I think I may have just done something either immesurably mad or incredibly genius, and I can’t really decide which it was. Truthfully, that sort of distinction can be hard to make out when I’m in ideal psychological states and I haven’t exactly been in one of those lately, but I digress.

I ran into this on CraigsList today:

ADULT FILM PRODUCER LOOKING FOR A DP ASAP. (ATLANTA)

WE ARE LOOKING FOR AN EXPERIENCED DP. WE NEED SOMEONE WHO IS ABOUT THERE BUSINESS. POINT BLANK. IN AND OUT! THIS IS A HIGH END ADULT FILM SO WE NEED SOMEONE WHO IS GOOD AT LIGHTING FOR HORROR FILMS. THE PAY IS $300 PER 8HR DAY BASED ON YOUR EXPERIENCE. WE ALSO HAVE CATERING SO YOU WILL EAT PLENTY OF GOOD FOOD. THIS IS A VERY PROFESSIONAL PRODUCTION. NOW THERE IS A CATCH. WE NEED SOMEONE ASAP MEANING TODAY NO LATER THAN TOMMORROW THROUGH WED THE 8TH OF OCT. SO SEND US YOUR INFO INCLUDING YOUR REEL AND IF WE FEEL LIKE YOU CAN COMPLIMENT OUR SITUATION WE WILL CONTACT YOU IMMEDIETLY. WAITING ON YOU! THANKS.

Now, the first and most obvious thing that leapt out at me was that looking for a DP in the adult film industry is sort of like looking for cow-flop in the ranching industry; you’re positively awash in it, pun wholly intended. But once the giggling subsided and I thought about the idea of looking for a Director of Photography who’s got some experience with lighting horror films seemed brilliant.

Most horror flicks are extremely low-budget. They’re independently distributed. They’re made by folks who love the genre and they have very particular visual tropes and references, including the lighting. It’s an obvious match for low-rent adult film.

No, I didn’t send my name in as the potential DP for an adult film. That’s far, far too sane. Besides, I may have a lead on a job with AUCradio and that’d be far more interesting, economically.

I did something much, much worse.

I sent a very polite request to ask if they knew of any apprenticeship opportunities in the local industry in audio engineering or video editing, mentioned I had my own editing suite, and mentioned my interest in the genre not because of the sexual content, but because the high turn-around rate of the development process seemed ideal for someone who learns readily by hands-on doing.

So, yeah, I just sent an inquiry for references off to a local porn company.

Worst case, they completely ignore my email and I just kept myself occupied for 10min writing it. Best case they hook me up with the editing group / people / guy they use as their go to and I have something to do in the afternoons / evenings learning how the job’s done and what’s involved. Ideal case would be discovering I have a flair for the work and they want to pay me thousands of dollars a week to do something I’m good at.

I don’t expect the ideal, don’t even really want it, per se, but I don’t object to it.

It’s interesting, in any case.

Ironically, I stumbled on this mere seconds after I sent that email:

Sarah Palin porn film made by Larry Flynt

The Hustler founder has made an X-rated movie using an adult-film actress who resembles the governor of Alaska.

Flynt’s team had posted an anonymous advert on the website Craigslist just days after Mrs Palin took the Republican convention by storm last month.

The ad read: “Looking for a Sarah Palin look-alike for an adult film to be shot in the next 10 days.”

The actress would be paid $3,000 (�1,700) for the part.

Flynt’s spokesman confirmed to the New York Daily News that the film had been shot, but he would not yet reveal the title.

Bloggers have already suggested various titles such as “Northern XXXposure” and “Riding Pipeline”

Seriously, guys, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. Which is kind of funny, but there you go.

Serendipity.

Duran Duran's Someone Else Not Me makes for the most depressing webcam porn background audio track ever.

Seriously. If anything were to drive young men to kill themselves in front of the keyboard, that'd be it.

( Someone Else Not Me )

Someone truly dipped into the inspired-but-evil category for that one.

Don't ask how I know.

You can find some crazy things when you poke around in the technical hinterlands of the world. I'm a great advocate of plunging around in the world willy-nilly, digging up the most obscure of technological oddities and serving them up here for a hungry readership.

OK, like, three of you care. Sue me.

Regardless, this is the latest crazed fine, SKY-click, an integrated call center solution that links web pages to Skype integration and has relatively low overhead. Folks go to your site, clicks a "contact a representative" link and whoosh, they get shifted over to someone based on their needs, set expertises, language, et al.

It's a measure of my mindset that I took one look at the system capabilities and the subscription costs and immediately thought, "Damn, this would be a huge boon for running a phone-sex operation with built-in webcam support!" I mean, consider, you could have your operators all standing by, set with attributes like gay_male, or age_play or bdsm and automatic routing would take place based on the website of origin and it's innate traits which get passed along to the center routing algorithm. And the cost ($50 for the first 5 operators, $20 each for additional) sounds like a lot, but it certainly runs a lot less than the PBX's that handle call-forwarding for sites now. Make sure each operator has a nice Bluetooth or other wireless headset and a half-decent webcam, and there's big money to be made even after the overhead comes out.

I suppose it should bother me that the first things I think of when I see new technology is how to twist it to illicit purpose.

If Penny Arcade can make fun of the World of Whorecraft site (now simply Whorecraft, probably due to fear of that undoubtedly already mighty-thewed behemoth elite Blizzard casting a baleful eye about), so can I:

Whorecraft is the first fantasy adult website of its kind to extend stories of sorcery, swords, and fantasy worlds a step further with sex! The team behind Whorecraft is really just a bunch of gamers at heart who wanted to create something different.

The whole idea was spawned from playing different computer games and daydreaming of alternate endings for fantasy sex. PERVERTS!

Whorecraft is specifically targeted to anyone who's ever imagined their fantasy world characters coming to life in a sexual way.

The idea behind "Whorecraft" was conceptualized by Dez almost a year ago and has been in the making for quite some time. Although Dez came from the adult industry and he is a gamer at heart, so the fusion of these 2 ingredients was inevitable.

The problem here is, well, I'm not sure I'm horrified at the very idea, jealous that someone else would put it together before I could, or, geek-senses tingling, have the vast desire to critique their individual episodes on the grounds of thematic and historical accuracy.

I mean, can you not critique:

Why? Cause naturally that's where they take it! After all, what you give, you will receive!

Starring Monica Mayhem and Christian, this little feature pits the Rogue against the Warrior except he's in for a real shock!

Or ...

A priest farming for herbs, witnesses a brutal attack on a young warrior. Feeling empathic she comes to his aid but it is too late to help. Her goodwill ends up costing her more that she can afford.

On that latter, I can just feel the itch starting to say, "You can't gather those herbs in Stranglethorne!" or shouting "Backstab has a 5sec cooldown, you losers!"

Yeah, I'm like that.

Yes, its that time again ...

Session Start (exopilot:acmexgurl): Sat Aug 05 21:32:05 2006
[21:32] acmexgurl: hi... anyone therre?
[21:32] acmexgurl: well anyway, gguess your not there?
[21:46] exopilot: Only transiently so.
[21:46] acmexgurl: hold on a sec. be right back
[21:46] acmexgurl: ok im back. sorry bout that. sstill there?
[21:46] exopilot: Mostly.
[21:46] acmexgurl: oh your tthere :) hi...
[21:47] acmexgurl: a/s/l (age seex location)?
[21:47] exopilot: You mean, you haven't read my profile?
[21:48] acmexgurl: im 27/f/USA. was lookin at your profile. thought you might like to chat.
[21:48] acmexgurl: so what have ou been up to exopilot?
[21:48] exopilot: Arguably, if you'd looked at my profile, you'd know my ASL. In theory. In an assumptive mode.
[21:48] acmexgurl: cool. i was just hangin out waatching tv. i was getting kinda horny :) (*blushes)
[21:49] exopilot: Ah, yes, a different bot script intro. They are getting cleverer, though not as clever as the "contact my other login" ones. That was a brilliant innovation.
[21:49] acmexgurl: bot? whats that? some kinda insult or something?
[21:49] acmexgurl: feel like a littlle cyber fun with me ? please please...
[21:49] exopilot: No, its more an automoton nomenclature.
[21:49] acmexgurl: oh well your loss. why dont you open up my profile and see what you missed out on. theres a link there to my homepage where i have ssome real nice pics to leave with.
[21:50] exopilot: I suppose recoding you with an Eliza recognition library and a human backup would be too much like fun. Though cyber fun.
[21:50] exopilot: Ah, well, life continues apace and I have more material for my blog.

I swear, the bots lately are either getting smarter or dumber.

The big one recently has been a swarm of "hi, my login here's flaky so contact my other id" intros, which is actually a brilliant bot innovation because it first-cuts the live folks dumb enough to respond from the rest. Of course, the fact they tend to send out five different ones with the same construction within 30sec of each other is ... beyond annoying. Its inane.

I wonder how much business these things actually manage to make?

[05:31] point5b: You realize, pics of naked models intently playing computer games would sell, even if they were actually playing and exhibiting common bad posture.
[05:31] exopilot: Well, yeah.
[05:32] exopilot: Maybe even better.
[05:32] exopilot: "Live webcam, naked girl raiding Stratholme!"
[05:32] point5b: :D
[05:32] point5b: With PiP for the raid itself.
[05:32] exopilot: Exactly.
[05:32] exopilot: And, vs the boss, reverse screens.
[05:32] point5b: So we can see WHY she's hooting and yelling.
[05:33] exopilot: "Ooooh, Ragnos! *fap fap fap*"
[05:33] point5b: *shudders*
[05:33] point5b: Too realistic for me, man.
[05:33] exopilot: I have to know all foulness.

Look, folks, you're not around at 5a on a Friday. You just don't know what its like to be going through porn writing amusing captions and critiquing the content.

Yeah, its sad. But we're hardcore.

Later ...

[05:55] point5b: What is wrong with me that I gag-caption soft core porn?
[05:55] point5b: *laughs*
[05:55] exopilot: What's wrong with me that I hep?
[05:56] point5b: "We're captioning porn, and I he'pped!"
[05:56] exopilot: Of course, "gag-captioning" hardcore porn would be a wholly different meaning.
[05:56] point5b: *snarfs*

Its a sad world.

At least of writing and directing a decent porn with a real (if laughable) plot and effects. The Penultimate Genius tells us about Pirates:

So, based soley on the fact that it is supposedly the most expensive porn movie ever made, I bought Pirates, no trench coat and baseball hat required, thanks to on-line outlets. Just click the link already and buy your own copy. I had to own a copy of it just because of what I'd read about it, and I'm glad I did. If only for historical purposes...

Anyway, the wife and I sat down and pressed play around 11 p.m., poured some Captain Morgan's into some glasses (hey, it's a pirate movie) and watched. First off, there are actual sets, not your normal warehousey-looking "sets." That is, this movie does not in any way have the look of any of the porn movies I've seen in my life, and I'm going to guess I've seen maybe 40-50 in my life, 37-47 of them in college after dinner in the frat house, when Daddy-O [real nickname] used to fast forward through the exposition so we could only just watch the sex scenes. And then in reverse.

This movie looks like a real movie, albeit a B-movie, but, still, that's a plus.

Then, there's attempted acting. You have to give them that, too, because in most porn movies the "acting" is little more than five minutes of lame set-up between sex scenes, with tons of innuendo and overture. Some of the actors can, actually, act, especially Evan Stone, who has a sense of comic timing perfect for the role of Capt. Edward Reynolds. And Steven St. Croix does a good job of acting, too, in the role of Marco, the man who lost the love of his life, who just happens to be sex-crazed sex-addict first mate of Reynold's ship, Jules, played by porn-starlet-of-the-moment Jesse Jane. Sadly, most of the females can't act anywhere near the level of the men, which is odd, since you'd think in the porn business, it'd be the girls who are better at faking it. But, then, it's the men have to deliver the goods at the end of a scene, so...

I hate it when other people do things I've been meaning to do, half my life. I mean, as a screenwriter and film geek, porn is pretty much the holy grail of production. Scripts get largely ignored, cheap sets are the norm, and acting skills are secondary to a mostly decent attractiveness rating. If, like me, you never intend to be anywhere near the front end of a camera, its the lowest stress film-making experience ever.

So, yes, a high-budget porn film with real effects. Fear my brain and my ability to find the perverse.

Speaking of perverse, the film info site actually provides a sex act breakdown by type.

( Sex Acts Within: Open With Care )

Alright, so, having looked at that fairly impressive list ... what qualifies as fetish? You've just got to wonder.

I wonder.

(I also wonder.)

You know, I should never be allowed to write porn. I've completely and utterly lost the ability to write straight up smut, and instead end up with some thing with a complex implicit backstory, a blind protagonist, and both quotes from the Bible and obscure Latin term references.

Don't ask if you can see it. Its not done, and frankly its too bizarre for the usual suspects to be really into it. Maybe if I ever bring it to some kind of completion, I'll let the public have access.

There is something wrong with me, I swear.