LAS VEGAS, N.M. – At the end of each year, in addition to taking stock of the twelve months we’ve just left behind, it’s traditional to cast our gaze into the future in an attempt to pierce the veil of mystery and prepare ourselves for what’s to come.

With this solemn journalistic duty in mind, I offer you the following Bold Porno Predictions for 2016.

First and most assured among my predictions, I anticipate firing my travel agent for once again booking me a trip to the wrong Las Vegas. (Don’t get me wrong: The area east of Santa Fe, N.M., is not without its charms, but it’s not exactly the ideal spot for conducting post-show interviews with AVN Award recipients.)

Now, on to the rest of the industry.

The Free Speech Coalition will name as its new chief executive officer an extremely high-profile individual who is well-versed in handling controversy with dignity, sensitivity and decorum; a man whose name has become synonymous with outstanding public relations instinct: Martin Shkreli.

The company currently known as MindGeek will once again rebrand, unveiling a new name and corporate identity that better speaks to the company’s dominant position in the market: OprahManwinfrey.

Popular adult webmaster message board GFY will finish recounting 2016 award-nomination votes, only to find the nominees have all left the industry in the interim in order to escape impending arrest, “pursue mainstream entrepreneurial opportunities” and/or bask in a newfound relationship with their lord and savior.

Noted adult industry muckraker/blogger Mike South will disappear briefly during one of his fishing trips, later emerging to post a message explaining he’s living on the island of Saipan and running a brand new website called SouthernPacificBukkake.

With great fanfare, XBIZ will announce Steve Hirsch as the Sagacious Prophetic Badass Motherfucker Keynote Speaker From Hell for its Miami Conference and as the Godlike Flawless Master of the Universe Keynote Speaker for its subsequent Los Angeles show.

In an attempt to further distance themselves from the “mainstream” porn industry, self-described feminist pornographers will start a new self-regulatory regime under which all feminist pornographers must agree unanimously each and every movie produced by the new feminist porn syndicate is socially and politically acceptable in advance of its release. The regulation will set off an endless series of votes, recounts, vetoes and overrides that ultimately will result in not one new feminist porn movie being released ever again.

Hoping for a Derek Jeter/Kobe Bryant-style “farewell tour,” controversial male performer Donny Long will announce his retirement from porn only to reappear six weeks later announcing his return to porn … followed by an attempt to sell all his porn domains a month later, followed by a religious conversion, followed by another return to porn, followed by a vacation that includes a chance encounter with someone he has pissed off, followed by a visit to an urgent care facility for emergency removal of foreign objects from his rectum.

After publishing a particularly nasty but very likely true post about Charlie Sheen, blogger and occasional SEO consultant XXXJay will be found unconscious in a West Hollywood dumpster with the tattered remains of a laptop wrapped around his neck and the letters “RAT” scrawled across his naked chest in bright red crayon. Upon waking up in the hospital, Jay quickly will dispel rumors he was assaulted at Sheen’s behest, explaining “this is just how I wake up every Saturday.”

After penning yet another series of viciously unfair remarks about various people in the adult entertainment industry and thereby becoming the defendant in a defamation lawsuit, writer Ben Suroeste will attempt to avoid justice by fleeing the country via the border with Mexico, only to find his flight blocked by militant Donald Trump supporters who hang out in the Sonoran Desert shooting passers-by on the chance they’re “one of them goddamn rapists comin’ up from Mexico.”