I say that because I thought we were back yesterday and then ha ha nope, we were down again for 10-12 hours, until the small hours of the morning. I’m going to give it another day or so before I believe that we are actually stable. You saw my Twitter, and Jon’s, and you can probably guess what I think of our current hosting provider¹.

But assuming that we’re up long enough for you to read this, there’s a case of somebody absolutely screwing … not even a customer, in this case more of a partner absolutely sideways in the most hypocritical and impunity-rich manner possible.

See, I was going to talk about the latest update at Oh Joy, Sex Toy, where Erika and Matt share their long-awaited take on the Hismith Quadruple Penetration Fucking Machine. One may recall that the last time this particular pan-sexual roto-plooker was mentioned, I thought Matt ‘n’ Erika had actually made it up and went looking. Note where I found it, that’s going to be important in a second.

The reason I wanted to talk about today’s OJST was because right in the middle of the epic of the HQPFM, there are three panels (which I’ve arbitrarily numbered 10, 11, and 12), which culminate in a shocked-looking Erika stating matter-of-factly (in what I imagine was a very small voice) I saw God. I was eating lunch at the time and nearly choked on laughter and also sandwich. As it is, I think there’s still some mustard-covered sprouted-multigrain sandwich bread in my nasopharyngeal space². I went to the sosh-meeds to share my appreciation and sorrow, only to find that Erika and Matt had bigger things on their mind:

WELL.

Amazon just booted us from their affiliate program, which we use to sell *their* sex toys and copies of our books on sexual health, because Oh Joy Sex Toy features explicit images.

They informed us they do not have to pay us any of the money we earned before this.

So all the pre-orders we did for LET’S TALK ABOUT IT (and all of THEIR sex toys that we sold for them) that were placed through our Amazon affiliate link… nothing. The income we generated from those sales, they do not have to pay us. [emphasis mine]

There’s more, but that’s the heart of it. Amazon did not come to dominate nearly every aspect of commerce and technology by playing fair and out-hustling lazy competitors. They did it by viciously undercutting businesses to where they could not possibly make a profit, squeezing contractors, killing their pick-and-pack workers, demanding delivery speed that results vehicular death on the regular, and inviting companies to sell on their platform until they can pirate designs and kick them off. Oh yes, and withholding money that rightfully belongs to other people because the only way to get it back is to have a deeper legal budget than Amazon and literally nobody has a deeper legal budget than Amazon except maybe Disney.

People ask me why I don’t use Amazon, ever, and everything in that last paragraph is why. Amazon doesn’t give a shit about anybody they have contracted business with, they are merely a source of money to be extracted at their leisure. I have an account with them that’s more than 20 years old, and which has purchased exactly nothing since 2019. There are books that I’ve been waiting for Diamond to get to my local comic shop³ for more than a year that could be here tomorrow via Amazon, and I won’t do it. There’s entire series that exist only on comiXology that I desperately want to read, and likewise no. It’s not worth the human damage.

I don’t think it’s been a big thing here, and certainly something I’ve tried to minimize, but there will never be another link to Amazon or an Amazon-owned enterprise here. If there’s a pre-order that a creator wants people to use, or something that’s exclusive to comiXology I will mention it, but you’re going to have to find it yourself. Fuck Amazon in the physical manifestation of its collective corporate ear-hole, and fuck Jeff Bezos in particular. They suck.

PS: Buy Erika and Matt’s books and merch from almost anyplace else but especially your local bookstore. Support their Patreon. And Let’s Talk About It is not only a marvelous book that you should absolutely read because it will make you a better person, it inadvertently led to the creation of a new heirloom in my family.

And seriously — fuck Amazon.

Spam of the day:

The sexual part of a woman’s brain is much more responsive to the signals your body is giving off than it is to anything you say. That’s why it’s absolutely essential that you know how to turn a woman on regardless of what you say.

Save your money, I’ll tell you the secret: have a luxurious, Commander Hadfieldesque moustache.

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¹ Who bought out the previous hosting provider, who were everything you want in a hosting provider: boring. Excitement is definitely not something you want with respect to your web hosting.

² Ow.

³ Huh. Monopolies suck and screw over everybody they interact with, who’d have guessed.