To be honest with you, I’m not feeling very yeehaw this week, y’all. Last weekend’s travel disrupted my routine, the cat isn’t letting me sleep through the night, and I’m having the weird neurodivergent sensory fallout where several of my favourite sweaters are too big, too bulky, too twisted, too high-collared, too thick, too long… idk man! Idk but it’s annoying. I’m annoyed and it’s nothing’s nor no one’s fault.

All things considered though, I had a good week. Or at least, I feel good about how I handled the week. Felt like a very adult, keep your head down and just get things done kind of week. And I did! But now my brain must revolt!

The family visit went well and I got a lot done on the house, got a lot of technical details that will be useful down the line (anyone have direct experience with 90s-era manufactured homes? HMU!). It’s frustrating that maintaining it hasn’t been a priority, but I accept that if some of these things have sat in disrepair for this long then it’s basically up to me to make what repairs I can to stave off any further damage of this house I’ll theoretically inherit at some point down the line. But I also want it to be livable in the meantime, you know?

The incremental renovation work becomes a side project for me to hyperfixate on in my spare time (lol). One thing at a time, replace this light fixture and that water tap. Research how to install a walk-in shower stall. Keep the roof up and the lights on and food in the pantry, keep moving forward and doing what we can to help who we can. Okay that’s like, five things.

So then on the other end of my week was Irma’s vet appointment to have her teeth cleaned. She turned 8 this year and I’ve never had her teeth cleaned; they’ve been after me for a few years to do this and I don’t know why I’ve avoided it, my own personal leaky pipe I guess. She ended up having four extractions but they were very normal tooth problems for an 8yo small breed dog so at least my delays didn’t cause her to lose any major teeth (and I got to keep them! More teeth for my teeth collection).

Irma was very mad with me when I picked her up at the vet, and given how exhausted I’ve been with my own dental adventures I can’t blame her. They said she was a perfect dog and she really bounced back fast after the anaesthesia; we walked the whole way home without her looking at me once. 😭 Recovery should go fast and they gave her The Good Stuff to manage pain at home but she’s still so uncomfortable and I feel terrible I don’t know how to help her beyond turning on her heat pad.

So you see, nothing bad this week, nothing that upends my life, no surprises out of left field, et cetera. Just… so much adulting. But that’ll happen when you’re masquerading as a mature, responsible adult: people expect you to act like one! Ah, bollocks.

☑️ Done and Done - Tried to haphazardly shoot some kind of content on the train back into town, followed by a day of post-travel rest. I didn’t stream at all but did do two days on SextPanther instead (and felt good about acknowledging my energy levels and accommodating myself thusly). I also fretted plenty over Irma’s dental work but kept a level head, and kept things mellow while she recovered. Continued the DIY research I started last weekend to repair and renovate the poorly maintained parental house.

📋 Coming up - Fingers crossed for a “normal” week, though it starts off with both a fire alarm test in my apartment building plus a dentist appointment (for me this time). Aiming for at least one spicy livestream, and SP was fun so maybe more of that too. My bestie is moving so I’m on call to help wrangle the cat. My mom gave me my grandfather’s pinky ring and it’s cute but it’s yellow gold and I don’t fuck with that so I plan to stop in at a jeweler to see about having it rhodium plated, maybe take myself somewhere nice somewhere in the mix.

In a move that’s upset a lot of fine sexy folk, the CEO of the clip site ManyVids has basically outed herself as a SWERF with a savior complex. And I’m gonna educationally rant about it a bit because I need to get it out of my system.

ManyVids as a platform has been… going downhill for a while now. The site has always been buggy af, with some rather basic features being broken as long as I’ve had a seller account. They used to be a bastion for clips of taboo kinks, but in recent years started cracking down on certain niches or even words and phrases. No more “step-moms” nor “Mommy Dommes”, no more werewolf dick or knotting (don’t ask unless you’re into werewolf dick), etc. etc. Tale as old as time these days, with adult platform after adult platform after gaming platform bending the knee to the moral censorship threatened by the government and championed by religious groups but actually low-key enforced by credit card processors.

When MV launched the SFW side of their site a couple years ago, ManyVidsTV (which features basically anything you’d find on Twitch with slightly more heaving bosom and oiled abs), I felt pretty whatever about it. To me, it’s rational to mix in SFW content when your core NSFW business is under attack. It gives you a “respectable” face, a way to promote your site that social media can’t mess with because you are, in fact, safe for work; just another layer to the funnel. It felt like camouflage.

But then, the CEO of ManyVids, Bella French, made a whammy of an update to the bio on her personal website. She talks about how she turned to sex work because she was in debt, and no one should ever be forced to make that choice, to devalue their “sacred” sexuality, just because they made bad financial decisions! Excuse me but 🤮. Her bio reads like a cautionary tale, “I support those who do this work, but also this work is bad, actually, and it is my mission in life to save you.”

So which is it? Does ManyVids support their users and “return power to the hands of the creators” who sell their content through the platform, or is it also a part of the “exploitative adult industry” people need to be safely escorted away from?

And you know what Bella? Like, I’m sorry your content got stolen/leaked. I’m more sorry that such an event twisted you, made you feel such shame around your own sexuality, such guilt around “resorting” to sex work to pay the bills. But that’s you, that was your choice, and it sounds like you ignored what was best for you and made a bad choice at that. Just because hot sauce exists doesn’t mean you have to put it in your eye, does it? Just because sex work exists doesn’t mean it’s your only option. That’s the mindset of someone who thinks they’re too good to work at McDonald’s, who views sex work as a get-rich-quick scheme because they have an ego about it.

I didn’t start camming when I was 20 because I was in debt and the industry got its exploitative hooks into my hopeless flesh, I started because just like every other adult, I needed a job, and camming was an option that sounded fun to me, that aligned with my interests. Sure I was naive, I made some poor choices along the way, but that’s why we need better education and resources about how to live and work safely in this industry, not tech industry exit strategies for when we hit soul-crushing burnout because of a lack of support.

This pivot from ManyVids makes it sound like every sex worker needs saving, and because someone stole her content once (which is a well-known risk) she’s now on a crusade to be the woman who changes our lives for the better. Because life as a sex worker can’t possibly be happy, or healthy, or accepted by friends family and peers. Help, help, get us out of here!!, cried no adult creator earning income from the platform that she continues to profit from.

Now, some idle speculation if you’ll indulge me, but this sounds a lil bit like some of that chatbot-induced psychosis. I mean, the bio reads like it was written by genAI, and over recent months the official ManyVids X/Twitter has posted slop multiple times… this one is extremely cringe but also the new biz model is literally from ChatGPT? (The comments on that post are actually worth reading, btw.) Again, speculation, but this whole move reeks of ill-informed and poorly thought out genAI influence.

So then, the now what? Well, we know that age verification laws are having mixed results. So in the long haul that’s probably not going to bring about any actual change for any sex workers. In fact, it’s a large part of what will make the work more unsafe! Thusly, it’s easy to see that doubling down on AV within your seller platform is Not A Good Idea.

There are plenty of other clip sites out there, such as Clips4Sale and APClips (both recommended by friends). There’s our good ol fansites like OnlyFans and Fansly, LoyalFans and JustforFans, where creators retain control of their content’s distribution direct to buyers. And yes, all these platforms still have to regulate content and themes, sometimes more aggressively or less transparently than creators deserve. But again that’s usually (Usually!) less about the CEO’s personal traumas/opinions and more to do with external censorship. Recently, indie studios including Erika Lust, Aylo (a.k.a. PornHub), and Mile High Media have started to work together to standardize practices in porn production via a Code of Conduct for members*, so that too is a useful step in the right direction. (*Source was performer Jiz Lee on Bluesky, who also pointed out that APAC devised similar codes years ago, but theirs is focused on performers, not studios.)

Hope is not lost, not by a longshot. But if your goal is to make porn creators feel shame about the choices they make, pivoting to a message of “you need out of this life and I’m the only one who will step up to help you”… is, in a word, yucky. And in five words, fuck all the way off.

Like I said at the start of this, the practicality of selling content on ManyVids has been waning, be it from tech issues with the website, competitors taking less off the top (MV keeps 40% of all video sales vs. OF only 20%), and stepping up content regulation efforts. Creators and performers are all real tired of having the proverbial carpet pulled out from under us. After spending years as a major name for direct-to-consumer content sales, this shift in MV’s mission will move more of the market share to smaller sites, businesses with more involved teams and more updated tech, and staff that are even more driven to actually support the creators they host.

I’m not going to say this move completely kills MV, because to be honest a lot of people don’t care, are happy to look the other way as long as the system works for them. But I’ve already seen a few larger names vocally move away from the platform, choosing exclusivity over broad reach. So while it’s too early to tell whether this is actually a nail in their coffin or just a bump in the PR road, I hope they can course correct before ruining a lot of creators’ businesses, or that we all find a life boat outta there before they take us all down with them.

📺 Televisions - I finished The Witcher season 4. It was… okay. I think they did more of that timey-wimey stuff like in the first season, but I can’t quite wrap my head around what the order of events actually was. It was amusing to see so many wide shots in the early episodes to kind of obscure the actor swap; it was painful when Jaskier growled a better “No,” to mock Geralt than Hemsworth himself was able to pull off. But the big fights were great! More mage fights more! Left off on quite a cliffhanger but that led directly into…

🎬 Movie #1 - … The Rats: A Witcher Tale (2025), about the gang of troubled youths Ciri links up with. movie about the Rats. I liked how this both immediately proceeded the ending of Season 4 but also gave us context for what the group was up to before they met Ciri. It was a great bit of extended worldbuilding, the music was fire, and dare I say it? watching this was a lot more fun than Witcher se04.

🎬 Movie #2 - I saved Del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) for a quiet weekend evening and I’m glad I did. It was a beautiful movie in every detail, from the costumes to the editing to the performances, and rich with love and hope. But it was, also, brutal, and violent, excessively so but never in excess, if that makes sense. I’ll watch the Making Of stuff this coming week; I hope that in time we get to see even more of Elordi’s photography from the set.

🎵 Listening - Every time I get an email from Bandcamp with a new album release, I open it in a new tab and drop it in a group folder of new stuff to listen to. There’s currently about 50 albums in there, and that’s after working through about 15 of them in recent days. I’ll let you know if I find anything worth picking up.

👕 Wearing - I recently saw someone on IG share a hack they learned from their physical therapist, to help with their Ehlers Danlos Syndrome: tying their legs together when sitting/laying down so their muscles can actually rest. The idea is that using something external to provide that stability allows the muscles to chill since they aren’t compensating for loose ligaments. I’ve been sitting at my desk with a wide elastic exercise band across my thighs and I’ll be damned but my hips/lower back are proving this true! Bodies r dumb.

😅 Speaking of guilt and pleasure… All too often a friend will say, “Oh it’s a guilty pleasure of mine,” to which I respond, why do you feel guilty about it? They never have a good answer; I think it’s not so much that people actually feel guilty about whatever they derive pleasure from, but that they feel like they’re expected to, or that they cave to societal pressure to feel shame. This exploration of why people do enjoy their guilty pleasures goes a bit more in depth on that.

📖 All I can think about when I consider the concept of “extra-illustrating your books” is all the romantacy spicy booktok novels that are so popular now, and sending off your beloved hardcover edition of The Prince of Rain and Willow* or whatever to your favourite illustrator to ahem annotate. (*This is a made up title. I don’t do booktok but they all have titles like this.) Cottage industry or side hustle when…?

🤩 Idk if you’ve ever seen the music performance livestreams that come out of China, but they are next level. Full choreo, full hair makeup wardrobe, it’s like a mini concert or music video production, but instead of a stadium tour it’s all this work going into a live show that just gets streamed on mobile apps. I’ve been fascinated by these performances for years, and it’s even more exciting see behind the scenes and gain understanding of the work that goes into these megastar idol streams. While it’s mostly men wielding the cameras, one young camerawoman, known as Violent Zhouzhou, has captivated viewers; sometimes the streams of her get more viewers than the lives she’s shooting. Love it! This looks so fun to do.

👎 Thanks, I hate it!

Like I said, I’m not in the greatest of moods this weekend, so thank you for bearing with me through my ahem rant. I don’t really enjoy being angry let alone verbalizing my frustrations as a form of entertainment for others. But some things simply must be said! We must discuss the way these changes—personally-motivated changes—effect the greater community they occur in. Too much individualism going around these days and I don’t think it’s working.

I think really, if anything, anger used as a unifying force is the only way to utilize anger. Let it drive you not to avoidance but to being proactive, to stepping out of your comfort zone to identify what could change, what you could change right now. We often have more power than we realize.

Be good this week, be kind, be proactive. I’ll talk to you next weekend.

xox,