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…Christmas, one and all.

ARE YOU? ARE YOU?

(These tears were brought to your eyes in association with this awesome MeFi thread.)

For the past couple of months, my web obsession of choice has been FFFFOUND!, the no-you-can’t-come-in image bookmarking service. It’s really excellent, a consistently fun community-curated parade of imagery, with a strong art & design bias. But there’s just this one thing that’s been sort of bugging me.

All new frontiers in information recording, sharing and distribution can be assessed, I think, by their TTPO – Time To Porn Overload. The TTPO encompasses a measure of both the success of the sharing mechanism, and the point at which the greatest of its early promise dies a lonely, quiet death somewhere in a ditch.

FFFFOUND! is just reaching its PDTP (Porn Domination Tipping Point) – an impressive TTPO, given the site’s age. Over the past month or so, it’s become pornier and pornier; slowly at first, but now in a torrential deluge of artfully composed titty shots. The current breakdown, I estimate, is roughly as follows:

Within the month, I’d be willing to bet, the naked chicks will hold a controlling stake in the site. And it is only pictures of women – I can remember seeing maybe four pictures of naked dudes on FFFFOUND! Three of them were sex scenes, so there was a naked girl there too; in the fourth, the man was in the background, and ugly. I thought I’d spotted a fifth, but on closer inspection it turned out to just be a very androgynous-looking woman.

But hey, it’s art! No, it’s not. It’s a picture of a naked, baby-oiled chick with her hand up her bum. You didn’t bookmark that picture because you thought they were doing interesting things with lighting, or you really dug the leopardskin print bedsheets. Admit it.

I hasten to point out that I’m not saying this from a position of either prudish distaste or of the slightest surprise. Bookmark all the lady bits you want, seriously. It’s just an observation, accompanied by perhaps a sigh at most, that whenever I open Google Reader and see several hundred new FFFFOUND! posts waiting there, I know I’m going to have to press “J” a lot more to get past the sex people before finding that one bit of pretty but illegible typography that will totally change the way I look at the world. Ah well. That’s what having a stellar TTPO does for you.

Anyway, it seems I’m not the only one.

At a good friend’s birthday celebration recently, guests were asked to bring along something to entertain the other guests. All very nice. Naturally, I brought along a number of missing dog posters, which I thought I might as well share with the world at large. Please feel free to attach these to lampposts in your local area, for the distraction of passers-by.

Missing dogs (PDF)