Dear Brothers & Friends, 

Welcome to BROTHER BEASTUS 𖤐 GRIMOIRE!

5 Years of Brother Beastus

This month marks 5 years of BROTHER BEASTUS. 

I want to thank you all for following the blog and for all the great chats over the years. I’m grateful for the time we’ve all spent as an informal community. 

In hard times, this blog was often one of the things that kept me going. I am thankful for that.

For me, it’s always been about community—and I’ve always aimed to be that brother who holds space for community to grow.

Most Popular Post of All Time

Learned Along the Way

Here are some of the things I’ve learned over the past five years:

About you: Nice people with long weekends online

• You all are actually pretty polite & nice. There are rare exceptions but they’re very few and far between.

• You all love 4-day weekends. The blog is most active all day Friday to Monday.

• The other thing that repeats over the years is how much people reveal about themselves in what they think they see in me or the blog. People often have a pre-determined need, desire, or expectation for me to act a certain way that is often adversarial. It’s almost like there are three people in our conversations: them, their expectations, and me.

• People aren’t as divided as you may think. I find on the blog if I’m polite and respectful to people, they’re generally polite and respectful back. That might sound weird nowadays as it’s just generally accepted that people are partisan jerks. In my experience, that’s propagandistic bullshit. A few assholes dominating the spotlight doesn’t mean we all are.

Spirituality: Always hard to explain

• Explaining spirituality often destroys it. It’s not just that the words are inadequate, but it’s such a personal thing that it’s hard for others to relate to what works for me.

• To paraphrase Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, spirituality is ineffable. What works for me spiritually is to some degree uncommunicable to others—especially when in a text chat over social media.

‘If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?!?!’—RuPaul

• The blog has taught me that sometimes I need to focus on my own stuff before I can really help anyone else.

• If I didn’t return your message, it’s most often because I was dealing with difficulties unrelated to you. Don’t take it personally—unless you were an asshole (in a bad way). Then, it was personal!

• I’ve learned that sometimes I need to have faith that a greater power will guide all of us to where we need to be and that I’m only a small part of a bigger picture.

Brother Beastus Blog By the Numbers:

Established 5 years ago in August 2016

11,666 total followers exactly as of 1 Jan 2021

8,785 likes & reblogs received in last 30 days

70k posts published approximately

Hundreds of one-on-one chats 

Thousands of one-on-one chat messages 

Hundreds of original posts

3x deactivated by tumblr & 3x reactivated by tumblr 

1000 to 1 is the approx. ratio of polite followers to blocked accounts. By far, most interactions with people are decent.

Blog platforms: tumblr (2016), bdsmlr (2019-2021), twitter (2019), bandcamp (2021), substack (2021)

2600-5200 hours worked approximately (10-20 hours per week)

$0 money earned

Next 5 Years of Brother Beastus: More Original Art & Writing—and Optional Paid Subscriptions to Sustainably Support It

What’s ahead? I would like to be able to commission original comics, photography, and writing—and then bring that to all of you. These artists and writers need and deserve your support.

That’s my dream for the zine. In order to make that happen, I need your help and support.

That’s why I’m introducing optional paid subscriptions this week.

What do you get if you subscribe? See below!

—Brother Beastus

Introducing Paid Subscriptions

Optional paid subscriptions include premiums such as:

• Seeing Original Work First: You will receive previews of the original artwork & writing you financially supported and helped to create. You’ll see it first.

• Exclusive Discussions: You will be included in exclusive threaded discussions including Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions.

• You Get Everything: You will have complete access to the full Archive including Exclusive Discussions.

Exclusive Premium for Founding Friends

In addition to all the premiums listed above, Founding Friends get an exclusive online chat with Brother Beastus.

Introductory Discount of 20% off

Annual & Monthly Subscriptions are now 20% off for the first 12 months. A $6.66 monthly subscription is now only $5.33, and an annual $66.60 subscription is now only $53.28.

Subscribe Now to Get Your Discount & Show Your Support

Subscribe now

Your email is never shared, rented, or sold.

OnlyFans to Ban Porn: Will it stumble like $3M Tumblr or succeed like $114B Snapchat?

Pornpocalypse 2021: OnlyFans to Prohibit Porn

Although you’ll continue to see nudity on OnlyFans (OF), sexual activity will disappear from the site on October 1.1

It will be interesting to see if OF can get away with full nudity, something that other legitimized social media companies like WordPress-owned Tumblr wasn’t able to achieve for very long.

Unlike Tumblr, OF apparently plans to allow nudity—as long as there is no sexual activity. In other words, soft porn and erotica is in, and hardcore is out at OF.

c|net: OnlyFans will prohibit sexually explicit content starting in October

OnlyFans Lax Compliance Revealed in BBC Investigation

“In May, BBC News revealed the site was failing to prevent under-18s from selling and appearing in explicit videos, despite it being illegal for children to do so. At the time, OnlyFans said attempts to use the site fraudulently were ‘rare.’

Now, leaked documents show accounts are not automatically shut down if they break the site's terms of service….

Staff are told to moderate accounts with low user numbers ‘as we would and [restrict] when necessary.’ With middle range accounts, they are told to warn, ‘but only restrict after the 3rd warning.’ If one of the site's most successful - and lucrative - creators breaks the rules, the account is dealt with by a different team. 

‘There is a discrimination between accounts,’ says [an anonymous OF moderator]. ‘It shows money is the priority….’

One expert in content moderation says the documents clearly show that OnlyFans has ‘some tolerance’ for illegal material.”

This BBC investigation may be in part responsible for OF’s planned change in its Acceptable Use Policy to exclude sexual activity.

BBC: OnlyFans: How it handles illegal sex videos

Banning Porn is Perilous for OnlyFans

The path from porn to ‘legit’ business is a perilous one.

It’s one that Snapchat navigated successfully, and as of last night was valued on the stock market at $114B.

Tumblr’s approach back in 2018’s pornpocalypse was more retrograde. They banned photos of genitalia, female nipples, and buttholes, which is a much stricter approach than OF is taking. That’s when Tumblr had a big drop in page views and hasn’t recovered since.

Tumblr’s late 2018 transition from porn ultimately resulted in the company being sold to WordPress for a mere $3M in 2019.

OnlyFans Aims for ‘Legitimacy’ to Attract Equity Investors & Cash Out on Stock Market

“Any other company with growth like OnlyFans would be able to raise big money in a matter of minutes,” according to Axios, but OF can’t.

Despite projected revenue of $5.9B in 2021 and 120M subscribers, no big investors are interested mainly because of the porn on the site, which makes investment impossible for some venture capital funds with moral clauses and could create legal liability for OF.

Plus, payment processors that work with OF have trouble with porn. They can be shut down by regulators or MasterCard and Visa for paying out for porn. It’s often too risky for them to take a chance.

But the real reason this is happening now, is that OF’s majority owner, Leo Radivinsky, wants to cash out.

He’s making a lot of money; OF had profits of $375M in 2020, but he would make a lot more money if he could capture some of the equity value of the company.

He’s a multi-millionaire, but he wants to be a multi-billionaire.

Axios: OnlyFans has tons of users, but can't find investors

Future of OnlyFans: Winners & Losers

Winners: OnlyFans Owners, Competitors & Cryptocurrency

If OnlyFans’ transition from porn is successful, the obvious winners will be OF’s owners.

A move away from porn may also help competing sites like JustForFans—if they can maintain their current position on porn. Of course, they face much of the same anti-porn pressures that OF has faced.

Cryptocurrency is a possible winner. If someone can figure out how to popularize crypto for mass consumer uses—like subscriptions, then OF’s and competitors’ conflicts with payment processors over porn could be solved.

OF or competitors could simply adjust their business model to work with crypto instead of credit or debit, or that’s the dream.

Porn has historically helped other technologies (like VHS video and the consumer internet itself) emerge into mass popularity; it remains to be seen if can do the same for crypto.

Losers: OnlyFans Creators, Subscribers & All Content Creators

Creators and subscribers may find better pastures with OF’s competitors and head to them en masse. Unfortunately, that would mean they have to start all over again.

There’s also an opportunity cost for all content creators across the internet: Despite its problems, OnlyFans is one of the best examples so far of the internet empowering and paying content creators for their work.

The rest of the internet would benefit hugely if all of the internet started paying content creators appropriately.

OnlyFans may be the best way to create a future where that’s true. Unfortunately, it may be about to slip away.

Dragon-Like Pterosaurs with Huge Wingspans Once Flew Over Australia

“A fearsome beast with wings spanning 22 feet (about 7m). A mouth like a spear. The closest thing we've seen to a real-life dragon. That's how Tim Richards describes the Thapunngaka shawi, a flying reptile whose fossils he's been studying at the University of Queensland's School of Biological Sciences.… Pterosaurs populated the earth as recently as 66 million years ago,… and as early as 228 million years ago. They're distinguished for being the first vertebrae creature -- that is, a creature with a spine -- to take flight. The most famous pterosaur is the pterodacylus, which is why pterosaurs are often incorrectly known as pterodactyls.”

c|net: Meet the 'fearsome dragon' that terrorized ancient Australian skies 

Email AMA (Ask Me Anything) Saturday 21 August 2021

My Emailbox is open Saturday 21 Aug 2021.

Simply, reply to this email if you would like to Ask Me Anything.

(Previous tech. problems with replying to this email have been fixed.)

𖤐𖤐𖤐

Please enjoy the Full Moon 🌕 this Sunday and stay safe everybody! 

Infernal Blessings,

Brother Beastus