Alright, so you hear this term, “follow along porn,” thrown around, and honestly, at first, I just kinda scratched my head. Sounded like a whole lot of something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about. But then, I had this one experience, and lemme tell ya, it clicked. Not in a good way, mind you.
My Descent into “Follow Along” Hell
It all started innocently enough. I was trying to get into building these tiny, intricate ship models. You know, the ones with a million little pieces? Found this series of video tutorials online. The guy doing them, man, his hands were like a surgeon’s, and everything looked so clean, so perfect. He’d just dab a bit of glue here, place a microscopic part there, and bam, magic. That was the “porn” part, I guess – just watching this impossible perfection unfold.
So, I got my kit, my fancy tiny tools, my special glues, the whole shebang. Fired up the first video. “Okay,” I thought, “I can do this. He makes it look easy.” Famous last words, right?
- Step 1: Attach Part A to Part B. Video shows it slotting in like a dream. My Part A looked like it was actively repelling Part B. Took me twenty minutes and three layers of glue that looked like a snail had a party on it.
- Step 2: “Now, gently bend this photo-etched piece around the curve.” His piece bent like it was soft butter. Mine snapped. Just clean snapped. Had to order a replacement part, waited a week.
- Step 3 (a week later): The video conveniently skipped over how he held five tiny pieces together while the glue set. He just… did it. I needed an octopus’s arms or some kind of anti-gravity device. My desk started looking like a tiny, sticky battlefield.
I was pausing, rewinding, squinting at the screen. “How the hell did he do that?” became my mantra. The dude in the video never smudged glue, never dropped a piece into the carpet void, never cursed loud enough for the neighbors to hear. His workspace was pristine. Mine looked like a disaster zone. He’d be on step 20, and I’d still be wrestling with step 3, feeling like a total clutz.
The Grind and the “Revelation”
This went on for weeks. Every evening, I’d sit down, determined. And every evening, I’d end up frustrated, covered in paint smudges, with a model that looked less like a majestic ship and more like it had survived a direct hit. It was this weird cycle of hope, effort, intense frustration, and then a stubborn refusal to quit because I’d already sunk so much time and money into it. I was “following along,” alright, but it felt more like being dragged through mud by my teeth.
Why do I even bring this up? Because that whole ordeal, that’s what “follow along porn” really is, to me. It’s not about the slick final product you see in the video. It’s about the messy, infuriating, sometimes impossible journey of trying to replicate it when you’re just a regular person. The “porn” is the unattainable perfection they show you, while you’re knee-deep in the decidedly unsexy reality of your own clumsy attempts.
Did I finish the ship? Yeah, eventually. It looks… okay. From a distance. In dim light. But what I really “built” was a deep understanding of how misleading those super-smooth “follow along” things can be. They sell you a dream, but they rarely show you the sweat and the swear words that go into it for most of us. So now, when I see one of those perfect tutorials, I just chuckle. I know what’s likely happening off-camera for anyone actually trying to follow along. It ain’t always pretty, that’s for sure.
