of this firm used paint, adhesives, cloth, plastic, latex and all sorts of other things to fabricate world-class body art! Generally speaking, the art created is not erotic per se (one starts by using color-matched pasties to "remove" (or "Barbiefy") the nipples and venereal clefts of shaved female models), but it is not hard to believe SOME of the techniques they exploit are suitable for actresses in hard-core porn action.

Read an informative LV Review-Journal backgrounder here and then watch the 30-second trailer for the series here. If it interests you, one expects that Naked Vegas is available VoD from iTunes, Amazon, Hulu or whomever. (A closely related veteran SyFy series I have not seen is Face Off, look here.) FYI, the six episodes of NV bore these titles:

1. Paint the Town, Red
2. Devil Pirates and Aliens
3. Penn & Teller Painted Magic
4. Painted Playmate Claire Sinclair
5. Cosplay and Steampunk
6. Jabbawockeez Masked in Color

Trying to learn the real dope about show business
 

Easter and the East
 

Hey Dani,

In your video log d522.wmv you discussed how you get ideas for shoots, and brought up the notion of sticking a wooden egg inside yourself for Easter.

Because of your youth, I suspect you don't know that sticking a (chicken) egg inside herself and forcing it out was a stunt a woman undertook in a landmark film released a full dozen years before you were born! Let me tell you about it by quoting largely from a 2008 book of the famous sex film academic Linda Williams:

...as we have seen, American movies only tackled the representation of hard-core explicit sex within the genre of pornography. Moving-image pornography as practiced since the seventies has had the primary goal of arousing viewers through the maximum visibility of normally hidden organs and acts that often verge on the clinical, with aesthetic considerations secondary. The rule of maximum visibility did not mean that pornography outlawed all aesthetic concerns; nor did it mean, on the other side, that erotic art necessitated a corresponding lack of graphic content. Yet what we might call hard-core eroticism tempered graphic display with more subtle effects of line, color, light, and - in the performing art of film - subtleties of sexual performance that were much harder to achieve. In the end, moving-image pornography proved relatively easy to make and has flourished since the seventies in its own parallel universe in which art is not necessary (but can occasionally happen). In contrast, hard-core moving-image erotica proved difficult to make and did not flourish in this same time period...

One film of the 1970s, Oshima Nagisa's Japanese but French-produced In the Realm of the Senses (1976), fully succeeded in combining hard-core sex with erotic art. As perhaps the only work of seventies international cinema to actually do what Anglo-American and European critics and directors had only dreamed of doing, this single film occupies the whole of chapter 5... Pornography or not, Oshima's film has garnered important critical discussion among Western critics who know a great deal about Japanese culture... [Its] great influence has perhaps only begun to become evident since the late nineties, when a critical mass of new hard-core art cinema from Europe, Asia, and even, finally, from America, emerged to demand critical attention...

[This sadomasochistic-themed film] concerns the amour fou of a wealthy Japanese merchant, Kichi, and his woman servant, Sada... The film's reception in the West was influenced by the knowledge that it was based on a true story, already well known to the Japanese public, that had already served as the basis for another feature made the previous year.

I wouldn't be surprised if you were interested in viewing the film, given the subject matter and its importance. No doubt the Internet holds at least one copy of an English subtitles file (e.g. .srt) It seems that Hulu makes a version of the film (Is it cut at all?) available online here.

Further, since you are such a bookworm, perhaps you might like to read the aforementioned chapter 5, and the other commentary on sex films in that book and others. To this end, I'm listing a couple of handfuls of such books below, in publication date order. Note that the majority of these titles are published by university presses.

1. Hard Core - Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible [by Linda Williams] (U California, 1989)
2. Porn Studies [ed by Linda Williams] (Duke U, 2004)
3. Soft in the Middle - The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts (Ohio State U, 2006)
4. The Other Hollywood - The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry (Harper-Collins, 2006)
5. Black and White and Blue - Adult Cinema From the Victorian Age to the VCR (ECF, 2007)
6. The History of Sex in American Film (Praeger, 2007)
7. Screening Sex [by Linda Williams - this has chapter 5!] (Duke U, 2008)
8. Carnal Resonance - Affect and Online Pornography (MIT, 2011)
9. Hard to Swallow - Hard-Core Pornography on the Screen (Columbia, 2012)
10. Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (Wallflower, 2012)

I definitely did not know that. I learn the most interesting things from you.

A podcast could be an interesting idea. I'm not really sure what I would talk about though since I already discuss so much on my video logs. If I were to make podcasts it would have to wait until the braces came off.

What's funny is I've watched a few episodes of SyFy's FaceOff (my mom and brother love that show and watch it together on a fairly regular basis). It sounds similar to what you've written about.

Oops...my monitor is almost always on when I'm shooting video logs. I'll have to keep that in mind for next time.

One Good Deed
 

HI Danielle thank you for the vid log D548 you are amazing,you truly are without a doubt " The Queen of Hearts " I bow to thee my queen....:):)

Awww :) you are so sweet. Thank you!

Staycation
 

Several of the things you have written and videoed in recent postings lead me to suggest the following. It seems you were less than enthusiastic about the Halloween costume party expedition to Las Vegas with your girlfriendS (you did not say how many they were, if any, more than two). What if next time you guys wanted an adventure together, you thought about foregoing the total costs of travel, lodging, and other expenses, like travel time, and pooled your funds to finance a special party in Phoenix?

In Las Vegas, there are zillions of dollars invested in architecture and the like to let you imagine you are in some foreign country, like France, or a historical era, like that of Ancient Rome. While you obviously can't match the grandeur of such an operation, what if you instead enjoyed authenticity, by engaging a foreign students organization at ASU to throw a party celebrating their culture's past or present, with appropriate food, music, costume, decoration, or theatrics (included recorded ones)?

The web page here lists the following EXISTING clubs at ASU:

Coalition of International Students
Chinese Students and Scholars Association
Fulbright International Student Association at ASU
Indian Students Association
Iranian Students Association
Kazakhstan Student Association
Korean Students Association
Saudi Students Club
Singapore Student Association
PERMIAS - Indonesian Student Association
Philippine American Student Association
Qatari Student Association
Taiwanese Student Association
The Kuwaiti Club ASU
Turkish Student Association

Some of these groups take pains to explicitly say they welcome participation by everyone.

By the way, if I have to say this, not infrequently students will study outside their native countries to ESCAPE their families, native culture, legal or political circumstances, and some might even be more inclined to satirize (or just forget) things back home than celebrate them!

The existing organizations listed above do not exhaust the variety of nationalities which ASU tries to attract, one imagines with at least partial success. The page here indicates that ASU admission information is available in all of the following languages:

Portuguese (think Brazil)
Spanish (think most of Latin America)
Thai
Indonesian
Vietnamese
Japanese
Korean
Mandarin
Turkish

Holding the party on campus might be a way to stretch the party budget because of access to cheap or free meeting space. And it would be a way to make it easy for students without cars to attend or even serve to earn a couple bucks. I know Phoenix is not New York or Paris, but as a major metropolis, I'm sure there are at least some ethnic restaurants (and maybe even grocers) to help make things go.

Such a party would also be a way to meet other students (maybe even those who would inspire you by their example or even their friendship to persevere in your studies through the term and the years to come.) And who knows? Perhaps you'd even get to meet some nice boys there - foreign or American.

Finally, by making authentic contact with foreign cultures, you might be in a better position to stage interesting settings for your video productions - and maybe even generate bait which helps you land more foreign customers. Not every foreign culture is as porn-friendly as the USA, but in some cases that just means potential fans there are all the more hungry for such fare. And on the other hand, I'd argue that a country like Japan is even MORE porn-friendly than the States.

As a typical Millennial Generation Sailor Moon fan, you probably know that in Japan, adults as well as children are interested in things like drawn cartoon books ("manga") and animated versions ("anime"). But the popular adult fare there has no popular parallel in the United States. As an example, consider the animated series Ah, My Buddha! ("Amaenaide yo!"). Wikipedia writes of it: The show was broadcast in Japan with an R-15 rating, which is the Japanese equivalent of a 'Restricted' rating... The protagonist of the series is [a 16-year-old] monk-in-training... who transforms into a super-monk with the ability to perform mass exorcisms... He lives in a temple run by his grandma along with six teenage nuns-in-training. And how does he transform when needed? Simple! One or more of the nuns sexually arose him by doing something like flashing him, LOL! And afterwards, the ungrateful be-atches usually kick the $hit out of him for getting horny in the first place. And you thought Sookie and her friends cornered the market on odd supernatural sexcapades!

You could watch a typical (half-hour) episode of Ah, My Buddha!, dubbed into English, here, but instead, I'd advise you to invest your limited time in viewing the three documentary videos I will now mention.

Learn quickly about Japan's sexual heritage and culture via a largely-English-audio 14-minute clip from a year 2000 BBC-Japanese co-production here. (Or avoid the login, at the disadvantage of Vietnamese captions which overwrite the English ones, here.)

Then, if you have an hour to spare, I'd have you watch two half-hour episodes from Japanorama, a fast-moving, fun-loving three-season documentary series on contemporary Japanese culture produced by the BBC in the previous calendar decade. Alas, it will be another year until the BBC starts to sell its back-catalog of programming in the US via Internet video on demand. Until then, you can cheat by viewing these two programs at the following places online.

First watch the season 1, episode 3 program, titled Sex, here.
Then watch the season 3, episode 2 program, titled Ai and Koi (Love and Romance), here.

And to beat a dead horse, Chroma-Key is a great way to enjoy an exotic, even foreign, set without busting the production budget. :rolleyes:

F*ck Winter, Halloween is Coming!
 

Hey Dani,

Getting back to the issue of lame and faithless Halloween costumes, it just struck me that Game of Thrones provides a treasure-trove of creative ideas for horrific and identifiable Halloween characters and costumes! Sure enough, some quick Googling proves this has been a popular idea for some time now.

If this struck your fancy, I know you would be stormborn-tempted to go all Queen of Meereen on us - not the least because of the name and golden locks. But LB & Isis look silly in wings - and Isis would rather to play down the violence vibe in her life, given what her namesake does in the Mideast these days.

So I'd like to suggest you instead consider the path less taken, engaging your sword fetish for a tour of duty as Brienne of Tarth!

Finally, with soooo many characters in GoT, surely any of your fellow macabre merry-makers would have a wide range of characters from which to choose. And besides, how hard is it to stick a few fake knives into one's ketchup-bloodied gut and make like a Red Wedding non-survivor? Sheesh!

The industry: yesterday, today - and tomorrow?
 

Gay of Thrones
 

Hey Dani,

In a recent vlog you expressed the ambition to start watching Game of Thrones from HBO, as you are a fan of the book series. The show has amazing production values, like that of a feature film, including very realistic-looking CGI dragons which interact with the human cast. As I recall, each hour-long show, which leverages a cast of about 200 and a crew of roughly 800 others, not to mention the extras sometimes used, has a budget of about US$10 million!

Starting with the third season of the six exhibited so far, the Funny Or Die web site has been producing a short video synopsis for each weekly show, all of which you can find online here. Called Gay of Thrones, these hilarious reviews star Jonathan, the swishiest West Hollywood hairdresser you will ever meet, who leverages one's knowledge of popular culture to help keep track of the enormous cast of characters, as he recounts the latest episode to a (quasi-)celebrity customer on whom he is working. Why not spare three minutes now and pick any of these shorts to be sold on the concept - and the HBO series as well!

I'm sure that is absolutely hilarious! I will have to check it out after I've watched the actual Game of Thrones episodes.