Goodbye.
If you missed the earlier announcements - and judging by my messages, some of you have - this blog is closing today. Just to get this out of the way here at the beginning, there will be another post coming later this evening. It’ll be a short and sweet post saying the blog is now closed. And probably some links to the source lists and whatnot, just to make it easier for people who might find their way here weeks, months, or even years from now.
But for all intents and purposes, what you’re reading now is my last post.
I started this tumblr in September 2012, so about three and a half years ago. It’s weird to think I won’t be doing it anymore. Doing this blog, and thinking about what I’m going to do on the blog, have become a regular part of my life.
I’m going to miss it. As I write this, I’m honestly sad. I’ve talked before, and just did again in the last batch of reader questions, about how I don’t think my life would be the way it is today if I hadn’t started this tumblr. So for that reason alone I’m pretty attached to this place. Doing this blog helped change my life in ways I only could have dreamed of when I started it.
But even beyond that, I’m going to miss it. Everyone probably needs a creative outlet of some sort in their life. And I’ve never been much of an artist or anything like that. So I felt like the stuff I did here gave me that outlet. I’d always been a fan of the comics and stuff that guys like Johnny Fever did. And tumblr has always been full of porn gifs. When I decided to start this blog, I thought it would be cool to see if I could kinda combine those two things and use gifs to tell little stories. And it was. I enjoyed doing it.
I’m also going to miss the interactions with people here. I’m not sure how well it came through on your end of things, but this blog really felt like a community to me. I can’t even tell you like… when I started talking about how we were moving, I got messages from people in real estate. People in banking. People with moving companies. All offering their advice, their help. And some of them offering it for free. Actually, nobody ever mentioned money, but not mentioning money and offering to do it for free are two different things. So I won’t say everyone was offering their help for free.
When I posted a couple years ago about getting kidney stones, a lot of you wrote me with advice. Including a couple doctors. Actual doctors. I remember looking at one of their tumblrs and thinking whoa, a doctor with a tumblr. Because I’m pretty sure my doctor doesn’t have one.
And now that we’re moving, I’ve gotten several letters of advice from people who have done the same thing we are. Moving to a new place to openly be a couple. And they wanted to share some of the problems they ran into and the lessons they learned so that we can hopefully avoid them.
Those are just examples of the kind of interactions I’ve had with people throughout the life of this blog. If I had ever run into some kind of problem, I honestly feel like I could have posted about it here and there would have been several people offering to help me with it. Like physically help if they could. If a reader had written in about a problem, I would have gotten letters of advice for them too.
That’s not something you find just anywhere. It’s something special. I never could have anticipated anything like that developing when I first started doing this. And then there’s all the messages I’ve gotten since saying I was closing the blog, which I also talked about in the last reader questions. It’s been really overwhelming.
I’m going to miss it. And I’m going to miss everyone who helped contribute to making it that way.
But there are things I won’t miss about doing this. I won’t miss looking for porn. Really, I probably never even needed to look for porn in the first place. With the porn I had access to the day I started, I could have made the same number of gifs I ultimately posted here.
But it goes back to that creative outlet thing I talked about before. I had ideas for stuff and I’d always end up looking for new scenes that might match some of my ideas. And it turns into this never-ending search for something that probably doesn’t exist anyway. I won’t miss doing that.
Mostly, though, I won’t miss the little nagging worry in the back of my mind that one day someone would go “Ah-ha! I know who you are!”. Was I going to say the wrong thing and a reader would realize they know us? Would tumblr get hacked and information of mine would be exposed? I’ve had those thoughts in my mind every day.
Years back, before I ever even imagined doing a blog like this, there was a message board I used to go to. They had a section there where you could post pictures to be “faked”, meaning people with advanced graphic skills would photoshop cum onto the face of the person in the pic. Or put a dick in their mouth. You know, classy stuff.
And as opposed to posting a pic of their favorite celebrity, some posters there would post pics of people they actually knew in real life. Even in some cases, their mom or their sister or whoever. It seemed like a terribly bad idea to me but people did it. And a lot of times, they would just save a picture off that person’s Facebook account and post it to the board.
But it turned out, at least at the time, when you uploaded a pic to Facebook the picture would get renamed with a certain pattern of numbers. And part of that pattern was the profile ID of the account the picture came from. If you knew that pattern, you could figure out someone’s profile ID. And once you had the ID, you could then look up the person who posted the pic.
So when these posters were saving pics off the Facebook of a girl they knew and then posting them to get “faked”, they were unknowingly providing information on how to find that’s girl’s Facebook profile. And sure enough, some people caught onto this. And I guess just for their own amusement, they started contacting the people whose pictures were being posted. Saying hey, your friend, your co-worker, your classmate, your friend’s boyfriend, your brother, your son, is posting pictures of you because he wants to see dicks in your mouth.
Then when I first started this blog, there was (from what I gathered) a pretty popular porn tumblr that had just recently disappeared. It was run by a girl and I think a lot of it was about her sexual exploits. But it just up and vanished one day. And people started to say that she deleted it because someone figured out who she was and sent the link to her parents.
Those are just two of several examples I could mention. But I’ve had stuff like that on my mind the entire time I’ve been doing this blog. It’s one of the reasons that, for instance, I’ve never taken a picture of anything and posted it here. I know you can go into the internal data of a picture and find out information, like the location the picture was taken. And it’s something I don’t know a lot about, meaning I’m not savvy enough to be certain I could remove all that before posting something. So I didn’t take any chances doing it.
The first year in particular, back before I knew how she’d react, I was somewhat paranoid that I might slip up somehow and someone would send my mom a link here. Once everything happened and I told her about this place myself, that fear went away. But it was replaced by a new one, which was that I was posting about something that isn’t legal most places.
I talked to her about that when I told her about the blog, and when we discussed whether I should keep doing it. But by then I knew she had my back and I felt a little more comfortable. And I figured that even if something like that did happen, nobody could prove that anything I was saying here was actually true. It’s not like they’d have cameras in our house. I could just be making it all up.
But once we move, that’s not going to be the case anymore. If we’re presenting ourselves as a couple, which we hope to, then nobody would need to have cameras in our house. At that point, they would only need to prove we’re related. And if they had our names, that probably wouldn’t be too difficult.
I told you a while back about concerns she raised to me. And that was, while not the only one, I’d say the biggest. And there’s really no arguing it. It would be a lot more risky to do this blog once we’re openly a couple, because at that point we’d be conceding the thing that would be hardest to prove.
Once I accepted that, I also realized that this was just a good time to stop. Some of you even pointed out that I’d gotten hypothetical questions ages ago about when I might stop doing this. Early on I said if anything ever happened between my mom and I, although I obviously didn’t stop then. But I also said if/when we moved, that would be a decent point to stop.
And that’s the way it feels for me. I’m going to miss doing this, but we’re going to be starting a whole new chapter of our lives. And before you get to a new chapter, you have to finish one. I think this is a good place for this chapter to end.
I know some of you disagree. I’ve gotten several messages from people saying they’re sad because they want to know if she and I make it, if we last as a couple. But to be honest, I’m not worried about that in the slightest little bit. And trust me, I’m someone who tends to worry about things.
She’s the only person for me. I’ve known that all along. And she told me when we first started that the relationship we’d already had for 20-some years was much too important to risk on some kind of fling that might not last. So if she had any doubts that we might not be together for good, she wouldn’t have entered into this with me in the first place. We’ve known from day one that we were going to be together forever. And I know it’s a cliche, but we fall more in love with each other every single day. So it’s nothing anyone should be concerned about.
I guess that’s really all I have to say. On the surface this big move of ours is because she’s taking a new job. She’s not starting it for a while yet, so we have a nice long time to get moved, to get settled in, and get started on our new life together.
We’ve moved a few times before, back after my parents got divorced. Including a big one similar to what we’re doing now. And every time we did, I remember sitting in the car with her, about to leave our old house, and she’d squeeze my hand and say “Here we go!”. Like we were embarking on another new adventure.
I’m really looking forward to that moment. When we’re right about to pull out of our driveway and start this latest adventure together. I’m gonna try to squeeze her hand and say it before she can do it to me, assuming she even remembers that.
I love her more than anything in the world. If any one message came through on this blog, I hope it was that. And I don’t want to hide that anymore. I want to be able to shout from the rooftops about how much I love her. And hopefully, not too long from right now, I’ll be able to.
I’m going to miss this place. I’m going to miss you guys. Thanks for being part of this with me.
BYE!