November 23rd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Equal Opportunity Nipple Twisting
I believe I have at least a few readers who would enjoy doing stuff like this to the incredibly-buff Dante:
From this photoshoot at Bound Gods.
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The Sex Blog Of Record
November 23rd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Gone Clubbing
I think this poor fellow may have just written a check (with his mouth or, you know, the old-fashioned way) that his ass can’t cash:
From Usenet.
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November 22nd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Casually Pepper Spraying Naked Cherubs
In case you missed it, UC Davis Police officer Lieutenant John Pike has become a runaway internet meme: the “Casually Pepper Spray Everything” cop. The meme-images number in the many hundreds. Here he is, courtesy of the Pepper Spraying Cop tumbler, spraying a violent, dangerous, rebellious cherub:
Mom, can you really just stop having me drink sea water out of those gross shells? You know that those things are full of sand and little crabs and stuff, right? You HAVE dranken out of them before? Yes, I said “dranken”. Do something about it. What, you gonna correct me? You’re the one having an unabashed tide pool orgy… AAUUAUAGGHAGHAGAHHHHHHHHHHHH”
(The source image for that photoshop is William Bouguereau’s The Birth Of Venus.)
If you want a sense of how badly Officer Pike fucked himself and his career with those moments of casual spraying, contemplate this: the major media are already churning out “I feel sorry for him” pieces like this one: Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike. Me, I’ll save my sympathy until he shows up on TV in tears and begs for forgiveness … which I expect will happen right about the time aliens appear in the skies of Earth to demand a disco revival.
Meanwhile, back to the LOLs!
November 22nd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Trying Harder At The Turing Test
The spam robots, they try harder and harder.
Yesterday there was a trackback “comment” in my moderation queue, commenting on my post from six weeks or so ago called Son Of “Anything Worth Doing…”. The quoted snippet (which in a trackback comment represents a chunk of what the remote blog post said about the post being commented on) looked like this:
[…] Eros Blog’s contention of a amicable media issue isn’t pornographic. Yet it’s framed on a page that includes dual bare paintings and several links to sites that are possibly publishing or deliberating adult passionate issues. […]
Talking about me, we like; using full sentences, we like. Already a better comment than 99% of robots and a not-insubstantial fraction of human commentors. This one looks set to make the moderation cut. But there’s a nonsense fraction (“a amicable media issue”?) that raises a mental flag…
That’s the best I can recollect of my mental processes during the time it took me to navigate my mouse to the approve/disapprove buttons. By the time my mouse was hovering over the approve button, the jangle of “amicable media” had blocked up my clicking finger. Instead, I looked at the linking URL, and followed it.
Throw an “http:” and an “//” in front of carrie.zoko.in/?p=16 if you want to see it. What you’ll find is a fairly garbled essay on a blog with a default theme. The paragraphs about ErosBlog look like this:
Recently we wrote about how Facebook and other vital amicable networks bluster a open and eccentric web. This essay wasn’t pornographic. It was a contention of a record process issue.
Several websites picked adult a contention and wrote their possess views on a issue. One was Eros Blog, a site that by a possess outline is about “sex blogging, tributary nudity, eccentric sex [and] various sensuality”.
Eros Blog’s contention of a amicable media issue isn’t pornographic. Yet it’s framed on a page that includes dual bare paintings and several links to sites that are possibly publishing or deliberating adult passionate issues.
The ISPs web patience filters will roughly positively retard entrance to Eros Blog and take a post about my amicable media views with it. There will be one reduction place on a web where people can confront my ideas and other people’s perspectives on them. Not my porn ideas. Not my adult calm ideas. My ideas about record and how to run a web.
It’s nonsense, but it’s far from total nonsense. It has human sentence structure. It’s almost like something written in another language and run through Google Translate, but the grammar is too good for that and the wrong words are not wrong enough. There’s plenty of meaning — and the arc of an argument — to be discerned, even though some of the words make no sense at all, in context. What’s going on here?
And then it hit me — I’ve seen these paragraphs before.
In fact, I’ve seen them — a version of them — in another blog post that comments on that same Son Of Anything blog post. There’s already an approved trackback comment on that post, and it links back to this blog which contains the paragraphs in the original:
Recently I wrote about how Facebook and other major social networks threaten the open and independent web. This article wasn’t pornographic. It was a discussion of a technology policy issue.
Several websites picked up the discussion and wrote their own views on the issue. One was Eros Blog, a site that by its own description is about “sex blogging, gratuitous nudity, kinky sex [and] sundry sensuality”.
Eros Blog’s discussion of the social media issue isn’t pornographic. Yet it’s framed on a page that includes two nude paintings and several links to sites that are either pornography or discussing adult sexual issues.
The ISPs web blocking filters will almost certainly block access to Eros Blog and take the post about my social media views with it. There will be one less place on the web where people can encounter my ideas and other people’s perspectives on them. Not my porn ideas. Not my adult content ideas. My ideas about technology and how to run the web.
So I repeat, what’s going on here?
Near as I can tell, it’s the end result of a robot that’s trying to build human-looking blogs to be used as fodder to feed search engine robots, in an attempt to scam search traffic that could be sold onward to advertisers. Apparently the robot is doing something like this:
- Scan blogs for posts that have approved trackbacks (confirms trackback links are available at spam target)
- Follow the trackback link, grab some text that mentions the current spam target (appeal to vanity of spam target)
- Run the text through a gentle prose morphing algo that mostly substitutes synonyms (to avoid getting hit by duplicate text penalties, and to make it harder for the monkey on the approve/unapprove button to recognize the text)
- Post the text to the SEO-spam blog (triggering the automatic trackback comment and moderation process at the spam target, and hopefully getting an inbound link with some traffic and/or search engine juice)
- Profit???
The heartening thing in all this is that it’s discernibly algorithmic, and the algorithms are still very simple. There are some clever hooks designed to appeal to human weaknesses (like vanity) but the robots are still not doing anything fundamentally clever. I worry, though, every time I encounter one of these that gets closer to getting through my defenses. These mundane tasks — like spam comment moderation — only get a limited amount of attention (single-digit seconds per task, typically) and it doesn’t take a lot of mechanical cleverness to overwhelm that much monkey-meat processing. The spam robots aren’t quite ready to take over the world, but they grow smarter every month…
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November 21st, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Defining Sex Positivity
Franklin Veaux has set off on a bold stroll through the minefields of sex positivity, with this post that mostly expounds on what sex positivity is not. As somebody who has long used the term, I found his disquisition useful. I didn’t quite agree with his one paragraph on what “sex positive” actually is, though:
Sex positivity at its core is simply the recognition that there is more than one “right” way to have sexual relationships. It is an acknowledgement that human sexuality is incredibly diverse, that different people have different tastes and relate to sexuality in different ways, and that as long as everyone is having sex with consenting adult partners, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sex, regardless of the way people relate to it. In short, it’s a deliberate refusal to place one’s own sexuality on a pedestal and proclaim it the “right” way to have sex.
My thought upon reading that was that I’d just boil that down to “Sex positivity is about being non-judgmental about consensual sexual choices.” But upon reflection, I decided that’s not enough.
Franklin’s paragraph, and my sentence, are statements that establish a space by bounding it and excluding things from it. In my sentence, the word “non-judgmental” is key; “acknowledgment that … there is nothing wrong” and “deliberate refusal” are key phrases in his paragraph.
At best, we’re describing a lack of sex-negativity with phrases like these. I think being genuinely sex-positive requires something more. Franklin’s post details many specific things sex positivity is not; mostly, these are specific sexual propositions or arguments that have been claimed to underlie, and be necessary to, the sex-positive position. And I agree with him that none of these, individually, are necessary to sex-positivity.
However, I do think you can’t be sex-positive without — risking tautology here — being positive about some sex. Being “not negative” doesn’t quite get you there. Being “not negative” probably suffices to unsubscribe you from the armies of the anti-sex culture warriors, but you’ve got to take a positive position and celebrate sexuality in some way, I’d argue, to be sex-positive.
Do you have to celebrate all the sex? Of course not. If you’re like most people with pronounced tastes and opinions, some of the sexual propositions and subcultures out there will strike you as boring, frightening, risible, or worse. No matter. Sometimes being non-judgmental doesn’t require much more from you than keeping your mouth firmly shut. “It’s not for me” doesn’t make you judgmental, but if you examine your motives for expressing that sentiment, there’s usually a parcel of judgment to be found. Sex positive people, I’ve found, spend a lot of time celebrating what they are into, and waste very few words talking about the sex that doesn’t appeal.
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November 19th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Spam Robots Run Amok
This is hilarious, at least to me. One of the spam robots that leave the “Hi, excellent post! This will give me food for thought for days!” sort of generic blog comment spams appears to have malfunctioned in my moderation queue. It dropped its entire load of fake generic comments in a single comment box, which makes for a certain sort of geek-hilarity if you’ve been fighting spam long enough. Just for interest, I’m going to post the whole wodge of them behind the cut:
Read the rest of this entry »
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November 18th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Get Comfortable, This May Take Awhile
One does not usually read of sex being well-treated in literary fiction. But this line from a review of Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas is promising:
He writes of sex with every bit of the attention that Tolstoy devotes to the Battle of Austerlitz.
