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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
May 14th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This whimsical photo appears to date from the late 1800s. It exists in many small formats and heavily-cropped versions all over the web, but I failed at finding any genuine source information for it. This “best I could find” version comes from a page in the Wayback Machine archiving some sort of seemingly-defunct French-language MySpace clone; never let it be said that Bacchus does not go the extra mile!
In case you ever wondered how horn players have enough breath for the long notes, this is probably not the actual explanation. And you know the phrase “blowing smoke up her ass?” That operation probably looks a little like this.
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May 13th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
My father, who briefly attended Cal Tech and took Richard Feynman’s freshman physics class, used to marvel at the man’s skill on the bongo drums. But I never knew before today that he was also a fairly talented artist of the female form, and used that skill to illustrate some of the strippers of his acquaintance:
We’re looking at Dancer at Gianonni’s Bar, 1968. From here, with this to accompany it:
He started drawing at the age of 44 in 1962, shortly after developing the visual language for his famous Feynman diagrams, after a series of amicable arguments about art vs. science with his artist-friend Jirayr “Jerry” Zorthian — the same friend to whom Feynman’s timeless ode to a flower was in response. Eventually, the two agreed that they’d exchange lessons in art and science on alternate Sundays. Feynman went on to draw — everything from portraits of other prominent physicists and his children to sketches of strippers and very, very many female nudes — until the end of his life.
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May 12th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This is sort of disturbing. As unpacked at Naked Protesters, it appears that Carnegie Mellon University instructed its pet campus police force to charge a student with indecent exposure, but only did so after a complaint from the local Catholic bishop about her behavior. Seems she wore a pope hat (and no pants at all) in the student parade:
That smacks of abuse of power to me — the bishop’s and the university’s both.
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May 12th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
A Very Ticklish and Horny Girl posted this picture of her sex toy collection on Tumblr, along with the provocative caption “Any ideas what i should do with it?”
Which served to remind me (I’m sure you can follow my breadcrumbs of logic) that May is Masturbation Month, in honor of which The Stockroom is having a Masturbation Month sale:
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May 10th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I’m delighted to announce the latest major revision of the WordPress theme files that power how ErosBlog appears on your screen. Please let me know how it works for you!
Major changes include:
- Larger fonts everywhere. My original designer, seven years ago, used a then-trendy style of reducing all the font sizes roughly 25% from browser default as controlled by the user. Seven years later, I’m now somewhat wiser about respecting user/client preferences. So, fonts now bigger by default. And if you change them in your browser, stuff should work better, because:
- Flexible spacing. The old design had a lot of fixed-pixel spacing. I haven’t rooted them all out, but now, for the most part, white space expands and contracts depending on the available screen space and the browser-default or user-adjusted font sizing.
- Responsive(ish) design. A major goal of this effort was to make Erosblog less painful to use on phones and tablets and even very large screens. I’ve made feeble efforts in the past, but was hampered by my utter lack of comprehension regarding things like viewports and media queries. Now, as you view ErosBlog on increasingly smaller screen sizes, bits of the layout go away or get smaller and some mobile-friendly nav elements appear. As you move onto bigger screens, things should also look better, due to the fixed-pixel sizing mostly being gone.
Please, please, please let me know if ErosBlog is hopelessly or uselessly borked in any way for you on any device at any screen size. Leave a comment (or email me) with the problem you’re seeing, and don’t forget to mention your device and/or operating system and browser.
I do ask that you be gentle. Coding work like this is rather hard for me; I’m a liberal-arts graduate with no training for it and little understanding (all hard-won). I’m very much of a cargo-cult programmer, building stuff by cutting and pasting bits of other stuff that already works while having imperfect comprehension (or none at all!) of how the stuff fails or why it ever worked in the first place. I’ve probably got fifty hours into this latest revision, and I know how far from done I am. But if I wait to release it until it’s done and perfect, it will never be released. So, here are some major items that I hope to still deal with “later”:
- Fundamental design. Seven years ago my designer flaked with the job half done, and I ended up pasting up a Frankenstein monster consisting of her visuals wrapped around a skeleton of my old table-based structure that I originally wrote for a different content-management system and then ported to Greymatter before porting it again to WordPress. I’d dearly love to start over and write a new template from the ground up, with nothing borrowed from websites I “built” in 2000 by copy-pasting html from other sites. But for a cargo-cult programmer like me, that’s a huge job. Realistically, it may never happen.
- Validation and accessibility. My cargo-cult cut-and-paste CSS is full of errors, kludges (can you find the same-color-as-background periods used for spacing?), and deprecated stuff. There’s an enormous amount of work still to be done in cleaning it up, getting it to validate, and modernizing it so that elements actually relate to function in a good HTML5 sort of way.
- Bandwidth friendliness. ErosBlog was born at a time when slow dialup internet connections were thrashing their final death throes, and it’s always been operated on the assumption that readers are at desktops with large screens and bandwidth that’s too cheap to meter. Now that lots of ISPs have bandwidth caps and most smartphones are on limited data plans, there’s a lot more care that could go into serving content in ways that aren’t so bandwidth-wasteful.
- Visual polish. My only styling concern during this pass was to make sure that nothing broke horribly. There’s a whole lot of minor visual improvements that I plan to be working on for the next few weeks.
So, what was the boot-to-the-ass that finally got me motivated to do this very painful redesign? Simply, this: in the slightly more than two years since I got my first smartphone, I’ve gotten more and more dependent on it. It finally got to be a big enough fraction of my internet use that I began noticing my own aversive reaction whenever I’d accidentally click through onto a site that sucked (or was completely useless) at 320-pixels. And then I realized I had the very same aversive reaction when I landed at ErosBlog and had to try and pinch-zoom the content column large enough to read. And if I myself was having that reaction, how many others must be? Meanwhile, I kept landing with pleasure on mobile-friendly sites that put the content front-and-center and politely vanished most of the huge nav and advertising stuff that fills large screens. Eventually I couldn’t stand it. I want people to feel like that when they land on ErosBlog! So, I dug in and got to work.
Hopefully it’s better now. Do you know anybody who used to read ErosBlog but gave up in disgust because it sucked on their phone? If so, I’d be forever in your debt if you’d ask them to pretty-please have another look. Thanks ever so much.
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May 10th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This is a refreshing bit of Canadian jurisprudence. A tragic tale of death resulting from consensual but ill-advised bondage practices, and the charge brought was, accordingly, criminal negligence:
MONTREAL – A man convicted of manslaughter through criminal negligence after his girlfriend died during an experimental weekend of sado-masochistic sex has been ordered to serve a one-year prison term.
Patrick Deschatelets, 46, a Montreal firefighter, learned his sentence Thursday morning at the Longueuil courthouse during a hearing before Quebec Court Judge Claude Provost.
…
Deschatelets met the woman through a club for adults interested in sado-masochistic sex, in which one partner plays a dominant role while the other acts submissive. The victim had much less experience in such role-playing activities than Deschatelets. According to evidence heard during the trial, Deschatelets and the woman agreed to spend a weekend at his house, in February 2008, experimenting with role-playing activities.
…
On the day she died, the woman, who wrote about her experiences that weekend in a sort of diary on a computer, agreed to be bound in chains — with her feet fully restrained but touching the floor — with a metal collar around her neck. Deschatelets had the elaborate apparatus set up in his basement.
At one point, he stepped out to buy pasta for their dinner and when he came back, he found the woman unconscious and slumped forward in the chains. Using techniques he learned as a firefighter, he tried to revive the woman but she died of asphyxiation. It was later determined she had passed out from fatigue, slumped forward and was choked by the metal collar.
My impression is that the woman’s blog (aka “some sort of diary on a computer”) was very important to the defense, establishing a context of consent and doubtless saving the defendant from more serious charges. But there’s no excuse — not even her consent matters here — for leaving someone unsupervised and helpless in bondage that could compromise their breathing. It’s kind of amazing to see that the case was processed based on the actual criminal acts, rather than being treated as a kinky sex crime.
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May 9th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
From My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl Named Monique:
My brother Danny lost his virginity at age 25. To a call girl named Monique. Hired by our mother.
May 9th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I’ve noticed for years that there’s a particular strain of anti-gay nonsense out there that appears to be focused on shit. Who can forget Nancy Elliot’s concern about gay men “wriggling it around in excrement”? Or Dan Savage’s ignorance-busting response?
What’s interesting is that the people who suffer from the whole “you touch an anus that sometimes touches poo” theory of contagion seem to assume that their own extreme level of hysterical disgust at poop is universal. And so it leads them down the false path of thinking they can use poop to construct effective anti-gay insults. And that results in this:
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May 8th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This may look like the setup for a Mad Hypnotist fantasy, but it’s actually from last week’s update at Sex And Submission. Here’s the pitch:
In the not so distant future, there will be virtual reality games that allow the player to explore their fantasies in a simulated environment. Rilynn Rae plays her first game…
In her mind, it’s going like this:
Want more?
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May 6th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Imagine if Google programmed its servers to go through all the emails you send via Gmail and replace all the cuss words with asterisks. You’d be mad, right? Well, that’s pretty much what the voice recognition engine that powers Google Glass does:
In order to write emails or text messages with Google Glass, you dictate words. The device is pleasantly reliable at transcribing things you say … unless you happen to have a foul mouth. In that case, it’ll make what you say “safe for work,” even if you don’t want to be censored.
Geek.com’s Russell Holly was among the first to notice that the voice-to-text feature on Google Glass, much like that on Android, cleans up naughty words. If you drop an f-bomb, Glass will transcribe it as “f***.” That favorite four-letter word for “excrement” becomes “s***.” A female canine becomes “b****.” There doesn’t appear to be a way to circumvent this censorship.
No big deal, you’re probably thinking. A default setting in the voice recognition engine which they were probably using for something else first, something bland and corporate where censorship was a sensible default. They’ll change it. Sure. No doubt they will.
More interesting is what this tells us about the future, a future in which everything we perceive and everything we express is transmitted through many layers of data processing, layers that are owned by entities that do not work for us and do not have our best interests at heart.
Google already routinely tweaks its search algorithm so that some things just don’t show up so well in the results. Sometimes this is for searcher benefit (nobody wants to see more machine-generated nonsense keyword pages) but sometimes it’s in response to outside legal pressure, as when they started reducing the page rank of search results from torrent sites.
What’s it going to be like, living in a world where everything you say passes through filters you can’t see and don’t control? Where, when you search for something you can’t find, you don’t know if it doesn’t exist or if it was silently filtered from your search results? When someone says something to you, did they actually say that? Or were their words edited on the fly?
I have a friend who told me at length about the absurdly reductionist version of this he encountered in a MMORPG for children. Playing with his own children, he learned that the game was “defended” from profanity by not having a chat feature of any kind. Instead, all communication was selected from menus of pre-written possible dialog. Of course these did not include any cussing. The strongest disapprobation one could express was a stiff “You stink!” But of course there were many things the players wished to communicate that were not on the menus. Like prisoners of war, they quickly evolved visual codes for communicating arbitrary sentiments; I’ve forgotten the details, but at least one approach was the old “spell out words on the ground by dropping small pieces of loot” routine.
As Violet Blue put it in her Sex Tech roundup that led me to this Google Glass story, “if we wanted to be treated like children all our lives, this would be great.”
Going the other way into dystopian horror, Charlie Stross wrote a novel called Glasshouse (the title being a British slang reference to a specific Victorian Panopticon-style prison) that features a back story in which much memory of human history has been lost because it was edited out during something called the Censorship Wars. It seems that travel and commerce had come to rely on nanotech “Assembler Gates” that disassembled you at one location, transmitted you and your data over interstellar distances, and reassembled you at your destination. During the censorship wars, sophisticated worms were used to attack this A-gate network. Corrupted gates began editing people and their data, including their memories. The result? A history with big empty holes in it.
We already live in a world where grownups understand the risks they are taking whenever they use hardware and software that isn’t open source. If it’s proprietary, you can’t see what it’s doing and you can’t force it to behave properly (work for you instead of for your adversaries). Unfortunately, when it comes to communications and social networks, closed and proprietary commercial systems are currently in dramatic ascendency. The best you can do is decide which systems you mistrust the least — or retire from the game and hide in your cave.
I do believe we’ll eventually evolve a world where we communicate and network and search via systems that are open and subject to comprehensive infosec audits (although the complexity of actually doing those audits will be so high, most of us will instead rely on deciding which set of auditors we mistrust least). Of course, that world won’t look much like this one, commercially or politically or economically. And we won’t get there until we have endured such “a long train of abuses and usurpations” that the cost of doing things any other way is universally understood to be unbearably high. Getting there? It’s going to really suck.
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