After years of the interwebs being flooded with millions of hours of both amateur and pirated porn, adult film studio profits have dropped hard. But, ever the resilient purveyors of smut, the industry immediately started thinking up ways to reinvent porn for the modern age. (It's something they've always done.) Their best idea so far? Custom-made videos catered to the needs of individual customers. A vast array of niche products for tiny audiences, some of whom are actually willing to pay money.

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As opposed to the rest of the world, which regards porn which costs anything more than "zero" as highway robbery.

So performers who once earned thousands of dollars per scene are now doing webcam shows where name recognition takes a backseat to whether or not they fulfill a specific request, such as laughing at the viewer's small penis (which is apparently something people ask for). A few eager actors are still trying to cling to the old model, fighting fiercely for a shrinking market and continuous low pay, but when your competition is personalized videos and millions of 100-percent free streaming movies, you're essentially trying to float on a sack of iron dicks in the middle of the ocean.

We'd love for scientists to study the effects of this on human sexuality. Will it get to the point where everyone's fetishes are so specific that no two people can enjoy the same erotica? Back in the olden days, everyone in your parents' hometown could gather around the same Linda Lovelace video and become aroused in unison. Soon, your favorite porn star will be famous only to you, because she's the best at using a vibrator while dressed as a Civil War general while seductively eating a bowl of pho while laughing at your small penis.

When we say "gay bars," we don't mean bars with a primarily homosexual clientele. We're talking about very specific places -- i.e. underground party-filled establishments where gay people would go to meet other gay people and be themselves in a safe environment. They've been influencing mainstream culture for decades, whether you knew it or not. Disco and techno both got their starts in gay clubs, and the gay scene shaped Madonna's act before she became the biggest female pop star in history. We can also thank them for making club drugs like Ecstasy popular. And of course, the gay rights movement started with a series of riots at a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn.

But gay bars are going away. This would seem to be a huge loss to the culture as a whole, but the good news is that they're disappearing for mostly uplifting reasons.

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Well, technically they're disappearing from bankruptcy, but empowering bankruptcies.

As gay culture continues to be accepted in the mainstream, the traditional safe meeting spots for dating and hooking up are being replaced by online communities and apps, just like they are for heterosexual people. As for going someplace with your friends to have a good time without catching a hate-crimey vibe, it's fortunately way easier to find spots to do that now. Intolerance / country western bars are of course still a thing, but we actually made enough progress for gay people to no longer need bars that are exclusively for them.

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We finally have a bar scene where we can all come together to focus on what truly matters: getting drunk cheaply.

It's like during Prohibition, when people had to go to speakeasies to drink safely without getting arrested. Well, gay bars were basically the speakeasies of homosexuality. But ever since homosexuality was finally decriminalized in the U.S. (in 2003; homosexuality has only officially been legal since Finding Nemo came out), those kinds of places lost their "rebel" feel, costing them a lot of patrons and eventually leading to them being bought out by Home Depot. That is not a joke.

Another reason gay-oriented businesses are seeing fewer attendees is that many of the unique neighborhoods that once housed regular customers are being gentrified out of existence. And that's the mark of true progress: Gay business are no longer singled out for being gay, but for being in the way of the wealthy.

This is similar to what is happening at SeaWorld, which recently caved to the growing backlash driven by the documentary Blackfish and vowed to eventually free all of their Willies. Dolphins will be next, if the world follows India's example and bans the capturing and exhibition of our favorite seagoing assholes.

Once again, this is all being done for financial reasons. As a whole, people aren't buying tickets to animal circuses anymore, preferring to spend all that money on something that won't result in very uncomfortable questions from their children on the way back home. But because it's all about the money, it also means that wild animal shows will always be a thing somewhere in the world. They'll just go from "a common childhood memory" to "something you pay cash to watch in a dark basement in Thailand."

Helium prices have already doubled since 1998. If you do the math (don't panic, we won't actually make you do it), this could push the cost of filling a single Macy's balloon (around 18,000 cubic feet) to over $1 million. The Goodyear fleet, by the way, uses more than ten times that much gas per blimp.

Of course, these aren't "real-life Death Star" prices, but someone is eventually bound to sit down, add up the numbers, and decide that parade balloons simply aren't worth it. If they don't outright get rid of them, they might scale it down to a mere one balloon, or start charging people $100 per one childhood amazement in order to break even.