Finding Short Films, Old Television

[pornofan]

At this moment there is a freeleech torrent that sounded good, so I downloaded it and will watch soon.:
    Kus me zachtjes (2012) Eng Subtitle
    https://www.gaytorrent.ru/details.php?id=a8d99d2aaf3a3825721e650ad4175fa3d5f91ff06dd44df2

Meanwhile, in correcting the IMDB link in the description, I found myself musing aloud again and meandering off topic. Again. I wrote:

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Actually the IMDB link does not work, but whenever someone makes any attempt to provide that kind of link, it is obvious that the poster cares and has gone beyond uploading something, but taken some trouble to describe it. Oddly enough, not everyone even manages to do that.
This link:
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2599822/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
takes you to the database, but it basically adds nothing since this  short film known in English as "Kiss Me Softly" contains no audience reviews and the always welcome Parental Advisory (wherein we may learn about issues like nudity, on-screen sex, violence, and the ever-popular drug advisory pointing out appearances of cigarettes, alcohol, and other often illegal pleasures) is also missing.
Ever notice how hard it is to find short films online? YouTube has a lot, full length movies as well, and lots of labeled Gay content, but unless a short turns up there or, in the case of gay topics, is in some collection of gay shorts, one is pretty much out of luck. If you go to IMDB and look up some favorite hunk to find out what he has been in that you missed, you will often find that Very Big Name Movie Stars have done shorts. Some are for DVD extras. Some are Making Of or Behind The Scenes stuff. But some is just some shot made by ka friend or by some film student for school.
Try and find those. Just try. It's often as hard as finding old television shows. Much loved Fast and Furious star Paul Walker had a whole show when very young, enticingly called Throb. Not anyway in English that I can find. Much more recently, hairy-chested and gay friendly Paul Rudd had a telly programme called Wild Oats. Did we get to see him spread his in every episode? Any episode at all? Probably not, but there does not seem to be a single episode online. For even more frustration, look up your own silver screen crushes.

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The reason I'm putting this comment here is that it is a peeve of mine. History, what's left of it from now until we grow gills, is that we have reached the point where history happens like a torrent. Years ago, when Usenet and email were all there was on the Internet, it was said that reading news from Usenet was like trying to drink from a firehose. Much worse today, on the Internet of Off.

Old books like The Gutenberg Galaxy and Future Shock barely hinted at the inundation of info and misinfo all around us. People you don't want to talk to make statements on their tee shirts. Buying clothes is like watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade– an endless succession of logos and corporate sponsors. Elected politicians should wear similar display patches to announce their sponsors just as many sports teams do, and probably all successful race car drivers.

But it is not possible to keep track of all the stuff, or to be on top of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Hence, blogs and Likes and other online clues. And still the good stuff gets lost. The entertainment industry has addressed the issue by creating an endless array of reward shows where people you've never heard of win awards in categories that rarely matter. Seems like there is such a spectacle once a week, just like there are more US football bowl games than there are games in the regular season.

The result is that stuff gets lost in the shuffle. Which is where the Intertoobz come in. (A  brilliant US politician from the party you probably have already guessed) described the Internet that way. Hint: He's in the same party that, unlike any other on earth, is angry over the Great Global Warming host that this year brought the US, for example, the hottest Christmas on record.)

If it were not for torrent sites like this one, lots of stuff really, truly, would be lost to the ages. Classic Hollywood movies with major, legendary stars and directors, would be unfindable, even for cash money. And specialty niche items like non-porn movies with gay themes is only the start of the accessibility problem

As mentioned earlier, try finding short films. Pretty much not all that handy except for the video site named. Old television is another problem. One season of The Man From Uncle is not online where I have looked, and neither is most of such long-running shows as Bonanza, a western in which young Michael Landon went commando and did not always get strapped down for discretion. Or Murder She Wrote, in which Angela Lansbury did not, afaik, sing a single note but solved a crime a week for what seems like half a century, ending every adventure with a freeze frame to capture her perennial twinkle at the camera.

And those were popular shows that ran forever. What about a 2014 show called "Anne and Jake" with Matt Dallas, somewhere between Kyle X/Y and being in the news for coming out and then for marrying his boyfriend. (We won't mention the leaked solo sex video.) And you remember what a hunk Ben Browder is in Farscape and Farscape, right? That fur. That basket. He did some TV movies, too, before he became famous, but where is Martian Law? Nowhere. Maybe lousy, but I've yet to see him in anything where he did not brighten the screen even when he did not outright steam it up.

The same situation exists for print media. Forget early gay skin books or even the strait ones, some of which were ghostwritten by authors now very, very famous indeed. Think instead about magazines. On any US newsstand you can find titles along the lines of Teen Stars, Unthreatening Boys Named Corey, Skateboarders Shred, Longboards Rule, Nearly Naked Workouts, Hunks in Soap Operas, The Scent of Cage Fighters, Recipes You Might Not Have Seen Yet, Things You Can Knit....

Try to find any of those a month later. They are maybe randomly found in used book/magazine stores or if you are quick enough, maybe you can get a back issue from the publisher. But in general, hobby magazines, almost every sports magazine, and similar transient, time-sensitive stuff is just lost in the Gutenberg Galaxy. It's not on microfilm. It's not in libraries. It's all basically evaporated. Heaven help the person trying to research one of those topics, or to find out what Men's Magazines featured over the years and how it changed. Pro boxing is covered and even archived, but bicycling? Good luck with that.

And microfilm is another problem. Not only was everything scanned years ago, and badly much of the time, but then the originals were all discarded because the cheap newsprint was costly to preserve and if you have not thrown out last week's daily papers yet, you already know the bulk involved for storage. Unfortunately, Sunday colour magazines and comic supplements got saved, if at all, in unscintiallating black and white that does nothing to preserve or showcase covers by leading artists of the day. Comics fans are making old Pogo color strips available, slowly, but that is hardly the norm.

"Suddenly the past has fallen in behind us." A whole generation of young Brits has never heard of Shakespeare or complete the sentence that begins with "Romeo, Romeo...." But then, there are more Americans who believe the Lunar Landing was a hoax than supports of the pig party's billionaire assumptive candidate sometimes called The Ego (or with a reference to the Mafia he has been linked to in some detail, The Don). I'm horrified by people who have never seen Mae West, W.C. Fields, or The Marx Brothers. Since they would not know Fred Astair from Ginger Rogers, it's all fairly hopeless....

But at least, thank the godz, there are torrent sites where classics are preserved, where there are documentaries and feature films and such useful options as collected sex scenes without the rest of the movie getting in the way. Everyone who downloads something and seeds it helps preserve the culture and its variants. That does not mean you can find all of Harry Reems, but like Jeff Stryker, at least some of his work is around.

Oh, phooey. Sic transit, etc. Aren't these lovely icebergs we can watch from the deck? Stop, hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down....

[Semtex]

…there's battle lines being drawn, nobody's right if everybody's wrong.

A favoured blog of mine is The Analog Kid the guy who runs it is in my age bracket with a similar taste & obsession in music.  He does great mp3 rips of his old & hard to find vinyl collection as well as sharing anecdotes about the song, band or what have you being shared.  I actually stumbled upon him when looking for that 21 minute version of "that song" by "an artist formerly known as someone I thought relevant but now I refuse to name because of his antics" (turns out I like orange much more than purple) I used to play when I was going to go out and smoke a joint make certain the club I was playing in was structurally sound.

While not the same medium you are talking about his core function seems to be the same message, akin even to The Long Now Foundation and it's prep work for the coming digital dark age.  Before I get lost and forget what I was going to say, let me first say that's some quality ranting there, kudos. You are not alone.  We as humans are already a species suffering from amnesia (see Graham Hancock) and do far less than we should in preserving our history.

So to circle back, put a bow on it and say what I came to say, the first rule of The Analog Kid blog is if he writes about a song on the blog he shares the song, like Fight Club only better.  So….Matt Dallas + Sex Tape?

Also, so as to fulfil my part of the bargain My Logic is Sound