June 30, 2012

Reader, I married him.

Yesterday, on a bright rainy Glasgow morning, Montag and I took a cab down to the register's office in Park Circus and were pronounced Civil Partners by a kindly Deputy Registrar with crow's feet, slightly unconvincing black hair dye and a friendly, expansive smile. It was a tiny ceremony with ridiculous music, a heartfelt reading of e.e. cummings by Montag's mother, and weird vows that sidestep the 'm' word. It was short, and beautiful, and life-changing, and surprisingly easy. Despite predictions to the contrary, Montag was not punched at his own wedding.

After, we had guests over for home-made quiche, salad, champagne, and slices of a cake we bought cheap at Marks & Spencer. I managed to make Pimm's cups that were potable, or at least the guests were polite enough not to dump them over the balcony while I was watching. It was a good day. Now that Montag has made an honest man out of me, I suppose things are more the same than they ever were.

Firstly, I would be remiss in my manners if I failed to congratulate Evil Catullus on his nuptials!!

And as for me.... so I sent the following letter to the website, MyFreeCams.com -- which is, if not the premier website for webcam girls to ply their electronic sexual trade, surely the most enjoyably run:

Dear MFC,

I have an idea for a relatively easily enabled additional functionality which could be added to MFC, which would allow models (and MFC) to gain additional revenue with no more than a minimal setup cost to MFC, and minimal additional effort on the part of both models and customers. Specifically, I ask you to consider the following proposition for the creation of an online MFC video store.

Many models -- perhaps ten percent or more, based on my own brief survey -- have some number of videos for sale for tips of a set amounts of tokens. These videos come in all different formats and, naturally, are typically hosted at locations on other websites which allow people to upload the large file sizes involved and password protect the product. But, to a person seeking to browse generally all videos offered by MFC models, the task is impossible, because there exists no centralized repository of these videos, or of information about them. In order to allow such 'browsing' to be carried out, and thusly to increase the probability that customers will spend tokens on the purchase of videos, I propose the creation of an online MFC video store. The online MFC video store would have two components, a model-facing upload interface, and a customer-facing purchase-and-download interface.

The model-facing interface would permit models to upload videos from their personal computer to a designated storage space on MFC's server, in just the same way as they are now able to do with images. The model, in uploading the video, would be given the option of providing a brief description (perhaps in the range of a few hundred characters) and to classify the video along a number of lines; for example, by number and type of participants -- solo, girl/girl, boy/girl, three girls, 2 girls/1 boy, 2 boys/1 girl, orgy -- by type of acts involved -- shower, striptease, masturbation, penetration with toys, oral sex, anal sex -- by length of video; and by cost in tokens, including any promotional bundling (wherein for example two specified individual videos might cost 150 tokens, but if bought as a pair would cost a total of 250 tokens). All of this information would be input by the model, who would be responsible for its correctness. The model would, as well, have a master page of all of her own uploaded videos (formatted much like the existing page for uploaded images, but vertically arranged), wherein usage statistics would be available (specifically, the number of purchases and perhaps the time of day and geographical location of the purchaser) and where the model-provided information relating to individual videos could be edited, as well.

The customer-facing interface would permit customers to search the collection of uploaded vids by model name, and by the parameters input by the models, for example a customer could easily search for all vids featuring two girls and penetration with toys; or all videos over five minutes in length; or all videos priced between 150 and 200 tokens. Optionally, and again for trivial setup cost, additional parameters could be imported directly from the accounts of the uploading models themselves, so that the customer could for example search for videos by "blond" models, by "Canadian" models, by models identifying as having an "athletic" body type, or by "twenty-seven-year-old" models. Like any online store, the customer would either be able to indicate which videos he wished to purchase, gather them in a 'cart,' and and then pay the store through his tokens for the collection, or to immediately purchase individual videos without going to a collective checkout. Upon making such a purchase, the customer would receive a temporary, automatically generated access code with which to download each desired video. A customer having too few tokens to complete a desired purchase would be given an immediate opportunity to purchase additional tokens sufficient to cover the purchase, so long as the amount needed fell within that customer's existing limitation on the number of tokens able to be held in their MFC accounts. The payment, once made, would be distributed between MFC and the model in the same manner as any regular offline tip.

Naturally, the same geographic restrictions models are able to exercise over their rooms would apply to their videos; if a customer was located in a geographically blocked region relative to any especial model, the vids for that model would simply not appear in that customer's search. Additionally, models could limit access to view information about their videos to premium members, so that members not able to actually purchase videos would be unable to see what offerings that model had. The default setting would be the visibility of available videos, in order to encourage non-premium members to obtain premium accounts for the purchase of videos.

In addition to enabling customers to find videos which meet their interests, implementation of an online MFC video store would permit MFC to avoid models engaging in entirely offsite transactions for the sale of videos, which deprive MFC of revenue generated by those models as a result of their MFC activities. MFC would be able to engage in a degree of tracking of customer video purchase preferences. MFC would additionally continue to obtain the benefit of the video sales even if the models themselves were absent for long periods of time and were not actively engaged in promoting the sale of their own videos. The responsibility for removing videos from the store would rest wholly with the models, and so a model who left MFC entirely without removing uploaded videos would continue to generate revenue for MFC (and herself) through those video sales, even after having ceased to participate as an active model on MFC.

And now.... I calmly sit back and wait for the dollars to pour in.

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In auditing news:

borgo -- on page 19 of 20. You see how that's going, there?
Jack -- on page 2 of 11. And I'm not even warmed up.


Blessings!!