Remember yesterday when I was gung-ho about going to the DMV if for no other reason than to have something interesting for my blog?
Funny how naive I was in thinking that the DMV could offer any sort of interest.
To be fair, it’s not like I had a particularly negative experience there today — unless you count PTSD flashbacks to failed driving tests or the generally oppressive air of bureaucracy washing over hordes of upset numbers in the government’s labyrinthine system of rules and policy.
If anything, renewing my license was a quick and painless experience. The kind of trip through the DMV that left me saying-
-after I left, but would not have been my “fun activity” of choice over going to the class I missed.
Thus that did not blossom into a subject to fill my entire post. Nor did the lovely lunch I had with Mom afterwards, as much as I enjoyed it.
When I decided to scrap the idea, I half-considered writing about my unusual blog traffic today. Analytics are usually a fun subject for me, and for whatever reason a bunch of people looked at my blog today before I even wrote anything:
However I don’t exactly have a reasonable way to explain why I got more traffic today than I have in recent days, so it would just be mindless babble.
… As though the rest of this wasn’t already mindless babble. I know, I can hear you all saying that to your screens amid a slow eye-roll.
I’ll get to the point.
I went in to CSUF for my late class, Comm Law. So far my favorite course of the semester because of the professor.
An example as to why: She overlaid a well-edited video of John Oliver’s Supreme Court dogs over the audio of a case we were covering in our homework.
Today’s conversation broached into SCOTUS decisions which have affected obscenity and porn laws. It was a conversation full of amazing conversations and references one would not expect to hear in a classroom.
One such conversation involving that innocuous fair use butterfly photo I used for my Featured Image.
I kid you not… It ties back to Pornhub.
I know, I know. When I made a half-hearted post joking about that Pornhub ad carved into a bathroom stall in the Education Building, I said I was at risk of becoming a shill for the pornography aggregate.
After the glowingly positive piece I wrote about their analytics a while back, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking my semi-rapid increase in smut-related posts was a problem.
However, the way I see it I’ve just found myself increasingly interested in Pornhub-related subjects specifically. As niche a wheelhouse as that may be.
While talking about porn in class, I specifically brought up the yearly Pornhub analytics in reference to her joking about the existance of fetish websites for everything. In response, she told us about a podcast which dives deep into the way Pornhub has changed our society — for better and worse.
As someone who drives long distances back-and-forth, I’m always on the lookout for new podcasts.
So even though she warned us that it gets depressing after a certain point, I was curious and downloaded all seven episodes of the series.
It’s called “The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson,” and I’ll recommend it at least based on the first episode.
That episode features interviews with the Belgian boy who brought the website into popular consciousness, as well as the technical guy from Canada who worked on things like search engine optimization and mobile user logistics.
With promise of going into all the nitty-gritty, uncomfortable stories about society changing, the challenges to that industry with a massive and free entity in their midst, and so forth.
If you’ve got the time for it, why not take a chance and listen through some niche podcast programming with me?
I, for one, am clearly excited enough about it to share if nothing else.
Featured Image courtesy of Charles J Sharp via Wikimedia Commons
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 