As most of you have noticed, we’ve had a little bit of a shake-up around here. What was once the Paintball Pinups of Texas affiliate, PopCult & Pinups, is now XPNJunkie, a stand-alone gamer blog and website that may or may not succeed without its paintball fanbase to support it. While I doubt many care as to why we made the change, we’ve always tried to have a fair bit of transparency, and most times be as candid as possible about things happening around here. So settle in, because I have a feeling one’s gonna get long.
The Beginning of PopCult & Pinups
Before I can talk about PopCult & Pinups and then XPNJunkie, first I have to go back to the beginning of the whole thing. The whole thing sprouted about two years ago as something entirely different. I had been working as the photographer for the Paintball Pinups of Texas for a few years by then, and we were working to expand the Pinups’ reach on the internet past what Facebook was allowing. Because it wasn’t much. So, in addition to the Facebook and Instagram pages, we decided it was time to have an official Paintball Pinups of Texas website. So we did it, and there it was. But there was a problem.
As I was the main administrator of the website, it was up to me to keep it updated with content. But, as the days went on without receiving any content from anyone, the only thing I could contribute to it were the pinup photos, which we only did once a month. I, not being a paintball player, wasn’t really the best person to be updating a paintball-heavy website. So we updated with photos as often as we could, and would occasionally get tournament write-ups from the pinups that were competing, and all was great. Except, outside of the monthly photo shoots, I was kinda useless. I mean, sure, I maintained the website and kept everything looking tidy, but outside of that, I didn’t have anything to do.
This went on for about a year, and in the Paintball Pinup industry, the girls come and go. Some did it as a fun side project, some did it in their spare time, and some stuck around for a long time until ‘Life’ took them in a different direction. Some of them are still around to this day. But we would hit times where our selection of pinups would get fairly sparse, and in these times we would have to book outside talent to make our photo shoot. We didn’t really mind doing this, and it was fun to work with outside talent every once in a while, but we felt a little disingenuous calling these ladies “Paintball Pinups” when most of them had never even seen a paintball field. So we began calling them “guest models” even though that term was really generic and we hated it.
It lasted for maybe two features before we were looking for something else. Our list of available Paintball Pinups was still slim, so I proposed that we create a spin-off group-slash-website that could focus on something else and we could alternate between the two. Since we had always liked mixing a good amount of popular culture into our Paintball Pinup photos, we decided we would create a PopCult group that was separate from paintball, thus freeing us from that tether and allowing us the freedom to shoot whatever and whoever the hell we wanted. It was great! We called the group and website The PopCult Pinups, but quickly realized that it painted us into almost the same corner as the Paintball Pinups. Thus, we renamed the group to PopCult & Pinups, inferring that the two could be mutually exclusive, that the popular culture didn’t always have to have a pinup, and the pinup didn’t always reflect popular culture. Plus, it allowed me, the photographer and web admin who just “happened” to be a pretty big gamer, the license to update the website with whatever I damn well pleased. So I did, and life was good. For a while.
PopCult & <expletive deleted>
We updated PopCult & Pinups regularly for almost a year. In that year, I learned one thing. It is fucking difficult to spread the word of your website when you have photos of scantily clad women all over it. Even the word “Pinup” puts the PR guys on edge and makes the old ladies grab their chihuahuas. You are avoided like the plague.
I have always been an open-minded individual, and I was raised in a world of boob-filled slasher flicks, dick and fart jokes, Hustler and Playboy magazines, Tarantino films, and heavy metal music. And that’s how it was. We cussed. We talked about girls. We showed each other the playmate centerfolds we ripped out of our cousin’s magazines. Censorship did not play a very big role in our childhood.
And I personally don’t think it should play a role in our adult lives either, with the exception of racism, which isn’t so much a censorship thing as it is a common fucking decency thing. We wanted PopCult & Pinups to portray this freedom. We enjoyed using our swear words. We enjoyed posting photos of a lady wearing nothing but Xbox controllers. We enjoyed the things we enjoyed, and we weren’t afraid to enjoy them. But it came at a price. We knew people like these things, but it was hard reaching them, and if we did, they were too afraid to admit it.
We eventually wanted to grow, with other contributors posting their own personal interests, without fear of a corporate entity blacking out half their words. We wanted a female writer posting about her top ten hottest comic book man-bulges. We’d love to see a slideshow of the most awkwardly compromising Dead or Alive screenshots. Because why not?
Well, as it turns out, sexual assault is why not. It was the big Hollywood “me too” uproar that finally put the nail in the coffin for PopCult & Pinups. Amidst a ton of outcry at the way women are treated as a whole by men, trying to sell a Pinup website was damn near impossible. Despite our best efforts to explain that our photos are a celebration of women and not the objectification of them, we were still being compared to a Paris Hilton hamburger commercial.
So Cherry and I had a conversation one night in which I expressed my desire to pull the website out from under the shadow of the Pinups. I’d need to get a whole new domain, and re-brand the entire thing, and attempt to re-establish it on its own merit. The last thing I wanted to do was create an entirely new website from scratch, plus I had put so much time and effort into the PopCult & Pinups. So I migrated it, and in turn came up with the best name I possibly could at 2 a.m., XPNJunkie.
XPNJunkie; A Blog Without A Hook
X as in Xbox, P as in Playstation, N as in Nintendo. This established the website as mainly a console gaming blog. But leaving behind the Pinups has left a pretty big hole in our initial idea. The pinups were the hook to bring the clicks and visits to the page, the content was to keep them here. Now, we’re just another gaming blog in search of an identity. We have no hook. I have no shame in admitting this. As I said, I tend to be pretty candid here. I’m not some amateur pretending to be a professional gaming journalist. I’m an amateur with no formal education in English, or Journalism, or anything closely resembling the written language. I’m an artist. I have an art degree. That’s it. Oh, and an I.T. certification (something has to pay the bills, because it ain’t gonna be art.) So for now, I’m posting content to the site and keeping it afloat, so that when the time comes and inspiration hits, I’m not building something from scratch all over again.
What does the future hold for XPNJunkie?
Who the hell knows? Could last for years, could be done tomorrow. But what I would like to happen is to see XPNJunkie return to form with our original vision of presenting a website free of corporate censorship, written by a group of diverse individuals with open minds and loose tongues. Women who aren’t afraid of seeing a little more than just cleavage and guys who are comfortable enough with themselves to brush off a picture of Solid Snake in a banana hammock and get on with their day.
I know it always seems to come back to sex. But sex sells, and it always will, and yet despite that, it will always be the biggest obstacle to get past. Especially in an age right now where, in an attempt to get more females into the gaming industry, you have developers actively toning down their once titular (no pun intended) heroines for more “realistic” designs, and more appropriate clothing. We’ll always be caught between showing and saying what we want, and being “marketable,” because those two things rarely go hand in hand.
Our dream is to become the Maxim of video game websites, because Maxim in its hey-day was pretty fucking cool. I would love an article on how Link couldn’t really survive on health potions alone and would actually have to cook and eat the goblins he killed, complete with illustrations. I would love to see that article right next to one about Bayonetta’s hair-lingerie. Video game content, with no restrictions. That’ll be the day.
Well… I said this was gonna be a long one, and it looks like I was right. This was more for my own personal therapy, so to speak, as is most of what I write. If anyone read this through to the end, then I applaud you, and also thank you and hope that you have a deeper understanding of what we were (and are) trying to do here. All I (and we) want to do is write about what we want, and not get punished for it. Hopefully you agree.
