Henchmen and henchwomen,

I hope all of you have had a good holiday season. My apologies again for missing deadlines but rest assured – if it could be avoided it would have been. The last two months for me are a blur – outside of consistent editing and work related obstacles I had to tend to a couple family emergencies before and after Thanksgiving that really slowed me down. I hadn’t mentioned it sooner as when I was in the middle of it I wasn’t sure how serious it would become but thankfully everything went as well as it could, so the biggest cost for me outside of stress was simply time from work. 

Recently one of the servers I host my downloads from shit the bed. So I have spent the last week mitigating the wreckage while customers were buying products with dead links. I think I am ahead of it now… but if you were a customer who received a broken link in the last week that I magically didn’t reach out too already – hit me up.

I like to use the New Year turn to touch base with myself and with you about goals for ‘SHL’ and the direction about where I go from here and what I am to do with the work that I make. Yes, yes… I know some of you will say ‘bro it’s just porn, chill out’ but I am not chill. I take my work seriously, even if it isn’t serious work.

2023 came with a series of lessons for me, reality checks and setbacks. So I like to talk about it.

TKJ Aftermath

The Killing Joke for me was a blessing and a curse. I know to a lot of you the scope of work required to make something like that happen is simply a blind spot, but it was a humbling experience. To some degree upon reflection I am not even sure how it even got made to begin with. But it was an experiment for me about how far I could take a project before it becomes a personal and financial disaster for me and wether or not you, my audience, would meet me halfway to catch my trust fall. I don’t mean this lightly – if TKJ didn’t hit a certain amount of sales… SHL would have been buried in a shallow grave last year. I wish I could properly express my gratitude for your support. I think the only way I know how to do that is too continue to push my projects deeper into the ‘risk’ category, so I can set the bar higher for what you expect out of me as a creator in this genre.

Brand New Eyes

The recent server crash has had me shuffling through the last 3-4 years of work as I have been reorganizing data and re-uploading old titles. I found myself thinking and critically viewing the material more aligned with some of the more critical commentary from some of you folk – there could be more story, more action, so that they don’t feel like 80 percent sex and 20 percent setup. I mean hindsight is 20/20 – there is only so much story and action one can produce from a one day shoot. If a film is 60 minutes and 30 of them are sex – thats a 12 hour shoot and only 1 hour of it was actually producing the sex scene. Those 11 other hours are hair and makeup, reading and working through the script, shooting dialogue scenes and safely working through the action scenes.

But those are excuses right? One could argue – if a one day shoot only allows for you to get 10-20 minutes of story and action… why not just increase the amount of days you’d shoot? The rebuttal historically would be ‘Shooting two days per film doubles my budget but I can’t double the cost of my films’ and… I can’t. I won’t talk about how much TKJ cost, but it was a juggernaut. In the end it was roughly a 4 day shoot – but I did not quadruple the cost of the film to consumers. I multiplied the cost of the film by 1.67x the cost of a normal project ($60 for a standard film, $100 for TKJ) and IMO $100 dollars is the maximum I could ever and should ever place on a product.

But that begs to question – what are my intentions? Do I seek to be a ‘business’ thats driven by profit? Do I seek to be an artist and my artistic intent matters more than cost? What are my concerns and intent about the trajectory of the work I create and why I create it? I have pondered this for awhile now and its what lead to me making The Killing Joke. I think my answer is – I seek to have artistic integrity and want to push the boundaries of what I am capable of making. 

Business Not as Usual 

I think what that means for me is too plan from here on out to double my production days with little to no difference in the cost of the deliverable project. TKJ had me high from being able to direct scenes with no action, no sex. Scenes like Joker and Harley learning about Batgirls death from a henchman – Robyn’s hospital visit – Joker discovering an unconscious Harley Quinn on the floor in the aftermath of going behind his back – I loved how these scenes came out. I love how they heightened the context of everything before and after them. I think the defeat of a heroine holds more weight when you take more time with building the bridge you push them off. 

I am willing to lower my overall profit in pursuit of more rock solid releases. I also think buyers confidence will increase if you ‘feel’ the difference, even subconsciously, that the products quality is increasing even if only minimally by adding 10-20 more minutes of world building and peril. 

As of now – Generation Zod reflects this new mindset of the direction I am interest in going. 

Risk Factors

This comes with obvious risks. And it can come possibly with some notable drawbacks. Doubling budgets while maintaining the same price per film would mean potentially I take on less risky characters. This genre survives off the back of Batgirl, Supergirl and Wonder Woman. I don’t know I can afford to double production budgets on films with characters like Zatanna, Black Canary and Catwoman. But I do know one thing for certain – consumers are quick to become comfortable with ‘luxury’ fast. Single day productions with risky characters might not scratch the ‘itch’ after becoming conditioned to more lofty Supergirl films…

This attitude of pushing the bar up, doubling budgets, trying to ‘perfect’ the product could in reality not be a staircase to the clouds but rather digging a pit that buries me. There was a handful of people who were very keen and quick to express their disappointment in TKJ, how it didn’t live up to their expectations. While the few don’t speak for the many – I myself have become dismayed with my back catalogue now that I am living in a world where TKJ exists and was something I made. I would be a fool to not consider that attempting to increase the quality of my films could be a door that when you open it, you can’t close it.

But – I think my mind is set. I only want to make films in this genre if I can see proof that what I make next is better than what came before. 

Setbacks

2023 did not go the way I had hoped it would (thats putting it lightly). I am more comfortable addressing it now that I have taken steps towards heading in a new direction. I had intended to hit the ground running last year with TKJ, then pivot from there into a series of new films. But TKJ was a massive shoot and an even more massive edit. By the end the smoke had cleared – I hit a huge wall.

The studio I have shot the last three years of my work at – closed. The landlords of the property essentially forced the owner out of it. This was a winding blow for a couple reasons, one being that I couldn’t shoot new work with the same level of production I had been doing and the other was that I was financially tied up in that studios operating cost. The simple explanation without getting into the weeds was that I had prepaid for studio time for future work to help the studio owner out during hard times – so the studio closing essentially meant that financially some of my production cost got frozen. 

These are the drawbacks to not owning and controlling my own studio. Granted – in LA the cost to do so would be massive. We are talking like $80,000 dollars annually just to rent a big enough studio to comfortably film this kind of content. That kind of money isn’t justifiable for the business I run, especially since I only ever need shooting space for my personal work seldomly. You could argue that I could setup shop somewhere more affordable but pornstars live in LA, Vegas and Florida. The cost of flying in talent to the middle of nowhere would be expensive and most talent probably wouldn’t find it worth the time in travel anyway. 

All that to say – I made TKJ… turned around and had no studio to shoot in. I had not planned to develop new business relationships in LA for new shooting spaces, especially as its not easy to trip over a villains lair in LA and expect the owner to be comfortable with adult work being shot there. 

So instead I spent most of 2023 – doing preproduction work and focusing on what I was in control of – making costumes, ordering supplies, creating a battle plan for my next Black Label projects. Things like LoFi films became the focus to keep revenue coming to withhold the drought.

The studio owner eventually set down some new roots in a smaller studio space, but their path and SHL’s no longer run in parallel. I want to push my work forward, I can’t afford to go backwards in the quality of my work.

So 2023 became a dry year for me. Everything I wanted to do got delayed into this year. But thats show business – things don’t work how you want them too, lasting in this work means being flexible when everything goes the wrong way and finding a way to make it work for you.

TMI

I don’t know that it’s important to state any of this or share this degree of information with all of you. But it’s what I have been thinking about, dealing with, adjusting too and planning against. 

You

I’d like to say it one more time – Thank you. Everything that I am up too or doing is only made possible by paying customers. I am not a ‘company’. There are no employees. I am the camera man, the script writer, the costume maker, the editor, the audio guy, the producer, the director, the CEO, the guy who drags the gear to set, the guy who is cleaning the studio after a shoot, I am the one who washes the cum out of the costume, the customer service, the backend to my website and web management. And the only way I can afford to make these films, the only way I can afford to eat everyday is because of people like you who trust and are willing to preorder my work, purchase $20-$100 dollar films, who read my newsletters and care enough to demand I do it again and better. 

That isn’t lost on me. Heres to 2024 – may this year’s luck allow for more superheroine porn by yours truly. 

AMA

I’d like to open the floor to anyone who has any questions. Ask anything you’d like in the comment section. Well… maybe don’t ask me about release dates…

ROUNDTABLE

I’d like to also discuss a matter of business and I wanted your hive mind opinion on how I should conduct business. Recently I have received an overwhelming amount of request from people to resend downloads from films they bought and lost. I don’t mean like 10 request – I mean a lot more than that. I have people requesting downloads from films they bought four years ago, films they bought 6 months ago, etc. 

It’s becoming an issue as I have had multiple people threaten me, or do chargebacks when their requests are not met, or not responded too fast enough for their liking. 

So, I would like an official policy on how to handle these request but I would like for you to help me make the policy. How long should the period of time be to honor such request? Should there be a minimal fee required to redeploy film downloads? Do note aside from the time it cost me to do such request – all downloads cause server strain which do cost me a certain amount monthly to oblige. I don’t have a calculator on what that cost would be per download but how many people download a title does have a dollar amount tied to it. 

I personally am not of the opinion that anyone should have to buy the same film twice because they lost files, didn’t backup properly or lost a laptop. But I also can’t afford to stop everything I am working on and send a customer every film they ever downloaded because ‘shit happens’ and they can’t handle waiting a month for me to respond to their email.

… are you still reading this? I think I like to type too much. 

Love yah guys and gals. Thanks again.