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The Sex Blog Of Record
June 20th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
So the other night I was blowing up some internet tanks and surfing gaming blogs during the 45-second wait times it takes to load into new matches after my own tank gets blown up. And there on Terra Nova I stumbled across a sex-related post that really made me stop and marvel:
Where Are All The Sex Games?
Some of the post is about the worthy topic of sex-education games (like this shooter with an STD message) but I was just sort of snoozing through a skim-read until I got to this part, which really woke me up:
There’s rather a dearth of recreational, digital sex games, a fact that surprises me given the proclivity of clever porn mongers who hawk every kind of sex ware imaginable. Have throughout history, using any available technology. It’s well established, for instance, that early photography and film thrived on sexual innovations. And we certainly spent a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of cybersex back in the day, when everything digital was a novelty. Are we jaded? Or recession economics?
Well, it seems like a business opportunity to me. They appear to sell plenty of books and board games in those novelty sex shops. People could certainly use some variety in their sex lives. Yet the ecosystem somehow manages to eschew innovation, just like the video game industry. Microsoft, for instance, is blocking sexual uses of their Kinect device, citing ‘unintended puposes’ (imagine a mash-up of a Kinect device and teledildonics – long distance love, FTW!). I did find A-Chat , but it seems like a graphics enhanced chat room app, and that’s boring, too… I suppose there’s the seedy underbelly that is Second Life’s sex subculture, but it seems, well, seedy. And not terribly educational. But if people are into it, great. Let’s just have some other options.
It is rather remarkable, when you stop and think. Why isn’t there an adult-themed cyber fun park that’s at least as large (and profitable) as World Of Warcraft? Why don’t we in the English-speaking world have a thriving sexual-games output to rival the Japanese?
I have some ideas about this, but first, it’s probably worth dipping into the shallow waters of my knowledge about the sex game options readily accessible to your average North American:
- Of course there’s Second Life. It’s not a sex game per se, but it’s a big and well-established free-wheeling virtual space, has an in-game economy, and allows an enormous degree of user customization of objects and spaces in the world. Accordingly (and this is by reputation, I’ve never logged into Second Life) it features an enormous amount of sexual material, as you would expect. Just Google “Second Life sex” to get a hint of the sexual diversity that flourishes in that environment.
- There’s a paid space called the Red Light Center that’s said to be pretty wild. I’ve never looked deeply into it, because in the screen shots I’ve seen, the female avatars compare unfavorably in appearance to the female wood elves in original Everquest, circa 1998. If I’m going to cybersex somebody’s avatar, I want it to be sexy-looking. (Yes, the Everquest wood elves were hot, for the time and the available tech. But 1998 is an internet eternity ago. I expect better now.
- There’s Sociolotron, another paid adults-only service that’s got a sort of “glorified cyberchat” reputation, along with some actual monster-bashing and game content. Speaking from a position of ignorance, this one seems to be showing its MUDdy roots…
- Trending away from the online social space toward lonely stand-alone clients on your PC, there is the family of products like 3D SexVilla from ThriXXX, which I have described before as “like better paper dolls for grownups”. This genre is typically visually rich but low on “game factor”; I remember a title for the early Mac in the 1980s that was called “Virtual Valerie” and involved manipulating an onscreen vibrator against a greyscale line-art posed naked woman until she made some noises and started shaking. Some progress has been made since then, especially on the artwork and customization side, with better costumes, posing, and settings. But in gameplay terms, I’ve yet to see one of these that was terribly engaging. Obviously the way to improve these is to get them onto the network and plug other gaming humans into the response loop, but so far the sites that can do that haven’t attempted to match the visually-lush qualities of these local-client electronic dollies.
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff out there I haven’t seen, and I do invite readers to share in the comments if they know of any other noteworthy sex games. But I’m also confident there isn’t anything out there that even approaches a scale that could be called “mass-market”, and it’s a worthy question: why not?
I can think of a few contributing factors. “Uncanny valley” is a big one … we react well to cartoonish avatars and (maybe) to avatars that are hyper-realistic, but avatars that reach for realism and fall short? We process those as “creepy” and that’s usually an erotic dampener. (Certainly that’s a big contributor to my own lack of interest in the existing virtual worlds where sexual content is welcome.)
Another question is, how much are these worlds impacted by the Greater Internet Fuckwad problem? You can’t plausibly make an online adult playground without anonymity, but with anonymity comes an ocean of dicks, trolls, and creeps, all of whom feel unconstrained from demonstrating their worst and most colorful traits. It’s community poison, and the problem is too vast and varied for human moderation to be much of a solution. Some sort of clever community policing mechanic — as yet not invented so far as I know — would seem to be required.
Finally, the Terra Nova blog post focused to a much greater extent than I have here on the potential value of gamification in the field of sex education. I see the theoretical potential there, but it’s virtually impossible in a commercial sense to do anything involving legal minors and sexual information, no matter how tame. Too many people seem to go all explodey-head when you provide young people with access to sexual information; there are respectable non-profits that can survive that backlash, but I’ve yet to hear of a commercial enterprise with the ability (or courage!) to surf those dangerous waters. Worse yet, young people expect their applications to be networked; but if you add online interaction into any game environment that also requires anonymity, you’re back to the “dicks, trolls, and creeps” problem, this time with added opportunity for fearmongering. (“ZOMG, our kids are hanging out in an online space with TEH SEXXES and maybe PREDDATURZ!”)
So, that’s my answer to the missing sex games mystery: one part uncanny valley (which should go away in time as we get better at this stuff) and about four parts “how can you make a product that is pointless without anonymity but vulnerable to destruction (especially destruction of its reputation) by anonymous internet fuckwads?”
Packed deeply into the fuckwad problem, though, is the recognition that big feature-rich cyberspaces are expensive to create. If you’ve got the commercial resources to create one of these, you may find it’s safer to do something else with it (like a fantasy RPG) than to create an adult-content space that (if you fail to control the fuckwads) could destroy your corporate reputation and/or become a PR nightmare. But let me be clear: the game space itself might readily contain a thriving happy community that self-polices the fuckwads to an extent sufficient to keep the space thriving and happy, and yet it could still be destroyed (in the commercial sense) by the presence of fuckwads on the margins of the product, if those fuckwads are doing something that attracts lots of media scaremongering and knickertwisting.
So, even as we think “corps have all the money and are rightly scared to spend it on this” we shouldn’t extrapolate from there to “we’ll never see an adult playground like this”. We live in the open-source century, and big expensive-in-resources data/software artifacts are increasingly springing up like forests. We’re also learning (see “BitTorrent”) to distribute activities that are disapproved of by more dominant cultural forces (moralists with guns). So it’s easy to imagine a highly sexualized future adult online avatar space made without corporate money and running in a distributed or semi-distributed fashion that’s very difficult to suppress. That sort of project grows (if it does) very slowly, so don’t be holding your breath — but all the same, don’t be surprised if five or ten years from now, you’re reading breathless media articles about a sort of darknet Second Life where the users are complaining about virtual sharking by implacable panty-raiding fuckwads.
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June 14th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Eating contests in Japan are more entertaining than the US variety:
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June 12th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I know a girl who needs these panties in a bad way … I wonder if anybody makes them in a modern version?
Via Frequently Felt.
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June 11th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I’ve noticed a sharp uptick of attempted blog comment spam in the last couple of weeks … it’s long been a high-volume problem that I keep to a dull roar with electronic countermeasures, but just recently the number of attempts that get through my ice into my moderation queue has jumped from maybe a half-dozen a day to maybe a hundred. Another order-of-magnitude jump like that and I’ll have to start looking into getting better ice.
Thus was I in a receptive mood to be entertained by Franklin Veaux’s Welcome To Web 2.0 essay and flowchart this morning, in which he discusses how easily new whizbang web enterprises tend to stumble and die under the weight of bots and spam:
So it is with companies like Flavors.me and Box.net, started with equal parts naïveté and hope. I didn’t know about either company until I started getting pharmacy spam advertising URLs on their servers, and discovered with a quick Google search that they’re overrun with it.
Right now, as I type this, Box.net has about 40,000 Russian pharmacy redirectors living on its servers. I have a bit of a soft spot for Flavors.me, because I wrote them an email to let them know they have about 3,800 spam pharmacy redirectors on their site, and actually got an email back from a person who, according to her company profile, went to the same little liberal arts college I went to in Florida…but they still haven’t got a handle on the situation. I’ve been checking over the past few days, and the number of spam redirectors on their servers is, according to Google, increasing at the rate of about ten an hour, which probably means there’s a whole lot more that Google isn’t finding.
So in the efforts of public service, I’ve created this handy-dandy flowchart detailing the life cycle of a hot new Web 2.0 startup…
But what really caught my eye was his comments about would-be social-network host Ning. You remember Ning, right? I blogged about it first in 2008 when they threw all the adult social networks off their servers: Ning To Adult Social Networks: Bugger Off. And then again in 2010, when they evicted all the non-paying customers (that is to say, pretty much everybody) that were originally at the heart of their (if I may use the phrase charitably) business model: Fucked By Ning — Again.
What I did not know was that even as they were busy evicting all the people that foolishly trusted them enough to build sites on their “free” platform, they had already been pwnd by spammers. A day after that last blog post of mine, Franklin Veaux wrote this:
Recently, I found a spate of malware spam advertising URLs hosted on a Web site called nashville.net; the spam promised all sorts of free sexual delights if I would but go to such Web addresses as
www.nashville.net/profile/3nz5lxzvocvcd
and
www.nashville.net/profile/jetttoland59
and so on.
I did some poking around on Nashville.net and discovered that it has been compromised like a Senator with a gambling addiction; at the moment, it’s hosting somewhere around 4,200 phony profiles, all of which are redirectors to sites that try to download malware.
…
So I decided to be a good citizen and drop a line to the owner of nashville.net, and his Web host, letting him know he’d been massively breached.
That’s when things got interesting.
The Web site nashville.net is a “community site,” a small niche social networking site hosted by an outfit called Ning.
Parsing input: nashville.net
Routing details for 8.6.19.68
“whois NET-8-6-19-0-1@whois.arin.net” (Getting contact from whois.arin.net )
Found AbuseEmail in whois abuse@ning.com
8.6.19.0 – 8.6.19.255:abuse@ning.com
Using abuse net on abuse@ning.com
abuse net ning.com = postmaster@ning.com, abuse@ning.com, abuse@level3.com
Ning is a personal social networking site founded by the guy who started Netscape, Marc Andreessen. It basically lets you create your own mini MySpace or LiveJournal or whatever you like–a small social networking platform aimed at whatever niche you want. It’s had a checkered past, and has struggled to make money; three days ago, Ning announced that it would become pay only and would cancel its free services. It also fired 40% of its staff.
But that’s not the really interesting part.
The really interesting part is that it looks like all of Ning, with all the social networks and online forums it hosts, has been pwn3d from balls to bones.
A search for some of the exact words and phrases used by the virus redirectors on nashville.net, one of Ning’s social networking sites, produces 1,060,000 results…and as near as I can tell, they are all on Ning.
Update to 2011: A year later, Ning is still pwnd. Franklin Veaux again:
…[T]hey get pwn3d, like the has-been startup founded by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame called “Ning.” Ning was supposed to revolutionize social networking. After burning through all its capital with virtually nothing left to show for it, Andreessen bailed, and it is now little more than a shell for Russian virus downloaders, as I’ve mentioned before. The virus droppers I talked about a year and two months ago? Most of them are still active. Lights are on, but nobody’s home.
I’ve felt for a long time, and yammered to anyone who would listen, that building your website on a “free” platform provided by somebody else is a terrible error. The incentives are all wrong, and your trust will, inevitably, be betrayed. What’s semi-new to me, though, is Veaux’s insight that these platforms — especially the newest, hippest ones with the fewest hard-eyed security professionals on the payroll — are, as they become the unwitting and/or hapless hosts to web parasites, likely to founder under the parasitic burden, becoming the web equivalent of a caterpillar full of wasp larvae. And that provides another reason not to use them, also: because once they turn into what Google calls “bad neighborhoods”, your content there will tend to be penalized in search results because of its virtual proximity to the virus downloads and penis pill spam.
June 10th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
In which Dr. Marty Klein wonders, rather sensibly in my view, whether we shouldn’t worry rather more about the dog that doesn’t bark:
Everyone in America is conflicted about sex. But only people with certain kinds of sexual conflict get caught.
Some people conflicted about sex never masturbate, never ask a woman what time it is just to stand next to her, never look at porn, never choose a table or subway seat based on who they get to look at, never fantasize when they walk past a dress shop, never read a romance novel, never think about what’s under those tight NFL pants, never look up old boyfriends on Facebook, never wear a plunging neckline, never own a vibrator, never smell their spouse’s underwear.
They never think of sex, feel little passion, and rarely do it.
Such people’s sexual conflicts are never exposed to public scrutiny, because they’re rarely acted out in ways we can easily see. But the internal crippling of sex phobias, the terror that one might not be 100% heterosexual, the rage against others’ sexual self-acceptance–these qualities in our public servants should concern us far more than the phone sex of Anthony Weiner, the love child of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the prostitutes of David Vitter or Elliot Spitzer.
The problem with all the moralistic, self-satisfied, judgmental crap being thrown at, on, and around Anthony Wiener is that it affirms the idea that sex gets us in trouble–and that if we stay away from it, we’re OK. It affirms the idea that people who are conflicted about sex and act it out (in Weiner’s case, playfully, consensually, and without meeting or touching, remember) are somehow less trustworthy and less emotionally stable than people whose sexual conflicts leave them with frozen hearts, frozen bodies, and a complete lack of a paper trail.
June 9th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
It’s not hard to understand that the sites catering to the rivers-of-cum fantasy presumably have a special recipe involving condensed milk (or whatever). But is it possible to have too much of a good thing? I think it might be:
Source: a gallery of absurdly-faked cumshots from the PornPros network.
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June 8th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I’m not a huge Lady Gaga fan, but I do admire her courage. There are some who say it’s easy to be brave when you’re hella rich, but I’m not so sure — when you’re a memetic engineer working on memes about sex and freedom and what it means to be female in the 21st century, the waves of judgment and hatred and condemnation cannot be easy to surf, even when you’ve got a platoon of bodyguards and handlers and random sycophants to help catch and deflect the worst of it while reassuring you that you’re still perfectly fabulous.
None of which prevents Lady Gaga from running right out along the edge of the knife, and then dancing on the tip — and she does it as a matter of routine:
Apparently the official outfit included, variously, some opaque pasties or the basque/corset thing she’s seen falling out of here. But one should generally assume that celebrity “accidents” of this sort are as carefully engineered as every other public moment.
Thanks to Violet Blue for finding the photo.
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