So I’ve been exceptionally busy the past week or so… but you’ll know why in a moment. First of all, I had the immigration interview this week and now officially have my Green Card to stay in the US for a good while :) This is what the necessary paperwork looked like.

In other paperwork news, it’s also been catching-up-on-bookkeeping week, and I thought I’d share some of the financial details of running this site.

Many people assume that running a paysite, or any kind of camming/modelling rakes in the dough. Well, it can, don’t get me wrong. I see ads all the time on places like Craigslist to make a buttload of money modelling for adult sites, but it depends on what you’re doing. I have trouble relating to a lot of the other stats I see people post, since I seem to go about things in vastly untraditional ways.

Almost everyone from the webmaster side of mainstream porn world who checks out my site is horrified. Why are you charging so little! Where are the ads! Where are the galleries! Where is the update schedule! So I can’t promise I can really tell you what goes on in that big strange world of theirs. I do things the way I want. Even little things, like charging something like $10 instead of $9.95 makes me feel like I’m offering something special and personal, not a Wal-Mart special. I probably could charge and make more, or spend less, but then I’d feel like I was being held to expectations that were not in line with the way I want to expose myself here and run the place.

Anyway… my grand total income for StephTheGeek, Inc. last year?

About -$1500.
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The shoot last weekend got me thinking — how can I call myself an “amateur” when I strive for creating images that showcase professional quality photography?  But I see a genre that falls between mainstream “pro” erotic photography and “I’m taking this in my living room with my point-and-shoot digital camera” photography.  Both have a certain appeal, but I’d rather showcase my non-pro nature through the inclusion of less-than-perfect poses, lack of retouching, and occasional cat in the background than poor quality images.

Overly dark or blown out images are a distraction from the subject of the images.  I want to create arousing art that I am proud of the quality of.  Does that make me a professional?  I don’t think that seeking to polish one’s art should make that person any less of an artist.

The corset photos were posted hours after they were taken, after sifting through to weed out near duplicates and shots that just didn’t quite work.  The colours were corrected, and a few were cropped or tweaked slightly, but they remain largely as shot.  Buster (friend and photographer, who you may remember as doing several of my earlier shoots) will be putting his critical eye to the shots at some point and doing more extensive edits to release a “director’s cut” version of the shoot.

The bottom line is that I enjoy such a wild variety of content that it’s impossible to put it all in one category.  So much of it is raw and in the moment, while other stuff is planned and more elaborate.

If anything, I don’t mind being difficult to pin down  ;)

In looking for other girls/sites to feature here on SexyGeekGirl, I’ve had to really think about the keywords and genres used in the adult industry. There are a lot of phrases that get tossed around, and some of them capture part of the element I’m talking about here, but one has emerged as the clear winner — personality-based porn.

I’ll be writing more about coming to that conclusion, but it really hit home last night when I realized just how much personality-based porn crosses other genres. It’s not an aesthetic niche, it’s a philosophy.

So I was checking out the sites of two girls I enjoy, Apnea and Adorable Audrey, who are at first glance are quite different from each other…

But are these two girls actually in the same genre?

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Ah yes, the burning question — where did all the cams go?

To make a very long story very short: erotic stuff + minors on cam = some unhappy people and no credit card processing for Steph.

All my 24/7 cams are still running and completely free, but you won’t find them on this site.  Yes, I will still do cam shows, update a regular webcam, and other fun cammy stuff in the members section, but the 24/7 cams have proven too complicated to keep running on the same site.  I want to be able to have friends and family over who are not yet 18 without risking being hauled in for child pornography.

It’s difficult to be pursuing such opposing (in many people’s eyes) interests.  I want to have the freedom to create the kinds of erotica that interest me, but at the same time be using webcams as one of many means for recording and sharing my life to a broader audience.  I don’t think most of the world likes their porn mixed with their family, career, and academic pursuits.  Perhaps it was a little naive of me to think that it would go unnoticed.

Okay, so I’m not exactly in the mainstream porn world here. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like to keep an ear to the ground with what’s going on in areas like credit card processing, legal issues, and webcams.

So I’m perusing a forum thread on the topic of new regulations from CCBill regarding “leased” content and feeds on membership sites. Frustration abounds, since as you may not know, the credit card companies basically dictate what can and can’t be shown on websites down to the tiniest degree. The deal here is that there’s a new regulation from Visa saying that you can’t advertise content from other sites on your tour, ie. “Get free access to XYZ when you sign up!”, whether it’s a whole separate site or a plug-in feed of content.

I literally snorted at this comment:

“Why doesn’t Visa just produce all the porn for us so we can quit reacting to their steady stream of regulations?”

Seriously, man. Now I’m picturing what porn generated by banks and credit card companies would look like. Three minutes of fully clothed missionary position, perhaps. Thank god for European processors who may NOT BE RETURNING MY EMAILS ABOUT WHY I STILL CANNOT PROCESS CREDIT CARDS but at least don’t make you feel like “porn is the most regulated form of ‘free speech’ in the world” (quoted from the same thread as above).